The Icarus Girl (21 page)

Jess’s mum mumbled something that her father didn’t catch.

“Whatty whatty?” he asked.

“She knows about it,” she said, through the door.

“I don’t get this. I’m an idiot. Talk me through this—what’s happened? Something’s reminded you of . . . it?”

A brief pause, then: “I didn’t know I was allowed to remember.”

By now, her mum was out on the landing. Jess could feel her footsteps on the floor as she paced up and down by the telephone stand. Her mum was sniffling. She didn’t say anything for a minute.

Jess fidgeted as she felt her arm going dead. They couldn’t be talking about Fern and calling her “it.”

“She knows about her. I don’t know how she knows. She’s like a witch; she doesn’t even look right . . . Her eyes—”

“Look, Jess couldn’t possibly know.”

“Shut up! You don’t know, Daniel! They know! THEY ALWAYS KNOW! Twins . . . they always . . . Oh my God . . . she’s like a witch.”

“Sarah, no. Look, I’ll explain to her, I’ll talk to her . . .”

Sarah began rambling, her voice trembling.

“Three worlds! Jess lives in three worlds. She lives in this world, and she lives in the spirit world, and she lives in the Bush. She’s
abiku
, she always would have known! The spirits tell her things.
Fern
tells her things. We should’ve . . . we should’ve d-d-done
ibeji
carving for her! We should’ve . . . oh, oh . . . Mama!
Mummy-mi
, help me . . .”

TWELVE

Jess and her mum were hurrying through the park, nearly late for school again. There was a heaviness and awkwardness in Jess’s limbs that made her feel even more aware of her movements, her breathing, than usual. Despite the talk with her parents and the assurances that it was nobody’s fault that Fern had died, that Fern was in heaven (she had noted the slight wince that had twisted her mother’s mouth when her father had said this), she felt haunted. She wished desperately that TillyTilly had not brought her the baby and had not told her about her sister. She didn’t want a dead sister. She was scared that Fern might want her to be dead as well.

. . . She’d prefer

to keep me, too, and make me stay.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jess watched the colourful, frayed ends of her mother’s headscarf flying out. It was Wednesday, but she was thinking of the old man who always sat on the park bench on Tuesdays. He hadn’t been there yesterday, and Jess had been surprised by how strange that felt, walking past the stained brown slats of the bench, her gaze coasting over his absence. He wasn’t like TillyTilly or like Fern: she couldn’t even visualise him there once he was gone; as if his image and form had been wiped cleanly off the outer surface of the park, leaving an expanse as clear as . . . a whiteboard, or Mrs. McLain’s fridge. Yet since Fern everything seemed changed. Maybe he was still there somewhere on the inside, like the darkness left by the rain and food and liquid that discoloured the wood of his bench. What she needed was for the long-armed woman to tell her some simple story that could show her how to know the difference between leaving and being taken away, spell caster or spellbound.

She asked her mother why she didn’t tell her fairy tales.

“I do, Jess! I tell you the African ones, don’t I?”

This was true.

“Yeah, but what about the ones like, you know . . . ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and stuff?”

Her mother shrugged dismissively, swiftly lifting her free hand to her throat to rearrange her scarf. “You can read those for yourself. They’re simple enough.”

Jess waited. She wasn’t sure if the “normal” fairy tales that her mother omitted to tell her, the ones that always made her seem stupid when the other kids talked about them and she didn’t know them, really were simple. More leaves skittering away underfoot, and her mother was still silent, tugging on Jess’s hand as they moved under the trees. When she was sure that no further reply was forthcoming, she asked, “You know in ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ when she falls asleep?”

“Yeah . . .”

“How come everyone else falls asleep as well?”

They were out of the park gates and about to cross the road now. The lollipop man smiled at Jess, who smiled shyly back. “Late again, eh?” he greeted. Jess watched her mum smile and shrug, somehow making these sheepish gestures seem unapologetic. They were now paced at a half run down the pavement to the school building.

“Everyone fell asleep because of the fairy’s spell, doyface,” her mother said as they came to a stop at the school gates. Jess pulled a thoughtful face as she gripped the handle of her book bag. Her mother gave her a little push. “Come on, woman!”

“Yeah, but Mummy, why did the fairy make everyone else fall asleep?”

Her mother looked heavenward and gave a little sigh, her hands jammed in the pockets of her faded blue dungarees.

“Ummmm. Because she was a good fairy, and she didn’t want the princess to wake up years later surrounded by dead bodies, I suppose!”

Her mother pushed open the gate for her and paused, patting her green-and-blue-checked headscarf into place around the edges. “Anything else?” she asked.

Jess bit her lip and turned as her mother shut the gate. She gripped the black bars and stood on tiptoe so that she was taller.

“Are you sure that’s the reason everyone fell asleep when the princess did? Because of the good fairy?”

When her mother stared at her with raised eyebrows and a slight smile, Jess realised that she’d let a thin, fretful tone creep into her voice. She made her heels touch the floor again and, turning her eyes downward, carefully began to untwist the strap of her book bag from around her palm.

Her mother leaned across the gate and touched her wrist. Her voice was kindly.

“Yeah, I’m positive. It was the good fairy, Jess, because she had good intentions. I think I might know what you’re worrying about. When I first heard of that story, I used to wonder about what everyone in the castle dreamed about while they were asleep—whether they all dreamed the same thing. What if they were having a nightmare and they couldn’t wake up because the spell hadn’t been broken yet?”

Jess made no direct response, but looked over her shoulder to indicate that she had to get away because she was probably now officially Late Late.

Her mother nodded.

“You better go.”

Jess turned and started running towards the secretary’s office, her book bag thumping rhythmically against her knees. She drew to a halt before she reached the glass doors. Her mother was calling her. She turned and looked back towards the gate.

“Yeah?”

Her mother leaned over the gate again. “I just wanted to know,” she called out, “if that was the thing that was bothering you? What I said?”

Jess blinked. It was incredible that her mother could really believe that a mother’s dreams, a mother’s fears, were the same as her child’s, as if these things could be passed on in the same way as her frizzy hair had been, or the shape of her nose.

“Yeah,” she said, pulling open the door and retreating backwards into the lobby. From behind the glass, she watched her mum nod, smile, wave.

The truth was, Jess didn’t know what had frightened her about a whole castleful of people falling asleep just because one girl had. She had no idea, and no wish to explore this fear. But with her mother, it always seemed to be about reasons. Why, why, why? Didn’t she know that knowing why didn’t make things any less scary?

The ridges in the carpet felt too big, like narrowly spaced islands. Her knees were crushing them, but they were denting her shins in a grotesque kind of revenge.

Jess shifted uncomfortably and licked her lips, then parted them in an O of slowly dawning dismay as her eyes settled fully on the row of books that she had spread out before her, cover touching cover. Shooting a frightened look around her, she dropped the green-and-yellow-handled scissors to the floor and hurriedly began closing the books, smoothing crumpled edges of torn paper back between the covers. She hadn’t realised, somehow, what she had been doing. No, that was wrong—she’d known that she’d been cutting the pictures out, but only on a detached level, like someone within a dream. She had gone into the book corner and picked out the books with lots of pictures, her fingers smoothing over the glossy encyclopaedia photograph of the girl with the short blond hair gazing into the mirror at herself. Two girls, two smiles, snub nose pressed to snub nose. It was like twins. She had to show TillyTilly. But she couldn’t take the book in her book bag: it was too big, and it was a class book, not a take-home book. Then the scissors, biting the paper into slim pieces—the paper had been stiffer than she’d expected, and she’d had to place a firm hand on the page so that she was able to cut out the girl properly. She had been dimly aware that she was humming under her breath, and the humming lengthened to deep pauses in her breathing as she had found other books with other twins, and soon she was sucking a fleshy paper cut on the pad of her index finger whilst continuing to cut with her other hand.

But now, now she was going to get in trouble. To her left was a small heap of thin paper cutout twins, waiting to be shown to TillyTilly. She glanced at the one on top—an illustration of a pair of woolly-haired black boys in blue shorts playing football— before she scooped the fragments into her cupped hands and poured them into the green-and-white-checked pocket of her school dress. Then with trembling fingers she quickly began gathering up the incriminating flaps and fringes of paper scattered around her. She was interrupted by Patricia Anderson—
Call me Trish, saves time, hahahaha
—who made her jump.

“Oi,” Trish said, momentarily pausing in the noisy chewing of her gum. “What’re you doing in here, man? We’re gonna watch
Geordie Racer
and that
El Nombre
video in a minute.” When Jess, her heart thumping as she crumpled the leftover scraps in her hand, didn’t immediately respond, Trish continued, “You know . . .
El Nombre/Writing numbers in the desert sand!
”

A few of the twin pictures fell from Jess’s overstuffed pocket as she stood, and, dread leaping in her stomach, she bent and scrabbled for them at the same time as Trish, laughing, bent and picked one up. Trish held it in the air and pulled a face. It was the picture of the boy twins and the football, stark against Trish’s hand. Jess stared at it, her mind working furiously, searching for escape routes.

“What’s this, anyways?” Trish asked, as if it was something simple that was answerable in a few words, a sentence.

As Jess’s palms began to sweat when she realised how peculiar this must look, a cramped thought began to unfold inside her.
Something is really wrong with me.

Other kids didn’t do this sort of stuff, she was sure, even if they were twins.

She moved forward to snatch the picture away from Trish’s amused gaze, but Trish had turned it over. There was book print on the back; they both saw it. Jess fled the book corner and pushed past Jamie and Aaron, who were bringing in the TV and video for
El Nombre
.

In trouble again, she just knew it. Twin pictures fluttered out behind her as she raced down the corridors, hearing only her school sandals slapping against the floor and the sound of her laboured breathing as she mumbled almost incoherently, “No, no, no, no . . .” Almost before she realised it, she had flung herself against the gate, her fingers scrabbling at the catch. Someone was coming up behind her, shouting

(roaring),
shouting, “Jessamy!”

“No, no, no, no!” She lashed out without turning around, kicking and swinging one arm out behind her. She heard a pained gasp as she made contact with cloth and flesh (an arm, a leg?), and her other arm curled itself tightly around one of the bars.
Trouble
. Oh, she was really in trouble now! It wasn’t her fault, it was Fern’s. Fern had taken her thoughts, because it wasn’t her—

There was a brief struggle as Jess was prised from the gate, still kicking. It was Miss Patel, red-faced, shouting at her.

“Stop this right now! STOP IT!”

The words and the face and Fern and TillyTilly and the pictures and
El Nombre
and the numbers in the desert sand were all hurting her, burning her. They were all tied to her with bruising string, and they would trail her wherever she went, even though she wasn’t to blame for any of it.

Jess allowed herself to go limp in Miss Patel’s restraining grasp.

Jess’s eyes were closed. She was trying to hide in the dark.

Of course, she knew that she was actually in Mr. Heinz’s office, but she preferred to pretend that she was somewhere else, somewhere drifting and quiet. She was on a big high chair, and Miss Patel was on the chair beside her. Miss Patel was wearing too much perfume, and both she and Mr. Heinz were waiting for Jess to apologise for her behaviour.

Mr. Heinz’s voice broke into Jess’s lovely dark.

“Jessamy? We’re waiting.”

He sounded annoyed. What, Jess wondered, could he have to be annoyed about? Then she remembered the books. She supposed they were sort of his property. Jess kept her eyes closed and tried to think how TillyTilly would sort this out.

“Jessamy, stop this at once,” Miss Patel snapped, from somewhere in the drift. “I really don’t know how much of your behaviour is precocity and how much of it is plain attention-seeking.”

Jess’s feet began drumming against the floor: tap, tap, tap.

“It’s like you’re playing some sort of
game
where you want some kind of control over us. Believe me, I’ve heard stories about you, young lady. And it’s all got to stop. You can’t keep disrupting the class this way, it’s selfish.”

Selfish
. She didn’t know what she was supposed to think of that.

Jess’s eyes opened almost involuntarily, and she stared at Miss Patel’s face, at her mouth moving and the fading patches of eye makeup that clung to her skin. The skin beneath Miss Patel’s eyes looked fragile and nearly transparent, as if a finger brushing against it could puncture her. She looked, Jess realised, as if she had been crying. For some inexplicable reason, Jess began to feel very cross. No, cross was the wrong word. Cross was just stamping and shouting.