Just the thought of what her mum was going to say to her made her feel queasy.
Tilly didn’t look all that concerned.
“Then we’d better go home now,” she said, leading the way out of the park.
“Are we . . . you going to leave the gates open?” Jess asked, trotting after her as she started down the road.
“I’m too tired to pull them shut,” Tilly flung out over her shoulder.
“I could help,” Jess offered.
Tilly stopped, reached out and hugged Jess. As Jess awkwardly hugged her back, unused to having her arms around a body smaller and skinnier than her own, Tilly suddenly whispered into the air between them, her breath tickling the curling tendrils of Jessamy’s hair.
“Thank you for wanting to help,” she said, “but you need to get home now. Don’t worry about it.”
She left Jess at the back gate of the compound and scurried away, not looking back.
The cars that had been parked outside the compound when Tilly and Jess had left that morning were all gone. Only her grandfather’s car remained, the dark blue of it making a mere outline in the dark.
As Jess edged carefully past it, her mother and Driver sprang out of the car. Jess jumped back, a little whimper escaping her as the faceless pair advanced. Then, when they drew closer, she saw her mother’s tight expression of anger, and saw her crumple into tears.
“Oh my God, Jessamy! You are so selfish! Where on earth have you been?”
“I’m sorry, Mummy,” she said, falling forward and burying her face in her mother’s long T-shirt. But for some reason that she couldn’t have explained even to herself, once her mother could no longer see her face, Jess’s expression of remorse shifted into an empty reflex expression, the corners of her mouth tugging up into a smile.
NINE
Jess was alone downstairs, the top three buttons of her gingham checked dress undone as she steadily bounced a tennis ball off the wall of the centre house. She was pretending not to know that her parents were watching her from the top window, probably talking worriedly about her. Lips pursed now, her brow furrowed in concentration again as the thwacking sound of ball against brick became intermittent with the muffled drop of the ball hitting the ground.
A few minutes later, as Jess was reaching into the dust for the ball which she had just dropped, she looked up. She had heard someone moving, coming around the corner of the house.
Was it her mother?
Her mother had made her stay up nearly the whole night being talked at about how she should never, ever, try to run away, especially since this wasn’t like England where police would actually stand a chance of being able to find her if she had been hurt somewhere. Sobbing, her mother had told her how scared she had been, had told her about ritual murders. Jess had watched impassively, some part of her shocked and embarrassed at her own lack of emotion, wishing that she could feel something and be truly sorry.
If she saw her mother turning the corner, she would run around the other side of the house, she decided.
Enough was, after all, enough.
A face appeared around the corner, grinning mischievously. It wasn’t her mother; it was TillyTilly.
Relieved, she turned to her friend, who was wearing the same dim white costume as the day before. The beautiful, dark puffs of her hair sprang out from above the bits of string that dangled down below her ears, and she had the sleeves of the dress rolled up to the elbows.
“Did you get into much trouble?” Tilly asked, catching the ball as Jess threw it at the wall.
“Not really,” Jess said, after some consideration of the admonishments and “Praise Gods” that had heralded her arrival in the house. Her father and her grandfather had returned shortly after her, having been searching the immediate area.
“All right. Good.”
Tilly bounced the ball against the ground. Jess leaned against the wall and watched her.
“Did you say anything about me?”
Jess shook her head.
She expected Tilly to smile, but she didn’t; the expression on her lean, thoughtful face remained the same.
“You’re leaving soon.”
It was not a question, and Jess remembered with a shock that this was so. Her mother had told her to begin packing a few days ago, and when she hadn’t, had dragged Jess’s suitcase into the bedroom shared by Jess’s parents and begun packing it herself, marching into Jess’s room to fetch her book box, armfuls of clothes and underwear, shoes.
There was some languidness latent in the Nigerian atmosphere that made her forget the meaning of time passing—she could hardly even begin to understand that she’d been in Nigeria for nearly a month.
“Yeah,” she said, finally. “Tomorrow, actually,” she added, a note of astonishment in her voice.
Tilly laughed, a breathy laugh that was like her usual, wheezing laugh, but shorter.
“Will you forget all about me, Jessy?” she asked.
Jess stared incredulously at Tilly.
“What? Never!” Blushing, she added, in an undertone, “You’re amazing, TillyTilly.”
TillyTilly gave a full laugh, a gasping, delighted sound.
“You are, too,” she said, her tone sober.
Jessamy’s blush deepened. She put her hands behind her back and blew outwards.
There was a brief silence, in which Tilly’s nose wrinkled up as she thought silently. She looked sideways at Jess.
“Would you like to be like me? Like, be able to do the things I do, I mean?”
Jess nodded so hard she felt as if her brains were bouncing about inside her head.
Tilly nodded too, and Jess briefly got that odd feeling again that her actions were being mirrored.
“I’ll write to you,” Jess offered, adding, lamely, “if you give me your address.”
And your surname, she thought, surprised at how much she didn’t know about the girl.
TillyTilly threw the ball at the wall, caught it, turned it over in her hand, staring at it. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You’ll see me again.”
Jess believed Tilly; how could she not? And she had discovered that she liked surprises.
When she looked up, she saw the trailing tail of Tilly’s dress disappear around the corner and realised that TillyTilly had just said goodbye. She felt oddly disappointed.
Wasn’t there supposed to be more to a “goodbye” than that?
She clutched her chest, almost crying in her panic. How could she stay? How could she make Tilly stay, the being-friends stay?
O God, please help me to stay friends with TillyTilly, please, please, please. Let me keep her. She is my only friend; I have had no one else. She gave me a book, my mother’s book. I have had no one else.
Unable to bear her own thoughts any longer, she ran around the back of the house and towards the Boys’ Quarters, almost flying. She could hear her teeth chattering, as if she were cold, could feel a scream building up. She hesitated on the veranda, then resolutely putting her smaller fears aside, charged in, past the table with its fresh layer of brown dust. She turned left and ran down the corridor, dimly hearing her feet pounding on the ground.
“TillyTilly,” she said aloud, almost cried out.
Silence. Dust settling, floating through the air.
She reached the staircase.
Unlike her grandfather’s stone staircase, this staircase was wooden. It looked as if it was rotting, crumbling away.
How could anyone live here?
She was scared. Those steps wouldn’t hold her weight, there was no way that they were going to—
With a leap, she was on the bottom step. She wobbled, held her balance, ran up the stairs, trying to keep her feet from breaking through the softened wood.
Her foot jabbed through the wood on the top step, and she clutched at the banister as she fell to her knees, thrashing as she struggled to free herself. What if there were splinters? God, what if an enormous splinter of old wood just punche
d right through her foot, through the skin, through the bone?
“TILLY!” she screamed.
Silence.
She freed her foot by relaxing and wiggling it gently, gently out.
Her sandal had fallen through.
She was afraid to put her bare foot down on the floor; who knew what could be stepped on in this old place (there might be fragments of bone, maybe people had died in here) and so she hopped along on one foot, peering around her.
The top floor was completely unlike the bottom one, which was similar in structure to her grandfather’s. The top floor looked like an attic. The roof sloped into an odd-shaped peak over her head, a feature of the house that she was pretty certain was not discernible from the outside. The slope of the roof made her feel dizzy, spun thin, as if there were no sky, just grey stone above, and dust below. A row of closed doors spread out before her, and enormous cobwebs covered some of the old, heavy wooden doors.
But there were no spiders.
Unnerved, she stood as still as she could on one foot, listening for a sound, any sound that would indicate that her friend was here.
“TillyTilly,” she called, softly. “TillyTilly, I came to see you.” Her voice sank into the silence like a heavy stone in water, but without ripples. The silence was stifling, stealing her words and making nothing from them.
The doors lay dimly before her.
She really, really, really didn’t want to open one.
What was TillyTilly playing at? If she were here, friends or not, Jess was going to get angry with her about this.
A thought struck her. Maybe Tilly’s parents were here, hiding because they thought that someone who lived in her grandfather’s house had found out about them and wanted to kick them out!
She would have to open the doors, but slowly and quietly, so that if they were in there, in one of the rooms, she wouldn’t alarm them. Gingerly, she touched the handle of the first door in the row, then drew back her hand. The handle was strangely cold.
It’s made out of metal, stupid girl.
She forced herself to grip the handle again. She pushed the door open, her breath coming fast and then slow as she prepared herself to see two people huddled in a corner, glaring with hostility.
But dust floated in this room too, and the window was coated with it. It was a wonder that she had been able to see any light that night. In fact, had she really seen a light? Standing up here, she began to doubt it.
She hopped to the next door, feeling more confident. She would be all right. When she turned the handle, she found this room the same as the last. She started to feel as if she was in some sort of game show where she won whatever she found behind the doors. So far she had won nothing at all.
Behind the third door was some sort of display, or maybe a shrine.
As she stared at it, standing just outside the doorway, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. It was a picture, drawn in black charcoal on a tall wooden board that had been propped against the far wall of the room. The picture was a rough drawing, done in thick, sweeping strokes, a sketch of a black woman with thick, glossy hair that had been coloured in with the charcoal in a scribblelike intensity. Her expression was unsmiling but serene, the eyes wide and dark, seeming almost to see Jess where she stood, wavering on one foot, peeping around the corner of the door. And the charcoal woman’s arms—her arms were grotesque. Surely nobody could have arms that long! They were completely out of proportion to her body, long and thin, tentaclelike, stretching to her ankles. She had been drawn wearing a boubou with odd, swirling patterns that Jess had never seen the like of before.
And in front of the wooden board with the charcoal woman was a whole array of candles, some tealights, some big candles in empty, battered cans of Milo, some smaller ones arranged on a saucer. There were lots and lots of candles. None of them were lit, but she could see that they had all been burning at some point. They looked burnt down, their wicks black.
She felt that she should shut the door and leave this room.
“You shouldn’t have come in here,” TillyTilly spat.
Jess jumped as if she had been slapped, feeling a guilty tingle on the back of her neck. She spun around.
“Tilly!”
Tilly did not reply. She moved into the room, stepping over some candles, nimbly skirting others. She stepped in front of the board and spread her arms out so that Jess could no longer see the charcoal woman properly. In a sense, Jess was relieved, but she was also alarmed by the cold manner in which Tilly eyed her. She desperately wanted to ask what this was all about.
She didn’t ask.
Instead, she apologised.
“I’m sorry,” she said, for the second time in two days. Maybe she just wasn’t good at the whole being a friend, having a friend thing. Maybe it was something that needed practice. Which would explain why she was so bad at it. She stared at her bare foot, noticing how naked it looked beside her sandalled one.
Tilly sighed.
It was a forgiving sort of sigh, and Jess looked up hopefully.
Tilly was now at the doorway, although Jess had not sensed any movement within the room. The slope of the roof was definitely messing her up.
“Never mind,” Tilly said, stepping out into the corridor with her and closing the door.
Tilly guided her down the stairs, showing her the safe places to step on. Jess explained about her shoe falling through the staircase, and Tilly laughed. Jess laughed too, having overcome the panic she felt at the time, secretly feeling sorry for TillyTilly that she had to live in an old, dusty, odd house like this one.
Something occurred to her.
“Were you in there when I first came in?” she asked.
They had reached the veranda, and Jess had jumped off it and turned around to look at Tilly, who was still standing up on it.
Tilly snorted.
“Of course not.”
“Oh,” said Jess. “OK.”
TillyTilly gave her a considering glance, a shake of the head.
“Go home now,” she said, and Jess could tell by the way she said it that she didn’t just mean “go back to your grandfather’s house” but also “go back to England.”
“ ’Bye, TillyTilly,” Jess said.
TillyTilly gave her that fantastic, brilliant, but brief smile.
“See you later, Jessy,” she said, and went back into the house.
ONE
It was Jess’s “settling in” time at school. She needed this to be, well, settling in. Whatever that was.
It had been just over half a school term since they’d returned from Nigeria, but Jess still hadn’t “settled.” Before and after her return to England, and school, Jess had been frenzied in her activity, and then she had been ill, and her father didn’t think that she was ready for school again. Her mother insisted that Jess had to go; nothing was wrong with her, she could use the first few days to “settle in” again. Then her father had asked Jess what she thought about it. Did she want to go to school tomorrow?
Jess had raised her eyebrows at him in surprise.
What a silly question. As if she ever wanted to go to school.
And now they were asking her, giving her a choice: School, yes or no? Yet she felt confused, because she somehow knew by the way that her father was looking at her, his eyes cautious behind his spectacles, that although he had been arguing with her mother about whether she should go to school or not, he would like her to be brave, to be completely recovered, to be a normal child who wanted to see her friends at school. And her mother wanted her to go, simply, Jess supposed, for the sake of going, and rules, and being there if the school was open and nothing was wrong with you.
They were offering her a choice, a chance to say “no,” when if she did, one would be angry and the other disappointed. Was it really, actually, a choice?
With a small, almost unnoticeable movement, her eyes flicked helplessly from one face to the other.
“Yeah,” she said final
ly, and was rewarded with smiles from both.
Ever since they had returned to England, Jess had been looking out of windows for extended periods of time, sailing eagerly towards the front door whenever there was a knock or the door-bell rang. She spent hours painstakingly braiding a special friendship bracelet for TillyTilly in the tiniest sections possible, then unpicked it and began again because the colours were all wrong. The atmosphere of tense, coiled-up waiting in her had confused her parents, whom she had caught several times gazing bemusedly at each other.
Then, after this period of absorption (with . . . what, exactly? friendship bracelets? expectancy? impossible to tell) came the inevitable fever, the whites of her eyes tinged pink, her head lolling dejectedly on her pillow, her fingers limp as if the bones in them had evaporated. She mumbled, made small sounds, like singing noises, broken songs, because when she was ill she could never speak properly.
Jess’s parents had, thankfully in her opinion, given up carrying Jess to the GP whenever she ran such a high temperature. Her GP, Dr. Collins, was as baffled as they were. Jess had already undergone extensive tests: for allergies and anaemia, of all things. They all proved inconclusive because nothing, he explained looking at this little girl who was pulling weakly at her clothes because she was hot, and trembling violently because she was cold, was physically wrong with her.
Jess invariably got over it. Her mother made her eat pepe soup with digestible specks of ground beef in it, and her English grandmother insisted she sup chicken soup with barley, and she began to sleep properly again and totter about to get things she wanted when her mother, absorbed at the computer in her study a few doors away, didn’t immediately answer her calls. She would sway when she got out of her bed, fizzing, coloured dots dancing before her eyes as she wobbled across the floor, zigagging like a baby learning to toddle.
Then she recovered (and still no TillyTilly!) only two days before school started again.
When she finally arrived in the classroom, the rest of Year Five was listening to Miss Patel reading a passage about Sir Francis Drake’s travels from a thin hardback book with a bright picture of his ship, the Golden Hind , on the front. Colleen McLain and Andrea Carney looked at her and whispered behind their hands to each other. Colleen McLain was very clever; she always finished her work faster than everyone else and would sit straight in her chair, her arm waving rhythmically in the air: “Miiiiiiiiiiiiiss. Miiiiiiiiiiiss.”
The Icarus Girl Page 7
