The Icarus Girl (33 page)

“My father would die laughing,” Sarah added after a stunned silence.

TillyTilly was now sitting on the floor beside Dr. McKenzie’s chair, pulling a Jelly Baby apart and rolling the bits into little balls between her fingers.

(TillyTilly, don’t, you’ll make a mess.)

“You know you’re wrong, don’t you?” Jess informed Dr. McKenzie, as grandly as she could. But her knees were jiggling up and down with fear. Oh God, what if he was right and she was just this mad, mad girl who did things that she couldn’t control?

“Sometimes we do things that we don’t like and that we can’t understand, Jess. It’s possible that all TillyTilly means is that part of your mind, say, the part of you that can show you’re angry in a reasonable way, hasn’t developed as quickly as other parts, like the part of you that likes reading lots of books—”

He paused and his brow puckered as he looked at the little green balls of dismembered Jelly Baby at his feet before scooping them up.

“Listen, Jess, we can talk about this more later, but I just wanted you to know this so that next time you see TillyTilly coming, you can remember that she doesn’t have to be there.”

She doesn’t have to be there
. That’s what Shivs had said, too. What was wrong with everybody?

TillyTilly threw her arms around Jess’s shoulders, hugging her close.

“I do have to be here, you need me,” she whispered in Jess’s ear, and Jess was aware of trying not to shrink from Tilly’s touch so as not to make her angry and she wished that sound
(hmmmmmmmmzzzzzzzz)
wasn’t rocking through her and making her feel faint. Dr. McKenzie thought that he knew what TillyTilly meant, but he was wrong. Nobody knew what Tilly meant, and nobody knew what Jess meant either, though with Jess, they could if they really wanted to.

“Please don’t talk to TillyTilly again,” Sarah begged, as they got on the bus to go home. She was flustered paying the bus driver, and dropped her gloves, floundering to pick them up until Jess snatched them up for her. On rising, Jess was surprised to see that Sarah’s eyes were filled with tears. Not knowing what to say, Jess took a seat by the window and stared out, unseeing, at the houses and shops and cars moving past.

Sarah sat down beside her and squeezed her hand.

“Think of it like not speaking to a normal friend. She can’t make you play with her.”

Jess began to drum her feet lightly on the bus floor as she tried not to listen to the pleading in her mother’s voice. She tried, instead, to imagine how she really could have done these things herself. She saw herself kicking the computer, pushing it off the table, making sure it was broken beyond repair because she hated her mother.

And the mirror. Could she
really
have taken it off the wall and flung it to the floor so that the glass sprayed out in jigsaw-puzzle pieces, then calmly put the empty frame back on the wall, at an angle?

And not
remember
?

The trouble was that, with TillyTilly, it was possible.

Possible, but not true, she decided.

“Jess. Promise me?”

Silence.

“Jess? Please. It’s already hard with your father being poorly—” Sarah’s voice was rising out of her control, and Jess flinched a little bit, embarrassed.

“Yeah. OK,” she mumbled, noncommittally. Everyone acting as if she had a choice. But she wasn’t the fairy; she wasn’t.

“OK what?”

“OK I won’t talk to her.”

Oh, Shivs, why did you have to tell? You are a bad friend. Good
friends don’t tell secrets like that. Why is TillyTilly always right?

TWENTY-TWO

Jess would be nine on July the twenty-fifth, during the school holidays.

“We were wondering if you’d like to spend your birthday in Nigeria,” her mother said brightly as Jess chopped the crust of her toast up into little, little pieces at the kitchen table.

We?

Jess looked at her father, who was wearing a T-shirt, pyjama bottoms and a belted dressing gown and propping himself up at the table with his elbow. His cornflakes had descended into a pool of mush before him, and he seemed to have been reading the same two lines of the morning newspaper over and over again, his lips moving slowly as his finger traced the lines of print. His chin was covered with thick stubble that was spreading up his cheeks.

His hair looked a mess. Jess didn’t think he’d brushed it for ages.

She worried about things like this—him not drinking or disposing of his own coffee, him not smiling, him looking so tired all the time but not sounding like he meant it when he said so, him not brushing his hair. He didn’t look like part of the “we.”

What would he be like in Nigeria?

What would her grandfather say?

He’d probably look straight at her with those keen, sparkling eyes and know that it was Jess’s friend who had done it, and therefore Jess’s fault.

She wouldn’t be gold anymore, because he’d know the truth.

She tried to think of what the Yoruba for “mud” would sound like.

“So what d’you think?”

Her mum put another piece of toast on Jess’s plate. Jess was annoyed. She didn’t want any more toast. She stabbed at it with her table knife.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you want to see your grandfather again? I thought you missed him.”

Jess carried on stabbing.

“If you didn’t want it, you should have said so,” Jess’s mum told her, yanking the toast out from under Jess’s knife in one deft move.

“I don’t want to go,” Daniel said quietly, from opposite Jess.

Sarah and Jess both looked at him in surprise.

“But I thought we agreed—” said Sarah.

“I don’t want to go. I didn’t really want to go the last time either,” he informed her languidly.

Sarah didn’t reply, but quickly began buttering her toast and spreading it with jam. Jess risked a look at her to see if she was going to explode and start an argument, but she seemed pretty calm.

“It’s nothing personal,” Daniel added abruptly, as if Sarah had protested (was a different version of the “conversation” running in his head?). He rubbed his eyes. “I just don’t want to go anywhere.”

“Yes, OK,” Sarah said testily. Then, in order to end this exchange, she turned to Jess while Daniel went back to the crucial two lines of black print on his paper.

“Just let me know when you make up your mind, OK?”

Jess nodded, then caught a flash of TillyTilly lurking in the passageway between the sitting room and the kitchen—the pockets of her school dress seemed to be stuffed full of paper— but she had disappeared again in a second.

“Can I have another piece of toast?” she asked, to her mother’s clear exasperation. Jess didn’t care; she wasn’t going to go out there by herself so that TillyTilly could invisibly pull her hair and push and pull at her when she refused to speak. It was hard not being able to talk to Tilly and not being able to talk
about
her either. Dr. McKenzie and her mother were wrong: TillyTilly’s presence was no longer a matter of Jess’s choice, if indeed it had ever been.

(I wasn’t pretending to be someone else; it was TillyTilly dragging secret things out of me like she sometimes does. I didn’t choose TillyTilly, I just couldn’t say Titiola right. Really, truly, please believe me.)

Her father was passive and uninvolved, apparently unaware of TillyTilly’s now imaginary status in the household. Taking the opportunity of having him as a captive audience in the sitting room as he watched television—always the adverts; occasionally he smiled at some unknown or hidden element of them—Jess had told him of the problem of TillyTilly. She bit down her fear and risked her secret; she told her father that Tilly was real, and, barely even acknowledging it with a nod, he had told her in exchange that there was a very small person trapped in a space like this. (He held up his hands to describe a narrow box shape.)

The person was fast asleep.

Everything was colourless and slow because this small person was asleep, and nobody knew how to wake them up. They wouldn’t wake up because they didn’t really want to—it was too hard being awake. He asked her if she understood, but she had stared at his face, which was wet with tears even though his voice remained steady and low, and then she’d looked around the sitting room at all the colours and told him yes, she understood, because she wasn’t sure if he knew that it was Jess he was talking to, and anyway it was her fault, so she had to understand. The doctor had given him some special pills, but she never saw him take them. Once, when Jess was on the stairs and her parents were in the sitting room, she had heard her mum ask, “Please tell me what’s the matter, please. Is it work? Is it me?” but he only said, “No and no and no, no, no. I’m just tired. So tired. That’s all.”

It had been hardest not to talk to TillyTilly the previous night, when Tilly had said to her, “You’re angry, Jessy. You’re angry with Siobhan, she’s made it all worse and now you’re not allowed to speak to me in case I do something. But I’ll be good! I won’t do anything you don’t want me to!” The candles had been placed all around Jess’s bed, and TillyTilly had been talking from behind the big wooden board with the long-armed woman on it. Jess couldn’t see Tilly’s face, but she could see her arms supporting the board, and the fraying blue-and-turquoise friendship bracelet on her wrist.

“You understand that I’ve got to
get
Siobhan, don’t you?” TillyTilly said. “ ’Cause you won’t really forgive her until she’s been
got
. You’re really angry with her, Jessy, and I know it’s because you never had a proper, really really here friend, and now she thinks you’re mad. It scares you for people to be scared of you and think you’re weird, remember?”

It was no use; Jess could still hear her from the safe place, and it took every bit of strength she had not to reply. She couldn’t let TillyTilly say this; she couldn’t let Shivs, who was brisk and bright and strong, be taken away and replaced with . . . she didn’t know. Just . . . someone else who didn’t know why they had to be there, who slept most of the day and had a flat dullness in their eyes for the rest of it. Being
got
was supposed to be like being beaten up, bruised, bleeding, crying, but this was stranger and worse.

It was as if TillyTilly had a special sharp knife that cut people on the inside so that they collapsed into themselves and couldn’t ever get back out. No colours, her father had said. No colours! She wasn’t angry at Shivs, although she had been. They’d made up, they’d spoken on the phone, and Shivs had apologised ramblingly before explaining that she’d been scared, not for herself, of course—you wouldn’t catch Siobhan McKenzie being a scaredy-cat—but for Jessamy.

“I felt as if she didn’t really . . . well,
like
you much,” Shivs had said lamely.
(That’s not the problem, she likes me too much.)

Jess kept all of this in her mind, trying to think of other things as well, while TillyTilly reminded her that Shivs had sworn
(see this wet, see this dry, stick a needle in my eye . . . )
not to tell.

Tiny flames were leaping all around her, and Jess peeped at them through her half-closed eyes, trying not to feel as if the charcoal woman was staring at her. She wasn’t going to let TillyTilly get Shivs, she wasn’t, she wasn’t, she wasn’t.

“I told you that this McKenzie would only bring trouble,” TillyTilly had said finally, before emptying the room of herself, the candles, and, last of all, the tall, inexplicably reproving board.

“Jess, do you know what happened to my tea lights?” her mother asked, now, at the breakfast table.

Jess shook her head and eyed her father as he rose and wandered out of the kitchen. He looked at TillyTilly, who had come back again, as she sat waiting on the staircase. He looked
straight
at her, as if he saw her but didn’t fully register what he saw, and Jess saw TillyTilly shrink up small against the wall as if something in his gaze frightened her. But neither Jess’s father nor TillyTilly said anything, and after that split-second pause, Daniel padded into the sitting room.

“It’s really quite strange because I had three packs of them: all gone.” Her mother seemed about to continue, but was interrupted by the trilling of the telephone, which she rose to answer. After a second, “Jess, the bell tolls for thee,” she announced from the hallway, beckoning Jess.

It was Siobhan, who was reminding her that she was coming over at five to spend the night.

“Oi,” Shivs said, lowering her voice to a static crackle, “my dad doesn’t really want me to come. He thinks . . . I dunno.”

(I don’t want you to come either, Shivs, but I do, but I don’t.)

Jess had no time to force her voice over the drowning of her heart, because Shivs quickly filled in. “But then my mum told him not to worry, and that you’re this really nice girl and properly brought up, and you’re really good for me because you’re all intelligent and stuff. So I’m still coming!”

“Oh,” Jess managed to say.

“I dunno. I just thought I’d tell you. Um.” The turn of Shivs’s voice was tinted with remorse. “All right, see you then, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jess croaked, ignoring TillyTilly, who was stretched out over the ceiling like a grinning sheet.

Shivs shouted “BYE!” at the top of her voice and swiftly hung up.

Perturbed, Jess went and sat back down in the kitchen while her mum washed up and muttered aloud a brief list of things that needed to be fetched. She supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised that TillyTilly knew how to use the phone: she knew how to do everything.

“I want to go to Nigeria for my birthday,” she announced to her mother, who cheered her decision. It didn’t matter if her grandfather did know the truth about what had happened to her father—though he hadn’t mentioned her “thief friend” again—Jess had a feeling that he would also know how to make TillyTilly stop.

“We might have to leave your father behind in England, though,” her mother told her.

“Want me to tell a ghost story?” Shivs said in a loud whisper, turning her torchlight into Jess’s face.