Fairytales for Wilde Girls (17 page)

 

A Shroud of Songbirds

On the morning of Edgar's eighteenth birthday, thirty dead birds had been arranged in a line from Isola's window to Edgar's front door. A hysterically excited Rosekin woke her at dawn, and Isola ran out into the morning mist, her bedsheets billowing cape-like behind her, a meowing Morris at her heels. Using the sheets, she collected up the birds – each noodle-necked, with wide blank eyes and lolling tongues – and went to bury them where the plum tree once stood. But that crypt was full, and so she snuck into the backyard of Number Thirty-seven, bundling the birds, sheets and all, in the crater dug for the apple tree, still unfilled these months later.

 

Edgar and Isola and a Party – Part Deux

The moon sat alone in the transparent sky, a lonely plastic bride on a blueberry wedding cake. A moon without stars was a princess without courtiers, and not for the first time, Isola pitied Her.

Aurora Court had never been so noisy. The cracks in the asphalt street were plugged with sound, music she was sure would echo down to the underworld. The guests had been instructed to wear white for ‘optimum effect', whatever that meant, in a sternly worded group text from Majella Lavery.

The bride wore white, Isola reminded herself, and to mark the occasion she bought a third-hand wedding dress and slashed it short, unravelling the eighties puff sleeves and snipping loose the beading detail stained with ancient wedding cake. She skipped the veil but kept the matching wreath of dried pink roses, which she tried to dye deep red to match her shoes (she would never completely comply with any dress code) but which came out rather purplish-black like funeral flowers.

Alejandro and Ruslana checked the entire court for signs of Florence while Isola checked her make-up in the bathroom mirror, which cheekily told her that she looked ‘FAIR ENOUGH', as she scribbled her initials on it in whore-red lipstick.

By the time she'd reached Number Thirty-seven, Isola Wilde was late.

‘Traffic?' Edgar grinned, silhouetted in the doorway.

‘The worst,' sighed Isola.

Patches of him shone, as though his body was riddled with glow-in-the-dark tumours. It was actually ultraviolet paint, swirls of phosphorescent colour like his washable tattoos. Someone with bad handwriting had painted ‘EDDIE' in his thick curly hair as well as ‘18!!!' on his cheek.

By the front door were buckets dribbling neon goo down the sides: a rainbow of paints, glow-worm drool.

‘It's non-toxic,' said Edgar reassuringly. ‘At least, I'm pretty sure.'

Grape darted from behind him, with exaggerated eyelashes and blue hearts on her cheeks. She was joined by Jella, who was orange polka-dotted from head to toe, as though she'd swallowed fireflies, and they squealed and converged on Isola, marbling her skin and clothes. Jella gave her shining blue geisha lips. Grape liberally coated her hair in neon pink.

‘You look like a tragic bride,' teased Edgar, examining the wreath on her head. ‘Waiting for your . . . gloom.' He chuckled at his own pun.

Deemed acceptable at last, they led Isola into the house. Black lights had been arranged on the walls, and the glow was stronger inside, where party-goers with intricate swirls on their forearms marked each other with tribal handprints. They shone in the darkness like jungle-born angels.

Edgar led her through the crowd, the intoxicating pulse of paint and bodies, while pints were pushed into their hands. Mirrors and windows were draped in black fabric to hide the disorientating reflections. Grape seemed to be laughing raucously in every room Isola passed through, her mouth wide and exposing her tongue, which was poisoned green from drinking shots.

‘Look,' said Edgar, stopping to pluck a grubby slip of paper from a coffee table. ‘Boo Radley sent me a birthday card.'

Written crookedly in charcoal:
Exodus 22:18.

Isola felt something creeping along her shoulder. She looked down to see a crazy straw passing around her, slowly finding its way into the drink in her hand, like a curious curly-beaked bird.

‘Pip!' cried Edgar.

A lanky boy appeared between them, the straw protrouding from the corner of his grin. ‘Needs more chartreuse,' he told Edgar. ‘Get the lady a decent drink, go on.'

The sickly sweet scent of dope wafted about Pip like hippy cologne. He had long, untidy hair and his face was painted as a neon-green skull, so stunning it couldn't have been done by anyone but Edgar.

Edgar was laughing as he snatched away Pip's dripping straw and threw it into the crowd of dancing legs. He gestured to Isola. ‘Pip, this is –'

‘Isola Wilde.' Pip folded to one knee, grabbed her hand and kissed the plastic stone of her mood ring. He said her name like a detective unmasking the face of the culprit he'd suspected all along. ‘The face that launched a thousand ifs . . .' His skull-mouth beamed at her. ‘I've heard so much about you from Ed – really, more than is becoming, he's such a gossip – and I'm delighted to announce that you are no less than the exquisite vision conjured up in Edgar's mellifluous – and somewhat interminable – odes to your beauty.'

So,
thought Isola,
a particularly charming and verbose stoner.

‘Isola – Saint Philip Sutcliffe, or just plain Pip,' said Edgar, as Pip stood. ‘I'm sorry he's an arse. If he bothers you, go tell Jella.'

‘I'm not bothering her,' said Pip, looking wounded. ‘When do I ever bother people?'

‘You're doing it right now. Look, the ring's turned black,' said Edgar, indicating her hand.

Pip considered this for a moment. He scratched his blond chin-scruff. ‘Fair point,' he conceded. He turned and pulled a fizzing sparkler out of someone's hand, then put it, lit-end down, into Edgar's beer. Then, like a scruffy magician, he conjured a little paper umbrella from about his person and offered it for Isola's cocktail glass. ‘Lovers – adieu.' Pip tipped an imaginary hat at them before vanishing into the blur.

Just before midnight, Saint Pip climbed on the table and lifted his plastic cup of spiked punch.

A Toast by Saint Pip

‘Now, it may have been eighteen years since Edgar Llewellyn was last inside a vagina –' a rash of good-natured boos punctuated the crowd ‘– but as pathetic as that is, he's still cooler than everyone in this room, excluding me!'

More cheers, of course.

The grungy and effortlessly cool Ellie Blythe Nettle appeared bearing a gift of ‘a steak instead of a cake', since it was well-known that Mother Poe never allowed meat in the house. Ellie Blythe, with her ginger dreadlocks, constellations of freckles and silver ring in her eyebrow, was cute with a hard edge, like rock candy. To Ellie Blythe it was still the nineties and Kurt Cobain was merely between records, not gravestones. She was also openly lesbian – while her greatest admirer, Grape, was still finding her footing in her fluid sexuality. Now, emboldened by liquor, Grape dissolved into spasmic giggles when Ellie Blythe twisted a dreadlock in her direction, and almost immediately Isola lost her in the swell of the crowd.

The guests lit a bonfire out back, in the rabbit-burrow hollow, burning wet wood from lemon trees that were never planted. The flames belched blue. Isola hovered tensely over it but the birds burned unnoticed in their shroud. She watched their ashes float upwards and decided cremation was the best thing for them. They belonged to the sky, not the earth.

Drinks were spilling, voices were rising excitedly. Two of Grape's plus-ones, Shinji Honda and Miranda Lenkic, were splitting a slice of the steak cake in a corner and holding hands with faint embarrassment, their mouths too full to kiss. The paint buckets were nicked and Isola couldn't turn a corner without a glowing party guest trying to splatter her with greenish firefly blood, molten-red muscle. It got more difficult to distinguish friends from strangers as the intricate patterns on the guests' bodies melted into techno blurs. A shirtless boy jumped out at her from under the stairs, wearing Beethoven's death mask.

Isola laughed, but the girl behind her shrieked in fright.

‘What a
freak
!' snarled the familiar voice.

Isola ducked into the kitchen before Bridget McKayde could recognise her. Saliva was boiling in her mouth. She felt uneasy. Why would Edgar invite a girl like Bridget to his party? He'd never mentioned knowing her. Isola decided to find Grape, to make sure a scene was avoided.

Edgar had his head in the fridge, searching out a particular nectar amongst the endless rows of glass bottles. Isola tapped him on the shoulder and he bumped his head on a shelf.

‘Ouch – oh, hi!' Edgar said, rubbing his crown. He smiled, brazenly scooped a few blueberries out of the bottom of her refreshed cocktail glass and popped them in his mouth.

‘Have you seen Grape?'

Edgar pointed to his ears. ‘What?'

‘I said,' yelled Isola, standing on tiptoes to reach his ear, ‘have you see Grape?'

‘Why?' he shouted back, ‘are you bored?'

Someone shut the kitchen door and the music was blunted. A guest standing near the sink cracked open a wine bottle; the cork shot towards them and Edgar automatically pulled Isola close. The cork missed her by a whisker, pinging into the fridge and shattering a rack of glasses.

‘How can you be bored,' Edgar went on, as nonchalantly as possible, ‘when I just saved your life? This party is death-defying stuff.'

Wine was pouring in a waterfall from the fridge; Edgar stepped into the fizzy puddle and slipped. This time, Isola caught him, and as he regained his footing, they bumped heads. They laughed and didn't pull away. There was paint on Edgar's braces and his grin glowed in the dark. A mouthful of stars.

‘Who just saved
whose
life?'

‘I reckon we're square,' replied Edgar.

Still they stood, forehead to forehead, breathing one another in. Edgar reached for her hand, hesitated, then plucked the miniature umbrella from her glass instead.

Isola said, after a moment, ‘I'm getting wine in my shoes.'

‘Me too.'

He tucked the paper umbrella behind her ear, the brief brush of his fingers still cold from rummaging through the fridge. And then it didn't matter that she'd found Bridget but couldn't find Grape – Isola was with Edgar on his birthday, both of them glowing in the dark, and she hadn't bought him a present.

 

The Clock Strikes Midnight

‘Happy eighteenth birthday, Edgar Allan Poe.'

‘Stretch Out and Wait' by The Smiths had come dulled on the stereo, a song meant for slow-dancing, for lying in lavender fields.

Edgar scoffed. ‘Edgar Allan Poe is like, two hundred years –'

She stoppered his mouth with hers, and it was gloriously unexpected. Her lips were frosted with sugar and faeriedust. Through his transparent eyelids he thought he saw the neon marks on their arms and chest lift right from their bodies and encircle them, revolving like wedding bands, the broken dust satellites after two planets clash, after the centre of gravity shifts.

His pulse throbbed in his throat, a jellyfish sting, and he pulled her closer into the collision kiss. He smelt a dizzying perfume miasma and heard sparks and the buckling of glass – Cinderella's façade, her ballgown, was cracking at the hem and along her waist, where Edgar's hand lightly rested. Not a ballgown, he soon realised, but a bell jar – the invisible glass that kept her sealed within and everyone else out.

She jerked away as though she'd been bitten. He looked at her and surreptitiously tongued his teeth, praying she hadn't scratched herself on his silver braces.

She blushed and murmured, ‘I love this song.'

‘Oh, yeah,' said Edgar. He'd heard her playing The Smiths before and promptly downloaded the discography.

Blushing again, she rubbed at her lipsticked mouth with the back of her hand. ‘So, um,
have
you seen Grape?'

‘She's probably with Pip,' he said as the memory resurfaced somewhere in the back of his mind. ‘He said he was forming a wolf pack, or something just as mad, and he led a bunch of idiots off into Viv's –'

Isola ripped out of his embrace. ‘They WHAT?'

The cocktail glass dropped from her limp fingers, and someone behind her yelled out, ‘Taxi!'

But neither of them laughed. Isola was furious.

 

No Trail of Breadcrumbs

‘Are you kidding, Edgar? You promised!' she shrieked, and she shoved her way through the crowd, knocking past a boy who spilled his drink over Bridget, who in turn threw her drink in his poor oblivious face.

Isola didn't stop. The blur of luminous bodies wove around her. She barrelled past the people in the hallway; a hat stand was knocked over, a lamp smashed.

The cold air bulldozed her as she left Number Thirty-seven, her heels sinking into the lawn as she sprinted into the night.

‘Isola! Hold up!' Edgar called from the doorway.

‘You promised, Edgar!' Her voice bounced off the outer trees that formed the great wall between Aurora Court and Vivien's Wood, between Isola Wilde's rapidly darkening universe and the claustrophobic, always-getting-smaller world of Everyone Else.

Why
had she kissed him? What was she thinking? Because it had been
her
–
she
had initiated it, and his mouth had formed a waiting answer against the sudden question of her kiss. And then Morrissey's voice had warped; the music slowed and the scene turned burnt sepia and flickering, a piece of damaged film, and echoing in the back of her mind, a voice, an awful broken voice issuing from a bloodied mouth . . .

‘
He deserves better than a dead girl, Isola Wilde . . .'

Isola had gasped against his teeth and broken away, and now she was crashing through the undergrowth, rabbits and foxes scattering like teenage lovers spotlighted by police. She could see plumes of light ghosting distantly between trees. At first she thought they were faeries, but the lights flickered, and she realised: Pip's idiot wolf pack had carried flaming branches from the bonfire to light their way.

She ran towards the lights, but they split apart, beacons in all directions – her inner compass was liquor-flooded, and the needle spun. She pressed her hands to a nearby tree and asked it for directions, but it seemed as disorientated as her – in fact, its voice was so quiet, she could barely hear it over the pounding of her own heart.

Maybe Florence was right.

‘Isola! Isola!'

A pink diamond catapulted towards her; Isola tried to explain what had happened, but the stitch in her side seemed to have sewn up her lips, too. She wheezed breathlessly, but Rosekin understood nevertheless.

The faerie's wings trembled excitedly. Rosekin had always adored a drama. ‘Follow me, princess! I'll guide the way!'

Isola chased Rosekin instead of the darts of flame. Wicked tree roots went out of their way to snag her ankles and the high hem of her tragic wedding dress – why was the forest acting like this? Were the trees angry with her? Did they think, as Isola sometimes did, that she had provoked the mad girl ghost? Florence was somewhere out here, and while Isola had worried about herself and her neighbours, her six older brothers, she'd never stopped to think what effect a spirit like that could be having on the woods.

She ran on, through the soup of eyes watching, unblinking. The starless night hung indifferent above her, and Rosekin streaked too far ahead, leaving Isola to feel her way through the dark, panic crippling the map in her memory, which threw up roadblocks, misnamed avenues and occasional flickers of flame, at first far away and then seemingly right beside her in the trees.

Isola took her shoes off and ran, alien-bright, through the woods she knew and loved and now feared.

Figures streaked wildly up ahead. Torchlight and burning branches, and glowing splashes on forearms and feet, painted shadow-tribes. Isola felt dizzy.

Then an electric-pink shriek.

‘
Go back, Isola! Go back!
'

‘What?' Isola skidded to a stop. ‘Rosekin?'

Up ahead she heard Grape's obnoxiously loud laugh, Jella calling someone
sweetpea
and
sugardoll
. She heard Pip yelling tipsily, his voice spiralling between the trees, ‘I've seen
The Blair Witch Project
, I know what happens next!' to clouds of laughter from the others. Ellie Blythe started whistling a melody of horror movie themes. Isola stumbled on.

Rosekin's pink glow had vanished – only the voices guided her now, and even they were fading again.

‘Through here, through here!' Rosekin called encouragingly in her bell-voice. ‘I've found them – Isola, hurry!'

Exhaling at last, Isola burst through the trees and found it, her quarry – a flaming branch. But it had been abandoned, wedged upright in the earth at the centre of a mushroom ring.

No Grape. No Rosekin. Not even Florence.

Isola stood in the Devil's Tea Party.

Sinister giggles echoed from outside the circle and Isola spun on the spot. The leaves didn't crackle beneath her. She lifted her foot.

Feathers.

Glossy-like angel feathers, black and grey and brindle-spotted. The feathers of hundreds of birds plucked bald and abandoned, the inedible remains of a corpse's dinner.

She held her shoes close to her chest, the sharp heels her only weapon.

‘Rosekin?' she called, whirling on the spot. She called again, louder, ‘GRAPE? ARE YOU IN HERE? IT'S ISOLA!'

The upright flame munched its insatiable way down the branch. No-one shouted back.

‘GRAPE!' yelled Isola, cupping her mouth. ‘ROSEKIN!'

The ring of red and white mushrooms cast monstrous shadows behind them in the firelight. Her own shadow elongated, and another . . . a second, oddly-shaped shadow, cast from above . . .

Slowly, she looked up.

Above the Devil's Tea Party, suspended from the canopy, was a long, twisted chain made from the knotted bodies of dead faeries, tied together by their long sharp limbs, limp and lightless. Coloured faeriedust trickled off them like skin cells.

Hanging suspended at the end of the fae-rope was the missing white birdcage and, inside it, crushed, was Grandpa Furlong's mandolin, and a faerie-sized daisy-petal dress.

The Seventh Princess: An Instalment

‘The second dragon,' said Mother, ‘was Treachery.'

‘In the dead of the night, while the others slept, the fifth prince sat and watched the moon climb a ladder of stars, thinking only of his sister and whether the moon she watched was the same. On the wind, the second dragon came to him, and offered a golden claw, whispering in its ancient voice, “Trust me, for I am not like my brothers, and I want to help. I will take you to your sister.”

‘Trustworthiness was the second prince's greatest virtue, and also his flaw. The prince who kept all his sister's secrets like charms on a necklace chose to trust the second dragon. Without waking his brothers, he climbed upon the dragon's back, and never kept a secret again in this world.'