The Icarus Girl (15 page)

Dr. McKenzie’s sitting room was bigger than theirs, and it had stranger pictures on the walls: fierce, clashing daubs and waves of colour trapped behind glass. The walls were painted lilac instead of wallpapered, leaving still, bare expanses between the framed pictures. This way, you could see the corners of the room sharply: it was like being in a carpeted box, but it wasn’t cold. If anything, it was slightly too warm in the room, but neither was it claustrophobic—perhaps because of the enormous, south-facing windows. Jess teetered apprehensively on the edge of the cushioned bamboo-cane chair, feeling as if her hair had been combed and brushed too flat and close to her head. She wondered when Dr. McKenzie would start trying to work out what she was thinking; at the moment he appeared to be doing a lot of inconsequential talking with her parents, about the holiday in Nigeria and so on. He kept looking at her as if she was supposed to be talking too, but Jess remained resolutely detached.

They met Mrs. McKenzie, who was small and curly blond in much the same way as Dr. McKenzie was tall and red. She was filled with a sort of smiling energy that made her seem constantly in transit, whether she was bustling about with tea and biscuits, or even sitting and talking, her foot tapping.

Jess was nibbling on a biscuit forced upon her by Mrs. McKenzie and looking at a picture to the left of the doctor’s head. It wasn’t a painting, it was a large black-and-silver framed photograph of, as he explained when he saw her looking at it, his daughter when she was five. Jess couldn’t help smiling a little at the chubby, freckled-limbed five-year-old kneeling in a blue swimsuit by an attempted sand castle, wielding her red plastic spade before the wet heap of sand and squinting irritably into the camera, visibly outraged at being interrupted. Her hair was a wild bundle of auburn almost as curly as Jess’s own, only short. She had obviously been touched by the “curse of the McKenzies” too.

“That’s just one aspect of Siobhan’s character,” Dr. McKenzie told Jess with a wry smile before directing her attention to Siobhan’s most recent school picture, propped up against the wall on a low shelf filled with knick-knacks. To Jess’s surprise, the nine-year-old Siobhan still wasn’t smiling. Jess, who had an automatic camera smile, thought that you weren’t really allowed not to smile for school pictures. Siobhan looked attentive but a little surprised, her grey eyes gazing, it seemed, at the top of the photographer’s head, a black barrette pulling her hair back in bright waves around her round, freckled face.

Then a soft impatient “Oi!” and Jess shot a startled glance at the doorway to find the girl herself, or at least the tip of her pointy nose, a length of black legging and the swoosh of green skirt over it. Jess glanced at her father and Dr. McKenzie, who were still deep in quiet conversation now that Jess’s mum had gone off somewhere with Mrs. McKenzie, then she looked back at the sitting-room door, where half of Siobhan McKenzie was now in view—she was crouching in the hallway, holding on to the doorpost with one hand. At first glance, it looked as if her stomach was a distended, square shape until Jess realised that she had something shoved underneath her green T-shirt. She beckoned to Jess, then abruptly disappeared. Jess didn’t know what to do about this and she sat, half poised to rise from the chair, for another second or so before Siobhan’s tousled head snaked around the doorpost again and she gestured frantically for Jess to come.

“The bag!” she hissed.

Jess, bewildered, picked up her rucksack, which had
The Lord
of the Rings
in it, which she’d brought in case she got bored, and scurried over to Siobhan, who promptly took it from her, pulled a box of Milk Tray from underneath her T-shirt and shoved it in. She thrust the bag back at Jess and beckoned her upstairs.

“Come on. You can have some,” she promised, as they started climbing the stairs.

Mrs. McKenzie called out from the kitchen. “Shivs?”

Siobhan paused with one hand on the banister and smiled apologetically at Jess.

“Yeah?”

“Just checking you’re back in, love. How’s Katrina?”

“She’s all right—her piggy bank broke, though, and she’s had to put it all in a jam jar.”

“Aww! We can get her another one for her birthday.”

“Yeah . . .”

Siobhan showed Jessamy into her room, which was a sky-lighted, rainbow-wallpapered heap of clothes, shoes, papers and cuddly toys, and kicked the door shut. She took the bag from Jess and dumped herself on her bed, ripping the cellophane off the chocolate box with her teeth and spitting bits onto the floor. When she had the box open, she stared at Jess, who was sniffing at the faint scent of bubble gum in the air, with open curiosity.

“You can sit down if you want.”

Jess took a seat on the edge of Siobhan’s bed and indicated the row of pristine-looking Barbie dolls ranged against the far wall.

“Wow! You must have nearly all of them!”

Siobhan grinned widely and tossed a chocolate into her mouth, then offered the box to Jess, who gingerly picked one out at random. It turned out to be a praline—yuck.

“Yeah, they’re not all mine,” Siobhan said, waving at the Barbies. “Some are Katrina’s, but it’s my week to have ’em.” She rattled the chocolate box at Jess, who refused with a shake of her head.

“My mum won’t let me have Barbies. She thinks they’re evil. She says they, um, can’t be a role model for real women because they represent this white idea of beauty.”

Siobhan considered this in silence, her brow wrinkled as she bit into another chocolate, holding the other half, oozing caramel, in her hand.

“Yeah, but there’s, like . . . black ones, too,” she offered.

Jess shrugged.

“My mum says . . . they look just like the white ones, only with a different skin colour.”

Siobhan finished her chocolate and put the box down on the bed between them before asking, “Yeah? What d’you think?”

“I don’t know . . . They’re only dolls, I s’pose. I wouldn’t mind one.”

Siobhan scratched her head bemusedly. “Yeah,” she said, half-heartedly, then seemed to make up her mind about something and opened her mouth to show Jess her asymmetrically chipped front tooth. It had happened when she’d been playing a strange variation of blindman’s buff with “some idiot called Anna,” who had tied a belt over her eyes, told her to go forward, forward, forward, in pursuit of a special stone, effectively instructing Shivs to walk into a wall. Before Jess, amazed, could respond to this, Siobhan tapped the chocolate box between them and airily embarked upon another subject.

“These are from Katrina. She lives two doors down,” she explained. “It’s my birthday tomorrow, but my mum’s really weird about me having chocolate, so she’d probably take them away— that’s why I had to sneak them in.”

“Happy birthday for tomorrow—”

They found themselves sniggering conspiratorially, then Siobhan rolled off the bed and tugged at the leg of Jess’s jeans. “What’s your name?”

“Jess—well, Jessamy, really.”

“I’m Siobhan, but I HATE being called Ginger, so don’t! Call me Shivs, all right?”

A nod from Jess, then a pause in which Shivs ate some more chocolate.

“I’m supposed to be talking about psychology with your dad today,” Jess finally confided.

“Oh. Are you feeling really sad or something?” Shivs eyed Jess gravely and gave her knee a solicitous pat, which set Jess off laughing again. She didn’t think she knew anyone as . . . solid, as there, as this girl. She wondered for a moment if TillyTilly would like Shivs. She, Jess, certainly did.

“I s’pose I’m sad sometimes, but not right now,” she assured Shivs. “I get scared of stuff.”

“Scared? What of?”

Jess shrugged, unable to put it into words and unwilling to try.

“Hah! Well, you should hang around with me then, ’cause I’m not scared of anything! Not a single thing,” Shivs told her, laughing.

Looking at her stretched languidly out on the floor amongst her scattered belongings, Jess believed her. She began to reply, then stopped short as she caught sight of a copy of
Hamlet
by her foot and picked it up.

“This yours?”

Shivs was playing with a small pink teddy bear, making it dance. She flicked a glance at the book Jess was holding and nodded briefly.

“Wow,” Jess said, excitedly. “Are you reading it? D’you think it’s good? My mum’s just started reading it to me and I think it’s—”

Shivs threw the bear at Jess with a loud guffaw of laughter. “Jess, it’s not REALLY mine, it’s my dad’s! I borrowed it one time to trace that man on the front.”

“Oh.”

Shivs turned onto her stomach and looked consideringly at Jess.

“You can understand all that boring Shakespeare stuff? You must be really clever then.” She sounded impressed—impressed and something else that Jess couldn’t quite identify. Suddenly tongue-tied, Jess shook her head and tried to say that her mum had to explain quite a lot of it to her, but Shivs cut her off. “Maybe that’s why you get so sad,” she said, “because you’re clever.”

Jess thought about that, but before she could respond, Shivs asked, “D’you know your phone number?” Jess shook her head and Shivs laughed. “Me neither, you know! But I have to learn it next year, just in case.”

“Yeah,” Jess said quickly, but was unable to stop herself asking: “Just in case what?”

“Dunno—” Shivs began, then suddenly catlike, she sprang forward and knocked the box of Milk Tray off the bed so that it rolled underneath it, chocolates spilling everywhere. Before Jess could ask her what was going on, Mrs. McKenzie opened the door and smiled at her.

“There you are, love . . . So you and Shivs are getting on. Good . . . But d’you want to come and talk to Colin now?”

No.

“Yeah,” Jess said, getting up and slinging her rucksack across her shoulder as she looked nervously at Shivs, who gave her a confident thumbs-up.

“ ’Bye, Shivs.”

“Jess, I’m going to call you tonight,” Shivs said, following Jess to the door. Jess nodded, trying to appear nonchalant, but feeling embarrassingly warm. “On the phone, all right?”

Talking to Colin about psychology wasn’t as scary as Jess had thought it would be. She quite liked him. They were just sitting in the kitchen by themselves drinking hot chocolate with marsh-mallows floating in it; she felt embarrassed drinking in front of him so she had to put her other hand over her top lip whenever she sipped. He asked her what she thought of school, and if she’d liked it in Nigeria. Sometimes she felt a little bit uncomfortable, because the minute she’d answered a question he seemed to have another related one ready to follow it up straightaway, and some of the questions were quite hard, like, “How do you know that that teacher thinks you’re weird in a bad way?” But he didn’t really ask the questions as if he was demanding an answer, but more as if he didn’t need to know but would quite like to. She liked that. And she found that whenever the conversation got too tiring, she could just say, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” in an anxious way, and he would stop and start talking about something else.

He told her about how, when he was a little boy, he had nearly drowned, and he told her how scary it was with all the water churning and filling him up. It surprised her a lot that this had happened to him, and she’d had to ask him how he’d felt when he was safe again, because she couldn’t imagine a great tall person like him drowning.

“Well, I’ll tell you something, Jess—I very quickly began to feel as if it had never really happened, as if it had actually happened to someone else,” he replied.

She thought for a minute that he was going to ask her if she’d ever felt like that (she didn’t think she ever had), but he didn’t. She had also sort of expected him to be writing things down, like a report, but he didn’t do that either.

There were other times during that conversation that Colin McKenzie really surprised her. The first was when he asked her what it felt like when she was screaming. She stared blankly at him, nonplussed even when he said that she could write it down if she wanted to. And she didn’t even know
why
the question caught her so off balance—maybe it was because he had assumed that there
was
something for her to feel when she had a tantrum.

The second time was when he asked her to say the first word that came into her head in response to the words that he was going to say to her—she was too startled, too unprepared by this proposal. She wanted to bite back every word she said, or substitute it with another, but Dr. McKenzie, steadily stirring his hot chocolate with his spoon, went on inexorably churning out words.

“Mummy.”

“Um. Big. No—”

“Daddy.”

“Small. Smaller, I mean, than—”

“School.”

“Nobody.”

“Jess.”

“Gone?”

“Where have you gone, Jess?”

She had no idea.

That was surprising, too.

EIGHT

The next time Jess saw TillyTilly, it was a Saturday morning. It was a warm day, almost stickily warm. Jess was lying on her bedroom floor with a ream of blank paper and her crayons and paint box beside her. Her mother’s copy of
Little Women
, the cover Sellotaped onto the rest of the book, also lay beside her. Every now and then the telephone would ring, and her mother would run to it from the kitchen, shouting “I’ll get it, I’ll get it!” even though only Jess and she were at home. There was going to be a party tonight, held by a friend of Jess’s father’s family, and Aunt Lucy and Uncle Adam were going, and so were her father and her mother. Jess’s mum was frantically telephoning every babysitter that had ever been recommended to her, hoping that one would be able to babysit on such short notice: “Today! This evening!”

Jess’s dad had said reprovingly, “You shouldn’t have left it so late, you know. Lucy offered, but you were so concerned that she’d find a babysitter that would only suit Dulcie and not Jessamy . . .”

Jess’s mum had simply looked up from her diary of telephone numbers and growled in a threatening manner, the sound rumbling deep in her throat. Jess’s dad had remembered something terribly important that he needed to do, and went away.