by Allyse Near
She felt Isola squeeze back.
Names Exchanged
The next week Isola was sitting at the end of the driveway, her wavy mass of anime heroine hair uncombed, eyes fixed in a book.
Edgar shouldered his skateboard out into the court, greeted her, then proceeded to skate up and down the asphalt as damp oak leaves caught in the wheels and stuck to his jeans. He almost tripped on a hidden tree branch. Be cool, Edgar, he told himself, as he regained his balance and waited for Isola Wilde to talk to him.
After skating and waiting a solid fifteen minutes, he kicked his board under his elbow and marched over to her. She didn’t even look up as his shadow stained her hair.
‘Hey, Isola? Can I ask you something?’
She squinted up at him. ‘Yeah?’
‘Why do you live out here? On the edge of the spooky woods and all?’
A tiny smile cracked her still-life lips. ‘We used to live right in the middle of ’em, but the council made us move. Gingerbread cottages apparently don’t make for sustainable living.’
‘Ah –’ Edgar tapped his nose knowingly ‘– so you’re a witch.’
‘That’s what they tell me.’
Edgar laughed, but she didn’t.
He shifted his skateboard so she could see it clearly under the bulk of his arm. It was bright pink, an exact replica of the hoverboard from Back to the Future Part II. Red scars pocked his elbows from all the spectacular crashes he’d had on it.
‘Where did you move from?’ Isola asked, squinting up through the sunlight at him.
He sat down beside her, blocking the blinding light, and pointed to the far hills rising. ‘Other side of the valley. It’s only a twenty-minute drive. I didn’t even have to change schools.’
‘Why’d you move?’
‘My mum’s an old hippie. Her name’s actually listed as “Lotus Blossom” on her birth certificate.’
Isola’s narrow lips curved upward. ‘And?’
‘And they were building a transmitter tower over our house. Mum was convinced our brains would fry in our sleep. She legitimately considered making tinfoil hats.’
‘And she moved you here for health and safety?’ She chuckled at some invisible irony.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ She tossed her book into the grass and looked up at him, a curious glint in her eye. ‘What’s your real name?’
Edgar raised a mocking eyebrow and said loftily, ‘Honestly, I’m famous. I thought you’d claimed to have read all my work?’ He started picking the shredded leaves from his skateboard’s axle. ‘It’s Edgar Llewellyn. Not nearly as original as Isola Wilde.’
‘It’s not original at all. Mum named me after Oscar Wilde’s sister.’
‘No kidding. Was she a writer, too? What’d she do?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, looking put out. ‘At least, as far as I’m aware. She died really young.’
‘All the best people do,’ he conceded.
Then came rumbling in the distance; a monster waking up. The treetops shook with trepidation.
‘Is that a car?’ said Edgar in disbelief, before adding, ‘Is it weird that I’ve lived here a month and already I’m sensitive to the sounds of civilisation?’ He craned his neck as the car came into view and rolled along the dirt road that wound around the woods. Rusted red metal glinted through the hazy dust clouds. Two surfboards clogged the roof rack.
‘Aha,’ said Isola, her voice coloured with a hidden smile.
The ancient car looped around the court and came to a rolling halt in front of Number Thirty-six. A boy with sickly too-much-time-indoors skin and still-wet-from-the-shower hair climbed out of the driver’s seat.
‘Jamie Sommerwell!’ called Isola. ‘What brings you to these backwoods?’
The boy drummed the car roof nervously. ‘C’mon, Isola.’ He climbed back into the car, crawled across and kicked open the passenger door. ‘The surf’s supposed to be decent today.’ He patted the cracked leather seat.
‘You know, I charge by the hour.’
‘In what, Monopoly money?’
Isola rolled her eyes so dramatically they might have rolled out like blue marbles down the asphalt. She waved a hand towards the car. ‘Edgar, this is James. He’s not usually such a creep.’
The boy in the car gave a sharp jerk of his head in Edgar’s direction. He looked back to Isola, and said, ‘Chariot’s departing, Sola.’
‘Hold on.’ She got up, dusted gravel off her skirt and hurried indoors.
James and Edgar looked at one another.
‘Nice car,’ said Edgar.
‘Nice joke,’ said James coldly. ‘It’s a piece of shit, I’m well aware.’
They sat in awkward silence. Edgar blinked at his warped reflection in a dent on the bonnet. James fiddled with some controls on the dashboard until The Smiths filtered out of the speakers and drifted amongst the shrubbery of Aurora Court, netting in webs, crowding letterboxes.
Isola came marching out. Gripping the car’s barely attached passenger door, she looked inquiringly at Edgar. ‘You swim?’
‘About as well as Jeff Buckley.’
A husky laugh battered her throat, a trapped butterfly. ‘Well, we’re going to the beach. Care to join?’
She plopped a large straw-woven bag on the car floor. Edgar spotted a swimsuit, a towel, a heavily dog-eared book. He shook his head.
‘Sure? You’re welcome to, honestly.’
‘Nah. I gotta go plant some more trees for Mum.’
‘Well, okay. Try not to decapitate any more rabbits.’
Edgar skated back to his house. When he reached the letterbox, which still bent double as though spewing out letters, the car’s brakes screeched behind him.
Isola was working furiously to wind the window down. It stuck fast, and she yelled through the brief gap, ‘Hey, Edgar?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Nice skateboard!’ She winked, and James hit the accelerator.
To the Waters and the Wilde
Isola’s life when she was with James moved in chunks. The days souped into nights, and time seemed different, pliable somehow, like something spongy she could squeeze in her fist.
James’s ancient car – race-car-red originally, the fastest colour ever – was called Pepito and had a moustache painted on the bonnet. James drove Isola to the coast with wind whistling through the unstuck lining of the passenger door and The Smiths, Isola’s favourite band, on the radio. James always played their music when she was around.
Isola angled the rearview mirror towards her. As she had expected, her eldest brother sat in the back, his arms folded over his impeccable attire, staring out the window over the winding cliffs. Alejandro usually tagged along in cars with her but never lingered at the destination; he didn’t trust cars in the slightest, having a life-long attachment to horse-drawn coaches. She smiled and wished – not for the first time – that James could know him.
James scowled as he re-angled the mirror, but allowed Isola to put her feet up on the dash; she scratched her toenails luxuriously over the front compartment.
Isola smiled across at him, remembering how similar he’d looked when they’d first met. He had a wrinkled face even then, at the tender age of almost-five, with an air of being bothered and the constant smell of biscuits about him as he clutched a different Star Wars toy every day.
They were in the playground at their kindergarden. Under the not-so-watchful eye of a bored-looking twenty-something, who was reading shoddy celebrity tabloids and rolling her eyes at the babbling antics of the children, Isola had climbed the highest tree, misjudged the strength of the topmost bough and come tumbling down.
Isola had a vague memory of scrunching up her eyes against a dizziness, feeling the tilting world beneath her, hearing the grind of gears in the earth, the faint whispering pain of the tree branch she’d brought down.
And hovering over her was James – little Jamie then – with her hand clutched in his sweaty grip, brown eyes peer
ing anxiously down at her. She blinked groggily in the green-dappled shade, feeling the involuntary tears of shock dripping down her cheeks. His seemingly permanently scowl softened, just a little, and only in a way that she would ever recognise upon his face.
Barely a week after that Isola gave James chickenpox, and James let her hold one of his Star Wars figurines; they shared their sniffles and sandwiches, and couldn’t be pried apart.
But now…
They hadn’t spoken for a few weeks, not since she’d stormed out of his house. James wasn’t one to give chase, and Isola always forgot to stay angry at people. The car was somewhat cleaner – perhaps he’d finally washed it, and found her dusty apology scrawled on the window. Isola knew this tune, the musical theme of their relationship – ignore it, start again, pretend nothing had come between them.
It was too cold for swimming at Bloodpearl Beach, but adventurous dark heads on surfboards bobbed in the green-grey ocean, their wetsuits like seal skins. Alejandro drifted out of the car and whispered a foreign goodbye while James was waxing down the boards.
Froth crested the waves, cream on cold coffee. Rips snarled visibly along the sandbanks, sucking occasional swimmers out to sea. Lifeguards made repeated trips into the wave break. The sand was harsh with cracked seashells, cuttlefish bones. Seaweed festered on the northern end of the beach, shark eggs and starfish rotting amidst the bulbs.
They’d spent most of last year’s summer here, eating lemon-soggy fish and chips, watching late-evening thunderstorms roll over the mastheads of yachts. Isola’s hair had grown stiff with seasalt and she’d barely brushed it for months. Injury-prone Grape had stepped on coral, cutting open her foot, and had hobbled around on crutches for a week. They’d sat around a blue bonfire with local stoners and philosophy graduates, arguing about moon-landing conspiracy theories and whether there was any real reason they shouldn’t start a Fight Club. There had been dolphin spottings and surfing competitions and Grape was stung by a jellyfish on two separate occasions.
The summer that had just passed them by had been depressing in comparison. Toxic red algae had bloomed over the reef and a number of dolphins had beached themselves. Grape had been forced into hours of tutoring, her parents determined she raise her grades, and James had seemed colder, too. Isola was unsure what she might have done, until he had tried to kiss her and she had pulled away and knew that he was turning something unrequited into something akin to hate – the Devil’s alchemy – and now, instead of a memory to fondly wave back at, the summer before was a time to grab for in panic.
James was a great surfer. His board had a crooked fin and jagged marks on the nose that he claimed was proof of a deadly past encounter with sharks. Isola was pretty sure he’d had a spectacular wipe-out on the rocks that he didn’t want to admit to.
She, on the other hand, was not very good. Mostly she paddled around the wave break, lying on her belly on his old board as she caught the smaller waves back to shore. Without a wetsuit, her cold skin grew waxy. Her fingertips bubbled.
This was where she liked to be best.
She threw her board on the shore, paddled back out and floated, belly-up and eyes closed, devolving back to the ice statue, then the iceberg. Her ear canals flooded with salt and brine, suspending her brain in foreign fluid, and if she listened hard enough she heard the screams and panicked splashes of S. S. Titanic escapees; frenzies preserved forever in bubbles, like leaf fossils in rock.
Isola had missed the water. Alejandro had locked her bedroom window to ward off another visit from the dead girl, and Isola longed for the smell of oncoming rain spells, the wet rustle of fallen leaves sticking like gum to the sides of the house.
The dead girl hadn’t appeared again. The window stayed locked.
Isola closed her eyes and a surprise wave tumbled her. She surfaced with a cough, eyes stinging with saltwater. Whale-song vibrations travelled up her skull and static-leaped to the tips of her hair. She thought of giant squids, never seen alive, and mermaids, never seen dead. She thought of Christobelle, a tempest given shape. Isola had met her at this same beach.
Isola, six years old. Father, picking grains of sand from the cracked spine of his crime-thriller novel. Mother, knee-deep in the green, gently coaxing Isola into the ocean.
Isola remembered the salt glinting on the fine golden hairs of Mother’s arms, the imprint of bikini straps sunburned on her shoulders. She remembered the head rising from the water’s depths as the Wildes explored the rock pools at low tide. A tangle of psycho-red seaweed. Isola leaned closer – it wasn’t seaweed but hair. The single eye beneath the coarse swirls fixed on her.
‘Hello, sea child,’ murmured Christobelle, bubbles popping on her tongue, saltwater trickling from her mouth.
Isola wasn’t a naturally strong swimmer like Grape or a good surfer like James, but Christobelle had taught her how to linger at the bottom, collecting clams, stalking fish schools as the watery sun passed overhead. When Christobelle held her hand Isola could stay under as long as she liked – air bubbles seemed to pulse from the mermaid’s perpetually cold skin, keeping Isola’s lungs from going tight. Underwater, Christobelle’s thick hair seemed sentient – in fact, Isola was certain it lived, the way it twisted, curled around shells on the sea floor and lifted them to the mermaid’s eyes, even tapped Isola’s shoulder when Christobelle wanted her attention.
Isola kicked her legs to mimic her tail, and she wished her skin would glitter with golden scales too, and that one day she’d have hair to use as a weapon, and perfect breasts like Christobelle’s she could pour into seashell bras.
When Christobelle joined the ranks of the brother -princes, Isola was surprised to learn she and Ruslana were already acquainted.
‘Oh, it was a lifetime ago,’ Christobelle had sighed in the evening bath they’d shared. Isola had sat with her knees drawn up to her chest; the mermaid had taken up most of the space and her scales had been quite cold to the touch under the bubbles. ‘Well, Ruslana had come to investigate the disappearance of a handsome young sailor. She can tell when a woman’s involved in these sorts of things. Fantastic detective, she is. You know the first thing she said when she found me in that cave?’
‘What?’
Christobelle had shown her pearly teeth. ‘Couldn’t have finished him better myself.’
On the ride home with James, the back seat was empty. Isola propped her legs up on the dash, her still-damp skin glimmering in the glass-focused blaze of the setting sun. Morrissey mourned through second-hand speakers as they cannoned into the sunset like daredevils.
Forever the Girl – Advice from Saint Pip
Edgar’s best mate, Pip Sutcliffe, had excitable eyes high on his face like glassy periscopes. He wore slouchy knitted caps and hoodies and looked like the boy the bored security guard would indiscreetly follow around the store. In truth, he was a veritable fountain of nonsensical knowledge, passing out nuggets of information he’d gleaned from a lifetime of nosiness. Friends called him Saint Pip the Guru. He talked an awful lot of crap but if one looked hard enough there were rice-chunks of good sense, diamonds stuck in that steaming pile.
‘Pip,’ called Edgar, ‘I need your advice.’
Edgar was sprawled on nineteen-year-old Pip’s couch in his flat in downtown Avalon. The olive-green sofa had been taken from rubbish left on a stranger’s nature strip. It hardly had any springs and smelled as though it had been involved in something illegal. ‘A bargain,’ Saint Pip had labelled it.
‘Lucky for you, mate, the doctor is in.’ Pip was peeling vegetables over the sink in the adjoining kitchen. The apprentice chef wandered out, threw a carrot and peeler at Edgar, and joined him on the couch as he hacked away at a carrot for the stir-fry. ‘Now, what’s – Majella, babe, turn it down a decibel.’
Majella Lavery, more commonly known as Jella, was a gorgeous black Welsh girl with a vivid smile. She was Pip’s easy-going girlfriend, and the amicable hostess of the Big Party that had kicked off the school year, w
hich was held secretly in her parents’ house while they were holidaying in Barbados. The next morning she’d found broken beer bottles in the bathtub, a pair of naked strangers in her parents’ en suite, and a floating cloud of vomit in the pool.
‘Damage bill was, like, three hundred pounds,’ Jella had said cheerfully at the time. ‘Wicked party, though.’
Right now she was sunk in a mostly crushed beanbag (cheap on eBay, pick-up only, no refunds), playing a violent video game across the room. ‘You can’t tell me what to do,’ she responded heatedly. ‘Crush the patriarchy!’ Jella turned the volume on her game up; they could hear the violent screeching of zombies, the squeal of a chainsaw.
Pip shrugged, then asked loudly in Edgar’s ear, ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Well, there’s this girl –’
‘There’s always a girl, Eddie,’ said Pip, switching straight to guru-mode. ‘And there’ll always be the girl, you know? From Eve in the Garden to the Whore of Babylon. You know?’
‘The what of what?’
‘Never read the Revelations bit in the Bible?’ His huge eyes went even wider. ‘Hardcore stuff, man. She’s this chick who rides a dragon. I thought you’d have heard of it for sure. She sounds like she’s come straight out of your drawings.’ He waved his hand regally. ‘Continue, son.’
‘Well, there’s this girl, and I do fancy her a bit,’ Edgar admitted. ‘She’s –’
‘Pretty?’
‘Beautiful. And mysterious – she’s literally the only other person I’ve seen living on that street.’
Pip shifted in his beanbag. His periscope eyes zoomed in. ‘A mysterious chick who lives in the woods? Sounds hot.’
‘Sounds what?’ Jella called, looking around distractedly.
‘I mean, sounds not,’ Pip self-corrected. ‘Undead alert, Jella.’
Too late. Gore splattered the screen, and she sighed as she found herself on the restart menu. She dropped her controller and twisted in the beanbag.
