Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

Sarah cheered a particularly good stretch of uninterrupted music — the high, plucking sound of the electric guitar weaved in with steady keyboard and drum notes — then she puffed her cheeks out in mild exasperation as the comb dropped out of her mouth.

Jess picked it up, but instead of taking it back, her mum kept plaiting and said, over the music, “Tell me something interesting about school.”

“School? Um.”

“What?”

Jess decided what to say and raised her voice so that Sarah could hear her properly.

“Ummmm. Well, at singing assembly there was this song about everyone being the same, and I can’t remember all of it, but some of it went: ‘Whether black or white skin / With a frown or a grin, / Well, the Lord loves us all just the same. .’ ”

“Hmmm,” said her mum. “The Lord, hey?”

Jess giggled. “Mummy, why don’t you like the Lord?”

Sarah began another plait.

“It’s not that I don’t like him, Jess. It’s just — hmmm. Was there a picture of the Lord on the song-slide? Was he by any chance a white hippie?”

Jess shrugged as carefully as she could so as not to disturb her mother’s busy hands.

“There wasn’t a picture of the Lord, actually. There was this picture of a black boy, and he was frowning, then there was a smiling white girl, and Nam Hong put his hand up and said, ‘Miss, that’s shabby, because it’s saying all black people are moany and all white people are happy.’ ”

She listened, smiling, as her mum made her strange, suppressed laughing sound. After a little while, partly to take her mind off the smarting of her scalp, Jess asked, “Why does it matter if Jesus was a white hippie?”

Her mum stopped plaiting and wiped her hands down on her jeans.

“Sometimes it can be hard to really love someone or something when you can’t see anything of yourself in them,” she said, turning Jess to face her. She lightly touched Jess’s mouth. “Jesus doesn’t have lips as big as yours, and his skin is fair. How can you ever be as good as him on the outside when there’s nothing of him in your face?”

“Because it doesn’t matter about faces?” Jess offered.

Her mother shook her head just once, looking a little bit sad for a moment.

“Peace to those who are far away, and peace to those who are near at hand,” she murmured.

Jess was confused.

“What?”

Sarah turned her daughter back around. “Nothing, Jess.” Jess became worried, and decided to abandon the line of thought. “If there was a black Jesus, he’d have to look like Grandfather,” she decided aloud instead, ignoring her mother’s shout of laughter.

When her father woke up, Jess joined him and her mother in the sitting room and lay on the floor in front of the television, trying to read Little Women . But she fell to thinking about Tilly. It seemed that the better friends Jess became with Shivs, the more questions she had about TillyTilly. Although she was used to Tilly’s disappearing and reappearing, her apparent knowledge of everything, and her ability to do anything she wanted, even make Jess invisible, Jess now wanted to know exactly what it meant for TillyTilly to be not “really really” there. And where her friend went to when she disappeared. These were all questions that she wouldn’t dare to ask TillyTilly.

Jess couldn’t exactly picture TillyTilly flying all the way over to Ibadan and back to the lonely Boys’ Quarters, although she supposed that she could if she wanted to. This led her, unexpectedly, to think of the base sound that she’d heard hidden beneath all the other ones last night, and how scared she’d been. She closed the book and laid her cheek against the tattered cover.

The phone rang, and Jess jumped up when her mum shouted from the hallway, “It’s for you, Jess!” She took the receiver and put Little Women down on the telephone table, on top of the Yellow Pages.

“Oi,” Shivs said, “we were supposed to tell scary stories last night, you know! I just found the torch in my bag.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know any scary stories anyways—”

“I bet you do! You read all those books!”

“Not scary ones.”

“Well, I know loads! OK, here’s one: There was this boy called Johnny, right—”

“Shiiiiivs!”

“And Johnny’s mum sent him to the market to buy a chicken leg—”

“Shhhhhh.”

Jess caught a movement from the corner of her eye and looked to see TillyTilly sitting on the bottom step of the staircase. Her hair appeared to have unravelled from her thick plaits and rose up in two puffs, just like before, in Nigeria. Jess waved at TillyTilly as Shivs kept talking, and Tilly gave Jess a quick smile before Jess turned back towards the telephone table and pleaded, “Shivs, you know I don’t like those stories!”

“All right, sorry,” Shivs said contritely, then: “Guess what! Martin went to Cornwall, and he saw a ghost!”

Jess was about to reply when what felt like a damp white sheet flew over her. Taking a few steps backwards, she flapped at the covering with one arm, floundering until she came to a standstill.

“Oi, Jess, I have to go in a minute,” Shivs was saying, and Jess was trying to speak into the phone but her fingers kept slipping through it until the curve of the receiver was suddenly solid again in her hand and the sheet had sucked into her skin so that she felt cold and taut. As if through rippling sheets of cloth, Jess heard herself sneering, “Don’t phone me again with your stupid stories, white girl.”

Shivs laughed. “Oi, Jess, you’re rude, y’know,” she said, then waited for Jess’s answering giggle.

She waited and waited while Jess’s lips moved silently, struggling to take back those TillyTilly-words. But before she could say Jess-words, Shivs had said stiffly, “Fine then,” and hung up.

The minute that she did, TillyTilly darted out from behind Jess and up the stairs in a gleeful streak of green-and-white school check. Jess, drained of energy and weak with fury, gripped the edge of the telephone table and listened for the sound of Tilly’s footsteps overhead before she scrambled after her up the stairs.

Jess was LARGE with her anger, gasping aloud as she stomped into the bathroom then kicked at the toilet door, looking for Tilly. She found her in her mum’s study, sitting on the chair before the switched-off computer.

“Get away from there,” Jess told her in a loud whisper. “My mum’s work’s on that!”

TillyTilly shrugged and stayed where she was.

“Why are you all angry?” she asked innocently, before Jess could get her words out properly. Why was she ANGRY?

“You — you upset Shivs! And she thinks it was ME!”

“It was you. You said it, didn’t you?” TillyTilly stuck out her tongue.

“How did you do that?” Jess cried, no longer making the effort to keep quiet.

TillyTilly only smiled.

Drawing closer, Jess jabbed a finger at her.

“Who ARE you, TillyTilly?”

“Your sister—” The corners of Tilly’s mouth had turned down now.

“What about before that?”

TillyTilly moved across the room so that she was standing almost nose to nose with Jess.

“You like HER better than me,” she glared, “or you wouldn’t be making such a stupid fuss.”

Jess completely lost her head at that, lost it like she never had before. Baring her teeth in a snarl, she pushed TillyTilly away from her so hard that she staggered.

“I DO like her better than you! So what! You’re mean, TillyTilly — so, so mean, even if you are clever! And you try to make me mean as well! It’s more like sisters with Shivs than it is with you—” She advanced on TillyTilly, who was now retreating backwards towards the computer, cowering somewhat. “And with Shivs, it’s safer!”