Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

Jess turned away and frowned, kicking the leg of Mr. Heinz’s desk. She hated Miss Patel. Miss Patel was still talking. Her parents would have to pay for the damage to the books; her parents weren’t going to be very pleased with her. She had never liked Miss Patel; Miss Patel had started it— Having problems with the work already, Jessamy? — blaming her for being moved up when it wasn’t her fault. And now she was trying to get all upset.

Well, if Miss Patel was upset, then good.

And if she thought Jess was weird — fine, OK, good!

She needed to be still, but she couldn’t. Mr. Heinz carried on talking; Jess carried on kicking, kicking. TillyTilly was connected with her being in trouble again.

But if it wasn’t her fault, was it Tilly’s? And if it wasn’t Tilly’s fault, was it hers? How could she be so angry and not burst?

She was hot.

She tugged at the collar of her dress and said suddenly, without looking at anyone or anything in particular, “I’m not going to apologise.”

She had cut across Mr. Heinz; he had been saying something about maturity. There was no going back now. She had to continue. She kept her eyes on the middle distance.

“I’m NOT sorry. I don’t care. I’m glad I kicked Miss Patel. And I’ll kick her again if she doesn’t just GO AWAY!”

Then, nothing — except for her relief and the stir in the air caused by Miss Patel abruptly leaving the room with a noise that sounded like a sob. Jess slumped in her chair, kicking against the leg of Miss Patel’s vacated chair. She locked eyes with Mr. Heinz, whose mouth was now set in a grim line.

“What am I going to do with you, Jessamy Harrison?” he demanded.

Panic-stricken now, Jess gave the tiniest of shrugs. But there was no time for the question to be addressed, because her mum had arrived, flustered, the trailing end of her headscarf flicking around behind her ears, to take Jessamy home.

“You’re telling me that you destroyed school property so that you could show this to your friend Tilly?”

Jess, cross-legged on her bed, stared at her toes, wiggled them, then gazed at the picture flopping forlornly between her mother’s fingers. It was the blond girl with the snub nose, the one who was so happy to see her mirror-twin. Jess heaved a sigh.

“Yeah.”

The cutout fell to the floor; her mother had discarded it distastefully. Next, she spoke sternly.

“Jessamy. I want to know who Tilly’s mother is. I’m going to speak to her so that we can sort this out.”

Jess picked at a toenail and sighed. Surely her mother had figured out that TillyTilly wasn’t properly real? She was glad that she hadn’t let her parents know that it was Tilly who’d told her about Fern.

“I don’t know who Tilly’s mum is,” she said, when she had spun the silence out for as long as she dared.

Her mum clicked her tongue in irritation.

“I thought as much. You don’t know anything about this girl.”

True.

“Jess, what’s the matter? Why did you do that, cut out all these pictures? Is it because of Fern?”

Yes.

“No,” Jess whispered. Her head had begun to hurt.

Her mum took a deep breath.

“You scared Miss Patel, you know. Mr. Heinz too. They’re being very patient with you. . it would have scared anyone. Listen. . do you think you’re going to do anything like that again, Jess?”

“I don’t know.” Now her throat was hurting, a slow ache in rhythmic thuds.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” The irritation in her mum’s voice was tangible. “You’re the one who chooses what happens, Jessamy! YOU can decide not to do things like that if you don’t want to!”

Who’d said that she’d wanted to cut out the pictures? Jess clambered in beneath her covers and burrowed. “Like the fairy,” she said. It came out muffled.

“The FAIRY?”

“The one that made everyone fall asleep because the princess did. She chose what happened.”

Only when Jess peeped out from under the covers did she realise that her mum had left the room. She scurried out of bed and picked up the scrap of paper that had fallen to the floor.

Clutching it in her hand, she waited tensely on the edge of her bed for TillyTilly. She didn’t come. It was very quiet downstairs, although both her mother and father were there. So they weren’t talking. Jess wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Still holding the mirrored blonde girl, she padded down the passage to the bathroom without switching on the light and peered into the mirror, watching herself intently, one hand pressed hard against the rim of the basin. She blinked several times, trying each time to catch her reflection out in the dim light. Then she pressed a finger against the cold glass, joining herself to her reflection, pointing, marking herself. It was something of an accusing gesture. She stood this way for a while, listening to the sounds of the house, narrowing her eyes as she watched her own solemn face, and heard the woman with the long arms begin to sing to her softly, sweetly. She couldn’t properly understand how the long-armed woman was supposed to be Tilly. The song was sad, and Tilly never was. There was a story in the song, but she couldn’t understand it.

After some time, she started as if she had just woken from a trance, feeling the salty wetness of tears trickling down her face. The mirror had misted up; she couldn’t remember whether she had been breathing on it. It was cold. She thought that she could make out that her reflection was smiling.

A trick of sight or of sensation?

Cautiously, Jess wiped at her face, then crumpled the blonde mirror-twins between her fingers and went back to her bedroom.

Jess was in pain, worse than she’d ever been before; it was overflowing into miniscule gasping sounds, and it was making her vision, her stomach, her very mind, turn cartwheels amidst splashes of neon-bright colour. She wished desperately that she would swoon, like people did in books; she wished that she could. Her mum had said (jokingly?) that black people couldn’t faint, but she didn’t know if that was true, or even if it applied to her. Neither did she know whether she was awake or asleep, but whichever she was, she needed to be the other. For a full second, her senses imploded in a violent jolt, and no part of her could be spared to wonder if this was a dream. The searingly, impossibly hot coal that she pressed to her mouth was burning not only her lips and fingers, but, it seemed, every inch of her by association. She must be dreaming — where would she have found this thing, and why would she so doggedly continue to pass it over her lips, bursting the skin in an agony of heat and blood when the thing that she most wanted was to drop the coal and make it stop? Her whole body was quivering with the struggle to take her blistering hand away from her mouth.

She didn’t even know where she was. But it was so dark, what she would normally have called Dark Dark, the only thing glowing the fading embers so firmly enwrapped in her fingers. Yet she must be awake, because there was TillyTilly, who never came into her dreams, jumping up and down excitedly, encouraging her, reminding her that this was what they’d read about in her grandfather’s study: how the angel had cleansed Isaiah, telling her that she could do it. Jess had had no idea just how much it actually hurt to be purified. She had long forgotten what exactly it was that she was to be cleansed of. Her nostrils flared as she struggled to control her pain, to make it smaller, to pretend that she was not here until it all stopped or she died, or whatever was going to happen happened. She struggled to focus on TillyTilly, looking at her for as long as she could, pleading with her eyes for help. TillyTilly cocked her head to one side and looked as if she was calculating “for” and “against,” then she came forward and snatched the coal from Jess’s hand, which now fell, limp, to her side. TillyTilly rolled the coal around in her hand, even tossed it in the air a few times, then smiled and shook her head at Jess, as if to say, What was all that fuss about? But Jess was too stunned by the sudden absence of pain to be amazed at what Tilly was doing. She careered around in a half circle and then spun to the floor, hands held over her mouth as she struggled not to retch. She had to contain the smarting of the cooling flesh on her fingers.