The
Icarus Girl
Click to order via Amazon
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Anchor (April 11, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 140007875X
ISBN-13: 978-1400078752
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
A 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominated Book
ONE
"Jess?"
Her mother's voice sounded through the hallway, mixing with the mustiness
around her so well that the sound almost had a smell. To Jess, sitting in
the cupboard, the sound of her name was strange, wobbly, misformed, as if
she were inside a bottle, or a glass cube, maybe, and Mum was outside it,
tapping.
I must have been in here too long--
"Jessamy!" Her mother's voice was stern.
Jessamy Harrison did not reply.
She was sitting inside the cupboard on the landing, where the towels and
other linen were kept, saying quietly to herself, I am in the cupboard.
She felt that she needed to be saying this so that it would be real. It was
similar to her waking up and saying to herself, My name is Jessamy. I am
eight years old.
If she reminded herself that she was in the cupboard, she would know exactly
where she was, something that was increasingly difficult each day. Jess
found it easier not to remember, for example, that the cupboard she had
hidden in was inside a detached house on Langtree Avenue.
It was a small house. Her cousin Dulcie's house was quite a lot bigger, and
so was Tunde Coker's. The house had three bedrooms, but the smallest one had
been taken over and cheerily cluttered with books, paper and broken pens by
Jess's mum. There were small patches of front and back garden which Jess's
parents, who cited lack of time to tend them and lack of funds to get a
gardener, both readily referred to as "appalling." Jess preferred cupboards
and enclosed spaces to gardens, but she liked the clumpy lengths of brownish
grass that sometimes hid earthworms when it was wet, and she liked the
mysterious plants (weeds, according to her father) that bent and straggled
around the inside of the fence.
Both the cupboard and the house were in Crankbrook, not too far from
Dulcie's house in Bromley. In Jess's opinion, this proximity was
unfortunate. Dulcie put Jess in mind of a bad elf--all sharp chin and
silver-blonde hair, with chill blue-green lakes for eyes. Even when Dulcie
didn't have the specific intention of smashing a hole through Jess's fragile
peace, she did anyway. In general, Jess didn't like life outside the
cupboard.
Outside the cupboard, Jess felt as if she was in a place where everything
moved past too fast, all colours, all people talking and wanting her to say
things. So she kept her eyes on the ground, which pretty much stayed the
same.
Then the grown-up would say, "What's the matter, Jess? Why are you sad?" And
she'd have to explain that she wasn't sad, just tired, though how she could
be so tired in the middle of the day with the sun shining and everything,
she didn't know. It made her feel ashamed.
"JESSAMY!"
"I am in the cupboard," she whispered, moving backwards and stretching her
arms out, feeling her elbows pillowed by thick, soft masses of towel. She
felt as if she were in bed.
A slit of light grew as the cupboard door opened and her mother looked in at
her. Jess could already smell the stain of thick, wrong-flowing biro ink,
the way it smelt when the pen went all leaky. She couldn't see her mum's
fingers yet, but she knew that they would be blue with the ink, and probably
the sleeves of the long yellow T-shirt she was wearing as well. Jess felt
like laughing because she could see only half of her mum's face, and it was
like one of those Where's Spot? books. Lift the flap to find the rest. But
she didn't laugh, because her mum looked sort of cross. She pushed the door
wider open.
"You were in here all this time?" Sarah Harrison asked, her lips pursed.
Jess sat up, trying to gauge the situation. She was getting good at this.
"Yeah," she said hesitantly.
"Then why didn't you answer?"
"Sorry, Mummy."
Her mother waited, and Jessamy's brow wrinkled as she scanned her face,
perplexed. An explanation was somehow still required.
"I was thinking about something," she said, after another moment.
Her mum leaned on the cupboard door, trying to peer into the cupboard,
trying, Jess realised, to see her face.
"Didn't you play out with the others today?" she asked.
"Yeah," Jessamy lied. She had just caught sight of the clock. It was nearly
six now, and she had hidden herself in the landing cupboard after lunch.
She saw her mum's shoulders relax and wondered why she got so anxious about
things like this. She'd heard her say lots of times, in lowered tones, that
maybe it wasn't right for Jessamy to play by herself so much, that it wasn't
right that she seemed to have nothing to say for herself. In Nigeria, her
mother had said, children were always getting themselves into mischief, and
surely that was better than sitting inside reading and staring into space
all day. But her father, who was English and insisted that things were
different here, said it was more or less normal behaviour and that she'd
grow out of it. Jess didn't know who was right; she certainly didn't feel as
if she was about to run off and get herself into mischief, and she wasn't
sure whether she should hope to or not.
Her mother held out a hand and grasping it, Jess reluctantly left her towel
pillows and stepped out on to the landing. They stood there for a second,
looking at each other, then her mother crouched and took Jessamy's face in
her hands, examining her. Jess held still, tried to assume an expression
that would satisfy whatever her mother was looking for, although she could
not know what this was.
Then her mum said quietly. "I didn't hear the back door all day."
Jessamy started a little.
"What?"
Her mum let go of her, shook her head, laughed. Then she said, "How would
you like for us to go to Nigeria?"
Jess, still distracted, found herself asking, "Who?"
Sarah laughed.
"Us! You, me and Daddy!"
Jess felt stupid.
"Ohhhhh," she said. "In an aeroplane?"
Her mum, who was convinced that this was the thing to bring Jessamy out of
herself, smiled.
"Yes! In an aeroplane! Would you like that?"
Jess began to feel excited. To Nigeria! In an aeroplane! She tried to
imagine Nigeria, but couldn't. Hot. It would be hot.
"Yeah," she said, and smiled.
But if she had known the trouble it would cause, she would have shouted
"No!" at the top of her voice and run back into the cupboard. Because it all
STARTED in Nigeria, where it was hot, and, although she didn't realise this
until much later, the way she felt might have been only a phase, and she
might have got better if only (oh, if only if only if ONLY, Mummy) she
hadn't gone.
Jess liked haiku.
She thought they were incredible and really sort of terrible. She felt, when
reading over the ones she'd written herself, as if she were being punched
very hard, just once, with each haiku.
One day, Jess spent six hours spread untidily across her bedroom floor, chin
in hand, motionless except for the movement of her other hand going back and
forth across the page. She was writing, crossing out, rewriting, fighting
with words and punctuation to mould her sentiment into the perfect form. She
continued in the dark without getting up to switch on a light, but
eventually she sank and sank until her head was on the paper and her neck
was stretching slightly painfully so that she could watch her hand forming
letters with the pencil. She didn't sharpen the pencil, but switched to
different colours instead, languidly patting her hand out in front of her to
pick up a pencil that had rolled into her path. Her parents, looking in on
her and seeing her with her cheek pressed against the floor, thought that
she had fallen asleep, and her father tiptoed into the room to lift her into
bed, only to be disconcerted by the gleam of her wide-open eyes over the top
of her arm. She gave no resistance to his putting her into bed and tucking
her in, but when her father checked on her again after three hours or so, he
found that she had noiselessly relocated herself back on the floor, writing
in the dark. The haiku phase lasted a week before she fell ill with the same
quietness that she had pursued her interest.
When she got better, she realised she didn't like haiku anymore.
In the departure lounge at the airport, Jess sat staring at her shoes and
the way they sat quietly beside each other, occasionally clicking their
heels together or putting right heel to left toe.
Did they do that by themselves?
She tried to not think about clicking her heels together, then watched her
feet to see if the heels clicked independently. They did. Then she realised
that she had been thinking about it.
When she looked about her, she noticed that everything was too quiet.
Virtually no one was talking. Some of the people she looked at stared
blankly back at her, and she quickly swivelled in her seat and turned her
attention on to her father. He was reading a broadsheet, chin in hand as his
eyes, narrowed with concentration behind the spectacle lenses, scanned the
page. He looked slightly awkward as he attempted to make room for the paper
across his knees; his elbows created a dimple in the paper every time he
adjusted his position. When he became aware of her gaze, he gave her a quick
glance, smiled, nudged her, then returned to his reverie. On the bench
opposite her sat an immense woman wearing the most fantastical traditional
dress she had ever seen. Yellow snakes, coiled up like golden orange peel,
sprang from the beaks of the vivid red birds with outstretched wings which
soared across the royal blue background of the woman's clothing. Jess called
it eero ahty booby whenever she tried to imitate her mum's pronunciation of
it. Sometimes, when her mum was having some of her friends around, she would
dress up in traditional costume, tying the thick cloth with riotous patterns
a...
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