Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

Jess blinked a few times, trying to imagine this.

“It’d be madness,” she offered.

“Exactly! So don’t you start! This is not going to happen again, is it?”

She looked at him, blinking, surprised and dismayed. He wanted her to say that it wouldn’t happen again, but she didn’t know, she couldn’t say; she hadn’t even known that the fight was going to happen in the first place. It was like saying: What a surprise! It’s raining! I don’t like rain, so it won’t happen again, will it?

“It won’t happen again?” her father insisted.

Hmmm. Jess could now see that she was agreeing to too many things. Perhaps now it was time to make a stand, time to—

“No, it won’t,” she muttered. Next time, next time would be make-a-stand time.

When they got home, her mother was in the hallway speaking on the phone, the cord twisting around her wrist, her other hand to her forehead. She gave them a look as they passed, pointing a finger at Jess to make sure she stayed where she was. Jess and her dad looked at each other somewhat guiltily.

“Oh no,” said Jess’s dad. “That must be the school on the phone.”

“Mmmm, yes, I see,” her mum said quietly. Then: “Right. Well, I’m sorry about all that. I’ll make sure she understands that it’s shocking behaviour.”

She directed the words “shocking behaviour” at Jess, raising her eyebrows with an angry sarcasm. Jess held on even more tightly to her dad’s hand.

When Sarah Harrison came off the phone, she beckoned Jess into the sitting room. Jess followed, half pulling her father along by the hand, but her mother said, “Daniel, let her go. She’s got to learn that she can’t keep on doing this, and you’re not helping.”

Jess’s father let go of her hand, but argued, “You’re saying she can’t ‘keep on,’ but this is the first time she’s actually hit anybody. I’ve spoken to her, and it won’t happen again.”

Her mum didn’t reply, but jerked her thumb in the direction of the sitting room again, and Jess bolted in, cringing past her mother for fear of getting one of the rogue slaps to the side of the head that Sarah would sometimes give if she thought Jess had behaved badly. Her mother shut the door.

“D’you see what I mean?” Jess heard her father say. “She’s scared you’re going to hit her. This isn’t the way to make her behave herself, you know. It doesn’t matter whether you were brought up that way or not—”

“You can criticise my upbringing later, if you like. Right now, I’m trying to discipline my daughter. Did you know that she BIT someone? It’s bloody embarrassing, Daniel! Where on earth would she get that idea from?”

Jess sat on the very edge of a chair, craning to hear where her mother’s voice was coming from. The muffled quality of it suggested that she had her head in a kitchen cupboard. So it would be the tins. She heard her father clattering up the stairs, removing himself from the situation.

Her mother reentered the sitting room, and Jess flinched almost without realising what she was doing. Her mother, bearing an enormous tin of pineapple chunks in each hand, looked puzzled.

“For God’s sake! Nobody’s going to smack you, child,” she snapped.

Jess couldn’t hear her properly over the thwack thwack thwack sound that she had heard in Colleen McLain’s house, the sound that was replaying in her head over and over.

She wanted to put her hands over her ears, but her mum would lose it — Nigerian parents, her mother had once explained, could actually kill a child over disrespect. It had been known to happen.

Her mother thrust the pineapple tins at her, making her hold one in each hand. She felt the fleshy parts between her fingers stretching with the weight of them, felt the hard metal push into her palms. They were too heavy to hold. She wouldn’t last.

“See, I know for a fact that talking to you won’t help, but I just don’t know what to do with you anymore. So whenever you feel like hitting or, for God’s sake, BITING someone — like some kind of animal! — whether this is at school, or anywhere , you just remember these tins and how heavy they were to hold up for a whole half an hour.”

Jess didn’t look up at her mother’s face, but saw her hand point to the far corner of the sitting room. She walked over, turned to face the wall, and put the tins down for a few seconds so that she could find a comfortable kneeling position.

“And no resting on your bum! If you do, I really will smack you! I’ll be checking on you: you do not move, or put those tins down!”

Jess could already feel the prickling behind her eyes. She knew that she was going to cry because it was stupid and embarrassing to be kneeling here facing the wall holding two tins above her head, and because her hands would hurt for ages afterwards, and also because she would be terrified for the whole half hour that if her hands just couldn’t take it anymore and she let a tin drop, it would crack her skull open. If she died, it would be her mother’s fault, and she would come back as a ghost and let everyone know.

“Hate you,” she mouthed. “I hate you, hate you, hate you.” Her arms were wobbling already, there was no way she would be able to hold them straight up, the weight of the tins would break her hands.

Her mum was still in the room. “I’m not going to do the whole ‘it’s for your own good’ thing,” she said, in a gentler tone of voice, “but if you do this for half an hour, I’ll come and get you and then you can have Jesstime and we’ll say no more about it. I’ll consider it a lesson learnt. OK?”

Jess did not reply. She closed her eyes and concentrated on making her arms towers, strong towers that could hold up these stupid measly tins and even crush them and make them not exist. A half-hour tower, that’s what her arms would be.

“OK?” her mother repeated.

Jess could picture her standing in the doorway, her arms folded. Stupid, horrible woman .

“OK,” she managed to say, although it sounded more like a whine— Ohkaaaaaaaaay —because it was mixed in with a repressed sob and the strangled, snuffling sound of trying to draw in breath through a nose blocked with mucus: uh-uh-uhhhh, uhhhh, uhhhhhh .

She would never eat tinned pineapples again, not ever, she vowed, knowing even as she promised herself this that she would probably eat some later. Yes, that was what she could do, she could think about how, in half an hour, this would not be happening anymore, and although she would never forgive her mother, things would be back to normal.

Why couldn’t things stop changing around so that she wouldn’t feel as if she should love her mother one minute and hate her the next? It was too confusing. Sweat was forming on her forehead and she could feel beads of it on her upper lip.

“Hate you,” she whispered, filled with an anger that she could barely believe. She wanted to be swept up by it and throw the tins away from her, maybe break the television, some ornaments. “ Ohhhh . . hate you.”

“Who, me?” she heard TillyTilly say.

TillyTilly?

She opened her eyes, feeling the tears that she had squeezed up behind her eyelids spill out, and peered around the room.

TillyTilly was a little distance away from her, looking inquisitive.

She looked exactly the same as she had the day before, the end of one of her pigtails sweeping her shoulder, her head tipped a little to the side in her customary gesture, a small puzzled smile creasing the corners of her eyes.

Jess stared at her, open-mouthed, then twisted around slightly, listening for her mother. She couldn’t hear her, so her mother must have gone upstairs. Jess lowered her arms, but still did not risk letting go of the tins.