Fairytales for Wilde Girls (33 page)

 

Hearing Daisies

At the funeral Isola stood in her lace party dress and monochrome striped stockings. She read aloud, in a cracked voice that bled down the aisles, the forest's broken songbird:

‘Tread lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

The daises grow . . .'

At the wake Isola sat quietly at a piano in the far corner, playing with one hand a little lullaby Grandpa Furlong had taught her, a song that sounded an awful lot like the one Florence would one day sing at her window.

A black-suited and rather shaken Dr Aziz sought out Father over coffee and lemon cake, promising he'd done everything he could, and Father shouldn't blame himself, either, but sometimes they couldn't be saved, like Sylvia Plath, you know, sometimes it's reactionary or hereditary or just inevitable . . .

Their solemn faces then turned to stare at her, and an image bubbled up in Isola's mind, volcanic and shocking – Mother's right eye, a dead and bottomless pool, staring out, pinpointing her – and she jolted back to the present, to the wake and the cold piano keys and a weak cup of tea and Alejandro's hand on her shoulder, and that was the first time Isola Wilde pushed something down, submerged it until it stopped struggling, and she took a deep breath, opened both her eyes, and continued living.

Something in her was already starting to die.

 

La Mort d'Isola

Isola threw open every window in the house, propped Mother's bedroom door ajar to let the sour air drift out; the dust and memories. Afterwards, Isola soaked in a long, hot bath.

That night, as they lay holding one another in her bed, Isola told Edgar everything. Everything James would have scoffed at, Grape would have been worried by, Sister K would have denounced as the Devil's interference and Father would have shouted at if she'd dared bring up. She told him what had happened to her mother and to her – all without breaking the unspoken code of the Nimues.

There were some things about girls that boyfriends weren't meant to understand.

Edgar listened, didn't interrupt. The curtain was open, and by hot moonlight he took the offered book and read the last words of Lileo Pardieu, hidden under a photograph for seven long years.

‘Probably the only suicide note in the universe to include the word “cake”,' whispered Edgar through the dark.

After she'd sent him home, Isola climbed up to the roof and watched summer blossoms drift from Vivien's Wood. A lone star dropped over the horizon.

It would have been wonderful had Edgar been up there, wrapping her up in his long fuzzy arms. And it would have been beautiful with Mother, too – they'd hold hands and sneak sips of peach schnapps, alive together. It would have been a night to remember with any one of her brothers, all of whom were gone she knew not where.

She took a long breath and held it, imagining in that infinitesimal space before release that she sat alone with each of them in turn. The bumblebee flare of Rosekin hovering at her cheek, a glowing fuchsia earring. Alejandro's knotted cravat silky as it brushed her cheek. The wet slap of Christobelle's scales against the roof tiles. The click of Ruslana's black talons against her wicked silver dagger. Grandpa Furlong's scented pipe-smoke swirling in her hair. And James, before he started loving her and after he'd stopped – her imaginary Jamie, a pale counterfeit of the real, who didn't measure up on a second, lingering glance. Even Bunny, dozing in her lap, his claws contracting as he dreamt of fresh meat.

All this she saw, and all this she released; all of them vanishing into the stratosphere with the long hiss of her at-last exhaled breath. And they floated on the updraft, ascending to join hands in the ever-lengthening chain that made up the glitter of the comet's tiger tail.

 

She kept busy, but it was hard to forget. She forced herself to create a garden instead of a graveyard, every blossom a tombstone, all named for her princes. Mother Poe helped Isola until the front garden was as lovely as she'd always pretended it was.

A black rabbit nibbled at a gravestone rose. Smiling, Isola caught him and cradled him in her arms. She pressed his ears flat against his shivering crown. His eyes were disappointingly blue.

‘If you ever see my friend,' whispered Isola, ‘tell him he's always welcome to join me for dinner.'

The rabbit bared his teeth in a grin. Twin rows of jagged, black fangs.

 

Edgar took the apple tree he'd never buried in his own backyard and planted it in the hollow where the plum tree had stood. The apples grew scarlet and emerald with their initials already carved into the skin: E.L and I.W. The pips were black diamonds, and Isola collected them in her music box, crusting the frame of Mother's photograph in them.

At the base of the flowering Vigour Mortis, Isola buried four Spanish coins, two in a rabbit-skin, two in an apple: for the wood witch Lileo, Mother's doppelganger; for Florence, Isola's own dark twin, the Isola that almost was.

Lileo Pardieu-Wilde, the Beauty who couldn't Sleep, was finally free of her tower, and returned to her grave under the Bridge of Sighs. On it Isola laid wreaths she'd woven from flowers grown in her garden.

Sometimes, Father came with her. He didn't shuffle so nervously around her anymore; he didn't respond to her delicateness with distance, and their home was warmer for it. He knew something had changed, even if he wasn't sure what. He had noticed, however, that she was no longer wearing that damned wedding ring like a curse around her neck. It had appeared on his bedside table, the gold slightly flaking, his wife's initials engraved along the inside.

And sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, Isola thought she caught sight of Dusk the unicorn, regal and well-fed again, rushing through the undergrowth, bearing a Lady on his back. She was as wild as ever, and her black French hair had grown down to her ankles.

 

Isola was seventeen, and Edgar was curled in her bed, painting a rabbit on her collarbone. Not a fuzzy white courtier late for an important date, sending poor mad girls tumbling down burrows – but a red-eyed bunny, a garden-variety gargoyle.

And then they were painting each other's portraits on the diary-wall behind her bed, obscuring years of painful scribblings under great mad splodges, and when they touched each other's bodies they left fingerprint trails to mark where they'd been.

And Edgar had eyes rather like Bunny's, except not glowing red and not watching her like he wanted to eat her up. Well, he was, in a way, but she thought he wanted to do it slowly, to savour and devour her over a hundred years of always being together.

And in the morning, Edgar woke, curled round her spine, wrapped in her desert-genie body heat. Regretfully, he slid out from under the blanket, cricked the knot between his shoulder blades, and wrote on the still-dripping diary-wall behind her bed in gigantic pastel print:

ALL MY LIFE IS BURIED HERE

 

 

 

Talisman

For her eighteenth birthday, Edgar asked Father Wilde if he could have that wedding ring Isola used to wear as a talisman. Sneakily, he took another stone – a shiny red pearl she kept in a music box that played a haunting little tune when opened. Sometimes, when she didn't see him looking, she sat at the vanity, opened the box and held the red pearl so hard she could have pushed it into her palm, swallowed up through her lifeline.

They had a party, her first in eight years. Edgar saved his gift till last: the gold wedding band that had belonged to Lileo Pardieu, topped with a marbled stone he didn't know the origin of.

A ring of hers repackaged. A brand-new talisman.

 

Teenage Exorcism

She sent Edgar home to his own bed for a change, and stayed up to unwrap the package that had come in the mail. Not a birthday gift at all. Rather, a gift for someone else.

It was a hardback book with crisp lettering, fresh paper. She ran her thumb down the cool spine as though it were a loved one's.

Fairytales for Wilde Girls

by Lileo Pardieu-Wilde and Isola Wilde

The photograph at the back was of Mother at Blood-pearl Beach, a small Isola clutching her knees, and a beardless Father behind the lens.

The dedication:

In loving memory of my mother, Lileo Pardieu-Wilde, and to all girls everywhere, dead or otherwise.

She'd added her own stories to her mother's, updated
Wolverine Queen
, given a few more girls their happy endings. She stayed up half the night admiring the new illustrations and tracing words she'd memorised, all so beautifully different in print, and soon to be held by other girls, maybe some who needed a fairytale or two. Maybe even another Child of Nimue, who would recognise the familiar creatures, the distorted but beautiful viewpoint of the world, and know they weren't ever alone.

‘Go to sleep,' said a familiar voice above her, and hands lifted the book away. ‘You have had a long day.'

Isola flopped down on the pillow and said through a smile, ‘Fine, fine. Love you.'

‘I love you, too.'

‘Goodnight.'

‘Goodnight,
querida
.'

The Seventh Princess: The Last Instalment

‘Once the last dragon, Loneliness, had been slain by the Seventh Princess herself, she ran, as fast as her soft, dainty feet could carry her, and they were soon pierced by rocks and fields of nettles. She ran following in reverse the trail left by her brothers. She ran through biting snow and along the shore, and when she finally returned home, brother-less, much older than when she'd left, she peered in the castle window and saw her parents cradling their new fair-haired baby.'

Isola was almost asleep; her lashes fluttered as she struggled to outlive the story's end.

‘They loved her and missed her, she knew, but she couldn't bear to tell them the fate of her brothers. Besides, they had found happiness now, had caught it like a cloud, shaped and swaddled it, and she daren't break it up. She left the castle under the cover of darkness, cloaked and still bare-footed, a sword white as bone strapped to her back.'

Dream figures were already playing out on the cheeks of Lileo's daughter, a shadow theatre projected from the light inside. Wobbly perigee moons and volcanoes belching butterflies, all cast across the star-speckled eternity that is a little girl.

‘Legends soon spread across the region of a small, cloaked girl with a sword of bones, protecting their kingdom and the worlds beyond, seeking out dragons and slaying them, freeing villages and protecting treasures, occasionally rescuing small blonde royals.'

Lileo Wilde dropped her voice to a whisper, her pale lips hovering like butterflies over Isola's ear. ‘And sometimes, the rumours said, if she was seen in just the right light, the setting sun cast a path of blood at her long-hardened feet and, running after her, the encouraging shadows of six ghostly brothers.'