Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

At home after school, Jess settled herself cross-legged on the tall kitchen chair, drinking her chocolate milk and eating a makeshift cheese, peanut butter and chocolate-spread sandwich. The food wasn’t exactly making her memory of the afternoon go away, but it was helping. As Jess chewed, she ran her eyes over the green-and-white tiles running around the kitchen walls, particularly the area where the tiles ran behind the fridge and out the other side again, like a length of ribbon. Sometimes she left incriminating chocolatey hand marks on the white tiles.

A rap at the back door.

She glanced at the kitchen clock; it was only four o’clock and her dad didn’t usually finish work until five.

Jess jumped up and pulled the back door open.

“Hi,” TillyTilly said.

Tilly seemed different, just a little different. She stood just outside the door, one hand on the doorpost, almost exactly the same height as Jess, just as before, but— She was wearing shiny black buckled shoes, and kneesocks like the white, crocheted ones that Jess herself was wearing, and a checked green dress. Her face seemed fuller, her arms firmer, as if she had put on some healthy weight, and her hair! Her hair was completely different.

When Jess had thought about TillyTilly, she’d pictured her two enormous puffs of hair bound with thin, trailing string. But now the two puffs had been braided into thick, stubby plaits, the end of each plait brushing a shoulder.

“I like your hair,” Jess said, a hand flying up to her own single plait. She felt shy and embarrassed all of a sudden, as if things were too different.

Then TillyTilly smiled, and everything was all right again. Jess felt warmed. She smiled back, stepped aside for TillyTilly to come in.

“Me and my parents have just moved into the area,” Tilly said.

“Oh,” Jess said, trying to suppress her excitement.

TillyTilly had done it again! She’d done the impossible! Tilly might even go to her school! Why not? Jess had no doubt that Tilly would soon get herself moved to Year Five as well, but until then they could eat lunch together and maybe even play clapping games in the playground like the other girls did, and with Tilly there, she would be able to ignore Colleen McLain completely, as if she didn’t even exist, and—

“So, d’you want to do something?” TillyTilly asked, laughing a little.

“Let’s go upstairs,” said TillyTilly.

Jess hesitated in front of her mum’s closed study door, not knowing whether she was supposed to make some kind of introduction. She hadn’t had anyone whose parents her mum didn’t know to play before.

TillyTilly pulled at her hand.

“Come on!”

Jess’s room was gloomy because the curtains were drawn. The smell of lavender, her mother’s latest scent craze, hung in the air, and Jess was suddenly extremely aware of the way that her room looked.

It looked too full. There were too many big, chunky things robbing space, air. The shelves. . did they really need to be there, so wide and wooden, only half full with slim, gaudy paperbacks, the shelf sections opening into gaping squares of the blue-painted wall behind them? And her bed in the corner beneath the window, the patchwork quilt sprawled over it seeming to swell with a greedy fatness of colour! She was almost alarmed. She looked sidelong at TillyTilly, a quick, embarrassed glance, then went in through the doorway, feeling her toes squishing into the clumpy tufts of spotty rug. They gravitated towards Jess’s desk, looking at the pictures and postcards on the wall above it.

“Hmmm,” TillyTilly said, staring around. “There doesn’t seem to be very much we can do here.” She turned her gaze on to Jess. “D’you have any games?”

Jess shook her head. TillyTilly stood silent, her head tipped to one side, her eyes darting around the room. Her nose wrinkled up as she thought. Jess began nervously clicking her desk lamp on and off. She saw TillyTilly’s eyes flick across towards the lamp, then away again, as if the sound, the constant shift between circle-light and square-darkness bothered her. Soon, Tilly’s eyes did not shift from the lamp anymore but remained on Jess’s hand, Jess’s hand clicking the lamp on and off.

Jess frowned and stopped fiddling with the desk lamp.

“Games. . D’you mean like Connect 4 and snakes and ladders?” she asked. When TillyTilly, head still cocked, didn’t reply, Jess continued: “I don’t really have games like that. . My mum doesn’t like playing them all that much, and my dad’s usually doing something else. .”

TillyTilly stood on one leg and rubbed the sole of her foot against the kneesocked length of her other leg. It was distracting, and Jess’s words slowed down, and then died.

“Haven’t you got any brothers or sisters?” TillyTilly asked, switching feet. She had her arms out as if she was going to launch into the air any minute and just fly away. Jess perched herself on the edge of her desk.

“No,” she said. “You would’ve seen my brother or sister in Ibadan if I had one.”

TillyTilly dropped her arms to her sides. She looked at Jess, her gaze ruler-straight, intent.

“But. .” she said softly, “I thought. .”

Jess waited, feeling a little sick. There was a key in her chest that was being tightly wound until it hurt.

TillyTilly twiddled the end of one of her pigtails and smiled.

“D’you know a girl called Colleen McLain?” she asked.

Jess jumped, just a little surprised at this new line of conversation.

“Yeah,” she said. “She’s horrible. She thinks she’s amazing, and she chews her hair, and she hates me.”

TillyTilly looked suitably impressed by the gravity of all this, her eyebrows raised in what Jess fancied to be a mix of disapproval at Colleen’s behaviour and amazement that she could dislike Jess.

“And I hate her too,” Jess added, after a split-second reflection.

TillyTilly had begun to move around the room, picking up one and then another of Jess’s tiny painted china horses, examining the bright, thick crayons lined up in her wooden crayon box.

“I know Colleen as well,” she said, shaking her head slightly, as if amazed at the girl’s unlikeability. “She’s just as horrible to me as she is to you, you know. She’s out of order.”

“Yeah,” Jess affirmed, nodding vigorously, bemused but glad to have some support.

TillyTilly lowered her voice into a conspiratorial whisper, leaning closer to Jess as she did so, even though it was only the two of them in the room.

“We should get her.”

Jess stared into TillyTilly’s eyes, fascinated by their sleek shine. She felt disoriented, as if she was about to fall off the floor and land on the ceiling. The other objects in her cluttered room seemed smaller, lighter, blurry.

“Get her?” she echoed.

TillyTilly gave a solemn nod.

“As in. . beat her up or something?”

Jess wanted to draw back so that she could touch something and be sure that her room wasn’t really escaping her, but instead she found herself inching closer to Tilly.

TillyTilly gave an impatient toss of the head.

“No, not beat her up. Get her.” TillyTilly stared at her, one eye narrowing almost to the point of being closed in a wink, then suddenly burst out laughing.

Jess stepped back, shaking.

“Jessy, you idiot. I was only joking,” TillyTilly said. “Come on, let’s play outside.”

“All right,” said Jess. “Just let me tell my mum.”

Her mum, cast in profile by the light, was typing furiously in her study, her body swaying backwards and forwards slightly, as if she was dancing her ideas. The curtains were wide open, and the rich orangey sunset drowned everything in evening colour. She waited. After a few seconds, her mum stopped typing.