The Icarus Show

by Sally Christie

  The trouble was, Alan was excited. He thought he had it all sewn up and that Icarus’s day was done. He must have felt relieved at the prospect of no more uncertainty—and he over-relaxed. When Mr. Smith said, “Go,” he jumped up from his chair and stood to attention. Then he laughed and shouted, “Icarus dickarus! SIR!”

  Mr. Smith looked annoyed. Which was pretty restrained, all things considered. “Alan, you’re an idiot,” he said. “I thought perhaps you weren’t, but you are. What a shame. All right, sit down. We’ll forget Just A Minute. I thought it might be fun, but I was wrong.” He reached for a whiteboard pen. “I don’t mind, but the Icarus show must go on, nonetheless.”

  Alan was still standing up. He laughed again. “I’ll believe it when I see it, sir!”

  “Sit down, Alan!” No “Mr. Tydman” now. “I’ll believe in you as fit to remain in this class—when you sit down.” He was fiddling with the whiteboard pen, as if the cap wouldn’t go on. But really he was giving Alan time. It was like when Timmy takes too long in the bathroom, and Mum stands outside and counts to ten …

  But Alan still didn’t sit. He flapped his arms like a baby bird. Mr. Smith, intent on his pen cap, didn’t see, or at least pretended not to. He was listening for the scrape of Alan’s chair.

  “Alan, I’m warning you seriously now.” If this were Mum, she’d have reached seven or eight. “Listen carefully. I’m about to write on the board. While I am writing, you will sit down and tell us—since you clearly know something—who you think Icarus is. Then we’ll get on.”

  He turned to the board and wrote the date.

  Underneath it, very slowly, like Mum saying nine and a half, nine and three quarters, he wrote:

  “W h o i s I c a r u s?”

  And Alan slipped out of his place and tiptoed toward the front of the class.

  We watched.

  When he got there, he stopped and yelled, “YOU ARE, SIR!” Then he pulled his feather out of his pocket and stuck it down the back of Mr. Smith’s shirt.

  When shocking things happen in books and comics, people gasp. It happens quite often. But I’d never heard anyone gasp in real life—till then. When Alan did that, someone actually gasped. I don’t know who. Alan waited.

  Mr. Smith had given a start, but otherwise no reaction. (Impressive.) In the silence that followed, he spoke very softly, without turning round.

  “Beware deviation!” he said. It was scary. “Do you remember? I warned you, Alan. Deviant behavior can lose you the game.” He wasn’t talking about Just A Minute. I think he was using a metaphor, but I wasn’t about to ask. Whether he was or not, it was a threat.

  He raised his elbow and reached down his back for Alan’s feather, which must have been tickling. He fished about for some time, with no result. Maybe by now it had worked its way into his pants. Somebody snickered—and that’s when he lost it. He whirled round and started shouting. Spit flew right into Alan’s face.

  “THAT’S IT! I’VE HAD ENOUGH! WHAT’S GOT INTO YOU, ALAN? WHAT’S GOING ON?” He made one last, violent lunge with his arm down his back: The tickle was driving him mad. “AS FOR YOUR F— … AS FOR YOUR FEATHERS!”

  Alan didn’t say a word. The only sound was a small shuffling here and there round the room, as the people who’d thought to take out their own feathers quickly hid them away. Mr. Smith heard, and something about the sound seemed to make him give up.

  As suddenly as he’d started, he stopped. He gave up trying to fish out the feather. He gave up on it all.

  “Triple detention!” he said wearily. “And if there’s any more of this nonsense, there will be a note, I assure you—to your parents!” He motioned Alan back to his seat. “It won’t be from me, though, whatever you say. It’ll be from the principal!”

  So, Icarus wasn’t Mr. Smith. We learned in the rest of the lesson that he was in fact an ancient Greek boy. Daedalus, his father, was this amazing craftsman. Ever heard of the Labyrinth of the Minotaur? Daedalus built that! And when things went wrong for the two of them and they wound up imprisoned together, Daedalus made them each a pair of wings. He used real feathers—and blobs of beeswax for glue—and, Daedalus being Daedalus, they worked! He and Icarus flew away. Imagine that. Icarus got so excited about it that he kept on going up, higher and higher. He flew too close to the sun in the end, and the heat of it melted the beeswax. He died because his wings fell apart and he plummeted into the sea.

  That was Icarus in the myth. Who it was dishing out notes and feathers, here and now, we still didn’t know.

  Alan said no more that afternoon. In fact, everyone was silent. Mr. Smith had to pick on people when he wanted answers to questions. Peter’s stammer, I noticed, was really bad, and I myself felt jumpy. There was danger in the air.

  Alan had gotten it in the neck from Mr. Smith, so someone would get it from Alan. Someone, as he said, was going to get their head screwed off. Because that was the way things worked. Really, it should be the Icarus person, but if Icarus wasn’t revealing himself, it would have to be someone else. I knew I must exercise all my skill to make sure it wasn’t me.

  The way I liked to look at the world was in terms of Reactors and Non-Reactors. Non-Reactors were the ones who got by; Reactors got hurt. The ultimate example of a Non-Reactor was a stone. If you kicked a stone, it ended up just the same, only farther down the road. If you kicked, say, Bogsy—well, look what had happened with Alan that first day of term. The stone didn’t react to being kicked, and finished up a stone. Bogsy did react, and finished up—Bogsy. Which would you model yourself on? See!

  Of course, those are two extreme examples. Most things fall somewhere in between. Shadow’s not a stone, but she’s a definite non-reactor. Timmy isn’t Bogsy, but he ought to watch out. I mean, with a name like Timmy Meadows, you’re living dangerously, aren’t you? Sounds like a character out of Peter Rabbit. How much would it take for one of Timmy’s friends to call him Squirrel Nutkin? But Timmy doesn’t seem to worry about that. He has loads of friends and they’re always coming round ours. They make loads of mess—it drives Mum mad—but they’ve never fallen out. So far. So far, the only variation on Timmy I’ve heard is Tim.

  Thank goodness my name’s sensible. Alex Meadows. Alex. It’s even a bit like Alan. Nice and safe.

  But another of my sayings is Don’t Be Complacent. Which means if things are going your way, don’t think you can relax, because next minute they may not be. I try never ever to relax, except under special circumstances. One of the special circumstances is when I’m in Don’s shed.

  I went to Don’s shed a lot over the days following Icarus at school. Everyone seemed to be waiting—either for Icarus to make his next move or for Alan to get bored of waiting, and make a move of his own. Nobody wanted to be within range if he did. Nobody wanted to be the one to set him off.

  In Don’s shed, it was just me—and sometimes Shadow—and a spider or two. Oh, and a brilliant non-reactor that I’d never even seen. The shed was brick, so old that the mortar was crumbling away in places. There were loads of nooks and crannies and even little holes right through the wall. In a gap between two bricks, just under the roof, lived a creature that nibbled.

  I knew it nibbled because all summer (I mean since we’d moved) I’d heard it. It nibbled something brittle and dry, like burnt toast, only very, very quietly: much more quietly than a person eating toast could have done. And it went on nibbling no matter what else was going on. If Shadow came in, it went on nibbling, which made me think it couldn’t be a mouse because mice are definitely reactors when cats get involved.

  Once I climbed onto Don’s old chest of drawers to get a closer look. I shone a torch right into the gap where the nibbling was coming from and it didn’t even pause. I couldn’t see anything in there, but the sound was really close. Then one of the chest of drawers’ legs gave way and the whole thing tilted and I fell off. When the smash-crash was over—and Shadow had bolted—and I’d picked myself up and calmed down—I listened. Yes. You’ve guess
ed it! Superb. If Alan himself had come in and gone crazy and thrown things about and twisted my head off, the nibbler would have nibbled on, regardless. It was a reassuring thought.

  Don’s shed was a reassuring place altogether. I spent my time there relaxing on a pile of old sacks, reading, or sitting on my favorite box, or poking about among Don’s stuff. All the serious stuff—his wheelbarrow, his lawn mower, his tools—had been sold. His grown-up son, Donald, had come back from Australia when he died, and had a big clear-out. (That was when Maisie had gone to The Laurels: She’d been cleared out, too.) But Donald had left the things I suppose weren’t worth selling: flowerpots, tins of rusty old nails, stuff like that. I didn’t like the sound of Donald and so made sure I never met him.

  There were loads of interesting bits and pieces in the chest of drawers. I was going through them slowly. The day after Icarus Day, I found an old horseshoe and hung it on the door like I know people used to do for good luck. I banged in the nails with a broken brick, which made Shadow run outside. But she came back in and curled up on the sacks when the banging stopped. The nibbler wasn’t nibbling that day. In fact, I hadn’t heard it for ages. As summer came to an end, it had nibbled less and less and had at last—perhaps—gone. But that didn’t mean the shed was silent. No such luck. There were plenty of noises from the other side of the wall.

  Don’s shed stands back to back with our old one—the one that Bogsy’s family got when they bought our house. The division between the two gardens runs down between the backs of the sheds. I don’t think Bogsy’s parents like gardening—they never seem to do any—so the shed, as far as I could tell, became Bogsy’s own. I didn’t mind him having it. It was only a cheap, flimsy thing that Mum and Dad had bought as a kit. Don’s shed is much better, being brick, with a nice brick floor and a proper slate roof.

  I hadn’t a clue what Bogsy got up to in his shed, any more than he had a clue what I did in mine. I wondered what he thought of my banging. I know what I thought of the noises he made: the scraping and scuffling, the scratching, the bumps. They were irritating. Peculiar. But of course I never react.

  The day I found the second blank envelope—slipped inside that pocket in my bag, just like the first—I took it, like the first, to Don’s shed. Briefly I imagined Bogsy opening his in his shed. I knew he was there because I’d heard him. But then I remembered he was a reactor—he wouldn’t care where he opened his, or who saw. He’d probably opened it in the house.

  I unsealed mine and took out the slip of white paper. No feather this time. Just the note.

  “November 2nd,” it said, in computer writing. And underneath, “Icarus.”

  Even though this time I knew I wasn’t alone in getting an envelope, I still felt alone, sitting there with the note in my hands. I wished the nibbler was around. The spider was, but that was no help. It had spun a new web, I noticed, and was lying in wait, which made everything worse. Again I felt someone was watching me and yet, at the window, there was nobody there.

  November 2. This was September. In two months, the boy—Icarus—would fly. Now I believed it. The date made it real. But how would he? Why would he? Where? And who was he? So much was missing. Icarus held all the cards and he was playing them close to his chest. It struck me that really the thing to do would be to try and make a discovery, work something out, instead of waiting for Icarus to throw out crumbs of information. That way, he wouldn’t have all the control. But where to start? How to sneak up on him? Those were the questions—the urgent questions, because now the clock was ticking.

  A good place to start would be Maisie, I thought, so on Saturday morning, when I went to The Laurels, I was looking forward to updating her on all that had happened and to asking her opinion. But they told me at the reception desk that she wasn’t well enough to see me.

  They said that sometimes. They never said what she had or how badly. I was always careful not to react. I always said thank you and left. Today, though, perhaps because I needed her advice, perhaps because I’d decided that I must start doing something myself, I pretended to leave, but didn’t really. When I was halfway down the drive, I quickly stepped into the bushes (laurels, I suppose) and doubled back toward the building. I felt like a criminal, and hoped they didn’t have security cameras.

  I crept round the side of the building, where Maisie’s room let onto the garden through a pair of French windows, and looked in.

  She wasn’t in bed, as I’d expected, but sitting in her chair. The back of the chair was toward me, but Maisie’s head and shoulders poked up above it. She was dressed, I could see, and not in her nightie, but she was shaking. Her shoulders juddered and her head kept tipping forward. It was awful.

  For the first time, it occurred to me Maisie might die, like Don. What would I do then?

  I came away.

  Mum and Dad were talking in the kitchen.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mum, “with his Do Nothing policy, he won’t make a fuss, and anyway you can truthfully say the new one will be an improvement for everyone. Him, too. He’ll soon grow to love it. You’ll see.”

  I opened the door. “Who’re you talking about?” I said.

  Mum looked flustered. “You shouldn’t eavesdrop,” she said, “it’s sneaky.”

  “Who were you talking about?”

  “Alex, you … Oh, just—someone,” she said. “How’s Maisie?”

  “I wasn’t allowed in. She’s got the shakes.”

  “Is that what they said?”

  “No, but I saw. What’s wrong with her?”

  They looked at each other, puzzled and worried, and Dad said, “Parkinson’s?” Then, to me, “Parkinson’s disease. Some people get it when they’re old. It makes you shake—among other things. Oh dear, poor Maisie.”

  “Do you get better?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dad. “Maybe. But we don’t even know if it’s definitely that. Maybe it’s something else.”

  I got myself a pencil and paper and took them down to Don’s shed.

  The pencil and paper were to make a list. If I couldn’t see Maisie—and who knew how long this Parkinson’s thing would last—then I’d have to try working things out myself. I would make a list of everyone I knew, then cross out the names of the people who couldn’t possibly be Icarus. Eventually, I’d be left with just one—and the mystery would be solved. It was called a process of elimination. You found reasons to eliminate possibilities and you went on eliminating till you had your answer.

  I sat on the old wooden box and got myself a seed tray to press on. At the top of my piece of paper I wrote, “People Who Could Be Icarus,” and underlined it. Then I wrote, “Maisie,” and immediately crossed her out. Maisie couldn’t be Icarus. For a start, I just knew she couldn’t be Icarus, like I knew that pigs couldn’t fly. But the rule was you had to have a reason, not just a feeling. My reason for eliminating Maisie was that she didn’t have access to a computer (she didn’t have access to anything, really) and couldn’t possibly have written the notes.

  Underneath Maisie, I wrote “Donald,” and crossed him out, too. My reason for eliminating Donald was that he was in Australia.

  This was going well. Underneath Maisie and Donald, I put Mum, Dad, and Timmy. I crossed out Timmy because of his spelling, but I couldn’t think of reasons for Mum and Dad. Of course, I knew neither of them was Icarus but, however strong the feeling, it was just a feeling. Then I hit on a fact: Dad was allergic to birds. We couldn’t visit Auntie Jen because she had a parrot. (At least, that’s why Dad said it was.) That would do for Mum as well, I thought: Mum would never do anything with feathers, in case Dad got a reaction.

  After I’d eliminated them, I put down Auntie Jen. Auntie Jen said she wouldn’t come to Burstead until we went to Manchester because it was our turn. But we’d never go to Manchester because of Squawky. I could safely cross out Auntie Jen.

  Then, encouraged by my success, I wrote down the names of everyone in our homeroom, including Miss McGowan. And that gave me a
nother idea. I added Mr. Smith. I was able to cross him off straightaway—along with Alan Tydman—because of that clash they’d had in the Icarus lesson. It was like playing Clue: Alan had thought Mr. Smith was Icarus—so Alan couldn’t be Icarus himself—and Mr. Smith had thought Alan was loony, so he couldn’t be Icarus, either. But after that, I was stuck.

  I’d been doing so well. I’d been able to eliminate every single name on my list—till I’d put down the homeroom class. Suddenly there were twenty-eight names I hadn’t a clue about. And what about the whole year? A hundred and fifty names more! Some not even names, just faces, just row upon row of burgundy sweatshirts displayed in the photos in the Jubilee Hall. What about the school? A thousand sweatshirts. Talk about anonymous. This was as good as a dictionary definition.

  To cheer myself up, I wrote down my own name and crossed it out. I even wrote down Shadow and crossed out that.

  A thump from next door, and a brief clatter. Bogsy. Up to his tricks, whatever they were. I went to his name and put a hard, sharp line through it. He’d had a feather that first time, same as me.

  I tried to remember who else had been able to produce one when Alan had gone round questioning people. One or two I could picture, holding them up—Andy P, holding his, had been really excited—but mostly my memory was hazy. Had Peter Horn gotten one? I couldn’t be sure. He didn’t seem like an Icarus type, but really I knew very little about him.

  I realized I didn’t know anyone, not really. How could you tell what a person was like, inside? By being their friend, I supposed, but my Trust No One policy meant I was friends with no one. For the first time, I felt that there could be drawbacks to that.

  I’d begun the process of elimination enthusiastically—but then I’d gotten discouraged. The process had shown that I couldn’t assume Icarus was even someone whose real name I knew. Even if I put down the names of everyone in the whole world I’d ever heard of, he (or she) might not be among them. Maisie had pointed out this wasn’t personal. Icarus might be a stranger who’d decided to distribute a load of messages like junk mail.