Fairytales for Wilde Girls (30 page)

 

The Girl Who Was a Fairytale

Born under the sun in Lille, northern France, Lileo wasn't always a Pardieu. She began life with her father's surname – a man who gave Lileo sermons in a thunderous manner, as if
he
were the one nailed through his wrists and ankles. He preached a furious love, a divine suffering, and throughout her childhood, Lileo suffered in silence.

Despite her best efforts to suppress it, the strangeness began slipping out. The other schoolchildren called her
fille étrange,
and said she kept ravens and black rabbits in her thick dark hair, and their parents denounced her as an unlucky omen, for wherever she went the wildlife followed, foxes and rabbits swarming the farmlands they tended.

Lileo's mother, who had always seemed so understanding, would strike the girl across the face whenever she brought up the Nimue-world, whenever her curious eyes followed faeries as they drifted up the chimney.

‘
Tu es trop vieille pour les amis imaginaires
! Lileo, you are too old for imaginary friends!' the no-longer-Nimue woman roared, and Lileo grew up thinking books brought only trouble and the world would be better off if those damned covers stayed shut, their words left to fester inside.

They moved to London when Lileo was five, occasionally travelling back to France to bury their extended family in grand churches while Latin hymns rang out and Jesus watched from the coloured glass windows.

It was in a cemetery in Paris that she first met the ghost of Oscar Wilde, who was the first person to show her true kindness. Through him she discovered a cosmos of books unread, words unlearned.

Lileo's parents hated the books she buried her nose in, even the studious classics Oscar Wilde recommended to her. She daren't even tell them about the leather book under her bed in which she was recording all her fanciful tales, hoping to have someone to read them aloud to someday.

They despised the loose way she wore her hair, how she openly preferred cathedrals of sunlight and altars of wildflowers to the worship dictated between the pages of that book. When she entered adolescence, during their summers back in rural France, the boys she refused to kiss would label her a
sorcière,
and she ran away to stalk the graveyards, and stole cigarettes and lipglosses and sticks of bubblegum from the local
supermarchés.
The Pardieus finally sent her away, to a famously strict boarding school in Avalon, where a cruel nun struck her hands and the only class she comfortably passed was French.

The forest that frothed along the valley lip, she soon discovered, was a Nimue hub, and she'd tear her uniform climbing through the brambles to be amongst the bustle, to speak to these beings in a language no-one else around her seemed to know.

She stroked the nose of a beautiful unicorn foal she'd taken to calling Dusk. She avoided the swan creatures and threw silver coins into the shallow pond. She met a Scotswoman who was Nim-born too, and she met a boy with a caramel kiss just waiting there on his mouth, daring her to steal it.

Lileo swapped his kiss for a golden ring and a home as close as possible to the woods she loved. But it was still difficult to be happy.

Lileo had been using her mother's surname since her time at St Dymphna's. The Pardieus were a long line of women all bearing single daughters, all cursed with unhappiness if they tried to deny their roots – roots that sprouted where the Lake met the Tree – or cursed with men who denounced them as whores or witches or hysterical madwomen if they couldn't suppress their true natures.

Lileo's mother had chosen the first curse. She stayed married, and the more she fixed her eyes to the Word of God, the less she could see, until her memory clouded, and she'd forgotten all about the sons and daughters of Nimue.

Could Lileo have both? She wanted her forest and she wanted her husband – maybe she'd break the curse, or maybe it never really existed, or maybe she only had to try harder.

Her husband tried so valiantly. Lileo was difficult to live with. He didn't know it, but he was trying to share the burden. Trying to carry the curse for her.

She wandered the woodland and rubbed her blooming belly. She came home with the star-rise and he shouted at her –
What was she thinking? She was going to be a mother; she couldn't play at being the wandering nymph any longer!

That night, for the first time, Lileo Pardieu wished she wasn't a daughter of that wretched Merlin-murderer. Why couldn't she be normal? What had possessed her to have a child? For it was certain to be a girl, certain to be Nimue-cursed, and it would suffer through life as she had.

Mr Wilde was losing his patience. She hadn't made a choice yet. Him or Nim.

 

Lileo Pardieu lay in a half-dream, thick in the lavender field on Avalon's outskirts. A breeze ruffled her hair, the slipstream of an angel flying low, and her small daughter crept amongst the floaty violet stalks, speaking in a baby babble-tongue. Little Isola would often sing in this language, mimicking the strange words the flowers sang to her.

‘Isola,' called Lileo, and the toddler came wandering back, petals crushed in her fists and crammed in her mouth.

Isola stooped to pick up every strange insect and plant in Vivien's Wood as mother and daughter walked hand in hand back to the house. Lileo watched her, ready to stop her putting more things in her mouth – a little Lady, raised as if by unicorns to fear nothing natural.

An oasis. A small daughter, a stack of books on her bedside table, a head full of fantastical tales she'd learned from the Children she'd encountered.

Lileo felt as though her noisy heart might burst with happiness.

But happiness was not an amulet, and slowly the illness crept back.

She took whatever Dr Aziz prescribed, and in between doses she would sit in her bedroom and look out the window, the princess in her tower. Sometimes she practised her death.

She kissed a wild swan-boy with moons in place of pupils and she felt seven years drain out through her teeth, but that wasn't enough. In her worst moments she'd cry and beg her husband to leave her, to take their daughter before it infected her, too, but he'd point-blank refuse and she would tear off her wedding ring and throw fits, raging at him and the world that wouldn't let her be content, even though she had a beautiful husband and house and a woodland next door and a blue-eyed daughter who had been made out of faeriedust, who could shoot down the moon and no-one would miss it because she was night-beauty enough for the world.

She made compromises with herself, striking Faustian deals. Whenever she felt like running away from her family, she'd look in on her sleeping daughter. Count the breaths she took. Touch her translucent eyelids and try to see through to her dreams.

When Lileo felt like hurting herself, she'd get in the bath. The thoughts hardened, poking her skull with their sharp edges, and so she soaked them, softening the suicidal impulses to jelly, to reset another day.

She told stories to her daughter – some she'd heard told as legends amongst the other Children of Nimue, many she'd invented herself – and Isola laughed and gasped and shrieked and clapped, such a big audience in such a small body. Lileo Pardieu promised herself she wouldn't die until she'd seen her daughter outlive the first Isola Wilde.

Isola was sprouting up as fast as the plum tree in the front yard, and soon she was nine, and the day was approaching. Isola's tenth birthday. The final milestone.

Lileo grew paranoid that Isola's fate was cursed by her name. She tried to push it away. She didn't believe in the Children of Nimue anymore, although they hadn't got the memo and continued to fiercely exist. She didn't believe in prophecies. Her Isola, the Second Isola, would live past ten.

But everywhere she saw death omens for her daughter: coded in her breakfast cereal, scratched into the walls, written by invisible fingers in the bathroom mirror.

She was convinced. Isola would be ten soon, and the bargain had to be fulfilled. Death demanded a sacrifice, or else he'd take the Second Isola, too.

 

Silent Heart

Isola was back in the woods, unsteady on her feet. The vision of the past in her damaged eye was fading, and the present in her single eye was blurring. She couldn't see either world properly anymore.

‘It was my birthday party,' Isola whispered through numb lips. ‘I was turning ten.'

The last party Mother threw for her: summer, green grass, cake, children; the air was sticky and the sky was cloudless; the guests lolled in the sunshine. Isola remembered shy Grape and mouthy James there, and Rosekin fluttering round and round a blue balloon on a string tied to Grape's thumb, entranced by it. Grape couldn't see her – none of them ever could, and Isola smiled and felt secretly, smugly sorry for those who didn't have Nimue blood running through them.

There was Mother, sitting at the roots of the plum tree. She leaned against the trunk, her eyes shut against the sun. When Isola approached, she woke up, smiled and opened her arms. Her eyes were dark. Her hug was weaker than usual. She was so skinny Isola could feel her ribs under her breasts, the steel bars of a cage.

Mother's freckled shoulders were sunburned. She took Isola's hand, pressed it to her clavicle. Her handprint smudged a pearly white shock in the scarlet, an opposite bruise, and then sunk into her skin, Mother's body memorising the whorls of her fingerprints, storing her DNA.

‘I have a special present for you, Isola,' said Mother, handing her the beautiful bound book of fairytales, handwritten by Lileo Pardieu herself.

Curious, Isola opened to the first page and a second gift fell out – a silver charm bracelet, each droplet shaped like the cycles of the moon.

While Isola exclaimed over the pretty bracelet and the extraordinary book, Lileo smiled, held Isola close and told her to live twice her life on behalf of the original, long-gone Isola Wilde. And then she left Isola to play; she'd spilled champagne on her dress and was going to change, maybe take a quick bath, she said.

Quick was too long, and Isola climbed the stairs in her grass-stained party dress to find her. Somewhere on those stairs she heard the mirror break, a splash of water. She paused, eyes skyward. Then bare feet trekked dirt up to the second storey.

Isola knocked. ‘Mum?' she said, pushing open the bathroom door. The chandelier light blinded her, and she shielded her eyes for a moment. ‘Mum, what're you doing up here?'

Mother was a triptych. Hair, toes, bubbles, shadow.

She lay perfectly still.

The hiss of candles extinguishing.

Her head, resting on the bath rim, was turned towards the door, as though she'd looked over at her knock. Her right eye stared unseeingly at the girl in the door, through her to a shadow world that had always seemed to press in on her, jostling for space in the room.

Mother's dead eye fixed on Isola.

Then it happened. Mermaid fins surfaced in the bubbly water, and baby faeries dribbled from the lit candlewicks to munch on the rose petals floating on the water's surface. A cloud of sparrows burst from Mother's dark hair, swooping noisily around the ceiling. Everything beautiful was revealed as ugly at last. Fairytales were monster's lullabies. Blood was running thick down the side of the tub, spelling ‘ISOLA' across the chessboard tiled floor. The water was still running and it spilled over Isola's feet, bringing the wash of blood with it.

Isola looked at her palms. Blood ran from her lifeline.

Footsteps pounded like heartbeats on the stairs, and Father was shouting
no, no, no
, but Alejandro got there first, hugging Isola to him as the last candle hissed out, telling her, ‘Everything will be all right, princess. I promise.'

The magic mirror was broken in the sink. The glass crucifix was clasped in Mother's bloodless hand.

Isola pulled away from Alejandro, crossed the room. The moon bracelet slipped from her wrist – it was far too big, something to grow into, like an expectation or an heirloom dress. Falling to her knees, while Father lifted Mother from the bath, she heard it – the most horrible silence, echoing down the veins of the woman before her –

How silent the unbeating heart.

 

In the woods, Isola spoke. ‘My mother died,' she whispered through a mouthful of sadness, ‘instead of me.'