Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

Her dad smiled at her.

“Of course you can. What do you want?”

“I don’t know! Anything!”

Her dad poured his coffee down the sink, then turned to the fridge.

“I hope your friend Tilly’s not fussy!”

For the picnic, Jess’s dad gave them some sausage rolls, some mushroom sandwiches, two slices of her grandma’s apple pie, and a carton of orange juice with two paper cups and a shopping bag to put all the rubbish in. “Make sure you two don’t litter the park,” he said. Then he’d asked if he could be introduced.

“Wait a minute,” said Jess, clutching the bag full of things. “She’s sort of shy, she might not like it.”

She poked her head out of the back door to signal to Tilly. Her friend had moved farther down the pavement and was already shaking her head “no.”

Jess drew her head back in.

“She’s shy,” she confirmed, and her dad laughingly threw up his hands.

“OK, fine! Have a good picnic, and say hello to her for me, then!”

Jess nodded and ran out to meet TillyTilly.

“Race you to the park,” cried Tilly, dropping her length of rope, and Jess ran the short distance to the park as hard as she could, running so hard that everything — people, shops, houses, Tilly — seemed to blur into each other.

But TillyTilly still got there first.

“It’s not fair,” Jess complained, bending over to get her breath back.

TillyTilly wasn’t even winded; she sat down and, assuming a cross-legged position, started taking things out of the bag.

“Never mind,” she said, “at least you came second!” And she nearly bent herself double with her wheezing laugh.

It turned out that TillyTilly wasn’t that hungry. She picked at the sausage rolls, shaking her head at them even when Jess explained that they were “just like Gala.”

“Gala?” she said, wrinkling her nose.

Jess began to get the feeling that had crept up on her before, that this was either not Tilly or a different TillyTilly from the one that she had first met in Nigeria. But it was only a momentary sensation.

“You know. . Gala. .” she pressed.

TillyTilly shrugged her shoulders and began sliding the mushrooms out of the mushroom sandwiches and nibbling them. She wouldn’t even touch the apple pie, but she drank some orange juice. Tilly’s lack of appetite spoiled Jess’s, and they ended up wasting most of the picnic. They had found a nice spot on a bench surrounded by green bushes with the tiniest red berries on them.

Around the corner was the painted wooden-and-steel roundabout, and once they had put the remains of the food in the shopping bag and thrown it away, they took turns pushing each other on it, shrieking with mixed fear and delight as the whole world went flying past and they tried to catch up.

Soon Jess was tired again, and she returned to the bench and lay on it. TillyTilly stretched out on the grass, pulling a tuft of it between her fingers.

“What shall we do now?” Tilly asked, after a few minutes of silence.

Jess had been thinking about things. She turned to look at Tilly.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, TillyTilly?”

TillyTilly looked surprised, then shook her head, laughing.

“I don’t know,” she said.

She gave Jess an odd look. It was more of a stare, like she couldn’t see Jess properly and was trying to get her into focus.

“What about you?”

Jess laughed. “I don’t know. . I’d like to fly.”

TillyTilly scratched her head. “You mean, like in an aeroplane?”

Jess shook her head. “No, fly, like when we were falling yesterday, but only, like, upwards.”

TillyTilly smiled then, the swift brilliance of her smile lighting her whole face.

“Oh,” she said. “I think you’ll do that; I think you’ll be a flier. I’ll be one too.”

Jess closed her eyes and beamed with satisfaction. If TillyTilly said so, then it would be true. She would fly.

“Jessy,” she heard Tilly say. Jess opened her eyes again. TillyTilly was sitting up now, wriggling and restless. “What shall we do?”

Jess shrugged.

“We should write a poem,” said Tilly.

Jess sat up and stared.

“A poem ? What about?”

“I dunno. . I came up with the idea; now you do something!”

Jess scratched her knee. “We don’t even have a pen or paper.”

TillyTilly felt in one of the pockets of her school dress and came up with a blue biro. She smiled again. She had a much crumpled, but blank, sheet of paper, too.

Jess began to laugh.

“What else have you got in your pockets?” she enquired.

TillyTilly tapped the side of her nose.

It took much quiet thought with their heads bent together over the paper, whispering ideas. Jess was sure that writing the poem took a long time, although she wasn’t sure how long, because she didn’t have a watch and she didn’t quite know what it was about time and TillyTilly. Halfway through, something was wrong with the pen, and Jess got blue ink all over her hands, but managed to finish writing down the poem. It was disappointingly short for so much effort. TillyTilly took the paper and smoothed it out, then read it aloud, her finger running over the crossings-out and scribblings to get to the actual poem:

“All my thoughts have left, with her.

I thought I’d kept them in my head

But when I tried to find the thoughts

They all told me she was dead.

I asked if I could go to her

To find my thoughts, to think one day,

But they said ‘No,’ ’cause she’d prefer

To keep me, too, and make me stay.”

They sat quiet for a few minutes, arms flung loosely around each other, cheek pressed against cheek, then Jess sighed and shifted, breaking the loop of arms and legs.

“It’s a sad poem,” she said, “definitely really sad.” She felt as if she hadn’t written it, and neither had TillyTilly. But they must have, because they’d come up with the rhymes. “What rhymes with ‘head’?” she’d asked Tilly, and Tilly had squeezed her eyes shut while thinking, then whispered in her ear so that the word was all tickly, “Dead.”

Jess put the poem in her own pocket to copy it at home, but they had to throw the ruined biro away. Then, just as TillyTilly started to say something, Jess heard a clamour of voices.

Trish Anderson from Year Five came careering around the bushes.

“Hello, Jessamy!” she called out.

Jess shrank in her seat and looked at TillyTilly, then realised that she had vanished. The bit of grass that she had pulled up lay on top of the growing grass. Jess stared, frowned, then turned back to Trish, trying to think.

“Whatcha doing here by yourself?” Trish asked. She sat down on the bench next to Jess.

Go away , thought Jess, oh, just leave me alone .

She had just realised with stunning clarity that she was the only person who saw TillyTilly. She put a hand to her mouth as she tried to sort this out in her mind. She didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her before. TillyTilly had not met anyone in her family, no one had met her, and she refused to meet anyone. And even when Jess was with TillyTilly, never mind that people couldn’t see Jess; the most noticeable thing was that they couldn’t see TillyTilly. She suddenly felt very small and a little bit scared.

Is TillyTilly… real?

All she knew, as Trish began talking and calling her other Year Five friends over, was that even if TillyTilly wasn’t real, if it was a choice between there being just her and Tilly or her and real people, she’d much, much rather have Tilly.

“I wasn’t by myself, I was with my friend,” she said suddenly, interrupting Trish’s flow of speech. Trish had been offering to push her on the swings. Even though she would’ve liked that, Jess turned her down. It would somehow be disloyal to TillyTilly to hang around with Trish and her friends. Also, she needed to go home and think about all this and, later, copy out the poem.