The Icarus Girl

by Helen Oyeyemi

Oh, Shivs, why did you have to tell? You are a bad friend. Good friends don’t tell secrets like that. Why is TillyTilly always right?

  TWENTY-TWO

  Jess would be nine on July the twenty-fifth, during the school holidays.

  “We were wondering if you’d like to spend your birthday in Nigeria,” her mother said brightly as Jess chopped the crust of her toast up into little, little pieces at the kitchen table.

  We?

  Jess looked at her father, who was wearing a T-shirt, pyjama bottoms and a belted dressing gown and propping himself up at the table with his elbow. His cornflakes had descended into a pool of mush before him, and he seemed to have been reading the same two lines of the morning newspaper over and over again, his lips moving slowly as his finger traced the lines of print. His chin was covered with thick stubble that was spreading up his cheeks.

  His hair looked a mess. Jess didn’t think he’d brushed it for ages.

  She worried about things like this—him not drinking or disposing of his own coffee, him not smiling, him looking so tired all the time but not sounding like he meant it when he said so, him not brushing his hair. He didn’t look like part of the “we.”

  What would he be like in Nigeria?

  What would her grandfather say?

  He’d probably look straight at her with those keen, sparkling eyes and know that it was Jess’s friend who had done it, and therefore Jess’s fault.

  She wouldn’t be gold anymore, because he’d know the truth.

  She tried to think of what the Yoruba for “mud” would sound like.

  “So what d’you think?”

  Her mum put another piece of toast on Jess’s plate. Jess was annoyed. She didn’t want any more toast. She stabbed at it with her table knife.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you want to see your grandfather again? I thought you missed him.”

  Jess carried on stabbing.

  “If you didn’t want it, you should have said so,” Jess’s mum told her, yanking the toast out from under Jess’s knife in one deft move.

  “I don’t want to go,” Daniel said quietly, from opposite Jess.

  Sarah and Jess both looked at him in surprise.

  “But I thought we agreed—” said Sarah.

  “I don’t want to go. I didn’t really want to go the last time either,” he informed her languidly.

  Sarah didn’t reply, but quickly began buttering her toast and spreading it with jam. Jess risked a look at her to see if she was going to explode and start an argument, but she seemed pretty calm.

  “It’s nothing personal,” Daniel added abruptly, as if Sarah had protested (was a different version of the “conversation” running in his head?). He rubbed his eyes. “I just don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “Yes, OK,” Sarah said testily. Then, in order to end this exchange, she turned to Jess while Daniel went back to the crucial two lines of black print on his paper.

  “Just let me know when you make up your mind, OK?”

  Jess nodded, then caught a flash of TillyTilly lurking in the passageway between the sitting room and the kitchen—the pockets of her school dress seemed to be stuffed full of paper— but she had disappeared again in a second.

  “Can I have another piece of toast?” she asked, to her mother’s clear exasperation. Jess didn’t care; she wasn’t going to go out there by herself so that TillyTilly could invisibly pull her hair and push and pull at her when she refused to speak. It was hard not being able to talk to Tilly and not being able to talk about her either. Dr. McKenzie and her mother were wrong: TillyTilly’s presence was no longer a matter of Jess’s choice, if indeed it had ever been.

  (I wasn’t pretending to be someone else; it was TillyTilly dragging secret things out of me like she sometimes does. I didn’t choose TillyTilly, I just couldn’t say Titiola right. Really, truly, please believe me.)

  Her father was passive and uninvolved, apparently unaware of TillyTilly’s now imaginary status in the household. Taking the opportunity of having him as a captive audience in the sitting room as he watched television—always the adverts; occasionally he smiled at some unknown or hidden element of them—Jess had told him of the problem of TillyTilly. She bit down her fear and risked her secret; she told her father that Tilly was real, and, barely even acknowledging it with a nod, he had told her in exchange that there was a very small person trapped in a space like this. (He held up his hands to describe a narrow box shape.)

  The person was fast asleep.

  Everything was colourless and slow because this small person was asleep, and nobody knew how to wake them up. They wouldn’t wake up because they didn’t really want to—it was too hard being awake. He asked her if she understood, but she had stared at his face, which was wet with tears even though his voice remained steady and low, and then she’d looked around the sitting room at all the colours and told him yes, she understood, because she wasn’t sure if he knew that it was Jess he was talking to, and anyway it was her fault, so she had to understand. The doctor had given him some special pills, but she never saw him take them. Once, when Jess was on the stairs and her parents were in the sitting room, she had heard her mum ask, “Please tell me what’s the matter, please. Is it work? Is it me?” but he only said, “No and no and no, no, no. I’m just tired. So tired. That’s all.”

  It had been hardest not to talk to TillyTilly the previous night, when Tilly had said to her, “You’re angry, Jessy. You’re angry with Siobhan, she’s made it all worse and now you’re not allowed to speak to me in case I do something. But I’ll be good! I won’t do anything you don’t want me to!” The candles had been placed all around Jess’s bed, and TillyTilly had been talking from behind the big wooden board with the long-armed woman on it. Jess couldn’t see Tilly’s face, but she could see her arms supporting the board, and the fraying blue-and-turquoise friendship bracelet on her wrist.

  “You understand that I’ve got to get Siobhan, don’t you?” TillyTilly said. “ ’Cause you won’t really forgive her until she’s been got. You’re really angry with her, Jessy, and I know it’s because you never had a proper, really really here friend, and now she thinks you’re mad. It scares you for people to be scared of you and think you’re weird, remember?”

  It was no use; Jess could still hear her from the safe place, and it took every bit of strength she had not to reply. She couldn’t let TillyTilly say this; she couldn’t let Shivs, who was brisk and bright and strong, be taken away and replaced with . . . she didn’t know. Just . . . someone else who didn’t know why they had to be there, who slept most of the day and had a flat dullness in their eyes for the rest of it. Being got was supposed to be like being beaten up, bruised, bleeding, crying, but this was stranger and worse.

  It was as if TillyTilly had a special sharp knife that cut people on the inside so that they collapsed into themselves and couldn’t ever get back out. No colours, her father had said. No colours! She wasn’t angry at Shivs, although she had been. They’d made up, they’d spoken on the phone, and Shivs had apologised ramblingly before explaining that she’d been scared, not for herself, of course—you wouldn’t catch Siobhan McKenzie being a scaredy-cat—but for Jessamy.

  “I felt as if she didn’t really . . . well, like you much,” Shivs had said lamely. (That’s not the problem, she likes me too much.)

  Jess kept all of this in her mind, trying to think of other things as well, while TillyTilly reminded her that Shivs had sworn (see this wet, see this dry, stick a needle in my eye . . . ) not to tell.

  Tiny flames were leaping all around her, and Jess peeped at them through her half-closed eyes, trying not to feel as if the charcoal woman was staring at her. She wasn’t going to let TillyTilly get Shivs, she wasn’t, she wasn’t, she wasn’t.

  “I told you that this McKenzie would only bring trouble,” TillyTilly had said finally, before emptying the room of herself, the candles, and, last of all, the tall, inexplicably reproving board.

 
“Jess, do you know what happened to my tea lights?” her mother asked, now, at the breakfast table.

  Jess shook her head and eyed her father as he rose and wandered out of the kitchen. He looked at TillyTilly, who had come back again, as she sat waiting on the staircase. He looked straight at her, as if he saw her but didn’t fully register what he saw, and Jess saw TillyTilly shrink up small against the wall as if something in his gaze frightened her. But neither Jess’s father nor TillyTilly said anything, and after that split-second pause, Daniel padded into the sitting room.

  “It’s really quite strange because I had three packs of them: all gone.” Her mother seemed about to continue, but was interrupted by the trilling of the telephone, which she rose to answer. After a second, “Jess, the bell tolls for thee,” she announced from the hallway, beckoning Jess.

  It was Siobhan, who was reminding her that she was coming over at five to spend the night.

  “Oi,” Shivs said, lowering her voice to a static crackle, “my dad doesn’t really want me to come. He thinks . . . I dunno.”

  (I don’t want you to come either, Shivs, but I do, but I don’t.)

  Jess had no time to force her voice over the drowning of her heart, because Shivs quickly filled in. “But then my mum told him not to worry, and that you’re this really nice girl and properly brought up, and you’re really good for me because you’re all intelligent and stuff. So I’m still coming!”

  “Oh,” Jess managed to say.

  “I dunno. I just thought I’d tell you. Um.” The turn of Shivs’s voice was tinted with remorse. “All right, see you then, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Jess croaked, ignoring TillyTilly, who was stretched out over the ceiling like a grinning sheet.

  Shivs shouted “BYE!” at the top of her voice and swiftly hung up.

  Perturbed, Jess went and sat back down in the kitchen while her mum washed up and muttered aloud a brief list of things that needed to be fetched. She supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised that TillyTilly knew how to use the phone: she knew how to do everything.

  “I want to go to Nigeria for my birthday,” she announced to her mother, who cheered her decision. It didn’t matter if her grandfather did know the truth about what had happened to her father—though he hadn’t mentioned her “thief friend” again—Jess had a feeling that he would also know how to make TillyTilly stop.

  “We might have to leave your father behind in England, though,” her mother told her.

  “Want me to tell a ghost story?” Shivs said in a loud whisper, turning her torchlight into Jess’s face.

  Jess blinked furiously and only just managed not to fall out of the bed. It was a slightly uncomfortable squeeze with both of them on the single bed under two sets of covers, but she’d ignored the blow-up mattress that her mum had set up on the floor and insisted that they both sleep on her bed. She’d also reopened the bedroom door after Shivs had kicked it shut in her customary way, because she wasn’t taking any risks whatsoever.

  “No . . . no ghost stories,” Jess told her, trying not to sneeze as a strand of Siobhan’s hair encountered her cheek.

  Shivs twisted restlessly around for a little while, then scratched her head.

  “Why can’t I sleep on the floor, anyway? You got mice or something?”

  “Ewwww, no. I just . . . don’t want you to pull my leg or anything in the night. I get scared.”

  “Awww, I won’t, though! Let me sleep on the floor, please please please! I need room! I put my arms out and everything— I’d make you fall out!”

  “No!”

  “Awwww but I’m sleepy, Jess,” Shivs complained. “And you won’t even let me tell a ghost story to keep myself awake.”

  “If you complain any more,” Jess said quietly, in a spooky voice, “I’m going to make you go downstairs and eat some more of those spicy prawns—I know there’s some left . . .”

  “Aargh,” Shivs said, “shabby.” She hadn’t liked the spicy prawns at all, and Jess giggled aloud just thinking about Shivs’s pop-eyed expression when she’d shovelled a forkful of prawns, mushrooms and rice in her mouth in defiance of Sarah’s warning to “go slowly.”

  “Hah, you can’t take your pepper,” Jess’s mum had said, shaking her head while Shivs jogged silently around the room gasping for air until she was taken upstairs to brush her teeth and tongue with Aquafresh. She’d had to have a burger and chips instead.

  Shivs stopped wriggling and turned over so that her face was jammed into the pillow.

  “G’night, then,” she murmured. “S’not my fault if you end up on the floor.”

  Jess sat up a little bit and watched, grinning, as Shivs snuggled down farther, slipping her thumb into her mouth. It was OK, it would be OK. She only had to make sure that she watched Shivs all night. She couldn’t sleep at all, she wouldn’t sleep, she would fight TillyTilly to the last about this—

  But, of course, she did eventually fall asleep, with her arm flung protectively over Siobhan’s shoulder.

  “Pssst! Wake up, Siobhan!”

  Jess was calling her, she had to get up, and she had to go somewhere, didn’t she? Yes, and quietly. Or was that the dream? Siobhan stretched, cracked her eyes open and peered about her. Jess was nowhere to be seen; she had been calling from outside the room, but now she had gone.

  “Siobhan, wake up!”

  “Uhhhh—” Shivs wondered who had groaned, then realised that it was her. It was cold, her hands were cold; she didn’t want to get out of bed, she wanted to go back to sleep, but she was worried about Jess, who wanted her to go somewhere. She half climbed, half fell out of bed, not feeling the roughness of the rug under her bare, numbed feet, and stumbled out of the bedroom door. There were no lights on anywhere, and her squinted eyes were taking an incredibly long time to become accustomed to the darkness.

  “Jess?” she called softly, then waited. From somewhere downstairs, Jess giggled. Were they playing hide-and-seek? Shivs blinked and shook her head, feeling more wide awake. She started down the stairs, deciding not to call out any longer. Two could be cunning. Hesitating halfway down, she peered into the dark and tried to decide whether Jess would be in the sitting room or the kitchen. The sitting room—she would be hiding behind a chair. Putting a hand over her mouth so that she didn’t laugh aloud, she began to tiptoe into the sitting room. Shivs was a little bit frightened in there, almost not quite daring to crawl around the sofa to find Jess. Jess wasn’t there; the room was dark and felt like an open mouth—some sort of mist was moving through it, a pervading warmth, and the carpet seemed to ripple slightly under Shivs’s feet, like a tongue.

  All right, so now she was being silly, she told herself.

  Her eyes had still not adjusted, and the shoulder of her loose nightie was slipping down her arm. Nervously, she tugged it up again.

  “Shivs—” It was Jess again, and her voice was louder and more urgent. Now it sounded as if it was coming from upstairs.

  How would she have done that, got upstairs again already?

  Backing out of the sitting room, Shivs looked up the stairs to see Jess standing at the top, framed by a faintly incandescent brightness against the pitch black. It was strange, the way she looked, her features sharp and beautiful, as if there were a lantern burning under her skin. But she wasn’t holding anything—no torch, no candle, nothing. This was a dream, it must be.

  A strange expression crossed Jess’s face and she looked over her shoulder at something behind her, her hand going up over her face before she turned back to Shivs. “Shivs, don’t—”

  There was a lifting, a jolting and a falling back into place as something swung in Siobhan’s sight, and she immediately saw that Jess was not standing on the top step after all; there was another girl behind her. Only the shape, only the shape of another girl, but she didn’t want to see her come into Jess’s fierce light.

  She had seen, but not quite seen. For a second, she thought that she wouldn’t be able to move, that she’d never move again,
but then her knees gave way, and, dropping down with her hands over her face, Siobhan tremblingly waited for everything to stop happening.

  Someone came, and the someone touched her.

  “It isn’t really happening,” Jess quavered from the staircase, watching TillyTilly and Siobhan running together, screaming without sound as they

  (or was it only Siobhan? or only Tilly?)

  threw Siobhan against the front door, against the walls, on the floor. Siobhan’s body was twisting, her face shaped into a grimacing smile as she pranced jerkily into the sitting room with her nightie swirling out around her thin frame, then leapt back out as Jess breathlessly ran a little way down the stairs, and gripped the banister so tightly that it hurt her fingers. She didn’t quite dare to try and stop Tilly now. It was some fearsome, grotesque dance: Siobhan tiptoeing and then dragging across the floor, her red hair falling out of its loose knot and over her shoulders as she spun into the kitchen, while TillyTilly, partially elevated in the dim light, was somehow operating her, although Jess couldn’t see quite how: her hands were at Siobhan’s back

  (in her? above her? Oh, don’t be in her, don’t let TillyTilly have her hands jammed into my friend’s body)

  and Siobhan was gasping and laughing, and they all went into the kitchen and Siobhan/Tilly knew where the knife drawer was (of course! of course!)

  and Jess knew that she hated both of them when Siobhan started to hurt herself with the knife edge, because it was her fault and she was bleeding too and she couldn’t stop.

  Only apparently none of that happened. Because Siobhan had only fallen all the way down the stairs and broken the skin of her neck quite badly on the pointy end of the banister when it had inexplicably broken off. Just how, they didn’t know. It didn’t matter that all the knives were in the knife drawer, clean and untouched, and it didn’t matter that when Jess had stopped screaming Siobhan was all in a heap on the bottom step, but it mattered that TillyTilly hadn’t liked Shivs from the start. Only now could Jess tell her that it was OK that she couldn’t keep a secret; she was a good friend now that she was going to die.