Is TillyTilly ... real?
All she knew, as Trish began talking and calling her other Year Five friends over, was that even if TillyTilly wasn’t real, if it was a choice between there being just her and Tilly or her and real people, she’d much, much rather have Tilly.
“I wasn’t by myself, I was with my friend,” she said suddenly, interrupting Trish’s flow of speech. Trish had been offering to push her on the swings. Even though she would’ve liked that, Jess turned her down. It would somehow be disloyal to TillyTilly to hang around with Trish and her friends. Also, she needed to go home and think about all this and, later, copy out the poem.
“I think I’d better go and find her,” she added.
Trish shrugged, laughing.
“All right, suit yourself.”
Jess didn’t remember to show her mum the poem until the next morning, just before school. The day started with a general feeling of discontent. Her mum read the poem at the kitchen table as she ate her bacon sandwich. When she got past the first line, she put down the sandwich. Her lips began moving without any sounds coming out as she read the poem to herself, then she read it again, her eyebrows raised. Jess had written By Jessamy Harrison and Titiola at the bottom. Even if TillyTilly wasn’t real, she had reminded herself, she still deserved credit for the poem. She would have to discuss the realness thing with TillyTilly today, if she saw her.
She couldn’t even begin to think what she meant by “not real.”
Jess was tempted to spatter her porridge, but knew it drove her mum mad, and so refrained, hoping to be rewarded with some positive comments about the poem.
“Jess,” her mum said, finally, putting the sheet of paper down, “are you sure that you wrote this?”
Jess drank some orange juice before answering, drinking slowly to show how offended she was.
“Yes, me and Tilly did. What’s wrong with it?”
Her mum looked at the poem again, shook her head.
“How old is Tilly again?” she asked, suddenly, looking at Jess.
Jess shrugged uncomfortably.
She felt as if she was keeping a terrible secret for her friend: The thing is, she’s not real, but it’s a secret.
Her mum picked her sandwich up again and took a bite, looking reflective. She kept glancing down at the poem.
“Muuuuum,” Jess said impatiently.
“Mmmm?”
“What d’you think of it? D’you like it?”
“Jess, if you were unhappy, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you, darling?”
Jess was confused. This had nothing to do with anything. She was now being forced to consider her answers so as not to make her mum cross with her, when all she wanted was for her mum to like the poem. Her mum waited without appearing to be waiting, eating her sandwich, checking her watch. They were going to be a little late, as usual.
“Yes,” Jess said finally in a very small voice. “Do you like the poem, though, Mummy?”
Her mum stood up and got Jessamy’s coat, began helping her into it.
“It’s . . . quite mature, Jess. It’s a bit of a sad poem, isn’t it?”
Don’t ask me about it, I’m asking you.
“What were you and Titiola thinking about when you were writing it?” her mother asked when they headed through the park to school. Jess moped. There was something too cheerful about her mother today, something too jaunty in her walk and the questions she asked. Jess could sense it, it was almost tangible; her mother didn’t think that TillyTilly was real either. That must be it.
“We were just finding rhymes.”
Her mum nodded. “Right. Well, I do like it, Jess, it’s just . . . well, I think it’s . . . I like it, but if you want the truth, it . . . well, sort of confuses me that it was written by you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You think it’s too mature.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re the one who reads me Shakespeare and stuff! How do you want me to write?”
Her mum ruffled her hair.
“Jesus on toast, Jess, I dunno.”
TEN
In the sitting room, Jess sat watching her mother dial, calling Nigeria. Her mum looked up and flashed her a smile in between punching in the last two numbers, and Jess smiled back, preparing herself for the odd feeling of hearing Bodija over the phone again. They both waited.
“Hello? Iya Jessamy calling from London!” her mum said.
There was a static pause, then Jess could hear a faint, crackling shriek of delight sounding from the other end, then a string of questions in piercing, fast Yoruba. It sounded like Aunty Funke, but it could well have been Aunty Biola. Jess watched her mum throw back her head and laugh, before responding in equally fast Yoruba. She turned, treading a small half circle on the carpet, then suddenly looked at Jess. She seemed to catch herself and winked at Jessamy before questioningly indicating the phone. Jess nodded.
“Funke, here is your girl, o,” she said in English, laughing. She handed the receiver to Jess and dropped into one of the sitting-room chairs.
Jess gripped the receiver, pulling the mouthpiece closer to her face. Her hands were slightly sweaty and the phone felt slippery. She licked her lips.
“Hello, Aunty,” she said, listening for the audible echo of her voice bouncing down the phone line in a way that it did not when she was speaking to somebody in England.
There was that unnerving split-second delay before Aunty Funke crackled so that it was sharp and shrieking, “Jess! How is everything, eh?”
The question was imbued with unmistakable menace and malice.
Jess was instantaneously miserable and frightened; the way that she always was at first. This fear lasted a few seconds, then, before it was allayed and she could speak to her aunt comfortably, the phone would be taken from her by her mum.
On the telephone to Nigeria, Jess was seized by the fear that it wasn’t Aunty Funke she was talking to, but some thin, winding spirit that had intercepted the call, taking on her aunty’s accent and tone of voice, turning every sentence into a shrill cleaving of the nerves.
“I’m fine,” she whispered, letting the sound be stolen from her as the echo mocked. Now she had said she was fine twice. She almost added “Aunty,” but caught herself. This wasn’t her aunty Funke who made puff-puff in her lucky pan and sang while washing up at the sink and complained loudly—in English, for Jess’s benefit—whenever she was annoyed. The response was again delayed.
“Say what? Ah-ah, you this girl, won’t you speak up?” The wicked spirit thief sounded darkly amused, spitting out the question although they both knew that Jess’s throat was too dry from this ordeal for her to talk properly.
Every single time, she thought it might be different, but it never was; she never got to speak to her aunty Funke.
“I said . . . I’m fine,” she bellowed into the phone. She was suddenly enraged beyond belief, unaware of the fact that she was almost snarling. “How are you?” she added, belligerently.
The echoes were louder this time. Her mum took the phone from her, arching her eyebrows in bemusement before speaking to her sister in Yoruba. Jess couldn’t understand exactly what her mum was saying, but it sounded apologetic. She wiped her hands on the skirt of her school dress, and the green-and-white check reminded her of Tilly. Without another word, she left the room and went through the kitchen and out of the back door.
But Jess couldn’t find TillyTilly. She was lost to her, shrunken from her sight.
Jess understood implicitly that this had something to do with her realising that Tilly wasn’t real. She wished she hadn’t thought it, that her happiness hadn’t been stretched and pulled out of shape by that idea. How could she have . . . ?
As she ran through the park, a flurry of arms and legs and dress, searching frantically for her friend, the dread and panic thickened and bloomed in her lungs. She forced herself to stand still on the pavement, made herself draw in deep, deep breaths until she thought that she might s
uck herself inside out with the force of her breathing. A group of older children chasing each other down the other side of the pavement all stopped to look at her. One of them was a boyish-looking brown-haired girl wearing a baggy off-white T-shirt with Heartbreak High written on it in yellow letters. The girl yelled out, “Oi, wassamatter with you, man?”
Jess dropped to her knees and bowed her head, ignoring them. She didn’t mind them staring, she was used to it. When she had sufficiently quieted, she lifted her head.
“TillyTilly,” she called softly, then waited, listening, looking for TillyTilly to come skipping down the road, or running, maybe, or even to appear silently beside her.
Can’t you see I’m sorry—
No Tilly. Jess felt weak and dizzy, but she got home, and went into the kitchen and leaned against the table. She didn’t realise how odd she looked until her mother came to find her and gave a little shriek of surprised dismay. Jess heard it only dimly, as if the sound was being filtered through small holes in her hearing, the rest of which was filled with a low, resonant humming.
“Heh! You this girl! You were fine just thirty minutes ago!”
Jess turned her head and gazed at her mum, tottering a little with the effort to keep her neck straight. How could she have started feeling this ill so fast?
“It’s Tilly,” Jess tried to explain. “She’s gone away.” But it didn’t come out properly, because something was the matter with her tongue; it felt far too big for her mouth, and made flaccid, flapping movements against her bottom row of teeth and her lips. She realised that she was making her illness-singing sounds again.
“Jessy,” TillyTilly said quietly, insistently, from somewhere in the room. “Jessy, Jessy, Jessy.”
Jess, sprawled on the bed with the covers half falling off her achingly hot shoulders, came down from where she was floating in the darkness with the long-armed woman, and rolled over from her stomach onto her back.
“JESSY,” Tilly said again, her voice full of impatience.
Jess hesitated; the voice sounded different with her eyes closed; it sounded . . . older, somehow.
“Did you think I would leave you? We’re twins!”
Jess heard Tilly’s words, but didn’t respond. She didn’t want to. She was glad that Tilly had come back, but . . . the woman with the long arms was smiling and telling her a story about a boy and a magic bird that spread its wings over the land and made everything green and good . . . The words were making her feel fresher, coating her in dew. TillyTilly was speaking insistently, and her words were layering over and under the storyteller’s.
“. . . Jessy, you guessed without me explaining that I’m . . . that I’m not really here. I mean, of course I’m really here, just not really really here, if you see what I mean . . . Most of the time I’m somewhere else, but I can appear, and you haven’t imagined me! Remember Colleen’s house? And the amusement park? You know you couldn’t have imagined those!”
Jess did not move, but she listened to Tilly and to the soft, accented voice of the long-armed woman saying, “. . . And then the bird brought rain clouds, and its wings were pouring with rain, and the drought was over . . .” She felt TillyTilly’s bony hand brush her face and then withdraw, and this made her open her eyes. TillyTilly was nowhere to be seen.
Later, when Jess was caught up in a particularly bad bout of the fever and the room seemed to be throbbing, widening and contracting with shimmering heat, Tilly came back, and Jess was scared. Tilly was standing by her bedside, and she was smiling, but she was . . . folding over and crackling and jumping to different parts of the room like a piece of paper blown by a volatile wind. Tilly was paper-thin and peeling around the edges, and just beyond her, a pair of long, dark brown arms was snaking in through the open door, and the hands on the ends of them were trying to hold the smiling, paper-doll Tilly in place. She knew, now, that TillyTilly and the long-armed woman were somehow the same person, like the two sides of a thin coin.
There was no wind.
Jess screamed, and Tilly flew away, and her mum came instead.
Sometime in the night, Jess fell out of bed and lay exhausted on the floor. She made a feeble attempt to grasp the bedcovers with her hands so that she could pull herself back up, but soon abandoned the idea. She lay still, licking her dried-out lips, and tried not to hum or sing; she didn’t want her parents to be worried. Her mum had sat with her for the rest of the afternoon after her latest scream, forehead wrinkled as she distractedly scribbled notes for her book on her notepad. Jess, tumbling in and out of sleep, couldn’t be sure, but thought that she heard a baby crying. It wasn’t like proper crying, the way she’d heard babies on the bus crying—it was a weak sort of snuffling sound, ehh-hhh-ehhhh, as if the baby had already cried a lot. She lay still, staring straight up, a frown etched on her face as she tried to discern where the sound was coming from. It sounded quite near. She felt as if, beneath her breastbone, her heart was twisting in time to the feeble cries.
The sound grew louder. Jess paused, and then ducked her head so that she could see beneath her bed. There was a moment of pointillism, her vision swimming out of clarity and into a group of coloured dots, then reforming again. She couldn’t . . . There was a baby there: a tiny baby, a whole baby, naked aside from the dirty white shawl it was wrapped in. A baby. Left there underneath her bed, somehow, how? Jess stared through the gaps between her spread fingers as the baby kicked its legs and coughed out another gasping cry. Under her bed. She couldn’t touch the thing, it wouldn’t be real, it would get bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier, and kill her, like in the story her mother had told her about the wicked spirit that disguised itself. She couldn’t see its face; it was so helpless, it was tiny; the thing was crying, she couldn’t touch it, could she?
Almost without realising it, Jess had carefully placed her hands around the baby and brought it out, and settled it awkwardly on her lap so that she could put her finger into its feverishly hot little fist. The child was silent now, staring and solemn.
Oh my God, her skull—
Jess could see places where the top of the baby’s head looked scarily soft, and was seized with a fear that she would let the child drop and her head would smash open. Then she checked herself. Why had she supposed that the baby was a girl? There was no way you could tell from the pale, wrinkled-up little face with its luminous eyes filled with brown light. The hair was dark and tightly curled. It was tangled. She tried to draw the finger of her other hand through the baby’s hair, and then realised that she wouldn’t be able to keep the baby on her lap if she did so.
Whose are you?
Jess sat for a few minutes, her head pressed against the side of the bed to stop it from aching so, her finger caught in the baby’s hand, her eyes fixed on the girl—she knew it was a girl. The girl stared at her as well. She waited for the baby to get heavier.
Then there was a rush of air as TillyTilly leant over from Jess’s bed and deftly slipped the little girl from Jess’s lap. Jess jumped, then managed a small, sleepy noise of relief that someone was here to help her. She climbed onto the bed so that she could watch TillyTilly playing with the baby, bouncing her up and down on the covers, moving her arms and legs through walking motions. When she caught Tilly’s eyes, Tilly smiled, but said nothing and continued to dandle the little girl. Jess’s head felt worse and she could see spots of heat begin to float before her eyes.
She closed her eyes and when she opened them again she was lying flat, and the air was filled with the sound of the baby’s crying. TillyTilly was sitting at the end of the bed, and she spread her arms wide the better to show their emptiness. Jess fought to sit up, but she couldn’t; it was as if there were weights on her chest. She quickly became terrified. Why could she only hear the baby? She wanted to see her again, play with her.
“TillyTilly! What happened to that baby?”
TillyTilly did not reply.
Tilly was the one making the buzzing, humming noise; Jess knew that now. She was
at the door, making the sound without opening her mouth.
“TillyTilly, please don’t make that noise. I don’t like it, it’s making me ill,” she protested.
All the noise stopped—the crying, the humming, everything. The silence was thick.
“Where’s that baby?” Jess whispered.
TillyTilly executed a twirl in the doorway. “She’s dead . . .”
Jess stared at her friend. Her lips trembled as she struggled to speak, to think.
“You—?”
TillyTilly smiled graciously, as if she wasn’t really concentrating on the topic at hand, but on something else.
“Don’t be silly, Jessy, I couldn’t kill anyone. I’m only little.” She laughed.
Jess couldn’t laugh along; she was afraid again, and knew that something bad had happened to the baby.
“Then how come she’s dead?”
TillyTilly folded her arms. “I don’t like to say . . . but it’s your mother’s fault.” Then she dropped quite suddenly out of sight. Jess crawled to the edge of her bed and looked down at the floor. TillyTilly was lying flat out, like a starfish, grinning up at her.
“What are you talking about, it’s my mum’s fault?” Jess demanded. She had a teetering feeling—not as if she was about to scream, but a flatter feeling, as if she was about to fall down very hard and not be able to get up again.
Tilly kicked her legs in the air.
“Ask her—there were two of you born, just like there were two of me. The other one of you died,” she said, unbelievably casual, so matter-of-fact that Jess was fine with it until the meaning hit her.
Then, unexpected even to herself, Jess began to cry: hot, dry, racking sobs that robbed her of her breath with every spasm. She buried her face in her pillows. It was . . . too much. The baby had been there, and then it wasn’t, and then it was dead, and then it was her sister . . . and she still felt so poorly, so poorly. The humming sound was faint in the air again. She knew it would get louder.
“Stop it, TillyTilly, PLEASE STOP IT!” she shouted, then froze, realising that she had been too loud. She heard the creak of one of her parents stirring in their bed, and the humming noise escalated, but no one came. She turned onto her side away from Tilly, but Tilly was waiting on the other side of the bed.
The Icarus Girl Page 15
