by Allyse Near
‘Yes, and she was a princess, and –’
James stood suddenly, the blood rushing from his face. ‘Where did you hear this? Who puts this stuff in your head?’
Isola thought he sounded like Father when he spoke like that. She felt her face redden, and said defensively, ‘You wouldn’t even believe me last time –’
James laughed, sounding slightly manic, and threw his arms in the air. ‘Let me guess – the faeries told you, right?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘What was her name? Rose? Rosekin?’
She cringed, knowing already what he’d say.
‘Isola, Rosekin’s not real.’
Her gaze wandered to the schoolbag, the shoplifted flowers resting their snoozy bell-shaped heads inside.
A few years back, James had demanded an explanation for her near-constant flower-foraging, and she’d told him about her responsibility; to feed a garden faerie named Rosekin. Rosekin would have liked nothing more than to devour Mother’s secret garden in its entirety, so to dissuade her Isola brought home whatever she could find in Vivien’s Wood, blooms cut from strangers’ gardens and the manicured flowerbeds at St Dymphna’s. Occasionally, she’d visit the florist on High Street and, while pretending to peruse seed breeds and Valentine’s specials, mash up petals in the pocket of her blazer.
Even after he’d dismissed her notions, she didn’t hide her floral thievery. Those flowers were for Rosekin; what further proof did he need?
Isola felt very daft, suddenly, wearing a snake and no wiser than Eve; she hated that she’d once told him about the faeries, about her secret friends. He thought she was crazy.
And he didn’t know the half of it.
She’d only told him because she spent too much time around him. James would notice her focus fade away, see her smile into empty corners. And something had possessed her to tell him about her tiny secret friend, and of course he hadn’t believed her, and why had she thought otherwise? He’d seen every film version of Peter Pan but did not believe in Neverland, either.
James had lived in greenery once too, but now his forest was gone, receding like a hairline up the valley’s scalp. Maybe that’s why her world could only ever be a fantasy to him.
She dropped her gaze, and James pinched the bridge of his nose, clearly exasperated. The small part inside her that recoiled wanted to shrink away and nurse its wounds – she saw the look in his eyes and felt that piece freeze over, so she couldn’t feel anything at all.
‘Isola – just, don’t say shit like that. You sound like your mother!’
It took her some time to unwind the reptile, ruining any hope for a dramatic exit. When the snake was finally free she plopped him in the tank and left without a word. Stopping in the driveway, she kicked the front tyre of James’s car in frustration then wrote with her finger along his dirty windshield:
SORRY
– I.L.W.
Pretty Up Death and Girls Otherwise
On Friday afternoon, Isola discovered Mother had added a nativity scene to the plum tree deathbed. Plastic and real candy canes had been arranged amongst the dry leaves. The peppermint stripes reminded Isola of the dead girl’s stockings, and she shivered when she passed the tree, continuing through to the elaborate front garden, what she’d always thought of as a secret garden with invisible stone walls. All Mother’s doing, every flowering honeysuckle bush and jasmine vine. She’d stopped tending it a long time ago, but it seemed more beautiful now, thriving in advanced neglect.
‘Hey, Isola!’ A shouted squeak issued from a stalk of lavender. ‘I like what you did with the plum tree! Prettying up death is so you!’
Winsor. The bratty garden faerie eternally locked in a hate/hate relationship with Isola, who merely ignored her, as per usual.
Mother slept most of Saturday. Father had taken an extra shift. With the sun peeking shyly between clouds, Isola arranged a tartan picnic rug in the patchy shade of the plum tree. She opened her favourite book in the world and began flicking for a story.
Isola’s Favourite Book in the World
Les Fables et les Contes de Fées de Pardieu
or
The Pardieu Fables and Fairytales
by Lileo Pardieu
A memory: Isola as a toddler, sugarlump teeth, skin still smelling of milk. Hair that curled without use of an iron and sweet dresses that didn’t matter were dirtied. When she was old enough, she demanded the usual suspects at bedtime: The Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast.
Even then, Mother’s contempt for non-Pardieu fairytales was obvious.
‘Hmph,’ she snorted derisively at her latest request, folding up her knees to perch on Isola’s bed. ‘Listen to me, Isola. The original Beauty’s just an encouragement to young women to accept arranged marriages. What it’s really saying to impressionable girls is, “Don’t worry if your new husband is decades older than you, or ugly, or horrid. If you’re sweet and obedient enough, you might just discover he’s a prince in disguise!’’
Mother’s Most Lasting Advice
‘Never be that girl, Isola. Never pick the beast or the wolf on the off-chance he won’t devour you.’
Isola quickly learned the only stories Mother would never hesitate to tell were those written by Lileo Pardieu. Mother recited them from memory, translated from their original French.
Isola had been shocked to discover, when she finally received her rare and treasured bound book of Pardieu fables as a tenth birthday gift, that they were all slightly different to Mother’s versions – and not in the way she expected. Mother had never sanitised her occasional forays into traditional bedtime fare – Goldilocks was gobbled up or broke her neck falling from the bears’ upstairs window, and the woodsman was always too late to rescue Little Red Riding Hood. But she had altered Pardieu’s stories slightly, alleviating the gloomy thread that ran through them; that truthful darkness that never sought to light candles, never tried to brighten the unhappy endings, to whitewash horror with morals. The stories were overwhelming reminders that evil begot evil, bad things often happened to good people and that villains often triumphed.
And, above all, that being a girl in a terrible world was akin to being a princess, wicked queen, heroine, ugly stepdaughter, witch and fairy and child and mother in one fiery package, a bomb beribboned like a beautiful gift and left to tick tock tick tock behind high castle walls.
And then, one day too soon, Mother had blown.
The enormous book was leather-bound and gold-gilded. It looked as though it had been knocked from a wild woman’s bookshelf as the raging townsfolk ransacked her cottage and dragged her by her hair to the oil-doused stake in the village square. An inscription on the first page announced in curling copperplate:
Dear Reader,
These stories, fables and memories are all true in one way or another.
These stories are about you and me.
These stories feature:
– girls who kill
– girls who are killed
– girls who are alive
– and girls who are otherwise.
Isola had always loved the last line, girls who are otherwise, as distinguished from simply ‘dead’. Girls who are dead in all the ways a girl can be.
There was an author’s photograph on the last page of the book. Lileo Pardieu sat on a love seat on a cottage porch, the smoke from her clove cigarette rising like hologram dragonflies. Eyes lined in black kohl, troll’s blood. Severe black bob. Cyborg boots. An epilogue of narrowed eyes and crossed, skinny-frog limbs.
Lileo looked nothing like a fairytale – more like the ice queen in her carriage, swapping hearts for snow – and Isola wished, almost more than anything, almost more than Mother getting better, that she could plunge her fist into a slit in time and space, the tiny portal hidden in the book’s spine, and drag Lileo Pardieu out by her coarse French hair. It would be slick like a birth, and Lileo and Isola like twins separated by decades and oceans and death. Reunited at last.
Iso
la ripped up grass blades, razing her early-morning tongue with her teeth as she searched, and finally settled on the first fairytale, which dealt with two of her favourite topics: death and princesses. The slight wind fell silent to listen, and she read aloud to the beglittered tree, like the visitor to the hospital patient.
A fairytale in reverse. The fate is Grimm. Faeries have no tails, anyway, only downy green skins, jewel eyes and endless riches.
The prince has the charming habit of locking princesses in his tower. His eyes are toxic, the colour of fairy hides, dewy witch-apples.
These are hieroglyphs.
Picture-words. You know this story.
Princess tower-locked, rope-haired, blood-lipped. Magic mirrors give poor advice, Cassandra truths. Thoughts of escape, but she’ll never run fast enough on those glass feet.
Fairy godmother, green-skinned, ruby-eyed. She offers a silk dress and a thimbleful of faeriedust, not much and not nearly enough to fly with. But, oh, how she’ll float.
Stepmother to the rescue. Dragons with throats full of soot. Arrows sail through the tower window. Roses etched along the shafts. Somebody loves her.
But stepmother tangles on the moat of roses. Body rots in the brambles.
Sleepless Beauty stays up late. Insomniac Beauty. Painted in the stars is poor advice, Cassandra truths. Her glass feet are starting to crack from all the pacing, all the prince’s forced waltzes.
The silk dress is soon a shroud. The gold dust is in her eyes and she floats to the top of the tower room to find her courage hidden there, amongst the shadows and cobwebs.
The blue-eyed blonde fashions her braid into a noose, and all the towers are gallows, every cinderblock a storybook, telling the same tale of tragedy. After hours of creaking in the wind, her hair snaps, and the body tumbles. Roses at the tower base, the tomb of Wakeful Beauty. Asleep at last.
The bed of roses ever made a tomb for Sleeping Beauty.
No sooner are her glass toes thrust into the mud grave than the revolutions begin. Uprisings, fire and steel. The prince is lynched in the ballroom with the dead girl’s hair. Royalty’s a thing of the past. The kingdom chooses their monarch.
Naturally, they elect a wolf.
The Dead Girl – Part Deux
The dead girl from the woods was sitting in Isola’s window, illuminated by the light of the Hindenburg moon.
Isola had only noticed the girl as a speck of Tinkerbell light; the moonbeams had caught something on her wrist, reflecting silver. The light danced on Isola’s face and woke her, like a lighthouse attracting her attention, warning her of rocks and treacherous shorelines.
Isola threw off the tangle of sheets and sat up.
They each waited for the other to speak. The moon held her star-strewn breath.
‘Hello, dead girl,’ said Isola, ever the hostess.
‘Hello, heartbeat girl,’ said the uninvited guest. ‘It’s like a drum, it’s so fucking loud. Turn it down, will you?’
Isola didn’t know what to say. Ghosts often said strange things, as though conducting conversations half in dream, one foot hooked desperately in the doorway of the living world they’d been dragged so unceremoniously from. Sometimes they mistook Isola for old friends or enemies. Sometimes they entangled their fates with the red string of hers and she learned to call them brothers.
The dead girl perched on the windowsill and twisted sideways, settling into the frame more comfortably, her silhouette lit by moon- and neon street-light. A stockinged shadow puppet.
‘You see ghosts, you strange little creature.’ One striped leg swung down, kicking at Isola’s bookcase. A pale mouth smirked. ‘Eye-so-lah. You must be pretty special.’
Isola shrugged. ‘I just pay attention.’
The silver on the dead girl’s wrist looked like a manacle, one half of handcuffs. The girl must have noticed Isola’s gaze, for she lifted her wrist, the manacle jangling, and said, ‘Come look.’
Warily, Isola climbed out of bed and examined the dead girl’s wrist from the middle of the room.
‘It’s a charm bracelet,’ said the dead girl proudly.
The charms showed the moon cycle cast in silver, each droplet dangling from the chain, singing when they clinked together. New, crescent, quarter, half, gibbous, full, waxing and waning round her wrist.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Isola. ‘What’s your name?’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ The girl ignored the question and instead smiled at the bracelet. ‘My mother gave it to me.’
‘Oh.’ Most of her face was still hidden behind her dark hair, but the girl looked as thin as Death on a diet, and her broken voice crackled like sweets unwrapping. Rosekin and the other faeries’ dramatic death-tale was reliable for once. Huh. That was a first.
‘So what’s your name?’ Isola ventured again. Ghosts liked to talk about themselves, she had found; their histories and faces and names were all they had left in the world. ‘I’m Isola.’
‘I know that, weren’t you even listening?’ the dead girl snapped, thudding her fist to the windowsill. ‘I thought you were supposed to be smart!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Isola, although she wasn’t. Alejandro had always advised her to tiptoe through conversations with ghosts she didn’t know – some were liable to explosive rage and violence, and it was best to assume they all were at first. Stranger danger, spirit-style.
The dead girl, as if bored with Isola’s company, contorted into a crouch, preparing to spring from the windowsill. ‘Well, if you’re really a smart girl after all . . .’ She tilted her head and smiled back at Isola.
The moon lit the black hollow where her eye had once been.
‘. . . you’ll stay out of the damn woods.’
Little Voices
‘Where’ve you been all weekend?’
‘Why?’ Alejandro touched her hair, disturbing it slightly. ‘Did you miss me, querida?’
Isola immediately smoothed her hair back down. ‘No,’ she scowled, ‘I had a visitor.’
He leaned down and kissed her cheek. Isola rubbed it clean.
Alejandro had permanent dark circles under his eyes, like Isola often woke with when she slept with mascara on. They had matching wobbly colt legs, except Alejandro was skinny from a youth spent on drugs. The stunning clothes he wore – the clothes he died in – were the height of Victorian dandy fashion. Every day he changed his appearance slightly, although the simple fact he was dead left him permanently unchanging. He sometimes tied his crushed-grape cravat – the only colour on him – to hold back his hair, or wore it like an ascot or an armband. He arranged the diamond pins on his laced cuffs and coat pockets in differing patterns, sometimes mirroring the movement of the stars. On Isola’s last birthday, he’d arranged the diamond pins to read ‘16’ on his starched black lapels.
Wordlessly, he took her schoolbag and carried it as they ventured through Vivien’s Wood. Forever the gentleman.
‘And may I enquire as to whom you have replaced me with?’
‘If I was going to replace you, I’d pick someone a little livelier than her – the girl we saw last week. The dead one in the cage.’
Alejandro stiffened. ‘What did she want?’
‘Well, first she asked me to turn the volume of my heartbeat down. Then she told me to stay out of the damn woods.’
Alejandro tugged nervously on his silk cravat.
‘I’ll do neither,’ declared Isola, shaking out her ice-blonde hair. ‘It’s my heart, and my woods. I was here first.’
‘I do not like this, Isola.’ Creases of worry braided Alejandro’s eyebrows together. ‘If Rosekin is right about . . . about what happened, a death like that can do things to people. Twist them.’
Isola could remember that protruding leg and cramped cage all too well. She shivered then said brusquely, ‘Since when did Rosekin know anything about anything?’
‘You would do well to heed the stories of faeries, Isola,’ Alejandro admonished. ‘Their voices might be faint, but the
ir words are tall indeed.’
Isola only shrugged. She didn’t want to believe it was true – but she’d seen the hollow eye socket, heard the scratched voice like an ancient recording of a girl talking. ‘What happened to the body?’
‘I left it. The unicorns will finish it off.’
‘That’s cruel,’ muttered Isola.
‘She is already dead, querida. Crueller to let the herd starve another winter, I think.’
At St Dymphna’s, Grape had made a triumphantly late start to the term, and she carried her arm, bent crooked by the thick plaster cast, as though it were some precious baby bird.
‘Seven days in bed? For this?’ Isola teased.
‘I’ve not wasted it,’ said Grape, affronted. ‘I had to become ambidextrous.’
For the whole day, Grape wrote notes with her left hand. She took a great deal of badly concealed joy out of handing worksheets scribbled with shapes and nonsense to teachers, even though each nun told her in exasperation that she didn’t have to hand in anything at all. But Grape only took this as a challenge, and started on a maths sheet with a pen clamped between her teeth.
Isola spent the afternoon art class drawing idly on Grape’s cast: bunches of rotund purple grapes for her namesake, faeries in bubblegum-glow, an empty birdcage . . .
‘I wish you’d seen it,’ Grape was saying. ‘It was so funny – I ran up and pushed Majella into the pool, and then she jumped out and chased me, and I ran up the stairs and whack, right into Ellie Blythe Nettle – remember her? – then I fell down the stairs, everyone loved it, it was hilarious, my arm was killing me but I kind of drank too much and forgot about it.’
‘Sorry I missed it.’
‘You shouldn’t always run off like that! People will start suspecting.’
‘Suspecting what?’
Grape gave a Cheshire-cat grin. ‘That you’re Batman. Duh.’
Grape was the only good thing about St Dymphna’s. Isola had not been raised religiously; her baptism occurred to pacify the grumblings of her devout grandmother, who had since winged her way up to the strictly conservative heaven she’d never found on earth. Father had chosen to send Isola to St Dymphna’s after a spate of teen pregnancies at the local comprehensive; Catholic schoolgirls apparently didn’t ever get pregnant or even look sideways at boys. Besides, Mother had gone to St Dympha’s and hadn’t she turned out all right?
