Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

When he was gone, the rush to get ready for church ensued. Her grandmother had been an Anglican and had managed to convert all of her children to Anglican practices, so they were used to seeing their father off first so as not to incur his wrath at their “not praying together as a family.” Jess, her mother and her father were the only ones who weren’t involved in the scramble to prepare for the eleven o’clock service, since her mother had quietly “given up on organised religion” a few years after her arrival in England, a fact that she refused to discuss with Jessamy’s grandfather. She wouldn’t allow Jess to be taken to the service either, insisting that she was a gloomy enough child already without the Nigerian warnings of hellfire making things worse. Jessamy’s father had obligingly attended the Baptist service with her grandfather the first Sunday and had come back looking wilted, saying simply that the five-hour prayer session had been “tiring.”

But this week, her grandfather had left for the service early and was going to return with his friends for scriptural discussion, and these friends, Aunty Funke had warned, would need to eat and drink. Ebun had complained in a matter-of-fact whisper the night before, when they had been drifting off to sleep, that prayer meetings at the house always meant that she and Tope had to get up earlier to go and fetch water for their grandfather to wash with and for Aunty Funke to cook with.

Jess hesitated to get up because she wasn’t sure if getting up meant committing herself to meeting these prayer people.

When she heard the resounding hisssssssssssss of puff-puff batter being dropped into Aunty Funke’s big, dented red frying pan, she nearly fell out of bed and onto the floor in her haste to get up, then noticed something had fallen from the bed with her.

She smiled silently and with puzzlement as she picked up the battered copy of Little Women , turning it over in her hands. Could it have come from her grandfather’s study? She didn’t recall having seen any children’s books there, but then again, neither did she recall any children’s books at all in the house, other than the ones in the box that she’d taken from her suitcase and slipped under her bed.

She got underneath her bed and rummaged in her book box, just in case. It was darker here, but she could see her own copy of the book, which was hardback and in pristine condition — the way she kept all her books, except for the parts of the text that had been lightly scribbled and replaced with pencilled additions, some one-sentence long, some as long as a paragraph. Jess made a habit of amending books that hurt her in some way — some books had bad things happening to characters in what she felt was a completely unnecessary and extremely painful way, especially considering that the situations weren’t even in real life, so she had taken to scratching some of the printed text out and adding happier things. So far, Little Women and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess were her most heavily annotated books.

One day, her mother had caught her and had asked in tones of mixed disbelief and amusement, “What makes you think that you know how to tell a story better than Louisa May Alcott does?”

Jess had not known exactly what to say when it was put that way, and had found herself replying defiantly, “Well it’s not a proper story if everyone’s miserable. It’s not fair to make us watch people be sick, and be poor, and lose everything, and die, and Beth’s so nice you’d think Louisa May Alcott would have treated her better!”

Thinking about this, Jess put her own copy back into her book box and crawled out from under the bed. She opened up the tattered copy that she still clutched, and read, with some surprise, the name

Bisi Oyegbebi

written in neat, small black lettering on the flyleaf.

Her mother’s copy?

And beneath her mother’s name was her own full name, written in the same wobbly, lopsided letters as the “HEllO JEssY” that had been in the Boys’ Quarters.

JessaMY WuRaOla HaRRISOn—

SaTuRDaY August 27Th 1994

She closed the book and gave a sudden laugh.

TillyTilly had given her a gift!

She lifted the book to her nose, and smelt the black ink of her grandfather’s red-barrelled ink pen. She remembered now having seen the pen there, on top of a stack of papers on her grandfather’s writing desk, as TillyTilly had spun her around the room until all the colours had whirled together and both of them had had to stop for a few seconds with their hands pressed over their mouths to stifle their giggles.

Jess quickly crawled back under the bed and placed this new, old book on top of the other books in her box. Then she bounced out of the room to try and persuade her aunt to let her have some puff-puff before she had brushed her teeth instead of afterwards.

“Jessy,” Tilly hissed, from somewhere in Jess’s immediate vicinity. “Psst! Jessy!”

Jess had been sitting on the front veranda of the Boys’ Quarters, looking around for her friend. In the central house, behind her, she could hear voices uplifted in prayer and song, Ebun accompanying on tambourine, a bell ringing at intervals. The confusion of sounds meant that she couldn’t see where the voice was coming from, but she replied immediately.

“Yeah? Hey, TillyTilly, where are you?”

The bushes near the back gate of the compound rustled, and Jess watched as a noticeable ripple ran through the leaves. She heard Tilly laugh softly.

Jess laughed herself, and jumped up.

“Hey, TillyTilly, that’s not fair! Come out!”

Tilly laughed again.

“All right, all right,” she said, her voice muffled.

She stepped out of the bushes in a completely different area, to the far right of where the rustling had been. Jess made an astonished whistling sound through her teeth. She had been practising it all morning with Uncle Wole, who had made a similar sound when he had seen the amount of fufu that her aunt was preparing to go with her smoked-fish stew.

“Are you sure that you’re not preparing for a modern-day Feeding of the Five Thousand?” he had asked in a dubious tone of voice. “You’re only cooking for twenty people, you know!”

He had been about to expand on this even further when Jess had begun pestering him to show her the whistling sound again.

Now that Jess really had something to whistle about, she made a point of utilising the sound as much as she could. She looked at Tilly and back at the bushes, making the whsssssst sound again.

“You run fast,” she said admiringly.

Tilly fidgeted, eyed the veranda that Jess had just stepped down from.

“Yeah,” she said.

Jess noticed that Tilly had changed her odd outfit from the day before for another one. This time she was wearing what looked like a dim white net curtain that had been bunched and gathered at the arms and neck to make sleeves and a scoop neck. This dress was even longer than before and trailed nearly to the dusty ground.

Jess decided to look at something else in case Tilly noticed that she was staring and got annoyed. She would be annoyed herself if she’d had to wear something like that and someone stared at her, even if it was a friend.

“Thanks for the book,” she said finally.

TillyTilly smiled, shrugged.

“It’s OK.”

Jess put her hands into the pockets of her shorts, then looked around, feeling a little bit awkward.

Tilly appeared to be looking very hard at the floor, her brow creased with thought, as if she was pondering something difficult.

She lifted her head.

“Would you like,” she asked, suddenly breathless, “to go to the amusement park?”