Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“You really scared us, you know!”

Tilly didn’t reply. She wasn’t looking at Jess, but somewhere to the left of her. Her gaze was preoccupied, her thin cheeks sucked inwards as she frowned deeply.

“Jessamy! What are you doing! Don’t make me come up there and get you!” Jess heard Lidia threaten.

“I’m coming. I’m just getting something from upstairs,” she called.

“Well, hurry up,” Lidia said.

Jess looked back at TillyTilly, who was now, suddenly, looking at her, and she became worried for a few seconds that maybe this wasn’t TillyTilly at all, but someone else altogether.

“She’s a Portuguese,” TillyTilly said angrily. She nearly spat the word “Portuguese” out, her accent becoming somewhat Yoruba as she did so.

Jess was puzzled.

“I’m glad I scared her. I should have got her,” TillyTilly muttered, pressing her face against her knees then shaking her head as if to clear it.

Jess sat on the step that she had been standing on.

“Why? She’s quite nice, actually.”

TillyTilly glared.

Jess was tempted to take back what she had said, then decided not to.

“She is ,” she insisted, then added, “and anyway, she’s not from Portugal, she’s from Madeira. It’s different, isn’t it?”

“Portuguese,” TillyTilly maintained, shaking her head emphatically and pointing at the ground in a short, sharp gesture that Jess recognised as her uncle Kunle’s favourite “earth be my witness” one.

Jess was quiet for a few seconds, thinking this over.

“Did you do that thing with the passage light?” she asked finally.

TillyTilly rocked backwards and forwards a little and said nothing.

“Jessamy! What are you doing?” Lidia called.

“She’s going to come and get me in a minute, and I haven’t even looked anything up about Madeira,” Jess said in tones of resignation.

TillyTilly uncurled her body and grabbed Jess by the arm.

“Do you want to give Lidia a proper fright?” When she saw Jess’s expression of doubt, she persisted. “It’ll be fun, I promise!”

Jess looked consideringly at TillyTilly, then smiled.

They stood up and held hands, Jess’s face turned towards TillyTilly’s for a moment before Tilly moved behind her. Jess could hear her breathing and her small, ticklish laugh as Lidia came upstairs.

“The light’s working again!” Lidia said, switching it on. “Jessamy!”

Her feet on the stairs sounded thunderous to Jess; giant’s feet coming up a mountain, displacing bits of rock and moss.

Everything seemed to slooooooow doooooooooown .

As the light flooded the stairway, and as Lidia and Dulcie’s heads came poking around the staircase bend, Jess saw Lidia’s mouth open to address her, then both Lidia’s and Dulcie’s mouths stretched wider in amazement and shock as TillyTilly’s arms enfolded her from behind and pulled her

and through the staircase, the carpet and the actual stair falling away beneath her feet as if she and Tilly were going underground in a lift that would never stop descending. The scene changed to a sort of blanketing brown darkness, hollow and moist, and Jess’s head was spinning and she was laughing and screaming at the same time, like the slide, like the slide, only more. .

TillyTilly was silent, so quiet that Jess thought that she wasn’t there, and had to waste a moment of the glorious free fall to twist her head, gasping in, the air jetting madly through her nostrils and lungs, to look at Tilly, whose cheek was now pressed against hers, her mouth open in a silent laugh. Jess’s hair was blowing into Tilly’s face, and she couldn’t think that this was really happening, couldn’t believe it until they crashed.

“No,” she heard TillyTilly rasp as they began to dip and plummet, “no, we’re not supposed to—”

They smashed against the ground so hard that Jess felt broken and winded, her face pressed against the ground, the weight of TillyTilly lying half across her back. The insides of her mouth hurt from where she had inadvertently bitten herself. She could taste blood on her tongue.

Ohhhhhhhh. It hurts.

Tilly’s head had banged hard against the back of Jess’s head, and she felt as if a bump might be growing there. TillyTilly rolled slowly away from her, then they both lay still. Jess began to feel claustrophobic when she realised that, wherever they were, there was no room to sit up. There was a thick layer of the brown darkness above, and she was lying on some more of it. She crumbled the stuff between her fingers and realised, with wonder and alarm, that it was earth, the stuff the daffodils in the playground were planted in in the spring. It was earth, but it was dry, so dry, and hard. She and TillyTilly had been falling through earth as if it was air!

And now they were stuck.

She began to find it harder to breathe the more she looked upwards to the compacted earth that lay only a few centimetres away from her nose. Suppose it all came falling down? They must have fallen quite a way. She wondered what Lidia was doing, and that made her laugh a little bit. What would Dulcie be saying? Would Dulcie be in awe of her now, and think that she was magic? She was beginning to feel drowsier and drowsier the less that she was able to breathe. And it was dark down here.

She turned her head and fixed her eyes on the outline of her friend, who was lying very still. From where Jess was lying, Tilly’s eyes appeared to be closed. She was breathing evenly, so she was probably awake. Maybe thinking.

“TillyTilly,” she whispered. “What happened? Why did we crash? Are you going to get us up again?”

TillyTilly opened her eyes. They were almost luminous.

“We fell. I don’t know why. It’s all right. I can get us up again.”

She sounded defeated, unhappy.

“It was a good trick, though, TillyTilly,” Jess said encouragingly. “Dulcie’s and Lidia’s faces! Did you see them? It was so funny! And it was fun when we were falling, although I suppose we couldn’t have expected to keep on falling forever—”

TillyTilly might have smiled, but Jess couldn’t see properly. Jess coughed weakly.

“I can’t really breathe properly anymore; it’s like. . there’s no room. .”

TillyTilly made a sort of clucking sound in the back of her throat, then she reached out, feeling for Jess’s hand. Jess met her halfway, and Tilly squeezed her hand reassuringly. Then TillyTilly simply stood up, pulling Jess, who struggled and kicked a little, bracing herself for suffocation, upwards with her.

Jess felt earth push into her face and her mouth, and she drank it, as a vast amount of air whistled past her ears, and TillyTilly’s hand fell away from hers, and she was standing, spitting out the dank taste of the soil, on the staircase, alone. Dulcie and Lidia were now at the top of the steps; they looked as if they had just been searching for her in the bedrooms.

“Oh my GOD! There you are! What. . what did you do? Where did you go to?” Dulcie screeched, before Lidia could say anything. “I’m telling your mum!” she added, in tones of high indignation. She hopped up and down on the top step, jabbing her finger at Jess. “You are SO WEIRD! You weren’t like this before you went abroad! What’s HAPPENED to you?”

Jess knew she wasn’t helping matters by giving vent to hysterical laughter. She was numb.

Lidia, spotting a wrongness in her, came forward and cupped Jess’s face in her hands, her own hands shaking. She cleared her throat.

“You just. . ran away and hid, didn’t you?” she asked, nodding her head slightly to give Jess a lead to follow.