Now, the sunny day is gone and I’m on my knees in the bush with my hands pressed into the earth, trying to find a way to stand up, but I can’t because I’m stuck in a mesh of branches that are spiking into my back. I think maybe I can scrunch myself up and inch out backwards, and I shift my hands into a good position so that my right palm presses into something hard and knobbly in the ground. As I grasp it, I hear someone laughing, saying “Look at Callie!” and the others running to the bush to watch me. I’m curious now about the object in my right hand, and am careful to keep hold of it as I scratch myself slowly into the light, rolling backwards until I’m sitting on the grass. I find that I’m holding something pale under dark crumbly soil, which I brush off with the tips of my fingers, tracing along crevices and points. Cradled in my hand, I have the skull of a small animal, and my eyes start to sting.
Precious says, “That’s gross. What is it?” and everyone crowds in to see. Tilda thinks it might be a calf skull, because of the cows in the next field, and Precious points out that I’m crying. “It’s because you came last,” she says. I smear the tears away but don’t really understand. Maybe I’m upset about being last, maybe I’m jealous of my triumphant sister, or maybe I’m thinking of the dead animal. What I haven’t mentioned yet, is that I am remembering our birthday, Tilda’s and mine. We are seven.
Tilda says, “Don’t worry about that thing, come back to the picnic and we can have our cake.” I take her hand but have the skull in my other hand, clamped to my chest. When I give it to Mum she inspects it and wraps it up in a paper napkin saying it might belong to a lamb, and it’s a beautiful discovery that she will put into a painting one day, but first it needs a good wash and if I want I can take it to school for the nature table. I hold my hands out while Mum pours water over them from a plastic bottle, then dries them with her skirt. The other children are standing around, watching, and then everyone is singing “Happy Birthday.” I lie on my back with my head in Mum’s lap, looking upwards at Tilda, who’s standing with her legs apart and her face turned to the sky. She’s singing, even though she’s one of the birthday girls, and the sun shines through her hair, making it glimmer like a halo. At that moment I’m hurting with adoration of her. Then Tilda flops to her knees and I sit up, and side by side we blow out the candles.
The next day is Monday, which means school. I bring in the skull, wrapped in a plastic bag, and we’re drawing pictures of our weekend when our homeroom teacher, Miss Parfitt, looks over my shoulder, saying, “Interesting, Callie, expressive.” I explain that my gashed-up picture is the bush and the skull. Then she examines Tilda’s drawing of a birthday cake and a yellow spider in the sky, which is the sun, and says in an absentminded way, “How lovely.” My picture is dark like my hair, and Tilda’s is gold, like hers.
Miss Parfitt is my favorite teacher, and she places the skull in the center of the nature table like it’s the most impressive exhibit, which it is, better than the crackly old bird’s nest and heaps of dead leaves, and superior to the egg shells with faces and cress hair. I feel proud.
But two weeks later, the skull disappears from the display, and I cry in class as Miss Parfitt stands at the front with her arms folded, saying, “Whoever took the sheep skull should put it back on the table, and no more will be said.” Days pass and nothing happens.
It’s all I can think about. Mum and Tilda both know how upset I am and that I was looking after the skull on behalf of the dead lamb and its mother. To cheer me up, Mum makes a painting of the skull one evening after work, but I have to pretend to like it, because the colors are too bright and it lacks tenderness. And, at night, when we’re in our beds, I tell Tilda that I think Precious is the prime suspect because she doesn’t like the skull and she doesn’t like me. Tilda says she would like to punch Precious in the mouth, that Precious is a gobby attention seeker who needs to be shown a lesson.
“And you’d be standing up for me,” I say.
“That too. I’m your guardian angel.”
I can’t tell from her face whether she means it, or whether she just likes to think of herself as special.
For a couple of days we follow Precious around the playground chanting, “We know; we know what you did,” and I think to myself, And you have warty fingers and smell of biscuits. Precious finally retaliates with: “Don’t think you can escape your weirdo sister, Tilda Farrow.” At this point Tilda does punch her in the mouth, and I cry with love and gratitude while Precious runs and tells Miss Parfitt. (Years later Tilda said, “Do you remember how horrible we were to Precious Makepeace?” I’ve looked her up on Facebook, but she isn’t there.)
That night, alone in our bedroom, I take the pink princess notebook that I received for my birthday and I write on page one: “My dossier.” I have learned the word from Mum, who keeps a dossier on her favorite artists, making notes about their techniques and styles, trying to understand them and (Mum’s words) “absorb their essence” so that she can make her own work better. Then I start to write about Tilda, describing everything she did that day, how she looked and what she said. All the small things. The way she laughed when she punched Precious and then looked around to see if she had an audience. The pity in her eyes when she looked at me—her crybaby twin. She’s braver than me, I write. And she’s stronger than me. Then I cross out my words, realizing that while I idolize my sister, I don’t know her at all, not deep down. If I want to absorb her essence, I’m going to have to write a whole lot more.
When I finish working on my dossier, I look at the pages and feel deeply satisfied, as though by writing about Tilda I’m less dominated by her.
4
Spring 2017
Tilda’s embedding me in the heart of her relationship—join us here, join us there, come bowling, come to the theater. It’s weird because I used to see my sister only once every three or four weeks, and then, only for movie nights. The latest development is an invitation to meet her and Felix at Borough Market to help look for a French cheese called cancoyotte, which has to be served with champagne and walnuts apparently. Also, she wants Lithuanian rye bread and sea salt caramel, and a micro greenhouse that sits on the window ledge and sprouts rocket and chard. Tilda explains her shopping list on the phone in a voice that suggests that her niche ingredients are incredible earth-shattering news, but I infer that the real agenda is for me to spend yet more time with Felix. I say yes straightaway.