The Icarus Girl

by Helen Oyeyemi

  A shrug from Jessamy. What did he want her to say?

  Dr. McKenzie leaned forward again. “Have you not thought that sometimes your mum might find that a little bit scary as well? I know I would.”

  Jess shook her head and frowned seriously at him.

  “I’m not scary.”

  “Hardly anyone thinks of themselves as a scary person, Jess.”

  “Is this your last appointment for today?” Jess asked, after a moment’s consideration. The doctor looked intrigued, but nodded her a yes. “Can I go back with you to see Siobhan for a few minutes? I just remembered that I’ve got to tell her something really important.” She glanced at her mother, who had started to object.

  “Sarah, you can come too, if you want,” said Dr. McKenzie. He appeared to ponder for a moment, chewing his lip, then nodded affably and checked his watch before popping another Jelly Baby into his mouth. “We still have some time left, though . . .”

  When Jess had, in a halting fashion, told Shivs as much about TillyTilly as she could, leaving out the events of the night before so as not to scare her, Shivs nodded her head serenely.

  “That’s a bit cool, you know,” she said thoughtfully, before tiptoeing to the bedroom door and putting her ear against it to make sure that they weren’t being listened to. “So she only talks to you when no one else is there?”

  Jess, sitting cross-legged on Shivs’s neatly made bed (the only tidy thing in the room), gazed at her best friend in fixed astonishment.

  “You don’t think I’ve gone mad?”

  Shivs shook her head and yawned, running her hand through the curly tangles of her hair until she inadvertently made them stand upright like a brush. Jess stifled a giggle and decided to leave her that way.

  “Nah . . . you’re not mad, and you’re not one of those stupid kids who have imaginary friends just for something to do. This girl called Gemma . . . in my class . . . she used to have some imaginary friend called Katy. Katy, y’know! Not even something like TillyTilly and all the time she was like ‘You can’t sit there . . . Katy’s sitting there,’ but sometimes she’d forget Katy was supposed to be there and sit there herself, the plum!” She laughed, and Jess, astounded to hear this brief account of something so far from her own experience, fell back on to the bed laughing herself. Shivs came over and dropped onto her knees at the bedside, settling herself before saying, “And Gemma wasn’t scared of Katy.”

  Jess sat up, her face serious now. “I didn’t say I was scared of Tilly!” (She was.)

  Shivs lay flat on her back, then sprang up, hands out, eyes wild as she imitated Jess on the night when Shivs and Dulcie had slept over, shouting out “TILLYTILLY!” in the dark. Then she fell back on to the floor, laughing, but Jess couldn’t join in. She hadn’t known that she’d looked like that. She was embarrassedly gulping back tears again, and Shivs sprang up again and climbed onto the bed, putting an arm around her shoulder, pressing her cheek to Jess’s.

  “Oi, if I had a friend who kept appearing and disappearing and got my teacher, I’d be a little bit scared that they’d get me, too! So listen, what is TillyTilly? I mean, is she dead or something?”

  Alarmed, Jess stared upwards at the skylight before replying, almost as if she’d expected TillyTilly to be there, her thin limbs and body pressed flat against the glass, her face a squashed smudge with malevolent eyes, mouth moving in promises to get them. Shivs, laughing, glanced up too, and they looked at each other, smiling, while Jess spoke, Shivs pretending to wipe sweat off her forehead.

  “I don’t know what she is . . . she said that I do know! But I think she’s wrong, because I have no idea.”

  “Maybe she’s your sister, the one who died.” Shivs thoughtfully blew the hair out of her eyes.

  “No . . . I don’t think so somehow. I mean, why would she be at my grandfather’s house? I don’t know, actually.”

  “Or maybe your mum had a twin that died?”

  Jess looked doubtful.

  Shivs shook her head in wonder. “I can’t believe that was her on the phone!”

  “You think I’m lying about that?”

  “No, but . . . well, it didn’t sound any different from you, not even a very little bit.”

  “That’s because she kind of made me say it—”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  Shivs grimaced. “Do you still want to hang around with her, this girl?”

  Jess didn’t have a chance to reply because Mrs. McKenzie knocked on the door and put her head around it, speaking urgently. “Jessamy, you have to go home now.”

  Jess couldn’t understand the note of worry in her voice, but she got up quickly, saying to Shivs, “Don’t tell anyone—”

  “I promise!” Shivs licked her finger. “See this wet, see this dry, man!”

  Jess’s mum was outside the door with Mrs. McKenzie. As soon as Jess came out, she put a hand on her shoulder and began guiding her hurriedly down the stairs, calling out goodbye and “We’ll let ourselves out” to Mrs. McKenzie. She was breathing hard in a fast, flustered way, and Jess looked up at her before seizing her hand and squeezing it for reassurance.

  “Mummy, what’s the matter?”

  Her mother looked at her with a look of trying to place her in context, as if she’d only just remembered that Jess was there, and now who she was.

  “Daddy’s ill. He’s in hospital, Jess. We’re going to get a taxi to go and see him.”

  That was when Jess remembered, too too late, that TillyTilly had said she was going to get Daniel Harrison. She didn’t want this to be her fault, but she knew that it was— (TillyTilly, don’t make my dad die for being scared of me.)

  “Ill? Ill how?”

  Alarmed by her daughter’s trembling, Sarah reached out from amidst her own shock and squeezed both of her daughter’s hands to calm her. She hoped that Jess wasn’t going to faint again; her lips seemed drained of colour.

  “I don’t know yet, Jess. Apparently he collapsed at work.”

  Jess knew that if she could picture her father, she could hold him in her mind and make him be alive and make him be all right, but everything about him had dissipated—once he had fallen out of the line of her sight, she couldn’t properly remember what it was like when he had been there.

  TWENTY

  They didn’t know what had happened to Jess’s father, and they didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but he had been “well” enough to be discharged from his overnight observational stay that morning.

  Yet as soon as Jess got home from school, even before, she knew what was the matter with him: it was TillyTilly. Tilly’s verdant, earthy smell clung to him in clumps, but instead of making him light and fast-moving like she was, it dragged Daniel’s arms, legs and head down so that he moved more slowly and deliberately than he had before, as if everything lay just out of his reach. He looked up infrequently, lethargically pushing at his glasses when they started slipping down his nose instead of just raising his head. He kept saying that he was tired, so tired, but his voice was so uninflected that it seemed that he didn’t even mean it. It was difficult to tell what he was thinking, or whether he was too tired to think at all.

  Jess’s mum had told her on the way home from school that the first thing her father had done when he returned from the hospital was to go to bed, leaving her to call his work, Aunt Lucy and Jess’s grandparents to let them know that he was back home. He hadn’t got up since then, and Sarah was worried that they might have given him some drug at the hospital that was having an adverse side effect. This probably meant that Jess’s grandma would be over later that evening with some chicken-and-barley soup. The phone was ringing as they came through the door; Jess dropped her book bag, kicked off her shoes without undoing the laces and ran upstairs, glad that her mother was too busy answering the phone to tell her not to bother her father, or to follow her upstairs. She had wondered if she would find TillyTilly there, had braced herself for Tilly to be guarding the doo
r to the bedroom, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t there at all. It seemed she’d known that this time Jess would demand an answer . . . and a remedy.

  Her father lay as immobile as a column beneath the covers, which he had pulled up over his head. His back was to the door, and his oblong-framed, steel-rimmed glasses were on the bedside table beside the lamp.

  Jess crept closer and touched the glasses for reassurance before she gingerly put a hand on his shoulder. “Daddy?”

  “Mmmm.” He didn’t turn over. She moved around to the other side of the bed so that she could see his half-open eyes looking over and past her, towards the window. Could he SEE her?

  “Daddy.” She tugged fearfully at his hand, feeling the ice of Tilly’s skin as his fingers didn’t curl around hers in return. Instead, leaving his hand to her

  (a gift—yours if you want it)

  he closed his eyes fully, as if she had said nothing at all.

  Jess moved nearer to his face and touched his slackened skin with her other hand; she wasn’t ready to let go of his hand yet. In contrast to the rest of his face, his closed eyelids were stretched in a swollen tautness. What was happening to his features? He breathed as if he were sleeping, but there was a wakeful fever-sickness in the occasional, involuntary-seeming twitch of his mouth.

  Suddenly, he sighed gustily, sending her heart into a startled convulsion.

  “Jess, I’m sorry.”

  She let his fingers slip out of her grasp and said, overloudly, “Sorry?”

  Slowly, slowly, his hand went to his forehead, but he missed his face and his fingers brushed jerkily against the headboard as if the limb had fallen out of control.

  Jess watched in horror: no one could tell her that it was going to be OK—this wasn’t her father at all, it was a thing, slurred of speech, emptied, inside out, outside in, by two girls, one of whom could bring seven years’ bad luck in a razor-edged shatter of a looking glass. Had Tilly taken something from him that made him forget where and who he was and put him in some other place, alone?

  “Daddy! What happened to you?”

  “So tired.”

  “Daddy—”

  “Fell. Down far . . .”

  Her skin tingled at his words; he sounded younger than she did.

  “Far?” she whispered.

  “Tired. Sorry, Jess. Be better later.”

  Jess wanted to touch his hand again, but she didn’t dare— there was no reassurance there, the hand wasn’t his. Moving away now and crossing the room to leave, she could almost hear TillyTilly whispering to her

  (he’ll never hit you again, Jessy)

  and in despair, she wished aloud, past caring whether he heard, that she’d got angry at her mum instead. Why hadn’t she got angry with her before? Because she was scared of her? But couldn’t you be angry with people that you were scared of? No, it was her dad’s fault: he shouldn’t have changed the way he had, he shouldn’t have looked at her like that—

  “Put on the lights,” her father said from the bed, his voice suddenly alert. The childish note of command in his voice made her jump to the light switch faster than his normal, gentle request would have. But—

  “No, not those lights,” he whispered, in his own voice now.

  “Oh.”

  Jess turned the light off again and slunk away to her own room, wanting to disappear.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Jess had expected TillyTilly to come again in the night, and so approached sleep as an extension of the concentration that she put into going into her safe place. Although sleeping, always she was aware of sound and movement, so when she felt TillyTilly in the room, knocking on her dreams, she stayed still.

  When TillyTilly said and did nothing, she cracked open one eye to find that circles of orange light were flickering in the corner of her room by the window, and TillyTilly was sitting cross-legged in the middle of them with her head bowed and her back to Jess. Rows of candles, her mother’s tea lights. Jess’s breath caught in her throat and she almost sat up, fearing that her curtains would be set alight, but then she saw, facing her, the charcoal-on-board drawing from the Boys’ Quarters, lit up by the stolen fire. She hadn’t seen it for so long, and it still scared her; it wasn’t like the ibeji woman at all. The picture really was badly drawn: childishly drawn, in fact, unnerving and somehow vital in the thick and careless sweeping of black. It was wrong, all wrong, and wild. TillyTilly had drawn it herself, for herself, and Jess’s mind reeled at this, tried to reject it, then could only cry out, “TillyTilly!” (I’m so sorry, sorry for you, TillyTilly, you really are alone.) But as soon as she spoke, the candles were gone and so was the board, and so was TillyTilly.

  “You’re dead,” Jess said to the empty, lightless corner, “aren’t you?”

  Saturday morning. “TillyTilly,” Jess said to the air in her bedroom. She was half in and half out of the room, just about to leave it as she looped one end of her skipping rope around her arm. “Shivs is coming over . . .”

  After a brief pause, TillyTilly said, “Yeah? Well, I hope you have fun.”

  Jess looked around, waiting for Tilly to materialise, and when she didn’t, said, “Just don’t DO anything, OK?”

  “I won’t.”

  There had been a truce between them for the past few days; partly because Jess realised that she couldn’t make TillyTilly go away no matter how hard she tried, and partly because of Tilly and the candles. Getting people for Jess was supposed to be how TillyTilly stopped herself from being alone, but she didn’t seem to understand the irrevocability of the getting. Jess’s father hadn’t shown much improvement or been able to go to work for the past week, and Jess had been certain that someone would turn to her and ask her what she had done—Tilly’s mark on him was so obvious to her. Instead, the word “depression” had frequently been said in low tones when her mother and Aunt Lucy thought that Jess was out of earshot, and her father’s mantra seemed to have become, “So tired. Be better later.” All he did was sleep, and sometimes sit in the sitting room for an hour or so, unspeaking, watching television with an empty expression before going back to bed. And he was eating hardly anything. How could this have anything to do with something normal? Only Tilly could do it, and it seemed that Tilly didn’t know how to make it better. “I’m sorry, Jess,” she had said, over and over, hugging her, when Jess had come upstairs with the report that her mother was asleep on the sofa with her mouth half open and a pen slipping slowly out of her fingers. Tilly didn’t need to remind Jess that she only got people on Jess’s instruction, and Jess knew that the fact she could never remember being angry enough for that meant only that she didn’t want to remember.

  Shivs didn’t understand when she said that her father’s being ill was her fault.

  “It’s not,” she said confidently, her curls flying as she skipped on the spot with her neon-pink rope. “When you said that before, I asked my dad what was wrong with your dad, and he said it’s something that he can . . . thingie—overcome.”

  Jess had purposely guided Shivs away from the empty bench that was her and Tilly’s favourite, leading her instead to the swings. “That depression thing?” she asked.

  Shivs shook her head impatiently and caught her breath.

  “Dunno. Listen, how silly is it that you think you did it? Think about it . . . duh!”

  Jess dropped her skipping rope and tried to think how to tell Shivs that it was TillyTilly without saying it aloud.

  “Ummm, Shivs?”

  Her friend had just counted twelve uninterrupted skips and now stopped, beaming.

  “What?”

  “Actually, nothing.”

  Walking around to the back of Jess’s swing snickering, Shivs gave her a hard push, and Jess gasped laughingly as she rocked upwards.

  “You know your friend TillyTilly?” Shivs asked, when Jess’s swing had slowed.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Does she still hang around with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Doe
s she still scare you?”

  That was a little bit more difficult. In some ways it was an enormous yes, in others, no.

  Shivs breezed on despite Jess’s lack of reply.

  “Anyways, I was wondering if I could meet her. But then I remembered you said she only comes in the room when it’s just you two—”

  “She’s started coming in when other people are there too, like once with my dad and once in my classroom,” Jess interjected quickly. Why had she said that? Did she really think that she could risk TillyTilly meeting Shivs? She supposed she was curious.

  “So, what . . . d’you think you can get her to come in the room when I’m there?” Shivs casually rippled the end of her skipping rope across the grass, as if playing a one-woman game of Colours.

  Jess already knew the answer to that. She dragged her feet across the ground as she pushed the swing backwards.

  “She’ll come only if she wants to.” Then: “Is this because you don’t believe me about TillyTilly?”

  Shivs got on to the swing beside Jess.

  “Nooo,” she said slowly. “It’s just I was thinking about her a lot, and I was wondering if she was, you know . . . nice.”

  “She can be! Nice people aren’t nice all the time!”

  “Yeah, but, you know . . .” Shivs trailed off, unable to put into words what she was thinking.

  After they’d foraged for their own lunch in the kitchen, Jess looked in the sitting room to see if either her mother or father was down there. Her father was a slumped figure on the sofa, his hand on top of the remote but not pressing any buttons as advertisements reeled across the television screen. Shivs stayed politely outside the door while Jess bolted in to pick up the cold cup of coffee that she knew would be at his feet. There was a delicate, shrivelled skin over the top of it that Jess broke with the spoon, trying to estimate how much he’d drunk this time. Darkly dried coffee circles told her that he’d had maybe two, three sips. He didn’t look at her, didn’t seem aware that his daughter was there, standing in front of him.