Fairytales for Wilde Girls (10 page)

 

The Moon Melodies

At first, when Isola stirred awake to the gentle, garbled singing, she thought Mother had the radio on in the bathroom – it wasn't unheard of, even at 3 am. She shuffled out of bed, wary of leaving Mother alone with water and electricity, and found the bathroom dark, the tub stark dry.

She could still hear singing. A girl's voice.

‘Christobelle?' she whispered. Like all mermaids, Christobelle fancied herself something of a siren, and had taught Isola a number of old merfolk-songs.

‘Isola,' answered a voice that wasn't Christobelle's. ‘Here.'

She followed the voice back to her room. The third prince Ruslana, a slinky silhouette at the window, motioned her over.

The ghost girl whose body Isola had found in the woods, lank-haired and dirty-clothed, was standing on the lawn and singing wolf-like up at the moon in nonsense-lyrics. Her voice was perhaps pretty once, but now it just sounded broken, hoarse. Occasionally she raised her hand to wipe a fresh trickle of blood from her chin.

Isola felt nothing but pity.

‘Poor girl,' she muttered, wishing she could help her. She looked at Ruslana. ‘You're a Fury, you're meant to investigate these things. Can't you find out what she wants with me?

Ruslana shook her head, Cleopatra-eyes still fixed on the girl. ‘Not if she doesn't want me to.'

Fatherhood: An Interlude

Father Wilde poured a drink of amber brandy, sloshed it round the glass. He had to get up in two hours anyway; he wondered whether it was worth going back to bed. Maybe he should check on his daughter. He could hear her, walking around upstairs.

He sighed, placing the emptied glass on the kitchen table. If he went upstairs and asked what was bothering her, he doubted his daughter would tell. Isola had always been a talkative kid, confident in her vocabulary, with a clear speaking voice good for public speeches in halls without microphones. After her birthday, after all that stuff with her mother had come to a head, she'd retreated up those stairs and sometimes he thought that she'd never come down, that Isola was up with his wife where he couldn't reach them, that her voice couldn't cross the void in this damned house, its two separate storeys like echelons of the underworld and afterlife.

And here he was, trapped in limbo with the dead philosophers and all the unbaptised babies, like his mother-in-law said Isola would be if they didn't take her to church in the first place.

Father Wilde poured another drink.

Why had he expected Isola to remain the same, he wondered? Maybe it was simple puberty, her quiet, her coldness, her strange sleeping hours. He spent her tenth year clearing his throat in the doorway, leaving glasses of milk and sloppily buttered sandwiches. He wasn't used to this, to being the one who climbed the stairs when she was teary or sleepless or gripped in the golden claws of a king-sized tantrum. She had only taken to her room in her pre-teens – which had never been her sanctuary, not when she had a gloaming woods in her constant periphery – and he had called the doctor for her then, and taken his wife's book from her.

Then a change so drastic and yet he couldn't put his finger on it. Isola, aged eleven, came down the stairs, pale but lovely, sadder than she should have known at her age. He tried to fatten her up, but the weight went to the birds. She was her, but not quite her – she now possessed the strangest calm, stolen from the girls in that damn storybook.

Maybe it was this house, which breathed deeply but only at night, and so he had made solid plans to move them away that year. He had expected her to cry, of course, but not to rage; she had held her breath and turned purple, and swore she'd never forgive him if he took them away from the woods.

His old Isola would have cried. Now her papery backbone had stiffened, almost become frozen. Eventually the real estate agents had taken the sign from the lawn, and they continued on as the Wildes at Number Thirty-six, in this horrible house, with its faulty wiring and flickering lights, water stains on the ceilings from the bathroom upstairs, as the trees closed in around them.

 

Starring Edgar Llewellyn as Himself

One: Spend time with her.

Two: Just be you.

That was the advice dispensed by Saint Pip after barely any consideration, but Edgar took it as gospel all the same.

Every time Edgar went to collect the rare bundles of mail, there she was, picking at her torn stockings, shuffling through bills and discarding junkmail, arranging the letters alphabetically. He put out the bins as Isola cooed at the cat, trying to coax it indoors. They would both smile and flush slightly, and the street between them seemed narrower every day.

 

Isola leaned back against the front door and smiled into the hall. She was growing quite fond of the family at Number Thirty-seven. There was the hippy mother, the husband, a suit-and-tie-and-sorry-got-caught-in-traffic kind of man. The bratty brother who Isola often spied hiding in the yard with a gadget in hand, waiting for his sister to emerge from the house so he could direct his remote-controlled helicopter to mercilessly swoop her; the sister who shrieked for Edgar's attention, to watch her bounce on the trampoline, watch me skip the jump rope ten times in a row, watch me hit Cassio with this tree branch, watch me tie a bonnet on Isola's cat, it's not animal cruelty I swear.

Then Edgar. Slouchy, kind Edgar. The bright teeth that blunted his mumbles. His silver braces rhyming with Isola's golden necklace. Tall and bulky, black wavy hair always in his eyes. Meaty hands, hairs standing to attention on his arms.

He had the broad chest and shoulders of a woodsman, she noted. Well used to cutting girls out of wolf bellies.

Mother Wilde was sitting up in bed, a book open on her lap. She clearly wasn't reading it, but the action alone was enough to double the smile on Isola's face.

‘What're you so flushed about?' Mother inquired.

‘Nothing, Mum.'

‘Hmm. I don't buy it.' Mother seemed slightly put off. ‘It's that boy across the street, isn't it?' She smiled and her eyes were brighter than they'd seemed in months. But there was something else in her face, a strange tightness about her features as though her smile had lit a candle and the wax was melting down.

 

Isola on the Outer

As November drained into December, the first strangled sparrow appeared in the frosty garden. Its little head was twisted right around; a demonic possession. At first, Isola blamed Morris, the family cat, who sometimes left distasteful but well-intended gifts of chewed mice and frogs for her. Then she saw the crescent mark on its noodling throat. A tiny moon bruise. As if the person who'd throttled it had done so with a lunar-charm bracelet.

Isola coddled the limp creature into a tissue-lined shoebox and buried it under the plum tree while Morris sniffed around the shallow grave.

That night, Alejandro and Ruslana both came to stand at the window, and they listened to the ghost girl's strange, lyricless tunes sung much louder than the previous time. Her appearances seemed random, arbitary. They still weren't sure what she wanted. Sympathy? Vengeance? Or just an audience for her lilting, choked vocals?

 

The next night, the midnight music was welcome for a change; the exotic strumming conjured images of musty blues bars, chapped fingertips. Isola heard the strains beginning as she readied herself for bed, and had to stop herself from squealing with joy as she climbed out of her bedroom window and perched on the roof, waiting for the sixth prince's song to end before she spoke.

GRANDPA FURLONG:
The sixth prince. An elderly ghost and faithful friend to the eight-legged.

He sat with his legs dangling carelessly over the edge in his dusk-coloured overcoat, felt-brimmed hat tugged low over his brow.

Grandpa Furlong was an elderly black gentleman who had died of lung cancer – starched hospital bedsheets, a chest oozing tar – and his pipe, his mandolin and his hacking cough had followed him into death. He'd been a university lecturer and knew all there was to know about spiders. He could identify them by their web patterns and knew how quickly the blood of the bitten would curdle. The abundance of spiders was what had initially drawn Grandpa Furlong to Vivien's Wood, where Isola had found him strumming in tune to the weaving of webs.

The music stopped as his fingers lifted from the rumbling strings.

‘Hi, Grandpa!'

‘Blue Eyes. It's been a while.' Grandpa Furlong grinned, showing smoke-stained canines. ‘I heard about your uninvited guest from the gossipy little thing in your garden. The, ah, pink –'

‘Rosekin.'

‘Ah, yes. Rosie told me, in that dramatic way a' hers,' said Grandpa Furlong, his wrinkled hands fumbling in his overcoat for his old-fashioned pipe. ‘And I'm gonna spend a few nights watchin' over you, my li'l lady.'

The pipe had always been a source of fascination to Isola. When he lit it with the single match he'd been buried with – the match head never broke black – the pipe wafted plumes of psychedelic colour, the exhales of a hookah-smoking caterpillar. It smelled differently every time it was lit, too, and was never as coarse as real tobacco.

Tonight, the smoke was desert-orange, and it smelled like vanilla and sandalwood and grass and chalk, as though dead scents were wafting randomly from the other side. A window to eternity accidentally left cracked.

‘Why, hello, darlin',' he cooed, cupping a little mass of fuzzy black in his palm. Isola saw the glitter of black eyes, the thin strokes of leg. It was Grandpa Furlong's favourite spider.

‘Hi, Dame Furlong,' said Isola to the spider. She lived in the potted rosebush at the front door, and waited ever-patiently for Grandpa's appearances.

His mouth puckered up in a wizened grin. He stroked Dame Furlong's back, and after a minute the spider climbed up Grandpa's arm and made herself cosy on his warm pipe.

There was a clattering behind them; Alejandro was walking over the roof tiles. ‘The upstairs windows are all locked and sealed. She cannot get in again without your express permission.' He sat down. ‘Hello, Mr Furlong.'

‘Hello, my young friend,' said Grandpa Furlong graciously. He offered Alejandro a toke on his pipe and, as always, the first prince shook his head, saying, ‘My apologies. I have abandoned the habit.'

The ghosts watched the polished stars, and Isola watched the curtained windows of Number Thirty-seven. The woods loomed dense and black. One of Aurora Court's twin streetlights fuzzed in and out of consciousness.

‘Do you think she's a split?' Isola asked suddenly, wondering why no-one had suggested it before.

They called them ‘splits' or sometimes ‘echoes': half-hearted hauntings, the kind her brothers had always warned her about. They were people who had died with their minds half-made up, who were unpredictable, confused, often caught in loops. Splits were unable to change, unable to move on; they infected their surroundings with their feelings – emotions so strong they anchored them to the earth.

Grandpa Furlong was the most knowledgeable of her brothers despite his limited education. He was worldly, but not yet weary.

‘I don't know,' mused Grandpa Furlong. ‘She's actin' out some life events sure, by th' sounds of it. But I'm told she's quite conscious of where she is – and of who
you
are, Blue Eyes.'

‘She has only died recently,' added Alejandro. ‘Perhaps she is still coming to terms with it.'

‘Then why come back as a ghost at all?' queried Isola.

She could smell the salty rain contracting in the bellies of the overhead clouds carried in from the fathering ocean. The cold tiles bit into her legs. She shivered.

‘Don't be frightened, now,' said Grandpa Furlong. Careful not to dislodge Dame Furlong, he inhaled deeply from his pipe, pursed his lips and shot wedding rings of smoke towards the Poe house. The bright orange smoke was changing colour, slowly turning toxic-yellow. ‘I'll be here as long as you need me, Blue Eyes. She's jus' a girl, and a dead one, at that. You needn't be scared o' her.'

‘Don't forget,' said Isola seriously, ‘she's half-witch.'

‘And half-princess,' said Alejandro thoughtfully. ‘Gracious,
querida
. We may have met your match.'

 

Grandpa was very interested in the things the dead girl had said to Isola. Particularly her mentioning of the racket Isola's pumping blood had made. Some ghosts resented the living for so easily possessing what they no longer had, he mused. A beating heart. Hot, sticky blood. A chance to change.

Grandpa Furlong's nightwatch seemed to be doing the trick. Weeks passed without sightings of the dead girl and only occasional snatches of singing, like it had drifted up from deep underwater. Isola felt safe while Grandpa Furlong strummed hymns on the roof, serenading the moon, gradually encouraging Her to reveal a little more – a sliver of white light here, a crater or two the next night.

The hypnotic strings drew more faeries than ever to Number Thirty-six, resulting in midnight garden parties of a sort. Rosekin, who usually slept in the music box on Isola's bookshelf, sat and leaned against the cold window. Her cousin Winsor was sometimes allowed to join her, and the little night-lights pulsed dreamy pink and emerald-green to the chords as more rainbow orbs drifted past. That arrangement didn't last long, as Winsor simply could not behave herself. It was only her third night when she found a ladybug traversing the book spines, and proceeded to pull its legs off.

‘Out! You – you feral Tinkerbell!' Isola huffed, shooing Winsor back through the crack in the walls.

‘He don't even play good, anyway!' Winsor stuck out her green tongue and hurled the insect's corpse on the bed as a parting gift.

Each night Isola stayed up as late as she could, reading her book of fairytales under drooping eyelids, trying to exhaust herself. She'd been having a repeated dream of standing before a mystery door. She'd breathed out and it'd swung open, having accepted the secret password of her presence, her warm exhale. Something bright had blinded her, and she'd woken up throttled by midnight's sticky fingers, sickly sweet night-breath having tangled in her lungs.

Waking abruptly from this same dream for the third time in a fortnight, Isola held her breath until, through the thumping blood in her ears, she discerned a mandolin note from the roof.

She peeked into the master bedroom. Mother lay on her side, the curving mountain range of her body rising and falling with tiny earthquakes. Isola counted another night Mother hadn't died in her sleep.