The Icarus Girl (11 page)

The confidence in Mr. Heinz’s voice seemed to make Daniel Harrison shrink somehow, but Jess, watching from beneath her eyelashes, could not see exactly how or what the change was. Daniel looked at Sarah, who gave him a slight shrug (
They want
to make our daughter special; what can we do?
), then he looked at Jessamy. Jessamy took another self-conscious nibble at the biscuit. She did not like to, could not, eat very much in front of strangers.

Then her father looked at Mr. Heinz.

“Let’s try it,” he said, his tone suddenly cheerful. “Where’s the harm? If you don’t like it, you’ll tell us, won’t you, Jess?” he added.

Another one of those choiceless, spiral questions. She had to think carefully, clutching the biscuit in her palm as a talisman against the three faces looking at her. They had suddenly become a
group
.

What could she do?

Thinking of this, now, Jess put her head down and cried quietly, miserably.

After a few minutes, when Jess had composed herself, the nurse returned her to her class, where she spent the rest of the day going through the motions of being a Year Five pupil, hunched over a stack of coloured paper with scissors, glue, a copy of the book that Miss Patel had been reading from, and some coloured pencils. She vaguely noted that there were three other people at the table with her, but said hardly anything to them, not even when Jonathan Carroll and Nam Hong’s wet-tissue fight ended up hitting her in the face. She gave a nod in acceptance of their apologies and continued snipping and colouring, placing things against the page, making sure that the only thing that she had any control over would look just right. She talked to Tunde Coker, who was also at her table, even less than usual, and steadfastly refused to look at Colleen McLain, who as always finished making her Sir Francis Drake booklet before anyone else.

“Bit slow, aren’t you, Jessamy?” Colleen called out loudly, and Jess pretended not to hear, in fact, did
not
hear, made it her business only to hear the small clicking sound of Tunde’s pencil breaking as he pressed too hard, and the scratchy, grating sound as he sharpened it up again.

THREE

At home after school, Jess settled herself cross-legged on the tall kitchen chair, drinking her chocolate milk and eating a makeshift cheese, peanut butter and chocolate-spread sandwich. The food wasn’t exactly making her memory of the afternoon go away, but it was helping. As Jess chewed, she ran her eyes over the green-and-white tiles running around the kitchen walls, particularly the area where the tiles ran behind the fridge and out the other side again, like a length of ribbon. Sometimes she left incriminating chocolatey hand marks on the white tiles.

A rap at the back door.

She glanced at the kitchen clock; it was only four o’clock and her dad didn’t usually finish work until five.

Jess jumped up and pulled the back door open.

“Hi,” TillyTilly said.

Tilly seemed different, just a little different. She stood just outside the door, one hand on the doorpost, almost exactly the same height as Jess, just as before, but— She was wearing shiny black buckled shoes, and kneesocks like the white, crocheted ones that Jess herself was wearing, and a checked green dress. Her face seemed fuller, her arms firmer, as if she had put on some healthy weight, and her hair! Her hair was completely different.

When Jess had thought about TillyTilly, she’d pictured her two enormous puffs of hair bound with thin, trailing string. But now the two puffs had been braided into thick, stubby plaits, the end of each plait brushing a shoulder.

“I like your hair,” Jess said, a hand flying up to her own single plait. She felt shy and embarrassed all of a sudden, as if things were too different.

Then TillyTilly smiled, and everything was all right again. Jess felt warmed. She smiled back, stepped aside for TillyTilly to come in.

“Me and my parents have just moved into the area,” Tilly said.

“Oh,” Jess said, trying to suppress her excitement.

TillyTilly had done it again! She’d done the impossible! Tilly might even go to her school! Why not? Jess had no doubt that Tilly would soon get herself moved to Year Five as well, but until then they could eat lunch together and maybe even play clapping games in the playground like the other girls did, and with Tilly there, she would be able to ignore Colleen McLain completely, as if she didn’t even exist, and—

“So, d’you want to do something?” TillyTilly asked, laughing a little.

FOUR

“Let’s go upstairs,” said TillyTilly.

Jess hesitated in front of her mum’s closed study door, not knowing whether she was supposed to make some kind of introduction. She hadn’t had anyone whose parents her mum didn’t know to play before.

TillyTilly pulled at her hand.

“Come on!”

Jess’s room was gloomy because the curtains were drawn. The smell of lavender, her mother’s latest scent craze, hung in the air, and Jess was suddenly extremely aware of the way that her room looked.

It looked too full. There were too many big, chunky things robbing space, air. The shelves . . . did they really need to be there, so wide and wooden, only half full with slim, gaudy paperbacks, the shelf sections opening into gaping squares of the blue-painted wall behind them? And her bed in the corner beneath the window, the patchwork quilt sprawled over it seeming to swell with a greedy fatness of colour! She was almost alarmed. She looked sidelong at TillyTilly, a quick, embarrassed glance, then went in through the doorway, feeling her toes squishing into the clumpy tufts of spotty rug. They gravitated towards Jess’s desk, looking at the pictures and postcards on the wall above it.

“Hmmm,” TillyTilly said, staring around. “There doesn’t seem to be very much we can do here.” She turned her gaze on to Jess. “D’you have any games?”

Jess shook her head. TillyTilly stood silent, her head tipped to one side, her eyes darting around the room. Her nose wrinkled up as she thought. Jess began nervously clicking her desk lamp on and off. She saw TillyTilly’s eyes flick across towards the lamp, then away again, as if the sound, the constant shift between circle-light and square-darkness bothered her. Soon, Tilly’s eyes did not shift from the lamp anymore but remained on Jess’s hand, Jess’s hand clicking the lamp on and off.

Jess frowned and stopped fiddling with the desk lamp.

“Games . . . D’you mean like Connect 4 and snakes and ladders?” she asked. When TillyTilly, head still cocked, didn’t reply, Jess continued: “I don’t really have games like that . . . My mum doesn’t like playing them all that much, and my dad’s usually doing something else . . .”

TillyTilly stood on one leg and rubbed the sole of her foot against the kneesocked length of her other leg. It was distracting, and Jess’s words slowed down, and then died.

“Haven’t you got any brothers or sisters?” TillyTilly asked, switching feet. She had her arms out as if she was going to launch into the air any minute and just fly away. Jess perched herself on the edge of her desk.

“No,” she said. “You would’ve seen my brother or sister in Ibadan if I had one.”

TillyTilly dropped her arms to her sides. She looked at Jess, her gaze ruler-straight, intent.

“But . . .” she said softly, “I thought . . .”

Jess waited, feeling a little sick. There was a key in her chest that was being tightly wound until it hurt.

TillyTilly twiddled the end of one of her pigtails and smiled.

“D’you know a girl called Colleen McLain?” she asked.

Jess jumped, just a little surprised at this new line of conversation.

“Yeah,” she said. “She’s horrible. She thinks she’s amazing, and she chews her hair, and she hates me.”

TillyTilly looked suitably impressed by the gravity of all this, her eyebrows raised in what Jess fancied to be a mix of disapproval at Colleen’s behaviour and amazement that she could dislike Jess.

“And I hate her too,” Jess added, after a split-second reflection.

TillyTilly had begun to move around the room, picking up one and then another of Jess’s tiny painted china horses, examining the bright, thick crayons lined up in her wooden crayon box.

“I know Colleen as well,” she said, shaking her head slightly, as if amazed at the girl’s unlikeability. “She’s just as horrible to me as she is to you, you know. She’s out of order.”

“Yeah,” Jess affirmed, nodding vigorously, bemused but glad to have some support.

TillyTilly lowered her voice into a conspiratorial whisper, leaning closer to Jess as she did so, even though it was only the two of them in the room.

“We should
get
her.”

Jess stared into TillyTilly’s eyes, fascinated by their sleek shine. She felt disoriented, as if she was about to fall off the floor and land on the ceiling. The other objects in her cluttered room seemed smaller, lighter, blurry.

“Get her?” she echoed.

TillyTilly gave a solemn nod.

“As in . . . beat her up or something?”

Jess wanted to draw back so that she could touch something and be sure that her room wasn’t really escaping her, but instead she found herself inching closer to Tilly.

TillyTilly gave an impatient toss of the head.

“No, not beat her up. Get her.” TillyTilly stared at her, one eye narrowing almost to the point of being closed in a wink, then suddenly burst out laughing.

Jess stepped back, shaking.

“Jessy, you idiot. I was only joking,” TillyTilly said. “Come on, let’s play outside.”

“All right,” said Jess. “Just let me tell my mum.”

Her mum, cast in profile by the light, was typing furiously in her study, her body swaying backwards and forwards slightly, as if she was dancing her ideas. The curtains were wide open, and the rich orangey sunset drowned everything in evening colour. She waited. After a few seconds, her mum stopped typing.

“D’you want dinner or somesuch? Is something the matter?”

She was smiling; she was pleased; her eyes were far away and things were happening before them, behind them.

“Um . . . can I play out?”

Her mother raised an eyebrow.

“
May
I . . .”

Jess rolled her eyes at her mother’s fussiness, and Sarah Harrison laughed aloud.

“With whom? And for how long?”

“With my friend Titiola. And for about half an hour.” Even though Jess had pronounced the name wrong, she knew better than to say “TillyTilly.” She could just envision her mother asking:
What kind of a name is that?

“Titiola?” her mother said with interest, pronouncing the name properly. “A Yoruba girl, then? Who are her parents?”

Jess shrugged.

“I dunno! They just moved in around here! I
dunno
!” she repeated, a little excitedly.
Are you going to let me play out or not?

“All right . . . fine . . . but can I meet her?”

“Dunno . . . she’s shy.”

“What? Well, you can play out with her today . . . and maybe you should have this Titiola over one of these days so that I can meet her . . .”

Jess ran into her bedroom and grabbed TillyTilly by the arm. They passed the study door in a blur of green and white and giggles, clattering down the stairs and then outside.

“Let’s go to Colleen’s house,” TillyTilly said once they had reached the front gate of Jess’s garden. Jess opened her mouth to protest, but TillyTilly had already darted away, and Jess, afraid to lose her, sped along behind.

Colleen McLain’s kitchen was much, much neater than Jessamy’s.

If Mummy saw this
, Jess thought, awestruck,
she’d go mad and
make Daddy help more.

She stood open-mouthed, looking around at the yellow-and-pink transfers on the kitchen tiles, the transfers that exactly matched the linoleum on which she and Tilly stood. Tilly nudged her and pointed, laughing, at the spotless white surface of the fridge, the Post-it Notes pinned to it with bright plastic fridge magnets. Even the handwriting was neat, evenly formed:
Elaine,
we’ve run out of milk
and
Don’t forget Colleen’s dental appointment on
Saturday
. The room was filled with a light steam, which was emerging from the pot bubbling out stewy smells on the cooker. Meat, potatoes and some kind of green vegetable, maybe. It was the bubbling pot, the fact that Mrs. McLain was actually in the process of making dinner and would probably return to the kitchen any minute, that alarmed Jess.

“We’re going to get caught, TillyTilly!” she whispered. She ignored TillyTilly’s snort of derision as her eyes began surveying the room for places to hide.

Both Jess and Tilly froze as the sound of a woman yelling floated in through the doorway. From upstairs?

“. . . can’t believe you! This is too much for me! What exactly is the
matter
with you?”

There was no response other than the snuffling sound that accompanied weeping.

The woman’s voice grew even louder, if this was possible.

“Ohhh! Jesus God!” the woman snarled.

Then came a quick, staccato whacking sound, followed by another, and another. Loud. Jess flinched.

“Get out of my sight!”

“TillyTilly, we weren’t asked here . . . I should go home before my mum kills me,” Jess said urgently. Her voice seemed to boom into the long quiet that followed those hard whacking sounds.
Before my mum kills me
. How could she have said that? Suppose it had happened, right here, and someone’s mum had killed them?

“It’s not even as if she’s a nice girl anyway. And no one ever died from a slap, Jessy,” TillyTilly said, her hands in the pockets of the green-and-white-checked dress. “Besides,” she continued after a short pause during which Jess reflected that none of this made her feel any more comfortable, “she was probably hitting a table or a wall with something. White people do that, I think.”

Jess laughed aloud, then clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the sound. TillyTilly began pulling her towards the kitchen doorway. Jess bent her knees to make herself heavier, but it didn’t work. Tilly continued to drag her, and she began to panic.