The Icarus Girl

by Helen Oyeyemi

  “Did you push her?” Sarah asked Jess after Dr. McKenzie had arrived and the ambulance had taken Shivs to the hospital. She sat in the living room with her hand over her mouth and kept saying aloud that she was trying to understand how Siobhan had taken such a serious fall, and what pressure a four-inch piece of strong wooden banister end would have to undergo to break and leave a jagged, spiking thing. Jess was bundled up in her mother’s arms, her eyes closed, her breathing erratic. Her lips were almost blue. Her mouth was framing a word over and over again, the same word, sometimes slow, sometimes fast: “Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly.”

  “Why can’t you stop being angry, Jessamy?” Jess felt Sarah mumble into the shoulder of her nightie.

  Jess replied, “Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly.”

  Upstairs, Jess’s father had been woken up by the commotion, and when Jess opened her eyes, she saw him step over the piece of banister that had fallen away and walk into the kitchen as if he hadn’t seen it.

  “Just forget all about it. It’s over,” TillyTilly said, somewhat petulantly from Jess’s bedside. Jess, with the covers pulled up over her face, tried to breathe quietly, but her heart was fluttering, letting her know that it was not after all OK to be scared. She had given up on her safe place. There was no safe place after last Saturday night; nowhere was safe when downstairs Shivs had been forced to dance that clumsy dance in her pyjamas, lifting her feet high, so high, colliding with every surface until she went to hospital and was all white and still and not getting better. Everyone thought that she, Jessamy, had pushed Siobhan, and in a way she was glad to be blamed at last; it had been bound to happen, she couldn’t have three people got and just get away with it, no way. She knew why Shivs’s being got had been different from her father’s—TillyTilly had not liked Shivs from the start, and Shivs had said that she wasn’t scared of anything, but she should have been scared, trying to tell Jessamy that her own twin sister didn’t like her. That’s what TillyTilly was telling her now.

  “You’re not really allowed to go and see Siobhan in hospital,” Jess’s mum had told her, even though Jess hadn’t asked. She knew that Dr. and Mrs. McKenzie wouldn’t let her; they didn’t think she was a bad girl, TillyTilly had told Jess during the fever-days following Shivs’s being got. They just thought that Jess was very troubled, and she needed to see a new doctor. But that wasn’t going to happen, because this time TillyTilly was going to look after her and make sure that she didn’t have to see a new doctor and get in trouble all over again. Jess had accepted that while she was sick, but now she was better.

  “You’re a ghost,” Jess whispered to TillyTilly from under the covers.

  TillyTilly began to get angry.

  “I’m not,” she insisted. “I’m not a ghost! That’s a dumb thing to say!”

  “You are,” Jess insisted, fainter now as she grew less certain.

  “Jessy, I’m not a ghost! I am NOT a ghost.”

  Jess turned over, teeth gritted.

  “What happened to your twin then?” she asked.

  She heard TillyTilly breathing quietly, but no reply. Jess recalled Shivs’s screaming and the stream of red-black.

  “I don’t know,” TillyTilly said, her voice pressing soft into the dark.

  “What?”

  “I can’t remember. All gone. Only my name—”

  Oh, God. Only Titiola’s name was left, and Jess had taken even that. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be. How could you forget being ripped away from your twin?

  “Ah, Jess, but you did,” TillyTilly said aloud. “It’s the ripping part that you forget first. It never comes back.”

  “TillyTilly, but you are dead, aren’t you?” Jess pleaded, turning back towards the now indistinct form of her friend kneeling at the bedside. She timidly touched Tilly’s hand. “I don’t understand.”

  “No. Now forget, forget,” TillyTilly said, pulling down the covers and touching Jess’s forehead with her soft, brown hand. She was the long-armed woman now, and she smelt of coconuts.

  Jess had her eyes closed and didn’t open them, because then she fell deeply asleep and dreamt that she was flying, flying high above all the land, onward and onward, disappearing like a pin thrown into the blue. The rushing wind stung her eyes into slits, and her fluffy hair rippled out in sheets behind her, sometimes whipping in her eyes and lashing across her cheek. She would never fall, because her friend was flying with her and would catch her.

  It was a blessing, even if she didn’t know it—the remembering of so many things that were her fault being drained away from her by her sister, who had promised to take care of her. Memories were burdens that took Jessamy through three worlds of hurt, the three worlds that only twins inhabit, and she was only half a twin.

  Yet even as she fell asleep, Jess was aware on some level that her memories were being moulded so that they were all different, and that Siobhan had not been dancing, but rolling, bump bump bump, from upstairs to down, terrible, she shouldn’t have pushed her, why had she pushed her?

  It was a hot day in June when Jess returned from the park through the back door into the kitchen, and noticed that there was an empty coffee cup in the sink.

  It was her father’s.

  Puzzled but happy, she smiled, feeling as if this was somehow a gift. She dropped her mother’s hand and ran through the kitchen and into the passageway, shouting, “Daddy?”

  He was in bed, but that was OK. She wanted to tell Tilly, but she was nowhere to be found.

  ONE

  “Daddy, there were, like, ten people in that car!” Jess risked the gusty whirring of the air-conditioning on her face as she knelt up on the seat and gesticulated wildly at the battered light-blue Ford that had just pulled ahead of them on the road. The people were crammed inside the car so tight that from the back they looked like one dark mass, as if they had been mixed together and spread across the car windows. You could differentiate backs of heads and necks, but only eventually.

  “Um, I think that’s another cab,” her father said doubtfully, fanning himself with a newspaper as he looked at her mother for verification.

  “Yup! The police don’t really care about that sort of stuff round here,” Sarah told Jessamy, who was gaping as she tried to imagine being in the backseat with six or seven other people, all in a ball of sweat, elbows, knees and rough hair.

  They were back in Lagos, two days before Jess’s ninth birthday.

  “The buses are worse,” Sarah smiled, to loud guffaws from their cabdriver.

  Daniel playfully dragged Jess back down into a sitting position on the seat and threw his arms around her. She briefly rested her head on his shoulder and twisted a few strands of his hair around her finger, delighting in his laughing “ouch,” glad that he was here and real, and that his eyes and hands and movements were his own again. Then they were both laughing as Sarah told them (and the driver) a new story that her friend Yemi, who lived at Ojoo, had told in a letter she had written her. The roads entering and leaving the immediate vicinity of Ojoo were extremely bumpy and filled with potholes, and Yemi had written that a truck loaded with petrol had crashed just outside the town. The driver had managed to escape the entanglement relatively uninjured and flee the scene for assistance, the immediate result of which had been about thirty people ignoring imminent danger and running out with buckets to fill up on diesel for their electricity generators. If you could afford a generator in the first place, you could never have enough fuel for it, since NEPA was always in the throes of some system failure that meant no light, and petrol was very expensive. It was an irony, said the driver, nodding sagely, that in a country where the chief source of wealth was petrol, people were behaving as if they’d never seen it before. Sarah bitterly suggested government corruption and Daniel tentatively agreed, but with a pull in his voice as if he suspected that he might be laughed at for offering his opinion. The driver, sent from Bodija by Sarah’s father, who had airily ignored her insistence that she could get a cab herself,
laughed at both of them.

  “Ah, no, that cannot be the reason,” he said, casually checking the rearview mirror. “Our military boys are too honest for all of that now!”

  Then all three adults sniggered in some mysterious solidarity that left Jess to wonder instead at the curious thought of a small crowd running out in flip-flop sandals to take what they needed, even if the taking might kill them.

  The first person that she saw when the car had come in through the gates was Uncle Kunle, but his shouts of welcome as he helped Gateman to unload the suitcases were mainly for Jess’s mother. It was Aunty Funke, in a dazzling blue-and-silver boubou, who, after greeting Daniel and Sarah, swooped on Jess, enfolding her in a big, soft embrace.

  “Ah-ah! What is this, now? Are you sure this is Jessamy?” she teased, taking the by now diffidently smiling Jess by the hand and leading her into the house, where it was cooler. “Did someone come from the sky and just stretch you upwards and upwards?” Funke continued, making Jess laugh.

  Inside, Ebun was as cool-faced as ever. Her hair, wrapped around and around in black thread, looped stiffly outwards from her scalp. She sat on a chair in the hallway, talking in unhurried Yoruba to the new houseboy, Kola, who stood at the ironing board set up against the wall, neatly sprinkling water from a small bowl onto a rumpled white shirt before setting about it with the hot iron. When Ebun saw them, she approached, smiling vaguely, hugged Jess and told her that she was welcome. Jess greeted all her cousins, even deigning to drop a kiss on the deferential Bose’s cheek as the six-year-old stood before her with downturned eyes.

  Then, impatient to find her grandfather, she ran out of the back of the house and up the outside stairs that led to the upper level, where the sleeping rooms, the kitchen and her grandfather’s study were. In her haste she ran straight into the man that she was seeking, and she hissed with the pain of her nose bumping his arm as he stretched out to catch her.

  “Wuraola! My own Wura-Wura! You are too much in a hurry!” her grandfather laughed, picking her right up off the ground and patting clumsily at her nose. Jess shrieked exultantly as her grandfather spun her around, letting her go for a split-second before catching her again and putting her down.

  “Daddy, she’s too big for that,” Sarah said half-heartedly, putting her head out from the parlour where she, Daniel and Biola were loudly catching up. She watched, smiling, as Gbenga beckoned to Jess and told her, “Wura! I have something to show you!” Jess took his hand and he walked her to his study, pausing to shout out, “Ebun and Tope! I trust that you are bringing minerals to the sitting room for everyone—” There was a rippling cheer from downstairs, and then Jess, smiling up at her grandfather, was led into the high-shelved, cream-and-brown-wallpapered study.

  Jess had to reach out and steady herself on a shelf as the memory of TillyTilly impishly grinning in the chair by the big desk hit her with some force.

  “See! It’s a birthday present for you and your sister!” Her grandfather pushed her up towards the desk, where a small wooden statue sat. Jess tried to halt and snatched at her grandfather’s big hand, because she didn’t want to go near it. If Fern was supposed to look like her, then this statue didn’t look anything like Fern. She couldn’t imagine anyone being at peace because of this carving, with its long, heavy features and clasped hands. It looked too bulky and too light a brown, with some deeper brown blotches, as if it were covered in previously dark skin that had been bleached. The head seemed unnaturally pointy, and the sloping cheekbones and stylised, pupil-less eyes not glossy-book beautiful, but real and here before her, supposed to represent Fern but not. The only beautiful thing was the hair: the intricately chiselled pattern of braids pouring down over the shoulders. But even as a woman, neither she nor Fern could look like this, ever, ever, amen. Overflowing with a fear that now some could-have-been-would-have-been Fern would dog her thoughts and dreams, Jess turned quickly away from the statue and threw her arms around her startled grandfather’s belted waist.

  “Why didn’t YOU tell me about Fern?” she whispered into his shirt.

  Her grandfather put his hands on her shoulders. He sounded troubled.

  “We don’t do things that way, Wuraola. When someone dies, it’s a special thing, almost secret. If someone dies badly or too young, we say that their enemy has died. There is no way to say these things directly in English. It’s a bad thing for you to have lost your sister. She’s half of yourself. That’s why . . . you needed to be older to understand what it meant.”

  There was more to understand? Jess was tired of it all.

  Her grandfather tipped her chin up so that she was looking at him.

  “Wuraola,” he said sternly, as if he was about to tell her off. Then he stopped.

  “Yeah?”

  “Wuraola.”

  He looked so serious that she grew worried.

  “Yes, grandfather?” she tried, tightening her arms around him.

  He shook his head and said again, slowly, deliberately, “ Wuraola.”

  “Yes?”

  “How many times did I call you?” he asked gravely.

  “Three?”

  “Three. Now tell me this truth: Who told you about Fern?”

  Jess pulled away from him, stumbling out of the study and outside. He followed her, silent—did he have to follow her,

  holding her intently in his sights like some wise and stalking creature?

  “I—I don’t know. I can’t remember,” she stammered. It was almost true: she was forgetting so many things about TillyTilly, but she couldn’t forget the baby that Tilly had taken from her arms, the baby who had been crying for such a long time until it was quiet and solemn, gazing with its tiny, crumpled face. To be remembered. Tilly didn’t need to be remembered, but she wanted to be. Why? It was the same with Fern. But people forgot, they forgot, and it wasn’t her fault. Jess’s grandfather caught her up in his arms again when she tried to escape him and slide across the wall, wailing, with tears slipping from her as if they would never stop.

  Later Jess could never remember the actual day of her ninth birthday.

  Not even the morning part of it, when she woke up to Aunty Funke’s yam and special egg

  (“Many, many, many happy returns of the day, Jessamy!”)

  and then helped her mum to put things outside, around the back of her grandfather’s house, under a specially set out green-and-white canopy by the outside stairs. They had decided to do things Hobbit-style, and Jess and her mother had picked out presents for each of her cousins and for Uncle Kunle, Aunty Biola and Aunty Funke, and a big, hardback secondhand anthology of African poets for her grandfather that her mother had found in a small book-shop. The night before, her cousins Akin and Taiye had been bullied into bringing out a table from each of the sitting rooms to join the ones that the canopy people had provided, even though they’d protested that someone might steal the tables, and that it would have been better to put them out the next morning.

  “Let me see the face of the man who would steal my tables,” her grandfather had said scornfully.

  Jess didn’t feel nine. She didn’t feel any age; she never had. The joined tables were facing the Boys’ Quarters, and every now and then Jess glanced at them, squinting at the windows, trying to see if she could see someone moving. No one was. She wasn’t sure if even TillyTilly would dare to risk her grandfather’s wrath now that her hiding place (and her candle-stealing antics) had been discovered. Jess had to bend and slap at her ankle as a fly attempted to nestle in the mosquito bite on her leg, and Sarah turned to Daniel, who had just brought out a stack of the rented white plastic chairs, and said, “We need to get something to keep these flies away—”

  “Don’t ask me, it’s your country . . .”

  “Ha ha!”

  Jess peered at the array of chairs that her mother and father were putting out.

  “Why are there so many chairs?” she wondered aloud, crouching down on the sandy ground. That was when she realised that TillyTi
lly was there, actually there, kneeling under the end table, gazing at her seriously. She was barefoot and wearing her net-curtain dress again, but her hair was loose, fanning dark and blowsy over her shoulders and back. She looked like some sort of shantytown princess.

  But Tilly couldn’t really be here; there was something in the dimensions of her that made her look like one of the paper cutouts that Jess had snipped from the books in Year Five— creasable and thin at the edges. Jess didn’t hear her mother’s cheery reply.

  “There are loads of people coming to see us, Jess—people who just missed us last time. You know . . . cousins and sub-cousins and random friends and whatnot . . .”

  “Surprise!” TillyTilly mouthed, beginning to crawl towards Jess.

  Jess didn’t like her eyes, they were wide and glaring, as if the gap between eyelid and eyelid had been pushed so far that it would never close, and they would never fully meet. Why did she look like this? Jess began to hurry out from under the table as she recalled the last thing that she had heard her mother say. It seemed (wrongly) as if she’d only just finished saying it, only just said, “I’m just going to go and give Aunty Funke’s jollof rice a stir so I can say I helped to make it—”

  Oh, TillyTilly and time.

  “Happy birthday!” Tilly’s voice sounded manically bright as she came out from under the table and dusted down her dress, her eyes fixed on Jess. “Happy birthday to you, Jess, and to Fern.”

  Jess turned and began scrambling up the stone stairs.

  “Time to swap!” Tilly cried. “I did my share, I got everyone you wanted me to! I want to be alive, too!”

  “Mummy. Mummy—”

  “I said HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” TillyTilly yelled, dragging at Jess’s ankles.

  Jess let out a piercing scream and struggled against the hands that seemed made of steel as she tumbled down step by step, hard stone grazing her knees into ridged flaps of skin. A balloon came loose from the canopy and drifted past Jess’s desperately flailing hands. It was a stinging yellow, Jess’s least favourite colour. It spun in her vision, that yellow balloon.