Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“TillyTilly! What happened to that baby?”

TillyTilly did not reply.

Tilly was the one making the buzzing, humming noise; Jess knew that now. She was at the door, making the sound without opening her mouth.

“TillyTilly, please don’t make that noise. I don’t like it, it’s making me ill,” she protested.

All the noise stopped — the crying, the humming, everything. The silence was thick.

“Where’s that baby?” Jess whispered.

TillyTilly executed a twirl in the doorway. “She’s dead. .”

Jess stared at her friend. Her lips trembled as she struggled to speak, to think.

“You—?”

TillyTilly smiled graciously, as if she wasn’t really concentrating on the topic at hand, but on something else.

“Don’t be silly, Jessy, I couldn’t kill anyone. I’m only little.” She laughed.

Jess couldn’t laugh along; she was afraid again, and knew that something bad had happened to the baby.

“Then how come she’s dead?”

TillyTilly folded her arms. “I don’t like to say. . but it’s your mother’s fault.” Then she dropped quite suddenly out of sight. Jess crawled to the edge of her bed and looked down at the floor. TillyTilly was lying flat out, like a starfish, grinning up at her.

“What are you talking about, it’s my mum’s fault?” Jess demanded. She had a teetering feeling — not as if she was about to scream, but a flatter feeling, as if she was about to fall down very hard and not be able to get up again.

Tilly kicked her legs in the air.

“Ask her — there were two of you born, just like there were two of me. The other one of you died,” she said, unbelievably casual, so matter-of-fact that Jess was fine with it until the meaning hit her.

Then, unexpected even to herself, Jess began to cry: hot, dry, racking sobs that robbed her of her breath with every spasm. She buried her face in her pillows. It was. . too much. The baby had been there, and then it wasn’t, and then it was dead, and then it was her sister. . and she still felt so poorly, so poorly. The humming sound was faint in the air again. She knew it would get louder.

“Stop it, TillyTilly, PLEASE STOP IT!” she shouted, then froze, realising that she had been too loud. She heard the creak of one of her parents stirring in their bed, and the humming noise escalated, but no one came. She turned onto her side away from Tilly, but Tilly was waiting on the other side of the bed.

“I’m not making that noise,” TillyTilly explained, baffled, and she climbed into the bed and hugged Jess close. TillyTilly’s body was so cold, the chill radiated through her. Jess’s heartbeat slowed down and she felt. . protected. But the humming noise was so loud now that TillyTilly was in the bed with her!

It was hurting her ears.

“We’re twins to each other now,” TillyTilly whispered fiercely, hugging Jess again. She patted Jess’s hair, her cheek, her cold fingers chasing Jess’s fever away with every touch. “We’ve got to look after each other. We’re twins, best friends.”

Jess nodded, unable to speak. She felt like crying again. She didn’t understand.

“Her name was Fern,” TillyTilly whispered in Jess’s ear, as Jess began to fall away from the room, fall into sleep. “Your twin’s name was Fern. They didn’t get to choose a proper name for her, a Yoruba name, because she was born already dead, just after you were born. You have been so empty, Jessy, without your twin; you have had no one to walk your three worlds with you. I know — I am the same. I have been just like you for such a long time! But now I am Fern, I am your sister, and you are my twin. . I’ll look after you, Jessy. .”

The first foggy waking thoughts, emerging through dappled gauze, were of Fern. The memory of the baby girl made Jess big-eyed with wariness at first, then it captivated her. She started off thinking about how tiny Fern had been, how fragile and moonlight pale, and then she realised with a shock that she, too, must once have been like that.

Exactly like that, in fact.

She held her hands up in front of her and tried to imagine them as pudgy little fists; tried to create a continuity between a time when she didn’t know herself and now, when she was all too aware of her Jessness.

Had her mother held each of their hands, acted as a link between the child that was feeble and limp, and the one who kicked and screamed?

Had her mother—?

Jess abruptly tried to turn away from thoughts of her mother when she remembered that terrible, dark thing that TillyTilly had said.

It was your mother’s fault.

Heartless.

Was her mother heartless?

It seemed like it. She laughed and acted as if everything was normal, and surely you had to be sad forever if your baby died, it was such a sad thing.

Instead, Jess tried to imagine what it would have been like to share this room with Fern, her. . sister.

Jess shifted and felt the sun on her face; someone must have come in and drawn her curtains open while she slept.

Fern would have looked just like her, and the similarity would have given Jess that confidence to connect and tell her things. . confide in her instead of screaming out her fears. Could it be that simple? I scream because I have no twin . Jess doubted it, distrusted the way that it came out so smoothly.

Her line of thought was interrupted by her mother coming in.

Her mother was a shadow-lady, strange and dark, grotesque. It was her fault about Fern, and now her voice was too loud, her eyes too dark, as she came towards the bed.

Sarah said, “And how is your body this morning?”

Without consciously knowing what she was doing, Jess flinched in a flurry of bedding, nearly falling from her mattress in her gesture of avoidance. When she realised that she had an arm defensively up over her face, she loosened her body and, shocked at herself, flopped back down among her pillows, raising her eyes apologetically to her mum’s face.

Her mum had taken a step back and seemed to have receded, become smaller. Bemused, she had folded her arms across her upper body.

It’s Mummy, it’s Mummy. She’s not going to — she won’t.

“I’m feeling a little bit better, but my head still aches and I’m really thirsty,” Jess managed to say.

Her mum didn’t reply immediately, but looked hard at Jess and then, swiftly, around the room. Finally she nodded.

“If I bring you some orange juice or tea or something, can you see if you can manage to get up and brush your teeth, darling?” She was walking backwards towards the door. Her expression was now determinedly untroubled, and she hadn’t touched Jess at all, and Jess was glad. Then she felt bad. She didn’t know if TillyTilly was lying. Had Tilly lied before? She couldn’t remember. But she needed to know about what had happened to Fern, if Fern was even real.

“Mummy—”

“Jess?”

“Did I have. . Was there two of me?” At the last minute, Jess realised that she couldn’t say “sister”; the word wouldn’t fall off her tongue.

Jess looked up at her mother, who stood trembling with her hands clasped together as if in prayer. She had never seen her mother like this; her mother never prayed.

“Yes. There were two of you. Brush your teeth and we’ll talk about it when I come back.”

With careful movements, she left the room and fell into a jerky stagger, one of her blue slippers falling off as she careered into the toilet.

Not quite knowing what she was doing, Jess noiselessly followed Sarah’s path to the door. Sticking her head out of her bedroom door, she saw her father, who was brushing his teeth at the bathroom sink. He put down his toothbrush and pressed both hands on the sink, leaning forward as he listened intently to her mother’s stifled sobbing through the wall. Jess, trembling, tensed herself, preparing to duck back into her room.