? ? ?
On Friday afternoon I keep an eye on her at school, fearing that she’ll be in meltdown mode. When I ask if she’s scared she just says, “Oh, no, I’m fine,” as if there’s no cause for concern; but I carry on worrying right up to 5:00 p.m., when the audience arrives. By five thirty the school hall is packed and buzzing and noisy, but the chat quiets down swiftly as the music starts and the curtains part to reveal the bedroom of the sleeping Darling children. A few minutes later, when Tilda appears, I feel sick.
She walks shakily to the center of the stage, her face white, her eyes blank with fear, and I’m rooted to my spot by the wall, hardly able to breathe. But, from somewhere, my sister summons up her courage and starts to let rip with the Peter Pan voice, loud and clear. Soon she’s dominating the stage, jumping around as though the floor were on fire, waving her sword about. And it becomes clear that it’s Liam, not Tilda, who is shaken by the occasion. He was dynamic and swashbuckly in rehearsal, but is now somehow diminished by the spotlight. In every scene he’s outacted by Tilda. Sometimes she does little asides to the audience that have everyone laughing, and her performance causes several bursts of spontaneous applause. At the end, when the parents clap and whistle, she glows as she bows, with Liam glancing at her, half admiring, half puzzled. Afterwards, Mrs. Brookes comes over to Mum, and I’m surprised to see that she’s obese and has a row of fat metal hoops that go all the way up one earlobe.
“Right little actress, your Tilda,” she says, with a smile as wide and open as Liam’s. “I could see her going professional.”
She turns to me: “What about you? Didn’t you want to be in the play?”
I shrug. Liam joins us, and Mum says he gave Captain Hook a soulful side, and he must come to our house some time. As she’s speaking, Tilda arrives and we all go out to the car. “See you Monday,” Liam says. And Tilda beams, as though he’s mended everything between them.
Later, when we’re back home, I go upstairs to our bedroom and rummage through the clothes in a drawer that is jam-packed full of my tops and T-shirts. There’s an old red woolen sweater, too small for me now, that I keep right at the back, well hidden; and I take out my dossier, which I keep wrapped inside the sweater. It’s no longer in the princess book I had when I was seven, but a smart notebook that I bought in WHSmith with my pocket money. I open it up and see that I haven’t added anything for six whole months; but now I get writing with the words coming into my head furiously and hard, like I’m under a waterfall that’s packed with words. I set out the details of how she fell in love with Liam and how it made her obsessed with him. Then I write about how she fell apart when she thought he didn’t like her anymore, crying herself to sleep at night and violently hurting herself, going nearly mad. Everything got better when she was acting, I add. She was an amazing Peter Pan and the whole audience loved her; I even think it made Liam want to be her friend again.
10
2017
I wake up queasy, remembering that Tilda’s meeting me for lunch today. Partly I’m nervous about screwing up, and scaring her off. Also, I’m angsty about Daphne, who sits by the shop doorway, watching everything. My boss has a habit of irritating people with her inquiring, nosy personality, so I suppress thoughts of work while I shower, and instead concentrate on the questions I’ll ask Tilda. I tell myself, Don’t antagonize. Be subtle.
The bookshop is a five-minute walk away, on Walm Lane, just past the Samaritans charity shop. It’s Daphne’s baby—that’s how she describes it—and is called Saskatchewan Books, which looks peculiar in the middle of Willesden Green, which is international but more in a halal-meat way. But Saskatchewan is Daphne’s birthplace, so that’s a good reason, and she likes to say it’s a suitable name because the shop is spacious and empty. Not empty of books, but of customers. I don’t mind. I like the quiet. I work there three days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
I tell Daphne that I’ll be going out to lunch, instead of my normal routine of a cheese sandwich in the stockroom.
“Lunch out, sweetness? That’s nice. Is it a special day . . . ? It’s not your birthday, is it?”
I get the truth out and done with. “No, I’m meeting my sister.”
“Tilda? Coming here?” Her tone has flipped from soft to sharp.
She gets up, walks around awkwardly, tidying the shelves, rearranging the nonfiction table. Then: “What’s happening with your sister? She was so successful, with all that TV, then Rebecca—but it’s been ages, hasn’t it, since she’s been in anything? A year or something?”
The shop fills with silence. Eventually I reply with: “She’s fine.”
“It’s absolutely right that you should be discreet. But I’m thinking an autobiography would sell well. I could see that being snapped up. And it would get her face back in front of the public.”
She carries on tidying, then settles at her desk near the window display, lining up her purple Moleskine notebook and Virginia Woolf coffee mug and opening her laptop. She looks like a giraffe-woman she’s so long and thin, her legs stretched out under the desk, her feet poking out. It’s always the same—she inhales on her electric cigarette with a little snorting sound, then starts bashing the keyboard for a novel called The Lady Connoisseurs of Crime, which is a sequel to The Primrose Hill Murders and A Death Before Breakfast. She calls the books her “cozy murders,” and they have quite a following, which subsidizes the shop. Daphne says that other people have a business to support their vanity publishing—but she writes books in order to do vanity business. I’d say she spends half her time on her novels and the other half on internet-dating sites in her doomed quest to find a boyfriend.