Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

Shivs twisted restlessly around for a little while, then scratched her head.

“Why can’t I sleep on the floor, anyway? You got mice or something?”

“Ewwww, no. I just. . don’t want you to pull my leg or anything in the night. I get scared.”

“Awww, I won’t, though! Let me sleep on the floor, please please please! I need room! I put my arms out and everything— I’d make you fall out!”

“No!”

“Awwww but I’m sleepy, Jess,” Shivs complained. “And you won’t even let me tell a ghost story to keep myself awake.”

“If you complain any more,” Jess said quietly, in a spooky voice, “I’m going to make you go downstairs and eat some more of those spicy prawns — I know there’s some left. .”

“Aargh,” Shivs said, “shabby.” She hadn’t liked the spicy prawns at all, and Jess giggled aloud just thinking about Shivs’s pop-eyed expression when she’d shovelled a forkful of prawns, mushrooms and rice in her mouth in defiance of Sarah’s warning to “go slowly.”

“Hah, you can’t take your pepper,” Jess’s mum had said, shaking her head while Shivs jogged silently around the room gasping for air until she was taken upstairs to brush her teeth and tongue with Aquafresh. She’d had to have a burger and chips instead.

Shivs stopped wriggling and turned over so that her face was jammed into the pillow.

“G’night, then,” she murmured. “S’not my fault if you end up on the floor.”

Jess sat up a little bit and watched, grinning, as Shivs snuggled down farther, slipping her thumb into her mouth. It was OK, it would be OK. She only had to make sure that she watched Shivs all night. She couldn’t sleep at all, she wouldn’t sleep, she would fight TillyTilly to the last about this—

But, of course, she did eventually fall asleep, with her arm flung protectively over Siobhan’s shoulder.

“Pssst! Wake up, Siobhan!”

Jess was calling her, she had to get up, and she had to go somewhere, didn’t she? Yes, and quietly. Or was that the dream? Siobhan stretched, cracked her eyes open and peered about her. Jess was nowhere to be seen; she had been calling from outside the room, but now she had gone.

“Siobhan, wake up!”

“Uhhhh—” Shivs wondered who had groaned, then realised that it was her. It was cold, her hands were cold; she didn’t want to get out of bed, she wanted to go back to sleep, but she was worried about Jess, who wanted her to go somewhere. She half climbed, half fell out of bed, not feeling the roughness of the rug under her bare, numbed feet, and stumbled out of the bedroom door. There were no lights on anywhere, and her squinted eyes were taking an incredibly long time to become accustomed to the darkness.

“Jess?” she called softly, then waited. From somewhere downstairs, Jess giggled. Were they playing hide-and-seek? Shivs blinked and shook her head, feeling more wide awake. She started down the stairs, deciding not to call out any longer. Two could be cunning. Hesitating halfway down, she peered into the dark and tried to decide whether Jess would be in the sitting room or the kitchen. The sitting room — she would be hiding behind a chair. Putting a hand over her mouth so that she didn’t laugh aloud, she began to tiptoe into the sitting room. Shivs was a little bit frightened in there, almost not quite daring to crawl around the sofa to find Jess. Jess wasn’t there; the room was dark and felt like an open mouth — some sort of mist was moving through it, a pervading warmth, and the carpet seemed to ripple slightly under Shivs’s feet, like a tongue.

All right, so now she was being silly, she told herself.

Her eyes had still not adjusted, and the shoulder of her loose nightie was slipping down her arm. Nervously, she tugged it up again.

“Shivs—” It was Jess again, and her voice was louder and more urgent. Now it sounded as if it was coming from up stairs.

How would she have done that, got upstairs again already?

Backing out of the sitting room, Shivs looked up the stairs to see Jess standing at the top, framed by a faintly incandescent brightness against the pitch black. It was strange, the way she looked, her features sharp and beautiful, as if there were a lantern burning under her skin. But she wasn’t holding anything — no torch, no candle, nothing. This was a dream, it must be.

A strange expression crossed Jess’s face and she looked over her shoulder at something behind her, her hand going up over her face before she turned back to Shivs. “Shivs, don’t—”

There was a lifting, a jolting and a falling back into place as something swung in Siobhan’s sight, and she immediately saw that Jess was not standing on the top step after all; there was another girl behind her. Only the shape, only the shape of another girl, but she didn’t want to see her come into Jess’s fierce light.

She had seen, but not quite seen. For a second, she thought that she wouldn’t be able to move, that she’d never move again, but then her knees gave way, and, dropping down with her hands over her face, Siobhan tremblingly waited for everything to stop happening.

Someone came, and the someone touched her.

“It isn’t really happening,” Jess quavered from the staircase, watching TillyTilly and Siobhan running together, screaming without sound as they

(or was it only Siobhan? or only Tilly?)

threw Siobhan against the front door, against the walls, on the floor. Siobhan’s body was twisting, her face shaped into a grimacing smile as she pranced jerkily into the sitting room with her nightie swirling out around her thin frame, then leapt back out as Jess breathlessly ran a little way down the stairs, and gripped the banister so tightly that it hurt her fingers. She didn’t quite dare to try and stop Tilly now. It was some fearsome, grotesque dance: Siobhan tiptoeing and then dragging across the floor, her red hair falling out of its loose knot and over her shoulders as she spun into the kitchen, while TillyTilly, partially elevated in the dim light, was somehow operating her, although Jess couldn’t see quite how: her hands were at Siobhan’s back

(in her? above her? Oh, don’t be in her, don’t let TillyTilly have her hands jammed into my friend’s body)

and Siobhan was gasping and laughing, and they all went into the kitchen and Siobhan/Tilly knew where the knife drawer was (of course! of course!)

and Jess knew that she hated both of them when Siobhan started to hurt herself with the knife edge, because it was her fault and she was bleeding too and she couldn’t stop.

Only apparently none of that happened. Because Siobhan had only fallen all the way down the stairs and broken the skin of her neck quite badly on the pointy end of the banister when it had inexplicably broken off. Just how, they didn’t know. It didn’t matter that all the knives were in the knife drawer, clean and untouched, and it didn’t matter that when Jess had stopped screaming Siobhan was all in a heap on the bottom step, but it mattered that TillyTilly hadn’t liked Shivs from the start. Only now could Jess tell her that it was OK that she couldn’t keep a secret; she was a good friend now that she was going to die.

“Did you push her?” Sarah asked Jess after Dr. McKenzie had arrived and the ambulance had taken Shivs to the hospital. She sat in the living room with her hand over her mouth and kept saying aloud that she was trying to understand how Siobhan had taken such a serious fall, and what pressure a four-inch piece of strong wooden banister end would have to undergo to break and leave a jagged, spiking thing. Jess was bundled up in her mother’s arms, her eyes closed, her breathing erratic. Her lips were almost blue. Her mouth was framing a word over and over again, the same word, sometimes slow, sometimes fast: “Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly.”