Fairytales for Wilde Girls (22 page)

 

Stopped Clock

Isola had never felt more alone. She was cut off from everyone; she couldn't unfreeze herself in Grape's company no matter how hard she tried. She jammed her thumbs under the mask but it wouldn't slip, and she didn't feel like herself anymore.

She avoided Edgar; after what happened with James, she had felt a resurgent desperation to keep him untainted by the wickedness that seemed to follow her, although she knew this new determination would pass; she needed the comfort he offered, and staved off the inevitable trip across the street by clinging to Alejandro, and her room, and the heavy book of fairytales, which almost never left her arms.

Mother, meanwhile, now spent her days in bed, her nights in the bath, and most of her evenings in between at the Church of the Unlocked Heart.

Her church-going didn't seem like the usual concentrated pouring of energy that characterised her manic cycle. Isola suspected she secretly believed that they might have the liquid gold cure hidden somewhere about their church. Scratched around the edges of old coins in the collection plate, perhaps, or frozen in lumps inside the altar candles, or wedged between the confessional doors, or even buried in code amidst the personal revelations of the group therapy sessions.

Isola couldn't begrudge her wishful thinking, but she felt resentful nevertheless. How could Mother not notice Isola's pain, when Isola had spent years tending to hers?

Father didn't even notice when Mother was gone from Number Thirty-six.

They were a household of people, each living alone.

 

The inevitable came in March. Returning from the Church, Mother slammed the door a little harder than usual, and threw off her coat with livid gusto.

‘You would not believe the audacity of those people!' she roared. ‘An
exorcism,
Isola! They tried to perform an
exorcism
on me!'

‘So you could sweat it out?' said Isola uncertainly.

‘Lunatics!' Mother went on. ‘I just wanted to try something different – and then this! Oh, Isola, promise me you'll never get involved with religious nutters, especially if they're the kind who think a person can be possessed!'

‘You sent me to a Catholic school,' Isola pointed out, more bemused than ever. ‘And not a modern one, either. That's
exactly
what they think.'

 

Springling

Spring brought a floaty sense of
le féminin
to Isola's wardrobe: exposed shoulders, white dresses and braided hair – she played at being a Virgin Suicide with bare feet and filly legs. The short blonde hairs on her upper thighs glimmered in the sunlight. She smelled like peaches and wore bracelets woven from velvet scraps and pebbles she'd surely found long ago on a forest floor.

Spring brought something else, too.

Edgar plopped the plump pink baby in her arms.

‘Isola Wilde,' he announced, ‘say hello to Puck Vivien Llewellyn.'

Baby Puck stirred himself awake in the cradle of her arms. He poked his tiny fingers through the cuff of his romper suit. His grey-milk eyes struggled to focus on her face, so he blinked sleepily up at the gold ring swinging from her necklace instead.

‘Puck's from
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
and Mum reckons Vivien's a boy's name, too,' said Edgar, retrieving a dummy from under the couch. ‘I reckon they're getting weirder, personally.'

Isola didn't say anything. She stared down at the baby in something resembling shock.

Edgar surpressed a sigh, feeling frustrated, and then felt guilty for feeling frustrated. Sometimes, talking to Isola was like speaking aloud to a cemetery; it seemed so many different ears were listening, but no ghost voices answered from beneath the ground.

Something was going on with her, but there was no concrete way for him to help, apart from being kind. At least, that's what Lotus Blossom had said, about their sweet blonde neighbour and women in general, when he confided in her Isola's increasingly distant behaviour.

Said Lotus Blossom

‘Ah, sweetie. If the poets couldn't unriddle them, then you certainly can't. Be kind, and keep your ears on offer if she wants to talk. But you can't draw out the strangeness, Edgar. It's not a poison.'

 

An Already Broken Pact

Vivien's Wood looked, if possible, even worse than the last time she'd visited.

Isola had not entered it since the disastrous epilogue to Edgar's birthday party; Father, her princes and her own sense of self-preservation had warned her off.

She had to battle her way through the brambles; she didn't even recognise half the thorns and weeds that had built up such sturdy walls.

Toxic-red flowers had sprouted along the Bridge of Sighs. Isola averted her eyes from the brilliantly red ring of the Devil's Tea Party, unwilling to remember that night she'd spent in it. Worst of all was Vigour Mortis – the eternal tree at the forest's centre was fading fast. Its boughs were bare, and dark, gooey sap seeped through its bark like bloody tears from a churchyard Virgin Mary. The bells Isola had tied to its trunk wouldn't ring if she shook them in her hands.

Spring rambled down the mountain trails and into the valley below, a steady trickle from a perfumed stream of blossoms and warm weather, but it had not come to Vivien's queendom. When Isola had escaped the thicket of woolly undergrowth and was heading back to the house, she heard strange noises behind her. She turned back.

With a great unanimous groaning, the border trees leaned sideways, wrapping their boughs around their neighbours in handshakes and pacts, forming a wall too dense for Isola to pass through.

They'd barricaded her out.

A formal rejection at last.

‘It's not my fault!' Isola yelled. ‘It's not my fault she's here!'

 

The Midnight Fountain

She had to get out of the house. Between Mother's turn for the worse and Alejandro's dour mood and the impenetrable woods like an old friend ignoring her phone calls, and an
actual
old friend ignoring her phone calls, and Father working longer shifts than ever, and Florence's singing getting louder, and Grape nervously skirting her gaze – she had to get away.

Grape had tried for so long, and so hard. But she had shied away, fearing being unwanted, and it was like the wolves had circled, bitten in the luna-light, and Grape was a werefriend now, only calling around the full moon. Their conversations were short and mostly consisted of Grape asking if she was all right, if she wanted to
talk
about anything. Isola felt she was disappointing her when she said everything was fine. Grape always looked rejected when they sat together at school.

Nothing was fine. Isola was living skinless. Everything got to her.

But even then, there was Edgar. He sent a text close to midnight, asking her over in all-capital letters. With her hair in wild pigtails, slept on and curly so they looked more like antlers, and wearing a crown of sticky daisies, she went to meet him.

‘C'mon, I've got something to show you.' He winked, adding, ‘That's not s'posed to sound dirty.'

He'd just got his licence and borrowed his dad's shiny black car, and they sped down High Street. For a moment, she thought he was taking her to The G Spot, and was about to say she didn't have a fake ID and her breasts probably weren't big enough anyway, but they passed by the club, which thumped on its foundations, a fresh vomit stain on its industrial bolted door.

‘Sorry, Edgar, I know you like
Harry Potter,
but this ain't wizarding school,' said Isola. ‘Saint D's is closed up at night.'

‘You're wrong,' said Edgar. ‘For one –' he swiftly scaled the wrought-iron fence ‘– it's fairly easy to get in at night. And two –' he held out his arms, and she gratefully used him as a stepladder as she followed him over ‘– I freaking
love Harry Potter
.'

Isola laughed, brushing herself down. ‘Breaking and entering. What a date.'

‘It's not really – we're not going in, per se. It's more like . . . climbing and strolling.'

He led her up the garden path towards the gothic convent and continually glanced over his shoulder; Orpheus double-checking for his dead bride.

Isola had the distinct feeling he was purposely blocking her view of the school with his bulky frame. ‘What is it?' she said, smiling despite her suspicions. ‘Why are we here?'

He stopped her in her tracks, put his hands on her shoulders and spun her around, reversing their positions. She could hear the bubbling of the fountain close behind her. ‘Remember when you said you hated winter?'

‘Because I hate snow.'

‘But you'd like it if it was warm?' He grinned smugly. ‘I thought, since we didn't get to spend the winter together, I didn't get a chance to change your mind. So . . .'

He spun her around again, revealing the surprise: Sister Marie Benedict's memorial fountain, filled with soap powder, was spewing foam. A palace of bubbles to froth in.

‘D'you like it?' He grinned nervously. ‘I did
so
much trespassing for you.'

‘Warm snow,' said Isola in wonder, cupping a handful of bubbles.

‘
And
it smells like lavender, and will probably clean your clothes,' Edgar pointed out, so proud of the fountain, his self-created winter night in April.

Clasping hands, they plunged through the foamy world. They felt their way around blindly until their feet touched stone and they climbed into the fountain.

They made themselves beards of bubbles and tried to have a snowball fight, but the floral-scented froth dissolved in their hands. They laughed and Edgar grabbed Isola's hands and they danced, and she could faintly hear The Smiths' ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' playing in his parked car. His smile was so natural and Isola thought he looked like a picture on one of her tarot cards, but she couldn't remember which omen or from which pack or whether it importuned destiny or death.

‘Why are you doing this?' Her words were like scattered dandelion seeds, white and feathery and searching out updraughts.

‘Doing what?'

She'd stopped dancing, and he stopped laughing. She stood on tiptoes to examine his face.

A boy with monster's cheekbones and strait-jacket arms. The sort of boy who'd insist on being buried with his lover in a heart-shaped coffin, mummified knee to knee. Romantic even in the face of destruction.

‘Doing what?' he repeated.

‘Being so good to me. You deserve better than . . .'

‘Than you?'

Isola felt she was teetering on the edge of a black hole, the great unblinking pupil of the universe. She took a deep breath. ‘Than a dead girl.'

Edgar shook his head of curly hair and laughed. ‘What?'

The kiss Edgar had planted on her hand was searing hot. He took the same hand again and touched it to her breast and said loudly, ‘Listen! You hear that?' He took her other hand and pressed it to his own soaked chest. ‘And that too? You're alive. We're alive. Listen.'

‘It's so loud,' whispered Isola, and their lips met, and they would have drowned in the springtime snow, she was sure, without each other to breathe in.

 

Edgar's body was flawed and warm and fascinating. Hardly any hair on his ankles, his skate shoes had worn them away. Eczema on the back of his knees. Charcoal under his fingernails. Toenails sloppily painted sea-green by Portia. Chicken pox and falling-off-skateboard scars. An old wound on his abdomen.

‘It was a donation,' he said softly. ‘Someone died – someone young. Only thirty or so.'

Isola raised her head from where it rested on his bare chest. He'd never mentioned a dead donor. She waited for him to speak.

‘I mean, I was happy when I got the news, obviously. It's the worst, being on those waiting lists; they'd call in the middle of the night and we'd drive to the hospital, I'd get prepped for surgery, and then the doctors come in to tell you it's diseased, or it's not a match, or it's gone to someone who's dying that little bit faster than you.'

Isola traced the scar, imagining her finger as the scalpel, hating the idea of Edgar flush under surgery lights, drugged to dreaming. ‘No wonder you hate hospitals,' she said softly.

‘Yeah,' he sighed, tightening his arm around her shoulder. ‘And, like I said, it was so good to finally get the damn kidney, but . . . I still feel bad about it, sometimes,' he said, with a groan of frustration, struggling to put it all into words. ‘Like I wished that person dead . . .' He swallowed hard, looking up at the ceiling.

‘And your wish came true,' Isola finished quietly. She traced the scar again, as though unzipping it, seeing the stranger's parts inside. ‘But,' she whispered, ‘aren't they still alive, in a way? At least, in pieces.'

 

She got up at dawn and found Mother Poe meditating on a straw mat in the living room. The vibrations of Isola's stealthy footsteps must have disturbed her Zen, because when Isola made to sneak past her to the hallway, Mother Poe said cheerfully, without opening her eyes or shifting an inch, ‘Sure you don't want to stay for breakfast, dear?'

A Hearty Breakfast Prepared by Earth Mother Poe

– A strawberry smoothie

– Half a grapefruit

– Oats

– A free lesson in meditation

– A weirdly chilled conversation about the importance of contraception

Mother Poe let Isola hold Puck while she bustled about in the kitchen. Struck silent by the duel distractions of the adorable, wriggly baby and Mother Poe's (‘Please, just call me Lotus Blossom') liberal attitude, Isola didn't bother correcting her impression. She and Edgar hadn't had sex. She had considered it, but was ultimately content to lie there, examining him shirtless and moon-lit, rather than let him see her bruises, her moon-markings.