“Oh my God!” Jess stumbled backwards, her fingers allowing her nightie to flow back out around her, her hand moving to press her chest in an attempt to help along the stilling of her heart. “Don’t do that ever again!”
Tilly rose from her half handstand so that she sat upright in the chair again.
“Well, I don’t think we’ll be back in here . . . It’s sort of boring, don’t you think? All that anticipation!”
Somehow, Jess realised, Tilly had known how much she had wanted to enter this room.
When Jess woke for the second time, she turned over and lay on her back, basking in the morning sunlight that was pouring into the room. She only became aware after a few seconds that she was smiling from ear to ear.
She looked to her side, noting that Ebun had already left her bed, her sheets rumpled and tossed. She could hear bustling activity on the kitchen floor and smell cooking; it smelt like her Aunty Funke’s speciality of smoked fish, palm oil and spinach stew. Then she remembered that it was Sunday, and that it was her grandfather’s turn to host his Baptist prayer group. Her grandfather was a proud member of the Oritamefa Baptist Church.
She stretched her arms out to either side of her, kicking the covers off her body and pedalling her legs in the air while she thought about getting up. For the past two Sundays, her grandfather had dressed up in white-and-gold agbada, traditional costume, with a white embroidered cube-shaped hat on his head and the tail of his costume draped over his right arm, his left hand clutching a slim wooden cane which was purely an accessory, since he walked perfectly well without aid. Aunty Funke would hand Driver the Bible that Jessamy’s grandfather needed for his part of the discussion and prayer, and her grandfather would climb into the backseat of the car, careful of his clothes. Then her mother, or Aunty Funke, or Aunty Biola, would close the door for him, and the car would pull out around the back of the house and through the gates hastily pulled open just in time by Uncle Kunle and Gateman. Gbenga Oyegbebi’s head would always be held high so that he looked glittering and regal through the shiny windows of the car.
When he was gone, the rush to get ready for church ensued. Her grandmother had been an Anglican and had managed to convert all of her children to Anglican practices, so they were used to seeing their father off first so as not to incur his wrath at their “not praying together as a family.” Jess, her mother and her father were the only ones who weren’t involved in the scramble to prepare for the eleven o’clock service, since her mother had quietly “given up on organised religion” a few years after her arrival in England, a fact that she refused to discuss with Jessamy’s grandfather. She wouldn’t allow Jess to be taken to the service either, insisting that she was a gloomy enough child already without the Nigerian warnings of hellfire making things worse. Jessamy’s father had obligingly attended the Baptist service with her grandfather the first Sunday and had come back looking wilted, saying simply that the five-hour prayer session had been “tiring.”
But this week, her grandfather had left for the service early and was going to return with his friends for scriptural discussion, and these friends, Aunty Funke had warned, would need to eat and drink. Ebun had complained in a matter-of-fact whisper the night before, when they had been drifting off to sleep, that prayer meetings at the house always meant that she and Tope had to get up earlier to go and fetch water for their grandfather to wash with and for Aunty Funke to cook with.
Jess hesitated to get up because she wasn’t sure if getting up meant committing herself to meeting these prayer people.
When she heard the resounding hisssssssssssss of puff-puff batter being dropped into Aunty Funke’s big, dented red frying pan, she nearly fell out of bed and onto the floor in her haste to get up, then noticed something had fallen from the bed with her.
She smiled silently and with puzzlement as she picked up the battered copy of Little Women, turning it over in her hands. Could it have come from her grandfather’s study? She didn’t recall having seen any children’s books there, but then again, neither did she recall any children’s books at all in the house, other than the ones in the box that she’d taken from her suitcase and slipped under her bed.
She got underneath her bed and rummaged in her book box, just in case. It was darker here, but she could see her own copy of the book, which was hardback and in pristine condition—the way she kept all her books, except for the parts of the text that had been lightly scribbled and replaced with pencilled additions, some one-sentence long, some as long as a paragraph. Jess made a habit of amending books that hurt her in some way—some books had bad things happening to characters in what she felt was a completely unnecessary and extremely painful way, especially considering that the situations weren’t even in real life, so she had taken to scratching some of the printed text out and adding happier things. So far, Little Women and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess were her most heavily annotated books.
One day, her mother had caught her and had asked in tones of mixed disbelief and amusement, “What makes you think that you know how to tell a story better than Louisa May Alcott does?”
Jess had not known exactly what to say when it was put that way, and had found herself replying defiantly, “Well it’s not a proper story if everyone’s miserable. It’s not fair to make us watch people be sick, and be poor, and lose everything, and die, and Beth’s so nice you’d think Louisa May Alcott would have treated her better!”
Thinking about this, Jess put her own copy back into her book box and crawled out from under the bed. She opened up the tattered copy that she still clutched, and read, with some surprise, the name
Bisi Oyegbebi
written in neat, small black lettering on the flyleaf.
Her mother’s copy?
And beneath her mother’s name was her own full name, written in the same wobbly, lopsided letters as the “HEllO JEssY” that had been in the Boys’ Quarters.
JessaMY WuRaOla HaRRISOn—
SaTuRDaY August 27Th 1994
She closed the book and gave a sudden laugh.
TillyTilly had given her a gift!
She lifted the book to her nose, and smelt the black ink of her grandfather’s red-barrelled ink pen. She remembered now having seen the pen there, on top of a stack of papers on her grandfather’s writing desk, as TillyTilly had spun her around the room until all the colours had whirled together and both of them had had to stop for a few seconds with their hands pressed over their mouths to stifle their giggles.
Jess quickly crawled back under the bed and placed this new, old book on top of the other books in her box. Then she bounced out of the room to try and persuade her aunt to let her have some puff-puff before she had brushed her teeth instead of afterwards.
EIGHT
“Jessy,” Tilly hissed, from somewhere in Jess’s immediate vicinity. “Psst! Jessy!”
Jess had been sitting on the front veranda of the Boys’ Quarters, looking around for her friend. In the central house, behind her, she could hear voices uplifted in prayer and song, Ebun accompanying on tambourine, a bell ringing at intervals. The confusion of sounds meant that she couldn’t see where the voice was coming from, but she replied immediately.
“Yeah? Hey, TillyTilly, where are you?”
The bushes near the back gate of the compound rustled, and Jess watched as a noticeable ripple ran through the leaves. She heard Tilly laugh softly.
Jess laughed herself, and jumped up.
“Hey, TillyTilly, that’s not fair! Come out!”
Tilly laughed again.
“All right, all right,” she said, her voice muffled.
She stepped out of the bushes in a completely different area, to the far right of where the rustling had been. Jess made an astonished whistling sound through her teeth. She had been practising it all morning with Uncle Wole, who had made a similar sound when he had seen the amount of fufu that her aunt was preparing to go with her smoked-fish stew.
“Are you sure that you’re
not preparing for a modern-day Feeding of the Five Thousand?” he had asked in a dubious tone of voice. “You’re only cooking for twenty people, you know!”
He had been about to expand on this even further when Jess had begun pestering him to show her the whistling sound again.
Now that Jess really had something to whistle about, she made a point of utilising the sound as much as she could. She looked at Tilly and back at the bushes, making the whsssssst sound again.
“You run fast,” she said admiringly.
Tilly fidgeted, eyed the veranda that Jess had just stepped down from.
“Yeah,” she said.
Jess noticed that Tilly had changed her odd outfit from the day before for another one. This time she was wearing what looked like a dim white net curtain that had been bunched and gathered at the arms and neck to make sleeves and a scoop neck. This dress was even longer than before and trailed nearly to the dusty ground.
Jess decided to look at something else in case Tilly noticed that she was staring and got annoyed. She would be annoyed herself if she’d had to wear something like that and someone stared at her, even if it was a friend.
“Thanks for the book,” she said finally.
TillyTilly smiled, shrugged.
“It’s OK.”
Jess put her hands into the pockets of her shorts, then looked around, feeling a little bit awkward.
Tilly appeared to be looking very hard at the floor, her brow creased with thought, as if she was pondering something difficult.
She lifted her head.
“Would you like,” she asked, suddenly breathless, “to go to the amusement park?”
Jess thought for a moment about the time she’d been there with her mum and her mum’s old school friends. With TillyTilly, she was certain, it would be different. But—
“TillyTilly, it’s Sunday!” she exclaimed. “I don’t think it’ll be open!”
TillyTilly folded her arms and gave Jess a scornful stare. Jess felt the blood rushing to her cheeks.
“Was your grandfather’s study open?” Tilly demanded. Jess slowly shook her head, then nodded it, unsure whether Tilly meant before or after Tilly had broken in. “Come on!”
TillyTilly started to walk, and Jess stood still for a couple of seconds, then, laughing, caught up with her.
Even before they arrived at the gates of the amusement park, Jess was utterly exhausted, and her brown sandals were caked with dust. The walk from Bodija to central Ibadan, where the amusement park was, was so tiring that Jess started to feel oddly, as if she was walking uphill and, her vision swimming with her weariness, had more than once suggested to TillyTilly that they turn back and sit in the parlour with some minerals.
“I’d just need to explain who you were and then we could—” she began, but TillyTilly interrupted her.
“You can’t tell anyone about me, Jessy! Can’t you tell that I’m not supposed to be there?”
Jessamy felt as if she were finally getting somewhere.
“So you do live in the Boys’ Quarters?” she pressed.
TillyTilly just trudged along silently, the back of her dress trailing on the ground. Jess watched the bit of material get steadily dirtier and dirtier.
Finally, Tilly stopped walking and shot her a sideways glance.
“I do. Sometimes.”
She gave a loud sigh, an irritated sigh, (look what you’ve done, Jessy, you’ve made me cross with your questions) and shaking her head slightly, continued walking.
Jess wanted to ask if she lived there with her parents, but it was clear from the set of her friend’s shoulders that any further questioning would not be welcome. Maybe Tilly was like Sara Crewe and both her parents were dead; that must be why she hid in the Boys’ Quarters and was so adept at stealing candles— maybe it was the only way that she could survive.
Maybe.
“TillyTilly, are you angry with me?” Jess cried, hurrying after her friend.
Tilly shot her an unreadable glance.
“No.”
Jess felt uncomfortable, as if she should apologise anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she offered.
Tilly trudged on, but the fact that she was now swinging her arms slightly indicated that she was in a better mood.
“It’s all right, Jessy. I wasn’t mad at you.”
Liar, thought Jess, you were. You’re a liar.
She blinked, surprised at this traitorous thought. What could have made her suddenly feel so hostile towards Tilly, who was mysterious and almost magical, opening doors that were locked, living in a deserted building next to a whole family of people without their noticing!
“Just don’t ask me any more questions. It’s not fair. I don’t ask YOU any questions,” Tilly pointed out.
“Except for when you first came up to me, and you were copying me,” Jess reminded her.
TillyTilly suddenly looked confused, passing a hand over her forehead in a distracted manner.
“What?” she snapped. “Shut up!”
Jess’s mouth clamped shut. Now TillyTilly was sounding just like the other children at school. She wanted to turn back on her own, but she was scared because she didn’t know the way. She decided that she was going to keep on following Tilly, but she was going to let her know that she wasn’t happy about it.
“You’re being really mean, Titiola,” she said firmly, not caring that she had pronounced it in an overly English way. Two could be mean.
Instead of wincing, or getting angrier, Tilly looked at her thoughtfully.
“Sorry,” she said abruptly.
Jess revised her opinion all over again. TillyTilly had apologised, and had regained her place as the most interesting person that Jess knew.
“It’s all right,” she said happily, and they linked arms and walked on.
At the padlocked gates, the words AMUSE YOURSELVES were picked out in yellow-, red- and green-painted bubble letters above them.
TillyTilly surveyed the gates.
“Do you think you can climb over?” she asked.
The gates loomed impossibly high.
“No way!”
She waited.
Tilly cocked her head and looked at Jess consideringly.
“Are you sure? I think you could. I could.”
Jess shook her head emphatically.
“I couldn’t, TillyTilly!”
“All right,” said Tilly, and, leaning on the bars of the iron amusement-park gates, stretched her arms out and pushed them open.
The gates went backwards with a gust of warm air, and the padlocks fell to the ground, their chains loosened, sunken in the sand. Jess stared at the enormous padlock at her feet, then up at the gates, then at TillyTilly, then around.
No one was about. She was grateful for that.
“TillyTilly,” she said. “What did you—?”
Tilly grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her along. They ran into the park, which was empty of people, but full of swinging movement and the dusky brown of settling sand and dust. Jess whooped and jumped around Tilly in a circle, almost inaudible below the music from the bumper-car dome and the whirring of various machineries. The Ferris wheel, which stood a little distance from the slides, flashed bright neon red and green. Tilly and Jess slapped hands and bumped hips, laughing in disbelieving exhilaration. Jess ran over to the big yellow inflatable slide, and climbed to the top of it. Arms stretched up to the sky, her mouth ready to shout with elation, she launched herself downwards, slipping and skidding and bumping down to make it last longer.
It was as if the amusement park was alive. The bumper cars were whirling about, dots of colour playing over the roof of the glass dome that they were housed in, and Jess could imagine ghostly passengers swerving crazily over the tracks on the floor.
Jess climbed to the top of the slide again, and watched the Ferris wheel turn slowly at first and then faster, until it was a steadily rotating wheel of light. She stared around, gaping as she realised that all of this w
as really happening, and suddenly sat down.
“TillyTilly,” she began to say, then the sound became a squeal as she found that she was freefalling down the slide again.
When she reached the bottom, she caught her breath and then ran around to where TillyTilly was jumping up and down by the bumper-car dome.
“Come on!” Tilly said and leapt into a moving car.
Jess hesitated, afraid of jumping for a seat and missing, but TillyTilly waved at her impatiently with one hand, already steering herself away from the other cars that were randomly colliding with the one she had selected.
“What are you doing just standing there?” Tilly demanded, standing up in her seat, turning the wheel so far to the right that she nearly veered into the wall.
Jess laughed and ran for a bumper car, which swerved out of her way. She managed to skip out of the way of another, which had been heading for the back of her legs. She could hear Tilly laughing and calling out, and began to feel flustered.
“You can do it, Jess! You can get one! Just jump!”
Jess grabbed at the very next bumper car that came her way, throwing herself at it and clambering up into the seat, scratching her shin on the chrome as she did so.
Tilly immediately drove at her, ramming into Jess’s car before she got a chance to handle the steering wheel properly. The jolt shuddered through her body, making her teeth chatter, and Tilly threw her head back and laughed, moving away to bump an empty car. Jess, gritting her teeth, intent on revenge, managed to dodge Tilly’s bumper car, positioning herself so that she could slam into her with maximum impact.
She did, and Tilly’s mouth opened up into a pinky brown cavern with sharp white teeth as she gave a little scream of surprise, then called out, “Brilliant!”
Later, when they had been on everything and the electricity from the control box had run out (NEPA), the amusement park was still again.
That was when Jess looked around and realised that the sun had set.
“Oh my God, TillyTilly! We’re . . . I’m going to be in BIG trouble!”
The Icarus Girl Page 6
