“You two are SUCH scaredy-cats! Your faces!” Shivs continued, as Jess plucked helplessly at her covers, trying to rein in her laughter as she sent a mental apology to TillyTilly.
“Well, ha ha,” Dulcie said crossly, and lay back down.
“Jess.” Shivs flicked Jess’s face. “Your cousin’s all right, you know.”
SEVENTEEN
On Sunday morning, a while after Shivs and Dulcie had left, Jess was sitting on the kitchen floor listening to the strong, riotous rhythms of Ebenezer Obey and His International Brothers as they leapt through “Bisi Cash Madam.” The singing, which was in Yoruba anyway and so incomprehensible to Jess, was nowhere near as good as the actual music, which was dancing in Jess’s head and making her want to get up and run up and down the room. It was like a beat jumping inside her, telling her something fun, but she couldn’t get up because her mum, smelling of the palm oil that they’d eaten with yam that morning, was cornrowing her hair in preparation for school tomorrow. She wriggled impatiently, wishing she’d never asked for cornrows now, as her mum’s fingers raked globules of hair food through her hair before plaiting it firmly and a little painfully to her scalp. Her mum tapped her on the shoulder with the comb that she held between her teeth, and Jess knew that that meant to keep still. She groaned and resisted the temptation to put her hand up to her head to feel the amount of unplaited hair left—it would only end up feeling as if there were still loads and loads left to do. Her father wasn’t even there to amuse her by reading aloud unusual stories from The Observer. He was still in bed, pleading exhaustion. This had gone uncommented on by Sarah, who was in a good mood anyway and had started playing one of King Sunny Ade’s albums on the cassette player as soon as she’d woken up. Jess and her father could only conclude that all was well with the book.
Sarah cheered a particularly good stretch of uninterrupted music—the high, plucking sound of the electric guitar weaved in with steady keyboard and drum notes—then she puffed her cheeks out in mild exasperation as the comb dropped out of her mouth.
Jess picked it up, but instead of taking it back, her mum kept plaiting and said, over the music, “Tell me something interesting about school.”
“School? Um.”
“What?”
Jess decided what to say and raised her voice so that Sarah could hear her properly.
“Ummmm. Well, at singing assembly there was this song about everyone being the same, and I can’t remember all of it, but some of it went: ‘Whether black or white skin / With a frown or a grin, / Well, the Lord loves us all just the same . . .’ ”
“Hmmm,” said her mum. “The Lord, hey?”
Jess giggled. “Mummy, why don’t you like the Lord?”
Sarah began another plait.
“It’s not that I don’t like him, Jess. It’s just—hmmm. Was there a picture of the Lord on the song-slide? Was he by any chance a white hippie?”
Jess shrugged as carefully as she could so as not to disturb her mother’s busy hands.
“There wasn’t a picture of the Lord, actually. There was this picture of a black boy, and he was frowning, then there was a smiling white girl, and Nam Hong put his hand up and said, ‘Miss, that’s shabby, because it’s saying all black people are moany and all white people are happy.’ ”
She listened, smiling, as her mum made her strange, suppressed laughing sound. After a little while, partly to take her mind off the smarting of her scalp, Jess asked, “Why does it matter if Jesus was a white hippie?”
Her mum stopped plaiting and wiped her hands down on her jeans.
“Sometimes it can be hard to really love someone or something when you can’t see anything of yourself in them,” she said, turning Jess to face her. She lightly touched Jess’s mouth. “Jesus doesn’t have lips as big as yours, and his skin is fair. How can you ever be as good as him on the outside when there’s nothing of him in your face?”
“Because it doesn’t matter about faces?” Jess offered.
Her mother shook her head just once, looking a little bit sad for a moment.
“Peace to those who are far away, and peace to those who are near at hand,” she murmured.
Jess was confused.
“What?”
Sarah turned her daughter back around. “Nothing, Jess.” Jess became worried, and decided to abandon the line of thought. “If there was a black Jesus, he’d have to look like Grandfather,” she decided aloud instead, ignoring her mother’s shout of laughter.
When her father woke up, Jess joined him and her mother in the sitting room and lay on the floor in front of the television, trying to read Little Women. But she fell to thinking about Tilly. It seemed that the better friends Jess became with Shivs, the more questions she had about TillyTilly. Although she was used to Tilly’s disappearing and reappearing, her apparent knowledge of everything, and her ability to do anything she wanted, even make Jess invisible, Jess now wanted to know exactly what it meant for TillyTilly to be not “really really” there. And where her friend went to when she disappeared. These were all questions that she wouldn’t dare to ask TillyTilly.
Jess couldn’t exactly picture TillyTilly flying all the way over to Ibadan and back to the lonely Boys’ Quarters, although she supposed that she could if she wanted to. This led her, unexpectedly, to think of the base sound that she’d heard hidden beneath all the other ones last night, and how scared she’d been. She closed the book and laid her cheek against the tattered cover.
The phone rang, and Jess jumped up when her mum shouted from the hallway, “It’s for you, Jess!” She took the receiver and put Little Women down on the telephone table, on top of the Yellow Pages.
“Oi,” Shivs said, “we were supposed to tell scary stories last night, you know! I just found the torch in my bag.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know any scary stories anyways—”
“I bet you do! You read all those books!”
“Not scary ones.”
“Well, I know loads! OK, here’s one: There was this boy called Johnny, right—”
“Shiiiiivs!”
“And Johnny’s mum sent him to the market to buy a chicken leg—”
“Shhhhhh.”
Jess caught a movement from the corner of her eye and looked to see TillyTilly sitting on the bottom step of the staircase. Her hair appeared to have unravelled from her thick plaits and rose up in two puffs, just like before, in Nigeria. Jess waved at TillyTilly as Shivs kept talking, and Tilly gave Jess a quick smile before Jess turned back towards the telephone table and pleaded, “Shivs, you know I don’t like those stories!”
“All right, sorry,” Shivs said contritely, then: “Guess what! Martin went to Cornwall, and he saw a ghost!”
Jess was about to reply when what felt like a damp white sheet flew over her. Taking a few steps backwards, she flapped at the covering with one arm, floundering until she came to a standstill.
“Oi, Jess, I have to go in a minute,” Shivs was saying, and Jess was trying to speak into the phone but her fingers kept slipping through it until the curve of the receiver was suddenly solid again in her hand and the sheet had sucked into her skin so that she felt cold and taut. As if through rippling sheets of cloth, Jess heard herself sneering, “Don’t phone me again with your stupid stories, white girl.”
Shivs laughed. “Oi, Jess, you’re rude, y’know,” she said, then waited for Jess’s answering giggle.
She waited and waited while Jess’s lips moved silently, struggling to take back those TillyTilly-words. But before she could say Jess-words, Shivs had said stiffly, “Fine then,” and hung up.
The minute that she did, TillyTilly darted out from behind Jess and up the stairs in a gleeful streak of green-and-white school check. Jess, drained of energy and weak with fury, gripped the edge of the telephone table and listened for the sound of Tilly’s footsteps overhead before she scrambled after her up the stairs.
Jess was LARGE with her anger, gasping aloud as she stomped into the bath
room then kicked at the toilet door, looking for Tilly. She found her in her mum’s study, sitting on the chair before the switched-off computer.
“Get away from there,” Jess told her in a loud whisper. “My mum’s work’s on that!”
TillyTilly shrugged and stayed where she was.
“Why are you all angry?” she asked innocently, before Jess could get her words out properly. Why was she ANGRY?
“You—you upset Shivs! And she thinks it was ME!”
“It was you. You said it, didn’t you?” TillyTilly stuck out her tongue.
“How did you do that?” Jess cried, no longer making the effort to keep quiet.
TillyTilly only smiled.
Drawing closer, Jess jabbed a finger at her.
“Who ARE you, TillyTilly?”
“Your sister—” The corners of Tilly’s mouth had turned down now.
“What about before that?”
TillyTilly moved across the room so that she was standing almost nose to nose with Jess.
“You like HER better than me,” she glared, “or you wouldn’t be making such a stupid fuss.”
Jess completely lost her head at that, lost it like she never had before. Baring her teeth in a snarl, she pushed TillyTilly away from her so hard that she staggered.
“I DO like her better than you! So what! You’re mean, TillyTilly—so, so mean, even if you are clever! And you try to make me mean as well! It’s more like sisters with Shivs than it is with you—” She advanced on TillyTilly, who was now retreating backwards towards the computer, cowering somewhat. “And with Shivs, it’s safer!”
Tilly stiffened and stood still.
“Safer! So Shivs is your sister! So you’re scared of me!” she blazed.
Jess halted, uncertain whether or not to retract, and whether she should draw closer. She didn’t want to. Something was happening to the air around TillyTilly; there was some sort of breeze sticking to her outline, as if she was drawing it in.
“I’m going to phone Shivs back,” Jess faltered, “and I’m going to—”
“Tell her it was me!” TillyTilly screeched, running at Jess with a whoosh, ribbons trailing. Jess, frightened, backed up quickly, but Tilly stopped short a few centimetres away and pushed
at the space between them with her fingers until Jess felt it actually cave in.
TillyTilly smiled grimly when the screen of Sarah Harrison’s computer monitor was slashed across as parts of it fell out with a soft cracking sound. The air filled with sickly wisps of smoke, and Jess could see an orange fizzle starting somewhere near the back of the computer. She let out a soft whimper (Oh, trouble, I’m in trouble again) and TillyTilly said to her from somewhere amidst the thickening grey, “You’re scared of me . . . good!”
When all the fuss had calmed down, Jess, unwilling to take the blame for breaking the computer, told her mum that it was TillyTilly who’d done it. Sarah groaned, but she was not as angry as she could have been, since her files were all backed up on a series of neatly labelled disks, but she was extremely annoyed at the expense of having to buy a new computer.
“I thought I heard running around upstairs! Well, what on earth did she DO to it? I don’t think it can be repaired.”
Jess looked down at her shoes, shamefaced. She had no reply to all this.
Her mother frowned and said, “You’re NOT to let your friends go into my study, and in fact, once you’ve found out Tilly’s mum’s name or her telephone number, you’re not to have Tilly over here, all right?”
Jess, nodding glumly, was inwardly appalled. How was she supposed to stop TillyTilly when she could do anything that she wanted?
It was nearing the end of Monday afternoon, and Jess was sitting in the very middle of the sofa watching the last few minutes of Count Quackula . Her mother was upstairs in her study installing the new computer that she’d marched out and bought that day, and Jess had already finished her jam-and-cheddar sandwich. She clutched the cushions on either side of her in preparation for the end music, which she always found scary, even though she knew it was silly to. It was the lightning splintering the skies above the silhouette of the castle, and the eerie, insane cackle that did it. Controlling her desire to whip around and check behind the sofa (just in case), she began laughing quietly to console herself, an edge of terror in her laugh as the credits for the cartoon rolled. Then she jumped as light flooded the room. It was her father, whom she had not heard come into the house, and as he sat down beside her with a knowing smile, his arm stretched out along the back of the sofa as if he’d been there all day, he said, “Worrying yourself with Count Quackula. Again . . .”
Jess buried her face into a cushion and groaned. “Daddyyyyy—”
She stopped as her ears were flooded with the familiar buzzing sound
(hmmmmmmmmzzzz)
and got onto her knees on the sofa, peering over it until she could see—at first blurrily but then in sharp relief—TillyTilly stretched out on the floor, halfway into the sitting room and half out into the passageway. She looked as if she had fallen there, silently.
Her head was flopping listlessly to one side and her limbs were spread limply, looking more as if they surrounded her than belonged to her. Jess, embarrassed, tried not to look at her pink knickers. After the initial throb of panic at seeing Tilly, Jess stared for a second longer when Tilly didn’t get up but continued to gaze impassively at the ceiling. Looking up at the ceiling herself, only to find nothing there, Jess began to feel afraid for her friend. What was the matter with her? And how could she be getting poorly in the same way that Jess did?
Knightmare was on now, and as Jess glanced at her father to see if he had noticed anything, she found that he was staring vacantly at the television with his mouth half open in an oddly unfinished expression. Torn between wondering what was the matter with him and what was the matter with Tilly, she looked back at Tilly, willing her to get up. Finally she could wait no longer and scrambled over the sofa. She crawled cautiously towards the still figure spread out in front of her, but when she reached TillyTilly her eyes were closed, and Jess had to bend close to her face in order to hear the halting cycle of her breath. Jess briefly thought of things like hospitals or the GP before dismissing them. Instead, she enfolded the other girl in her arms and pulled her upright, into a sitting position. TillyTilly was light—so light it was like holding cotton wool. Or nothing at all. But Jess was still scared of her: scared of the ice that lingered in the touching, and of the glint in her hidden eyes. Nevertheless, she pulled TillyTilly closer to her, thinking that somehow her own warmth might make her better. Cradling the back of Tilly’s head with one hand, her fingers brushed one of Tilly’s spongy puffs of hair as she whispered, “TillyTilly, what’s the matter? How comes you’re all poorly?”
TillyTilly didn’t reply, but shifted a little and squeezed her lips together as if trying to suck in the very air.
“I didn’t mean it when I said you were mean,” Jess said tremulously. No, she couldn’t be a baby about it; she had to think of something. Think! She was struck by an idea. “Are you pretending, to scare me? Because of the fight?” she asked, moving back so that she could watch Tilly’s face. No, her skin was too ashen, almost as if smeared with dark grey face paint. Suddenly distracted, Jess gazed curiously for a moment at the back of her father’s motionless, blondy-brown head. The flickering of the TV screen seemed slowed down, or speeded up, or both, since she couldn’t make any sense of the dialogue, or even of the image. Jess was suddenly aware of a distortion of time, a twisting that alarmed her because Tilly had never done this so obviously before. It was unnerving.
She turned back to TillyTilly, whom she had inadvertently let flop back down to the carpet. She tightened her grip. What would happen without TillyTilly, and where, now, would Jess see something of herself? No, she couldn’t think about herself right now, Tilly was ill—
(Oh, she’s mean, oh, she’s my sister, oh TillyTilly don’t go . . . don’t GO, don’t be sick l
ike this, you’re not supposed to hurt.)
Could a person survive losing two twins?
It was too, too miserable being a child and not being able to know these things or believe in a future change. So strange, being powerless to do anything for her own happiness.
Now they were both crying, and Jess was startled because she had thought at first that it was only her. She wanted to wipe her face so that her tears didn’t drop onto her and Tilly’s clothes the way that they were. Tilly’s eyes were still closed, but she was sobbing so hard that her body was shaking in Jess’s arms. Then Tilly drew a great sigh and fell quiet, breathing almost noiselessly. She opened her eyes and motioned to Jess to let her go, and eased herself backwards on her hands.
“I don’t want to be like this,” she told Jess, letting her hands fall into her lap. Her head was drooping distressingly, as if she couldn’t hold it up.
Jess sniffled and wiped at her eyes.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it? Because I’ve been a bad sister.”
TillyTilly smiled, and there was a bewildering moment of blur between her and would-have-been-could-have-been Tilly, the wise-eyed ibeji woman, who wasn’t actually there, couldn’t be there at the same time as TillyTilly.
“No, not that. It’s like . . . You know when we fell?”
Jess remembered the flying-sinking feeling and nodded.
“It’s like that,” Tilly whispered, smoothing out her skirt with her trembling hands. Big tears were falling from her eyes again.
“It’s not what’s supposed to happen. Something’s wrong. I can’t—”
Jess watched as Tilly’s lips moved noiselessly for a few moments, as if she had forgotten how to speak, or what the words were. With effort, she met Jess’s eyes and said, “If only you could speak Yoruba. Or understand it.”
Jess reached out and timidly touched Tilly’s hand. “I’m sorry that I can’t, TillyTilly. Can’t you teach me?”
She wanted to be a better sister, too, but she didn’t think she could ask Tilly about that.
“Jess!”
The Icarus Girl Page 21
