The Icarus Girl (17 page)

Lidia looked unconvinced. “Hmmm,” she said.

She turned to Jess.

“Aren’t you going to sit down? This is your house, after all!”

Jess took a seat around the table from where Dulcie and Lidia sat. There was silence as they all ate the ice cream. Jess could see Dulcie’s eyes moving back and forth. She was probably trying to think of something engaging to say or do.

After a few seconds, Dulcie put her elbows on the table and wiped her mouth.

“So, when are you going to beat us?” she asked.

Lidia looked startled.

“What?”

Dulcie eyed the babysitter apprehensively.

“You know . . . that’s what babysitters do . . . They beat people when their parents are gone.” She looked at Jess for confirmation, but Jess just ducked her head with an embarrassed laugh and went on with the slightly less complicated business of eating the ice cream. It was quite difficult with Lidia and Dulcie across the table from her. She put one hand over her mouth so that they didn’t see her eating.

Without answering Dulcie, Lidia picked up her bowl and announced that she’d brought some videos, or they could play with the Connect 4 that Aunt Lucy had brought and left at Jess’s house.

“Which d’you want to do first?” she asked.

Dulcie, looking disappointed that she hadn’t managed either to frighten Lidia with her knowingness or annoy her with her annoyingness, nudged Jess.

“Oi. What shall we do?”

Jess shrugged and squashed ice cream beneath her spoon.

Lidia looked at them both and shook her head, smiling a little bit. Her earrings swung.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s go into the sitting room!”

As they passed the staircase, Jess looked longingly upstairs. She wanted to go and read up on Madeira in the world encyclopaedia that she’d taken up to her bedroom in preparation as soon as she’d been briefed on Lidia by her mum. She knew that Dulcie would have made fun of her if she’d started reading the encyclopaedia in the sitting room, and it also wouldn’t have been a surprise for the babysitter. Lidia put a hand on her shoulder and guided her into the sitting room. Jess remembered the telephone conversation she had overheard and realised that it might be difficult to get away from Lidia this evening, seeing as she had been identified as the problematic child.

They settled down cosily, with Dulcie cuddling up to Lidia on the sofa and Jess sitting cross-legged in front of the television as they watched some taped back-to-back episodes of SuperTed and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
. They had seen one episode of each programme when the telephone rang. Jess looked around at the other two.

“It’s
your
house,” said Dulcie, taking her thumb out of her mouth. “You can’t expect Lidia to get the phone just because she’s old.”

Jess sighed and began to get up, but Lidia got there first.

“Hello?”

Jess and Dulcie watched as Lidia flushed bright red and shot them an embarrassed glance before she continued speaking in a lower voice.

“Oh my God, Paul, how did you get this number? You’re not supposed to call me when I’m babysitting!”

Dulcie bounced up and down on the sofa cushions. “Ahahahahaha! Lidia’s got a boyfriend! Kissy kissy!” She pouted and smacked her lips several times while Jess watched open-mouthed as Lidia went even redder and then laughed.

“Oh, that’s Dulcie, one of the girls I’m looking after tonight,” Lidia said, her colour going down. She raised her voice so that they could hear her properly and stuck her tongue out at Dulcie, who laughed delightedly, hiding her face in her hands and falling back onto the cushions. Jess turned back to the television. SuperTed and Spotty were arguing.

“Yeah . . . she’s already asked me when I’m going to beat her . . .” Lidia laughed again. “Yup, I’ll see you tonight.” A pause. “Yeah, ten, maybe ten thirty. Okay, buh-bye.” Another pause, then Lidia smiled, flushing again, and said, “Yeah, me too.”

“I love yooo, I miss yooo,” Dulcie sang in a falsetto, her arms flung out wide. “Kissy kissy,” she added, blowing her hair out of her face. She squealed in mock-terror and scrambled off the sofa, running around it as Lidia tried to catch her and tickle her. Jess could feel the vibrations of Dulcie’s feet pounding on the floor. Then Dulcie stamped in her ice-cream bowl by accident. “Oh!” she squeaked. “It’s cold, it’s COLD!” She began hopping around, waving a foot in the air. Lidia collapsed in laughter.

Then there was a sound from somewhere above their heads. It was unmistakably a clicking, maybe of a door or window opening and closing again. Then there was another louder, heavier sound, like something falling over. Jess imagined feet walking upstairs, someone looking in the rooms.

The three of them froze. Jess looked outside into the passage, where it was dark. The kitchen was opposite the sitting room, separated from it by the staircase that led to Jess’s mum’s study and the bedrooms. She was wondering if this was a situation like her dad had been talking about, an intruder situation. It hadn’t sounded so bad at breakfast, but now Jess realised that she didn’t like uninvited people. They all waited tensely for another sound, but there was nothing.

The house had become a shadowy, empty space where people could come in and out if they wanted to, touch things, take things, lurk.

“What’s going on? Did you turn the passage light off?” Dulcie demanded of Lidia.

Her voice was even more raucous than usual. Lidia put a hand to her forehead as she tried to remember. Jess tried to remember too.

“It doesn’t matter whether I turned off the passage light anyway, because the . . . the . . . sound was from upstairs,” Lidia said, standing up. “Probably something just fell over by itself, but I think I’d better have a look,” she added uncertainly.

“No, don’t, you silly person,” Dulcie said, holding on to Lidia’s arm. “We should call the police. We were watching this programme, and there were robbers, but the man said he was going to go and see what was happening, and the robbers bashed him over the head and took his computer, and Mummy said, ‘See, he should have called the police!’ ”

Lidia strode across the room, Dulcie holding on to her arm and wailing “No, no,” Jess quietly following. Lidia pressed the switch for the passage light, and the lightbulb flickered. A sputter, a flare of illuminating light, then it died. They peered about in the darkness, and Lidia groaned.

“The lightbulb had to go just now, didn’t it,” she sighed. “Well, all right, fine.” She and Dulcie darted across the passage and into the kitchen, where the light was still working. Jess stood in the sitting room, straining to see what they were doing. She was badly frightened, and her fear was a numb chill that held her rigid in the certainty that, if she moved too suddenly, everything in sight was going to fall on top of her. She focused on the lighted kitchen. Dulcie was sitting with her legs dangling over the side of the sink unit, singing quietly and off-key about beating up robbers, and Lidia had found a heavy stainless steel frying pan. She held it up, swung it a little bit. “All right,” Jess heard her say. Lidia took Dulcie’s hand in her free one, and they came back to the passage. The hand that held the pan was shaking, and she kept taking deep breaths. All three of them stood listening again, and there was still no sound. But Jess couldn’t stop thinking about the first clicking sound, as if someone had actually
come
in
. But how would they have come in from upstairs? There were no windows open.

Lidia mounted the staircase, telling Dulcie to wait at the bottom with Jess, and as they both peered upwards, their arms around each other in the goose-bumped solidarity of unease, Jess and Dulcie saw her turn the bend in the staircase that took her out of sight. There was a few moments’ tense quiet in which they heard her switching lights on and off in the different rooms, then Lidia returned, the frying pan dangling limply from her hand, a smile on her face.

“I don’t know what we heard, but there’s no one upstairs and all the windows are closed, so
that’s
all right.”

As Lidia spoke, Jess was staring behind her with her mouth open. For just a second, she had very indistinctly seen a large corner of checked cloth peeping out from round the bend of the staircase, then it had dragged upwards. As Lidia came down the stairs, Jess ran up, her heart thumping.

“Jessamy, can you come here, please!”

TillyTilly was curled up in a sort of ball on the very top step, her bony knees drawn to her chin, her face in the shadows. Jess couldn’t see her expression.

“TillyTilly! What are you doing here?” she whispered, her heart rising up and up until she thought it might burst right out of her mouth. She wanted to touch her friend, at first to see if she was really there, but then, quite suddenly, she crossed into fury. She wanted to pinch Tilly, and scratch her. But she didn’t quite dare. Cautiously, Jess took another step upwards, then when she could see Tilly’s face properly, she stood a few steps down and folded her arms.

“You really scared us, you know!”

Tilly didn’t reply. She wasn’t looking at Jess, but somewhere to the left of her. Her gaze was preoccupied, her thin cheeks sucked inwards as she frowned deeply.

“Jessamy! What are you doing! Don’t make me come up there and get you!” Jess heard Lidia threaten.

“I’m coming. I’m just getting something from upstairs,” she called.

“Well, hurry up,” Lidia said.

Jess looked back at TillyTilly, who was now, suddenly, looking at her, and she became worried for a few seconds that maybe this wasn’t TillyTilly at all, but someone else altogether.

“She’s a Portuguese,” TillyTilly said angrily. She nearly spat the word “Portuguese” out, her accent becoming somewhat Yoruba as she did so.

Jess was puzzled.

“I’m glad I scared her. I should have got her,” TillyTilly muttered, pressing her face against her knees then shaking her head as if to clear it.

Jess sat on the step that she had been standing on.

“Why? She’s quite nice, actually.”

TillyTilly glared.

Jess was tempted to take back what she had said, then decided not to.

“She
is
,” she insisted, then added, “and anyway, she’s not from Portugal, she’s from Madeira. It’s different, isn’t it?”

“Portuguese,” TillyTilly maintained, shaking her head emphatically and pointing at the ground in a short, sharp gesture that Jess recognised as her uncle Kunle’s favourite “earth be my witness” one.

Jess was quiet for a few seconds, thinking this over.

“Did you do that thing with the passage light?” she asked finally.

TillyTilly rocked backwards and forwards a little and said nothing.

“Jessamy! What are you doing?” Lidia called.

“She’s going to come and get me in a minute, and I haven’t even looked anything up about Madeira,” Jess said in tones of resignation.

TillyTilly uncurled her body and grabbed Jess by the arm.

“Do you want to give Lidia a proper fright?” When she saw Jess’s expression of doubt, she persisted. “It’ll be fun, I promise!”

Jess looked consideringly at TillyTilly, then smiled.

They stood up and held hands, Jess’s face turned towards TillyTilly’s for a moment before Tilly moved behind her. Jess could hear her breathing and her small, ticklish laugh as Lidia came upstairs.

“The light’s working again!” Lidia said, switching it on. “Jessamy!”

Her feet on the stairs sounded thunderous to Jess; giant’s feet coming up a mountain, displacing bits of rock and moss.

Everything seemed to
slooooooow doooooooooown
.

As the light flooded the stairway, and as Lidia and Dulcie’s heads came poking around the staircase bend, Jess saw Lidia’s mouth open to address her, then both Lidia’s and Dulcie’s mouths stretched wider in amazement and shock as TillyTilly’s arms enfolded her from behind and pulled her

and
through
the staircase, the carpet and the actual stair falling away beneath her feet as if she and Tilly were going underground in a lift that would never stop descending. The scene changed to a sort of blanketing brown darkness, hollow and moist, and Jess’s head was spinning and she was laughing and screaming at the same time, like the slide, like the slide, only more . . .

TillyTilly was silent, so quiet that Jess thought that she wasn’t there, and had to waste a moment of the glorious free fall to twist her head, gasping in, the air jetting madly through her nostrils and lungs, to look at Tilly, whose cheek was now pressed against hers, her mouth open in a silent laugh. Jess’s hair was blowing into Tilly’s face, and she couldn’t think that this was really happening, couldn’t
believe it
until they crashed.

“No,” she heard TillyTilly rasp as they began to dip and plummet, “no, we’re not supposed to—”

They smashed against the ground so hard that Jess felt broken and winded, her face pressed against the ground, the weight of TillyTilly lying half across her back. The insides of her mouth hurt from where she had inadvertently bitten herself. She could taste blood on her tongue.

Ohhhhhhhh. It hurts.

Tilly’s head had banged hard against the back of Jess’s head, and she felt as if a bump might be growing there. TillyTilly rolled slowly away from her, then they both lay still. Jess began to feel claustrophobic when she realised that, wherever they were, there was no room to sit up. There was a thick layer of the brown darkness above, and she was lying on some more of it. She crumbled the stuff between her fingers and realised, with wonder and alarm, that it was earth, the stuff the daffodils in the playground were planted in in the spring. It was earth, but it was dry, so dry, and hard. She and TillyTilly had been falling through earth as if it was air!