Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

(I wasn’t pretending to be someone else; it was TillyTilly dragging secret things out of me like she sometimes does. I didn’t choose TillyTilly, I just couldn’t say Titiola right. Really, truly, please believe me.)

Her father was passive and uninvolved, apparently unaware of TillyTilly’s now imaginary status in the household. Taking the opportunity of having him as a captive audience in the sitting room as he watched television — always the adverts; occasionally he smiled at some unknown or hidden element of them — Jess had told him of the problem of TillyTilly. She bit down her fear and risked her secret; she told her father that Tilly was real, and, barely even acknowledging it with a nod, he had told her in exchange that there was a very small person trapped in a space like this. (He held up his hands to describe a narrow box shape.)

The person was fast asleep.

Everything was colourless and slow because this small person was asleep, and nobody knew how to wake them up. They wouldn’t wake up because they didn’t really want to — it was too hard being awake. He asked her if she understood, but she had stared at his face, which was wet with tears even though his voice remained steady and low, and then she’d looked around the sitting room at all the colours and told him yes, she understood, because she wasn’t sure if he knew that it was Jess he was talking to, and anyway it was her fault, so she had to understand. The doctor had given him some special pills, but she never saw him take them. Once, when Jess was on the stairs and her parents were in the sitting room, she had heard her mum ask, “Please tell me what’s the matter, please. Is it work? Is it me?” but he only said, “No and no and no, no, no. I’m just tired. So tired. That’s all.”

It had been hardest not to talk to TillyTilly the previous night, when Tilly had said to her, “You’re angry, Jessy. You’re angry with Siobhan, she’s made it all worse and now you’re not allowed to speak to me in case I do something. But I’ll be good! I won’t do anything you don’t want me to!” The candles had been placed all around Jess’s bed, and TillyTilly had been talking from behind the big wooden board with the long-armed woman on it. Jess couldn’t see Tilly’s face, but she could see her arms supporting the board, and the fraying blue-and-turquoise friendship bracelet on her wrist.

“You understand that I’ve got to get Siobhan, don’t you?” TillyTilly said. “ ’Cause you won’t really forgive her until she’s been got . You’re really angry with her, Jessy, and I know it’s because you never had a proper, really really here friend, and now she thinks you’re mad. It scares you for people to be scared of you and think you’re weird, remember?”

It was no use; Jess could still hear her from the safe place, and it took every bit of strength she had not to reply. She couldn’t let TillyTilly say this; she couldn’t let Shivs, who was brisk and bright and strong, be taken away and replaced with. . she didn’t know. Just. . someone else who didn’t know why they had to be there, who slept most of the day and had a flat dullness in their eyes for the rest of it. Being got was supposed to be like being beaten up, bruised, bleeding, crying, but this was stranger and worse.

It was as if TillyTilly had a special sharp knife that cut people on the inside so that they collapsed into themselves and couldn’t ever get back out. No colours, her father had said. No colours! She wasn’t angry at Shivs, although she had been. They’d made up, they’d spoken on the phone, and Shivs had apologised ramblingly before explaining that she’d been scared, not for herself, of course — you wouldn’t catch Siobhan McKenzie being a scaredy-cat — but for Jessamy.

“I felt as if she didn’t really. . well, like you much,” Shivs had said lamely. (That’s not the problem, she likes me too much.)

Jess kept all of this in her mind, trying to think of other things as well, while TillyTilly reminded her that Shivs had sworn (see this wet, see this dry, stick a needle in my eye. .) not to tell.

Tiny flames were leaping all around her, and Jess peeped at them through her half-closed eyes, trying not to feel as if the charcoal woman was staring at her. She wasn’t going to let TillyTilly get Shivs, she wasn’t, she wasn’t, she wasn’t.

“I told you that this McKenzie would only bring trouble,” TillyTilly had said finally, before emptying the room of herself, the candles, and, last of all, the tall, inexplicably reproving board.

“Jess, do you know what happened to my tea lights?” her mother asked, now, at the breakfast table.

Jess shook her head and eyed her father as he rose and wandered out of the kitchen. He looked at TillyTilly, who had come back again, as she sat waiting on the staircase. He looked straight at her, as if he saw her but didn’t fully register what he saw, and Jess saw TillyTilly shrink up small against the wall as if something in his gaze frightened her. But neither Jess’s father nor TillyTilly said anything, and after that split-second pause, Daniel padded into the sitting room.

“It’s really quite strange because I had three packs of them: all gone.” Her mother seemed about to continue, but was interrupted by the trilling of the telephone, which she rose to answer. After a second, “Jess, the bell tolls for thee,” she announced from the hallway, beckoning Jess.

It was Siobhan, who was reminding her that she was coming over at five to spend the night.

“Oi,” Shivs said, lowering her voice to a static crackle, “my dad doesn’t really want me to come. He thinks. . I dunno.”

(I don’t want you to come either, Shivs, but I do, but I don’t.)

Jess had no time to force her voice over the drowning of her heart, because Shivs quickly filled in. “But then my mum told him not to worry, and that you’re this really nice girl and properly brought up, and you’re really good for me because you’re all intelligent and stuff. So I’m still coming!”

“Oh,” Jess managed to say.

“I dunno. I just thought I’d tell you. Um.” The turn of Shivs’s voice was tinted with remorse. “All right, see you then, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jess croaked, ignoring TillyTilly, who was stretched out over the ceiling like a grinning sheet.

Shivs shouted “BYE!” at the top of her voice and swiftly hung up.

Perturbed, Jess went and sat back down in the kitchen while her mum washed up and muttered aloud a brief list of things that needed to be fetched. She supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised that TillyTilly knew how to use the phone: she knew how to do everything.

“I want to go to Nigeria for my birthday,” she announced to her mother, who cheered her decision. It didn’t matter if her grandfather did know the truth about what had happened to her father — though he hadn’t mentioned her “thief friend” again — Jess had a feeling that he would also know how to make TillyTilly stop.

“We might have to leave your father behind in England, though,” her mother told her.

“Want me to tell a ghost story?” Shivs said in a loud whisper, turning her torchlight into Jess’s face.

Jess blinked furiously and only just managed not to fall out of the bed. It was a slightly uncomfortable squeeze with both of them on the single bed under two sets of covers, but she’d ignored the blow-up mattress that her mum had set up on the floor and insisted that they both sleep on her bed. She’d also reopened the bedroom door after Shivs had kicked it shut in her customary way, because she wasn’t taking any risks whatsoever.

“No. . no ghost stories,” Jess told her, trying not to sneeze as a strand of Siobhan’s hair encountered her cheek.