Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“These are from Katrina. She lives two doors down,” she explained. “It’s my birthday tomorrow, but my mum’s really weird about me having chocolate, so she’d probably take them away— that’s why I had to sneak them in.”

“Happy birthday for tomorrow—”

They found themselves sniggering conspiratorially, then Siobhan rolled off the bed and tugged at the leg of Jess’s jeans. “What’s your name?”

“Jess — well, Jessamy, really.”

“I’m Siobhan, but I HATE being called Ginger, so don’t! Call me Shivs, all right?”

A nod from Jess, then a pause in which Shivs ate some more chocolate.

“I’m supposed to be talking about psychology with your dad today,” Jess finally confided.

“Oh. Are you feeling really sad or something?” Shivs eyed Jess gravely and gave her knee a solicitous pat, which set Jess off laughing again. She didn’t think she knew anyone as. . solid, as there, as this girl. She wondered for a moment if TillyTilly would like Shivs. She, Jess, certainly did.

“I s’pose I’m sad sometimes, but not right now,” she assured Shivs. “I get scared of stuff.”

“Scared? What of?”

Jess shrugged, unable to put it into words and unwilling to try.

“Hah! Well, you should hang around with me then, ’cause I’m not scared of anything! Not a single thing,” Shivs told her, laughing.

Looking at her stretched languidly out on the floor amongst her scattered belongings, Jess believed her. She began to reply, then stopped short as she caught sight of a copy of Hamlet by her foot and picked it up.

“This yours?”

Shivs was playing with a small pink teddy bear, making it dance. She flicked a glance at the book Jess was holding and nodded briefly.

“Wow,” Jess said, excitedly. “Are you reading it? D’you think it’s good? My mum’s just started reading it to me and I think it’s—”

Shivs threw the bear at Jess with a loud guffaw of laughter. “Jess, it’s not REALLY mine, it’s my dad’s! I borrowed it one time to trace that man on the front.”

“Oh.”

Shivs turned onto her stomach and looked consideringly at Jess.

“You can understand all that boring Shakespeare stuff? You must be really clever then.” She sounded impressed — impressed and something else that Jess couldn’t quite identify. Suddenly tongue-tied, Jess shook her head and tried to say that her mum had to explain quite a lot of it to her, but Shivs cut her off. “Maybe that’s why you get so sad,” she said, “because you’re clever.”

Jess thought about that, but before she could respond, Shivs asked, “D’you know your phone number?” Jess shook her head and Shivs laughed. “Me neither, you know! But I have to learn it next year, just in case.”

“Yeah,” Jess said quickly, but was unable to stop herself asking: “Just in case what?”

“Dunno—” Shivs began, then suddenly catlike, she sprang forward and knocked the box of Milk Tray off the bed so that it rolled underneath it, chocolates spilling everywhere. Before Jess could ask her what was going on, Mrs. McKenzie opened the door and smiled at her.

“There you are, love. . So you and Shivs are getting on. Good. . But d’you want to come and talk to Colin now?”

No.

“Yeah,” Jess said, getting up and slinging her rucksack across her shoulder as she looked nervously at Shivs, who gave her a confident thumbs-up.

“ ’Bye, Shivs.”

“Jess, I’m going to call you tonight,” Shivs said, following Jess to the door. Jess nodded, trying to appear nonchalant, but feeling embarrassingly warm. “On the phone, all right?”

Talking to Colin about psychology wasn’t as scary as Jess had thought it would be. She quite liked him. They were just sitting in the kitchen by themselves drinking hot chocolate with marsh-mallows floating in it; she felt embarrassed drinking in front of him so she had to put her other hand over her top lip whenever she sipped. He asked her what she thought of school, and if she’d liked it in Nigeria. Sometimes she felt a little bit uncomfortable, because the minute she’d answered a question he seemed to have another related one ready to follow it up straightaway, and some of the questions were quite hard, like, “How do you know that that teacher thinks you’re weird in a bad way?” But he didn’t really ask the questions as if he was demanding an answer, but more as if he didn’t need to know but would quite like to. She liked that. And she found that whenever the conversation got too tiring, she could just say, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” in an anxious way, and he would stop and start talking about something else.

He told her about how, when he was a little boy, he had nearly drowned, and he told her how scary it was with all the water churning and filling him up. It surprised her a lot that this had happened to him, and she’d had to ask him how he’d felt when he was safe again, because she couldn’t imagine a great tall person like him drowning.

“Well, I’ll tell you something, Jess — I very quickly began to feel as if it had never really happened, as if it had actually happened to someone else,” he replied.

She thought for a minute that he was going to ask her if she’d ever felt like that (she didn’t think she ever had), but he didn’t. She had also sort of expected him to be writing things down, like a report, but he didn’t do that either.

There were other times during that conversation that Colin McKenzie really surprised her. The first was when he asked her what it felt like when she was screaming. She stared blankly at him, nonplussed even when he said that she could write it down if she wanted to. And she didn’t even know why the question caught her so off balance — maybe it was because he had assumed that there was something for her to feel when she had a tantrum.

The second time was when he asked her to say the first word that came into her head in response to the words that he was going to say to her — she was too startled, too unprepared by this proposal. She wanted to bite back every word she said, or substitute it with another, but Dr. McKenzie, steadily stirring his hot chocolate with his spoon, went on inexorably churning out words.

“Mummy.”

“Um. Big. No—”

“Daddy.”

“Small. Smaller, I mean, than—”

“School.”

“Nobody.”

“Jess.”

“Gone?”

“Where have you gone, Jess?”

She had no idea.

That was surprising, too.

The next time Jess saw TillyTilly, it was a Saturday morning. It was a warm day, almost stickily warm. Jess was lying on her bedroom floor with a ream of blank paper and her crayons and paint box beside her. Her mother’s copy of Little Women , the cover Sellotaped onto the rest of the book, also lay beside her. Every now and then the telephone would ring, and her mother would run to it from the kitchen, shouting “I’ll get it, I’ll get it!” even though only Jess and she were at home. There was going to be a party tonight, held by a friend of Jess’s father’s family, and Aunt Lucy and Uncle Adam were going, and so were her father and her mother. Jess’s mum was frantically telephoning every babysitter that had ever been recommended to her, hoping that one would be able to babysit on such short notice: “Today! This evening!”

Jess’s dad had said reprovingly, “You shouldn’t have left it so late, you know. Lucy offered, but you were so concerned that she’d find a babysitter that would only suit Dulcie and not Jessamy. .”

Jess’s mum had simply looked up from her diary of telephone numbers and growled in a threatening manner, the sound rumbling deep in her throat. Jess’s dad had remembered something terribly important that he needed to do, and went away.