The Icarus Girl (20 page)

“. . . Jessy, you guessed without me explaining that I’m . . . that I’m not really here. I mean, of course I’m really here, just not
really really
here, if you see what I mean . . . Most of the time I’m somewhere else, but I can appear, and you haven’t imagined me! Remember Colleen’s house? And the amusement park? You know you couldn’t have imagined those!”

Jess did not move, but she listened to Tilly and to the soft, accented voice of the long-armed woman saying, “. . . And then the bird brought rain clouds, and its wings were pouring with rain, and the drought was over . . .” She felt TillyTilly’s bony hand brush her face and then withdraw, and this made her open her eyes. TillyTilly was nowhere to be seen.

Later, when Jess was caught up in a particularly bad bout of the fever and the room seemed to be
throbbing
, widening and contracting with shimmering heat, Tilly came back, and Jess was scared. Tilly was standing by her bedside, and she was smiling, but she was . . . folding over and crackling and jumping to different parts of the room like a piece of paper blown by a volatile wind. Tilly was paper-thin and peeling around the edges, and just beyond her, a pair of long, dark brown arms was snaking in through the open door, and the hands on the ends of them were trying to hold the smiling, paper-doll Tilly in place. She knew, now, that TillyTilly and the long-armed woman were somehow the same person, like the two sides of a thin coin.

There was no wind.

Jess screamed, and Tilly flew away, and her mum came instead.

Sometime in the night, Jess fell out of bed and lay exhausted on the floor. She made a feeble attempt to grasp the bedcovers with her hands so that she could pull herself back up, but soon abandoned the idea. She lay still, licking her dried-out lips, and tried not to hum or sing; she didn’t want her parents to be worried. Her mum had sat with her for the rest of the afternoon after her latest scream, forehead wrinkled as she distractedly scribbled notes for her book on her notepad. Jess, tumbling in and out of sleep, couldn’t be sure, but thought that she heard a baby crying. It wasn’t like proper crying, the way she’d heard babies on the bus crying—it was a weak sort of snuffling sound,
ehh-hhh-ehhhh
, as if the baby had already cried a lot. She lay still, staring straight up, a frown etched on her face as she tried to discern where the sound was coming from. It sounded quite near. She felt as if, beneath her breastbone, her heart was twisting in time to the feeble cries.

The sound grew louder. Jess paused, and then ducked her head so that she could see beneath her bed. There was a moment of pointillism, her vision swimming out of clarity and into a group of coloured dots, then reforming again. She couldn’t . . . There
was
a baby there: a tiny baby, a whole
baby
, naked aside from the dirty white shawl it was wrapped in. A baby. Left there underneath her bed, somehow, how? Jess stared through the gaps between her spread fingers as the baby kicked its legs and coughed out another gasping cry. Under her bed. She couldn’t touch the thing, it wouldn’t be real, it would get bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier, and kill her, like in the story her mother had told her about the wicked spirit that disguised itself. She couldn’t see its face; it was so helpless, it was tiny; the thing was crying, she couldn’t touch it, could she?

Almost without realising it, Jess had carefully placed her hands around the baby and brought it out, and settled it awkwardly on her lap so that she could put her finger into its feverishly hot little fist. The child was silent now, staring and solemn.

Oh my God, her skull—

Jess could see places where the top of the baby’s head looked scarily soft, and was seized with a fear that she would let the child drop and her head would smash open. Then she checked herself. Why had she supposed that the baby was a girl? There was no way you could tell from the pale, wrinkled-up little face with its luminous eyes filled with brown light. The hair was dark and tightly curled. It was tangled. She tried to draw the finger of her other hand through the baby’s hair, and then realised that she wouldn’t be able to keep the baby on her lap if she did so.

Whose are you?

Jess sat for a few minutes, her head pressed against the side of the bed to stop it from aching so, her finger caught in the baby’s hand, her eyes fixed on the girl—she knew it was a girl. The girl stared at her as well. She waited for the baby to get heavier.

Then there was a rush of air as TillyTilly leant over from Jess’s bed and deftly slipped the little girl from Jess’s lap. Jess jumped, then managed a small, sleepy noise of relief that someone was here to help her. She climbed onto the bed so that she could watch TillyTilly playing with the baby, bouncing her up and down on the covers, moving her arms and legs through walking motions. When she caught Tilly’s eyes, Tilly smiled, but said nothing and continued to dandle the little girl. Jess’s head felt worse and she could see spots of heat begin to float before her eyes.

She closed her eyes and when she opened them again she was lying flat, and the air was filled with the sound of the baby’s crying. TillyTilly was sitting at the end of the bed, and she spread her arms wide the better to show their emptiness. Jess fought to sit up, but she couldn’t; it was as if there were weights on her chest. She quickly became terrified. Why could she only
hear
the baby? She wanted to see her again, play with her.

“TillyTilly! What happened to that baby?”

TillyTilly did not reply.

Tilly was the one making the buzzing, humming noise; Jess knew that now. She was at the door, making the sound without opening her mouth.

“TillyTilly, please don’t make that noise. I don’t like it, it’s making me ill,” she protested.

All the noise stopped—the crying, the humming, everything. The silence was thick.

“Where’s that baby?” Jess whispered.

TillyTilly executed a twirl in the doorway. “She’s dead . . .”

Jess stared at her friend. Her lips trembled as she struggled to speak, to think.

“You—?”

TillyTilly smiled graciously, as if she wasn’t really concentrating on the topic at hand, but on something else.

“Don’t be silly, Jessy, I couldn’t kill anyone. I’m only little.” She laughed.

Jess couldn’t laugh along; she was afraid again, and knew that something bad had happened to the baby.

“Then how come she’s dead?”

TillyTilly folded her arms. “I don’t like to say . . . but it’s your mother’s fault.” Then she dropped quite suddenly out of sight. Jess crawled to the edge of her bed and looked down at the floor. TillyTilly was lying flat out, like a starfish, grinning up at her.

“What are you talking about, it’s my mum’s fault?” Jess demanded. She had a teetering feeling—not as if she was about to scream, but a flatter feeling, as if she was about to fall down very hard and not be able to get up again.

Tilly kicked her legs in the air.

“Ask her—there were two of you born, just like there were two of me. The other one of you died,” she said, unbelievably casual, so matter-of-fact that Jess was fine with it until the meaning hit her.

Then, unexpected even to herself, Jess began to cry: hot, dry, racking sobs that robbed her of her breath with every spasm. She buried her face in her pillows. It was . . . too much. The baby had been there, and then it wasn’t, and then it was dead, and then it was her sister . . . and she still felt so poorly, so poorly. The humming sound was faint in the air again. She knew it would get louder.

“Stop it, TillyTilly, PLEASE STOP IT!” she shouted, then froze, realising that she had been too loud. She heard the creak of one of her parents stirring in their bed, and the humming noise escalated, but no one came. She turned onto her side away from Tilly, but Tilly was waiting on the other side of the bed.

“I’m not making that noise,” TillyTilly explained, baffled, and she climbed into the bed and hugged Jess close. TillyTilly’s body was so cold, the chill radiated through her. Jess’s heartbeat slowed down and she felt . . . protected. But the humming noise was
so
loud now that TillyTilly was in the bed with her!

It was hurting her ears.

“We’re twins to each other now,” TillyTilly whispered fiercely, hugging Jess again. She patted Jess’s hair, her cheek, her cold fingers chasing Jess’s fever away with every touch. “We’ve got to look after each other. We’re twins, best friends.”

Jess nodded, unable to speak. She felt like crying again. She didn’t understand.

“Her name was Fern,” TillyTilly whispered in Jess’s ear, as Jess began to fall away from the room, fall into sleep. “Your twin’s name was Fern. They didn’t get to choose a proper name for her, a Yoruba name, because she was born already dead, just after you were born. You have been so empty, Jessy, without your twin; you have had no one to walk your three worlds with you. I know—I am the same. I have been just like you for such a long time! But now I am Fern, I am your sister, and you are my twin . . . I’ll look after you, Jessy . . .”

ELEVEN

The first foggy waking thoughts, emerging through dappled gauze, were of Fern. The memory of the baby girl made Jess big-eyed with wariness at first, then it captivated her. She started off thinking about how tiny Fern had been, how fragile and moonlight pale, and then she realised with a shock that she, too, must once have been like that.

Exactly like that, in fact.

She held her hands up in front of her and tried to imagine them as pudgy little fists; tried to create a continuity between a time when she didn’t know herself and now, when she was all too aware of her Jessness.

Had her mother held each of their hands, acted as a link between the child that was feeble and limp, and the one who kicked and screamed?

Had her mother—?

Jess abruptly tried to turn away from thoughts of her mother when she remembered that terrible, dark thing that TillyTilly had said.

It was your mother’s fault.

Heartless.

Was her mother heartless?

It seemed like it. She laughed and acted as if everything was normal, and surely you had to be sad forever if your baby died, it was such a sad thing.

Instead, Jess tried to imagine what it would have been like to share this room with Fern, her . . . sister.

Jess shifted and felt the sun on her face; someone must have come in and drawn her curtains open while she slept.

Fern would have looked just like her, and the similarity would have given Jess that confidence to connect and
tell
her things . . . confide in her instead of screaming out her fears. Could it be that simple?
I scream because I have no twin
. Jess doubted it, distrusted the way that it came out so smoothly.

Her line of thought was interrupted by her mother coming in.

Her mother was a shadow-lady, strange and dark, grotesque. It was her fault about Fern, and now her voice was too loud, her eyes too dark, as she came towards the bed.

Sarah said, “And how is your body this morning?”

Without consciously knowing what she was doing, Jess flinched in a flurry of bedding, nearly falling from her mattress in her gesture of avoidance. When she realised that she had an arm defensively up over her face, she loosened her body and, shocked at herself, flopped back down among her pillows, raising her eyes apologetically to her mum’s face.

Her mum had taken a step back and seemed to have receded, become smaller. Bemused, she had folded her arms across her upper body.

It’s Mummy, it’s Mummy. She’s not going to—she won’t.

“I’m feeling a little bit better, but my head still aches and I’m really thirsty,” Jess managed to say.

Her mum didn’t reply immediately, but looked hard at Jess and then, swiftly, around the room. Finally she nodded.

“If I bring you some orange juice or tea or something, can you see if you can manage to get up and brush your teeth, darling?” She was walking backwards towards the door. Her expression was now determinedly untroubled, and she hadn’t touched Jess at all, and Jess was glad. Then she felt bad. She didn’t know if TillyTilly was lying. Had Tilly lied before? She couldn’t remember. But she needed to know about what had happened to Fern, if Fern was even real.

“Mummy—”

“Jess?”

“Did I have . . . Was there two of me?” At the last minute, Jess realised that she couldn’t say “sister”; the word wouldn’t fall off her tongue.

Jess looked up at her mother, who stood trembling with her hands clasped together as if in prayer. She had never seen her mother like this; her mother never prayed.

“Yes. There were two of you. Brush your teeth and we’ll talk about it when I come back.”

With careful movements, she left the room and fell into a jerky stagger, one of her blue slippers falling off as she careered into the toilet.

Not quite knowing what she was doing, Jess noiselessly followed Sarah’s path to the door. Sticking her head out of her bedroom door, she saw her father, who was brushing his teeth at the bathroom sink. He put down his toothbrush and pressed both hands on the sink, leaning forward as he listened intently to her mother’s stifled sobbing through the wall. Jess, trembling, tensed herself, preparing to duck back into her room.

Jess was crying too, angry with herself, stuffing her fingers into her mouth to keep quiet so that she wasn’t heard and blamed. When her father reached out and knocked on the wall between bathroom and toilet, she heard her mother take a shuddering breath.

“Sarah! What’s happened? Can I come in?”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

“Can I come to you?”

“No. I’m all right. I’ll tell you later.”

“Oi, I’m coming.”

Jess retreated into her room, drawing the door carefully behind her so that it didn’t slam. She wiped her tear-stained face with the sleeve of her nightie and sank to her knees on her bedroom floor, stretching her arm up uncomfortably to hold the doorknob so that the door was open just wide enough for her to hear. She had to strain and press her ear against the airy gap between door and door frame.