Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

Jess was light, light light-headed with fear.

“Mummy,” she said, impatiently shrugging off Sarah’s attentions with the towel as she was led out of the bathroom, “You have to believe me! I didn’t do it! It was TillyTilly—”

Then she stopped, confused, and said nothing more.

Her mother’s eyes grew wide and fast-blinking, the lashes trembling.

“So TillyTilly came here tonight and decided to break something again, hey?”

Sarah handed the towel to Daniel and started down the stairs to fetch the dustpan and brush. She needed to change from slippers into shoes as well.

Jess’s dad now took his turn. “Jess—”

Jess wriggled away from him and started back to the bathroom.

Despair. Despair. It was as if they were all on Tilly’s side, determined that Jess be blamed for something that she didn’t even know she’d done. She could see Tilly’s plan, and she could see that it was going to be one long line of TROUBLE until she didn’t want to be Jess anymore.

Desperately she said, “You don’t believe me! Well, OK, I’ll clear it up. It’s my fault, anyway — I made all this mess!”

Restraining her, Daniel tugged Jess out of the way as Sarah, looking clownlike in a pair of his black boots, reentered the bathroom, clicking her tongue at the extent of the sprayed glass. Jess kicked hysterically, hearing the rasping sound beginning in the back of her throat, the one that preceded a screaming fit.

Jess’s father picked her right up, and both of them saw a nerve tighten near Sarah’s jaw. But she bent over and steadily began to sweep the shards of glass into the dustpan, shaking the brush every now and again to dislodge shining specks.

Jess made one last blind swipe at the bathroom floor, her arms spinning around in an attempt to break free from her father’s hold, then she yelped as glass spiked the top of her palm, and a bead of blood sprang from an area on her palm just below her middle finger. She stopped struggling and stared at it, fascinated.

“Oh God, Jess!” Her father sat her on the top step of the staircase and took her hand, inspecting it, but Jess snatched it back and held her hand up before her face, gazing absorbedly at the cut.

So now she bled, when the skin wouldn’t lift from her hands before.

She let out a low whine and rocked back and forth, and her father (go away, GO AWAY) tried to take her hand back in his.

Sarah had dropped her dustpan and brush and was repeating, “Daniel, you’ll need to get some disinfectant and some cotton wool—”

Jess looked up from the cut, and stopped them both in their tracks.

There must have been something in her gaze that held them both so stiff, but she didn’t care.

Sarah shrank back, murmuring, “Jess, what is it?”

“Shut up!” Jess fired back, cradling her hand at her chest. “Shut up! It’s all your stupid fault anyway. You don’t believe me, just when I need you to—”

“Daniel, get the disinfectant,” Sarah said steadily. She and Jess were staring at each other.

Jess couldn’t stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she’d be scraped hollow. She didn’t like saying these things, but she didn’t know how to stop.

She wanted to stop.

Her mother was holding on to the top of the banister as if preparing to flee, only not yet.

“You hate me, anyway! You want to hit me when I scream just because YOU got hit! She wouldn’t BE here if it wasn’t for YOU—”

Daniel stayed stock-still, his eyes fixed. Jess was spilling over, spewing out words. (Daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy)

“And it’s all YOUR FAULT about Fern! You think it’s your fault, and it is, it is, it is!”

Jess’s voice had escalated to some peak of dark satisfaction, and Sarah winced and closed her own eyes with a slight shaky nod of something like acceptance. But it was Jessamy’s eyes, like cold hard stones, like the girl that Fern would have been, that made Daniel start forward, carpet slipping under his feet, and wildly strike out almost before he knew what he was doing, hitting his daughter with such force that she jerked backwards with a whole-body snap.

“DON’T talk to your mother like that,” he yelled, looking neither at Sarah nor at Jess. His voice wobbled on the last few words.

Her mother put her arms around Jess and gently touched her cheek, rubbing the spot that hurt.

“Disinfectant,” Daniel said, slowly heading down the stairs.

Jess stared, bewildered, after him, feeling tides turning in her stomach. Everything, everything had crossed over in the spin of a second.

Jess went to sleep nursing the cut on her hand. She kept thinking about the peculiar (whiteblanket) feeling that had overwhelmed her when she screamed at her mother. Had TillyTilly been the glass that cut her? Not only that, but the way her father had looked at her: horrified, repulsed, she could see it over and over again.

So now they both hated her, they were a group of two. Well, fine, she hated them too. But she couldn’t help weeping a little when she remembered that now she didn’t even have TillyTilly anymore.

She fell asleep for a little while, but woke up when TillyTilly appeared.

“Oh, Jess,” TillyTilly laughed, spinning in circles, her arms out. She was hiccupping and giggling, then suddenly suppressing tears, the dimensions of her face stretching impossibly so that her eyes were like long, pale, luminous slits in the night. “You’re afraid of me! It’s changing us! Stop. .” She gave a raucous whoop.

The air was condensing; it was the only way to describe what was happening — there was a sort of mist, a palpability, an elusive smell like madness. Jess knew with all the certainty of childhood that her bed was a haven from which she must not stray. She must beware, because TillyTilly was no longer safe.

Had she ever been?

The very fabric of TillyTilly was stretching, pulling apart, a brown cycle of skin and eyes and voice whipping around Jess and the bed in ever-decreasing circles.

Jess dropped onto her hands and knees, curling herself up closer to the bedclothes. It was dark with her eyes open, dark with them closed. She could smell Tilly’s skin. The leafy pomade had intensified into a wet, rotting vegetation smell. Could she call for her mother, who was a wall’s thickness away? Candles burned, and on the outside of Tilly’s circle of tea lights, Jess knew that the terrible, beautiful, long-armed woman would be there, setting the air humming with her presence, looking on.

“Ohhhh,” Jess whispered. She could feel shadows falling, cold across her. “Ohhh. . please, please, don’t let this be happening. I want this not to be real. I want this not to be. .”

TillyTilly laughed then, and the room (and the bed) seemed to Jess to tilt sickeningly from side to side.

Tilly is trying to shake me off the bed.

Clutching the sides of her bed so hard that one of her nails bent inwards over itself, Jess gave a sharp cry and forced herself to open her eyes, blinking away the wetness that filled them. The room was dim and still, filled with a bitter smoky smell, but no one was there.

The door. . but the door was too far away.

too. .

far. .

away. .

“I’m only little, Jessy.” The voice came from above her, a high, lilting, singsong voice that sounded younger than TillyTilly’s normal voice. “Just a little girl. Nothing more. Do you find it hard to believe? I thought you wanted to be like me? That’s your problem! You always want to know where you belong, but you don’t need to belong. Do you? DO YOU?”

Jess did not look up or give any indication that she had heard, even though her stomach was heaving and she could taste the bitter bile juice at the back of her mouth.