Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“You really need to hate people,” TillyTilly continued.

Pause.

“You deserve to.”

Then something began to drip slowly onto Jess’s back, so slowly that she almost didn’t feel it until she felt the cloth of her pyjamas cling and stick to her back. She nearly put her fingers to the wet patch, but, with enormous effort, lay still, her eyes wide and watchful. She felt as if her mind was slipping away from her, soaring so high that she would not be able to reclaim it. If only the liquid, whatever it was, wasn’t so very hot, so hot that it numbed her skin and felt freezing cold.

How can this not be over?

TillyTilly was still speaking, and Jess, unmoving, allowed the words to drift in and out of the air around her. Whatever happened, she would not leave this bed.

“Go on, Jessy, hate everyone, anyone, and I’ll get them for you,” TillyTilly screeched. “The whole world. We’re twins, both of us, twins. Doesn’t that mean something?” Then, more hesistantly: “Jess. Help me. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m scared.”

But Jess didn’t respond. TillyTilly was a liar. She said it didn’t matter about belonging, but it did.

“Land chopped in little pieces, and — ideas! These ideas! Disgusting. . shame, shame, shame. It’s all been lost. Ashes. Nothing, now, there is no one. You understand?”

TillyTilly’s voice, changing in timbre, beginning to sound like an adult woman’s now, carried on unstoppably: “There is no homeland.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, TillyTilly,” Jess whispered. But there was no pause in the rant, and by now the dripping had increased in flow to a thin yet steady torrent. Jess did not, could not and would not look up. She must be spared, she must not be touched.

“Do you suffer through making your own suffer?” Tilly raged. “And then our blood. . spilt like water. . like water for the drinking, for the washing. . our blood. . I’m a WITNESS. Twins should know what each other suffer!”

The flow seemed to have stopped. Hardly knowing what she was doing, Jess turned her head to the side, and then looked upwards, slowly, slowly, holding her breath, already crying because now she knew that she didn’t want to close this gap between seeing and being seen—

“There is no homeland — there is nowhere where there are people who will not get you.”

Something hanging upside down from the ceiling; face dangling a few centimetres away from hers; those pupils, dilated until there was no white; those enormous, swollen lips, almost cartoonish except that they were deepest black, encrusted with dead, dry skin, coated here and there with chunks of

(I don’t know, I don’t want to know, please don’t let me ever know, even guess)

something moist and pinky-white. .

The lips, which had paused, continued to move. Transfixed, she caught a glimpse as they moved over a small, mauve stump; the remains of a tongue .

“Stop looking to belong, half-and-half child. Stop. There is nothing; there is only me, and I have caught you.”

And it was only at this point that Jess began to scream, long and loud, as the silent, never-ending torrent of reddish black erupted from that awful mouth, and engulfed her, baptising her in its madness.

The worst thing was that it was all really happening.

“Two of me. No, us. TillyTilly, JessJess, FernFern, but that’s three. TillyTilly and JessFern? Or FernJess?” Jess, sitting upright, was mumbling questions to herself in the streaming daylight from her window. She was perched on the end of her bed, pushing her book bag across the floor with her foot. “Who are you, TillyTilly? You know, you know.” She had a dry feeling at the back of her throat from being hungry and thirsty and not quite daring to go down to breakfast despite repeated irritated calls from her mother. Before this she had washed quickly, expecting the silent, silvery taps to jet forth sprays of water, but they hadn’t. She’d brushed her teeth and put on her school dress and cardigan before carefully reaffixing her hair beads all by herself. She hadn’t had the bathroom mirror to do it in and had had to use the little swing mirror on her desk to do the beads. And now her thoughts turned to TillyTilly, who was fragmenting and becoming double, and how she, Jess, was to keep herself safe from everyone.

There was a knock on her closed bedroom door.

“Jess, can I come in?” her father said from outside.

Jess leant from the bed and scooped up her book bag, clutching it to her before saying, “Yeah.”

Daniel, dressed for work in suit and tie, put his head around the door. He looked surprised. Jess aimed a kick in his direction. Had he expected her to be lying in bed poorly, her laboured breathing and pink-tinged eyes an indication in themselves that she would be unable to go to school that day?

Instead Jess was vertical and fully dressed, quiet, with her chin resting on her chest as she stared absently at the floor, swinging her legs, which were in high white socks and ended in black lace-up shoes for the cold weather.

“Listen, Jess. Yesterday, you behaved appallingly towards your mother.”

No response visible or audible from her.

“True or false?”

Finally: “True.”

“Right. You behaved badly, but I didn’t mean to hit you as hard as I did, or even hit you. You know that.” (Yeah, right.)

“Your mother’s forgotten all about it, and I want to as well. Can’t we make up?”

Jess nodded because she knew she had to, and grudgingly offered her father a handshake, which he somehow turned into a swift hug. As she wrinkled her nose at his change of aftershave, she also became aware of how glad she was that it was morning. She didn’t think that she could bear another night of Tilly-tricks all alone.

“Should I say sorry to Mummy?” she asked into her dad’s shoulder.

Daniel let Jess go and chucked her under the chin. He smiled.

“Probably.”

Jess was forced out of her safe place by the shock of Colleen McLain’s voice. And when she looked at Colleen, who was viewing her with a mixture of concern and glee, she also saw TillyTilly, who was really, impossibly, here in the classroom, sitting opposite her at the table.

“Hello again,” TillyTilly said in a conversational tone once Jess had allowed herself one frightened glance in that direction. “I really am sorry about before, and I’ll make it up to you! I don’t even want to swap places anymore, honest!”

Jess twisted away in her seat and looked instead at Colleen.

“What?” Colleen half stretched out a hand with a small, confused intake of breath, and Jess was disgusted to find that her eyes were filled with tears from being so frightened of Tilly. She rubbed at her eyes hard with her knuckles, and Colleen chewed disgustingly on her hair and stared at her with those narrowed brown eyes before asking, “So, what, shall I get Miss or not?”

“Don’t,” Jess told her hastily, as across from her TillyTilly said, “I understand, you know, why you hate him worse than her now. It’s worse when they’re always nice and then they change like that.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Jess hissed, hands to her ears again, then let out a little sob before she realised that Colleen hadn’t gone away, but was still hovering.

Colleen paused, then pulled out the chair beside TillyTilly, shielding Jess from the view of Sam Robinson and company, who were now beginning to look over.

“Look. What are you telling me to shut up for? I wasn’t even being nasty,” Colleen began heatedly; then, when Jessamy didn’t reply, she locked her fingers together and lowered her voice. “Why are you crying? Jessamy, you shouldn’t cry in front of people, seriously.”