Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“Sorr ee , your majest ee ,” Dulcie drawled, then looking upwards at Shivs, demanded: “So do you know any more clap games or what?”

Shivs grinned and started plaiting, ignoring Dulcie’s yell of “Argh!” when she pulled too hard. “Too many for you, my little friend.”

“Little! How old are you, then?” Dulcie asked, belligerent.

“Nine.”

“So’m I! So how am I your ‘little’ friend, silly!”

“No, you’re the fool — I meant that,” Shivs paused and looked questioningly at Jess, “met-a-for-i-cal-ly.” When Jess nodded sagely over Dulcie’s head, Shivs looked triumphant, if a little confused, but Dulcie’s bewildered silence was enough for Jess to keep her reservations over whether Shivs’s statement actually made any sense to herself. She wasn’t exactly sure what a metaphor was yet, but they’d found the word in some long review that Jess’s mum had been writing about someone else’s book.

Later that evening, Jess and Dulcie were in the kitchen with Jess’s mum and her friend Bisola Coker, Tunde’s mum. They’d just finished making their final batches of puff-puff and were carefully dropping them onto napkin-covered plates. Across the passageway, Shivs, who had gracefully bowed out of the puff-puff making when she’d realised that they weren’t just going to be watching Jess’s mum cook, was involved in an intense game of marbles (using marbles that, she’d proudly told them earlier, she’d stolen from her cousin Martin) with Jess’s dad. From what Jess could tell, Shivs’s victory whoops were met only by low groans of defeat from her father, and hardly ever the other way around. Jess was a little bad-tempered herself since both Mrs. Coker and her mum had commented that, overall, Dulcie’s puff-puff had come out better than hers.

“Maybe you’re a bit African by association,” Mrs. Coker teased Dulcie, who nodded before turning to Jess with a superior smile and sticking her tongue out.

“But I’m the Nigerian,” Jess wailed, flapping a napkin at her mum to get her attention. “You can’t SAY that!”

Sarah smiled over at Mrs. Coker, then conceded, “Maybe it’s this new puff-puff pan. Maybe because Dulcie used it second, hers were more fluffy. It must be like Aunty Funke’s pan. . the more you use it. .”

Jess ignored her. Everyone knew that it was all in the batter. She took a big, doughy bite of one of her own puff-puffs and declared that she thought hers were better anyway (and they were!), privately wishing that she and Shivs hadn’t agreed to call off the cat’s cradle contest. When Shivs followed Jess’s dad into the kitchen, cheerfully patting the marbles in her pockets and demanding “one of those puffy things,” Dulcie and Jess both rushed forward with their plates, covertly elbowing each other out of the way as Shivs looked from one plate to the other. Jess’s heart sank as she sniffed appreciatively at the air above Dulcie’s plate and said to her, “Yours are all nice and fluffy,” before she picked up one of Jess’s flatter, darker ones with a chipped-toothed grin. Her sleeve was rolled up from her marbles match, and a bit of the blue-and-white friendship bracelet that Jess had made her was showing.

“Ohhhh,” Dulcie had just begun to complain when Jess’s dad leaned forward and scooped up one of hers, saying with a wink, “Sorry, Jess, but I just can’t resist Dulcie’s.”

That night, Jess wrapped the covers around herself on the floor mattress farthest from the bed, Dulcie having after all bagged her bed and Siobhan the mattress in between. They had just finished a box of Cadbury’s Roses and a bumper bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps smuggled in by Shivs, whose skill for procuring chocolate seemed to grow in direct proportion to the severity with which she was forbidden it. Dulcie, having been, to Jess’s great satisfaction, knocked out of the clapping-game competition, had adjudicated the outcome of the final round: two-person Hanky Panky, Shivs versus Jess, which Shivs won. Dulcie was now complaining in the dark, a sleepy monotone diatribe. Shivs was fast asleep with her face turned into the pillow. Jess, too, was on the edge of sleep, Dulcie’s voice swimming in her ears.

As Jess’s eyes flickered shut for longer and longer periods of time, she began to hear an underworld of sound beneath the normal one of Shivs’s regular breathing and the thin whine that she always heard in her ears when she concentrated too hard on hearing. There was something else: faint at first, but stronger and stranger the more she listened for it. It was some sound stuck between the echo of bongo drums and the sound of something (a stone?) rattling inside an empty space, a hollow space, throbbing and clicking until she feared that it would shake the ground. Fighting the paralysis of sleep, she struggled to sit up, but when she did the sound chased itself away into the dark, leaving only a profound silence, like being under water. Jess stared around the room, watching the shapes of things in the shadows, then lay back down again, only to spring up, terrified, when Dulcie raised her head and gave a sharp scream from her bed.

“TILLYTILLY,” Jess shouted before she could stop herself, scrambling up and jumping forward onto the bed.

Dulcie was quivering under the covers, but she was alone, and all right. She seemed to be all right. Jess’s mum appeared at the door and put the light on.

“What happened?”

Dulcie, wide-eyed and pale-faced, looked into Jess’s pleading eyes, gulped hard then looked away and gave a shaky laugh followed by a more genuine, rueful one.

“Nothing, Aunt Sarah. I’m sorry. I just thought something touched me.”

When Jess’s mum had gone, Dulcie sat bolt upright in the bed and asked in a dramatic stage whisper, “All right, so which one of you crawled over and pinched my foot?”

Silence.

Jess and Shivs looked at each other in the dark, Jess’s heart pounding so hard that she thought she might be sick.

Oh, TillyTilly, leave her alone, please, please.

“Come on, just tell me! Whichever one of you it was, your hand was SO cold! I thought it was a dead person or something—” Dulcie’s voice had grown tentative, and she was now kneeling up on the bed, peering at them.

Shivs started giggling helplessly. “It was me,” she spluttered. “I was only pretending to be asleep! Sorry, Dulcie, but your foot! It was just THERE, waiting to be pinched!”

The wave of relief that washed over Jess had such force she was dizzied and nearly rolled off her mattress.

“You two are SUCH scaredy-cats! Your faces!” Shivs continued, as Jess plucked helplessly at her covers, trying to rein in her laughter as she sent a mental apology to TillyTilly.

“Well, ha ha,” Dulcie said crossly, and lay back down.

“Jess.” Shivs flicked Jess’s face. “Your cousin’s all right, you know.”

On Sunday morning, a while after Shivs and Dulcie had left, Jess was sitting on the kitchen floor listening to the strong, riotous rhythms of Ebenezer Obey and His International Brothers as they leapt through “Bisi Cash Madam.” The singing, which was in Yoruba anyway and so incomprehensible to Jess, was nowhere near as good as the actual music, which was dancing in Jess’s head and making her want to get up and run up and down the room. It was like a beat jumping inside her, telling her something fun, but she couldn’t get up because her mum, smelling of the palm oil that they’d eaten with yam that morning, was cornrowing her hair in preparation for school tomorrow. She wriggled impatiently, wishing she’d never asked for cornrows now, as her mum’s fingers raked globules of hair food through her hair before plaiting it firmly and a little painfully to her scalp. Her mum tapped her on the shoulder with the comb that she held between her teeth, and Jess knew that that meant to keep still. She groaned and resisted the temptation to put her hand up to her head to feel the amount of unplaited hair left — it would only end up feeling as if there were still loads and loads left to do. Her father wasn’t even there to amuse her by reading aloud unusual stories from The Observer . He was still in bed, pleading exhaustion. This had gone uncommented on by Sarah, who was in a good mood anyway and had started playing one of King Sunny Ade’s albums on the cassette player as soon as she’d woken up. Jess and her father could only conclude that all was well with the book.