“We’re nearly there,” Siobhan-who-wasn’t had kept saying to her, but they never were. Sometimes it was TillyTilly, but not very often, because TillyTilly could only come when she was asleep in Jess’s body; she could only come in the dreamtime.
“You have to stay here for a long time, Jessy,” TillyTilly would say when she came, and then Jess would try and fight her, scratch her, beat at her, crying that she had to let Jess swap back. But TillyTilly would laugh and throw Jess off, cartwheeling away into the sandstorm that whipped Jess’s lips and made her eyes small pools of hopeless, grainy yellow. Whoever it was that really came and helped her, they didn’t have a proper name. They wouldn’t speak to her, or let her see their face, and Jess learnt to be carried in silence. Oh, Tilly and time. Tilly and space, too.
There had been a jolt, some kind of slamming both inside and out, and Jess now began to see a way to return.
Jess’s vision blurred as she and the silent girl stumbled into the mouth of a leafy green clearing. Things were growing, different from the dead land before. Wheezing, holding her side at the sudden change of air, Jess was tempted just to let herself fall, but the thick, wet, brown sludge that was underfoot repulsed her, and instead she peered cautiously about her. Away from the unchanging russet tones that she had become accustomed to, it was difficult to see, and the trees ahead seemed to catch the light coming from where she stood, yet without throwing it up before her so that she could see farther. The way was dim, and she could hear a distant noise, like water running, but then again maybe like a bird calling through the spaces between the trees, the sound changing until it was deep and liquid.
She heard her name.
“Wuraola!”
Above the faint but insistent dripping, she heard her name, a resonant whisper, the word so transformed that she stood for a second transfixed before realising that somebody there really was calling her.
She listened again, thinking herself mistaken, but there was no repeat.
She paused for a second, thinking fast, moistening her lips, which had dried again with fear.
SHOULD she? Go?
Should she go?
Her head felt heavy, as if it was wobbling with ungainly weight at the top of her neck, which had become slender, like a flower stem, in proportion to her skull. She could feel the air cycling out through her nostrils as if it, the air, was alive, and her body was doing nothing to help her breathe. She tried to retain her fear, but could not even hold on to that. Everything seemed fuzzy. If she did not go forward, the sludge underfoot would claim her for sure. Soooo tired. And the way not to be tired was ahead, where somewhere, the sound of her name still lingered like the memory of light at the base of a glass lantern.
“Can I go?” she asked the girl on whose back she had come this far.
The girl bowed her head but didn’t reply. Her hair was dark and matted, tangled with leaves and small, broken branches. Jess climbed off her back and tottered before she placed a hand on a tree trunk to steady herself and thanked the girl. The girl didn’t answer her, but shook her head sorrowfully and drew Jess close so that she was gazing silently into her face.
Jess realised with a feeble, drowsy awe that she was looking at herself. Face, unsmiling lips, eyes full of the dark that she’d found in the midst of the wilderness. And small, tiny: the beautiful details of baby hair growing in as fuzz at the start of the forehead, away from the knotted hair.
She was wrong, the silent girl told her with a slow shake of the head. Not. . herself.
It’s. . her.
Jess had to adjust her thanks. The feeling of having to do this was precious and easily bruised, like a tender, budding thing that could grow or fail and die, depending on the whim of the earth. It couldn’t die, it mustn’t, not after all this, how could it?
She believed in the fatal flaw.
“You can share my name,” she promised, not even knowing now if she was speaking aloud, if she could or should to this girl, who had held her without hands.
Ah, and the girl was gone. . she had dissolved and dissipated as if she had been taken away into the sky in a stream of light, sprinkled brown. Upwards. There was a mist spiralling into clear blue light, breaking away into smaller puffs the higher it went. Jess gazed and gazed at the sapphire lid of this place, dreaming of what it meant. .
Wuraola. .
Jess moved forwards, slowly, feeling as if she was wading through treacle, or honey, maybe, thick and clouded. She was going to get TillyTilly, and Tilly was big, and strong, and more than just a little girl whose twin had died. Tilly was the sun, and the storm cloud that blotted it out. But there was a sister-girl now, one who could now call herself Wuraola where true names were asked for. Jess charged onwards, stamping on leaves both brittle and wet, feeling them crack in her spine, but smiling ferociously, smiling transfigured, overstepping big, gnarled tree roots and not falling down, oh, not now.
It was TillyTilly who had been calling her, thinking that she could win again, but when Jess faced the girl who was at once too tall and too short, blotting out the trees, her long arms reaching out hungrily, her thick black hair flying out in all directions, she wasn’t afraid. And because Jess wasn’t afraid, Tilly was. The glue in the air dried and cracked.
“Don’t, Jessy, please,” TillyTilly pleaded in a scream that rang in Jess’s ears, but Jess ran at her with the wind, an invisible current of fast-moving air behind her, taking her feet nearly off the slippery ground (she didn’t hear the silent sister-girl telling her that it wasn’t the right way, not the right way at all)
and
hopped,
skipped,
jumped
into Tilly’s unyielding flesh as she clawed at Jess’s presence
(it hurt them both burningly)
back into
Jessamy Harrison woke up and up and up and up.
PRAISE OF THE LEOPARD (Yoruba)
Gentle hunter
his tail plays on the ground
while he crushes the skull.
Beautiful death
who puts on a spotted robe
when he goes to his victim.
Playful killer
whose loving embrace
splits the antelope’s heart.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DAH (DAVlD GIBBONS) because this novel wouldn’t have happened, none of it, if it wasn’t for you.
FIFI (RAFIF AL-RUHAIMI), my first girlina-fan, partly because you missed your stop on the Tube whilst reading a story of mine (how cool!), and partly because you charmed/bullied me into writing more.
KITTY (CATHERINE UMEH), that Ibo girl, and LEE-LEE (LIDIA DE FREITAS) of the CVMS Paperclip Klan — you’ve both been amazingly encouraging, and because you put up with my bitter tirades against everyone who dared to be having a life whilst I wrote The Icarus Girl.