Fairytales for Wilde Girls (13 page)

 

Isola's Nursery

So this was the way
, Edgar thought to himself. In this castle behind the woods, a young suitor's blood was the only price that could be paid to gain entrance to the princess's chambers. The hallway to her bedroom was rigged with trick mirrors and family portraits. He only caught blurred glimpses of a family of three.

Her room was just as he'd imagined it: a crucible of strawberry lipglosses and ouija boards, a Hello Kitty acid trip. There were teacups everywhere with the bottoms coated in leaf flakes; flaky images of the future.

Isola lowered him gingerly to the bed and fetched a first-aid kit from the bathroom. It was brimming with the usual (band-aids, gauze, tweezers, eye drops) and the slightly bizarre (compression bandages and splints for snakebites, sanitised eyepatches, a cartoonish pamphlet of instructions for on-the-spot amputations).

‘At least you're prepared for anything,' he quipped. ‘Where's the zombie survival shelter?'

‘Underground,' she replied, sitting on the floor and swabbing the gash on his leg, ‘with shotguns, liquor and canned brains. So we can try and get used to the taste, you know.'

Her hair was pinned up, a turban of curls; she had purplish autopsy fingernails. She'd recently switched her Lolita fashion for a kind of burnt-out-goddess look: oversized shirts with loud slogans like VAMPIRISM BITES and FREE MARIE ANTOINETTE; ratty boots spray-painted gold and studded with plastic jewels and miniature Union Jack flags; red lip-stain as though she'd just been eating raspberries.

Edgar watched as Isola cleaned the area of gravel flecks and stripped skin, then sanitised and threaded a needle.

‘I'm sorry,' he muttered. ‘I
really
hate hospitals.'

‘It's fine.'

The needle pierced his skin. He stiffened reflexively but kept his mouth firmly closed.

While she diligently stitched, he peered at the smatterings of freckles on her arms, and felt the calluses on her sewing-toughened fingertips. The necklace he'd thought a pumpkin was actually a heavy gold ring on a chain.

Up close, he could tell her eyelashes were blonde, but she disguised them with mascara as thick as paint. He could see the downy fuzz at her hairline and on the nape of her neck, the dark roots growing though her Nordic white-blonde dye, the mole on her left earlobe, the freshly picked scab under her chin.

She was so beautiful. Only the blind would think her invisible, whatever she said otherwise.

She could have been a teenage Wendy in her nursery, gently sewing shadows to the wild boy's feet. Edgar glanced down just as the thread began to zigzig.

‘You stitch like Frankenstein,' he complained.

‘Doctor
Frankenstein,' Isola corrected. ‘I'm sure he didn't go to medical school to be forever associated with a monster.'

‘I was referring
to
the monster.'

‘And it's a common mistake for people to refer to the monster as “Frankenstein”. Honestly, Edgar, read the classics or don't ever reference them.'

Edgar smiled before quickly grimacing as he twisted his face away from Isola's ministrations. He peered around the room, spotting a photograph of a much -younger Isola with her parents. Isola's mother was a look-alike in brunette; he still hadn't seen her. He'd barely glimpsed her father. Number Thirty-six was an oversized dollhouse, all the furniture and lived-in airs for show. Already he noticed the quiet; missing the rambunctiousness of his siblings, the clatter-forever of children in the house.

Isola continued sewing quietly. The wound began to grin at him.

A minute passed before he put the question out like a velvety feeler. ‘So, is that James bloke your boyfriend?'

‘He's a friend who is a boy, yes,' said Isola. ‘I've known him for years. We've been fighting lately, though.'

Edgar tried again to force an admission he didn't want to hear. ‘Lover's quarrel?'

‘More like tension between two people who have spent far too much time together and have now memorised one another's flaws,' explained Isola. She smiled sweetly, and added, ‘Which of your steady stream of visitors is
your
beloved?'

Edgar laughed. No-one had come to see him. Aurora Court was adrift from the rest of the world, a patch of semi-suburban wilderness too hard to find, and once inside, too difficult to find your way out of again.

‘I haven't had a girlfriend. Not since Lenore died, anyway.' He sighed.

He picked up the book with the golden French title and the English translation beneath from her bedside table. It opened to the last page, to a woman with razor-sharp angles, feathered black hair, feline eyes. The photograph was only loosely secured. Edgar lifted the photo. ‘Hey! There's something written here –'

‘No!' Isola slammed her hand over his, crushing the picture flat. ‘I know. I don't wanna see it!'

‘What? Why?' Edgar tried to pry a corner of the photograph up.

‘Because I can't stand to know what it says, okay?'

‘It's probably just a dedication to whoever owned the book before you, or a bit of graffiti –'

‘Or it's a note written by Lileo Pardieu!'

‘Shouldn't that make you want to read it even more? You worship her.'

‘Yes, and that's precisely the reason!'

Isola wrenched the book from Edgar's grasp and hugged it to her chest. ‘These books are incredibly rare, even in France. Lileo might have put them together herself. And she died young. There are no more Pardieu stories. And if she wrote that note, then that's the only Pardieu I've never read. Don't you understand why I want to hold on to that? To keep her last words to me a secret?'

She shoved the book under the bed and resumed her stitching. Edgar made a mental note never to mention Lileo Pardieu again.

 

A Heathen's Prayer

More dead birds littered the garden of Number Thirty-six. Not just sparrows now, but tiny finches, ravens, even a bluebird, all broken at the throat, their mellifluous voices sucked out, stamped with moons like a killer's calling card. A nest of three babies, translucent skin, featherless, harmless.

Isola rooted them out. One had been hidden in a rosebush, stuck through with thorns like a victim of an Iron Maiden, another had bounced into the centre of a sticky spiderweb on the honeysuckle shrub. Ten in total, and Isola buried them coffinless at the roots of the plum tree. The earth was starting to freeze. Her fingernails broke, the edges bleeding cherry into the dirt.

Isola could think of no fitting epigraph, no poem or silver lining. In the stapled photograph, Lileo Pardieu glared out from under her tousled hair, raccoon eyes in black.

Lileo would have to be more than a lucky charm now. She would be the patron saint, like Dymphna hanging over the nunnery-turned-high school.

‘Please, Lileo,' Isola whispered, her dirty hands clasped in a prayer. ‘Keep them safe from her. The birds, the Poes, and the princes.'

As she said this aloud, an awful thought struck her: These strange incidents and apparitions seemed to increase when she spent time with the boy across the street. Were these wormy birds a warning, perhaps, about Edgar?

 

Hear the Daisies

Edgar was going away over the Christmas break. He texted Isola to come over the afternoon before he left. It had been raining, and Christobelle's single red eye winked teasingly at Isola from the puddles in the street.

‘Go away,' Isola hissed, stamping in a puddle deeper than she'd fathomed. Muddy water flecked the hem of her dress.

‘Look,' said Edgar, directing her to stand over the busy crater in Number Thirty-seven's backyard. ‘They're finally rebuilding, the clever little scamps.'

The rabbit burrow was no longer a catacomb, but a metropolis. The crater remained, but new tunnels had been built; bridges and overpasses, intricate yet fragile. She crouched down to admire their work, their wriggling bobtails visible in the dark.

She reached down to pet one then, remembering the fangs on the black rabbit below the plum tree some time ago, she quickly withdrew her hand.

‘Where are you going for your holiday?' she asked Edgar.

‘Rome, to see Mum's relatives. I'll miss the snow,' he said, somewhat wistfully.

Isola shuddered, remembering the predicted blizzards. ‘I hate snow.'

He snorted. ‘Then you clearly hate fun.'

‘Snow's not fun, it's . . . cold!'

Edgar laughed. ‘So you'd like it if it were warm?'

She shrugged. ‘And if rain was, like, bath-temperature, then yes, winter would be grand.'

 

‘I'm so glad to finally meet you face to face, Isola,' said Lotus Blossom, jangling with beads, her hair in a fishtail braid. ‘What with the move and then this –' she patted her protruding belly ‘– and now packing for this ridiculous trip, I haven't had a chance – but what a lovely name!
Isola
. . .' she repeated, chewing it around her mouth, rubbing the large bump under her blouse. Then, ‘Lovely.
Lovely
. That's a nice one, too . . .'

‘When's the baby due?' Isola asked Edgar as they started climbing the stairs.

‘Not till April. She always goes for a Shakespeare name in the end. She just agonises over whether or not our middle names are “unique” enough.' He shook his head.

‘What's your middle name?'

‘If I tell you, you can't laugh.'

‘Promise I won't.'

‘It's Laugh.'

Stifling a burst of Edgar's middle name, Isola pressed her fingers over her mouth and asked, as seriously as she could manage, ‘Where's Edgar from?'

‘
King Lear.
'

‘Can't say I've read it.'

‘It's mental. It's got a bunch of characters running around, pretending to be completely nuts, and lots of Elizabethan special-effects, big storms and stuff – and a really gross eye-gouging scene.'

Isola thought of a handsome sailor bending over a writhing, terrified Christobelle, of a sparrow plucking a glazed blue eye from a girl strung high in a cage. She shivered.

‘Edgar's a prince.'

Isola twisted on the stairs to stare at him; Edgar reached out and steadied her, even as she caught the banister and practically gasped, ‘What?'

‘In
King Lear
,' he explained, looking up at her, a soft concern in the creases round his eyes. ‘The character I was named after.'

‘Oh. Yes, of course.'

Isola turned around again, and Edgar stepped up beside her to take the remaining stairs in tandem, his hand still hovering over her lower back.

‘Did your parents pick a theme, too? Is your brother called Oscar?'

A sneaky glint of humour pulsed in his pupil. How did Edgar remember what she'd said months ago, through the mask of that fog-and-laser party? She didn't know what to say. She couldn't make the same mistakes she had with James . . .

‘I don't actually have a brother,' said Isola, with as much conviction as she could muster, and it was like saying ‘the earth is flat' or ‘I hate fairytales' or ‘I don't love my mother now that she's sick'.

‘I thought so,' Edgar said, and smiled. He didn't seem mad or surprised at all. ‘Lying about your family, lying about your name – are you really even a teenage girl?'

‘Got me. I'm actually the ghost of a Spanish dandy who died two hundred years ago in an opium den.'

He led the way to his room, and there was a slight pause in conversation, like a gap between teeth. She decided to give him a glimpse into the truth; as much as he could handle without becoming a second James Sommerwell.

‘My mum . . . She's sick because of me.'

‘What?' said Edgar in surprise.

‘Well, it was there already. The illness, but only quietly. Dormant. When I was born, I . . . recontaminated her.'
Parasite baby,
thought Isola. She should have melted to keep her mother from dissolving.

‘You're not a disease, Isola Wilde.'

It was as if Edgar had heard her thoughts. Maybe his braces picked up on brainwaves.

Edgar's room had the air of an art studio, smelling strongly of paint and charcoal, crayons and clay. It had bright posters of giant robot anime from the '80s and of great space operas with gunslingers and busty girls, the kind full of blood spatters washed pink by American editors. His bookcase was crammed with epic fantasy, mainstream horror, and multiple editions of the
Harry Potter
novels in various states of disrepair from vigorous re-reads. Adorning the floor were ripped-knee jeans in every shade of black.

They had both trekked in mud from the yard. Isola imagined daisies and weeds sprouting from the carpet in the spring.

He kicked off his shoes, rubbing his palm over the fantastic wound that was rising into a ropey scar.

‘You know,' said Isola pointedly, ‘I half-expected your leg to turn green and fall off.'

He blushed. ‘Sorry I made you do that. When Mum went for a scan, Dad helped me sneak into the doctor's office next door. I needed some antibiotics, but the doc thought it was really excellent work. She kept asking me whether I knew cross-stitching.' He made a face, turning his scabbing wound away from her when Isola caught a glimpse of a tattoo on his bared ankle. She bent forward to look at it: a shapely mermaid reclining on the rock of his ankle bone, starfish over her nipples.

‘That,' said Isola, pointing, ‘is amazing.'

‘Amazingly hideous,' Edgar said, grimacing. ‘It'll be gone soon enough.'

‘Sorry to break it to you,' said Isola, ‘but soap won't cut it.'

‘What about a cheese grater?' Edgar grinned at her appalled expression. ‘It's not permanent, I swear. I just drew it on. I was drunk and my mate Pip convinced me it'd improve my collection. Look.' He rolled his jeans up to his knees. Above the mermaid was a rocketship, a Celtic cross, a tiger, an ankh, and an octopus sucking on the mast of a doubloon pirate ship.

‘Wow! You drew all that?' Isola's eyes traced a suction cup on an octopus tentacle, the whiskers on the haughty tiger's face. ‘You're brilliant. Really brilliant.'

‘Cheers.' Edgar shrugged as through tossing off the weight of her compliment. ‘I wanted to show you something else while you were here.' He opened his laptop, clicked the mouse a few times. ‘You know Oscar Wilde wrote a poem about his sister Isola? It's called
Requiescat
– do you know it?'

Isola shook her head, and he read aloud from the screen:

Tread lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

The daises grow.

All her bright golden hair

Tarnished with rust

She that was young and fair

Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,

She hardly knew

She was a woman, so

Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,

Lie on her breast;

I vex my heart alone,

She is at rest.

Peace, peace; she cannot hear

Lyre or sonnet;

All my life's buried here,

Heap earth upon it.

Her eyes gazed into the future, and she said in a voice that seemed to emerge from deep water, ‘I might've heard it before. But I can't remember where.'

She went to the precarious Leaning Tower of Sketchbooks beside his unmade bed and riffled through a book without invitation. She made an accidental charcoal fingerprint. His drawings were as intricate and beautiful as his impermanent tattoos, the sketchbooks filled with apocalyptic cityscapes, imperial horsemen and burnt-out suns. Gladiators with antlers. Strange blonde girls dressed in glass.

A graphite sketch of a wild woman in bulletproof underwear perched on the ridged crown of a dragon's head caught Isola's attention.

She smiled. ‘Ruslana . . .'

‘What?'

‘Nothing.' She tapped the sketch. ‘I like her outfit. She reminds me of someone.'

‘The Whore?'

‘The
what
?'

‘The Whore of Babylon.' Edgar tossed pillows haphazardly on the bed and started stacking up half-finished canvases to give the appearance of a clean room. ‘She's from the Bible. Pip put me on to it. I love that kind of mad stuff.'

‘You'd really like Lileo Pardieu's stories, then,' said Isola mildly, tracing the Whore's wicked pencilled grin.

Suddenly the bedroom door opened, and Mrs Llewellyn entered, a rattling tub under her arm. Both Edgar and Isola sat up straighter and Isola shut the sketchbook, as though they'd been caught doing something wrong.

‘Hello, there,' she said warmly, smiling at Isola.

Isola ducked her head, unable to shake the feeling that a scandalously intimate moment had been suspended between her and Edgar like a spiderweb, then broken with the scraping of doorframe on carpet.

‘You always forget,' Mrs Llewellyn said under her breath as she dropped the tub in front of her son. Edgar's cheeks reddened and he muttered something unintelligible back. His mother gave an exasperated sigh and whispered, ‘Well, there's no need to be embarrassed.'

As Mrs Llewellyn left, Isola peered into the tub with interest, barely suppressing a flinch when she realised what was inside.

Pills. Packs, bottles and boxes of them, all with Edgar's name on the labels. He was busily popping tablets from their blister packaging at an incredible speed, chasing them down with a glass of water, which had been precariously placed atop a tray of watercolours. He didn't speak and Isola didn't question him as she was momentarily trapped in the ugly past, back to when Mother was double-dosing, to the rattling that echoed down the hallway between her room and her mother's, the bulging bathroom cabinet, the tablets swept surreptitiously under tongues.

Finally, Edgar seemed to have taken the last of his pills. He looked at her, his brow furrowed, his cheeks still flushed. He gulped down the rest of the water, and said quickly, smothering a burp, ‘They're legal.'

‘You take more tablets than my mum,' said Isola.

He shrugged. ‘I had a transplant. Kidney. I was entirely yellow for, like, all of last year.'

She imagined him then, with skin like the pages of an old, unpopular book. Surprised at his forthrightness, she asked, ‘And you take all these every day?'

‘Yep.' He hiked up the front of his shirt, and her eyes flashed down and back to meet his in an instant.

Isola avoided gazing at the ugly scar across his belly, instead noticing the blush had spread to his elf-like ears. With a start, she realised he really
was
embarrassed to be telling her this, as though it were something to be ashamed of.

‘I think it looks quite rugged,' Isola told him, and he grinned awkwardly, snorting when she added, ‘it's like a hardcore tattoo. Done with a
knife
.'