The Icarus Girl

by Helen Oyeyemi

  “Yeah, but there’s, like . . . black ones, too,” she offered.

  Jess shrugged.

  “My mum says . . . they look just like the white ones, only with a different skin colour.”

  Siobhan finished her chocolate and put the box down on the bed between them before asking, “Yeah? What d’you think?”

  “I don’t know . . . They’re only dolls, I s’pose. I wouldn’t mind one.”

  Siobhan scratched her head bemusedly. “Yeah,” she said, half-heartedly, then seemed to make up her mind about something and opened her mouth to show Jess her asymmetrically chipped front tooth. It had happened when she’d been playing a strange variation of blindman’s buff with “some idiot called Anna,” who had tied a belt over her eyes, told her to go forward, forward, forward, in pursuit of a special stone, effectively instructing Shivs to walk into a wall. Before Jess, amazed, could respond to this, Siobhan tapped the chocolate box between them and airily embarked upon another subject.

  “These are from Katrina. She lives two doors down,” she explained. “It’s my birthday tomorrow, but my mum’s really weird about me having chocolate, so she’d probably take them away— that’s why I had to sneak them in.”

  “Happy birthday for tomorrow—”

  They found themselves sniggering conspiratorially, then Siobhan rolled off the bed and tugged at the leg of Jess’s jeans. “What’s your name?”

  “Jess—well, Jessamy, really.”

  “I’m Siobhan, but I HATE being called Ginger, so don’t! Call me Shivs, all right?”

  A nod from Jess, then a pause in which Shivs ate some more chocolate.

  “I’m supposed to be talking about psychology with your dad today,” Jess finally confided.

  “Oh. Are you feeling really sad or something?” Shivs eyed Jess gravely and gave her knee a solicitous pat, which set Jess off laughing again. She didn’t think she knew anyone as . . . solid, as there, as this girl. She wondered for a moment if TillyTilly would like Shivs. She, Jess, certainly did.

  “I s’pose I’m sad sometimes, but not right now,” she assured Shivs. “I get scared of stuff.”

  “Scared? What of?”

  Jess shrugged, unable to put it into words and unwilling to try.

  “Hah! Well, you should hang around with me then, ’cause I’m not scared of anything! Not a single thing,” Shivs told her, laughing.

  Looking at her stretched languidly out on the floor amongst her scattered belongings, Jess believed her. She began to reply, then stopped short as she caught sight of a copy of Hamlet by her foot and picked it up.

  “This yours?”

  Shivs was playing with a small pink teddy bear, making it dance. She flicked a glance at the book Jess was holding and nodded briefly.

  “Wow,” Jess said, excitedly. “Are you reading it? D’you think it’s good? My mum’s just started reading it to me and I think it’s—”

  Shivs threw the bear at Jess with a loud guffaw of laughter. “Jess, it’s not REALLY mine, it’s my dad’s! I borrowed it one time to trace that man on the front.”

  “Oh.”

  Shivs turned onto her stomach and looked consideringly at Jess.

  “You can understand all that boring Shakespeare stuff? You must be really clever then.” She sounded impressed—impressed and something else that Jess couldn’t quite identify. Suddenly tongue-tied, Jess shook her head and tried to say that her mum had to explain quite a lot of it to her, but Shivs cut her off. “Maybe that’s why you get so sad,” she said, “because you’re clever.”

  Jess thought about that, but before she could respond, Shivs asked, “D’you know your phone number?” Jess shook her head and Shivs laughed. “Me neither, you know! But I have to learn it next year, just in case.”

  “Yeah,” Jess said quickly, but was unable to stop herself asking: “Just in case what?”

  “Dunno—” Shivs began, then suddenly catlike, she sprang forward and knocked the box of Milk Tray off the bed so that it rolled underneath it, chocolates spilling everywhere. Before Jess could ask her what was going on, Mrs. McKenzie opened the door and smiled at her.

  “There you are, love . . . So you and Shivs are getting on. Good . . . But d’you want to come and talk to Colin now?”

  No.

  “Yeah,” Jess said, getting up and slinging her rucksack across her shoulder as she looked nervously at Shivs, who gave her a confident thumbs-up.

  “ ’Bye, Shivs.”

  “Jess, I’m going to call you tonight,” Shivs said, following Jess to the door. Jess nodded, trying to appear nonchalant, but feeling embarrassingly warm. “On the phone, all right?”

  Talking to Colin about psychology wasn’t as scary as Jess had thought it would be. She quite liked him. They were just sitting in the kitchen by themselves drinking hot chocolate with marsh-mallows floating in it; she felt embarrassed drinking in front of him so she had to put her other hand over her top lip whenever she sipped. He asked her what she thought of school, and if she’d liked it in Nigeria. Sometimes she felt a little bit uncomfortable, because the minute she’d answered a question he seemed to have another related one ready to follow it up straightaway, and some of the questions were quite hard, like, “How do you know that that teacher thinks you’re weird in a bad way?” But he didn’t really ask the questions as if he was demanding an answer, but more as if he didn’t need to know but would quite like to. She liked that. And she found that whenever the conversation got too tiring, she could just say, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” in an anxious way, and he would stop and start talking about something else.

  He told her about how, when he was a little boy, he had nearly drowned, and he told her how scary it was with all the water churning and filling him up. It surprised her a lot that this had happened to him, and she’d had to ask him how he’d felt when he was safe again, because she couldn’t imagine a great tall person like him drowning.

  “Well, I’ll tell you something, Jess—I very quickly began to feel as if it had never really happened, as if it had actually happened to someone else,” he replied.

  She thought for a minute that he was going to ask her if she’d ever felt like that (she didn’t think she ever had), but he didn’t. She had also sort of expected him to be writing things down, like a report, but he didn’t do that either.

  There were other times during that conversation that Colin McKenzie really surprised her. The first was when he asked her what it felt like when she was screaming. She stared blankly at him, nonplussed even when he said that she could write it down if she wanted to. And she didn’t even know why the question caught her so off balance—maybe it was because he had assumed that there was something for her to feel when she had a tantrum.

  The second time was when he asked her to say the first word that came into her head in response to the words that he was going to say to her—she was too startled, too unprepared by this proposal. She wanted to bite back every word she said, or substitute it with another, but Dr. McKenzie, steadily stirring his hot chocolate with his spoon, went on inexorably churning out words.

  “Mummy.”

  “Um. Big. No—”

  “Daddy.”

  “Small. Smaller, I mean, than—”

  “School.”

  “Nobody.”

  “Jess.”

  “Gone?”

  “Where have you gone, Jess?”

  She had no idea.

  That was surprising, too.

  EIGHT

  The next time Jess saw TillyTilly, it was a Saturday morning. It was a warm day, almost stickily warm. Jess was lying on her bedroom floor with a ream of blank paper and her crayons and paint box beside her. Her mother’s copy of Little Women, the cover Sellotaped onto the rest of the book, also lay beside her. Every now and then the telephone would ring, and her mother would run to it from the kitchen, shouting “I’ll get it, I’ll get it!” even though only Jess and she were at home. There was going to be a party tonight, held by a fr
iend of Jess’s father’s family, and Aunt Lucy and Uncle Adam were going, and so were her father and her mother. Jess’s mum was frantically telephoning every babysitter that had ever been recommended to her, hoping that one would be able to babysit on such short notice: “Today! This evening!”

  Jess’s dad had said reprovingly, “You shouldn’t have left it so late, you know. Lucy offered, but you were so concerned that she’d find a babysitter that would only suit Dulcie and not Jessamy . . .”

  Jess’s mum had simply looked up from her diary of telephone numbers and growled in a threatening manner, the sound rumbling deep in her throat. Jess’s dad had remembered something terribly important that he needed to do, and went away.

  Jess herself had been offended by the concept of the babysitter.

  “I’m not a baby,” she had insisted over breakfast as she carefully nibbled at the brown crust of her toast before starting on the real stuff.

  Jess’s dad had patted her cheek and then tweaked her nose in a comforting manner.

  “I know. You’re enormous, an enormous huge girl.”

  “What?!” Jess stuck out her tongue.

  Her dad stuck out his tongue too.

  Her mum joined in.

  They all waggled their tongues at each other, then carried on eating. After a few seconds of companionable munching, Jess pursued her theme.

  “Can’t me and Dulcie just stay here by ourselves? We’d behave! You’d just need to leave some food, and we’d tuck ourselves in and everything.”

  Her mum laughed so hard she nearly choked on her toast. She kicked Jess’s dad under the table, and he laughed a little too then explained, “The thing is, Jess, little girl, you and Dulcie have this thing where sometimes you fight. Imagine if we left you by yourselves—it’d be mayhem. Also, it wouldn’t be safe because you wouldn’t know what to do if something happened.”

  “Something like what?”

  “Well, like intruders or something. People coming into the house uninvited.”

  Jess thought of TillyTilly.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Jess’s mum sipped at her orange juice.

  “Jesus on toast, Jess, we’re not leaving you and Dulcie alone and that’s that.”

  “But do we have to have a babysitter?” Jess wailed. “Couldn’t you just drop me and Dulcie off at Grandma and Grandpa’s?”

  “Thing is, Jess, old man,” her father said, drumming a little tattoo on the table with his butter knife, “they’re going to the party as well.”

  “You just can’t win. Sorry,” her mum added.

  At that point, Jess had rolled her eyes and, taking another bite of her peanut butter on toast, had resigned herself to the indignity of the as yet nameless babysitter.

  As she lay surrounded by paper and scattered crayons, her head resting on her outstretched arm, Jess began thinking about one of the dreams that she had the previous night. She wanted to remember it—it had been nice—but it was too vague. The woman with the long arms had been smiling, flying through her dreams again, and Jess thought the woman might have been hugging her, the arms looping around and around Jess’s body, holding her, the skin smooth like a velveteen rope. Jess didn’t know how she could have thought that she was scary before. Or maybe it had been the drawing that was scary, the black squiggles, and the actual woman was lovely. The arms took some getting used to, though. She tried to draw the long-armed woman, her crayon skimming over the smooth paper, but the browns that she used were all wrong, either too light or too dark.

  She glanced up from the paper when Tilly Tilly ran into her room and jogged up and down on the spot, then skipped, then hopped, clapping all the while, as if she was doing some elaborate form of exercise.

  “Hello, Jessy,” she puffed, still bobbing. It sounded rhythmical: Heh-low (clap) Jeh-see (clap), it could be a song.

  Jess laboriously coloured in the woman’s boubou, then pushed her papers away and stood up. She, too, began jumping up and down, clapping, concentrating on not hitting the floor so hard that her mum would shout, “Are you having a one-woman wrestling match in there?”

  “What (clap) are (clap) we (clap) do (clap) ing (clap),” she said, after a little while. TillyTilly shrugged and carried on jumping. She was moving around the room in a circle now, and Jess followed. Downstairs, her mother was interviewing someone on the telephone, “Do you have experience with . . . well, sensitive kids? My daughter’s easy enough to please in terms of feeding and entertainment and for the most part, behaviour . . . What? Yes, of course, but the thing is, she has this enormous imagination and . . . yes, mmmm, exactly, you know what I’m talking about! That’s it! She gets so absorbed, so caught up in things! And then she upsets herself.” The rest was muffled. Jess tried not to strain her ears so that she could listen better, but it was always fascinating for her when she heard herself being talked about, described.

  But TillyTilly called her attention back to the room. She had crouched down in the area that Jess had just vacated and was systematically crumpling up sheet after sheet of the long-armed-woman drawings that Jess had begun and abandoned.

  Now she was even tearing them, her eyes narrowed in an expression of if not quiet anger, then at the very least intense concentration.

  Rip, rip, rip, scrunch.

  Somehow, Jess did not dare to stop her.

  Downstairs, her mother continued speaking.

  “Oh, the other girl, my niece? She’s fine. You should have absolutely no problems with her . . .”

  When Tilly had finished ripping up the pictures, even the one that Jess had been doing when she came in, she scattered the handfuls of ripped paper on the floor, laughing a little bit, a raspy chuckle. She looked completely absorbed, as if Jess wasn’t even there.

  Jess stepped forward, a little nervously. Her voice wobbled as she spoke.

  “Why did you do that, TillyTilly? I was only trying to . . .”

  She paused because she had been expecting Tilly to interrupt her, but the girl rose slowly from her crouch and simply gazed at her, unblinking, her head turned slightly away from Jess. There was definite hostility there. Jess began to feel a little resentment herself. This was the second time that TillyTilly had acted strangely over the woman with the long arms. Could it be that Tilly didn’t want to . . . well, share her?

  “You spied,” TillyTilly said in a low voice. She stood very still and continued to stare at Jess. “You shouldn’t have gone in there.”

  Jess folded her arms. “I apologised already,” she said firmly.

  TillyTilly smiled.

  “Yeah,” she said, as if only just remembering. “You did.”

  “Well then,” said Jess, refusing to smile herself.

  TillyTilly sank back down to the floor and grabbed a light-brown crayon.

  “Come on, let’s do some drawing,” she said, smoothing a piece of paper out before her. She grabbed some brown and green crayons and a bit of black charcoal, and began to draw.

  Jess stayed where she was, reluctant to give in just like that. But curiosity got the better of her, and she sidled over to see what TillyTilly was drawing. It was a girl with her hair in two pigtails, wearing a green-and-white-checked dress; Tilly was drawing herself. For someone who was supposed to be even older than the Year Six girls, it was a bit rubbish. It made Jess feel dizzy to look at it, and she’d seen plenty of people drawings done by other kids in her class. The arms and legs were sticklike, and the torso was too rounded, like a dumpling. The checked squares on the dress were gaping, irregular holes of white surrounded by green, and the pigtails were scribbles of charcoal, looking like flaps of tangled hair sprouting from an otherwise bald brown scalp. The eyes were far too big, taking up half the face, and were too round. Jess was tempted to laugh, partly because she didn’t know what else she could do at such a drawing, but knew she couldn’t do much better herself. The weirdness of the drawing might have had something to do with the way in which Tilly was clutching the crayon. Instead of hold
ing it like a pencil, she was holding it as one would a thick stick, or a baton: all her fingers curling around it. The lines that she drew were identical in their thickness and straightness, and when she tried to round them into more anthropomorphic shapes, they went haywire.

  Jess raised her eyebrows in wonder,

  (I don’t think you are older than Year Six, TillyTilly) then quietly sat down and began her own drawing. She was drawing a rainbow arching over a house. She was quite good at houses and rainbows, and trees as well, but avoided drawing people because she was bad at people. Also, she didn’t want to embarrass TillyTilly, because as bad as she was at drawing people, she was almost certain that her people drawings were better than Tilly’s.

  She stuck her tongue out a little with the exertion of colouring the windows in blue, even right up to the very corners for a perfect picture, and when she looked up, she saw that across from her, TillyTilly had her tongue stuck out a little too as her eyes scanned Jess’s face. Jess smiled uncertainly. What is she doing? TillyTilly smiled her rapid and fast-disappearing smile, then closed her mouth again and carried on drawing.

  When Tilly had gone, Jess spent the rest of the afternoon lying on her bed, drowsing. Her head had begun to ache again, and she wondered if she shouldn’t go and get something from her mum for it, then decided that she couldn’t really be bothered to get up. Also, her mum would probably think that it was all a trick so that she’d have to stay and take care of Jess. Soon, the heat of the day outside began to annoy her, and she tugged her curtains closed. There would probably be a storm tonight, she thought feebly, curling up with one arm draped across her forehead to block out the light.

  Jess had just opened her eyes after another short, confused nap in which she had been unsure if she was awake or asleep, when she perceived, out of the corner of her eye, that there was someone staring at her from outside her room, virtually filling the passageway with their presence, which sounded like a continuous buzzing, clicking hum. It was like hmmmzzzmmmzzzhmmm, over and over. It felt as if it had been staring at her for a very long time, with the biggest eyes she had ever seen, only she hadn’t noticed. It was very, very tall yet didn’t seem to have a body, but appeared to be made of a sort of vibrating blackness. Blackness like the darkest jelly. Hmmzzzmmm . It looked as if the tall thing wasn’t going to come in, but it certainly wasn’t about to let her out either. She felt light-headed and not at all concerned about it, although if she had been well, she might have been worried. She could hear herself humming a wordless song, as she did when she was feeling poorly. Oh, she was definitely quite ill.