Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“That’s a bit cool, you know,” she said thoughtfully, before tiptoeing to the bedroom door and putting her ear against it to make sure that they weren’t being listened to. “So she only talks to you when no one else is there?”

Jess, sitting cross-legged on Shivs’s neatly made bed (the only tidy thing in the room), gazed at her best friend in fixed astonishment.

“You don’t think I’ve gone mad?”

Shivs shook her head and yawned, running her hand through the curly tangles of her hair until she inadvertently made them stand upright like a brush. Jess stifled a giggle and decided to leave her that way.

“Nah. . you’re not mad, and you’re not one of those stupid kids who have imaginary friends just for something to do. This girl called Gemma. . in my class. . she used to have some imaginary friend called Katy. Katy, y’know! Not even something like TillyTilly and all the time she was like ‘You can’t sit there. . Katy’s sitting there,’ but sometimes she’d forget Katy was supposed to be there and sit there herself, the plum!” She laughed, and Jess, astounded to hear this brief account of something so far from her own experience, fell back on to the bed laughing herself. Shivs came over and dropped onto her knees at the bedside, settling herself before saying, “And Gemma wasn’t scared of Katy.”

Jess sat up, her face serious now. “I didn’t say I was scared of Tilly!” (She was.)

Shivs lay flat on her back, then sprang up, hands out, eyes wild as she imitated Jess on the night when Shivs and Dulcie had slept over, shouting out “TILLYTILLY!” in the dark. Then she fell back on to the floor, laughing, but Jess couldn’t join in. She hadn’t known that she’d looked like that. She was embarrassedly gulping back tears again, and Shivs sprang up again and climbed onto the bed, putting an arm around her shoulder, pressing her cheek to Jess’s.

“Oi, if I had a friend who kept appearing and disappearing and got my teacher, I’d be a little bit scared that they’d get me, too! So listen, what is TillyTilly? I mean, is she dead or something?”

Alarmed, Jess stared upwards at the skylight before replying, almost as if she’d expected TillyTilly to be there, her thin limbs and body pressed flat against the glass, her face a squashed smudge with malevolent eyes, mouth moving in promises to get them. Shivs, laughing, glanced up too, and they looked at each other, smiling, while Jess spoke, Shivs pretending to wipe sweat off her forehead.

“I don’t know what she is. . she said that I do know! But I think she’s wrong, because I have no idea.”

“Maybe she’s your sister, the one who died.” Shivs thoughtfully blew the hair out of her eyes.

“No. . I don’t think so somehow. I mean, why would she be at my grandfather’s house? I don’t know, actually.”

“Or maybe your mum had a twin that died?”

Jess looked doubtful.

Shivs shook her head in wonder. “I can’t believe that was her on the phone!”

“You think I’m lying about that?”

“No, but. . well, it didn’t sound any different from you, not even a very little bit.”

“That’s because she kind of made me say it—”

“Yeah? How?”

“I don’t know. .”

Shivs grimaced. “Do you still want to hang around with her, this girl?”

Jess didn’t have a chance to reply because Mrs. McKenzie knocked on the door and put her head around it, speaking urgently. “Jessamy, you have to go home now.”

Jess couldn’t understand the note of worry in her voice, but she got up quickly, saying to Shivs, “Don’t tell anyone—”

“I promise!” Shivs licked her finger. “See this wet, see this dry, man!”

Jess’s mum was outside the door with Mrs. McKenzie. As soon as Jess came out, she put a hand on her shoulder and began guiding her hurriedly down the stairs, calling out goodbye and “We’ll let ourselves out” to Mrs. McKenzie. She was breathing hard in a fast, flustered way, and Jess looked up at her before seizing her hand and squeezing it for reassurance.

“Mummy, what’s the matter?”

Her mother looked at her with a look of trying to place her in context, as if she’d only just remembered that Jess was there, and now who she was.

“Daddy’s ill. He’s in hospital, Jess. We’re going to get a taxi to go and see him.”

That was when Jess remembered, too too late, that TillyTilly had said she was going to get Daniel Harrison. She didn’t want this to be her fault, but she knew that it was— (TillyTilly, don’t make my dad die for being scared of me.)

“Ill? Ill how?”

Alarmed by her daughter’s trembling, Sarah reached out from amidst her own shock and squeezed both of her daughter’s hands to calm her. She hoped that Jess wasn’t going to faint again; her lips seemed drained of colour.

“I don’t know yet, Jess. Apparently he collapsed at work.”

Jess knew that if she could picture her father, she could hold him in her mind and make him be alive and make him be all right, but everything about him had dissipated — once he had fallen out of the line of her sight, she couldn’t properly remember what it was like when he had been there.

They didn’t know what had happened to Jess’s father, and they didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but he had been “well” enough to be discharged from his overnight observational stay that morning.

Yet as soon as Jess got home from school, even before, she knew what was the matter with him: it was TillyTilly. Tilly’s verdant, earthy smell clung to him in clumps, but instead of making him light and fast-moving like she was, it dragged Daniel’s arms, legs and head down so that he moved more slowly and deliberately than he had before, as if everything lay just out of his reach. He looked up infrequently, lethargically pushing at his glasses when they started slipping down his nose instead of just raising his head. He kept saying that he was tired, so tired, but his voice was so uninflected that it seemed that he didn’t even mean it. It was difficult to tell what he was thinking, or whether he was too tired to think at all.

Jess’s mum had told her on the way home from school that the first thing her father had done when he returned from the hospital was to go to bed, leaving her to call his work, Aunt Lucy and Jess’s grandparents to let them know that he was back home. He hadn’t got up since then, and Sarah was worried that they might have given him some drug at the hospital that was having an adverse side effect. This probably meant that Jess’s grandma would be over later that evening with some chicken-and-barley soup. The phone was ringing as they came through the door; Jess dropped her book bag, kicked off her shoes without undoing the laces and ran upstairs, glad that her mother was too busy answering the phone to tell her not to bother her father, or to follow her upstairs. She had wondered if she would find TillyTilly there, had braced herself for Tilly to be guarding the door to the bedroom, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t there at all. It seemed she’d known that this time Jess would demand an answer. . and a remedy.

Her father lay as immobile as a column beneath the covers, which he had pulled up over his head. His back was to the door, and his oblong-framed, steel-rimmed glasses were on the bedside table beside the lamp.

Jess crept closer and touched the glasses for reassurance before she gingerly put a hand on his shoulder. “Daddy?”

“Mmmm.” He didn’t turn over. She moved around to the other side of the bed so that she could see his half-open eyes looking over and past her, towards the window. Could he SEE her?

“Daddy.” She tugged fearfully at his hand, feeling the ice of Tilly’s skin as his fingers didn’t curl around hers in return. Instead, leaving his hand to her