by Allyse Near
Mother was holding her hand over the pan now, flexing her fingers as though trying to catch the rising heat. Something sore and unsaid seemed to hang over the room.
Isola lowered her eyes to the table as Father packed his lunch; she recognised the front-page photograph on the paper. The great black expanse of night, the winking ring of coloured lights and iron, the blurry, lonesome figure perched atop like a little foundling-bird, still uncertain to test his wings . . .
The family cat, Morris, wound between her legs under the table, and the sudden brush of whiskers startled Isola out of her reverie. Morris mewled, and Mother coaxed him through to the next room and into the laundry, where his food was waiting. Father plunked his cereal bowl in the sink. The unattended eggs began to sizzle evilly.
‘Dad? Eggs.’
Father Wilde jumped and hurried to the stove. ‘Scatterbrained,’ he muttered under his breath, scraping the blackened eggs into the rubbish bin.
Isola scowled. She hated the way he spoke about Mother. At least she was up today, out of bed, trying to make conversation. That was more than Isola could say for him.
Body Parts
The plum tree in the Wildes’ front garden was dying.
It had been doing so for three years now; occasionally, Lazarus-like, it would groan out of its grave-state and fruit would drip like juice prisms from its boughs, purple crystals. Then the plums would wither and parachute down, and the tree would sink a little deeper into the earth, its branches turning the faded grey of moor mist; the wind no longer whistling joyfully about it, but murmuring, as though it knew it danced at a deathbed.
The afternoon stretched out before Isola, a last day of freedom. Father had driven off and Mother had slumped upstairs and now the house stood like an Amityville Horror, somehow so empty even with Mother bundled back into her bed.
Isola closed her eyes and crossed her legs, assuming a yoga position her mother had taught her (when yoga had briefly been the new acupuncture, had been the new Zoloft); always something else to try, a new cure-all in her manic stages. The faux-goddess grew sharper in her mind: roots dragging through her hair, sunbaked skin, earth under her fingernails.
Sensing the familiar rustle of clothing above her, Isola opened her eyes, blinking out the sunlight, which had collected like rainwater in the sockets.
Alejandro stood in the poor shade the tree cast, offering her his saddest smile.
‘It’s really going to die this time,’ Isola said softly.
‘Yes, I believe so,’ he mused, then added, almost hesitantly, ‘whenever my mama was ill, she always sat up in bed to fix her hair. She said pains portend guests, and she wanted to be prepared to receive them.’
Isola peeked up at him, surprised. She didn’t know much about his family, his Life Before; she was familiar with the skeleton of the story, but not the meat.
Alejandro crouched down beside Isola, too proper to sit himself in the dirt. ‘When my sisters were struck down, she would always rouse them to rag-curl their hair.’
‘That can’t have gone down well.’
‘Oh, they loathed it.’ He paused. ‘But dressing properly always made Mama feel better, I believe.’
Uncrossing her legs, Isola said, ‘Well, if you reckon it’ll help . . .’
‘What will? Querida?’
But Isola had already taken off into the house, answering his question when she emerged with an armful of plastic bags bulging with Christmas trinkets from the attic.
Alejandro and Isola strung lights around the tree, hoping for a pretty effect of sun spotting through coloured glass in lieu of electrical effects. They tied baubles where the plums should have grown. Gaudy tinsel looped the boughs like feather boas on a drag queen.
‘Perhaps an angel for the top, too,’ suggested Alejandro.
‘No way!’ She shook her head. ‘We don’t need to remind it of its impending death with religious iconography.’
‘Christmas is religious iconography, Isola.’
‘Besides,’ she said cheerfully, ‘it’s not going to die.’
‘But you just said –’ Her dress pocket buzzed, and Alejandro asked, ‘Bee?’
Isola shook her head again, extracting her vibrating mobile phone. ‘Grape.’
I TOTLLY HAVE CARPET BURN ON MY KNEES FRM THE PARTY LAST NITE, Grape complained.
THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID, Isola texted back.
Grape sent an icon of a laughing face, adding, CARPET BURN COZ I FELL DOWN THE STAIRS AND IT WAS SPECTCULR SO I HAD 2 PRETEND I DID IT ON PURPOSE. MY HAND LOOKS LIKE A MANGO (SIZE AND COLOUR) COZ I LANDED ON IT AND YOU TOTALY MISSED IT, WHY DID U LEAVE SO ERLY?
‘CARPET BURN’ SOUNDS LIKE AN STI, Isola replied.
LOL FINE, BE MYSTERIOUS. U MISSD A BRILLIANT NITE.
AND YOU’LL BE MISSING SCHOOL TOMORROW, I’M SURE.
PROBBLY. MUM JUST SAID SHE THINKS MY WRIST IS BROKEN?!! HAHAHAHA LOL
Alejandro peeked over Isola’s shoulder on the pretext of reaching for Santa-shaped baubles. ‘You left early?’ he enquired.
Isola pocketed the phone. ‘I shouldn’t have gone.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because –’ she waved a frustrated hand to the upstairs window and the conspicuously closed curtain ‘– Mum got herself in a state and now Dad’s taken off.’
‘All this because of a social event?’ He raised a dark eyebrow.
‘Social event . . . You make me sound like a debutante,’ she said mockingly, curtseying and making a rather ugly face.
‘Well, how else will the suitors know to come calling?’
‘That’s why Dad’s in a foul mood, apparently. Suitors, you know.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Cause there’s such an abundance after me.’
‘Fathers can be foul when it comes to such matters,’ said Alejandro fondly. ‘Releasing the child’s hand to allow another to take it in marriage.’
‘Marriage?’ spluttered Isola.
She’d only made an appearance at the party because she knew she’d be noticed more if she wasn’t there. Alejandro had told her that, in his experience, people were all about the empty spaces; the things they don’t have, the words that aren’t said. In Avalon, it was all about who wasn’t touching who, who hadn’t shown up to the party.
‘I didn’t even stay long,’ Isola admitted, scratching at the sap bleeding along the boughs of the dying tree. ‘I was in the woods, mostly. Grandpa says the herd’s got a beautiful new foal.’
‘And did you find the creature?’
Isola shook her head. ‘No. It was weirdly quiet in there, though. Like there wasn’t a single animal ali–’
She jumped as a flock of finches bulleted from the treetops, carolling shrieks of terror, sensing – before Isola and Alejandro heard it – a rumble that became a roar.
From around the edge of the woods, a moving van burping black exhaust fumes came trundling up the street. Its howling engine cut in front of the house opposite. Two cars followed in its wake: a modest station wagon with a sofa tied to the roof, and a sleek city car.
‘New neighbours,’ Alejandro commented, watching with keen interest as the furniture-Tetris got under way. A bed frame was dropped in the driveway, and a clumsy mover knocked down the letterbox with a dining table.
Isola shrugged. ‘Pass me those reindeer antlers.’ She continued bedecking the tree, disguising its bald patches, its rapidly browning leaves. Isola tried her best not to watch. She knew how it felt to be stared at. But she was only human, and when she did finally peek between the gaudy-bright branches, she saw:
A boy with black hair and a hangover slouch.
A boy she’d only seen through blue mist.
He was moving things from the station wagon into the house. Boxes of worldly possessions. Hidden things.
The boy retrieved another armful from the boot. He headed towards his house but turned suddenly, perhaps spying the peripheral glitter of sun on the plum tree. He looked straight through the thinning branches at her.
&n
bsp; He didn’t see Alejandro. Nobody ever did.
The boy waved without raising his arms – only wiggling his fingers. He had a pink skateboard under one arm and a box marked ‘BODY PARTS’ under the other. He walked to the end of his driveway. Isola mirrored him, the asphalt between them suddenly uncrossable, a tarry River Styx.
A Picture of Isola Wilde as Viewed by a Sober Edgar Allan Poe
He recognised her immediately. The dark and the noise and the liquor could only camouflage so much. Cinderella’s day-time disguise was a girl with:
•origami hair, as though some enthusiastic Japanese schoolgirl had tried to fold each section into a variety of animal shapes. It’d come up wild instead, a veritable safari. Her body seemed tiny and impeccably neat by comparison.
•arched eyebrows, pencilled the colour of Swiss chocolate, a shade too dark for her dyed hair.
•oodles of scarlet ribbons woven through her white-goldilocks.
•bare feet and a cream-froth dress that were Woodstock-muddy.
And she was alone – excluding the pathetically wilting plum tree – and looked for all the world content with her own company.
Boy – An Appraisal
Isola Wilde knew perfectly well that appearances told you nothing about a person, unless the only thing you were interested in was establishing from their attire what period they died. Nevertheless, she noticed several key things about Edgar Allan Poe’s appearance that she hadn’t in the smoggy microcosm of the Big Party’s kitchen the night before.
He was big. Tall and broad with meaty hands, a slight pudginess about him.
He wore braces – like a mouthful of diamonds in the sunlight.
Large round ears, sticking out and ending in slight elfin points, a changeling baby’s.
A battle helmet of curly black hair.
Distinctly rounded shoulders, as if slouching would somehow make his overall size less noticeable.
‘Going to give me your real name this time, bright eyes?’ the boy called.
Isola felt a smile curling her lips. ‘Isola Wilde.’
She knew he didn’t believe her when he replied, ‘I’ll call you Number Thirty-six, then, shall I?’
‘And you must be the new Number Thirty-seven.’
Edgar Allan Poe/Number Thirty-seven bowed in acknowledgement. A Playstation controller fell out of the BODY PARTS box and he hastened to pick it up.
‘Edgar!’ A middle-aged woman emerged from the house with fresh paint stains over her smallish baby-bump and a relaxed slouch that mirrored her son’s. ‘I need you – Portia’s getting into the silverware and you know how she is with knives!’
Edgar Allan Poe waved at Isola again, almost dropping the box. He struggled to heave it higher. ‘See you round, Annabel Lee.’
Isola returned to the tree, lacing reams of golden bells through the branches.
‘You told him your real name,’ said Alejandro quietly.
He was rearranging tinsel, his face obscured, but Isola knew from his tone what his expression would be like. She could sense it, slight on the wind, if she sniffed: jealousy, mixed with a heady dose of love and a strong desire to protect her. Not just from scrapes and sickness and televised suicides, but from boys, from men.
Alejandro had been Isola’s brother since she was four years old. Her favourite brother, and the first of six.
Isola Isolated
There had been an Isola Wilde once before, dead at the ripe old age of nine in the year 1867. The famous Oscar’s baby sister. The second Isola was named for her.
Isola’s mother loved Oscar Wilde. If he weren’t both gay and deceased, she always said, she would have married him in a Victorian heartbeat. Modern Isola often wondered what nineteenth-century Isola would have been like had she grown to a more respectable age. Nine years old. Each year lived like a cat’s life.
The second Isola thought the first Isola – the real Isola Wilde – would have grown into a remarkable lady, if given a sporting chance. A playwright, a poet, an artist. She would have been quick with a quip, like her brother, and written twisted, haunted books with velvety lesbian undertones, and maybe even been thrown in jail for it, too.
The second Isola didn’t die at nine. At her tenth birthday party, on a lawn scattered with children clutching fistfuls of frosted cake and rapidly deflating balloons hovering at ankle-height, Mother Wilde sat in the dewy shadow of a plum tree and drew Isola on to her lap, whispering in her ear that she must live twice as hard on behalf of her tragic forebear.
Teenage Isola wore too much make-up and was almost uncomfortably skinny, her long limbs bunchy, stuffed with straw – like a voodoo doll of a popular girl.
She lived in black-laced army boots and periodically invented her own fashions. She was only recently sixteen, and she had a secret universe a doctor once called a ‘fantastic flight of fancy’. Her parents had long since abandoned the doctor’s suggestion to encourage and play along – and yet it was still real, often more solid to her than the planet under her feet. Her middle name was Lileo. Pronounced Lie-lee-oh.
Isola loved things that other people didn’t, especially when it came to body features. Like overbites and freckles and rounded tummies, stretchmarks and birthmarks and pigeon toes and ears with elvish points.
Mother Wilde always said a beauty flaw was a beauty fluke. A good thing.
Flaws mark the flakes, she would say. Meaning flawed people are like snowflakes. Unique. Or maybe frozen.
Isola Wilde was frozen. If she licked her wrist she tasted seasalt. She knew exactly how she had come to be an ice girl. She remembered it like an old movie, a past life.
A sculptor had carved her from a block of the berg that sunk the Titanic. He made her in the image of his daughter, dead when her lungs swelled with blood – the dainty cough into the handkerchief, the same little spot of crimson that had taken her mother.
Completed, the sculptor moved Ice Princess Isola from his eternal winter workshop and into his little cottage by the bay. In the dead winter, which was as cold and tempered as the wedding veil of a bride left at the altar, he couldn’t bear to light the stoves and fireplaces and see the tears dripping from the sculpture’s pores, her frozen hands – blood running from a lifeline.
At winter’s end they found the sculptor blue, chill-poisoned, and the ice girl was smiling wicked-frozen forever, so perfectly formed that they thought it a shame to hide her in the cold cottage overlooking the sea. They mounted her instead in the village square, and not one summer did she so much as break a sweat.
But that was only a fairytale.
The Dead Girl
As she walked to school on Monday, Isola found a dead girl in Vivien’s Wood.
The emaciated body, Holocaust-thin, was hanging from a tree. Not by a rope or a Rapunzel braid – she was stuffed inside a child-sized birdcage, cramped against the paint-flaked bars, one striped-stockinged leg hanging down and swaying like a pendulum.
Before she had discovered the corpse, Isola had been on a mission. She had deviated from her usual trail, following signs of the rarely seen herd – a possible glimpse of a rainbow tail, the tease of soft clopping up ahead. She knew for certain they were out here, but they had been scarce for years now, and she never seemed to spot them – her, the only girl in Avalon that even knew about the unicorns!
But the herd was forgotten as Isola stood under the cage and counted the number of times the leg swung, the crooked minutes it ticked by. She couldn’t see the corpse’s face, only a scrub of dirty dark hair, a grey dress. She examined the tarnished silver buckles on the black shoes, the ladders in the stockings. She reached out hesitantly.
‘If you dawdle any longer, you will most certainly be late.’
She hadn’t heard Alejandro appear so suddenly beside her, the way a shadow does in the midday sun. Isola dropped her outstretched hand and pressed herself against the tree trunk. The twisted dizzy branches seemed to close over her, a witch-fingered hug.
‘Go along, now,’ sa
id Alejandro. He was peering up through the branches, his dark eyes searching for the bough that held the cage aloft.
‘But I can’t just leave her,’ insisted Isola. ‘I have to help her down.’
‘She is beyond even your help, querida,’ said Alejandro softly. ‘Go, I will stay with her. I must see . . .’
Isola knew better than to argue with the wisest and most stubborn of her brothers. She crunched across the forest carpet, glancing back at Alejandro, who stared up as if hypnotised at the figure in the birdcage.
She knew what he needed to see. Whether the girl would return. Whether she would haunt.
Sometimes it was hard to tell what was corpse and what was ghost.
But ghosts did not frighten Isola Wilde. They never had.
Dramatis Personae
ALEJANDRO: The first prince. A beloved guardian and ghost of a young man.
DEAD BODY: A girl, a cage, a mystery.
Four was the age when Isola first starting seeing ghosts; at least, that’s the earliest she could remember. Alejandro was the very first she had ever met. A dashing young man from Victorian London; beautiful, with his mother’s Spanish colouring, the dandy dress and aura he’d inherited from his peacock-strutting father. He died aged twenty-four in an opium den, soaking into death as he lay in a pool of absinthe and dyed ostrich feathers – the same way he’d spent most of his short life.
St Dymphna’s Ladies College was staffed by nuns. A few of them still taught and the rest merely flitted like rumours on the ground, only glimpsed in slices of life – sagging grandma bras strung on a washing line in a hidden courtyard, baskets of lemons left in the locker room, candles burning lonely in the little chapel at all hours.
It was strange to be back again. Somehow, every time Isola passed through the iron-wrought gates at the end of the school year, she couldn’t imagine returning in autumn. The final clang behind her seemed like a closing of a chapter, heralding a blank page to scribble on. But here she was. Grape had made good on her word, and Isola had sat beside an empty desk throughout the morning’s classes.
