The Icarus Girl (34 page)

Jess blinked furiously and only just managed not to fall out of the bed. It was a slightly uncomfortable squeeze with both of them on the single bed under two sets of covers, but she’d ignored the blow-up mattress that her mum had set up on the floor and insisted that they both sleep on her bed. She’d also reopened the bedroom door after Shivs had kicked it shut in her customary way, because she wasn’t taking any risks whatsoever.

“No . . . no ghost stories,” Jess told her, trying not to sneeze as a strand of Siobhan’s hair encountered her cheek.

Shivs twisted restlessly around for a little while, then scratched her head.

“Why can’t I sleep on the floor, anyway? You got mice or something?”

“Ewwww, no. I just . . . don’t want you to pull my leg or anything in the night. I get scared.”

“Awww, I won’t, though! Let me sleep on the floor, please please please! I need room! I put my arms out and everything— I’d make you fall out!”

“No!”

“Awwww but I’m sleepy, Jess,” Shivs complained. “And you won’t even let me tell a ghost story to keep myself awake.”

“If you complain any more,” Jess said quietly, in a spooky voice, “I’m going to make you go downstairs and eat some more of those spicy prawns—I know there’s some left . . .”

“Aargh,” Shivs said, “shabby.” She hadn’t liked the spicy prawns at all, and Jess giggled aloud just thinking about Shivs’s pop-eyed expression when she’d shovelled a forkful of prawns, mushrooms and rice in her mouth in defiance of Sarah’s warning to “go slowly.”

“Hah, you can’t take your pepper,” Jess’s mum had said, shaking her head while Shivs jogged silently around the room gasping for air until she was taken upstairs to brush her teeth and tongue with Aquafresh. She’d had to have a burger and chips instead.

Shivs stopped wriggling and turned over so that her face was jammed into the pillow.

“G’night, then,” she murmured. “S’not my fault if you end up on the floor.”

Jess sat up a little bit and watched, grinning, as Shivs snuggled down farther, slipping her thumb into her mouth. It was OK, it would be OK. She only had to make sure that she watched Shivs all night. She couldn’t sleep at all, she wouldn’t sleep, she would fight TillyTilly to the last about this—

But, of course, she did eventually fall asleep, with her arm flung protectively over Siobhan’s shoulder.

“Pssst! Wake up, Siobhan!”

Jess was calling her, she had to get up, and she had to go somewhere, didn’t she? Yes, and quietly. Or was that the dream? Siobhan stretched, cracked her eyes open and peered about her. Jess was nowhere to be seen; she had been calling from outside the room, but now she had gone.

“Siobhan, wake up!”

“Uhhhh—” Shivs wondered who had groaned, then realised that it was her. It was cold, her hands were cold; she didn’t want to get out of bed, she wanted to go back to sleep, but she was worried about Jess, who wanted her to go somewhere. She half climbed, half fell out of bed, not feeling the roughness of the rug under her bare, numbed feet, and stumbled out of the bedroom door. There were no lights on anywhere, and her squinted eyes were taking an incredibly long time to become accustomed to the darkness.

“Jess?” she called softly, then waited. From somewhere downstairs, Jess giggled. Were they playing hide-and-seek? Shivs blinked and shook her head, feeling more wide awake. She started down the stairs, deciding not to call out any longer. Two could be cunning. Hesitating halfway down, she peered into the dark and tried to decide whether Jess would be in the sitting room or the kitchen. The sitting room—she would be hiding behind a chair. Putting a hand over her mouth so that she didn’t laugh aloud, she began to tiptoe into the sitting room. Shivs was a little bit frightened in there, almost not quite daring to crawl around the sofa to find Jess. Jess wasn’t there; the room was dark and felt like an open mouth—some sort of mist was moving through it, a pervading warmth, and the carpet seemed to ripple slightly under Shivs’s feet, like a tongue.

All right, so now she was being silly, she told herself.

Her eyes had still not adjusted, and the shoulder of her loose nightie was slipping down her arm. Nervously, she tugged it up again.

“Shivs—” It was Jess again, and her voice was louder and more urgent. Now it sounded as if it was coming from
up
stairs.

How would she have done that, got upstairs again already?

Backing out of the sitting room, Shivs looked up the stairs to see Jess standing at the top, framed by a faintly incandescent brightness against the pitch black. It was strange, the way she looked, her features sharp and beautiful, as if there were a lantern burning under her skin. But she wasn’t holding anything—no torch, no candle, nothing. This was a dream, it must be.

A strange expression crossed Jess’s face and she looked over her shoulder at something behind her, her hand going up over her face before she turned back to Shivs. “Shivs, don’t—”

There was a lifting, a jolting and a falling back into place as something
swung
in Siobhan’s sight, and she immediately saw that Jess was not standing on the top step after all; there was another girl behind her. Only the shape, only the shape of another girl, but she didn’t want to see her come into Jess’s fierce light.

She had seen, but not quite seen. For a second, she thought that she wouldn’t be able to move, that she’d never move again, but then her knees gave way, and, dropping down with her hands over her face, Siobhan tremblingly waited for everything to stop happening.

Someone came, and the someone touched her.

“It isn’t really happening,” Jess quavered from the staircase, watching TillyTilly and Siobhan running together, screaming without sound as they

(or was it only Siobhan? or only Tilly?)

threw Siobhan against the front door, against the walls, on the floor. Siobhan’s body was twisting, her face shaped into a grimacing smile as she pranced jerkily into the sitting room with her nightie swirling out around her thin frame, then leapt back out as Jess breathlessly ran a little way down the stairs, and gripped the banister so tightly that it hurt her fingers. She didn’t quite dare to try and stop Tilly now. It was some fearsome, grotesque dance: Siobhan tiptoeing and then dragging across the floor, her red hair falling out of its loose knot and over her shoulders as she spun into the kitchen, while TillyTilly, partially elevated in the dim light, was somehow
operating
her, although Jess couldn’t see quite how: her hands were at Siobhan’s back

(in her? above her? Oh, don’t be in her, don’t let TillyTilly have her hands jammed into my friend’s body)

and Siobhan was gasping and laughing, and they all went into the kitchen and Siobhan/Tilly knew where the knife drawer was (of course! of course!)

and Jess knew that she hated both of them when Siobhan started to hurt herself with the knife edge, because it was her fault and she was bleeding too and she couldn’t stop.

Only apparently none of that happened. Because Siobhan had only fallen all the way down the stairs and broken the skin of her neck quite badly on the pointy end of the banister when it had inexplicably broken off. Just how, they didn’t know. It didn’t matter that all the knives were in the knife drawer, clean and untouched, and it didn’t matter that when Jess had stopped screaming Siobhan was all in a heap on the bottom step, but it mattered that TillyTilly hadn’t liked Shivs from the start. Only now could Jess tell her that it was OK that she couldn’t keep a secret; she was a good friend now that she was going to die.

“Did you push her?” Sarah asked Jess after Dr. McKenzie had arrived and the ambulance had taken Shivs to the hospital. She sat in the living room with her hand over her mouth and kept saying aloud that she was trying to understand how Siobhan had taken such a serious fall, and what pressure a four-inch piece of strong wooden banister end would have to undergo to break and leave a jagged, spiking thing. Jess was bundled up in her mother’s arms, her eyes closed, her breathing erratic. Her lips were almost blue. Her mouth was framing a word over and over again, the same word, sometimes slow, sometimes fast: “Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly.”

“Why can’t you stop being angry, Jessamy?” Jess felt Sarah mumble into the shoulder of her nightie.

Jess replied, “Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly, Tilly.”

Upstairs, Jess’s father had been woken up by the commotion, and when Jess opened her eyes, she saw him step over the piece of banister that had fallen away and walk into the kitchen as if he hadn’t seen it.

“Just forget all about it. It’s over,” TillyTilly said, somewhat petulantly from Jess’s bedside. Jess, with the covers pulled up over her face, tried to breathe quietly, but her heart was fluttering, letting her know that it was not after all OK to be scared. She had given up on her safe place. There was no safe place after last Saturday night; nowhere was safe when downstairs Shivs had been forced to dance that clumsy dance in her pyjamas, lifting her feet high, so high, colliding with every surface until she went to hospital and was all white and still and not getting better. Everyone thought that she, Jessamy, had pushed Siobhan, and in a way she was glad to be blamed at last; it had been bound to happen, she couldn’t have three people
got
and just get away with it, no way. She knew why Shivs’s being
got
had been different from her father’s—TillyTilly had not liked Shivs from the start, and Shivs had said that she wasn’t scared of anything, but she should have been scared, trying to tell Jessamy that her own twin sister didn’t like her. That’s what TillyTilly was telling her now.

“You’re not really allowed to go and see Siobhan in hospital,” Jess’s mum had told her, even though Jess hadn’t asked. She knew that Dr. and Mrs. McKenzie wouldn’t let her; they didn’t think she was a bad girl, TillyTilly had told Jess during the fever-days following Shivs’s being
got
. They just thought that Jess was very troubled, and she needed to see a new doctor. But that wasn’t going to happen, because this time TillyTilly was going to look after her and make sure that she didn’t have to see a new doctor and get in trouble all over again. Jess had accepted that while she was sick, but now she was better.

“You’re a ghost,” Jess whispered to TillyTilly from under the covers.

TillyTilly began to get angry.

“I’m not,” she insisted. “I’m not a ghost! That’s a dumb thing to say!”

“You are,” Jess insisted, fainter now as she grew less certain.

“Jessy, I’m not a ghost! I am NOT a ghost.”

Jess turned over, teeth gritted.

“What happened to your twin then?” she asked.

She heard TillyTilly breathing quietly, but no reply. Jess recalled Shivs’s screaming and the stream of red-black.

“I don’t know,” TillyTilly said, her voice pressing soft into the dark.

“What?”

“I can’t remember. All gone. Only my name—”

Oh, God. Only Titiola’s name was left, and Jess had taken even that. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be. How could you forget being ripped away from your twin?

“Ah, Jess, but you did,” TillyTilly said aloud. “It’s the ripping part that you forget first. It never comes back.”

“TillyTilly, but you are dead, aren’t you?” Jess pleaded, turning back towards the now indistinct form of her friend kneeling at the bedside. She timidly touched Tilly’s hand. “I don’t understand.”

“No. Now forget, forget,” TillyTilly said, pulling down the covers and touching Jess’s forehead with her soft, brown hand. She was the long-armed woman now, and she smelt of coconuts.

Jess had her eyes closed and didn’t open them, because then she fell deeply asleep and dreamt that she was flying, flying high above all the land, onward and onward, disappearing like a pin thrown into the blue. The rushing wind stung her eyes into slits, and her fluffy hair rippled out in sheets behind her, sometimes whipping in her eyes and lashing across her cheek. She would never fall, because her friend was flying with her and would catch her.

It was a blessing, even if she didn’t know it—the remembering of so many things that were her fault being drained away from her by her sister, who had promised to take care of her. Memories were burdens that took Jessamy through three worlds of hurt, the three worlds that only twins inhabit, and she was only half a twin.

Yet even as she fell asleep, Jess was aware on some level that her memories were being moulded so that they were all different, and that Siobhan had not been dancing, but rolling,
bump
bump bump,
from upstairs to down, terrible, she shouldn’t have pushed her, why had she pushed her?

It was a hot day in June when Jess returned from the park through the back door into the kitchen, and noticed that there was an empty coffee cup in the sink.

It was her father’s.

Puzzled but happy, she smiled, feeling as if this was somehow a gift. She dropped her mother’s hand and ran through the kitchen and into the passageway, shouting, “Daddy?”

He was in bed, but that was OK. She wanted to tell Tilly, but she was nowhere to be found.

ONE

“Daddy, there were, like, ten people in that car!” Jess risked the gusty whirring of the air-conditioning on her face as she knelt up on the seat and gesticulated wildly at the battered light-blue Ford that had just pulled ahead of them on the road. The people were crammed inside the car so tight that from the back they looked like one dark mass, as if they had been mixed together and spread across the car windows. You could differentiate backs of heads and necks, but only eventually.

“Um, I think that’s another cab,” her father said doubtfully, fanning himself with a newspaper as he looked at her mother for verification.

“Yup! The police don’t really care about that sort of stuff round here,” Sarah told Jessamy, who was gaping as she tried to imagine being in the backseat with six or seven other people, all in a ball of sweat, elbows, knees and rough hair.

They were back in Lagos, two days before Jess’s ninth birthday.