The Icarus Girl
Page 23
“DON’T talk to your mother like that,” he yelled, looking neither at Sarah nor at Jess. His voice wobbled on the last few words.
Her mother put her arms around Jess and gently touched her cheek, rubbing the spot that hurt.
“Disinfectant,” Daniel said, slowly heading down the stairs.
Jess stared, bewildered, after him, feeling tides turning in her stomach. Everything, everything had crossed over in the spin of a second.
EIGHTEEN
Jess went to sleep nursing the cut on her hand. She kept thinking about the peculiar (whiteblanket) feeling that had overwhelmed her when she screamed at her mother. Had TillyTilly been the glass that cut her? Not only that, but the way her father had looked at her: horrified, repulsed, she could see it over and over again.
So now they both hated her, they were a group of two. Well, fine, she hated them too. But she couldn’t help weeping a little when she remembered that now she didn’t even have TillyTilly anymore.
She fell asleep for a little while, but woke up when TillyTilly appeared.
“Oh, Jess,” TillyTilly laughed, spinning in circles, her arms out. She was hiccupping and giggling, then suddenly suppressing tears, the dimensions of her face stretching impossibly so that her eyes were like long, pale, luminous slits in the night. “You’re afraid of me! It’s changing us! Stop . . .” She gave a raucous whoop.
The air was condensing; it was the only way to describe what was happening—there was a sort of mist, a palpability, an elusive smell like madness. Jess knew with all the certainty of childhood that her bed was a haven from which she must not stray. She must beware, because TillyTilly was no longer safe.
Had she ever been?
The very fabric of TillyTilly was stretching, pulling apart, a brown cycle of skin and eyes and voice whipping around Jess and the bed in ever-decreasing circles.
Jess dropped onto her hands and knees, curling herself up closer to the bedclothes. It was dark with her eyes open, dark with them closed. She could smell Tilly’s skin. The leafy pomade had intensified into a wet, rotting vegetation smell. Could she call for her mother, who was a wall’s thickness away? Candles burned, and on the outside of Tilly’s circle of tea lights, Jess knew that the terrible, beautiful, long-armed woman would be there, setting the air humming with her presence, looking on.
“Ohhhh,” Jess whispered. She could feel shadows falling, cold across her. “Ohhh . . . please, please, don’t let this be happening. I want this not to be real. I want this not to be . . .”
TillyTilly laughed then, and the room (and the bed) seemed to Jess to tilt sickeningly from side to side.
Tilly is trying to shake me off the bed.
Clutching the sides of her bed so hard that one of her nails bent inwards over itself, Jess gave a sharp cry and forced herself to open her eyes, blinking away the wetness that filled them. The room was dim and still, filled with a bitter smoky smell, but no one was there.
The door . . . but the door was too far away.
too . . .
far . . .
away . . .
“I’m only little, Jessy.” The voice came from above her, a high, lilting, singsong voice that sounded younger than TillyTilly’s normal voice. “Just a little girl. Nothing more. Do you find it hard to believe? I thought you wanted to be like me? That’s your problem! You always want to know where you belong, but you don’t need to belong. Do you? DO YOU?”
Jess did not look up or give any indication that she had heard, even though her stomach was heaving and she could taste the bitter bile juice at the back of her mouth.
“You really need to hate people,” TillyTilly continued.
Pause.
“You deserve to.”
Then something began to drip slowly onto Jess’s back, so slowly that she almost didn’t feel it until she felt the cloth of her pyjamas cling and stick to her back. She nearly put her fingers to the wet patch, but, with enormous effort, lay still, her eyes wide and watchful. She felt as if her mind was slipping away from her, soaring so high that she would not be able to reclaim it. If only the liquid, whatever it was, wasn’t so very hot, so hot that it numbed her skin and felt freezing cold.
How can this not be over?
TillyTilly was still speaking, and Jess, unmoving, allowed the words to drift in and out of the air around her. Whatever happened, she would not leave this bed.
“Go on, Jessy, hate everyone, anyone, and I’ll get them for you,” TillyTilly screeched. “The whole world. We’re twins, both of us, twins. Doesn’t that mean something?” Then, more hesistantly: “Jess. Help me. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m scared.”
But Jess didn’t respond. TillyTilly was a liar. She said it didn’t matter about belonging, but it did.
“Land chopped in little pieces, and—ideas! These ideas! Disgusting . . . shame, shame, shame. It’s all been lost. Ashes. Nothing, now, there is no one. You understand?”
TillyTilly’s voice, changing in timbre, beginning to sound like an adult woman’s now, carried on unstoppably: “There is no homeland.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, TillyTilly,” Jess whispered. But there was no pause in the rant, and by now the dripping had increased in flow to a thin yet steady torrent. Jess did not, could not and would not look up. She must be spared, she must not be touched.
“Do you suffer through making your own suffer?” Tilly raged. “And then our blood . . . spilt like water . . . like water for the drinking, for the washing . . . our blood . . . I’m a WITNESS. Twins should know what each other suffer!”
The flow seemed to have stopped. Hardly knowing what she was doing, Jess turned her head to the side, and then looked upwards, slowly, slowly, holding her breath, already crying because now she knew that she didn’t want to close this gap between seeing and being seen—
“There is no homeland—there is nowhere where there are people who will not get you.”
Something hanging upside down from the ceiling; face dangling a few centimetres away from hers; those pupils, dilated until there was no white; those enormous, swollen lips, almost cartoonish except that they were deepest black, encrusted with dead, dry skin, coated here and there with chunks of
(I don’t know, I don’t want to know, please don’t let me ever know, even guess)
something moist and pinky-white . . .
The lips, which had paused, continued to move. Transfixed, she caught a glimpse as they moved over a small, mauve stump; the remains of a tongue.
“Stop looking to belong, half-and-half child. Stop. There is nothing; there is only me, and I have caught you.”
And it was only at this point that Jess began to scream, long and loud, as the silent, never-ending torrent of reddish black erupted from that awful mouth, and engulfed her, baptising her in its madness.
The worst thing was that it was all really happening.
NINETEEN
“Two of me. No, us. TillyTilly, JessJess, FernFern, but that’s three. TillyTilly and JessFern? Or FernJess?” Jess, sitting upright, was mumbling questions to herself in the streaming daylight from her window. She was perched on the end of her bed, pushing her book bag across the floor with her foot. “Who are you, TillyTilly? You know, you know.” She had a dry feeling at the back of her throat from being hungry and thirsty and not quite daring to go down to breakfast despite repeated irritated calls from her mother. Before this she had washed quickly, expecting the silent, silvery taps to jet forth sprays of water, but they hadn’t. She’d brushed her teeth and put on her school dress and cardigan before carefully reaffixing her hair beads all by herself. She hadn’t had the bathroom mirror to do it in and had had to use the little swing mirror on her desk to do the beads. And now her thoughts turned to TillyTilly, who was fragmenting and becoming double, and how she, Jess, was to keep herself safe from everyone.
There was a knock on her closed bedroom door.
“Jess, can I come in?” her father said from outside.
Daniel, dressed for work in suit and tie, put his head around the door. He looked surprised. Jess aimed a kick in his direction. Had he expected her to be lying in bed poorly, her laboured breathing and pink-tinged eyes an indication in themselves that she would be unable to go to school that day?
Instead Jess was vertical and fully dressed, quiet, with her chin resting on her chest as she stared absently at the floor, swinging her legs, which were in high white socks and ended in black lace-up shoes for the cold weather.
“Listen, Jess. Yesterday, you behaved appallingly towards your mother.”
No response visible or audible from her.
“True or false?”
Finally: “True.”
“Right. You behaved badly, but I didn’t mean to hit you as hard as I did, or even hit you. You know that.” (Yeah, right.)
“Your mother’s forgotten all about it, and I want to as well. Can’t we make up?”
Jess nodded because she knew she had to, and grudgingly offered her father a handshake, which he somehow turned into a swift hug. As she wrinkled her nose at his change of aftershave, she also became aware of how glad she was that it was morning. She didn’t think that she could bear another night of Tilly-tricks all alone.
“Should I say sorry to Mummy?” she asked into her dad’s shoulder.
Daniel let Jess go and chucked her under the chin. He smiled.
“Probably.”
Jess was forced out of her safe place by the shock of Colleen McLain’s voice. And when she looked at Colleen, who was viewing her with a mixture of concern and glee, she also saw TillyTilly, who was really, impossibly, here in the classroom, sitting opposite her at the table.
“Hello again,” TillyTilly said in a conversational tone once Jess had allowed herself one frightened glance in that direction. “I really am sorry about before, and I’ll make it up to you! I don’t even want to swap places anymore, honest!”
Jess twisted away in her seat and looked instead at Colleen.
“What?” Colleen half stretched out a hand with a small, confused intake of breath, and Jess was disgusted to find that her eyes were filled with tears from being so frightened of Tilly. She rubbed at her eyes hard with her knuckles, and Colleen chewed disgustingly on her hair and stared at her with those narrowed brown eyes before asking, “So, what, shall I get Miss or not?”
“Don’t,” Jess told her hastily, as across from her TillyTilly said, “I understand, you know, why you hate him worse than her now. It’s worse when they’re always nice and then they change like that.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Jess hissed, hands to her ears again, then let out a little sob before she realised that Colleen hadn’t gone away, but was still hovering.
Colleen paused, then pulled out the chair beside TillyTilly, shielding Jess from the view of Sam Robinson and company, who were now beginning to look over.
“Look. What are you telling me to shut up for? I wasn’t even being nasty,” Colleen began heatedly; then, when Jessamy didn’t reply, she locked her fingers together and lowered her voice. “Why are you crying? Jessamy, you shouldn’t cry in front of people, seriously.”
TillyTilly had stopped talking and was now staring at the oblivious Colleen, a poisonous smile hovering on her lips. Their elbows were almost touching. Jess drummed her feet harder on the floor and tried to ignore all of this, but Colleen scraped her hair back behind her ears with her fingers and leaned across the table, still talking earnestly.
“You’ve got to tell Mr. Munroe, and he’ll let you go to the toilet or something. I’ll come with you if you want. Just stop crying, OK?”
“Help me,” Jess said faintly, sliding off her chair and under the table. Both TillyTilly and Colleen were gazing at her in consternation now, their expressions momentarily identical. They blurred; she didn’t know which she was supposed to be scared of now. And the classroom: the classroom was an elastic cube and it was twanging, throwing her with it from side to side as it grew bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller, pulsating like a brightly lit heart with book reviews and timetables on its secret, inside walls.
“Help you? What? Oi, Jessamy—” Colleen crawled under the table, but Jessamy didn’t reply, because it turned out that half-black people could faint after all.
It was proving awkward, this after-school session with Dr. McKenzie. She didn’t want to answer any of his questions, because they were so difficult. She almost wished that she had agreed to have the appointment on another day as her mother had suggested when she picked her up from the nurse’s office at school.
She felt so sleepy.
But she daren’t stop concentrating because that would leave a crease in her vision for TillyTilly to slide gaily on in.
Jess reminded herself again that she mustn’t believe that Tilly really wanted things to be the way they were before; she had to remember that there were two Tillys. It was difficult because she wanted the nice one back, the one who had said she would take care of her and had brought the ibeji woman.
Jess realised that she had to be careful not to blurt out “TillyTilly” in every sentence. The two Tillys filled her thoughts to bursting.
Now Dr. McKenzie was asking her about yesterday; her mum had told him all about it. Why? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t screamed—but she had been mean, and her dad had hit her for the first time. Her father . . . a thought niggled at her: something else had happened about him. What? Any coherent thought was lost in the swim.
“You said that a friend of yours broke the mirror,” Dr. McKenzie began.
Jess looked at her mother before replying, “Yeah.” There was a moment’s silence before she shook herself and remembered to say, “But it was me. I was lying ’cause I thought I’d get in trouble.”
Dr. McKenzie nodded understandingly, then said casually, “And were you lying about who broke the computer as well?”
Jess wasn’t stupid. “No.”
“This friend . . . Tilly. She lives around your area?” (Nooooooo, don’t ask about HER now.)
“Yeah.”
“And you two go around together quite a lot?”
“Um . . . I s’pose so.”
“Sarah, have you met Tilly?”
Jess’s mum shook her head.
“Not from lack of trying. Apparently she’s shy. Good at breaking things, though, judging by my computer.”
Sinking farther down into her chair, Jess adopted a resigned expression as she began to recognise that Sarah probably didn’t believe her about the computer either.
“How would I have broken your computer, Mummy?” (Did you not see how badly that computer was broken? Mummy, I am eight years old, and I am not very strong.)
“How would TILLY have broken it?” her mother countered.
Jess shrugged despondently, lifting her hands before dropping them hopelessly. Dr. McKenzie watched her for a few seconds before offering her a Jelly Baby. She took one, but didn’t eat it, pressing at it with her fingers instead.
“Jess,” Colin said at length, “it seems as if it’s more important to you that your mum believes that Tilly broke her computer than the mirror in the bathroom. Why do you think that is?”
Surprised, Jess realised that she hadn’t thought about it in that way.
“I don’t know.”
“Is it because you knew the computer was more important to me, because it had all my work on it?” Sarah asked gently.
Jess gave a disgusted shrug.
“I don’t know! You don’t believe me, anyway. You want me to tell you things, then when I do, you don’t believe me. What’s the point?”
“I believe you, Jess,” Dr. McKenzie said quietly, leaning over and tapping Jess’s wrist to get her attention. “I know that things can be real in different ways.”
Jess ignored him. Now he was trying to say that TillyTilly was imaginary.
“L
ike . . . say I have an idea of . . . a mermaid, the mermaid is real, but not real in the same way as this table is,” he said, knocking the table in question.
Glaring at him, Jess said, “That’s nice.” He didn’t understand at all. An idea of a stupid mermaid couldn’t come to you and scare you; an idea of a mermaid couldn’t get your Year Five teacher so she never came back. Jess finally popped the flattened Jelly Baby into her mouth for comfort.
And now Dr. McKenzie leaned back in his chair again and asked, “Why are you angry?”
And Jess said, “Because I’m tired and you’re confusing me.”
Then Dr. McKenzie said, “Jessamy, are you scared of your mum?”
Just like that.
Jess, now feeling wide awake, peered at Dr. McKenzie then at her mum, who was looking equally surprised.
“I don’t know,” she said finally, being as honest as she could be, because he’d told her that if she wasn’t honest then she wouldn’t feel better. The words came out in a rush. “Sometimes I feel like she wants me to . . . I don’t know. She wants me to be Nigerian or something. And I don’t want to be changed that way; I can’t be. It might hurt.”
“Hurt?” said Dr. McKenzie.
“Yeah, like . . . being stretched.”
“Jess, it’s not a matter of my wanting you to be Nigerian— you are, you just are!” her mother said. When Jess looked at her, she continued, “You’re English too, duh. And it’s OK.”
It wasn’t. She just didn’t know; if she could decide which one to be, maybe she would be able to get rid of TillyTilly, who was angry with her for worrying about it. Ashes and witnesses, homelands chopped into little pieces—she’d be English. No— she couldn’t, though. She’d be Nigerian. No—
“Jessamy, you’re a very articulate child, and your ideas are sometimes . . . surprising. Did you know that?”