Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“Jess, say hello to Dr. McKenzie,” Sarah urged as they arrived, thrusting the reluctant Jess forward a little. The doctor laughingly insisted that they call him Colin. Jess gaped up at him, managing a squeaky “Hello.” She hadn’t expected him to be so tall and so. . red. Dr. McKenzie was very thin, maybe even almost as thin as TillyTilly, and the long hands clasping Jess’s own were smooth, pale and slim-fingered, their length broken only by the clean encirclement of a white-gold band on his wedding finger. He looked young, younger than Jess’s father, and his face was slightly gaunt although his cheeks were ruddy. Even if his mouth wasn’t smiling, his faded blue eyes and the crinkling of the skin around them reassured her that he was friendly. But — his eyebrows were red! His eyebrows and his tousled, slightly upstanding hair — the most peculiar sort of red that Jess had ever seen, like orange paint, although the eyebrows were darker. Oh, she mustn’t stare, she had to not stare at Dr. McKenzie’s hair, but he caught her awestruck gaze and ruefully ran a hand through the tuft, saying, “Curse of the McKenzies.”

Dr. McKenzie’s sitting room was bigger than theirs, and it had stranger pictures on the walls: fierce, clashing daubs and waves of colour trapped behind glass. The walls were painted lilac instead of wallpapered, leaving still, bare expanses between the framed pictures. This way, you could see the corners of the room sharply: it was like being in a carpeted box, but it wasn’t cold. If anything, it was slightly too warm in the room, but neither was it claustrophobic — perhaps because of the enormous, south-facing windows. Jess teetered apprehensively on the edge of the cushioned bamboo-cane chair, feeling as if her hair had been combed and brushed too flat and close to her head. She wondered when Dr. McKenzie would start trying to work out what she was thinking; at the moment he appeared to be doing a lot of inconsequential talking with her parents, about the holiday in Nigeria and so on. He kept looking at her as if she was supposed to be talking too, but Jess remained resolutely detached.

They met Mrs. McKenzie, who was small and curly blond in much the same way as Dr. McKenzie was tall and red. She was filled with a sort of smiling energy that made her seem constantly in transit, whether she was bustling about with tea and biscuits, or even sitting and talking, her foot tapping.

Jess was nibbling on a biscuit forced upon her by Mrs. McKenzie and looking at a picture to the left of the doctor’s head. It wasn’t a painting, it was a large black-and-silver framed photograph of, as he explained when he saw her looking at it, his daughter when she was five. Jess couldn’t help smiling a little at the chubby, freckled-limbed five-year-old kneeling in a blue swimsuit by an attempted sand castle, wielding her red plastic spade before the wet heap of sand and squinting irritably into the camera, visibly outraged at being interrupted. Her hair was a wild bundle of auburn almost as curly as Jess’s own, only short. She had obviously been touched by the “curse of the McKenzies” too.

“That’s just one aspect of Siobhan’s character,” Dr. McKenzie told Jess with a wry smile before directing her attention to Siobhan’s most recent school picture, propped up against the wall on a low shelf filled with knick-knacks. To Jess’s surprise, the nine-year-old Siobhan still wasn’t smiling. Jess, who had an automatic camera smile, thought that you weren’t really allowed not to smile for school pictures. Siobhan looked attentive but a little surprised, her grey eyes gazing, it seemed, at the top of the photographer’s head, a black barrette pulling her hair back in bright waves around her round, freckled face.

Then a soft impatient “Oi!” and Jess shot a startled glance at the doorway to find the girl herself, or at least the tip of her pointy nose, a length of black legging and the swoosh of green skirt over it. Jess glanced at her father and Dr. McKenzie, who were still deep in quiet conversation now that Jess’s mum had gone off somewhere with Mrs. McKenzie, then she looked back at the sitting-room door, where half of Siobhan McKenzie was now in view — she was crouching in the hallway, holding on to the doorpost with one hand. At first glance, it looked as if her stomach was a distended, square shape until Jess realised that she had something shoved underneath her green T-shirt. She beckoned to Jess, then abruptly disappeared. Jess didn’t know what to do about this and she sat, half poised to rise from the chair, for another second or so before Siobhan’s tousled head snaked around the doorpost again and she gestured frantically for Jess to come.

“The bag!” she hissed.

Jess, bewildered, picked up her rucksack, which had The Lord of the Rings in it, which she’d brought in case she got bored, and scurried over to Siobhan, who promptly took it from her, pulled a box of Milk Tray from underneath her T-shirt and shoved it in. She thrust the bag back at Jess and beckoned her upstairs.

“Come on. You can have some,” she promised, as they started climbing the stairs.

Mrs. McKenzie called out from the kitchen. “Shivs?”

Siobhan paused with one hand on the banister and smiled apologetically at Jess.

“Yeah?”

“Just checking you’re back in, love. How’s Katrina?”

“She’s all right — her piggy bank broke, though, and she’s had to put it all in a jam jar.”

“Aww! We can get her another one for her birthday.”

“Yeah. .”

Siobhan showed Jessamy into her room, which was a sky-lighted, rainbow-wallpapered heap of clothes, shoes, papers and cuddly toys, and kicked the door shut. She took the bag from Jess and dumped herself on her bed, ripping the cellophane off the chocolate box with her teeth and spitting bits onto the floor. When she had the box open, she stared at Jess, who was sniffing at the faint scent of bubble gum in the air, with open curiosity.

“You can sit down if you want.”

Jess took a seat on the edge of Siobhan’s bed and indicated the row of pristine-looking Barbie dolls ranged against the far wall.

“Wow! You must have nearly all of them!”

Siobhan grinned widely and tossed a chocolate into her mouth, then offered the box to Jess, who gingerly picked one out at random. It turned out to be a praline — yuck.

“Yeah, they’re not all mine,” Siobhan said, waving at the Barbies. “Some are Katrina’s, but it’s my week to have ’em.” She rattled the chocolate box at Jess, who refused with a shake of her head.

“My mum won’t let me have Barbies. She thinks they’re evil. She says they, um, can’t be a role model for real women because they represent this white idea of beauty.”

Siobhan considered this in silence, her brow wrinkled as she bit into another chocolate, holding the other half, oozing caramel, in her hand.

“Yeah, but there’s, like. . black ones, too,” she offered.

Jess shrugged.

“My mum says. . they look just like the white ones, only with a different skin colour.”

Siobhan finished her chocolate and put the box down on the bed between them before asking, “Yeah? What d’you think?”

“I don’t know. . They’re only dolls, I s’pose. I wouldn’t mind one.”

Siobhan scratched her head bemusedly. “Yeah,” she said, half-heartedly, then seemed to make up her mind about something and opened her mouth to show Jess her asymmetrically chipped front tooth. It had happened when she’d been playing a strange variation of blindman’s buff with “some idiot called Anna,” who had tied a belt over her eyes, told her to go forward, forward, forward, in pursuit of a special stone, effectively instructing Shivs to walk into a wall. Before Jess, amazed, could respond to this, Siobhan tapped the chocolate box between them and airily embarked upon another subject.