Fairytales for Wilde Girls (25 page)

 

Toxic Pretty

Isola heard sharp feet kicking at her window.

‘What is it?' she hissed, opening the window a crack. ‘What do you want, Winsor?'

The faerie was slumped on the windowsill. She didn't answer; her green glow had dulled to a sickly rinse.

‘Winsor?' Isola picked her up tentatively, and the faerie took a stuttering breath.

‘Poison . . . flowers,' she moaned.

‘What?' Isola cupped the faerie in her palm.

‘What . . . did you do?' wheezed Winsor. ‘Did you spray toxins . . . did you want . . . to kill me . . .' Part of Winsor's face was sketched with glittering green veins; her right eye was white and gooey.

‘No, no, of course not! I –'

The faerie stilled in her hand.

Bunny hopped up to the windowsill. ‘Who she?' he asked interestedly.

‘Winsor, she said she'd been poisoned. Bunny, what do I do?'

‘Cut out infected eye,' Bunny ordered.

‘What?'

‘She got toxin in eye, see? Cut out eye, or faerie die.'

Isola hesitated. She felt for a pulse and it was like an ant under her fingertip. ‘How did this happen?'

Bunny grunted mysteriously.

Nothing was small enough except for the safety pin Winsor had tried to steal. Isola used the pin and the silly booklet about amputations, thought of Christobelle's sailor,
King Lear.

Bunny sat in her lap to watch the impromptu operation with keen interest.

Like a balloon the eyeball popped and flooded, and she scooped it out, washing the hollow with the last drops in a vodka flask, hoping it was enough to save a faerie she didn't even like.

 

Dream-weaving

That night, she heard Mother crying in the bathtub.

When Isola shifted, Bunny leapt up from the floor and settled on her chest. His nails contracted over her heart. ‘You stay,' he growled.

‘But Mum –'

‘Her or me, girly.'

‘Why?' whispered Isola. ‘Why do I have to choose?'

Later she dreamed she held a bow carved from the bones of people she loved. She raised the bow, drew back the string, and released a flaming arrow like an insult. The arrow hit her target, and the full moon caught ablaze, a fireball shrieking heat and ash in the night sky.

She dreamed of the school gardens like Versailles; Mother on the mend, hospital-gown clad but smiling, strolling in the garden, an IV drip full of champagne rolling beside her. Then Mother turned, smiled at her. The sun caught her canine teeth and the reflecting light exploded, enveloping Isola, then the door, the room, then always the blinding light, the molten golden terror. Gasping awake to a room without princes made her wish she hadn't woken at all.

The house was too quiet. Mother was sleeping. Father was working. Bunny watched Winsor snooze in her little matchbox bed, an oddly hungry gleam in the gargoyle's red eyes.

Isola decided to go outside and taste a blade of grass by the herb patch. Sure enough, it fizzed on her tongue, a definite toxin.

DID YOU SPRAY SOMETHING ON THE GARDEN?
she texted her father.

YEAH. I WAS SICK OF THOSE RABBITS TEARING UP EVERYTHING. COULDNT FIND WHAT U USED SO I BOUGHT SUM PESTICIDE STUFF. IF U R COOKING VEGETABLES, MAKE SURE U CLEAN THEM OFF. BETTER YET, GO GET SUM OFF MRS LLEWELYN.

Isola turned her phone off, flushed out her mouth and went to check on Mother. It was clear now, why she'd cried all night – Father had poisoned her garden. He'd poisoned Winsor, and who knew how many rabbits and flowers and birds and fae-kind.

Isola went up to the attic.

It was a proper Anne Frank-attic, with hidden staircases and boxes and whole lives packed between foam and cardboard.

So much of her mother lived only in boxes now. Diaries, little snippets of her personality, dried and preserved like animal foetuses in jars, like pressed petals dissolving between old photographs and scribbled-in notebooks. There was a home video of Mother Wilde in her wild heyday, eight months pregnant and bikini-clad at the beach, marching with her stomach protruding like a prize. Dried pieces from the top tier of a wedding cake. Things of baby Isola's, too: moth-chewed romper suits and frilly bows to disguise baby baldness. A Spanish-to-English dictionary and a tarnished silver flute. Images of Father beardless, and, even stranger to her gaze, happy.

She found Mother's old medical files, expired prescriptions and X-rays of a broken arm, a stretching spine. There was an ultrasound of Isola, as well as another solemn little creature that didn't quite make it.

She took the X-rays back to her room and arranged them on the window, churchly artworks that filtered the light through Mother's insides.

 

Florence and Christobelle and now Winsor – all these girls with missing eyes, and where did they go? She imagined a forest of eyes sprouting right out of the rich earth of Vivien's Wood, snaking towards the canopy on stalks of eyelashes; blinking lids, irises centering the flowers, another set of watchers. Isola rubbed and paranoid-picked at her own right eye, and overnight it grew bloody and inflamed, shot through with red veins like channels on Mars.

Winsor awoke after three days. Sitting up in her tissue-lined matchbox, she raised her hands to rub her eyes, and found the empty socket.

It was a hellish tantrum. Screaming, she beat her fists, tore at her hair. Isola thought the faerie would rage until her glow went out.

Winsor scrabbled at the windowsill, carving grooves in the wood with her sharp hands. When she tried to rip the delicate fabric of her own wings, Isola opened the window in a panic and Winsor zipped away.

‘Winsor, come back!' Isola called desperately. ‘I'm sorry about what happened, but I need to check if you're healing!'

‘I HATE YOU!' howled the tiny voice. ‘You poisoned me and ruined my face and
I can't wait till she kills you
!'

 

Meat and Bones

By May the whole lunar cycle ringed her neck – markings like the strangled birds had, but larger, clearer, like love bites. That's what the girls at school would see, anyway. Isola examined the perfect crescent moon nesting in the hollow of her throat, the half-moon at her collarbone. She dusted her neck with nude foundation and drew her tie as tightly as she could.

At the rosebush, something glittered in Dame Furlong's web. She had knitted a kiss goodbye. Isola smiled, and it reached her eyes.

 

Grape had taped pictures of Olympians up in her locker, determined to lose her non-existent belly fat in time for the Spring Swimming Carnival.

Isola wrapped her arms around her middle and watched as Grape rifled through the book stacks, searching for homework she was half-certain she'd done. They were pretending the event in the chapel hadn't happened, but it was clear on her friend's face that Grape was actually worried
for
her – and that was comforting, even though Isola wished she needn't worry at all.

‘You don't seem yourself,' said Grape hesitantly. ‘Are you getting sick?'

Getting sick and tired of that question, actually,
Isola thought. ‘I'm fine.'

‘If you say so . . .' Grape's face fell. ‘It's just, Isola, don't take this the wrong way, but you've gotten
so
skinny . . .'

‘And look at you,' Isola said quickly, hoping to steer the conversation away from its dangerous waters. ‘You're a regular Xena Warrior Princess.'

Grape smiled at that.

Isola knew she had been working extra hard in the pool, developing her upper-body muscles in preparation for the upcoming Spring Swimming Carnival, and had been flashing ‘the gun show' at her, at James, at Ellie Blythe, whenever she found an opportune moment in conversation.

‘Do you reckon if I win enough ribbons, Sister K will let me trade them in for good grades?' Grape joked.

‘Yeah, and maybe your parents'll give up on the whole “academics” thing once you win at the Olympics,' said Isola.

Aside from the Guinevere and Arthur houses at St Dymphna's, there were also Lancelot (yellow) and Merlin (green). A red plastic crown, which all the Arthur house girls had to wear, sat innocently at the back of Grape's locker. Bridget McKayde was in Arthur house. They won every event because they were more talented, which was fair enough, but they wore the crowns as though they'd earned them.

Isola and Edgar jumped up and down on Number Thirty-seven's backyard trampoline, absorbing different views of one another. Isola, her hair fanning even wilder around her; Edgar, topsy-turvy, doing a backflip, his huge feet over his head.

They tried to kiss while they bounced, a pair of anti-gravity Valentines.

‘If you really don't like Guinevere,' Edgar was saying against her lips, ‘you could always go solo – make up your own house.'

They bumped teeth with an audible clink. Isola laughed and pulled back. ‘Like what?'

‘Like Mordred.'

‘Remind me which one he was again?'

‘The in-bred little brat who killed his dad, King Arthur.'

‘Oh, yeah. But with a name like Mordred, what hope did he have?'

Edgar bounced out the syllables: ‘Mor –
dred.
It's the most evil name of all time.'

‘Wonder if Bunny'll prefer Mordred,' Isola wondered aloud.

‘What?'

She pulled him into a high-rise kiss. They seemed to float suspended for the longest moment, held up by invisible mannequin strings, gravity loosening its choke-hold.

 

Maybe Grape was right. Isola might have been falling sick. She slept most of the weekend, and didn't feel right; her voice was growing hoarse, and she felt alien in her now sickly-thin body.

She peeled off her clothes and stood in her underwear before the mirror, eyes narrowing as she critiqued the reflection. A body like Marie Antoinette after her diet of cake and sugar and pretence had been replaced by occasional mouthfuls of moonlight, slitted between prison-barred windows.

Bunny came scuffling out from under the bed and Isola hastened to cover herself.

‘I is hungry now,' he announced.

She pulled her shirt down over her head, mussing up her hair, and huffed. ‘Then eat something.'

‘Fool get me food.'

‘Yeah, and you haven't eaten anything I've offered, except a tonne of sweets. So what do you want?'

Bunny seemed to be choosing his words carefully. ‘No eat plums,' he said slowly, ‘not till starving. No eat thyme. Sweets and meats, candies and bloodies, oh yes.'

‘Meat?' Isola repeated, shimmying into her skirt. ‘Okay, I'll stop at the deli on the way home –'

‘Not your icky ucky meats!' His red eyes gleamed and he ran his tongue along his upper lip.
‘Rare
meats . . . Yummy raw delicious wriggly . . .'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘Nimue meats,' Bunny elaborated. ‘Magical meats, fool girl. Faerie, Fury, goblin, ghostie, I eats them all up, yes . . . Don't eats much,' he added, in a tone evidently meant to reassure her. ‘Only little here and there – likes faeries, long as not too much flower in them, and Bunny likes unicorns best, rarest and tastiest, makes I strong to be protector!'

Isola clasped the ring on her necklace in shock. ‘Let me make this perfectly clear,' she said through numb lips. ‘I agreed, with Alejandro, to keep you fed and housed. You never said I'd have to kill
unicorns
for you! That wasn't part of our deal!'

‘Not unicorns!' snapped Bunny. ‘Unicorn. Just one last for ages!'

‘But they're a dying herd – I never even get to see them! It's so hard for them to live anywhere, even Avalon's not safe for them anymore! They've just had their first foal in years –'

‘Perfect. Foal unicorn is yummy yummy. Keep I strong for ages, girly.'

‘Forget it!'

‘Then forget deal! Fool is more foolish than Bunny thought. Fool will give up self life for monster baby's!'

‘They're not monsters!' shouted Isola. ‘They're intelligent, sensitive creatures, and they're alive, and you've got no right to choose when their lives end!'

‘Then fool chooses her own end.' He scurried into the cupboard, disappearing into the childhood toys Isola hadn't had the heart to throw away. After a moment, she heard the crackle of shiny wrappers as he bit open sweets he'd hidden for emergencies.

‘And I thought feeding Rosekin was a struggle,' she muttered.

 

‘I is leaving,' Bunny announced, like a precocious teen runaway hoping to be begged to stay. ‘I has no power with no foods.'

Isola ignored him.

‘If I leaves, you will be possessed,' growled Bunny, ‘and she will destroy you.'

‘And you're still gonna leave?' snorted Isola.

‘No matter. You is already possessed.'

Isola froze.

‘You has been for while. She is dark force round you. But you is strong when you has walls – ghosties and mermys and such. Bunny last wall. No more wall . . . No more Isola.'

He bounded up to the windowsill, nosed it open.

‘Bunny, wait!'

He threw her an ugly look.

‘So you can pronounce my name, after all?'

The gargoyle snorted derisively and bounded off the windowsill, darting into the forest like a swift night wind. She pitched a caramel after him, one for the road. She didn't care what a nasty gargoyle said. Isola would build her own walls.

 

When Isola dug out the pamphlet from under her bed, rang the Church of the Unlocked Heart and told the receptionist what she wanted, she was first asked, not if she were a lunatic, but her name.

‘Lux Lisbon.'

‘We'd be happy to help you, Miss Lisbon. You've made the right decision in calling us. Now, if you could please answer some questions for me – do you believe wholeheartedly in God?'

Shiva. Vishnu. Aphrodite. Nimue. ‘Sure.'

The click of acrylic nails on a keyboard; like ants in metal boots marching down Isola's spine. She shivered them away.

‘Uh-huh. And how old are you, Miss Lisbon?'

‘Sixteen.'

A pause drifted down the current between them.

‘Sorry,' said the receptionist, ‘we don't do teenage exorcisms.'

The Seventh Princess – An Instalment

‘Finally, there were no more princes to defeat. And yet, there were no other dragons, either, because the princes had done their parts, and they prayed with dead hands and lips their love to their sister. There, asleep in the dragon's lair, she felt each and every last brother leave this world, and she tasted their final words like magic potions, and upon them she grew quietly stronger.

‘The prayers of the eldest prince awoke her from a deep sleep, and she knew they had all left her now, and she had to somehow find the strength to defeat the last and worst dragon.'

‘What was it?'

‘Loneliness.'