Fairytales for Wilde Girls (7 page)

 

The Boy – A Second Glance

As autumn marched through the valley like an army clad in cottony russet, most of the tinsel strips fluttered loose from the plum tree, and leaves had browned and dropped. The tree looked as though it was undressing; a sad old stripper unveiling her bones to an apathetic crowd.

Clutching the Pardieu fables, Isola went to settle herself at the roots. Her usual spot, however, was taken.

Something furry was lumped there, wheezing slightly. She leaned over the creature, its eyes shuttered tight. Purple stained its mouth, and there were soured plums clutched in its paws.

‘Are you the little fellow who's been eating all of Mum's thyme?' Isola asked the woozy black rabbit. She picked up a nibbled plum, all shrivelled on the inside. ‘Sorry, little bunny, but it's bad fruit.' Isola stretched her fingers to stroke its floppy ears.

Two things happened instantaneously. The rabbit bolted awake at her touch, bared its teeth at her – a horror-mouthful of black fangs – and hissed venomously. Then a scream echoed around the court, as bright and high as stars.

Isola sprang to her feet. The scream had come from across the road. The black rabbit darted through a scrub of dandelion clocks, whooshes of white ballooning up in his wake as he tore off towards the woods.

More screams. Her imagination sprouted feathers and flew – flew to the forest where the corpse had hung, to the window where the girl ghost had threatened her.
Stay out of the woods
.

Isola ran across to Number Thirty-seven; the shouts were coming from the backyard. Holding tightly to her fairytale book, a knight's shield, she crept around the side of the house, squeezing close to the wire fence, leaning forward so as not to catch her hair.

Yet another scream swirled with secondary flavour now. Laughter. It sounded like children – the littlest Poes. She exhaled with relief and turned to make good her escape.

‘Who are
you
?'

Isola looked down in surprise at the owner of the grumpy voice. A sandy-haired boy blocked her path and glared up at her from under an obviously mother-cut fringe.

‘I'm Isola,' she replied, as cheerfully as she could. She had never been good with children; she found it difficult faking the constant sunniness. ‘Is everything all right here?'

‘It was just fine until
you
started snooping around,' said the po-faced little Poe. ‘Who invited you, anyway?'

‘I did, you creep.'

Isola spun around. Edgar Allan Poe had joined them in the narrow channel beside the house.

‘C'mon, Annabel Lee,' said Edgar cheerfully, and it wasn't faked at all.

‘She said her name's
Isola
, retard,' intoned the boy, with an exaggerated rolling of eyes.

She paused at the sight of the spacious backyard, also scattered with kids' toys and half-built furniture. Garden tools and an upended tree sapling circled a great crater in the middle of the yard.

‘Move it!' snapped the boy, shoving his way past her. ‘Dumb blonde!'

‘Hey!' Edgar made a snatch for his shoulder as the boy ran past. ‘Little brat. . .' He turned back to Isola, and that remarkably natural smile was still there. ‘Come to complain about the noise, hey, neighbour?'

She crossed her arms. ‘I thought you were being murdered.'

‘And you were dashing over to save us? Mighty brave of you. And you didn't even bring a weapon!' He wiped his dirt-smeared hands on his jeans, peering at the gilded French title on her storybook. ‘Unless that brick counts? Less fables –'

‘
Les Fables et les Contes de Fées de Pardieu
. It means, “The Pardieu Fables and Fairytales”.''

‘Oh, cool.'

‘You know them?'

‘Never heard of 'em.'

‘You're kidding! You don't know Lileo Pardieu? Any of her stories?' Isola rattled off a few titles to his increasingly bewildered face. ‘
Lady of the Unicorns? The Seventh Princess? Talismans? The Wolf Prince
?'

‘Edgar!' shrieked a small girl who was bouncing on a trampoline and surveying the vast woodland behind the house with every jump. Isola recognised her piercing pitch: the screamer. ‘Edgar, I can see them! They're running into the trees!'

‘What happened?' asked Isola.

‘Come look.' Edgar led her over to the crater in the yard. She expected to find a pulsing meteor or a NASA-stamped fallen satellite, but all she saw was a network of half-collapsed catacombs.

‘We tried to plant an apple tree for Mum and accidentally caved in a rabbit burrow. They all came scrambling out like fluffy zombies – Portia flipped. That's her,' he added, pointing at the bouncing girl with brunette pigtails whipping the air like helicopter blades. ‘She's six. You met Cassio, he's ten. Don't worry, he hates everyone.'

Isola had never looked at Edgar this closely in natural light. He matched his slouch with a nervous air, like a groom left at the altar forever ago. She envisioned a beautiful girl trailing lace and a honey-gold veil as she ran down the aisle, leaving Edgar alone in his rented suit, a lilac in his buttonhole, a chip on his shoulder.

His face was a ghost story: graveyard eyes, cheekbones as sharp as urban legends, a sealed-coffin mouth. The grin was not forced, but seemed so out of place. Isola didn't understand how he did it. For her, trying to force happiness was like slipping on a ring a size too small – she'd spend the rest of the day trying to pull it off.

‘This is the girl from Number Thirty-six, Portia,' announced Edgar. ‘The house with the shiny tree you like so much. She says her name's Annabel Lee.'

‘It's not. I'm Isola,' she called.

‘Edgar drew you,' said Portia matter-of-factly, with the honesty of the innocent. ‘In his book; I know, I
saw
.' She stopped bouncing and sunk into the mat, her windswept pigtails settling over her shoulders, and added, ‘I think he
likes
you!'

 

Wings and Wanderings

Mother was crying so softly, like the overtures before a musical. Isola opened her music box and listened to the nameless tune – it had no company branding, no scrawl to number the opera the melody had been borrowed from – and waited for the noise in the walls to grow silent.

Late night telly – the insomniac's battleground. The newsreaders were still wearing roses in their lapels, a smidgen of extra blush settling in the hollows of their cheeks. They were discussing the previous month's teen suicide, and its tragic broadcast by a morally bankrupt rival network. They were making a list of Things We Must Do, strapping on their preaching armour in the quest to save the youth from themselves, thudding their fists against the desk, firing off bulletpoints. Bullying drugs sex depression divorce the internet the media the government the filth they play on that wicked rival network, all of it to blame!

Isola went downstairs for a glass of water. Father was awake, jaundiced in the streetlight and staring out the living-room window at the dolled-up plum tree. His arms were clasped behind his back and he looked uncomfortable as he always did when faced with proof of Isola's eccentricities. Isola knew he grew doubly cross whenever Mother encouraged it.

She waited until he closed the curtain and padded back to his bed before she crept mouse-quiet upstairs, tugging her dressing gown closer.

She wasn't sure why she bothered to sneak about. He never noticed anything.

 

Walking to school the next day, Isola was starting to think that the unicorns had moved on. They had been endangered in this forest for some time now. She would not blame the stragglers if they followed on.

She tried not to think about the cage with the body inside, the bony leg protruding like a bleached-white clue. A dead girl was here, somewhere in the tangling gloom and Grimm. But she was supposed to forget about it, according to Alejandro and the others. Nothing doing now.

Her footsteps crackled in the leaves, and she pretended she was clad in a gown of flame, her train fanning out, devouring the solitude of the forest. She loved these woods, the thick undergrowth and hammocks of spiderwebs.

In Vivien's Wood were dangerous creatures that had never sought human contact, like each of her brothers had. At best, they were indifferent to humans like her, and the princes urged Isola to never speak with them while she was alone.

There were wild swans that transformed into beautiful young men in the moonlight. Isola had long been warned that they would try and trick her into kissing them, and through her lips steal seven years of her semi-precious life.

The wood imps were out today – these little straw men resembled voodoo dolls and lived underground, only coming up when Jupiter was visible in the night sky. She could hear them snuffling through the grass. The smoking feathers of phoenixes wafted ash from their secret tree-hollows.

Vivien's was an eternally dark forest, and even Isola sometimes confused her way in the maze. She only knew she had reached the centre of the woods when she found certain landmarks. They were –

The Devil's Tea Party:
A ring of toxic toadstools circling a small clearing where the canopy was as thin as gauze.

The Wish-You-Well:
Not a wishing well, but a natural pond where the water was perfectly clear and where Christobelle liked to sun herself.

Vigour Mortis:
A beautiful tree that looked different every time Isola saw it, and, like her plum tree, appeared periodically close to death. The next day, however, it would be fit to bursting with life, and she only recognised it because of the bells she had tied to the lowest boughs with thick ruby ribbons.

The Bridge of Sighs:
A tree sprouting sideways out of another, the parasite twin, its topmost branches sinking into the earth. A mossy archway to another dimension.

By the Bridge of Sighs was where Isola had first found it. The cage, strung high in an old oak tree. The outline of a girl stuffed unceremoniously inside it.

Now, finding herself under the bridge, she looked up. Nothing but a rope, its ends chewed and frayed. No body – the unicorns would probably have got to her by now, as Alejandro had predicted.

But there was no cage, either.

 

Wilde Child

Like most obsessions, Isola Wilde's began with a story.

Mother was retelling a Pardieu fairytale called
The Seventh Princess
. The seventh-born child of an adored King and Queen, their first daughter, had been kidnapped by a tribe of treasure-loving dragons. She would be eaten up within the week if the royal family did not pay a ransom of everything gold in their kingdom.

The King and Queen offered all the gold in their vaults immediately – they could put no price on their precious daughter's life.

‘But they soon discovered it was an impossible ask,' said Mother, in her dramatic storyteller cadence, ‘because theirs was a fair-haired kingdom by the sea, of hilltops drenched in golden wildflowers and beaches of sand, and the dragons coveted
everything
gold – the yellow hair scalped from the peasants, the golden flowers hacked at their stems, every last grain of sand stolen from the dunes, not to mention every ray of sunshine that fell on their little seaside kingdom.'

‘Greedy dragons,' commented chubby-cheeked four-year-old Isola. ‘Poor people. They'd have to live bald
and
in the dark!'

‘Not to mention without flowers, and isn't
that
a terrible way to live?' Mother smoothed Isola's hair on the pillow and continued, ‘Luckily for the seventh-born princess, she had been blessed with six older brothers, or, as they put it, they had been blessed with her.

‘The first brother-prince, the bravest, told the King and Queen: “I will save our kingdom's greatest treasure. I need nothing but your blessing.” The second brother-prince, loving, stepped forward and said, “You'll also need us.” Following him was the third brother, strong-willed and calm; the fourth brother, honest and kind; the fifth brother, thoughtful and trusting; and the sixth brother, musical and talkative.

‘The King and Queen quietly despaired, but gave their sons their blessing – without it, they feared the royal children would not return. The sons had pledged to find their sister-princess, who was infinitely more precious than gold, trapped in the scaly clutches of the dragons, and rescue her with their swords and their combined skills, altogether more useful than treasure.'

Already Isola's eyelids were sliding over her dewy baby-blues. Her fingers tangled in her hair, curls as fine as a seahorse fringe.

‘Goodnight, Isola. We'll read more tomorrow.'

Isola managed to keep herself awake for the few minutes it took to direct her inquiry to the secret friend she'd known only for a few weeks.

‘Hey, Ale?'

A ripple in the dark, a pebble plummeting to the bottom of a pool. The sudden warmth of sharing a space with another person, of no longer being alone.

‘Yes, Miss Wilde?' She wasn't
querida
in those days – he didn't even yet dare call her Isola.

‘Alehan-doh –' she, in turn, had mispronounced his name ‘– what's a brother? Is it the same as a prince?'

‘In a way, yes. A brother is someone who protects,' said Alejandro, sitting at the end of her bed.

‘And a sister?'

‘A little princess who needs protecting. A girl like you.'

She rolled over and jutted out her chin. ‘I don't
need
protecting!'

‘No.' Alejandro shook his head then smoothed her blankets like Mother had done. ‘But you deserve it.'

Before the Wildes had moved in, Alejandro had long been there, haunting the addicts who'd lived in Number Thirty-six. The Sid-and-Nancy lovers were the most recent in a long line of people he'd decided to scare away from the same thing that had killed him. When Sid overdosed and Nancy ran screaming into the pitch-black woods, Alejandro had taken it as a sign and had hidden in the attic, curled up like a foetus in a dusty womb, waiting for sleep or rot to set in, for heaven or hell, for judgement.

For Isola.

For that was the purpose of his (after)life, he had decided later – to protect his sister-princess from all the dragons in the world. He had performed his self-imposed duty admirably for over twelve years. Isola had hair and sand and sun and flowers.

But Alejandro couldn't protect her from the kingdom itself.

Next, there came Ruslana. She had been dragged around the globe by the anguish of women, strangers' emotions catching her lips like fish-hooks, bruising them forever black. And now she had slunk her way to the Wilde house under the cover of a particularly inky night. She had sensed the uneasiness about Mother, who was even then wearying of the daily trek across the battlefield raging in her mind.

Upon spying her at the window, Isola, ever-trusting to Alejandro's brotherly despair, had invited the strange woman to stay for Mother's bedtime instalment of
The Seventh Princess
. Ruslana, stunned at being noticed, had not come into the room, but instead listened invisibly from the windowsill as Mother had described the brothers six valiantly traversing harsh crags of land, swamps and jungles as they searched for their golden-haired treasure.

And what a strange woman she was. Ruslana was more solid than Alejandro, could be seen when she wanted, unlike the ghosts that drifted through the walls of most people's perceptions. Sometimes her great cloak, alive as the witching hour, would reach out and ensnare Isola, wrap her up in the pulsing black comfort, soothing her with a grazing touch of her shadows.

Ruslana would never tell Isola her age or origin. She shook her head and pressed her blackcurrant lips together when asked, and said she would stay, if only to hear the remainder of the story Mother recited. Twelve years later she would still be there. Ruslana was hooked from the word ‘hero', she had later admitted to Isola, for she encountered them so rarely in the real world. Besides, Alejandro's mission to watch over Isola appealed to her naturally protective nature, and Ruslana became the second constant invisible in Isola's life.

One night, as Mother left and Ruslana drifted into reality to tuck her in, Isola voiced what had been playing on her mind for some time.

‘Mothers and fathers take care of you,' she muttered sleepily, ‘but brothers
protect
you.'

‘Is that so?'

Isola liked the sound of Ruslana's low, calm voice, her perfect English but strange accent, a hybrid of cultures and peoples.

‘Alejandro is my brother. That's why he's here. And so's Jamie.' A minute passed. She broke her own sleepy silence with a tentative request. ‘Will you be my brother too, Ruslana?'

A militant chuckle. ‘I'm a woman, Isola Wilde.'

‘Does that mean you won't?'

Like Mother, like Alejandro, Ruslana smoothed the blankets that Isola's restless limbs were so intent on tangling. Ruslana leaned close, as though she wanted to kiss her cheek goodnight, but instead pursed her Morticia-black lips. Isola didn't know it then, but Ruslana seduced the men who killed women and kissed them with those very lips, cutting them open, revenging a death by taking a life.

‘Nothing would give me greater honour, little princess.'

With twice the paranormal guardians, Isola seemed twice as strange. Father often thought his only daughter, his Wilde Child, was mad; the ‘brothers' she constantly described might be split personalities. And how, he wondered, at four, five, six years old, did she know about opium dens? How could she identify spider breeds and edible flowers and the distant origins of seaweeds floating like dumped bodies in the sea?

These questions were always asked by Father, and always came out hewn into spear-shapes and hurled at Mother as accusations no matter what tone he tried to take, as though trying to sandpaper the points into a less painful shape.
It's got to be those stories you tell her. You're twisting her imagination with those bloody fairytales!

On one of these occasions, Ruslana had felt the incessant pull deep in her belly – the heart of a girl in distress. It was only a mild pain compared to others she'd felt, but its proximity made it more forceful, and she felt it on both floors of the Wilde house.

Isola was standing at the top of the stairs in her pale pyjamas, her padded footsteps and watchful presence going unnoticed.

The shouts were moving upwards, like heat and smoke. The husband had found the hospital records of the wife's secret operation, and there would be no son now, not ever.

Wordlessly, Ruslana picked Isola up, cuddling the small sighing creature; her swirling cloak latched its tendrils around her limbs. The small girl was bundled into the shadows, and she would never fear the dark.

 

Of her eventual six collected brothers – the same number the Seventh Princess had – two were ghosts, one was a mermaid, one a faerie, one a Fury, and one a living boy. They came and went in her life, disappearing for weeks, sometimes for entire seasons, as was their nature.

Jealous, Isola had suspected they had secret sister-princesses elsewhere to protect, but they assured her that wasn't the case. They were also brothers to tombstones, they explained, to secret gardens, to murderers and gutters, to the sea – they had other places to haunt.

She knew it would be frighteningly easy for the princes to forget about her – after all, they didn't feel in quite the same way she did. Ghosts slowly strangled in their timeloops; childish faeries were too small to feel remorse for leaving; mermaids would go mad if they ignored the sea call; Ruslana was of the Furies, and so had girls to avenge every day for all of days, and who would never ever get her own chance to rest.

The princes didn't owe her anything. Their connection was of red string, not blood.

Maybe Isola had truly needed them when she was small. But now she was older, Isola didn't need them, she
wanted
them, and therein lay the difference. Did she deserve so large and warm a coterie? She was selfish, she knew; she fastened them to herself like charms on a bracelet, and froze her heart while in the company of other people, not allowing herself to get too attached. She had decided a long time ago that it was preferable to be frozen than exposed to the elements – even the pleasant ones.

The brother-princes loved her so ruthlessly, and Isola, like all children who were raised in the glow of it, did not question why. Privately, they wondered, not understanding themselves: What was it about Isola? What had she given them that her death wouldn't one day take away?

They had sought out the little fragile human girl themselves, seeking, in reality, a warm-blooded, air-breathing, still-living second chance. But there was something there now, something that had grown almost immediately.

She had two loving parents, but they'd sensed it, even then. Isola needed
them
. The Father was weak – he didn't have the capacity to handle either his daughter or his wife. And the Mother, she was worse – she ticked audibly, and they all knew it would only get louder and scarier as she ticked faster over time.

Since the moment they met her gaze, each of the princes had a responsibility, and even though Christobelle was as free as sea-froth, and Ruslana had her solemn duties, and Alejandro had already loved sisters of his own, and Grandpa Furlong grew closer to the crossing every day, and to Rosekin she was a carer and to James a friend-and-maybe-future-something-else, their stakes in her future were impossibly high.

Her happiness was theirs, and that made all the difference.