The Icarus Girl (29 page)

“Never, never, never,” Jess whispered to herself, unsure what she meant, and she closed her eyes tight and hid from TillyTilly, even though her hands and feet were numbing with cold. She could hear the rushing water drumming away in the bathtub.

“I’m not full, but you’re the hungry one,” Jess said between clenched teeth, as a cold hand
(was it within or without?)
touched her.

She was scared! She was so scared it was in her eyes and her hands and her bones and hair and teeth—

It was OK.

It
was
OK—

Then, without opening her eyes, she was caught in the crisp outward shattering of glass as
the mirror crack’d from side to side
, flying out of its frame. At the centre of it all was TillyTilly, manically screaming, “Seven years’ bad luck! Seven years’ bad luck! SEVEN YEARS’ BAD LUCK!”

“What are you?” Jess cried out from her safe place.

Tilly’s reply: “I don’t KNOW! You know! YOU know!”

Sarah heard the sound of loud breakage in the bathroom, and was there half an instant after Daniel, who had flung himself against the door and forced it open. There was a thin layer of cold water on the floor—it was from the overflowing bathtub. Water was also pouring gradually from the edge of the washbasin as well, since all the taps were on. And Jess, sitting near the middle of the room, small and inscrutable in her blue T-shirt, was surrounded by a myriad of glittering mirror pieces. Inexplicably, the white mirror frame was empty on the wall above the sink, rocked slightly to one side. In the middle of all this sat Jess, silently clutching her purple toothbrush, holding it out as if it were an offering. It had bits of glass in the bristles; she’d been incredibly lucky not to be blinded or hurt. Glass was everywhere—Jess blinked and shook her head; pieces of mirror were in her hair and scattered on her clothes and the floor. It broke the spell.

At the light clinking sound, Jess’s mum stepped gingerly into the room, moving quickly over to Jess and brushing her down with a towel as Jess’s dad turned off the taps.

Jess was
light, light light-headed
with fear.

“Mummy,” she said, impatiently shrugging off Sarah’s attentions with the towel as she was led out of the bathroom, “You have to believe me! I didn’t do it! It was TillyTilly—”

Then she stopped, confused, and said nothing more.

Her mother’s eyes grew wide and fast-blinking, the lashes trembling.

“So TillyTilly came here tonight and decided to break something again, hey?”

Sarah handed the towel to Daniel and started down the stairs to fetch the dustpan and brush. She needed to change from slippers into shoes as well.

Jess’s dad now took his turn. “Jess—”

Jess wriggled away from him and started back to the bathroom.

Despair. Despair. It was as if they were all on Tilly’s side, determined that Jess be blamed for something that she didn’t even know she’d done. She could see Tilly’s plan, and she could see that it was going to be one long line of TROUBLE until she didn’t want to be Jess anymore.

Desperately she said, “You don’t believe me! Well, OK, I’ll clear it up. It’s my fault, anyway—I made all this mess!”

Restraining her, Daniel tugged Jess out of the way as Sarah, looking clownlike in a pair of his black boots, reentered the bathroom, clicking her tongue at the extent of the sprayed glass. Jess kicked hysterically, hearing the rasping sound beginning in the back of her throat, the one that preceded a screaming fit.

Jess’s father picked her right up, and both of them saw a nerve tighten near Sarah’s jaw. But she bent over and steadily began to sweep the shards of glass into the dustpan, shaking the brush every now and again to dislodge shining specks.

Jess made one last blind swipe at the bathroom floor, her arms spinning around in an attempt to break free from her father’s hold, then she yelped as glass spiked the top of her palm, and a bead of blood sprang from an area on her palm just below her middle finger. She stopped struggling and stared at it, fascinated.

“Oh God, Jess!” Her father sat her on the top step of the staircase and took her hand, inspecting it, but Jess snatched it back and held her hand up before her face, gazing absorbedly at the cut.

So now she bled, when the skin wouldn’t lift from her hands before.

She let out a low whine and rocked back and forth, and her father
(go away, GO AWAY)
tried to take her hand back in his.

Sarah had dropped her dustpan and brush and was repeating, “Daniel, you’ll need to get some disinfectant and some cotton wool—”

Jess looked up from the cut, and stopped them both in their tracks.

There must have been something in her gaze that held them both so stiff, but she didn’t care.

Sarah shrank back, murmuring, “Jess, what is it?”

“Shut up!” Jess fired back, cradling her hand at her chest. “Shut up! It’s all your stupid fault anyway. You don’t believe me, just when I need you to—”

“Daniel, get the disinfectant,” Sarah said steadily. She and Jess were staring at each other.

Jess couldn’t stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she’d be scraped hollow. She didn’t like saying these things, but she didn’t know how to stop.

She wanted to stop.

Her mother was holding on to the top of the banister as if preparing to flee, only not yet.

“You hate me, anyway! You want to hit me when I scream just because YOU got hit! She wouldn’t BE here if it wasn’t for YOU—”

Daniel stayed stock-still, his eyes fixed. Jess was spilling over, spewing out words.
(Daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy)

“And it’s all YOUR FAULT about Fern! You think it’s your fault, and it is, it is, it is!”

Jess’s voice had escalated to some peak of dark satisfaction, and Sarah winced and closed her own eyes with a slight shaky nod of something like acceptance. But it was Jessamy’s eyes, like cold hard stones, like the girl that Fern would have been, that made Daniel start forward, carpet slipping under his feet, and wildly strike out almost before he knew what he was doing, hitting his daughter with such force that she jerked backwards with a whole-body snap.

“DON’T talk to your mother like that,” he yelled, looking neither at Sarah nor at Jess. His voice wobbled on the last few words.

Her mother put her arms around Jess and gently touched her cheek, rubbing the spot that hurt.

“Disinfectant,” Daniel said, slowly heading down the stairs.

Jess stared, bewildered, after him, feeling tides turning in her stomach. Everything, everything had crossed over in the spin of a second.

EIGHTEEN

Jess went to sleep nursing the cut on her hand. She kept thinking about the peculiar
(whiteblanket)
feeling that had overwhelmed her when she screamed at her mother. Had TillyTilly been the glass that cut her? Not only that, but the way her father had looked at her: horrified, repulsed, she could see it over and over again.

So now they both hated her, they were a
group
of two. Well, fine, she hated them too. But she couldn’t help weeping a little when she remembered that now she didn’t even have TillyTilly anymore.

She fell asleep for a little while, but woke up when TillyTilly appeared.

“Oh, Jess,” TillyTilly laughed, spinning in circles, her arms out. She was hiccupping and giggling, then suddenly suppressing tears, the dimensions of her face stretching impossibly so that her eyes were like long, pale, luminous slits in the night. “You’re afraid of me! It’s changing us! Stop . . .” She gave a raucous whoop.

The air was condensing; it was the only way to describe what was happening—there was a sort of mist, a palpability, an elusive smell like madness. Jess knew with all the certainty of childhood that her bed was a haven from which she must not stray. She must beware, because TillyTilly was no longer safe.

Had she ever been?

The very fabric of TillyTilly was stretching, pulling apart, a brown cycle of skin and eyes and voice whipping around Jess and the bed in ever-decreasing circles.

Jess dropped onto her hands and knees, curling herself up closer to the bedclothes. It was dark with her eyes open, dark with them closed. She could smell Tilly’s skin. The leafy pomade had intensified into a wet, rotting vegetation smell. Could she call for her mother, who was a wall’s thickness away? Candles burned, and on the outside of Tilly’s circle of tea lights, Jess knew that the terrible, beautiful, long-armed woman would be there, setting the air humming with her presence, looking on.

“Ohhhh,” Jess whispered. She could feel shadows falling, cold across her. “Ohhh . . . please, please, don’t let this be happening. I want this not to be real. I want this not to be . . .”

TillyTilly laughed then, and the room (and the bed) seemed to Jess to tilt sickeningly from side to side.

Tilly is trying to shake me off the bed.

Clutching the sides of her bed so hard that one of her nails bent inwards over itself, Jess gave a sharp cry and forced herself to open her eyes, blinking away the wetness that filled them. The room was dim and still, filled with a bitter smoky smell, but no one was there.

The door . . . but the door was too far away.

too . . .
far . . .
away . . .

“I’m only little, Jessy.” The voice came from above her, a high, lilting, singsong voice that sounded younger than TillyTilly’s normal voice. “Just a little girl. Nothing more. Do you find it hard to believe? I thought you wanted to be like me? That’s your problem! You always want to know where you belong, but you don’t need to belong. Do you? DO YOU?”

Jess did not look up or give any indication that she had heard, even though her stomach was heaving and she could taste the bitter bile juice at the back of her mouth.

“You really need to hate people,” TillyTilly continued.

Pause.

“You deserve to.”

Then something began to drip slowly onto Jess’s back, so slowly that she almost didn’t feel it until she felt the cloth of her pyjamas cling and stick to her back. She nearly put her fingers to the wet patch, but, with enormous effort, lay still, her eyes wide and watchful. She felt as if her mind was slipping away from her, soaring so high that she would not be able to reclaim it. If only the liquid, whatever it was, wasn’t so very hot, so hot that it numbed her skin and felt freezing cold.

How can this not be over?

TillyTilly was still speaking, and Jess, unmoving, allowed the words to drift in and out of the air around her. Whatever happened, she would not leave this bed.

“Go on, Jessy, hate everyone, anyone, and I’ll
get
them for you,” TillyTilly screeched. “The whole world. We’re twins, both of us, twins. Doesn’t that mean something?” Then, more hesistantly: “Jess. Help me. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m scared.”

But Jess didn’t respond. TillyTilly was a liar. She said it didn’t matter about belonging, but it did.

“Land chopped in little pieces, and—ideas! These ideas! Disgusting . . . shame, shame, shame. It’s all been lost. Ashes. Nothing, now, there is no one. You understand?”

TillyTilly’s voice, changing in timbre, beginning to sound like an adult woman’s now, carried on unstoppably: “There is no homeland.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, TillyTilly,” Jess whispered. But there was no pause in the rant, and by now the dripping had increased in flow to a thin yet steady torrent. Jess did not, could not and would not look up. She must be spared, she must not be touched.

“Do you suffer through making your own suffer?” Tilly raged. “And then our blood . . . spilt like water . . . like water for the drinking, for the washing . . . our blood . . . I’m a WITNESS. Twins should know what each other suffer!”

The flow seemed to have stopped. Hardly knowing what she was doing, Jess turned her head to the side, and then looked upwards, slowly, slowly, holding her breath, already crying because now she knew that she didn’t want to close this gap between seeing and being seen—

“There is no homeland—there is nowhere where there are people who will not
get
you.”

Something hanging upside down from the ceiling; face dangling a few centimetres away from hers; those pupils, dilated until there was no white; those enormous, swollen lips, almost cartoonish except that they were deepest black, encrusted with dead, dry skin, coated here and there with chunks of

(I don’t know, I don’t want to know, please don’t let me ever know, even guess)

something moist and pinky-white . . .

The lips, which had paused, continued to move. Transfixed, she caught a glimpse as they moved over a small, mauve stump; the remains of a
tongue
.

“Stop looking to belong, half-and-half child. Stop. There is nothing; there is only me, and I have caught you.”

And it was only at this point that Jess began to scream, long and loud, as the silent, never-ending torrent of reddish black erupted from that awful mouth, and engulfed her, baptising her in its madness.

The worst thing was that it was all really happening.

NINETEEN

“Two of me. No, us. TillyTilly, JessJess, FernFern, but that’s three. TillyTilly and JessFern? Or FernJess?” Jess, sitting upright, was mumbling questions to herself in the streaming daylight from her window. She was perched on the end of her bed, pushing her book bag across the floor with her foot. “Who are you, TillyTilly? You know, you know.” She had a dry feeling at the back of her throat from being hungry and thirsty and not quite daring to go down to breakfast despite repeated irritated calls from her mother. Before this she had washed quickly, expecting the silent, silvery taps to jet forth sprays of water, but they hadn’t. She’d brushed her teeth and put on her school dress and cardigan before carefully reaffixing her hair beads all by herself. She hadn’t had the bathroom mirror to do it in and had had to use the little swing mirror on her desk to do the beads. And now her thoughts turned to TillyTilly, who was fragmenting and becoming double, and how she, Jess, was to keep herself safe from everyone.