The Icarus Girl (14 page)

She directed the words “shocking behaviour” at Jess, raising her eyebrows with an angry sarcasm. Jess held on even more tightly to her dad’s hand.

When Sarah Harrison came off the phone, she beckoned Jess into the sitting room. Jess followed, half pulling her father along by the hand, but her mother said, “Daniel, let her go. She’s got to learn that she can’t keep on doing this, and you’re not helping.”

Jess’s father let go of her hand, but argued, “You’re saying she can’t ‘keep on,’ but this is the first time she’s actually hit anybody. I’ve spoken to her, and it won’t happen again.”

Her mum didn’t reply, but jerked her thumb in the direction of the sitting room again, and Jess bolted in, cringing past her mother for fear of getting one of the rogue slaps to the side of the head that Sarah would sometimes give if she thought Jess had behaved badly. Her mother shut the door.

“D’you see what I mean?” Jess heard her father say. “She’s scared you’re going to hit her. This isn’t the way to make her behave herself, you know. It doesn’t matter whether you were brought up that way or not—”

“You can criticise my upbringing later, if you like. Right now, I’m trying to discipline my daughter. Did you know that she BIT someone? It’s bloody embarrassing, Daniel! Where on earth would she get that idea from?”

Jess sat on the very edge of a chair, craning to hear where her mother’s voice was coming from. The muffled quality of it suggested that she had her head in a kitchen cupboard. So it would be the tins. She heard her father clattering up the stairs, removing himself from the situation.

Her mother reentered the sitting room, and Jess flinched almost without realising what she was doing. Her mother, bearing an enormous tin of pineapple chunks in each hand, looked puzzled.

“For God’s sake! Nobody’s going to smack you, child,” she snapped.

Jess couldn’t hear her properly over the
thwack thwack thwack
sound that she had heard in Colleen McLain’s house, the sound that was replaying in her head over and over.

She wanted to put her hands over her ears, but her mum would lose it—Nigerian parents, her mother had once explained, could actually kill a child over disrespect. It had been known to happen.

Her mother thrust the pineapple tins at her, making her hold one in each hand. She felt the fleshy parts between her fingers stretching with the weight of them, felt the hard metal push into her palms. They were too heavy to hold. She wouldn’t last.

“See, I know for a fact that talking to you won’t help, but I just don’t know what to do with you anymore. So whenever you feel like hitting or, for God’s sake, BITING someone—like some kind of animal!—whether this is at school, or
anywhere
, you just remember these tins and how heavy they were to hold up for a whole half an hour.”

Jess didn’t look up at her mother’s face, but saw her hand point to the far corner of the sitting room. She walked over, turned to face the wall, and put the tins down for a few seconds so that she could find a comfortable kneeling position.

“And no resting on your bum! If you do, I really will smack you! I’ll be checking on you: you do not move, or put those tins down!”

Jess could already feel the prickling behind her eyes. She knew that she was going to cry because it was stupid and embarrassing to be kneeling here facing the wall holding two tins above her head, and because her hands would hurt for ages afterwards, and also because she would be terrified for the whole half hour that if her hands just couldn’t take it anymore and she let a tin drop, it would crack her skull open. If she died, it would be her mother’s fault, and she would come back as a ghost and let everyone know.

“Hate you,” she mouthed. “I hate you, hate you, hate you.” Her arms were wobbling already, there was no way she would be able to hold them straight up, the weight of the tins would break her hands.

Her mum was still in the room. “I’m not going to do the whole ‘it’s for your own good’ thing,” she said, in a gentler tone of voice, “but if you do this for half an hour, I’ll come and get you and then you can have Jesstime and we’ll say no more about it. I’ll consider it a lesson learnt. OK?”

Jess did not reply. She closed her eyes and concentrated on making her arms towers, strong towers that could hold up these stupid measly tins and even crush them and make them not exist. A half-hour tower, that’s what her arms would be.

“OK?” her mother repeated.

Jess could picture her standing in the doorway, her arms folded.
Stupid, horrible woman
.

“OK,” she managed to say, although it sounded more like a whine—
Ohkaaaaaaaaay
—because it was mixed in with a repressed sob and the strangled, snuffling sound of trying to draw in breath through a nose blocked with mucus:
uh-uh-uhhhh, uhhhh, uhhhhhh
.

She would never eat tinned pineapples again, not ever, she vowed, knowing even as she promised herself this that she would probably eat some later. Yes, that was what she could do, she could think about how, in half an hour, this would not be happening anymore, and although she would never forgive her mother, things would be back to normal.

Why couldn’t things stop changing around so that she wouldn’t feel as if she should love her mother one minute and hate her the next? It was too confusing. Sweat was forming on her forehead and she could feel beads of it on her upper lip.

“Hate you,” she whispered, filled with an anger that she could barely believe. She wanted to be swept up by it and throw the tins away from her, maybe break the television, some ornaments. “
Ohhhh
. . . hate you.”

“Who, me?” she heard TillyTilly say.

TillyTilly?

She opened her eyes, feeling the tears that she had squeezed up behind her eyelids spill out, and peered around the room.

TillyTilly was a little distance away from her, looking inquisitive.

She looked exactly the same as she had the day before, the end of one of her pigtails sweeping her shoulder, her head tipped a little to the side in her customary gesture, a small puzzled smile creasing the corners of her eyes.

Jess stared at her, open-mouthed, then twisted around slightly, listening for her mother. She couldn’t hear her, so her mother must have gone upstairs. Jess lowered her arms, but still did not risk letting go of the tins.

“My mum didn’t let you in, did she,” Jess said. It wasn’t a question.

TillyTilly shook her head, looking pleased with herself, then she gestured at the tins.

“What’s all this fuss about? Just because of the fight?”

Jess was unsurprised that TillyTilly already knew.

“Yeah. The school phoned.”

TillyTilly shrugged, as if to say, What can you do?

“TillyTilly,” said Jess, after a little while. “TillyTilly, when are you going to show me how to be like you?”

TillyTilly began making her fingers walk on their points over the top of the tins.

“I never said I’d do that,” she said, looking at Jess out of the corner of her eye.

Jess sighed impatiently.

“Stop messing about! You said you would at Bodija—”

TillyTilly interrupted her. “No, I didn’t. I asked you if you’d like to do the things I can do, and you said ‘Yeah,’ and that was it. So there. I don’t see why you should start getting angry with me just because your mum’s punishing you with pineapple tins.” She tittered in a mocking way that Jess didn’t like, and Jess felt little ice-cold stabbings behind her eyeballs. Tilly stopped laughing when she saw the corners of Jess’s mouth turn downwards.

“Sorry,” she said gruffly. “Don’t be a crybaby about it, though.”

“Please, please make me be like you, TillyTilly. Come on. Please!”

TillyTilly adjusted her body so that she was sitting cross-legged.

“Yeah, yeah, I will,” she said. “Later. Not now. You don’t like school very much, do you, Jessy?”

Jess shook her head vigorously.

“I bet I’d like school if you came. Why don’t you come to my school?”

TillyTilly nibbled her fingernail, looking distracted.

“I can’t. I’m older than you lot.”

Jess was astonished. She hadn’t thought about that.

“You don’t
look
older than me,” she said, in a doubtful tone, adding in alarm: “What, even older than the Year Six girls?”

TillyTilly nodded, just once, then said, glancing at the ceiling, “Your mum’s coming.”

Tilly approached Jess and wrapped her thin arms around her shoulders. They rocked quietly back and forth and Jess felt her breathing slow, the heaving movements of her chest growing still as her friend’s cool hands and the smell of some sort of light, leafy pomade in Tilly’s hair comforted her. She closed her eyes. It was the embrace of someone who could protect her. Then the smell of fading greenery escaped on a waft of air as, eyes still closed, she heard Tilly’s light feet pattering across the sitting-room floor.

Jess expelled air, an unconsciously blissful smile on her face, then, hastily balancing a tin on each palm, raised herself up on her knees and extended her arms again. This time, she did not close her eyes; even the sharp pain of the tins’ hard roundedness on her skin seemed to recede. She was wondering, as she stared at the wall, why Tilly had left, especially since she could be invisible. Unless her mum was magic too, and would be able to see her and would ask all sorts of questions. And Jess knew Tilly didn’t like questions. Or maybe Tilly could do these things for one day only and then they ran out. Maybe she had run out of invisibility. She heard her mother at the door.

“Oh, Jess! You’re still here, I’d forgotten. All right,” Sarah said, “get up and give me the tins. On Monday we can talk about maybe having your new friend over, hmmm?”

Jess turned, her knees grazing painfully against the carpet as she swivelled her body around on her knees.

“Has half an hour gone?” she asked incredulously.

What was it about time and TillyTilly?

SEVEN

It was Sunday afternoon, and Jess’s parents were going to take her to Dr. McKenzie’s house, “just for a visit.” Dr. McKenzie was a psychologist, which mainly meant that he was supposed to know a little bit about what was happening inside her head, and be able to make her feel better by talking to her. This was scary. They were in the park, and Jess was winded from playing an energetic game of chase with Tilly, when Tilly, who was not at all out of breath, suddenly said “McKenzie” in a musing sort of way, as if the thought had just come to her on the air. Jess stretched her legs out across the bench and fanned herself with her hands, even though it was cold weather now and she had already undone the zip of her green puffer jacket.

“Oh yeah . . . he’s a psychologist. Psychologists—”

“Jessy, I know what a psychologist is!”

“Sorry. Um. They’re taking me to see him, Dr. McKenzie. Just for a visit, and if he thinks he can help, then I’m supposed to see him quite a lot.”

Tilly, chewing on a thumbnail, didn’t respond immediately, and Jess, gazing at her lying on the frosty grass in her school dress, couldn’t keep the amazement off her face.

“Aren’t you even a diddy-bit cold, TillyTilly?”

Tilly rolled over onto her back and kicked her legs in the air before sitting up and jabbing a finger at Jess, her mouth turned down in a frown.

“Don’t go and see that man,” she commanded. Her finger was trembling as she pointed, and Jess, who had never seen Tilly scared, was surprised and a little scared herself.

She began zipping her jacket up, looking away from Tilly.

“I’ve got to go,” she mumbled. “My mum’s making me.”

TillyTilly, who was no longer in sight, snorted from somewhere, and Jess felt a little more courageous now that those accusing eyes weren’t on her.

“And . . . I sort of want to go anyway, y’know,” she added, very quickly and in a low voice, in case she needed to take it back.

TillyTilly rematerialised on the bench beside her, crossly pushing Jess’s legs aside to make more room.

“Why d’you want to go? What do you need help for?” she demanded, without moving her face.

Jess grimaced; she hated it when Tilly did that—it was like talking to some sentient statue.

“Don’t do that, TillyTilly,” she pleaded.

Tilly didn’t respond, but kept her keen eyes fixed on her.

“I s’pose . . . I want to go because I’m not very . . . um, well, I’m not like Dulcie, or Tunde, or even Ebun. I’m just not—”

“What?” Tilly cried. “So now you WANT to be like those silly people? You want
him
to make you like
them
?”

Jess wondered why Tilly was getting so agitated, as if
she
were the one who was being made to see this psychologist. Maybe she was worried that Dr. McKenzie would say that she was made up.

“I won’t tell him about you, TillyTilly,” Jess reassured her hastily, but Tilly folded her arms and glared off into the distance. “TillyTilly, there’s something about Dulcie and Tunde and even the others, even Colleen, that’s
too
different from me. It makes me . . . weird. I don’t want to be weird and always thinking weird things and being scared, and I don’t want to have something missing from me, and—”

“Shut up!” Tilly leapt up from the bench and paced up and down in front of Jess. “You’re shabby! You keep saying something’s missing when nothing is! So you’re still going to see him!”

“I’ve GOT TO, though, TillyTilly! My mum—”

“He won’t help you, Jessy. There’ll only be trouble,” Tilly said darkly. Then she stalked away, leaving Jess alone on the bench surrounded by icy bushes.

Dr. McKenzie lived in Bromley, not that far from Dulcie. The bus went past the train station, and once they had passed it, the downslope of the road was familiar to Jess. The streets, and the area around the Baker’s Oven beside the train station, seemed at first teeming with people, but as Jess watched, she realised that it was the reflection of the glass in the shop window mixing in with the reflections of people standing in the bus behind her. Her eyes had gone out of focus without her noticing it.

“Jess, say hello to Dr. McKenzie,” Sarah urged as they arrived, thrusting the reluctant Jess forward a little. The doctor laughingly insisted that they call him Colin. Jess gaped up at him, managing a squeaky “Hello.” She hadn’t expected him to be so tall and so . . . red. Dr. McKenzie was very thin, maybe even almost as thin as TillyTilly, and the long hands clasping Jess’s own were smooth, pale and slim-fingered, their length broken only by the clean encirclement of a white-gold band on his wedding finger. He looked young, younger than Jess’s father, and his face was slightly gaunt although his cheeks were ruddy. Even if his mouth wasn’t smiling, his faded blue eyes and the crinkling of the skin around them reassured her that he was friendly. But—his eyebrows were red! His eyebrows
and
his tousled, slightly upstanding hair—the most peculiar sort of red that Jess had ever seen, like orange paint, although the eyebrows were darker. Oh, she mustn’t stare, she had to
not
stare at Dr. McKenzie’s hair, but he caught her awestruck gaze and ruefully ran a hand through the tuft, saying, “Curse of the McKenzies.”