Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

She reached the staircase.

Unlike her grandfather’s stone staircase, this staircase was wooden. It looked as if it was rotting, crumbling away.

How could anyone live here?

She was scared. Those steps wouldn’t hold her weight, there was no way that they were going to—

With a leap, she was on the bottom step. She wobbled, held her balance, ran up the stairs, trying to keep her feet from breaking through the softened wood.

Her foot jabbed through the wood on the top step, and she clutched at the banister as she fell to her knees, thrashing as she struggled to free herself. What if there were splinters? God, what if an enormous splinter of old wood just punched right through her foot, through the skin, through the bone?

“TILLY!” she screamed.

Silence.

She freed her foot by relaxing and wiggling it gently, gently out.

Her sandal had fallen through.

She was afraid to put her bare foot down on the floor; who knew what could be stepped on in this old place (there might be fragments of bone, maybe people had died in here) and so she hopped along on one foot, peering around her.

The top floor was completely unlike the bottom one, which was similar in structure to her grandfather’s. The top floor looked like an attic. The roof sloped into an odd-shaped peak over her head, a feature of the house that she was pretty certain was not discernible from the outside. The slope of the roof made her feel dizzy, spun thin, as if there were no sky, just grey stone above, and dust below. A row of closed doors spread out before her, and enormous cobwebs covered some of the old, heavy wooden doors.

But there were no spiders.

Unnerved, she stood as still as she could on one foot, listening for a sound, any sound that would indicate that her friend was here.

“TillyTilly,” she called, softly. “TillyTilly, I came to see you.” Her voice sank into the silence like a heavy stone in water, but without ripples. The silence was stifling, stealing her words and making nothing from them.

The doors lay dimly before her.

She really, really, really didn’t want to open one.

What was TillyTilly playing at? If she were here, friends or not, Jess was going to get angry with her about this.

A thought struck her. Maybe Tilly’s parents were here, hiding because they thought that someone who lived in her grandfather’s house had found out about them and wanted to kick them out!

She would have to open the doors, but slowly and quietly, so that if they were in there, in one of the rooms, she wouldn’t alarm them. Gingerly, she touched the handle of the first door in the row, then drew back her hand. The handle was strangely cold.

It’s made out of metal, stupid girl.

She forced herself to grip the handle again. She pushed the door open, her breath coming fast and then slow as she prepared herself to see two people huddled in a corner, glaring with hostility.

But dust floated in this room too, and the window was coated with it. It was a wonder that she had been able to see any light that night. In fact, had she really seen a light? Standing up here, she began to doubt it.

She hopped to the next door, feeling more confident. She would be all right. When she turned the handle, she found this room the same as the last. She started to feel as if she was in some sort of game show where she won whatever she found behind the doors. So far she had won nothing at all.

Behind the third door was some sort of display, or maybe a shrine.

As she stared at it, standing just outside the doorway, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. It was a picture, drawn in black charcoal on a tall wooden board that had been propped against the far wall of the room. The picture was a rough drawing, done in thick, sweeping strokes, a sketch of a black woman with thick, glossy hair that had been coloured in with the charcoal in a scribblelike intensity. Her expression was unsmiling but serene, the eyes wide and dark, seeming almost to see Jess where she stood, wavering on one foot, peeping around the corner of the door. And the charcoal woman’s arms — her arms were grotesque. Surely nobody could have arms that long! They were completely out of proportion to her body, long and thin, tentaclelike, stretching to her ankles. She had been drawn wearing a boubou with odd, swirling patterns that Jess had never seen the like of before.

And in front of the wooden board with the charcoal woman was a whole array of candles, some tealights, some big candles in empty, battered cans of Milo, some smaller ones arranged on a saucer. There were lots and lots of candles. None of them were lit, but she could see that they had all been burning at some point. They looked burnt down, their wicks black.

She felt that she should shut the door and leave this room.

“You shouldn’t have come in here,” TillyTilly spat.

Jess jumped as if she had been slapped, feeling a guilty tingle on the back of her neck. She spun around.

“Tilly!”

Tilly did not reply. She moved into the room, stepping over some candles, nimbly skirting others. She stepped in front of the board and spread her arms out so that Jess could no longer see the charcoal woman properly. In a sense, Jess was relieved, but she was also alarmed by the cold manner in which Tilly eyed her. She desperately wanted to ask what this was all about.

She didn’t ask.

Instead, she apologised.

“I’m sorry,” she said, for the second time in two days. Maybe she just wasn’t good at the whole being a friend, having a friend thing. Maybe it was something that needed practice. Which would explain why she was so bad at it. She stared at her bare foot, noticing how naked it looked beside her sandalled one.

Tilly sighed.

It was a forgiving sort of sigh, and Jess looked up hopefully.

Tilly was now at the doorway, although Jess had not sensed any movement within the room. The slope of the roof was definitely messing her up.

“Never mind,” Tilly said, stepping out into the corridor with her and closing the door.

Tilly guided her down the stairs, showing her the safe places to step on. Jess explained about her shoe falling through the staircase, and Tilly laughed. Jess laughed too, having overcome the panic she felt at the time, secretly feeling sorry for TillyTilly that she had to live in an old, dusty, odd house like this one.

Something occurred to her.

“Were you in there when I first came in?” she asked.

They had reached the veranda, and Jess had jumped off it and turned around to look at Tilly, who was still standing up on it.

Tilly snorted.

“Of course not.”

“Oh,” said Jess. “OK.”

TillyTilly gave her a considering glance, a shake of the head.

“Go home now,” she said, and Jess could tell by the way she said it that she didn’t just mean “go back to your grandfather’s house” but also “go back to England.”

“ ’Bye, TillyTilly,” Jess said.

TillyTilly gave her that fantastic, brilliant, but brief smile.

“See you later, Jessy,” she said, and went back into the house.

It was Jess’s “settling in” time at school. She needed this to be, well, settling in. Whatever that was.

It had been just over half a school term since they’d returned from Nigeria, but Jess still hadn’t “settled.” Before and after her return to England, and school, Jess had been frenzied in her activity, and then she had been ill, and her father didn’t think that she was ready for school again. Her mother insisted that Jess had to go; nothing was wrong with her, she could use the first few days to “settle in” again. Then her father had asked Jess what she thought about it. Did she want to go to school tomorrow?