Fairytales for Wilde Girls (16 page)

 

Girls and Unicorns

In bed Isola reread
Lady of the Unicorns
by red lamplight, her new window firmly double-bolted. Enter Mother, who did not look much better than the plum tree had in its last days. She'd somehow gotten thinner. Her cheeks were like shallow graves.

‘What are you reading?' Mother asked, even though she surely knew the answer; Isola read it constantly and there was no mistaking that dark binding, the golden glaze on the pages' edge.

‘“
Les Fables et les Contes de Fées de Pardieu
”,' Isola recited, and Mother chewed her lower lip, looking upset.

‘You should take a break from her,' Mother muttered, scrunching up her freckles in worry. ‘Madness like hers is catching.'

Isola quirked her eyebrow at this. She was sounding like Father when he'd railed against ‘
those bloody fairytales!'

‘Lucky I'm immune.' Isola shifted generously, and Mother climbed into her bed. They tangled their limbs and their fingers and hair.

There was one story in the Pardieu book that Isola hated.
Wolverine Queen
– a treatise on mothers and daughters, with nothing but unhappy endings on each page, sometimes at the end of each paragraph. Mother had said that the story had come from the author's ‘blue period, like the one Picasso had'. On those pages the women cut each other until they were ribbons, thinned into fragile streams. Isola had hated that story, partially because it was the only one that she read brand new in the book, the only one Mother had never told her as a bedtime story. Maybe without the sheen of nostalgia it was just a bitter love letter a Frenchwoman wrote to another, and it made something in Isola's skin tingle and twitch. Sometimes she resented her mother but she never hated her, never dreamt of such a thing. She pitied those who did hate their own mothers. Not having a mother would be like losing six brothers at once. Who would look out for you then?

‘I don't want you walking through the woods anymore,' Mother whispered.

Isola's stomach tightened. So Mother sensed it too: the evil below the window, the girl in the dark.

‘I just have a feeling,' Mother went on anxiously. ‘It's not safe right now. Please, Sola.'

Isola promised and shushed and soothed her.

It had been different, once. Like twins they'd felt each other's pain and shared nonsensical dreams. Mother would cry whenever Isola got an injection or a scraped knee. Sometimes she'd even felt it before it happened.

But Mother didn't seem to feel it anymore. If Isola had fallen and come home to show Mother the bloodied tears in her stockings, Mother wouldn't be peering out the window in waiting or anxiously clutching her knee. She'd be in bed or in the cakey bubbles of the bath. Sometimes she'd be crying, but it had nothing to do with her daughter.

Isola's bloody knees and needle-punctured arm crooks were trivial now, submerged in a pain too deep to fathom. Even now, snug under the feather quilt, Isola could feel the bed tilting, the deck of a ship at sea, as Mother puddled into the mattress, vanishing into herself.

‘Tell me a story,' said Mother huskily, and Isola began, not a Pardieu or a Grimm or an Anderson or a Perrault, but another Isola Wilde original, with Spanish dandies and eye-gouging sailors and boys named after Shakespearean plays. The tapestry spun from the wheel; they watched the ceiling as the coloured threads webbed, the words came together, and the invented universe breathed in for the first time.

 

‘D'you think you could drive me to school today?'

Father picked toast crumbs out of his sand-coloured beard. ‘You love walking in those woods, though.'

‘Not at the moment. I don't feel safe there. Besides, both Mum and Ale–' She clamped her hands over her mouth, but the damage had been done.

Father's eyebrows crushed all the warmth from his eyes. His bushy beard twisted to form a scowl. ‘What have I told you?' he roared. ‘Isola, you are
too old
for imaginary friends!'

 

 

Death Wears Curls

Isola was never alone for a moment. The brother-princes had been taking shifts to watch over her, like clockwork companions. The others searched all over for signs of Grandpa Furlong, but not a single Child of Nimue had seen him or so much as smelled his distinct cigar smoke or heard a mandolin note.

Isola was still surrounded by death.

When Isola was nine, the Wildes had gone to London to see a new doctor, a new offer of hope. They'd driven past the house where the poet Sylvia Plath had plugged the under-gaps of doorways with soaked towels to keep the invisible tendrils from reaching her sleeping children – both the gas from the oven and the death that lived in her blood. The desire that would surely jump hosts if it had half the chance; a possession.

Isola had been certain, for some time, that Sylvia Plath was a girl like her. That her eyes saw through to the next dimension like her own, like Mama Sinclair's had, like Lileo Pardieu.

‘Hello, Sylvia Plath.'

‘Hello, Isola Wilde.'

Sylvia Plath had a perfectly curled fringe even in death. She'd smoothed the wrinkles in her dress, her anxious forehead.

They'd sat for awhile on a bench outside the clinic while Father had read the newspaper and picked scabs around his worry-bitten fingernails. Isola and Sylvia had whispered about where it came from, this thing they shared. Mama Sinclair had said it emanated from the place where the Lake lapped against the Tree. Isola had thought of it as that place before turning four years old – that place where all stories came from.

Sylvia Plath had said she could never quite pinpoint its origin, but it had fed her writing, her freewheeling thoughts, and her appetite for self-destruction.

Her suffering-turned-philandering husband had called it her ‘cosmic circus' – that majestic inner world, the Nimue world, the neon marrow she needle-drew from her bones and sculpted, as it hardened, into poetry.

Sylvia Plath was a girl like Isola. Sometimes it worried Isola that all her heroines were dead.

Isola was convinced that her other role model, Lileo Pardieu, was a Child of Nimue – how else could her stories be full of such truths?

Summoning a ghost she didn't personally know was akin to shaking awake a sleepwalker – it could never be foretold how they would react, if they would see Isola and her coven of the supernatural as a threat. But she couldn't help herself, the idea clouded her brain like a fugue until, at the end of last summer, before Edgar, before Florence, she had tried to conjure Lileo Pardieu in a séance. She'd roped in James to help her, and although he'd kept saying, ‘no, no, no,' he'd never taken his finger off the glass. Isola had seen his eyes reflected, looming doe-wide, as if the glass had been the rifle eyeing him for his pelt.

She'd chosen to call for Lileo after Mother had tried to burn Isola's favourite book. Isola had swooped down and had pulled the book away before the chimney's kindling caught the attention of the dragon, who had already been stirring at the delicious flicker of flame. Tears had collected as question marks on Isola's cheeks. Mother couldn't explain why she had done it.

The guest of honour had never shown up. The cake had gone soggy and the tea had turned cold. She had a lonely party over the crumb-sprinkled Ouija board and Isola had read the fables aloud in her own voice again that night.

 

Horrorshow

Nights were a constant battle now. She couldn't sleep with the singing, even with Alejandro murmuring Spanish in her ear. What he recited she didn't know – a story, a secret, a grocery list – but it soothed her nevertheless, and sometimes she plucked out familiar words from the tangle like
princesa
,
querida
,
bella
. . . synonyms he used for ‘Isola'.

After Rosekin's pronouncement, they'd taken to calling her Florence – ‘the dead girl' was starting to sound rather informal, considering how hard she'd scratched at the bubble round their lives, how viciously she fought to get in.

All night Florence sang, and to Isola it was the howl of an air-raid siren.

The little sleep she did manage was cut up with nightmares – doors opening, bright light instantly evaporated; she was blind, with Spanish coins for eyes; the seacave was flooding with the rising of the tide; the hand she gripped in panic was fleshless.

When the dawn-heralding birds started squawking, before their terrified voices were cut off by a noose of cold hands and silver links, Isola found that, for the first time, even Alejandro's words – like Lileo Pardieu's – failed to bring her comfort.

 

Edgar Allan Poe and the Zombie Mona Lisa

Edgar had a collection of death masks, which included Mozart, Beethoven, the famous fake Robespierre and L'Inconnue de la Seine – a drowned French girl with the most knowing smile. He saw the recognition in Isola's eyes, painted on every squarish tooth as she smiled up at L'Inconnue mounted on the wall, bodiless, deathless, beautiful.

They tried on masks, ate microwaved popcorn, watched a Marx Brothers movie, threw darts at the dotted ceiling.

‘Listen,' said Edgar, bullseyeing the samurai poster in the ceiling corner, ‘it's my birthday on Friday.'

‘Congrats,' she said. ‘You're barely an Aquarius, by the way. More on the cusp of Pisces.'

‘Well, I just found out I'm having a party. The family's getting out of the house and everything.'

‘What kind? A clown-and-cake party? A dinner party? A Communist party?'

‘I don't know, Jella's planning it. She's getting some glow-in-the-dark paint or something. No-one believes that there's electricity this far out of town.'

Isola's misaimed dart hit the far wall. She pulled off the L'Inconnue mask. ‘They'll stay out of the woods, right?'

He chuckled. ‘I can't make any promises on behalf of thirty or so drunks, but –'

‘I am not joking, Edgar Allan Poe!' she snapped. ‘Tell them to stay out of the damn woods!'

The curl in her snarl sagged, and she ran an anxious hand through her hair, her knuckles and chunky rings snagging in the knots. ‘Sorry. I'm not myself lately. I haven't been sleeping well.'

‘That's all right,' he said, slightly startled by her rapid change in mood. ‘What's keeping you up? Good telly? Bad dreams?'

‘Something like that.'

She dropped the mask on the carpet and scattered the last of the unpopped kernels from her lap before she left. L'Inconnue smiled ruefully up at Edgar.

He glared at her dead French face. ‘What're
you
smiling at?'

 

‘Folie' Is French for ‘Mad'

‘Mental health,' snapped Sister K in her usual brutish manner. ‘One in five of you will suffer from some form of mental disorder, and I'll bet the rest of you will know someone who has.'

‘I know one,' whispered Bridget in a singsong voice.

Six months after the freckle-faced boy in the leather jacket had died at a travelling fair, youth mental health was still the hot topic. Counsellors toured schools and new hotlines had sprung up, as had the list of possible reasons why he'd done it: girlfriend/boyfriend troubles, bullies, problems at home, medication, brain chemistry, family history, friendships and enemies and school issues all coming together in the perfect stew of the wrong decision.

‘Jesus H. Cricket,' said Grape as they streamed from the classroom. ‘Adolescents these days! How many problems have we got?' She started ticking them off on her fingers. ‘If you're not fat, you're depressed. If you're not depressed, you've got an eating disorder. And if you've got an eating disorder – well, at least you're not fat.'

Isola goggled at her. ‘
Grape!
There's black humour, then there's nihilism. You're starting to sound like Jamie.'

‘Ooh, what a compliment,' said Grape with a short bow of acknowledgement. ‘What's old Sommerwell up to these days? I haven't seen him in ages.'

Isola shrugged.

‘You should invite him to Eddie's party. You know, for your plus-one.'

‘I don't think it's a plus-one party,' said Isola dubiously.

‘Uh-oh,' snickered Grape. ‘He probably should've written that on my invite.'

‘But he didn't send out invites.'

Grape just winked. ‘Happy birthday, Eddie!'

 

She knew James wouldn't say yes, even if he didn't have plans. Still, she was somehow relieved when he said he couldn't make it.

‘What did you get the guy for his birthday?'

‘Nothing yet,' said Isola, feeling the phone grow hot as a tumour against her ear. ‘Grape thinks I should jump out of a giant cake.'

Jamie chuckled down the line. ‘I guess the pleasure of your company will have to do, princess.'

Princess
. It made her heart ache to hear James call her that. James, who should still be her Jamie – the second prince, the passionate brother.

They had been so close, and they mimicked it well now. The earthquake – the most major fault line in their relationship – had happened just weeks before the dead girl in the cage, before the boy who leapt from the Ferris wheel. The folly of touching lips.

The scene:
the memory flickers like old film; burns and cracks in the reel. In a dark bedroom, a movie plays.
Pulp Fiction
's diner scene. Warped Chuck Berry pipes out of the speakers. The faux-blonde and the lanky boy dance along in slow motion, acting out the scene on the television. He grabs her hand; she twirls, laughs.

A close-up:
the girl smiles and the boy leans in. His lips touch hers before she flinches away.

A reaction shot:
The reel shudders. Hitchcockian violins screech. It's a horror movie now, low budget, big impact. The girl's eyes are as big as twin planet earths. There is life and death on the continents inside them.

At last the boy turns away. His face is a death mask. The film plays on behind them.

Fade to black
before the reel burns up.