Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“My mum didn’t let you in, did she,” Jess said. It wasn’t a question.

TillyTilly shook her head, looking pleased with herself, then she gestured at the tins.

“What’s all this fuss about? Just because of the fight?”

Jess was unsurprised that TillyTilly already knew.

“Yeah. The school phoned.”

TillyTilly shrugged, as if to say, What can you do?

“TillyTilly,” said Jess, after a little while. “TillyTilly, when are you going to show me how to be like you?”

TillyTilly began making her fingers walk on their points over the top of the tins.

“I never said I’d do that,” she said, looking at Jess out of the corner of her eye.

Jess sighed impatiently.

“Stop messing about! You said you would at Bodija—”

TillyTilly interrupted her. “No, I didn’t. I asked you if you’d like to do the things I can do, and you said ‘Yeah,’ and that was it. So there. I don’t see why you should start getting angry with me just because your mum’s punishing you with pineapple tins.” She tittered in a mocking way that Jess didn’t like, and Jess felt little ice-cold stabbings behind her eyeballs. Tilly stopped laughing when she saw the corners of Jess’s mouth turn downwards.

“Sorry,” she said gruffly. “Don’t be a crybaby about it, though.”

“Please, please make me be like you, TillyTilly. Come on. Please!”

TillyTilly adjusted her body so that she was sitting cross-legged.

“Yeah, yeah, I will,” she said. “Later. Not now. You don’t like school very much, do you, Jessy?”

Jess shook her head vigorously.

“I bet I’d like school if you came. Why don’t you come to my school?”

TillyTilly nibbled her fingernail, looking distracted.

“I can’t. I’m older than you lot.”

Jess was astonished. She hadn’t thought about that.

“You don’t look older than me,” she said, in a doubtful tone, adding in alarm: “What, even older than the Year Six girls?”

TillyTilly nodded, just once, then said, glancing at the ceiling, “Your mum’s coming.”

Tilly approached Jess and wrapped her thin arms around her shoulders. They rocked quietly back and forth and Jess felt her breathing slow, the heaving movements of her chest growing still as her friend’s cool hands and the smell of some sort of light, leafy pomade in Tilly’s hair comforted her. She closed her eyes. It was the embrace of someone who could protect her. Then the smell of fading greenery escaped on a waft of air as, eyes still closed, she heard Tilly’s light feet pattering across the sitting-room floor.

Jess expelled air, an unconsciously blissful smile on her face, then, hastily balancing a tin on each palm, raised herself up on her knees and extended her arms again. This time, she did not close her eyes; even the sharp pain of the tins’ hard roundedness on her skin seemed to recede. She was wondering, as she stared at the wall, why Tilly had left, especially since she could be invisible. Unless her mum was magic too, and would be able to see her and would ask all sorts of questions. And Jess knew Tilly didn’t like questions. Or maybe Tilly could do these things for one day only and then they ran out. Maybe she had run out of invisibility. She heard her mother at the door.

“Oh, Jess! You’re still here, I’d forgotten. All right,” Sarah said, “get up and give me the tins. On Monday we can talk about maybe having your new friend over, hmmm?”

Jess turned, her knees grazing painfully against the carpet as she swivelled her body around on her knees.

“Has half an hour gone?” she asked incredulously.

What was it about time and TillyTilly?

It was Sunday afternoon, and Jess’s parents were going to take her to Dr. McKenzie’s house, “just for a visit.” Dr. McKenzie was a psychologist, which mainly meant that he was supposed to know a little bit about what was happening inside her head, and be able to make her feel better by talking to her. This was scary. They were in the park, and Jess was winded from playing an energetic game of chase with Tilly, when Tilly, who was not at all out of breath, suddenly said “McKenzie” in a musing sort of way, as if the thought had just come to her on the air. Jess stretched her legs out across the bench and fanned herself with her hands, even though it was cold weather now and she had already undone the zip of her green puffer jacket.

“Oh yeah. . he’s a psychologist. Psychologists—”

“Jessy, I know what a psychologist is!”

“Sorry. Um. They’re taking me to see him, Dr. McKenzie. Just for a visit, and if he thinks he can help, then I’m supposed to see him quite a lot.”

Tilly, chewing on a thumbnail, didn’t respond immediately, and Jess, gazing at her lying on the frosty grass in her school dress, couldn’t keep the amazement off her face.

“Aren’t you even a diddy-bit cold, TillyTilly?”

Tilly rolled over onto her back and kicked her legs in the air before sitting up and jabbing a finger at Jess, her mouth turned down in a frown.

“Don’t go and see that man,” she commanded. Her finger was trembling as she pointed, and Jess, who had never seen Tilly scared, was surprised and a little scared herself.

She began zipping her jacket up, looking away from Tilly.

“I’ve got to go,” she mumbled. “My mum’s making me.”

TillyTilly, who was no longer in sight, snorted from somewhere, and Jess felt a little more courageous now that those accusing eyes weren’t on her.

“And. . I sort of want to go anyway, y’know,” she added, very quickly and in a low voice, in case she needed to take it back.

TillyTilly rematerialised on the bench beside her, crossly pushing Jess’s legs aside to make more room.

“Why d’you want to go? What do you need help for?” she demanded, without moving her face.

Jess grimaced; she hated it when Tilly did that — it was like talking to some sentient statue.

“Don’t do that, TillyTilly,” she pleaded.

Tilly didn’t respond, but kept her keen eyes fixed on her.

“I s’pose. . I want to go because I’m not very. . um, well, I’m not like Dulcie, or Tunde, or even Ebun. I’m just not—”

“What?” Tilly cried. “So now you WANT to be like those silly people? You want him to make you like them ?”

Jess wondered why Tilly was getting so agitated, as if she were the one who was being made to see this psychologist. Maybe she was worried that Dr. McKenzie would say that she was made up.

“I won’t tell him about you, TillyTilly,” Jess reassured her hastily, but Tilly folded her arms and glared off into the distance. “TillyTilly, there’s something about Dulcie and Tunde and even the others, even Colleen, that’s too different from me. It makes me. . weird. I don’t want to be weird and always thinking weird things and being scared, and I don’t want to have something missing from me, and—”

“Shut up!” Tilly leapt up from the bench and paced up and down in front of Jess. “You’re shabby! You keep saying something’s missing when nothing is! So you’re still going to see him!”

“I’ve GOT TO, though, TillyTilly! My mum—”

“He won’t help you, Jessy. There’ll only be trouble,” Tilly said darkly. Then she stalked away, leaving Jess alone on the bench surrounded by icy bushes.

Dr. McKenzie lived in Bromley, not that far from Dulcie. The bus went past the train station, and once they had passed it, the downslope of the road was familiar to Jess. The streets, and the area around the Baker’s Oven beside the train station, seemed at first teeming with people, but as Jess watched, she realised that it was the reflection of the glass in the shop window mixing in with the reflections of people standing in the bus behind her. Her eyes had gone out of focus without her noticing it.