Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

“Don’t ask me, it’s your country. .”

“Ha ha!”

Jess peered at the array of chairs that her mother and father were putting out.

“Why are there so many chairs?” she wondered aloud, crouching down on the sandy ground. That was when she realised that TillyTilly was there, actually there, kneeling under the end table, gazing at her seriously. She was barefoot and wearing her net-curtain dress again, but her hair was loose, fanning dark and blowsy over her shoulders and back. She looked like some sort of shantytown princess.

But Tilly couldn’t really be here; there was something in the dimensions of her that made her look like one of the paper cutouts that Jess had snipped from the books in Year Five— creasable and thin at the edges. Jess didn’t hear her mother’s cheery reply.

“There are loads of people coming to see us, Jess — people who just missed us last time. You know. . cousins and sub-cousins and random friends and whatnot. .”

“Surprise!” TillyTilly mouthed, beginning to crawl towards Jess.

Jess didn’t like her eyes, they were wide and glaring, as if the gap between eyelid and eyelid had been pushed so far that it would never close, and they would never fully meet. Why did she look like this? Jess began to hurry out from under the table as she recalled the last thing that she had heard her mother say. It seemed (wrongly) as if she’d only just finished saying it, only just said, “I’m just going to go and give Aunty Funke’s jollof rice a stir so I can say I helped to make it—”

Oh, TillyTilly and time.

“Happy birthday!” Tilly’s voice sounded manically bright as she came out from under the table and dusted down her dress, her eyes fixed on Jess. “Happy birthday to you, Jess, and to Fern.”

Jess turned and began scrambling up the stone stairs.

“Time to swap!” Tilly cried. “I did my share, I got everyone you wanted me to! I want to be alive, too!”

“Mummy. Mummy—”

“I said HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” TillyTilly yelled, dragging at Jess’s ankles.

Jess let out a piercing scream and struggled against the hands that seemed made of steel as she tumbled down step by step, hard stone grazing her knees into ridged flaps of skin. A balloon came loose from the canopy and drifted past Jess’s desperately flailing hands. It was a stinging yellow, Jess’s least favourite colour. It spun in her vision, that yellow balloon.

“You shouldn’t have come back here,” TillyTilly told her, before Jess fell

(down far, as her father might have said before he got better)

so sudden, so sudden. . she hadn’t known it could get this BLACK, and both she and TillyTilly were screeching “Happy Birthday!” as they fell and fell, but this time they didn’t crash against the earth as they had before — TillyTilly landed safely somewhere, and Jess just kept on flying. She’d shed her body as if it was some shell that the sea roars through, and yes, she’d said she wanted to fly, but she hadn’t meant it, not like this, not when she was soaring through things.

Her grandfather was shouting “ Wuraola! Wuraola! ” But the sound was warped and all wrong. It was a distorted voice down a long-distance line, soon to be cut off by flat beeping.

Sarah propped Jessamy up on a chair, tutting.

“What’s the matter with you? All this screaming again?”

Jessamy’s grandfather was hovering around in the background behind her, having come running down the stairs, slipperless and shouting his head off, and they both breathed a sigh of relief as Jess rubbed her poor ankle (the same one that had the open mosquito bite on it) and whined, “I fell down the stairs. It huuuuurts!”

Her cheeks were deeply flushed and her eyes startlingly lightened by the sun’s beams so that they looked more golden than hazel. And the end of her fluffy ponytail was dishevelled, but that was all, that was all. She was even trying to smile, though her mouth seemed loosened and was shaking.

“Well, there was no need to scream like that! I mean, Jesus on toast, Jess, it frightened me! Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday ,” Sarah mimicked, in a high, girlish voice, forgetting that this had sent spikes of unease shooting down her back when she’d first heard it.

“Sorry,” Jess said, then scrambled off Sarah’s lap as Aunty Biola came down the stairs carrying the enormous birthday cake.

“Cake! Cake!” she said, merrily, bouncing around in Aunty Biola’s path as her aunt smilingly tried to outmanoeuvre her so that she could get safely to the table. It was like a frenzy in her; Jess was jumping as high as she could manage, gleefully attempting to poke the cake, which Biola was holding higher and higher until the cake was in danger of toppling off its silver platter.

“O ya, stop that, now,” Jess heard her grandfather bark out from behind her. Sarah looked on in bafflement as Jess and her grandfather levelly met each other’s eyes, Jess’s expression suddenly sullen as she moved out of the relieved Biola’s way. Her father may have sternly told her off many times, but Sarah had never heard him speak this way to his Wuraola. She shrugged, reminding herself that Jess needed antiseptic for her knees, then began following Biola up to the kitchen, followed by Jess, who skipped up the stairs after them. She passed her grandfather without a glance, even though he frowned at her all the way up the stairs.

And as evening fell and Jess stood on her chair so that she was better able to blow out the candles on the enormous pink-and-white cake that Aunty Funke had made, Sarah leaned back into Daniel’s arms and watched thoughtfully as Jess, surrounded by a blur of smiling faces, cheers and clapping (and the soft smacking of balloons together as Bose and Femi attacked each other), blew out all the candles in one gusty puff and clapped her hands delightedly as she sang loudly along,

(HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOOOO)

finally smiling contentedly, because even if Jess’s voice did seem a little nasal (did she have some kind of fever coming on? it couldn’t possibly be malaria already), she was happy, at last.

Reclining on a sofa in the downstairs living room, Daniel was watching Sarah, Bose and Femi munch contentedly on the firm sweetness of sugarcane, plucking back the green with their fingers to reveal the creamy yellow-white that left gluey juices on their hands and clothes. Sarah’s father had sent for the sugarcane, but aside from Daniel, he was the only person in the room not eating it. Instead, half lying on the opposite sofa with his eyes closed, he was nodding occasionally in response to what Sarah was saying. A newspaper was on his lap as he ruminatively chewed on half a bitter kola nut, which he occasionally dipped into a small bowl of yellow salt that was set beside him. Bose and Femi were pushing trucks around on the floor in between their sugarcane eating activities, hers yellow and with a broken windscreen, his blue with the PepsiCo logo on the side.

Sarah changed to English. Daniel drooped for a few minutes longer under the unrelenting sun flowing in through the open, uncurtained window, then got up and put the setting on the fan to high. To his amazement, Sarah, who had been in the middle of explaining the plotline of her children’s story to her father, stopped, complaining to him, “Aw, why? It’s all cold now!”

“What?!”

Sarah began an exchange which they both knew would inevitably end in Daniel’s switching the fan power back to medium, but was interrupted by her father suddenly opening his eyes and saying, “Bisi-mi. When was the last time that you prayed?”

Discomfited, Sarah glanced at Daniel, who put his hands up to show that it wasn’t his situation.

“I can’t remember,” she said at last. “It was probably recently, though,” she added hopefully.