Fairytales for Wilde Girls (11 page)

 

The Mermaid's Tale

Goggle-eyed, her hair stuck under a cap, Grape surfaced at the end of the lane.

‘How'd I do?'

‘Pretty good,' replied Isola, flashing the waterproofed face of the stopwatch.

Grape's expression darkened slightly, and she swore under her breath.

‘Pretty good' was never ‘good enough'. Grape had a competitive streak thick as an extra bone running through her body. She listened to bold Mozart symphonies while working out at the gym and swam competitively year round at the Avalon Aquatic Centre, where Isola offered to time her laps.

Grape lifted her goggles; her skin was puckered underneath and water dribbled out the lenses. ‘Sure you're not getting bored?'

Isola shook her head. She had her favourite book and a head full of dark thoughts to keep her company. She didn't like swimming in the pool herself – they felt like oceans for prisoners and the chlorine tinged her hair green.

‘C'mon, Mieko,' she ordered, using Grape's Japanese given-name. ‘One lap, right now!'

‘But –'

Isola clicked the stopwatch and Grape kicked away, too competitive to let the challenge slide.

In Grape's place, a mass of red hair bloomed rose-like, and the mermaid smiled up at Isola.

‘So,' said Christobelle, hauling herself up to sit by the diving block, ‘what's happening with the boy?'

‘James?' said Isola, crouching beside her. ‘I don't know, he's still being –'

‘No, no, not him!' She splashed her tail, her golden scales glimmering.

‘Then what boy?'

‘You know –
the
boy.'

Christobelle's single eye scrunched happily. It was bright red, a few shades lighter than her hair. Over her right eye she wore a pale pink, heart-shaped shell – at least, over the place her right eye had once been. It had been taken by the man who'd taken her heart. A young sailor, a fisherman she'd loved at a distance. A salt-blooded shore-dweller in love with both worlds – his feet had been planted firmly on land, but his boots had slowly been flooding.

Longing lured her too close to his ship and, unawares, he caught her in a net. He pinned her to the deck and saw the future in her left eye – a vision of fame and golds richer than the love in his present. He'd be the owner of the beautiful mermaid in the travelling freak show. His fingers dug into her shoulders.

Frightened, Christobelle writhed and cried out, kicking him with her powerful tail. The sailor hit her across the face, and then in her shocked right eye he saw another vision – the fury of the sea personified, roiling black waves and a shipwreck at midnight. His death at her clawed hands, his throat clogged with her blood-red hair.

The sailor held the mermaid down with his rubber boot, and with his knife he gouged out her right eye, that dire future he saw there. If she didn't stop fighting, he threatened to slice off her scales one by one with his rusty knife, to spill her lovelorn fish guts on the decking and drag her to the freak shows as a taxidermied mer-witch.

The eye was all he took from her before the promised future came. Christobelle managed to tangle him in her hair and drag him overboard. She kept his drowned skeleton in a sea cave and visited it from time to time, weaving seaweed through his ribs, laying funeral wreaths of coral, loathing and laughing and mourning at the grave of a most-beloved enemy.

Somehow, Christobelle was still in love with the idea of love.

‘He's really nice,' said Isola, ‘but it wouldn't be fair to drag him into all this.'

‘Into what?'

‘You know.' Isola waved a hand at her world at large. ‘
This
.'

‘You fancy him,' teased Christobelle.

‘I'm also on the radar of a violent ghost,' retorted Isola. ‘He deserves better than me. Me and that dead girl.'

Grape was freestyling back towards the deep end. Christobelle slipped back into the water, giving Isola a knowing wink.

‘It wouldn't be smart,' added Isola. ‘My head's saying no.'

The mermaid smiled, highlighting another disfigurement – the beauty spot where the sailor she once loved put a hook in her mouth and popped it out her cheek to silence her screams.

‘The only common factor between our hearts and our heads,' said Christobelle wisely before she sank away, ‘is the first three letters.'

 

Bloodpearl Girls

An Avalon legend told of the Bloodpearl Mermaid, a vengeful creature that drowned men who dared to look at her, spirited children into seacaves, cursed women with barren wombs, lured ships onto rocks, poisoned fish hauls, and summoned storms. They said she would sprinkle sand and the blood she had spilled in the bubbly pink flesh where her right eye once was. She would freeze her victim's blood in arctic waters, cover her eye with a breast-pink, heart-shaped seashell, and once a year she would peel away the shell to find a marbled white-and-pink pearl there, a bloodpearl. She would add the pearl to the string in her hair, counting each year she had lived imprisoned under the glassy sea, like marks on the cell-block wall, notches in a bedpost.

‘Christobelle,' eight-year-old Isola had asked tentatively, ‘are you the Bloodpearl Mermaid?'

Wringing out her flamingo-flush of hair as they had sat at the cliff-base rocks, Christobelle had laughed gaily. ‘They call me many things,
querida
,' she'd said, mimicking Alejandro's accent. ‘It's wise to ignore gossip, but there are advantages in having, ah, a
reputation
such as mine.'

It wasn't an acceptance or a denial, and Isola didn't understand her answer at the time, but now, at sixteen, she recalled it as she memorised all the labels pinned to her back with sharp glares from the other girls. Mostly it was variants of ‘strange' and ‘unfeeling' and ‘did you hear about her mother'. A reputation. It didn't matter if it were true, only if it were something she could work with.

 

Downtown Avalon was flooded and half the plum tree's Christmas decorations had washed away in the recent rains; the rest were back inside, on the plastic Christmas tree that Isola had set up in the lounge because she knew it rallied Mother's spirit, even when the winter brought her low.

Instead, at the base of the plum tree, Isola was building a shrine. There, she placed pictures of the tree across time, its growth measured against that of a pigtailed toddler Isola, a school-uniformed Isola who blinked at the flash, a pouty adolescent Isola who wouldn't look into the lens.

The rain came heavier as the ice winds began to blow, and she nailed an umbrella into the trunk, sheltering the altar. There were candles and tributes, and stapled to the roots was a photocopied picture – a woman in black; a punk in slinky leather trousers and boots for kicking kingdoms down.

When the weather was drier, she read to the plum tree again, this time choosing a story where nature was a character, which featured a heroine of the girls-who-kill variety, to try and appeal to the tree's fighting spirit.

Clearing her throat, she huddled closer to the trunk, and began to read:

 

 

She had a flush of rainbow-rinsed hair, like them, and a small white horn protruding from her forehead like a tiara, a mark of her birthright.

The herd had found her as a newborn, a shivering lump left at the base of a weeping willow tree. She was sticky and cold, blue rapidly flooding her strange limbs. They thought her a malformed foal, with a pinkish-white coat and an oddly flat face.

The head of the herd was an ancient unicorn named Dark. He watched with cold black eyes while his mate, Moon, lowered her head and licked the strange creature clean. As she did so, the creature seemed to melt free from death's stony clutch. She was wailing; she was alive. She stirred, and they realised she was the creature called
human
, but not quite.

Dark informed them all in his wise voice that the creature was what was called a
Lady
. Whether birthed from unicorn mare or foundling girl, they did not know; their Lady's mother was never found, although all night they combed the woods for a bleeding, wandering mother, finding neither a splash of silver-blue blood nor the distinct footprints of another Lady.

As the weeks passed, and the foundling nestled in Moon's thick mane, the unicorns argued amongst themselves, unable to agree on her name. She'd never cried, not after that first night when they'd found her – she'd simply watched the herd with large bright eyes and a serious face. Her first word had been ‘Dark', not spoken but sung in a voice like dew, like mist, like comets.

And it was Dark who had suggested it, in the usual tricky cadence of the unicorn:

Our Lady is everything; our Lady is all.

And Lady shall be the name of the foal.

She will sing like a songstress and dance like a princess

be gentle as Ladies but hunt like a huntress.

The unicorns loved her, despite her malformities. They weren't sure of her lineage; by design or intention, she was at least part unicorn and they loved that part of her the most. At dusk, she would hunt with the strongest of the males. At dawn, she would frolic with the foals, curling her odd fingers through their multi-hued hair.

Nineteen summers had passed since the herd had found her, and she could still keep pace with their galloping – but on small white feet rather than hooves. Together, they were as fast as the wind, like poison darts.

She rode on Moon's back until she was older, until she was braver, and then she would tangle her fists in Dark's wild rainbow mane, and they would gallop together. He was the fastest, strongest and oldest of the unicorns.

He was the first to vanish when the hunters came.

 

Old Moon flicked her tail nervously. Her anxious breath was hot on the back of the Lady's neck. Dark had been missing for two days now. Moon and the Lady had hidden the herd in the depths of a jewel-walled cave before following the drag marks in the dust – the occasional splotches of Dark's silver goodbye-blood. The trail had led them to the weeping willow – her mother-tree, the Lady had come to believe – and to the semicircle of sixteen hunters.

There was no sign of Dark.

The hunters were also that odd creature called human, that much they could tell, but unlike the Lady their eyes and manes were mud-coloured, and their foreheads were smooth. They had draped themselves in matter entirely foreign to the forest.

Oh, mother-tree
, thought the Lady,
please deny them your shade. Make the hunters leave our home.

But the hunters were stretching out on the grass, gulping from water-skins, comparing the carcasses of small furry creatures to one another's kills.

Moon tugged at the Lady's mane with her teeth. Silently, they retreated into the hot woods.

 

Moonlight. Humid mist. The Lady was too hot to sleep. She longed to curl up against Dark's silky belly. Dark was coldness – like seasalt, like winds washed inland from faraway ice worlds, like the rolling thunderclouds. Without Dark, the herd was without a compass, a night without stars to navigate by.

The Lady sang songs and played with the foals, but she could also hunt, and she did so alone, without telling anyone, even old Moon. She sang as she hunted, making birdcalls to the forest and bubbling songs of apology to the fish as she slashed open their bellies.

As light began to spill into the clearing where the herd slept, the Lady returned with an armful of fish, berries and roots for her fellows. Old Moon was gone, the flattened grass at the edge of the clearing a mark of where she had lain.

She roused the herd and they followed Moon's trail, trotting silently together; the Lady led, with Seaweed and Pearl, the oldest unicorns after Moon, following close behind. At the weeping willow tree they found no hunters, only a smear of blood trickling down to the roots.

The Lady fell to her hindknees and dug up the stained mud before it could reach the roots. Her tree-mother would not feed on her unicorn-mother.

 

In the night, one by one, the unicorns were vanishing. Lady led the herd to rocky outcrops of cliff, to flooded pools, to caverns under waterfalls, to dense copses of trees. Yet every morning, she would awake to find another missing, another patch of blood, a spattered scuffle.

She went sleepless, and during the day would move the frightened herd again, but when they split to hunt, the parties would return one member less. They became a creature slowly shedding its limbs, its skins, and the Lady felt that parts of her strange hybrid body were breaking off too – she buried a piece of herself in the woods, strung another up in a tree, lost a limb in the river – until she was a shadow of herself, a rumour.

And, finally, there was only one unicorn left.

The tiny foal was the offspring of Seaweed and Pearl; they had called him Dusk, a nod to his grandfather, Dark. Seaweed had vanished in the night, and the Lady abandoned herself to Dusk's care. She kept him with her always, and spent her days foraging, hunting and singing, and at night she stroked his black coat, handfed him a paste of berries and meat, and sang to him in a comforting voice. She slept as little as possible. They never had enough to eat, or tricky enough places to hide – the foal was too young to run fast, too weak to climb rocks, too sleepy to travel far or to hunt for long. Lady rested her head against him, felt the shudder of his heart through his glistening coat – not cold like Dark's had been, but cool, like a dip in a briny pond. Dark diluted.