Astonished, Jess gazed upwards to find that she was kneeling teary-eyed in the living-room doorway, at her mother’s slippered feet.
“What’s the matter?” Sarah asked, equally surprised.
Jess opened and closed her mouth, then gave a little laugh and moved aside so that her father, sock-footed and carrying a plate with a sandwich on it, could reenter the sitting room. Both her parents looked at her expectantly. With growing disbelief, Jess yet again felt herself slipping into the gap—that gap of perception between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening. She stood up and said, lamely, “I hurt myself.”
“Where? Shall I take a look at it?” Her mum maintained steady eye contact with her, and Jess, disturbed, wondered if the gap was not as wide as she had thought it was. She couldn’t bear a halfway gap; it had to be a chasm or not there at all—fitting pieces together would be dangerous and doomed to misunderstanding.
“No, I only stubbed my toe, it’s all right now,” she said, quickly.
“Jess, d’you want some of this?” Daniel interrupted from the sofa, apparently under the impression that Jess wanted to eat something as boring as ham and cheese in a sandwich.
Jess was relieved when Sarah’s eyes slid off her towards him.
“I like the way you’re eating ham now when I’m doing a ham thing for dinner,” Sarah admonished.
As her father replied, Jess tried to creep past her mother. She was stopped by a tug at the beaded end of one of her cornrows.
“Hey, you. It’s nearly half past six, and you haven’t asked to phone Shivs yet! You two arguing or something?”
Jess hesitated, then shook her head. She still had to sort that out.
“Actually . . . can I use the phone?”
Her mum nodded, and Jess bolted up the stairs to her bedroom to find the purple address book.
Shivs was a long time coming to the telephone, and when she finally took the call, her voice was gruff.
“What?”
“Shivs, I’m really sorry about yesterday.”
“So?”
“So I’m sorry! You should accept my apology. Jesus, what d’you want from me?”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Shivs said automatically, as Jess had known she would, then they both collapsed into laughter. Finally, Shivs drew a breath and then asked, “What happened, anyway?”
Jess bit her lip. “Umm . . . well, I was just joking. I didn’t even mean it! I was about to say ‘jokes,’ but then my dad’s friend Jonathan made me jump and I dropped the phone, and when I’d picked it up you’d gone.”
Shivs gasped, apparently at the audacity of the lie. “Ohhhh, what’s WRONG with you, Jessamy Harrison! The truth shall set you free—I heard you breathing!”
“What’s all this Bible stuff, anyways?” Jess asked, buying time. What on earth was she supposed to say now? And she was already so worried about TillyTilly, who was not supposed to be sick.
“My mum made me go to church on Sunday. Dry as a bone. Jesus was some boring man, but still, I DID hear you breathing— it was like huhhh, huhhhh, huuuuh—”
Jess, having swiftly made up her mind, interrupted her. “All right, listen, I’ll tell you about it one day. All I can say about it now is that I’m really sorry and I didn’t mean it.”
“Yeah? Tell me one day like when?”
“Like . . . not now.”
“Oh, fine then, if you want to be all mysterious,” Shivs said, then: “Me and Katrina are best friends again—we made up today.” They’d had a fight over one of Katrina’s Barbie dolls, which was now missing a pink-plastic high heel, an occurrence that Shivs swore (wet and dry, stick a needle in her eye, if this turns out to be a lie) wasn’t her fault.
“Oh.”
“But me and you are still best friends. It’s just Katrina’s my school best friend, OK?”
“OK!” Jess didn’t complain, even though she didn’t have a school best friend herself.
“I’ve got to go and eat my dinner now,” Shivs said.
Jess could faintly hear Mrs. McKenzie calling in the background.
“All right. Bye.”
“Bye,” Shivs said cheerily. “I’m glad we made up. I didn’t take the friendship bracelet off, not even in the bath! And it took AGES making yours.”
After Jess had finished using the phone, her mum called Nigeria and spoke to Jess’s grandfather. Jess, sitting patiently on the steps waiting for her turn and bracing herself for the usual fear-provoking sound-echo on the line, pricked her ears up when she heard her mother mention the word ibeji, then look at her and turn away slightly before continuing in rapid Yoruba. She hadn’t talked with her mum about the issue of the ibeji statue for Fern again, preferring to keep it quietly in her mind for now while she worked out exactly how it was supposed to make Fern happy. When her mother finally stopped speaking and passed the phone to her saying, “There’s only a few minutes left on the card,” Jess spoke eagerly into the receiver.
“Hello, Grandfather!”
“My Wura! How are you, how is everything?”
She grimaced at the echo.
“I’m all right!”
“Good girl! Fine daughter!”
Jess smiled at a man who would say that she was a fine daughter just for being all right. Her grandfather’s next words made her heart stand still.
“Eh-heh, and also, have you heard from your friend?”
Jess’s eyes widened and she sank down on the bottom step of the staircase and looked through into the kitchen at her mother, who was slicing onions at the chopping board.
“Friend? Which friend? I mean . . . um. I do have friends, but which one . . . ?”
“Ha! You this girl! Have you forgotten already? That thief friend of yours who was stealing my candles and taking them to my own Boys’ Quarters,” her grandfather said equably.
Jess was silent, and the muteness wasn’t just inside her, but everywhere at once.
“Akin said that you came out of the Boys’ Quarters that day when you wanted to go home. Sae you remember?”
“Yes,” Jess whispered.
“I told him to check the place, but that foolish boy just went to the front steps and came back to tell me it was nothing. I checked the whole place myself a few days ago.”
“I didn’t have a friend there,” Jess said weakly.
“Eh-heh now, so you didn’t have a friend there! You were crying to go home and then afterwards you didn’t want to leave. You oyinbo are strange,” he teased.
Jess put a hand over her mouth so that he didn’t hear her laborious breathing. Had he found the board with the ibeji woman on it? He couldn’t have. He would have said something. But if Tilly had taken it away, then where was it?
“Wuraola.” Her grandfather’s voice was serious now.
“Mmmm?”
“Two hungry people should never make friends. If they do, they eat each other up. It is the same with one person who is hungry and another who is full: they cannot be real, real friends because the hungry one will eat the full one. You understand?”
“Yes, grandfather.” She was scared now, because she knew he wasn’t talking about food-hungry. She almost understood what he was saying; she was sure of it.
“Only two people who are full up can be friends. They don’t want anything from each other except friendship . . .”
Jess sprang up from the step, eying the darkened staircase as her grandfather’s voice was cut off with a loud series of beeps. Then, seeing nothing, she relaxed and gave a relieved laugh as she realised that it was only the lack of money on the phone card that had divided her grandfather and her into separate spaces again.
“Jess,” her mother called from the kitchen, “you hungry?”
Jess, who had dropped the phone with a clatter, calmed herself and replaced it carefully.
“Not really,” she said, chewing on her bottom lip.
“Pssst!”
Jess, who had run up the stairs
ahead of her mother to prepare herself for the first two fits of The Hunting of the Snark read out in a Yoruba accent, stopped short before entering her darkened bedroom. The sound didn’t come from there.
“Jessy—”
Jess looked to her right and to her left, then moved cautiously down towards the bathroom and pushed the door open. The bathroom was cold, but the square, white-framed mirror above the sink was coated with what looked like condensing steam. She took a couple of steps inside, wondering what TillyTilly was doing, then she tried to step back out again, not liking the indistinct way her outline loomed as she approached the mirror. But, with a rattling sound, the bathroom door slammed shut, as if pushed. When she touched the handle, it was so cold that she jumped away lest her hand stick to it.
“TillyTilly,” Jess whispered, and her voice sounded so, so small that she almost didn’t realise that she’d said it aloud. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it,” she said, trying to sound firm and assertive. Tilly had to stop it now.
No sound, no movement. It was dark in the bathroom, but Jess somehow knew better than to make a move towards the light switch. The tiles had a pale white glow of their own. Shivering, Jess rubbed her arms and moved forward to the mirror, as she knew Tilly wanted her to. With one hand, she tremblingly rubbed away a corner of the mist, only to see her own eye peering back at her.
“Jess?” her mother said, sounding as if she was at the other end of a long, hollow tunnel, rather than just outside the door. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” Jess murmured, now smudging mist away with her fist. Then, louder: “Yeah. I’m just brushing my teeth.”
“New habit?” her mother asked, with a smile in her voice. When there was no reply, she said, “Well, I’ll be in your bedroom, all right?”
“Mmmm.”
Jess had now cleared a rough little patch of mirror, but was bewildered to find that she was only looking at herself. What exactly had TillyTilly wanted her to see? It was Jess, just herself, her hazel eyes darting bemusedly around the mirror, her pale brown oval face framed with the beginnings of the thick cornrows that swung to her shoulders and ended with the brightly coloured bustle of wooden beads. She leaned closer, squinting, then gasped aloud as her reflection spoke to her.
“I want to swap places, Jessy.”
It was Tilly’s voice, but Jess’s mirrored mouth moving.
“Sw-swap?” Jess stammered, touching her face even as she tried to discover how this could be. Her reflected eyes narrowed and passed over her coolly, and the cheeks were sucked in thoughtfully before Tilly said, “Yes. I’ve decided that it’s about time.”
Jess, moving rapidly towards the bathroom door again, was trying to reconcile this Tilly with Tilly-who-was-ill. She’d changed again: two Tillys, nice Tilly, nasty Tilly, TillyTilly. She disagreed with Tilly’s last statement with a frantic shake of her head. “I’ll scream again,” she warned.
TillyTilly chuckled indulgently, but remained standing still in the mirror-world she inhabited, even as Jess was moving, trying to force the bathroom door handle down despite the cold.
“All right then, scream. They’ll only put you in the basement again, and we’ll swap places there. People don’t care when you scream, Jessy, because—” from the inside of the mirror, she leaned closer to the surface and it seemed to bulge and stretch as if she would tumble out, “—because it’s really annoying.”
Jess put a hand to her mouth, trying not to let her heart feel too full that TillyTilly, who was supposed to understand, was saying these things to her. She also began to feel the stirrings of anger amidst her fear.
“I’m not swapping,” she warned, but her voice came out thin and squeaky—a frightened voice. Oh, she was scared again. She’d never been more scared.
“Yes you ARE.”
TillyTilly sounded frustrated. As she spoke, all four taps, the two for the sink and the two for the bath, turned on with a single sharp hisssssss. The plugs were already in place.
“Next the water pipes,” TillyTilly warned, as Jess stared uncomprehendingly at the gushing water. Some of it leapt impossibly and splashed Jess where she stood. All of it was cold.
“A person could drown in here,” TillyTilly added, from the mirror. “The water would have to rise fast though . . .”
“Never, never, never,” Jess whispered to herself, unsure what she meant, and she closed her eyes tight and hid from TillyTilly, even though her hands and feet were numbing with cold. She could hear the rushing water drumming away in the bathtub.
“I’m not full, but you’re the hungry one,” Jess said between clenched teeth, as a cold hand (was it within or without?) touched her.
She was scared! She was so scared it was in her eyes and her hands and her bones and hair and teeth—
It was OK.
It
was
OK—
Then, without opening her eyes, she was caught in the crisp outward shattering of glass as the mirror crack’d from side to side, flying out of its frame. At the centre of it all was TillyTilly, manically screaming, “Seven years’ bad luck! Seven years’ bad luck! SEVEN YEARS’ BAD LUCK!”
“What are you?” Jess cried out from her safe place.
Tilly’s reply: “I don’t KNOW! You know! YOU know!”
Sarah heard the sound of loud breakage in the bathroom, and was there half an instant after Daniel, who had flung himself against the door and forced it open. There was a thin layer of cold water on the floor—it was from the overflowing bathtub. Water was also pouring gradually from the edge of the washbasin as well, since all the taps were on. And Jess, sitting near the middle of the room, small and inscrutable in her blue T-shirt, was surrounded by a myriad of glittering mirror pieces. Inexplicably, the white mirror frame was empty on the wall above the sink, rocked slightly to one side. In the middle of all this sat Jess, silently clutching her purple toothbrush, holding it out as if it were an offering. It had bits of glass in the bristles; she’d been incredibly lucky not to be blinded or hurt. Glass was everywhere—Jess blinked and shook her head; pieces of mirror were in her hair and scattered on her clothes and the floor. It broke the spell.
At the light clinking sound, Jess’s mum stepped gingerly into the room, moving quickly over to Jess and brushing her down with a towel as Jess’s dad turned off the taps.
Jess was light, light light-headed with fear.
“Mummy,” she said, impatiently shrugging off Sarah’s attentions with the towel as she was led out of the bathroom, “You have to believe me! I didn’t do it! It was TillyTilly—”
Then she stopped, confused, and said nothing more.
Her mother’s eyes grew wide and fast-blinking, the lashes trembling.
“So TillyTilly came here tonight and decided to break something again, hey?”
Sarah handed the towel to Daniel and started down the stairs to fetch the dustpan and brush. She needed to change from slippers into shoes as well.
Jess’s dad now took his turn. “Jess—”
Jess wriggled away from him and started back to the bathroom.
Despair. Despair. It was as if they were all on Tilly’s side, determined that Jess be blamed for something that she didn’t even know she’d done. She could see Tilly’s plan, and she could see that it was going to be one long line of TROUBLE until she didn’t want to be Jess anymore.
Desperately she said, “You don’t believe me! Well, OK, I’ll clear it up. It’s my fault, anyway—I made all this mess!”
Restraining her, Daniel tugged Jess out of the way as Sarah, looking clownlike in a pair of his black boots, reentered the bathroom, clicking her tongue at the extent of the sprayed glass. Jess kicked hysterically, hearing the rasping sound beginning in the back of her throat, the one that preceded a screaming fit.
Jess’s father picked her right up, and both of them saw a nerve tighten near Sarah’s jaw. But she bent over and steadily began to sweep the shards of glass into the dustpan, shaking the brush every now and
again to dislodge shining specks.
Jess made one last blind swipe at the bathroom floor, her arms spinning around in an attempt to break free from her father’s hold, then she yelped as glass spiked the top of her palm, and a bead of blood sprang from an area on her palm just below her middle finger. She stopped struggling and stared at it, fascinated.
“Oh God, Jess!” Her father sat her on the top step of the staircase and took her hand, inspecting it, but Jess snatched it back and held her hand up before her face, gazing absorbedly at the cut.
So now she bled, when the skin wouldn’t lift from her hands before.
She let out a low whine and rocked back and forth, and her father (go away, GO AWAY) tried to take her hand back in his.
Sarah had dropped her dustpan and brush and was repeating, “Daniel, you’ll need to get some disinfectant and some cotton wool—”
Jess looked up from the cut, and stopped them both in their tracks.
There must have been something in her gaze that held them both so stiff, but she didn’t care.
Sarah shrank back, murmuring, “Jess, what is it?”
“Shut up!” Jess fired back, cradling her hand at her chest. “Shut up! It’s all your stupid fault anyway. You don’t believe me, just when I need you to—”
“Daniel, get the disinfectant,” Sarah said steadily. She and Jess were staring at each other.
Jess couldn’t stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she’d be scraped hollow. She didn’t like saying these things, but she didn’t know how to stop.
She wanted to stop.
Her mother was holding on to the top of the banister as if preparing to flee, only not yet.
“You hate me, anyway! You want to hit me when I scream just because YOU got hit! She wouldn’t BE here if it wasn’t for YOU—”
Daniel stayed stock-still, his eyes fixed. Jess was spilling over, spewing out words. (Daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy)
“And it’s all YOUR FAULT about Fern! You think it’s your fault, and it is, it is, it is!”
Jess’s voice had escalated to some peak of dark satisfaction, and Sarah winced and closed her own eyes with a slight shaky nod of something like acceptance. But it was Jessamy’s eyes, like cold hard stones, like the girl that Fern would have been, that made Daniel start forward, carpet slipping under his feet, and wildly strike out almost before he knew what he was doing, hitting his daughter with such force that she jerked backwards with a whole-body snap.
The Icarus Girl Page 22