A face appeared around the edge, and Jess smiled with a deep, wondering joy.
It was TillyTilly, who had broken into her grandfather’s study.
“Come in,” whispered TillyTilly. Jess could hardly hear her over the other sounds of the night. She saw Tilly’s eyes shining.
“It’s dark in there, TillyTilly,” Jess whispered back, still unable to stop herself from smiling. They both knew they couldn’t put a light on in there. In case someone saw, and wondered.
“Don’t worry,” Tilly whispered, and held out her hand. Jess took it, feeling Tilly’s cool fingers link with her own, and then Tilly drew her into the darkness, and she wasn’t at all afraid because someone was holding her hand.
SEVEN
“Wait a minute.”
TillyTilly let go of Jess’s hand and Jess heard a thin, scratching sound, then saw a flare of light go up. A little flame danced atop a candle in a saucer in Tilly’s hand.
Jess gasped quietly.
“You’re the candle thief!”
The two of them smiled conspiratorially at each other in the candlelight, Jess noticing how the flame held up to Tilly’s lean face highlighted the triangles of shadow, the hollows of her cheekbones. Her eyes seemed even darker.
Tilly smiled.
“Let’s look around,” she said.
She took Jess’s hand and guided her slowly past each shelf. She passed the candle over the rows of leather-bound and hardback books, bringing the flame so close to some that Jess’s breath caught in her throat with amazement at her daring.
“You might set them on fire,” she warned, and Tilly looked at her seriously, the ends of the string in her hair bobbing as she nodded.
“I know!”
Jess carefully took some books down from the shelf, thick tomes of poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that sounded exciting, especially in the dark, with bookshelves and a window lit with faint moonlight.
“ ‘And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise,’ ” she whispered to Tilly, who obligingly held the candle so that words were discernible but no wax would drip onto it.
TillyTilly nodded sagely.
“It’s a good poem,” she said, with a knowledgeable air. “Ancestral voices, and all that.”
She actually said and all that, with the unconcerned tone of an English person. Jess’s expression grew more incredulous when she remembered the first thing she had said, in that pure Nigerian accent: Hello Jessy . The girl was a mystery.
TillyTilly smiled almost wickedly, as if she knew what Jess was thinking, but persisted in her line of discussion.
“D’you like it? The poem, I mean? It’s called ‘Kubla Khan.’ ”
Jess nodded.
“I like it a lot,” she said awkwardly. Tilly had knelt on the floor and begun examining some books at ground level. Jess couldn’t remember the last time she’d told anyone what she thought about a poem, or a book, or anything much really. “It makes me think of. . you know, when something’s so different and weird that when it touches other people it makes them different and weird too. . It’s like what my mum told me about Sir Galahad, and how he was the perfect knight, but when he saw into the Holy Grail, he couldn’t do anything else but die, really, because of, well, holy dread.”
She stood still, upright, her cheeks flushed, deliberately not looking down at Tilly but concentrating on a book in front of her until the gold lettering of the title had blurred. She didn’t want Tilly to laugh or make fun or anything; she didn’t think she could bear it.
She heard Tilly turn a few pages, then say excitedly, “I know exactly what you mean. Look, it’s like here, in Isaiah, where he’s made all clean when one of the angels touches his lips with the hot coal.”
She had an enormous, expensive-looking edition of the Bible in her arms and was jabbing at a section with her finger. Jess sat down cross-legged on the floor beside Tilly, and they spent a few minutes going through other books that Tilly knew, looking for examples of “holy dread.”
“TillyTilly,” said Jess, after a while.
“Mmmmmm.”
“How come you’ve read all these books and I haven’t?”
Then Tilly said something odd, like: “I haven’t read them, I just know what’s in them.”
Jess looked at her, wondering whether or not to believe her. Then, just to be on the safe side, in case she’d heard wrong, she said, “What?”
TillyTilly didn’t look up from her book, but smiled.
“I said I’ve had a lot of time to get to know what’s in them. Also, I’m much cleverer than you.”
“Oh.”
Jess thought of something else.
“So you sneak in here a lot? How do you do it?”
Tilly shrugged.
“The window.”
“The window? But my grandfather keeps the key in his pocket and…”
Tilly put a dismissive hand up, turned a page, apparently absorbed.
Jess tried again.
“Unless there’s another key. .?”
A slight nod, but Tilly refused to add anything further. Instead she jumped up and ran over to Jess’s grandfather’s swivel chair, springing on to it with an expression of glee.
Jess heard it skid backwards on its wheels and put out her hands in a cautionary gesture.
“Shhhhh!”
TillyTilly laughed quietly.
“Push me around the room on this and then I’ll push you,” she offered, whirling around in the chair, her voice sounding slightly garbled as she spun.
“OK!” Jess eagerly scrambled up, then bent and gathered the books that had been left scattered on the floor a little distance away from the still-burning candle. She slid them back into place, trying to remember which gaps in the bookcase she and Tilly had taken them from. She suddenly grew apprehensive and began to think of explanations should her grandfather awake, and draw his key out from amongst his nightclothes, perhaps, and put the key in the lock. .
Even as she thought about this, she heard the smooth, metallic sound of key being turned in lock, and an expression of utter panic crossed her face.
Then she heard Tilly laugh. She spun around to find Tilly leaning from the chair so that one of her hands was splayed out against the surface of the floor; she was in a sort of half handstand. As Jess stared at her, she slowly rotated the chair so that it made the soft clicking sound that she had heard before.
“Oh my God!” Jess stumbled backwards, her fingers allowing her nightie to flow back out around her, her hand moving to press her chest in an attempt to help along the stilling of her heart. “Don’t do that ever again!”
Tilly rose from her half handstand so that she sat upright in the chair again.
“Well, I don’t think we’ll be back in here. . It’s sort of boring, don’t you think? All that anticipation!”
Somehow, Jess realised, Tilly had known how much she had wanted to enter this room.
When Jess woke for the second time, she turned over and lay on her back, basking in the morning sunlight that was pouring into the room. She only became aware after a few seconds that she was smiling from ear to ear.
She looked to her side, noting that Ebun had already left her bed, her sheets rumpled and tossed. She could hear bustling activity on the kitchen floor and smell cooking; it smelt like her Aunty Funke’s speciality of smoked fish, palm oil and spinach stew. Then she remembered that it was Sunday, and that it was her grandfather’s turn to host his Baptist prayer group. Her grandfather was a proud member of the Oritamefa Baptist Church.