Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

When Jess awoke, she felt tingly and refreshed, and her fingers found the skin of her cheek as soft as if light silken cobwebs lay over her face. By midmorning, when Trish grabbed her in the corridor and told her that Miss Patel wasn’t going to be in for ages, so Year Five had an “easy peasy” substitute teacher called Mr. Munroe, the silk had disintegrated, and Jess felt brittle and breakable.

“What happened to Miss Patel?” she asked nervously, unsure if she really wanted to know.

Trish shrugged and popped her bubble gum, golden in the knowledge that her mornings and afternoons would now chiefly consist of tormenting Mr. Munroe.

“Well, Mr. Heinz said she had a family emergency, but Jamie’s brother’s in, like, secondary school and he told Jamie one time that sometimes when they say that it means the teacher’s gone a bit mental.”

Jess stared at her, feeling as if she should burst into tears but unable to muster the energy.

“Haha,” Trish prompted her, chewing hard.

“Haha,” Jess said, after a second’s delay.

When Jess and her parents got back, two days before New Year’s Eve, from the week they’d spent at Jess’s grandparents’ house in Faversham, there was a message on the answerphone for Jess — a first. It was from Shivs, who had honoured their six o’clock calling protocol. Listening to Shivs on the answering machine was weird — she kept leaving breathy pauses so that it felt as if this wasn’t a recorded message, but her talking in real time.

“Errrr. . hello, Jess. . oi, call me back. . I’ve got SOMETHING TO TELL YOU! Yeah. . Merry Christmas. . yeah, BYE.”

Jess dumped her rucksack in the hallway, ignoring the fact that a leg of her pyjamas was falling out from the top where she hadn’t zipped it up properly. She glanced at her mother for permission before running upstairs to fetch the purple address book with the pink hearts that only had one phone number in it. Jess carefully punched in the numbers that she knew by heart, a small crease of concentration in her forehead as she double-checked the book so as not to get it wrong.

She was relieved when Mrs. McKenzie picked up.

“Good evening! I’d like to speak to Siobhan, please,” she said, trying to be as polite as possible.

“Is that you, Jessamy? How are you? How was Christmas?”

“I’m fine, thanks. .”

Jess didn’t know what else she was supposed to say, and so she waited patiently for Shivs to come to the phone.

“It must’ve been you who’s been quoting Hamlet to Shivs— she’s utterly impossible now — keeps running around the house saying that we shouldn’t mind if she puts on ‘an antic disposition.’ ” Mrs. McKenzie laughed, and Jess found a laugh had been surprised out of her too.

“Anyway, here’s Shivs — say hello to your parents for me, will you?”

“Yeah, I will.”

There was some rustling, and then the sound of Siobhan abusing her mother.

“Oh, so NOW you’ve finished TALKING to her?”

“I was just saying hello—”

“You weren’t, though! You were all TALKING and stuff. Listen, she called for me, all right, not for you.”

“She’s holding on for you, you dozy mare. Take it.”

“Hello?” (From Siobhan.)

“Hi,” Jess said, smiling, both at being here, speaking to Siobhan, and at the conversation that she’d just overheard.

“Oi, Jessamy, where were you, man?”

“Went to my grandma and grandpa’s. They’ve got no Tescos where they live or anything.”

“Is it? Do they have Goo?”

Jess rolled her eyes; she’d forgotten Shivs’s current obsession with Goo, the blobby stuff that looked like congealed mucus and came in a capsule. You were supposed to collect different colours, both of Goo and capsule, until you had them all.

“Don’t think so,” she told Shivs.

“Well, it’s lucky you went, then, and not me!”

“Yeah. .”

Jess fiddled with the green-and-white friendship bracelet that was wrapped around her wrist. Siobhan had made it for her in honour of Nigeria.

Behind Jess, something heavy fell over (she suspected that it was the Christmas tree) and her mum said “Figs!” really loudly.

“You know my cousin, Dulcie, the one I told you about?”

“Yeah. She thinks she’s amazing.”

“Yeah. Well, I taught her the new clap for ‘Finger of Fudge’. . She was sooo annoyed. . and guess what, she didn’t even know ‘Milkman, Milkman’!”

Shivs snorted with the full force of a girl who is known in her primary school as the queen of clapping games.

“Not so amazing after all then, is she?”

Jess was about to reply, but Shivs cut her off.

“Guess what. . You know the other day, when you tripped over that stick thing?”

This turned Jess’s attention to one of several new puckered scars covering the areas between her kneecaps and ankles.

“Actually, I didn’t trip — you pushed me, and it was this huge branch,” Jess corrected her friend.

“Yeah, OK. . Anyway, guess what happened when I was coming home! I found a GOLDEN GOO, man. . in a capsule and everything — it was opened a bit, but still. . I really needed a golden one, so I picked it up, and my dad pretended he didn’t notice, cause my mum would KILL ME for picking stuff up from the ground.”

That was impressive, but also just Shivs’s luck. Most of the boys in Jess’s class would kill for a golden Goo. Jess said so.

“Yeah, I know! But then this dog started chasing me and my dad, dinnit, and it was this big fat dog, and the woman who owned it was like ‘Ginger, Ginger,’ not really bothering to STOP IT or anything. And the dog was black, anyway, so why call it Ginger? Anyway, so it probably wasn’t her dog. So I think the dog thought we were playing a game with it or something. . and I tripped over, and I hit my face, and I got a great big cut on my knee!”

“Oh. What does it look like?”

“It is going to be a BADMAN scar,” Shivs said grandly. “My mum put some stuff on it, but it’s going all peely.”

“Wicked!”

“I know!”

“Are you going to tell anyone that you ran away from the dog?”

“No way. . I already told Katrina that I fought it and it bit me, and that I might have RABIES.”

“Wicked!”

“I know!”

Jess thought she might be having some trouble with loyalties.

On Saturday morning, she was spread out on her bedroom floor drawing pictures with TillyTilly and trying to think of something to say that didn’t have anything to do with Shivs. Tilly always seemed to get cross whenever she talked about her. After a few seconds she still hadn’t thought of anything, so she bowed her head and concentrated on the snake that she was drawing. It was a big fat green-and-black python squiggling across the page, and she had to use red to get the forked tongue right. She tried to look over at Tilly’s picture when she’d finished her own, but Tilly squirmed away, shielding her piece of paper with her arm. Jess exhaled gustily.

“TillyTilly, are you cross with me?”

TillyTilly looked up and sighed irritably before snatching the piece of paper before her, crumpling it into a ball and stuffing it into the pocket of her school dress.

“You made me spoil it,” she complained.

Jess waited patiently before repeating her question.

“I’m not cross with YOU. I just don’t like Siobhan. I don’t think she’s a very good friend, not like I am.”

Jess started colouring the white paper behind the snake a light green. She was perplexed. TillyTilly was much cleverer than her and knew nearly everything — so if she said that Shivs was a bad friend, then she must be right. But Shivs was funny, and always thought of fun things to do, and she didn’t think Jess was weird. So TillyTilly might have got it wrong this time. Maybe.