by Allyse Near
But Isola knew that the manic stage would pass soon enough, and the longer it lasted, the deeper Mother would sink when it ended. Swinging high always meant falling low in the circus of her life. Today, Mother might be the trapeze artist, her sequinned torso glittering in the spotlight, flying high above her illness, but tomorrow she could well be the cockroach crushed under the ringleader’s boots, squashed juiceless under the strain of being sad.
Lately in the Wilde house, the swings had become more extreme, a pendulum gathering speed. Soon, Isola feared, the clock would once more stop altogether.
By the time she’d kicked off her shoes in the hallway after school that afternoon, Isola knew that the pendulum had swung.
Yesterday’s dishes were stacked high in the sink. The house was unwelcoming, celibate; the kitchen cold with uncooked dinner.
‘How was school, then?’ Father asked from the lounge room, his perfunctory question accompanied by the flutter of turning newspaper pages.
‘Grape and I faked cramps to get out of P.E.,’ said Isola, stopping in the doorway and shrugging at him. ‘But Sister K said we used that excuse last week, so I guess the nuns are tracking our periods now.’
From upstairs came the familiar waterfall. The sounds of Mother stripping in the bathroom.
Father turned the television on, pressing the volume control like an addict on a morphine drip. Louder louder louder, the noise shackling Isola’s ankles as she trudged her way upstairs. The aural riot tried its hardest to tug her down the stairs, to ignore Mother the way that Father chose to.
Isola allowed her gaze to rise skyward as she peeked through the ceiling with the X-ray vision she wished she had. Perhaps if she stared hard enough she could see through the ceramic tub, through Mother’s sun-speckled skin, to find the sadness that roosted in the red stew of her tragic guts, the depression that festered like tumours. She could shrink them with kisses, cut them out with razor-sharp lips like Ruslana’s.
It was no secret that Mother was mentally ill. She had only gotten worse since Isola’s birth.
Sometimes, very late at night, if she pressed her thumbs into her eyes and concentrated, making pictures in the electric shudders of colour that burst there, Isola remembered being inside Mother’s womb. The stucco pink walls were lined with stars, the mapped cosmos; soft gooey blush like the inside of a clam, and she was the grain of sand becoming the pearl.
Mother had other baby pearls brewing before, but instead of hardening they had softened, melting through the porous walls. She took care of these babies too, but nobody knew: she cradled them internally, secretly squished between her organs, padding her ageing joints, collecting in her brain stem. These were seedlings, saplings, never to blossom, never to become trees.
Isola was born to tears spilling from all eyes except hers. She never cried, never made so much as a squeak of befuddlement, and the nurses plunged her airways again and again, looking for the obstruction that didn’t exist.
‘A quiet little princess you’ve got, Mrs Wilde,’ the nurse said, beaming. Isola was finally planted into Mother’s sweat-drenched arms: tiny, wrinkled hands flexing; crusted eyes blue through the gunk; hair like she’d been licked by the unicorns, frothy above her bothered-looking face.
‘My princess,’ gasped Mother, flooded with pain-drugs and love-drugs. ‘My Isola.’
Isola pushed open the bathroom door to reveal the gentle shafts of chandelier light, inhaling the gel and soap and candle scents.
Her mother was in the claw-footed bathtub, hidden behind the Japanese-print screen, visible in pieces, a triptych; her toes at one end, at the other a twist of dark hair, pinned up. In between was a slinky silhouette, breasts and knees.
Isola went to the porcelain bathtub, kissed Mother’s flushed cheek like she always did, dipped her fingers in to check the temperature (usually boiling past most people’s endurance), and asked if she needed anything.
‘A doctor to double the dosage,’ sighed Mother, and then she laughed, lifting her pointed ballerina-foot out of the tub, soapy water dripping and spotting the bath rug. Isola saw her Mother’s whole life there – in the corns on her soles; the floaty-violet nail polish, slightly chipped; the dyed string anklet, woven on the shores of some faraway honeymoon beach.
‘Tell me a story, won’t you, Isola?’
It seemed to be one of the few comforting things Isola could administer to Mother; her voice, shaping the clay of a story, a tale that always had a happy ending. Isola didn’t think she was much of a storyteller, but she drew inspiration from Lileo Pardieu’s words, a vampire drinking in inky blood, and she wove tales until the bathwater ran lukewarm.
Isola loved Mother so much it hurt. The pain only worsened when Mother was hurting. When she was sad, Mother Wilde was a Greek tragedy. She would stay in her bed all day, and got in the bath at odd hours, soaking instead of sleeping, trying in vain to soften the tightly wound cogs inside.
A tealight candle floated past her fingers, and Isola stirred up a wave for it to travel on, a tiny tempest in the tub.
‘Once upon a time,’ said Isola quietly, ‘there was a boy called Alejandro, who loved his sister very much.’
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 furnitur
e. 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 peasant
s, 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.
