The Icarus Girl (28 page)

Could
a person survive losing
two
twins?

It was too, too miserable being a child and not being able to know these things or believe in a future change. So strange, being powerless to do anything for her own happiness.

Now they were both crying, and Jess was startled because she had thought at first that it was only her. She wanted to wipe her face so that her tears didn’t drop onto her and Tilly’s clothes the way that they were. Tilly’s eyes were still closed, but she was sobbing so hard that her body was shaking in Jess’s arms. Then Tilly drew a great sigh and fell quiet, breathing almost noiselessly. She opened her eyes and motioned to Jess to let her go, and eased herself backwards on her hands.

“I don’t want to be like this,” she told Jess, letting her hands fall into her lap. Her head was drooping distressingly, as if she couldn’t hold it up.

Jess sniffled and wiped at her eyes.

“It’s my fault, isn’t it? Because I’ve been a bad sister.”

TillyTilly smiled, and there was a bewildering moment of blur between her and would-have-been-could-have-been Tilly, the wise-eyed
ibeji
woman, who wasn’t actually there, couldn’t be there at the same time as TillyTilly.

“No, not that. It’s like . . . You know when we fell?”

Jess remembered the flying-sinking feeling and nodded.

“It’s like that,” Tilly whispered, smoothing out her skirt with her trembling hands. Big tears were falling from her eyes again.

“It’s not what’s supposed to happen. Something’s wrong. I can’t—”

Jess watched as Tilly’s lips moved noiselessly for a few moments, as if she had forgotten how to speak, or what the words were. With effort, she met Jess’s eyes and said, “If only you could speak Yoruba. Or understand it.”

Jess reached out and timidly touched Tilly’s hand. “I’m sorry that I can’t, TillyTilly. Can’t you teach me?”

She wanted to be a better sister, too, but she didn’t think she could ask Tilly about that.

“Jess!”

Astonished, Jess gazed upwards to find that she was kneeling teary-eyed in the living-room doorway, at her mother’s slippered feet.

“What’s the matter?” Sarah asked, equally surprised.

Jess opened and closed her mouth, then gave a little laugh and moved aside so that her father, sock-footed and carrying a plate with a sandwich on it, could reenter the sitting room. Both her parents looked at her expectantly. With growing disbelief, Jess yet again felt herself slipping into the gap—that gap of perception between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening. She stood up and said, lamely, “I hurt myself.”

“Where? Shall I take a look at it?” Her mum maintained steady eye contact with her, and Jess, disturbed, wondered if the gap was not as wide as she had thought it was. She couldn’t bear a halfway gap; it had to be a chasm or not there at all—fitting pieces together would be dangerous and doomed to misunderstanding.

“No, I only stubbed my toe, it’s all right now,” she said, quickly.

“Jess, d’you want some of this?” Daniel interrupted from the sofa, apparently under the impression that Jess wanted to eat something as boring as ham and cheese in a sandwich.

Jess was relieved when Sarah’s eyes slid off her towards him.

“I like the way you’re eating ham now when I’m doing a ham thing for dinner,” Sarah admonished.

As her father replied, Jess tried to creep past her mother. She was stopped by a tug at the beaded end of one of her cornrows.

“Hey, you. It’s nearly half past six, and you haven’t asked to phone Shivs yet! You two arguing or something?”

Jess hesitated, then shook her head. She still had to sort that out.

“Actually . . . can I use the phone?”

Her mum nodded, and Jess bolted up the stairs to her bedroom to find the purple address book.

Shivs was a long time coming to the telephone, and when she finally took the call, her voice was gruff.

“What?”

“Shivs, I’m really sorry about yesterday.”

“So?”

“So I’m sorry! You should accept my apology. Jesus, what d’you want from me?”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Shivs said automatically, as Jess had known she would, then they both collapsed into laughter. Finally, Shivs drew a breath and then asked, “What happened, anyway?”

Jess bit her lip. “Umm . . . well, I was just joking. I didn’t even mean it! I was about to say ‘jokes,’ but then my dad’s friend Jonathan made me jump and I dropped the phone, and when I’d picked it up you’d gone.”

Shivs gasped, apparently at the audacity of the lie. “Ohhhh, what’s WRONG with you, Jessamy Harrison! The truth shall set you free—I heard you breathing!”

“What’s all this Bible stuff, anyways?” Jess asked, buying time. What on earth was she supposed to say now? And she was already so worried about TillyTilly, who was not supposed to be sick.

“My mum made me go to church on Sunday. Dry as a bone. Jesus was some boring man, but still, I DID hear you breathing— it was like
huhhh, huhhhh, huuuuh
—”

Jess, having swiftly made up her mind, interrupted her. “All right, listen, I’ll tell you about it one day. All I can say about it now is that I’m really sorry and I didn’t mean it.”

“Yeah? Tell me one day like when?”

“Like . . . not now.”

“Oh, fine then, if you want to be all mysterious,” Shivs said, then: “Me and Katrina are best friends again—we made up today.” They’d had a fight over one of Katrina’s Barbie dolls, which was now missing a pink-plastic high heel, an occurrence that Shivs swore
(wet and dry, stick a needle in her eye, if this turns out to
be a lie)
wasn’t her fault.

“Oh.”

“But me and you are still best friends. It’s just Katrina’s my school best friend, OK?”

“OK!” Jess didn’t complain, even though she didn’t have a school best friend herself.

“I’ve got to go and eat my dinner now,” Shivs said.

Jess could faintly hear Mrs. McKenzie calling in the background.

“All right. Bye.”

“Bye,” Shivs said cheerily. “I’m glad we made up. I didn’t take the friendship bracelet off, not even in the bath! And it took AGES making yours.”

After Jess had finished using the phone, her mum called Nigeria and spoke to Jess’s grandfather. Jess, sitting patiently on the steps waiting for her turn and bracing herself for the usual fear-provoking sound-echo on the line, pricked her ears up when she heard her mother mention the word
ibeji
, then look at her and turn away slightly before continuing in rapid Yoruba. She hadn’t talked with her mum about the issue of the
ibeji
statue for Fern again, preferring to keep it quietly in her mind for now while she worked out exactly how it was supposed to make Fern happy. When her mother finally stopped speaking and passed the phone to her saying, “There’s only a few minutes left on the card,” Jess spoke eagerly into the receiver.

“Hello, Grandfather!”

“My Wura! How are you, how is everything?”

She grimaced at the echo.

“I’m all right!”

“Good girl! Fine daughter!”

Jess smiled at a man who would say that she was a fine daughter just for being all right. Her grandfather’s next words made her heart stand still.

“Eh-heh, and also, have you heard from your friend?”

Jess’s eyes widened and she sank down on the bottom step of the staircase and looked through into the kitchen at her mother, who was slicing onions at the chopping board.

“Friend? Which friend? I mean . . . um. I do have friends, but which one . . . ?”

“Ha! You this girl! Have you forgotten already? That thief friend of yours who was stealing my candles and taking them to my own Boys’ Quarters,” her grandfather said equably.

Jess was silent, and the muteness wasn’t just inside her, but everywhere at once.

“Akin said that you came out of the Boys’ Quarters that day when you wanted to go home.
Sae
you remember?”

“Yes,” Jess whispered.

“I told him to check the place, but that foolish boy just went to the front steps and came back to tell me it was nothing. I checked the whole place myself a few days ago.”

“I didn’t have a friend there,” Jess said weakly.

“Eh-heh now, so you didn’t have a friend there! You were crying to go home and then afterwards you didn’t want to leave. You
oyinbo
are strange,” he teased.

Jess put a hand over her mouth so that he didn’t hear her laborious breathing. Had he found the board with the
ibeji
woman on it? He couldn’t have. He would have said something. But if Tilly had taken it away, then where was it?

“Wuraola.” Her grandfather’s voice was serious now.

“Mmmm?”

“Two hungry people should never make friends. If they do, they eat each other up. It is the same with one person who is hungry and another who is full: they cannot be real, real friends because the hungry one will eat the full one. You understand?”

“Yes, grandfather.” She was scared now, because she knew he wasn’t talking about food-hungry. She almost understood what he was saying; she was sure of it.

“Only two people who are full up can be friends. They don’t want anything from each other except friendship . . .”

Jess sprang up from the step, eying the darkened staircase as her grandfather’s voice was cut off with a loud series of beeps. Then, seeing nothing, she relaxed and gave a relieved laugh as she realised that it was only the lack of money on the phone card that had divided her grandfather and her into separate spaces again.

“Jess,” her mother called from the kitchen, “you hungry?”

Jess, who had dropped the phone with a clatter, calmed herself and replaced it carefully.

“Not really,” she said, chewing on her bottom lip.

“Pssst!”

Jess, who had run up the stairs ahead of her mother to prepare herself for the first two fits of
The Hunting of the Snark
read out in a Yoruba accent, stopped short before entering her darkened bedroom. The sound didn’t come from there.

“Jessy—”

Jess looked to her right and to her left, then moved cautiously down towards the bathroom and pushed the door open. The bathroom was cold, but the square, white-framed mirror above the sink was coated with what looked like condensing steam. She took a couple of steps inside, wondering what TillyTilly was doing, then she tried to step back out again, not liking the indistinct way her outline loomed as she approached the mirror. But, with a rattling sound, the bathroom door slammed shut, as if pushed. When she touched the handle, it was so cold that she jumped away lest her hand stick to it.

“TillyTilly,” Jess whispered, and her voice sounded so, so small that she almost didn’t realise that she’d said it aloud. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it,” she said, trying to sound firm and assertive. Tilly had to stop it now.

No sound, no movement. It was dark in the bathroom, but Jess somehow knew better than to make a move towards the light switch. The tiles had a pale white glow of their own. Shivering, Jess rubbed her arms and moved forward to the mirror, as she knew Tilly wanted her to. With one hand, she tremblingly rubbed away a corner of the mist, only to see her own eye peering back at her.

“Jess?” her mother said, sounding as if she was at the other end of a long, hollow tunnel, rather than just outside the door. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” Jess murmured, now smudging mist away with her fist. Then, louder: “Yeah. I’m just brushing my teeth.”

“New habit?” her mother asked, with a smile in her voice. When there was no reply, she said, “Well, I’ll be in your bedroom, all right?”

“Mmmm.”

Jess had now cleared a rough little patch of mirror, but was bewildered to find that she was only looking at herself. What exactly had TillyTilly wanted her to see? It was Jess, just herself, her hazel eyes darting bemusedly around the mirror, her pale brown oval face framed with the beginnings of the thick cornrows that swung to her shoulders and ended with the brightly coloured bustle of wooden beads. She leaned closer, squinting, then gasped aloud as her reflection spoke to her.

“I want to swap places, Jessy.”

It was Tilly’s voice, but Jess’s mirrored mouth moving.

“Sw-swap?” Jess stammered, touching her face even as she tried to discover how this could be. Her reflected eyes narrowed and passed over her coolly, and the cheeks were sucked in thoughtfully before Tilly said, “Yes. I’ve decided that it’s about time.”

Jess, moving rapidly towards the bathroom door again, was trying to reconcile this Tilly with Tilly-who-was-ill. She’d changed again: two Tillys, nice Tilly, nasty Tilly, TillyTilly. She disagreed with Tilly’s last statement with a frantic shake of her head. “I’ll scream again,” she warned.

TillyTilly chuckled indulgently, but remained standing still in the mirror-world she inhabited, even as Jess was moving, trying to force the bathroom door handle down despite the cold.

“All right then, scream. They’ll only put you in the basement again, and we’ll swap places there. People don’t care when you scream, Jessy, because—” from the inside of the mirror, she leaned closer to the surface and it seemed to bulge and stretch as if she would tumble out, “—because it’s really annoying.”

Jess put a hand to her mouth, trying not to let her heart feel too full that TillyTilly, who was supposed to understand, was saying these things to her. She also began to feel the stirrings of anger amidst her fear.

“I’m not swapping,” she warned, but her voice came out thin and squeaky—a frightened voice. Oh, she was scared again. She’d never been
more
scared.

“Yes you ARE.”

TillyTilly sounded frustrated. As she spoke, all four taps, the two for the sink and the two for the bath, turned on with a single sharp
hisssssss
. The plugs were already in place.

“Next the water pipes,” TillyTilly warned, as Jess stared uncomprehendingly at the gushing water. Some of it leapt impossibly and splashed Jess where she stood. All of it was cold.

“A person could drown in here,” TillyTilly added, from the mirror. “The water would have to rise fast though . . .”