Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“So, what. . d’you think you can get her to come in the room when I’m there?” Shivs casually rippled the end of her skipping rope across the grass, as if playing a one-woman game of Colours.

Jess already knew the answer to that. She dragged her feet across the ground as she pushed the swing backwards.

“She’ll come only if she wants to.” Then: “Is this because you don’t believe me about TillyTilly?”

Shivs got on to the swing beside Jess.

“Nooo,” she said slowly. “It’s just I was thinking about her a lot, and I was wondering if she was, you know. . nice.”

“She can be! Nice people aren’t nice all the time!”

“Yeah, but, you know. .” Shivs trailed off, unable to put into words what she was thinking.

After they’d foraged for their own lunch in the kitchen, Jess looked in the sitting room to see if either her mother or father was down there. Her father was a slumped figure on the sofa, his hand on top of the remote but not pressing any buttons as advertisements reeled across the television screen. Shivs stayed politely outside the door while Jess bolted in to pick up the cold cup of coffee that she knew would be at his feet. There was a delicate, shrivelled skin over the top of it that Jess broke with the spoon, trying to estimate how much he’d drunk this time. Darkly dried coffee circles told her that he’d had maybe two, three sips. He didn’t look at her, didn’t seem aware that his daughter was there, standing in front of him.

“Daddy, shall I pour the rest away for you?” Jess was trying to reassure herself with the fact that her dad never finished his coffee, anyway — if she didn’t pour this cold brown liquid down the drain, then he would do it, standing over the kitchen sink watching it swirl hotly away. She waited for him to speak.

He still didn’t look at her, but when the advert for Coco Pops had finished, he nodded. “Thank you.”

Carrying the cup carefully in her hands, Jess passed Shivs and poured the coffee down the kitchen sink. Shivs, who followed her, watched in silence. Jess put the cup down in the sink, then changed her mind and washed it, dried it, put it back with the other coffee cups so it wouldn’t be lonely.

“Where’s your mum?” Shivs asked.

Jess dried her hands on a napkin and beckoned Shivs upstairs. “She’s probably in her study.” She was writing far, far more than she used to, and was crabbier about being interrupted.

Jess’s dad had apparently decided to go back to bed again and was shuffling dreamily up the stairs ahead of them. They couldn’t overtake him: the staircase wasn’t wide enough. Jess was embarrassed and shot an apologetic sideways look at Shivs, but Shivs only grinned at her before grabbing her arm and starting to give her a Chinese burn that meant they had to stop on the stairs for a few seconds anyway, involved in a hushed, giggling scuffle. When they finally made it to Jess’s bedroom, Shivs swung the door shut as if it was her own, kicked her buckle shoes off under Jess’s desk with a whoop and took a running leap at Jess’s bed, only landing by luck. Jess cringed and, more sedately, sat on the chair at her desk, pausing to reach underneath and put Shivs’s shoes neatly side by side so that she wouldn’t have to scrabble to find them. Shivs picked up The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll from Jess’s bedside and flicked through it, finding the place where The Hunting of the Snark had been bookmarked.

“Hmmm. A snark, hey,” she said before dumping the book on Jess’s pillow and bouncing excitedly up and down. “So, let me see TillyTilly!”

“She’s not seeing me,” TillyTilly warned, from outside the bedroom door.

Jess jumped and looked at Shivs, who was repeating her earlier demand and didn’t seem to have heard anything. Jess went to the door and leaned against it, murmuring pleadingly to the girl that she knew was on the other side.

“Please, TillyTilly, just for a minute,” she begged.

“Is that her?” Shivs toppled off the bed and started coming towards Jess, but was waved back.

TillyTilly gave a sigh.

“Fine. Just for a minute, but she can’t look at me, she has to turn around.”

“No, don’t do it, then,” said Jess, “if you’re not going to do it properly. What’s the point of that? How’s she even going to know you’re there?”

“She’ll know.”

“How?”

TillyTilly said nothing.

Jess chewed on her lip, agitating over how this would work out, then spun around to face Shivs, who was now sitting at the foot of the bed in hushed, expectant silence.

“Listen,” she began, “TillyTilly’s being all shy for some reason, so she doesn’t want you to look at her. So, um, could you close your eyes and put your hands over them?”

Shivs looked surprised, but obliged. “Is she ugly or something?” she enquired, wriggling in her place.

“No! I don’t know why she’s—”

TillyTilly opened the door and came in, closing the door behind her again. She looked at Shivs, then looked at Jess giving a wide-armed shrug. Shivs was now completely still.

“That wasn’t you opening and shutting the door, was it, Jess?” Shivs said in a low voice.

Jess shook her head no, then remembered that Shivs couldn’t see her.

“It wasn’t me, it was TillyTilly,” she explained.

“Come here and put your hand on my head,” Shivs ordered.

Jess moved across and placed her hand on Shiv’s tumbled head of hair.

“All right, now tell TillyTilly to do it again. Open and close the door, I mean.”

TillyTilly shook her head belligerently, and made an exaggerated bored expression, but went back over to the door when Jess looked at her pleadingly and nodded her on. She opened the door and slammed it shut.

“Oh,” Shivs said wonderingly. “Oh.”

“You two better stop slamming that door,” Jess’s mum shouted from next door.

Shivs giggled at that. “You three, more like,” she said.

Jess took her hand away from Siobhan’s head and moved back again.

“Can I talk to her?” Shivs asked.

TillyTilly shook her head at Jess, waving her hands violently to indicate that she would not be persuaded on this one.

“She doesn’t want to talk,” Jess told Shivs. How rubbish was this?

“Oh,” Shivs said, sounding crestfallen before coming up with another idea. “Will she come and sit beside me?”

Jess looked at TillyTilly, who held up a finger to her to indicate that she shouldn’t say anything, then began walking in a wide circle around Shivs, noiselessly climbing up onto the bed and jumping down again when she had to walk behind her. She was looking at Shivs carefully, unsmiling, almost grim-faced. Jess, watching, was briefly worried that TillyTilly might break her promise and do something, but she showed no sign of any such intention.

Siobhan was struck by how cold she felt, but it was a constantly moving coldness, sometimes giving way to normal air, as if it was expanding all around her. She feared that it might tighten, and she longed to rub her arms, but didn’t dare drop them in case she saw TillyTilly. She didn’t want to see her at all: from the moment that Tilly had come into the room, Shivs had felt a. . badness . It was the only way to describe it: it was like being sick and hearing rattling in your ears that wasn’t really there; it was slow, bottomless, soundless, creeping. . and it wasn’t just inside her stomach, but inside her head as well, slowly building in pressure. She’d had to make sure that she wasn’t imagining it, she’d needed the security of Jess’s touch to ensure that she wasn’t alone in the room with this. . thing. This was not another girl. This was not the kind of imaginary friend that you’d mistakenly sit on. She was a cycle of glacial ice.