Fairytales for Wilde Girls (24 page)

 

A World without Treasure

‘I'll haunt you,' Isola said, lying blankly on the bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling. The gargoyle emerged from under the bed and sat up on his hind legs, haughty nose sniffing the air.

She had done her begging, her shouting, her guilt-tripping – she was down to wounding. She had shown her ugliest side and Alejandro was leaving anyway, and these would be his last memories of her.

‘I'll haunt you forever, and you probably won't even mind.'

How deep did she have to dig her nails in before he caved? She didn't care. If someone had to tear this world of lovely flesh away from her – from Edgar and James and Grape and Mother and Father – then it could be him, not Florence.

‘Please, Isola.' He sounded hurt.

She turned her head slightly to look at him. Alejandro didn't owe her anything – not his protection, or his kindness, or even his presence. He was wreathed in the rosy light from her bedside lamp, and that wide black window was propped open, ready to swallow him whole.

‘You will not be alone.' Alejandro smiled fondly, but his eyes glittered wet. He twisted the diamond pins on his cuff. ‘The gargoyle will protect you – I have made him swear. And you will have Edgar and your family. Please remember that Grape is not your enemy. And neither is James,' he added, his restless fingers stilling. ‘You may have deigned him a prince, but he is not like us, Isola Wilde. He is, after all, only human.'

He was standing close to the window now, and Isola didn't remember him stepping back. She jumped up, knocking the Pardieu book from the nightstand, as she seized his hand and tried to drag him back. ‘Ale, listen! I trust you, I know you won't hurt me. Last night was just an accident –' He winced but she ploughed on. ‘I'm okay, so why are you leaving? Are you tired of me? Are you
scared
of her?'

‘Stop.' His voice was gentle, but she felt herself fall back on the bed with the force of it, hunching over.

Slowly, Alejandro crouched down and retrieved
The Pardieu Fables and Fairytales.
She wanted to leave it where it was, draw a crime-scene chalk outline around its splayed pages, keep everything as it was before Alejandro left.

He set it gently on her knee, the pages open, and her hands trembled over the story
Wolverine Queen.
So terrible the things that people who loved each other could do to one another, like she and Alejandro were doing now – and she flipped past the pages, pausing, when she read the word ‘dragon'. And though Alejandro was still there and she still had a chance to change his mind, she remembered Mother speaking . . .

The Seventh Princess: An Instalment

‘The sixth dragon,' intoned Mother. ‘Desertion.

‘At last there was only one. The first-born prince. The bravest one who had promised the King and Queen the safe return of all their children. His brothers were gone; his sister seemed beyond reach. And the sixth dragon came for him that night, in his thoughts, as he lay by the dying embers of his small campfire. Desertion teased and needled him from afar. The first prince despaired, and his steadfast heart began to fail him. His loyalty to his quest, to the lost remnants of his royal siblings, vanished like the last hot ash on the wind, and there the prince lay and moved no more, and he was never there to rescue anyone else again in this world.'

 

‘Isola Lileo Wilde. Listen to me.' Alejandro had placed his hands on her shoulders, holding her at a slight distance. ‘To answer your first question: I will not stay, because I fear for you while I remain a presence. What has overcome my brothers-in-arms could just as easily ensnare me. I have already proven that.'

She couldn't look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the words that Mother had read aloud so long ago, and six tears dripped down Isola's cheek in succession, thickly splattering the crinkled pages. Each drop shone a different colour for a lost prince. Yellow like Grandpa Furlong's mandolin. Pink for Rosekin's glow. Red for Christobelle's tangled hair. Black for Ruslana's lips. Brown for James's eyes.

‘Two: I would sooner tire of sunlight.'

And now her tears fell purple, the colour of Alejandro's cravat, then dust-orange, like the land his mother came from, then grey as the haze of harbour London, and finally green as the graves in which his sisters three were slumbering.

He planted a goodbye kiss on each of her tear-streaked cheeks, another on the back of her limp hand. A gentlemen to the end.

‘And three: no, I am not afraid of Florence. I fear nothing but a world without treasure – without you, my
bella querida,
my
séptima pequeña princesa
.'

 

The Gargoyle Commandments

‘Rules are: No water,' Bunny said imperiously.

‘Why?'

‘Water make I weak. Too much water kill,' Bunny said ominously. ‘Rule number next: No Mama.'

‘What? But – but she's ill, she's relying on me!'

‘How long she been ill?' he demanded.

‘Since . . . since before I was born.'

‘Then she can live without.'

‘No, I'm telling you, she can't! She got worse when I turned ten – she needs me, she's not like she was –'

‘What happened? When Solawile was ten?'

‘I . . . I . . .'

‘What happened?'

‘
I don't know!
' yelled Isola. ‘All I remember was that she was happy enough, and then it all turned rubbish – Dad was a mess, he wouldn't sleep in the same room as her, Mother wouldn't even get out of bed. She stopped wearing her wedding ring . . .'

She remembered going into the master bedroom, to check again that Mother hadn't died in her sleep. She remembered drawn curtains, musty air, and the steady rise and fall of Mother's chest like rolling mountains. Then a glint on the bedside table. The golden wedding band, cold without the contact of skin to survive off. Isola stole it and wore it every day and night on a chain around her neck. If Mother had noticed, she never mentioned it.

Bunny huffed and didn't even glance at the wedding-ring necklace she wore. ‘Rule number last,' he snapped. ‘No
argue
.'

 

Be kind to the smallest,
Alejandro had told her, and if it hadn't been for those words echoing from some distant unmapped constellation of her brain, Isola would have lost her temper hours ago. He'd only been in her room a day, and she was already battling a near-hatred for the rabbit-creature. He was snappish and inconsiderate; he had intruded upon the last stabilities in her life – her Alejandro, her upstairs-and-down-the-hall kingdom of Wilde Girl. Despite seeming to possess an intelligence equal to a human's, he gnawed incessantly on the furniture, snuffled and burrowed through her things, and took great pleasure in moving items from their rightful places, upsetting the careful disarray.

Upon discovering that he had taken each of her bras from the drawers and playfully tossed them about the room, fang-marks obvious in all the clasps, she clamped down on her tongue and offered him food.

The gargoyle crinkled his black nose over the tea saucer set in front of him. ‘What this?'

‘Canned plums,' said Isola, waggling her finger at him. ‘Don't think I've forgotten. You were eating them last autumn, when the tree was still around.' He bared his teeth at her, and she added, ‘I'd recognise those fangs anywhere.'

Nosing the saucer and its purple muck away, he said loudly, ‘Don't eat plums.'

‘Thyme, then?'

‘Don't eat thyme.'

‘This isn't a restaurant, Peter Rabbit.'

‘Gargoyle!'

‘Fine! What the hell do
gargoyles
eat?'

The gargoyle showed his long black teeth again and ran his tongue over them. ‘Rare meat.'

‘Rare, like raw?' said Isola uncertainly.

‘Rare like
hard-to-find.'
He smacked his lips but didn't elaborate.

She tried to tell Bunny the story of
why
exactly she was being haunted and her brothers possessed. He seemed intent on morphing the fault as her own, whatever way she spun the tale – Bunny had already passed his judgement.

‘Little ghosties,' muttered Bunny. ‘Little house full of little ghosties. Garden with pesties. Big forest with lotsa Nim bratties, oh yes. And girly wants to keep them! Fool girl Solawile wants to make
friends
. . .'

‘What's that s'posed to mean?'

Bunny wrinkled his nose at her. ‘Little fooly girl makes friends with Nim bratties, then is
surprised
when make Nim enemies, too?'

Bunny spent the next few hours bouncing about the room, getting used to the sponginess of his surroundings. He leapt from the bed to the chest of drawers, to the desk, to the windowsill, to the top of Isola's head when she wasn't looking.

Perched serenely, he said, ‘Ghostie Florey. Daughter of wood witch. Why you give her name?'

Isola stopped trying to push him off her head and considered his question. ‘Because she's a girl,' she finally answered, shrugging. ‘She was like me, once upon a time. She deserves a name, at the very least.'

Bunny leaned over her forehead so they were eye-to-eye; beady reds into blue marbles. ‘You are strange one, Solawile.'

Then, something wonderful. Bunny gave Isola her first music-less night.

She heard so much without Florence's songs – owls moaning battlecries to the mice and crickets roaming the night.

Alejandro wouldn't come back. She hadn't tried to summon the others; if he wouldn't return, none of them would.

 

Snowflake Romantics

Her house, for a change; the screaming baby at Number Thirty-seven had ruined the mood. Bunny grumbled about being made to hide in the garden. Father insisted they keep the lights on and the door wide open; they drew a single sheet over them and kept their conversation to whispers.

Together Isola and Edgar made grand plans for travels around the world, on foot through the Amazon sludge and aboard a hot air balloon over Nepal. They plotted to get Ellie Blythe Nettle and Grape, who obviously liked one another, together at last. In the bliss of togetherness, they now regarded all singledom as a social tragedy. When they kissed Edgar accidentally hooked his finger in the golden ring around her neck, and this time when he asked a question, she didn't hesitate to tell the truth. That when she was ten, Mother had stopped wearing her wedding ring, and now Isola wore it as an amulet – a reminder that she needed to protect her mother.

‘How very
Lord of the Rings
of you,' he observed, and she made a face, tucking the ring under her collar.

‘I've heard some of the girls at school laughing about it,' Isola said, in a tone of faux nonchalance. ‘They've said . . . It'll make me crazy, like it did her.'

Edgar went very still.

Isola held her breath. They never talked about Mother; Isola didn't talk about what had been going on in her house all these years with anyone – not Grape, not James, not even the trees in Vivien's Wood, who could never spill the secrets she whispered into their knotholes.

‘Isola Wilde. It's not a crime to be different, and you're not crazy.' He traced her collarbone, the cold necklace chain, then leaned in close to whisper the truth. ‘You're
magic
.'

Just like that, Isola was teetering; the emotional, irrational voice inside her that spoke like Rosekin immediately demanded she tell him everything,
everything,
and he would understand. She could scoop Bunny out of the garden and he'd recognise him for what he was, she could drag him by his hand through a graveyard until she found a freshly unearthed spirit to take haunting, and together they'd live, nesting in the rotted rafters of reality.

Almost immediately, Rosekin-Isola was drowned out by a suspiciously Bunny-like voice.
Fool,
the memory called her, and she remembered the disbelieving way James stared at her these days, his head tilting and eyes narrowing, lips crushing a cigarette, and knew she couldn't tell Edgar all of her truths – maybe not ever.

Stiffening, Isola dropped her head, unwilling to meet his eyes as he smiled so lovingly at her. Her gaze travelled down the freeway of his jawline marked with shiny black-stubble cars, the graffiti that adorned his skin, spray-painted, sloganised, and knew Edgar was a city, a place she'd like to live.

‘You should design a tattoo for me,' suggested Isola.

‘Easy.' Edgar uncapped a pen from the side table and drew the bedsheet down. She started giggling and closed her eyes, feeling the glide of the felt-tip, the suck of her sponge-skin as the ink blotted through. ‘Snow-flakes, right here, near your inner elbow. Maybe one here.' He sketched a beautiful webby flake on her hip bone. ‘A secret snowflake.'

‘How did you know?' Isola the Ice Girl whispered. She pressed her mouth against his before he could form an answer, but quickly pulled away. She'd shredded her lower lip on his braces; she held a tissue to the cut patch while he apologised over and over.

‘I hate my braces, but I hate crooked teeth more. See?' he fingered the roof of his mouth, showing Isola the crowding molars.

‘I don't know,' Isola said, smiling. ‘I think crooked teeth are pretty rock and roll.'

When they brought their lips together again, her mouth was sticky with the day's remains of cherry lipstick, and a secret she'd almost told him – and maybe a little blood.

Crooked teeth and rock and roll,
Edgar painted on the diary-wall before he left in the morning.