“D’you speak English?” Jess asked, as the thought suddenly occurred to her.
“D’you speak English?” the girl said, perfectly naturally, as if she was the one who had thought to say it first.
The feeling clung to Jess that she was being asked the questions, and that there was perhaps something more to them, that she was actually being asked something else entirely. Yet the girl’s face betrayed no flicker of understanding. Jess began to feel bewildered.
She swayed a little on her feet, tired from the sun, and sat down on the bottom step, looking thoughtfully at the girl. Clearly she had to ask something that would make her give an answer instead of another question.
“Where Do you live?” she asked, on impulse.
“Where Do you live?” It was said almost blithely, with a not-quite grin. A veritable Jessamy-echo.
Jess laughingly threw her hands up towards the sky. “What’s your name?”
Again, that listening pause, as if someone was saying something to her, someone speaking on a frequency just higher (or lower?) than Jess could hear, and Jess wondered if the girl had some kind of hearing difficulty. There had been a girl in her class who was partially deaf and had that same concentration and focus when listening to someone speak.
Then the girl spoke, almost without moving her mouth, as if reluctantly: “My name is Titiola.”
She shifted from foot to foot, then finally shone a smile as beautiful and fleeting as it was sudden. If Jess hadn’t kept her eyes fixed on her she would certainly have missed it, because that glow wasn’t waiting for anybody and had vanished in a millisecond, leaving the sober, solemn expression behind. Jess felt as if she was finally getting somewhere. She couldn’t help but smile in return as a sort of offering in homage to that now-absent radiance of the girl’s.
“Titi . . . sorry, I don’t want to say it; I’ll say it wrong, and I know your name means something. Um. What’s your surname?”
Silence.
Jess spoke awkwardly now, feeling as if she wasn’t being understood. “I mean . . . you know! My surname’s Harrison. And yours?”
Silence.
Except that this time the girl spread her hands in a strange gesture, her palms turned upwards, her hands stretched out flat. She didn’t look at Jessamy, but at her hands. Jess laughed because she didn’t know what else to do.
“Um. OK. I don’t know what to call you. Titiola?”
She pronounced it Tee-tee-yo-la, wincing as she said it, knowing that it sounded all wrong in her mouth, jarring.
The girl’s head snapped up, her eyes widening.
“Titiola,” she said sharply.
Jess could see that this wasn’t going very well. The girl didn’t seem to like her, and for some reason it was important to have her liking.
“How about,” she said, almost desperately, one hand rubbing against her leg, seeking out the drying mosquito bite, “I call you Tilly?”
The girl withdrew her palms and folded her thin arms, seemed to consider.
“Well, Titi doesn’t sound that much like Tilly. Tilly has all L’s and not enough T’s . . .”
The girl watched her, the corners of her eyes wrinkled up as if she was about to smile again.
“TillyTilly? Can I call you that? TillyTilly, I mean? It has two T’s . . . and I don’t want to get your real name wrong, and anyway, you call me Jessy when I’m actually Jessamy or just Jess, so Jessy isn’t really my real name either . . .”
She trailed off as she realised that the girl was laughing. She didn’t laugh like the other kids in Jessamy’s class; her laugh was a dry, raspy chuckle that sounded like wheezing. Jess found that she liked it.
Jess laughed too, glad that the two of them were there, one standing, one sitting, in the sunshine, glad that she had been so eager to be friends with somebody for once. It was a peering through good and pretty coloured glass, this gladness, this feeling that someone had been around the compound, knowing who she was, and wanting to talk to her. She had never been sought out this way before. It was funny and pleasing, like a bubbling fizz growing in her stomach.
The girl paused in her laughter, and then looked over her shoulder. Curious, Jess looked too, but couldn’t see anything except the Boys’ Quarters, which stood tall and grey and empty. Beyond that, she supposed, was only the car park and the back road that led to the rest of the houses in Bodija.
“I need to go,” the girl said, saying “go” on a winding-down breath, as if she were about to say something else, say what she had to go and do, but she didn’t.
Jess leapt up from the staircase and was surprised to see the girl shrink as if expecting a blow. She began to back away, moving faster with each step.
“Wait! Um. Wouldyouliketobefriends?” Jess asked, anxiously.
The girl stopped stock-still for a few moments, then spoke softly and almost as quickly as Jessamy had.
“Yes.”
Another swift, illuminating smile, then she added hastily, “Watch for a light tonight.”
She turned and hurtled away from where Jess stood, moving past the Boys’ Quarters and around the back of the car park in what felt to Jess, who could hardly follow her figure for the sheets of sunlight wobbling down, like seconds.
Jess thoughtfully climbed the steps up to the middle floor. The air smelt like a mixture of toast and baking bread. Aunty Funke was supervising Tope, and Akin was grunting as he poured cassava from one huge pot into another; they were at the final stage of the gari making in the kitchen, and steam billowed from the open kitchen door. Her mother had gone shopping with a carload of old friends. She had tried to persuade Jessamy to come along, but Jess, who had been to the amusement park with her mother, father and these same friends the day before, demurred. It had been almost, but not quite, as bad as the zoo.
In the parlour, she could hear Aunty Biola attempting to teach her father Yoruba, collapsing into helpless giggles whenever he mispronounced his vowels, giving them the flat English sound instead of lifting them upwards with the slight outward puff of breath that was required. Jess couldn’t speak Yoruba to save her life, but she somehow had an ear for it, and could hear when it was spoken properly, even catch a little meaning in it. She crept closer to the beads that formed the door curtain and peeped through them.
“Orukọ mi ni . . .” her father began, then stopped, confused when Aunty Biola fell about laughing again. He had said orukọ, “my name,” through his nose, as if it was a weird kind of sneezing sound.
“Orukọ,” she stressed gently as soon as she had recovered.
Her father shrugged, grinning.
“That’s what I said!”
Aunty Biola slapped her hands together in the typical Nigerian gesture for helplessness, exclaiming, “What am I going to do with this man?!” Then she fell back onto the the sofa as another fit of laughter overtook her.
Jess watched her father fan the two of them with a copy of Tell magazine, then she continued down the corridor. She paused outside the closed door at the end, her grandfather’s study. Ebun had told her, in the quiet of the night, lying in their beds, when the two of them had begun to speak as they did when they couldn’t see each other properly, that the door was always kept shut and locked—ever since the time that Bose, with her hands coated with spicy adun, had nearly destroyed the wine-coloured leather bindings of his specially commissioned copies of Things Fall Apart and A Dance of the Forests.
She hovered outside the door, longing to enter, just to glimpse just once, the rows of shelves Ebun had described to her, and the desk with the official-looking seal on it and to see her grandfather. Since the day she had gone into the entrance of the Boys’ Quarters, he was always wanting to know if she was happy, always wanting to make her happy, not in the anxious way of her English grandparents, who kindly, unintentionally made her feel abnormal, like a freak, but in a powerful, questing way that seemed to put her melancholy under a microscope and make her fears appear groundless. And so she quietly seated herself
cross-legged on the clean, shiny squares of the floor outside the study, her back against the wall.
Jess closed her eyes and thought about TillyTilly, glad that she hadn’t gone shopping with her mother. Should she ask Ebun about her? But she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to ask anyone, she wanted to keep TillyTilly. TillyTilly was nothing like Dulcie or anyone in Jess’s class; TillyTilly was barefoot and strange, and wanted to be friends.
Jess could hear Aunty Funke’s laughter ringing down the corridor above the sound of popping, puffing cassava pieces in the black iron cauldron that sat on a big gas ring in the kitchen. Her father was in the kitchen, teasing Aunty Funke. No, Aunty Biola was there too; both of them were laughing at something her father had said in an excited tone of voice.
Aunty Funke called her.
Jess did not reply, didn’t even move. She only stirred and opened her eyes when she realised that her grandfather was emerging from the study. She scrambled up and threw her arms around his waist as he emerged, his slippers shuffling out of the carpeted room and onto the linoleum, where she had been sitting. He laughed with surprise and, dropping the key into his pocket, passed his hand over her hair, which was now neatly cornrowed, thanks to the efforts of Bisola.
“So you were waiting for Baba Gbenga! Will you drink with me, madam?”
She nodded furiously, and he laughed again, beginning to move towards the kitchen although she didn’t release him. Her mother or father would have detached her, her father gently, her mother with an exclamation of mild annoyance, but her grandfather struggled good-naturedly into the kitchen and ordered Aunty Biola to bring him a Powermalt and a Fanta from the cold crate.
“My granddaughter and I are going to drink our health,” he said.
That night, something woke Jessamy. She wasn’t sure whether it was a sound or a smell or an abrupt sight in one of her various dreams that made her suddenly open her eyes and stare around. For the first time since arriving in Nigeria, she felt a gaping disorientation; for a split second she couldn’t even remember where she was, and everything was dim and out of focus.
Then clear images came tumbling back into her vision and she looked to where Ebun lay, breathing shallowly.
Then she remembered.
Tilly Tilly.
Was she too late?
She glanced at the window—it was still dark. She sat up as quietly as she could in the bed, then slipped out of the room. As she ran to the staircase leading to the balcony to watch for the light in the window of the deserted house, she heard a sound in the shadow behind her.
Not a voice.
She looked back down the corridor, saw nothing but doors and squares of floor stretching out before her.
There it was again.
A creaking noise.
Like . . . a door.
The noise stopped just as suddenly as it had started, and Jess walked down the corridor, hurrying slightly now, checking each room. She could hear the creaking sound in her head now; it didn’t need to be real.
The parlour door—shut.
Her mum’s and dad’s door—shut.
The storeroom door—shut.
Her grandfather’s door—shut.
The study door—partially open, a little space between door and doorpost exposing only more darkness.
What?
Breathless, she gave it a push, just a little push, with the tip of her finger, and slowly, impossibly, the door opened. She felt a thickness in the back of her head somewhere. Her tongue? Her brain? How could this door be open?
A face appeared around the edge, and Jess smiled with a deep, wondering joy.
It was TillyTilly, who had broken into her grandfather’s study.
“Come in,” whispered TillyTilly. Jess could hardly hear her over the other sounds of the night. She saw Tilly’s eyes shining.
“It’s dark in there, TillyTilly,” Jess whispered back, still unable to stop herself from smiling. They both knew they couldn’t put a light on in there. In case someone saw, and wondered.
“Don’t worry,” Tilly whispered, and held out her hand. Jess took it, feeling Tilly’s cool fingers link with her own, and then Tilly drew her into the darkness, and she wasn’t at all afraid because someone was holding her hand.
SEVEN
“Wait a minute.”
TillyTilly let go of Jess’s hand and Jess heard a thin, scratching sound, then saw a flare of light go up. A little flame danced atop a candle in a saucer in Tilly’s hand.
Jess gasped quietly.
“You’re the candle thief!”
The two of them smiled conspiratorially at each other in the candlelight, Jess noticing how the flame held up to Tilly’s lean face highlighted the triangles of shadow, the hollows of her cheekbones. Her eyes seemed even darker.
Tilly smiled.
“Let’s look around,” she said.
She took Jess’s hand and guided her slowly past each shelf. She passed the candle over the rows of leather-bound and hardback books, bringing the flame so close to some that Jess’s breath caught in her throat with amazement at her daring.
“You might set them on fire,” she warned, and Tilly looked at her seriously, the ends of the string in her hair bobbing as she nodded.
“I know!”
Jess carefully took some books down from the shelf, thick tomes of poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that sounded exciting, especially in the dark, with bookshelves and a window lit with faint moonlight.
“ ‘And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise,’ ” she whispered to Tilly, who obligingly held the candle so that words were discernible but no wax would drip onto it.
TillyTilly nodded sagely.
“It’s a good poem,” she said, with a knowledgeable air. “Ancestral voices, and all that.”
She actually said and all that, with the unconcerned tone of an English person. Jess’s expression grew more incredulous when she remembered the first thing she had said, in that pure Nigerian accent: Hello Jessy . The girl was a mystery.
TillyTilly smiled almost wickedly, as if she knew what Jess was thinking, but persisted in her line of discussion.
“D’you like it? The poem, I mean? It’s called ‘Kubla Khan.’ ”
Jess nodded.
“I like it a lot,” she said awkwardly. Tilly had knelt on the floor and begun examining some books at ground level. Jess couldn’t remember the last time she’d told anyone what she thought about a poem, or a book, or anything much really. “It makes me think of . . . you know, when something’s so different and weird that when it touches other people it makes them different and weird too . . . It’s like what my mum told me about Sir Galahad, and how he was the perfect knight, but when he saw into the Holy Grail, he couldn’t do anything else but die, really, because of, well, holy dread.”
She stood still, upright, her cheeks flushed, deliberately not looking down at Tilly but concentrating on a book in front of her until the gold lettering of the title had blurred. She didn’t want Tilly to laugh or make fun or anything; she didn’t think she could bear it.
She heard Tilly turn a few pages, then say excitedly, “I know exactly what you mean. Look, it’s like here, in Isaiah, where he’s made all clean when one of the angels touches his lips with the hot coal.”
She had an enormous, expensive-looking edition of the Bible in her arms and was jabbing at a section with her finger. Jess sat down cross-legged on the floor beside Tilly, and they spent a few minutes going through other books that Tilly knew, looking for examples of “holy dread.”
“TillyTilly,” said Jess, after a while.
“Mmmmmm.”
“How come you’ve read all these books and I haven’t?”
Then Tilly said something odd, like: “I haven’t read them, I just know what’s in them.”
Jess looked at her, wondering
whether or not to believe her. Then, just to be on the safe side, in case she’d heard wrong, she said, “What?”
TillyTilly didn’t look up from her book, but smiled.
“I said I’ve had a lot of time to get to know what’s in them. Also, I’m much cleverer than you.”
“Oh.”
Jess thought of something else.
“So you sneak in here a lot? How do you do it?”
Tilly shrugged.
“The window.”
“The window? But my grandfather keeps the key in his pocket and ...”
Tilly put a dismissive hand up, turned a page, apparently absorbed.
Jess tried again.
“Unless there’s another key . . . ?”
A slight nod, but Tilly refused to add anything further. Instead she jumped up and ran over to Jess’s grandfather’s swivel chair, springing on to it with an expression of glee.
Jess heard it skid backwards on its wheels and put out her hands in a cautionary gesture.
“Shhhhh!”
TillyTilly laughed quietly.
“Push me around the room on this and then I’ll push you,” she offered, whirling around in the chair, her voice sounding slightly garbled as she spun.
“OK!” Jess eagerly scrambled up, then bent and gathered the books that had been left scattered on the floor a little distance away from the still-burning candle. She slid them back into place, trying to remember which gaps in the bookcase she and Tilly had taken them from. She suddenly grew apprehensive and began to think of explanations should her grandfather awake, and draw his key out from amongst his nightclothes, perhaps, and put the key in the lock . . .
Even as she thought about this, she heard the smooth, metallic sound of key being turned in lock, and an expression of utter panic crossed her face.
Then she heard Tilly laugh. She spun around to find Tilly leaning from the chair so that one of her hands was splayed out against the surface of the floor; she was in a sort of half handstand. As Jess stared at her, she slowly rotated the chair so that it made the soft clicking sound that she had heard before.
The Icarus Girl Page 5
