The Icarus Girl
Table of Contents
PRAISE OF THE LEOPARD (Yoruba)
Acclaim for Helen Oyeyemi’s
THE ICARUS GIRL
“Remarkable. . . . A beautifully written and hauntingly memorable debut novel. . . . The most vivid, sharply etched, and authentic writing is firmly centered in reality, in the heart-breaking descriptions of a young mixed-race child grappling not only with cultural dislocation, but with the tribulations of growing up and self-identity in a complicated world.”
—
The Boston Globe
“[A] self-assured story about the hazards and mysteries of coming of age between two complex cultures.” —Elle
“Dazzling. . . . [A] haunting story of redemption and revenge.”
—
Essence
“Oyeyemi deftly weaves Nigerian mythology and magic realism into a suspenseful, lyrical—and sometimes funny—tale that leads to an unpredictable finish.” —
Newsweek
“Almost transcendent, a seamless weaving of Greek myth, Yoruba folklore and the cosmopolitan sensibility of modern-day London. The result is a suave, satisfying, well-crafted psychological thriller.” —
The Plain Dealer
“
The Icarus Girl
is an astonishing achievement.”
—
The Sunday Telegraph
(London)
“Oyeyemi looks set to claim her own place in a list of English-language Nigerian authors that includes Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe and, more recently, Ben Okri.”
—
Financial Times
(London)
“
The Icarus Girl
is a beautifully imagined and lyrically executed novel. At turns dark and funny, it is always balanced by an expansive light. Oyeyemi is a gifted writer.”
—Chris Abani, author of GraceLand
“A chilling story about the anguish of separation from all that should be most familiar and dear.” —
The Times
(London)
“A wonderfully ambitious debut in a formidable tradition.”
—
The Globe and Mail
(Toronto)
“
The Icarus Girl
introduces an extraordinary talent in Oyeyemi.”
—
The Orlando Sentinel
“Remarkable.” —
Black Issues Book Review
“A strong début. . . . Oyeyemi is able to modulate from the skittish internal landscape of an unbalanced child to an altogether more menacing psychological pursuit with a confident voice.” —
The Independent
(London)
“
The Icarus Girl
is a dark enchantment that leads readers into the recesses of a young girl’s fevered psyche. A bewitching tale of childhood joy and wonder, pain, loss, and cultural estrangement.” —Kerri Sakamoto, author of
The Electrical Field
and
One Hundred Million Hearts
“Utterly compelling. . . . It is a testimony to Helen Oyeyemi’s power that the reader is left breathlessly hopeful until the very end, and that hope is richly rewarded.” —
The Times-Picayune
HELEN OYEYEMI
THE ICARUS GIRL
Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and has lived in London since the age of four. She completed
The Icarus Girl
just before her nineteenth birthday while studying for her A-level exams. She is a member of the class of 2006 at Cambridge University, where she studied social and political sciences.
The Icarus Girl
is her first novel, and she is at work on her second.
Anchor Books
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is all for
Mary Oyeyemi
’Tony
and the other ’Tony, from before.
Alone I cannot be—
For Hosts—do visit me—
Recordless Company . . .
—EMILY DICKINSON,
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
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 earth-worms 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?”