Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

Jess herself had been offended by the concept of the babysitter.

“I’m not a baby,” she had insisted over breakfast as she carefully nibbled at the brown crust of her toast before starting on the real stuff.

Jess’s dad had patted her cheek and then tweaked her nose in a comforting manner.

“I know. You’re enormous, an enormous huge girl.”

“What?!” Jess stuck out her tongue.

Her dad stuck out his tongue too.

Her mum joined in.

They all waggled their tongues at each other, then carried on eating. After a few seconds of companionable munching, Jess pursued her theme.

“Can’t me and Dulcie just stay here by ourselves? We’d behave! You’d just need to leave some food, and we’d tuck ourselves in and everything.”

Her mum laughed so hard she nearly choked on her toast. She kicked Jess’s dad under the table, and he laughed a little too then explained, “The thing is, Jess, little girl, you and Dulcie have this thing where sometimes you fight. Imagine if we left you by yourselves — it’d be mayhem. Also, it wouldn’t be safe because you wouldn’t know what to do if something happened.”

“Something like what?”

“Well, like intruders or something. People coming into the house uninvited.”

Jess thought of TillyTilly.

“What’s wrong with that?”

Jess’s mum sipped at her orange juice.

“Jesus on toast, Jess, we’re not leaving you and Dulcie alone and that’s that.”

“But do we have to have a baby sitter?” Jess wailed. “Couldn’t you just drop me and Dulcie off at Grandma and Grandpa’s?”

“Thing is, Jess, old man,” her father said, drumming a little tattoo on the table with his butter knife, “they’re going to the party as well.”

“You just can’t win. Sorry,” her mum added.

At that point, Jess had rolled her eyes and, taking another bite of her peanut butter on toast, had resigned herself to the indignity of the as yet nameless babysitter.

As she lay surrounded by paper and scattered crayons, her head resting on her outstretched arm, Jess began thinking about one of the dreams that she had the previous night. She wanted to remember it — it had been nice — but it was too vague. The woman with the long arms had been smiling, flying through her dreams again, and Jess thought the woman might have been hugging her, the arms looping around and around Jess’s body, holding her, the skin smooth like a velveteen rope. Jess didn’t know how she could have thought that she was scary before. Or maybe it had been the drawing that was scary, the black squiggles, and the actual woman was lovely. The arms took some getting used to, though. She tried to draw the long-armed woman, her crayon skimming over the smooth paper, but the browns that she used were all wrong, either too light or too dark.

She glanced up from the paper when Tilly Tilly ran into her room and jogged up and down on the spot, then skipped, then hopped, clapping all the while, as if she was doing some elaborate form of exercise.

“Hello, Jessy,” she puffed, still bobbing. It sounded rhythmical: Heh-low (clap) Jeh-see (clap) , it could be a song.

Jess laboriously coloured in the woman’s boubou , then pushed her papers away and stood up. She, too, began jumping up and down, clapping, concentrating on not hitting the floor so hard that her mum would shout, “Are you having a one-woman wrestling match in there?”

“What (clap) are (clap) we (clap) do (clap) ing (clap) ,” she said, after a little while. TillyTilly shrugged and carried on jumping. She was moving around the room in a circle now, and Jess followed. Downstairs, her mother was interviewing someone on the telephone, “Do you have experience with. . well, sensitive kids? My daughter’s easy enough to please in terms of feeding and entertainment and for the most part, behaviour. . What? Yes, of course, but the thing is, she has this enormous imagination and. . yes, mmmm, exactly, you know what I’m talking about! That’s it! She gets so absorbed, so caught up in things! And then she upsets herself .” The rest was muffled. Jess tried not to strain her ears so that she could listen better, but it was always fascinating for her when she heard herself being talked about, described.

But TillyTilly called her attention back to the room. She had crouched down in the area that Jess had just vacated and was systematically crumpling up sheet after sheet of the long-armed-woman drawings that Jess had begun and abandoned.

Now she was even tearing them, her eyes narrowed in an expression of if not quiet anger, then at the very least intense concentration.

Rip, rip, rip, scrunch.

Somehow, Jess did not dare to stop her.

Downstairs, her mother continued speaking.

“Oh, the other girl, my niece? She’s fine. You should have absolutely no problems with her. .”

When Tilly had finished ripping up the pictures, even the one that Jess had been doing when she came in, she scattered the handfuls of ripped paper on the floor, laughing a little bit, a raspy chuckle. She looked completely absorbed, as if Jess wasn’t even there.

Jess stepped forward, a little nervously. Her voice wobbled as she spoke.

“Why did you do that, TillyTilly? I was only trying to. .”

She paused because she had been expecting Tilly to interrupt her, but the girl rose slowly from her crouch and simply gazed at her, unblinking, her head turned slightly away from Jess. There was definite hostility there. Jess began to feel a little resentment herself. This was the second time that TillyTilly had acted strangely over the woman with the long arms. Could it be that Tilly didn’t want to. . well, share her?

“You spied,” TillyTilly said in a low voice. She stood very still and continued to stare at Jess. “You shouldn’t have gone in there.”

Jess folded her arms. “I apologised already,” she said firmly.

TillyTilly smiled.

“Yeah,” she said, as if only just remembering. “You did.”

“Well then,” said Jess, refusing to smile herself.

TillyTilly sank back down to the floor and grabbed a light-brown crayon.

“Come on, let’s do some drawing,” she said, smoothing a piece of paper out before her. She grabbed some brown and green crayons and a bit of black charcoal, and began to draw.

Jess stayed where she was, reluctant to give in just like that. But curiosity got the better of her, and she sidled over to see what TillyTilly was drawing. It was a girl with her hair in two pigtails, wearing a green-and-white-checked dress; Tilly was drawing herself. For someone who was supposed to be even older than the Year Six girls, it was a bit rubbish. It made Jess feel dizzy to look at it, and she’d seen plenty of people drawings done by other kids in her class. The arms and legs were sticklike, and the torso was too rounded, like a dumpling. The checked squares on the dress were gaping, irregular holes of white surrounded by green, and the pigtails were scribbles of charcoal, looking like flaps of tangled hair sprouting from an otherwise bald brown scalp. The eyes were far too big, taking up half the face, and were too round. Jess was tempted to laugh, partly because she didn’t know what else she could do at such a drawing, but knew she couldn’t do much better herself. The weirdness of the drawing might have had something to do with the way in which Tilly was clutching the crayon. Instead of holding it like a pencil, she was holding it as one would a thick stick, or a baton: all her fingers curling around it. The lines that she drew were identical in their thickness and straightness, and when she tried to round them into more anthropomorphic shapes, they went haywire.