The Icarus Girl

by Helen Oyeyemi

  “So you want to scream! Good, fine! Scream in there!” Sarah banged hard on the locked basement door in response to the frequent thumping and kicking noises coming from inside. Tilly-who-was-Jess was still screeching at the top of her voice.

  “Oh, shit, shit, SHIT!” Sarah’s voice cracked as she cradled her wrist, which she had knocked whilst slamming the door. Jess-who-wasn’t-Jess slithered like a whisper over her skin, but she didn’t notice. Jess’s father, who was sitting on the bare steps leading down to the basement with his head in his hands, looked up distractedly. (See me? Can you?)

  Sarah was shaking her wrist out, her teeth gritted.

  Jess felt the hairs on the back of Daniel’s neck rise as, from inside the basement, Tilly-who-was-Jess whispered, “Daddy.” His brow knitted in surprise, and they both heard.

  “Sarah, let her out. You’ve made your point.”

  “Dadddyyyy!” Tilly-who-was-Jess was screaming now. “Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy!”

  Sarah looked at him coolly.

  “She hasn’t finished her tantrum,” she said. Then she leant against the wall and burst into tears, putting her hands over her face just a second after Jess and her father saw it crumple.

  Daniel took off his glasses and fiddled with them awkwardly. He heaved a sigh and tipped his head back to stare at the bit of ceiling above him—Jess was weaving smoke patterns on it—that was actually the sitting-room floor, as if it would yield him a solution. From the basement, Tilly-who-was-Jess screamed on.

  After a little while, Sarah rubbed at her face with both hands and looked at him. “I can’t do it,” she said, calmer now. “I can’t mother this girl. I try, but . . . I’m scared of her.”

  Daniel held back his fringe so that he could better resettle his glasses, and raised his eyebrows at her.

  Sarah gave a half laugh, exhaling hard.

  “And then, and then I get angry with myself for being scared of her, and then I get angry with her for making me scared.”

  She looked at him again, this time, it seemed, uncertainly.

  Jess was inside the basement now, whirling around Tilly-who-was-Jess, threatening her with a touch. (you will do more, more, more than scream, if I touch you just once) and Tilly-who-was-Jess was prostrate on the floor with her hands over her head, her hands flopping at the wrists, her fingers splayed as she pawed at the dusty rug that was speckled with chipped plaster from the ceiling. Unsatisfied, but unsure how to approach her body when it looked so ugly and weak, Jess carefully gathered herself and settled in a mass on top of her old yellow high chair, by the box with silvered barbecue equipment peeking out of it.

  Outside the basement, she heard her father ask, “What are you actually scared of?”

  Jess knew when Sarah had dropped to her knees on the floor, pressing her ear to the basement door. She knew when Sarah turned to face Daniel again, leaning her back against the door. Jess knew everything. Everything was tearing her apart.

  “I don’t know what I’m scared of! That’s why it doesn’t make sense, it’s stupid! I . . . I just feel like . . . like I should know her, but I don’t know anything. She’s not like me at all. I don’t think she’s like you, either. I can’t even tell who this girl is—”

  “So you lock her in the basement.”

  Sarah stood and folded her arms across her chest in a defensive gesture, but her next words were gentle. “Look, I don’t want to fight about this anymore.”

  Daniel nodded. His tiredness was tangible to Jess. It tasted . . . brown.

  Jess-who-wasn’t-Jess realised that something had changed. Tilly-who-was-Jess had gone quiet. She wobbled across the basement, walking so exaggeratedly that she touched her heel to the floor before putting her foot down, and with excruciating concentration on her face, began to snatch at the wisps of Jess-whowasn’t-Jess.

  The monstrosity of a pink T-shirt and jeans on a thin little body that wasn’t working properly. A spatula with a wooden handle fell out of the barbecue box as Tilly-who-was-Jess’s heavy hand disturbed it. She was swiping as if at a fly, and it was clear that she couldn’t actually see. She was looking, but she couldn’t see. She didn’t seem to care; her gaze was fixed and serene as she alternately shuffled and tiptoed along the room as if compelled by some dragging magnet. Tilly was going to touch Jess.

  Despite her most tearing, pulling effort, Jess couldn’t help but gather up like a ball of wool into Tilly’s arms.

  Tilly-who-was-Jess looked blindly around the room with Jess’s eyes, and smiled. (I’ll swap back now. I’m sorry.)

  But all Jess could do once she was herself again, and in one place, and whole, was scream. It wasn’t proper screaming, but the result of a kind of pressure on her lungs so that she made a piercing noise like steam whistling out.

  She felt bruised all over, but, steadily, she rubbed her hands together, wishing that she could get them so soft with sweat that the skin would come away all by itself, in gentle blood, the way tissue paper split and sagged in water. (Dear God, please take my skin, take my feet, and my hips, because she’s been in them and spoiled them and made them not work.)

  Then she knelt down and prayed to be free from TillyTilly.

  When Jess came out of the basement, she didn’t cry. She had no tear marks on her face, and was completely dry-eyed. She was all right. When she looked up at Sarah, she felt slightly bemused, without knowing why. It was a feeling of using borrowed eyes that she would soon have to return—her mother looked prettier, and more distinct. There was beauty in the unravelling wool coming from the shoulder of her grey jumper. She tried to step back and look some more, but Sarah immediately caught her up in a hug.

  “Are you OK, Jess? Yeah? I’m sorry that I had to do that.”

  Jess stood stiffly for a few moments in Sarah’s embrace, then her arms timidly crept around her mother. She was looking at her father over Sarah’s shoulder, and his encouraging smile in her direction was returned with a solemn one. She had to reassure him, so that he knew the difference between her and Tilly.

  Later in the evening, when Jess and her father were sprawled on the sofa in the flickering darkness of the living room watching one of Jess’s SuperTed tapes, Jess poked at her pink fluffy slippers with her toes, then looked up at her father.

  “Daddy?”

  She’d thought, when they’d heard Tilly screaming it in the basement, that maybe he’d flinch or stir uneasily the next time she said it to him, but to her relief he smiled and flicked her nose affectionately.

  “That’s meee . . .”

  “I don’t want to be in Year Five.”

  She was greatly surprised by her father’s response. He pulled her, elbows and all, into a hug, and whispered into her hair, “I know.”

  FIFTEEN

  “Jess, tell me a secret,” Colin McKenzie cajoled.

  Sitting on the low, red-cushioned chair opposite him, Jess tried hard to think of a secret that wasn’t TillyTilly. She thoughtfully cast her eyes over the low table scattered with papers that stood a little away from them, then at the tiny, silver-framed and blue-tinted landscapes ranged across the cream wallpaper of his office. Her mother, sitting beside her, was not as overly attentive as she had been on the first session. She was scribbling away on her notepad, maybe even sneaking a glance at her watch every now and again.

  “I get scared a lot,” Jess said, finally. She wasn’t sure whether that counted as a secret, but she hadn’t really mentioned it yet.

  “A lot?” Dr. McKenzie probed, offering her a Jelly Baby with a slight smile, as if they both knew that it was also an excuse for him to have another one. It made sense: Shivs must have inherited her sweet tooth from someone. Jess shook her head, then drew in a breath and peered sideways at her mother, who was still writing industriously, apparently absorbed. It made her feel better that her mother was trying her best to make her feel that she could talk.

  “I’m scared of everything—well, most things, I think. I’m always scared, for no reason. Sometimes I forget
about it, but it’s still there, because then something happens and I remember.”

  Sarah suddenly seemed to be paying attention. Though she hadn’t looked up from the pad, her pen had stopped moving, and there was a new stillness about her.

  Dr. McKenzie waited until Jess had recovered eye contact with him before asking, “What about Fern? Are you scared of her?”

  Jess unclenched her hands when she realised that her fingernails were spearing her palms.

  “Of course I am! But I try not to think about it. I think she’s going to—like, get me.”

  She gulped, frightened at the meaning, but happy that she’d said it now. The words made it sound lesser.

  Good.

  Dr. McKenzie was looking attentively at her mother; Jess didn’t dare look at her. Then his pale eyes turned to her.

  “Why do you think Fern would get you?”

  Duh, that was easy.

  “Because I’m the one who’s alive. She might be angry or something. Because it’s not fair.”

  Dr. McKenzie regarded her gravely. She wondered whether he was laughing at her on the inside: I thought she was supposed to be clever.

  “Fern was a baby when she died, Jess. She’s not going to grow up and get angry in the same way that you or I can. Or . . . do you think that babies can get angry that way?”

  Jess knew what was supposed to be the right answer. She mutely shook her head in response to his question, since there was no point explaining that she just knew.

  Dr. McKenzie said, “Hmmm.”

  What does that mean?

  “Jess, what do you think Fern would have been like if she were your age?”

  Slightly panicked, Jess stared at the table again, drumming her fingers on her lap. Her mother’s waiting silence was oppressive.

  “I don’t know! I don’t want to talk about her anymore, please.”

  Dr. McKenzie waited, then asked, “What does it feel like when you remember that you’re scared?”

  She knew better now than to be surprised by this. She tried to sort it into words. “I feel as if that fairy cast a spell on me, only she’s a bad one—”

  On viewing his inquisitive expression she added, “The fairy, in ‘Sleeping Beauty’? The one who cast the spell so everyone fell asleep?”

  “Ah, yes. I remember.” He nodded, slowly. “So you feel as if everything’s been changed, just by your being scared? Tell me if I’m getting it wrong, OK? So instead of falling asleep, you . . .”

  “Scream,” Jess finished, in a low voice, so determined now not to look at her mother that she was terrified her eyes would swivel in her head of their own accord. All she could do was hold on tightly to her seat and look at Dr. McKenzie, who was now gently asking her to close her eyes.

  “Just close them tight. Don’t worry. No one’s coming near you. I just want to see something.”

  Puzzled, Jess obediently clamped her eyes tight shut and waited in that familiar, smooth dark that was at first punctured with impressions of the colours that she’d seen when her eyes had been open. There was a still quiet, and no one said anything. Then, from nowhere, Jess’s stomach tightened as she began to feel frightened.

  What had happened to the other two?

  The hush was like an isolating sheet of glass, slicing her away from Dr. McKenzie and her mother so that she was adrift and alone; the surrounding darkness was no longer a refuge now that she had no one to hide from.

  Her eyelids twitched furiously as the rational part of her mind told her that of course they were still here, they were just being quiet. But she needed to see, if only to make sure that her surroundings had not grown solitary and strange.

  She knew that if they had been taken away, it would be TillyTilly who had done it.

  “Jess,” Dr. McKenzie said, and she quivered at his voice, because it sounded so different. She hadn’t realised how important it was for her to be able to see someone in order to hear them properly. She decided, for some reason, not to answer; he was somewhere on the outside of her eyelids and he could see everything while she saw nothing.

  “Jess. Are you scared now?”

  A brief nod. Oh, she wanted to open her eyes but she didn’t want to. She was already forgetting what it had all been like before she’d closed them.

  Dr. McKenzie spoke again.

  “Jess, this is your safe place. You can’t be truly scared in your safe place. When your eyes are closed, you’re inside yourself, and no one can get you there.”

  Jess’s lips trembled, and she finally opened her eyes and stared at him. Did he really believe that? And how could he know for sure?

  “Why can’t someone get me inside?” she asked.

  He shook his head at her as if she was silly for not knowing. “Because it’s OK,” he said softly. “Whatever you feel in there is OK. It’s not bad or wrong. You’re scared, and that’s all right. You can just be scared and then stop. Nothing happens in between.”

  But what about a twin, a twin who knew everything because she was another you? Could she do something in that time in between?

  “Promise?” she asked.

  He smiled soberly. “That’s for you to promise yourself, Jess.”

  It was OK to be scared. What a bizarre idea.

  One day, a girl forgot the sun.

  Her song had fled, so softly fled,

  Thus, she lay down in darkling sleep

  To follow, blinded, where it led.

  The ibeji woman came to Jess in her sleep and drowned her in a blue blanket that had sorrow in every fold. She said to stop being scared about the swap, and that she should dream instead, dream in the swim of things.

  Forget, forget, forget . . .

  “But, TillyTilly,” Jess said, “you shouldn’t have done it: it scared me, it’s not . . . it’s not like sisters.” And the ibeji woman, this could-have-been-would-have-been Tilly, swam out of sight in billowing blue, asking, “What is like sisters, then?” But Jess was sliding breathlessly down into the waiting sky, so she couldn’t find the words to tell TillyTilly that sisters was something about being held without hands, and the skin-flinch of seeing and simultaneously being seen. But in falling, Jess herself knew that she needed to understand the precious danger of these things, and what they meant, or she would never be happy.

  When Jess awoke, she felt tingly and refreshed, and her fingers found the skin of her cheek as soft as if light silken cobwebs lay over her face. By midmorning, when Trish grabbed her in the corridor and told her that Miss Patel wasn’t going to be in for ages, so Year Five had an “easy peasy” substitute teacher called Mr. Munroe, the silk had disintegrated, and Jess felt brittle and breakable.

  “What happened to Miss Patel?” she asked nervously, unsure if she really wanted to know.

  Trish shrugged and popped her bubble gum, golden in the knowledge that her mornings and afternoons would now chiefly consist of tormenting Mr. Munroe.

  “Well, Mr. Heinz said she had a family emergency, but Jamie’s brother’s in, like, secondary school and he told Jamie one time that sometimes when they say that it means the teacher’s gone a bit mental.”

  Jess stared at her, feeling as if she should burst into tears but unable to muster the energy.

  “Haha,” Trish prompted her, chewing hard.

  “Haha,” Jess said, after a second’s delay.

  SIXTEEN

  When Jess and her parents got back, two days before New Year’s Eve, from the week they’d spent at Jess’s grandparents’ house in Faversham, there was a message on the answerphone for Jess—a first. It was from Shivs, who had honoured their six o’clock calling protocol. Listening to Shivs on the answering machine was weird—she kept leaving breathy pauses so that it felt as if this wasn’t a recorded message, but her talking in real time.

  “Errrr . . . hello, Jess . . . oi, call me back . . . I’ve got SOMETHING TO TELL YOU! Yeah . . . Merry Christmas . . . yeah, BYE.”

  Jess dumped her rucksack in the hallway, ignoring the fact that a
leg of her pyjamas was falling out from the top where she hadn’t zipped it up properly. She glanced at her mother for permission before running upstairs to fetch the purple address book with the pink hearts that only had one phone number in it. Jess carefully punched in the numbers that she knew by heart, a small crease of concentration in her forehead as she double-checked the book so as not to get it wrong.

  She was relieved when Mrs. McKenzie picked up.

  “Good evening! I’d like to speak to Siobhan, please,” she said, trying to be as polite as possible.

  “Is that you, Jessamy? How are you? How was Christmas?”

  “I’m fine, thanks . . .”

  Jess didn’t know what else she was supposed to say, and so she waited patiently for Shivs to come to the phone.

  “It must’ve been you who’s been quoting Hamlet to Shivs— she’s utterly impossible now—keeps running around the house saying that we shouldn’t mind if she puts on ‘an antic disposition.’ ” Mrs. McKenzie laughed, and Jess found a laugh had been surprised out of her too.

  “Anyway, here’s Shivs—say hello to your parents for me, will you?”

  “Yeah, I will.”

  There was some rustling, and then the sound of Siobhan abusing her mother.

  “Oh, so NOW you’ve finished TALKING to her?”

  “I was just saying hello—”

  “You weren’t, though! You were all TALKING and stuff. Listen, she called for me, all right, not for you.”

  “She’s holding on for you, you dozy mare. Take it.”

  “Hello?” (From Siobhan.)

  “Hi,” Jess said, smiling, both at being here, speaking to Siobhan, and at the conversation that she’d just overheard.

  “Oi, Jessamy, where were you, man?”

  “Went to my grandma and grandpa’s. They’ve got no Tescos where they live or anything.”

  “Is it? Do they have Goo?”

  Jess rolled her eyes; she’d forgotten Shivs’s current obsession with Goo, the blobby stuff that looked like congealed mucus and came in a capsule. You were supposed to collect different colours, both of Goo and capsule, until you had them all.