Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

(a gift — yours if you want it)

he closed his eyes fully, as if she had said nothing at all.

Jess moved nearer to his face and touched his slackened skin with her other hand; she wasn’t ready to let go of his hand yet. In contrast to the rest of his face, his closed eyelids were stretched in a swollen tautness. What was happening to his features? He breathed as if he were sleeping, but there was a wakeful fever-sickness in the occasional, involuntary-seeming twitch of his mouth.

Suddenly, he sighed gustily, sending her heart into a startled convulsion.

“Jess, I’m sorry.”

She let his fingers slip out of her grasp and said, overloudly, “Sorry?”

Slowly, slowly, his hand went to his forehead, but he missed his face and his fingers brushed jerkily against the headboard as if the limb had fallen out of control.

Jess watched in horror: no one could tell her that it was going to be OK — this wasn’t her father at all, it was a thing, slurred of speech, emptied, inside out, outside in, by two girls, one of whom could bring seven years’ bad luck in a razor-edged shatter of a looking glass. Had Tilly taken something from him that made him forget where and who he was and put him in some other place, alone?

“Daddy! What happened to you?”

“So tired.”

“Daddy—”

“Fell. Down far. .”

Her skin tingled at his words; he sounded younger than she did.

“Far?” she whispered.

“Tired. Sorry, Jess. Be better later.”

Jess wanted to touch his hand again, but she didn’t dare— there was no reassurance there, the hand wasn’t his. Moving away now and crossing the room to leave, she could almost hear TillyTilly whispering to her

(he’ll never hit you again, Jessy)

and in despair, she wished aloud, past caring whether he heard, that she’d got angry at her mum instead. Why hadn’t she got angry with her before? Because she was scared of her? But couldn’t you be angry with people that you were scared of? No, it was her dad’s fault: he shouldn’t have changed the way he had, he shouldn’t have looked at her like that—

“Put on the lights,” her father said from the bed, his voice suddenly alert. The childish note of command in his voice made her jump to the light switch faster than his normal, gentle request would have. But—

“No, not those lights,” he whispered, in his own voice now.

“Oh.”

Jess turned the light off again and slunk away to her own room, wanting to disappear.

Jess had expected TillyTilly to come again in the night, and so approached sleep as an extension of the concentration that she put into going into her safe place. Although sleeping, always she was aware of sound and movement, so when she felt TillyTilly in the room, knocking on her dreams, she stayed still.

When TillyTilly said and did nothing, she cracked open one eye to find that circles of orange light were flickering in the corner of her room by the window, and TillyTilly was sitting cross-legged in the middle of them with her head bowed and her back to Jess. Rows of candles, her mother’s tea lights. Jess’s breath caught in her throat and she almost sat up, fearing that her curtains would be set alight, but then she saw, facing her, the charcoal-on-board drawing from the Boys’ Quarters, lit up by the stolen fire. She hadn’t seen it for so long, and it still scared her; it wasn’t like the ibeji woman at all. The picture really was badly drawn: childishly drawn, in fact, unnerving and somehow vital in the thick and careless sweeping of black. It was wrong, all wrong, and wild. TillyTilly had drawn it herself, for herself, and Jess’s mind reeled at this, tried to reject it, then could only cry out, “TillyTilly!” (I’m so sorry, sorry for you, TillyTilly, you really are alone.) But as soon as she spoke, the candles were gone and so was the board, and so was TillyTilly.

“You’re dead,” Jess said to the empty, lightless corner, “aren’t you?”

Saturday morning. “TillyTilly,” Jess said to the air in her bedroom. She was half in and half out of the room, just about to leave it as she looped one end of her skipping rope around her arm. “Shivs is coming over. .”

After a brief pause, TillyTilly said, “Yeah? Well, I hope you have fun.”

Jess looked around, waiting for Tilly to materialise, and when she didn’t, said, “Just don’t DO anything, OK?”

“I won’t.”

There had been a truce between them for the past few days; partly because Jess realised that she couldn’t make TillyTilly go away no matter how hard she tried, and partly because of Tilly and the candles. Getting people for Jess was supposed to be how TillyTilly stopped herself from being alone, but she didn’t seem to understand the irrevocability of the getting . Jess’s father hadn’t shown much improvement or been able to go to work for the past week, and Jess had been certain that someone would turn to her and ask her what she had done — Tilly’s mark on him was so obvious to her. Instead, the word “depression” had frequently been said in low tones when her mother and Aunt Lucy thought that Jess was out of earshot, and her father’s mantra seemed to have become, “So tired. Be better later.” All he did was sleep, and sometimes sit in the sitting room for an hour or so, unspeaking, watching television with an empty expression before going back to bed. And he was eating hardly anything. How could this have anything to do with something normal? Only Tilly could do it, and it seemed that Tilly didn’t know how to make it better. “I’m sorry, Jess,” she had said, over and over, hugging her, when Jess had come upstairs with the report that her mother was asleep on the sofa with her mouth half open and a pen slipping slowly out of her fingers. Tilly didn’t need to remind Jess that she only got people on Jess’s instruction, and Jess knew that the fact she could never remember being angry enough for that meant only that she didn’t want to remember.

Shivs didn’t understand when she said that her father’s being ill was her fault.

“It’s not,” she said confidently, her curls flying as she skipped on the spot with her neon-pink rope. “When you said that before, I asked my dad what was wrong with your dad, and he said it’s something that he can. . thingie — overcome.”

Jess had purposely guided Shivs away from the empty bench that was her and Tilly’s favourite, leading her instead to the swings. “That depression thing?” she asked.

Shivs shook her head impatiently and caught her breath.

“Dunno. Listen, how silly is it that you think you did it? Think about it. . duh!”

Jess dropped her skipping rope and tried to think how to tell Shivs that it was TillyTilly without saying it aloud.

“Ummm, Shivs?”

Her friend had just counted twelve uninterrupted skips and now stopped, beaming.

“What?”

“Actually, nothing.”

Walking around to the back of Jess’s swing snickering, Shivs gave her a hard push, and Jess gasped laughingly as she rocked upwards.

“You know your friend TillyTilly?” Shivs asked, when Jess’s swing had slowed.

“Yeah. .”

“Does she still hang around with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Does she still scare you?”

That was a little bit more difficult. In some ways it was an enormous yes, in others, no.

Shivs breezed on despite Jess’s lack of reply.

“Anyways, I was wondering if I could meet her. But then I remembered you said she only comes in the room when it’s just you two—”

“She’s started coming in when other people are there too, like once with my dad and once in my classroom,” Jess interjected quickly. Why had she said that? Did she really think that she could risk TillyTilly meeting Shivs? She supposed she was curious.