The Icarus Girl (16 page)

Jess herself had been offended by the concept of the babysitter.

“I’m not a baby,” she had insisted over breakfast as she carefully nibbled at the brown crust of her toast before starting on the real stuff.

Jess’s dad had patted her cheek and then tweaked her nose in a comforting manner.

“I know. You’re enormous, an enormous huge girl.”

“What?!” Jess stuck out her tongue.

Her dad stuck out his tongue too.

Her mum joined in.

They all waggled their tongues at each other, then carried on eating. After a few seconds of companionable munching, Jess pursued her theme.

“Can’t me and Dulcie just stay here by ourselves? We’d behave! You’d just need to leave some food, and we’d tuck ourselves in and everything.”

Her mum laughed so hard she nearly choked on her toast. She kicked Jess’s dad under the table, and he laughed a little too then explained, “The thing is, Jess, little girl, you and Dulcie have this thing where sometimes you fight. Imagine if we left you by yourselves—it’d be mayhem. Also, it wouldn’t be safe because you wouldn’t know what to do if something happened.”

“Something like what?”

“Well, like intruders or something. People coming into the house uninvited.”

Jess thought of TillyTilly.

“What’s wrong with that?”

Jess’s mum sipped at her orange juice.

“Jesus on toast, Jess, we’re not leaving you and Dulcie alone and that’s that.”

“But do we have to have a
baby
sitter?” Jess wailed. “Couldn’t you just drop me and Dulcie off at Grandma and Grandpa’s?”

“Thing is, Jess, old man,” her father said, drumming a little tattoo on the table with his butter knife, “they’re going to the party as well.”

“You just can’t win. Sorry,” her mum added.

At that point, Jess had rolled her eyes and, taking another bite of her peanut butter on toast, had resigned herself to the indignity of the as yet nameless babysitter.

As she lay surrounded by paper and scattered crayons, her head resting on her outstretched arm, Jess began thinking about one of the dreams that she had the previous night. She wanted to remember it—it had been nice—but it was too vague. The woman with the long arms had been smiling, flying through her dreams again, and Jess thought the woman might have been hugging her, the arms looping around and around Jess’s body, holding her, the skin smooth like a velveteen rope. Jess didn’t know how she could have thought that she was scary before. Or maybe it had been the drawing that was scary, the black squiggles, and the actual woman was lovely. The arms took some getting used to, though. She tried to draw the long-armed woman, her crayon skimming over the smooth paper, but the browns that she used were all wrong, either too light or too dark.

She glanced up from the paper when Tilly Tilly ran into her room and jogged up and down on the spot, then skipped, then hopped, clapping all the while, as if she was doing some elaborate form of exercise.

“Hello, Jessy,” she puffed, still bobbing. It sounded rhythmical:
Heh-low (clap) Jeh-see (clap)
, it could be a song.

Jess laboriously coloured in the woman’s
boubou
, then pushed her papers away and stood up. She, too, began jumping up and down, clapping, concentrating on not hitting the floor so hard that her mum would shout, “Are you having a one-woman wrestling match in there?”

“What
(clap)
are
(clap)
we
(clap)
do
(clap)
ing
(clap)
,” she said, after a little while. TillyTilly shrugged and carried on jumping. She was moving around the room in a circle now, and Jess followed. Downstairs, her mother was interviewing someone on the telephone, “Do you have experience with . . . well, sensitive kids? My daughter’s easy enough to please in terms of feeding and entertainment and for the most part, behaviour . . . What? Yes, of course, but the thing is, she has this enormous imagination and . . . yes, mmmm, exactly, you know what I’m talking about! That’s it! She gets so absorbed, so caught up in things! And then she
upsets herself
.” The rest was muffled. Jess tried not to strain her ears so that she could listen better, but it was always fascinating for her when she heard herself being talked about, described.

But TillyTilly called her attention back to the room. She had crouched down in the area that Jess had just vacated and was systematically crumpling up sheet after sheet of the long-armed-woman drawings that Jess had begun and abandoned.

Now she was even tearing them, her eyes narrowed in an expression of if not quiet anger, then at the very least intense concentration.

Rip, rip, rip, scrunch.

Somehow, Jess did not dare to stop her.

Downstairs, her mother continued speaking.

“Oh, the other girl, my niece? She’s fine. You should have absolutely no problems with her . . .”

When Tilly had finished ripping up the pictures, even the one that Jess had been doing when she came in, she scattered the handfuls of ripped paper on the floor, laughing a little bit, a raspy chuckle. She looked completely absorbed, as if Jess wasn’t even there.

Jess stepped forward, a little nervously. Her voice wobbled as she spoke.

“Why did you do that, TillyTilly? I was only trying to . . .”

She paused because she had been expecting Tilly to interrupt her, but the girl rose slowly from her crouch and simply gazed at her, unblinking, her head turned slightly away from Jess. There was definite hostility there. Jess began to feel a little resentment herself. This was the second time that TillyTilly had acted strangely over the woman with the long arms. Could it be that Tilly didn’t want to . . . well,
share
her?

“You spied,” TillyTilly said in a low voice. She stood very still and continued to stare at Jess. “You shouldn’t have gone in there.”

Jess folded her arms. “I apologised already,” she said firmly.

TillyTilly smiled.

“Yeah,” she said, as if only just remembering. “You did.”

“Well then,” said Jess, refusing to smile herself.

TillyTilly sank back down to the floor and grabbed a light-brown crayon.

“Come on, let’s do some drawing,” she said, smoothing a piece of paper out before her. She grabbed some brown and green crayons and a bit of black charcoal, and began to draw.

Jess stayed where she was, reluctant to give in just like that. But curiosity got the better of her, and she sidled over to see what TillyTilly was drawing. It was a girl with her hair in two pigtails, wearing a green-and-white-checked dress; Tilly was drawing herself. For someone who was supposed to be even older than the Year Six girls, it was a bit rubbish. It made Jess feel dizzy to look at it, and she’d seen plenty of people drawings done by other kids in her class. The arms and legs were sticklike, and the torso was too rounded, like a dumpling. The checked squares on the dress were gaping, irregular holes of white surrounded by green, and the pigtails were scribbles of charcoal, looking like flaps of tangled hair sprouting from an otherwise bald brown scalp. The eyes were far too big, taking up half the face, and were too round. Jess was tempted to laugh, partly because she didn’t know what else she could do at such a drawing, but knew she couldn’t do much better herself. The weirdness of the drawing might have had something to do with the way in which Tilly was clutching the crayon. Instead of holding it like a pencil, she was holding it as one would a thick stick, or a baton: all her fingers curling around it. The lines that she drew were identical in their thickness and straightness, and when she tried to round them into more anthropomorphic shapes, they went haywire.

Jess raised her eyebrows in wonder,

(I don’t think you are older than Year Six, TillyTilly) then quietly sat down and began her own drawing. She was drawing a rainbow arching over a house. She was quite good at houses and rainbows, and trees as well, but avoided drawing people because she was bad at people. Also, she didn’t want to embarrass TillyTilly, because as bad as she was at drawing people, she was almost certain that her people drawings were better than Tilly’s.

She stuck her tongue out a little with the exertion of colouring the windows in blue, even right up to the very corners for a perfect picture, and when she looked up, she saw that across from her, TillyTilly had her tongue stuck out a little too as her eyes scanned Jess’s face. Jess smiled uncertainly.
What is she doing?
TillyTilly smiled her rapid and fast-disappearing smile, then closed her mouth again and carried on drawing.

When Tilly had gone, Jess spent the rest of the afternoon lying on her bed, drowsing. Her head had begun to ache again, and she wondered if she shouldn’t go and get something from her mum for it, then decided that she couldn’t really be bothered to get up. Also, her mum would probably think that it was all a trick so that she’d have to stay and take care of Jess. Soon, the heat of the day outside began to annoy her, and she tugged her curtains closed. There would probably be a storm tonight, she thought feebly, curling up with one arm draped across her forehead to block out the light.

Jess had just opened her eyes after another short, confused nap in which she had been unsure if she was awake or asleep, when she perceived, out of the corner of her eye, that there was someone staring at her from outside her room, virtually filling the passageway with their presence, which sounded like a continuous buzzing, clicking hum. It was like
hmmmzzzmmmzzzhmmm,
over and over. It felt as if it had been staring at her for a very long time, with the biggest eyes she had ever seen, only she hadn’t noticed. It was very, very tall yet didn’t seem to have a body, but appeared to be made of a sort of vibrating blackness. Blackness like the darkest jelly.
Hmmzzzmmm
. It looked as if the tall thing wasn’t going to come in, but it certainly wasn’t about to let her out either. She felt light-headed and not at all concerned about it, although if she had been well, she might have been worried. She could hear herself humming a wordless song, as she did when she was feeling poorly. Oh, she was definitely quite ill.

Finally, she mustered enough concern to look directly at the person, and then discovered that it wasn’t actually there, and that she had been the one making the humming, clicking sound herself, with her teeth and tongue.

So that was all right then.

She fell asleep properly.

She was feeling much better in the evening, when her mum, wafting scent all over the place, hugged and kissed her good night.

Her father kissed her on the forehead.

“See you later, enormous girl,” he said.

Jess gave him a grudging smile. She sat herself on the bottom step of the staircase and watched as they went through the door, leaving it open for Aunt Lucy, who was struggling to free herself from Dulcie. Uncle Adam was already in the car; he was driving them over.

“Don’t goooooooo, Mummy, it’ll be a rubbish old party anyway,” Dulcie entreated, holding on to Aunt Lucy’s leg for dear life.

“Come on, Dulcie, you’re being silly,” Aunt Lucy said. She sounded as if she was beginning to get very annoyed.

The babysitter, who was standing by the staircase, her arm resting on the banister, observed the situation and sprang into action. Jess watched. Her name was Lidia, and she was at university, far older than Year Six. She was studying something long and boring-sounding that began with a B. Jess wished she could remember what it was, but it had been said too fast. She had thought that Lidia would look boring as well, because you had to be boring to spend your time babysitting, but she wasn’t; she just looked like a normal person, only wearing dangly wooden earrings. She had the nicest hair, too, long and thick and dark. Plus, she had brought a whole bag full of good stuff with her: puzzles and food and things. She was from Madeira. Jess hadn’t said a word to her yet, because she was going to look up Madeira and then say something interesting about it in front of Lidia (and Dulcie) so that Lidia would think she knew all about it.
So . . . why
don’t you have bells in your hair in the usual Madeiran tradition?
she’d say, and Lidia (and Dulcie) would look at her and realise that she was not to be messed with, nor, more importantly, a baby.

“Dulcie,” Lidia said, walking towards Dulcie and Aunt Lucy, “guess what? I’ve got some ice cream! I bet you like chocolate ice cream.”

Dulcie hesitated, and then let her mother go.

“Yeah, I like chocolate ice cream,” she admitted, as her mother gave Lidia a grateful smile and, dropping a kiss on Dulcie’s forehead, left. “But you didn’t need to say it like that, as if I’m an idiot or something:
nyehnyehnyeh . . . do you like ice cream?
Nyeh
.”

Lidia laughed. “All right, sorry.”

Dulcie glared at Jess and tossed her blond hair around.

“What are you looking at?”

Jess did not deign to reply. She knew what the tossing of the hair meant; it was a demand for admiration. Everyone always went mad over Dulcie’s long blond hair—it was just like Alison Carr’s. In fact, it was possible that if Dulcie Fitzpatrick had lived in Jess’s area and gone to Jess’s school, Alison Carr would have had some serious competition. There’d have been rival factions, Dulcians and Alisonites, and Jess would have claimed the friendship of the others as the cousin of The Dulcie. Hmmm. Jess looked at Lidia, waiting for her to say,
Wow, Dulcie, your hair is so
nice. Such a pretty girl
, but Lidia didn’t say that. She looked at the two of them and said, “So, do you want ice cream or not?”

Jess got up and followed Dulcie and Lidia into the kitchen. Dulcie was already holding Lidia’s hand, and she didn’t even know her! What a suck-up.

Dulcie pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and waited while Lidia started scooping out the ice cream. It was softening already, dripping down the edges of the scoop as Lidia began squishing it into the bowl. Jess remained standing, eyeing Lidia suspiciously. Dulcie gave her a smug glance, basking in the knowledge that she was bound to be Lidia’s favourite. Lidia was humming as she began spooning ice cream into a third bowl, and Dulcie’s preening was cut short by Lidia turning around and handing her the ice cream and a spoon. Jess stifled a laugh at Dulcie’s angelic expression as she said, syrup-sweet, “Thank you, Lidia.”