The Icarus Girl (25 page)

Dr. McKenzie waited until Jess had recovered eye contact with him before asking, “What about Fern? Are you scared of her?”

Jess unclenched her hands when she realised that her fingernails were spearing her palms.

“Of course I am! But I try not to think about it. I think she’s going to—like,
get
me.”

She gulped, frightened at the meaning, but happy that she’d said it now. The words made it sound lesser.

Good.

Dr. McKenzie was looking attentively at her mother; Jess didn’t dare look at her. Then his pale eyes turned to her.

“Why do you think Fern would get you?”

Duh, that was easy.

“Because I’m the one who’s alive. She might be angry or something. Because it’s not fair.”

Dr. McKenzie regarded her gravely. She wondered whether he was laughing at her on the inside:
I thought she was supposed to
be clever
.

“Fern was a baby when she died, Jess. She’s not going to grow up and get angry in the same way that you or I can. Or . . . do you think that babies can get angry that way?”

Jess knew what was supposed to be the right answer. She mutely shook her head in response to his question, since there was no point explaining that she just
knew
.

Dr. McKenzie said, “Hmmm.”

What does that mean?

“Jess, what do you think Fern would have been like if she were your age?”

Slightly panicked, Jess stared at the table again, drumming her fingers on her lap. Her mother’s waiting silence was oppressive.

“I don’t know! I don’t want to talk about her anymore, please.”

Dr. McKenzie waited, then asked, “What does it feel like when you remember that you’re scared?”

She knew better now than to be surprised by this. She tried to sort it into words. “I feel as if that fairy cast a spell on me, only she’s a bad one—”

On viewing his inquisitive expression she added, “The fairy, in ‘Sleeping Beauty’? The one who cast the spell so everyone fell asleep?”

“Ah, yes. I remember.” He nodded, slowly. “So you feel as if everything’s been changed, just by your being scared? Tell me if I’m getting it wrong, OK? So instead of falling asleep, you . . .”

“Scream,” Jess finished, in a low voice, so determined now not to look at her mother that she was terrified her eyes would swivel in her head of their own accord. All she could do was hold on tightly to her seat and look at Dr. McKenzie, who was now gently asking her to close her eyes.

“Just close them tight. Don’t worry. No one’s coming near you. I just want to see something.”

Puzzled, Jess obediently clamped her eyes tight shut and waited in that familiar, smooth dark that was at first punctured with impressions of the colours that she’d seen when her eyes had been open. There was a still quiet, and no one said anything. Then, from nowhere, Jess’s stomach tightened as she began to feel frightened.

What had happened to the other two?

The hush was like an isolating sheet of glass, slicing her away from Dr. McKenzie and her mother so that she was adrift and alone; the surrounding darkness was no longer a refuge now that she had no one to hide from.

Her eyelids twitched furiously as the rational part of her mind told her that of course they were still here, they were just being quiet. But she needed to
see
, if only to make sure that her surroundings had not grown solitary and strange.

She knew that if they had been taken away, it would be TillyTilly who had done it.

“Jess,” Dr. McKenzie said, and she quivered at his voice, because it sounded so different. She hadn’t realised how important it was for her to be able to see someone in order to hear them properly. She decided, for some reason, not to answer; he was somewhere on the outside of her eyelids and he could see everything while she saw nothing.

“Jess. Are you scared now?”

A brief nod. Oh, she wanted to open her eyes but she didn’t want to. She was already forgetting what it had all been like before she’d closed them.

Dr. McKenzie spoke again.

“Jess, this is your safe place. You can’t be truly scared in your safe place. When your eyes are closed, you’re inside yourself, and no one can get you there.”

Jess’s lips trembled, and she finally opened her eyes and stared at him. Did he really believe that? And how could he know for sure?

“Why can’t someone get me inside?” she asked.

He shook his head at her as if she was silly for not knowing. “Because it’s OK,” he said softly. “Whatever you feel in there is OK. It’s not bad or wrong. You’re scared, and that’s all right. You can just
be
scared and then stop. Nothing happens in between.”

But what about a twin, a twin who knew everything because she was another you? Could
she
do something in that time in between?

“Promise?” she asked.

He smiled soberly. “That’s for you to promise yourself, Jess.”

It was OK to be scared. What a bizarre idea.

One day, a girl forgot the sun.
Her song had fled, so softly fled,
Thus, she lay down in darkling sleep
To follow, blinded, where it led.

The
ibeji
woman came to Jess in her sleep and drowned her in a blue
blanket that had sorrow in every fold. She said to stop being scared about
the swap, and that she should dream instead, dream in the swim of
things.

Forget, forget, forget . . .

“But, TillyTilly,” Jess said, “you shouldn’t have done it: it scared
me, it’s not . . . it’s not like sisters.” And the
ibeji
woman, this could-have-been-would-have-been Tilly, swam out of sight in billowing blue,
asking, “What
is
like sisters, then?” But Jess was sliding breathlessly
down into the waiting sky, so she couldn’t find the words to tell
TillyTilly that sisters was something about being held without hands,
and the skin-flinch of seeing and simultaneously being seen. But in
falling, Jess herself knew that she needed to understand the precious danger of these things, and what they meant, or she would never be happy.

When Jess awoke, she felt tingly and refreshed, and her fingers found the skin of her cheek as soft as if light silken cobwebs lay over her face. By midmorning, when Trish grabbed her in the corridor and told her that Miss Patel wasn’t going to be in for ages, so Year Five had an “easy peasy” substitute teacher called Mr. Munroe, the silk had disintegrated, and Jess felt brittle and breakable.

“What happened to Miss Patel?” she asked nervously, unsure if she really wanted to know.

Trish shrugged and popped her bubble gum, golden in the knowledge that her mornings and afternoons would now chiefly consist of tormenting Mr. Munroe.

“Well, Mr. Heinz said she had a family emergency, but Jamie’s brother’s in, like, secondary school and he told Jamie one time that sometimes when they say that it means the teacher’s gone a bit mental.”

Jess stared at her, feeling as if she should burst into tears but unable to muster the energy.

“Haha,” Trish prompted her, chewing hard.

“Haha,” Jess said, after a second’s delay.

SIXTEEN

When Jess and her parents got back, two days before New Year’s Eve, from the week they’d spent at Jess’s grandparents’ house in Faversham, there was a message on the answerphone for Jess—a first. It was from Shivs, who had honoured their six o’clock calling protocol. Listening to Shivs on the answering machine was weird—she kept leaving breathy pauses so that it felt as if this wasn’t a recorded message, but her talking in real time.

“Errrr . . . hello, Jess . . . oi, call me back . . . I’ve got SOMETHING TO TELL YOU! Yeah . . . Merry Christmas . . . yeah, BYE.”

Jess dumped her rucksack in the hallway, ignoring the fact that a leg of her pyjamas was falling out from the top where she hadn’t zipped it up properly. She glanced at her mother for permission before running upstairs to fetch the purple address book with the pink hearts that only had one phone number in it. Jess carefully punched in the numbers that she knew by heart, a small crease of concentration in her forehead as she double-checked the book so as not to get it wrong.

She was relieved when Mrs. McKenzie picked up.

“Good evening! I’d like to speak to Siobhan, please,” she said, trying to be as polite as possible.

“Is that you, Jessamy? How are you? How was Christmas?”

“I’m fine, thanks . . .”

Jess didn’t know what else she was supposed to say, and so she waited patiently for Shivs to come to the phone.

“It must’ve been you who’s been quoting
Hamlet
to Shivs— she’s utterly impossible now—keeps running around the house saying that we shouldn’t mind if she puts on ‘an antic disposition.’ ” Mrs. McKenzie laughed, and Jess found a laugh had been surprised out of her too.

“Anyway, here’s Shivs—say hello to your parents for me, will you?”

“Yeah, I will.”

There was some rustling, and then the sound of Siobhan abusing her mother.

“Oh, so NOW you’ve finished TALKING to her?”

“I was just saying hello—”

“You weren’t, though! You were all TALKING and stuff. Listen, she called for me, all right, not for you.”

“She’s holding on for you, you dozy mare. Take it.”

“Hello?” (From Siobhan.)

“Hi,” Jess said, smiling, both at being here, speaking to Siobhan, and at the conversation that she’d just overheard.

“Oi, Jessamy, where were you, man?”

“Went to my grandma and grandpa’s. They’ve got no Tescos where they live or anything.”

“Is it? Do they have Goo?”

Jess rolled her eyes; she’d forgotten Shivs’s current obsession with Goo, the blobby stuff that looked like congealed mucus and came in a capsule. You were supposed to collect different colours, both of Goo and capsule, until you had them all.

“Don’t think so,” she told Shivs.

“Well, it’s lucky you went, then, and not me!”

“Yeah . . .”

Jess fiddled with the green-and-white friendship bracelet that was wrapped around her wrist. Siobhan had made it for her in honour of Nigeria.

Behind Jess, something heavy fell over (she suspected that it was the Christmas tree) and her mum said “Figs!” really loudly.

“You know my cousin, Dulcie, the one I told you about?”

“Yeah. She thinks she’s amazing.”

“Yeah. Well, I taught her the new clap for ‘Finger of Fudge’ . . . She was sooo annoyed . . . and guess what, she didn’t even know ‘Milkman, Milkman’!”

Shivs snorted with the full force of a girl who is known in her primary school as the queen of clapping games.

“Not so amazing after all then, is she?”

Jess was about to reply, but Shivs cut her off.

“Guess what . . . You know the other day, when you tripped over that stick thing?”

This turned Jess’s attention to one of several new puckered scars covering the areas between her kneecaps and ankles.

“Actually, I didn’t trip—you pushed me, and it was this huge branch,” Jess corrected her friend.

“Yeah, OK . . . Anyway, guess what happened when I was coming home! I found a GOLDEN GOO, man . . . in a capsule and everything—it was opened a bit, but still . . . I really needed a golden one, so I picked it up, and my dad pretended he didn’t notice, cause my mum would KILL ME for picking stuff up from the ground.”

That was impressive, but also just Shivs’s luck. Most of the boys in Jess’s class would kill for a golden Goo. Jess said so.

“Yeah, I know! But then this dog started chasing me and my dad, dinnit, and it was this big fat dog, and the woman who owned it was like ‘Ginger, Ginger,’ not really bothering to STOP IT or anything. And the dog was black, anyway, so why call it Ginger? Anyway, so it probably wasn’t her dog. So I think the dog thought we were playing a game with it or something . . . and I tripped over, and I hit my face, and I got a great big cut on my knee!”

“Oh. What does it look like?”

“It is going to be a BADMAN scar,” Shivs said grandly. “My mum put some stuff on it, but it’s going all peely.”

“Wicked!”

“I know!”

“Are you going to tell anyone that you ran away from the dog?”

“No way . . . I already told Katrina that I fought it and it bit me, and that I might have RABIES.”

“Wicked!”

“I know!”

Jess thought she might be having some trouble with loyalties.

On Saturday morning, she was spread out on her bedroom floor drawing pictures with TillyTilly and trying to think of something to say that didn’t have anything to do with Shivs. Tilly always seemed to get cross whenever she talked about her. After a few seconds she still hadn’t thought of anything, so she bowed her head and concentrated on the snake that she was drawing. It was a big fat green-and-black python squiggling across the page, and she had to use red to get the forked tongue right. She tried to look over at Tilly’s picture when she’d finished her own, but Tilly squirmed away, shielding her piece of paper with her arm. Jess exhaled gustily.

“TillyTilly, are you cross with me?”

TillyTilly looked up and sighed irritably before snatching the piece of paper before her, crumpling it into a ball and stuffing it into the pocket of her school dress.

“You made me spoil it,” she complained.

Jess waited patiently before repeating her question.

“I’m not cross with YOU. I just don’t like Siobhan. I don’t think she’s a very good friend, not like I am.”

Jess started colouring the white paper behind the snake a light green. She was perplexed. TillyTilly was much cleverer than her and knew nearly everything—so if she said that Shivs was a bad friend, then she must be right. But Shivs was funny, and always thought of fun things to do, and she didn’t think Jess was weird. So TillyTilly might have got it wrong this time. Maybe.

“Why don’t you think Shivs is a good friend?” she asked, doubt smudging the features of her face.

TillyTilly reached out and pulled angrily at Jess’s friendship bracelet until Jess had to drag her arm away in order to save it from being torn apart.