Fairytales for Wilde Girls

by Allyse Near

  ‘Got me. I’m actually the ghost of a Spanish dandy who died two hundred years ago in an opium den.’

  He led the way to his room, and there was a slight pause in conversation, like a gap between teeth. She decided to give him a glimpse into the truth; as much as he could handle without becoming a second James Sommerwell.

  ‘My mum . . . She’s sick because of me.’

  ‘What?’ said Edgar in surprise.

  ‘Well, it was there already. The illness, but only quietly. Dormant. When I was born, I . . . recontaminated her.’ Parasite baby, thought Isola. She should have melted to keep her mother from dissolving.

  ‘You’re not a disease, Isola Wilde.’

  It was as if Edgar had heard her thoughts. Maybe his braces picked up on brainwaves.

  Edgar’s room had the air of an art studio, smelling strongly of paint and charcoal, crayons and clay. It had bright posters of giant robot anime from the ’80s and of great space operas with gunslingers and busty girls, the kind full of blood spatters washed pink by American editors. His bookcase was crammed with epic fantasy, mainstream horror, and multiple editions of the Harry Potter novels in various states of disrepair from vigorous re-reads. Adorning the floor were ripped-knee jeans in every shade of black.

  They had both trekked in mud from the yard. Isola imagined daisies and weeds sprouting from the carpet in the spring.

  He kicked off his shoes, rubbing his palm over the fantastic wound that was rising into a ropey scar.

  ‘You know,’ said Isola pointedly, ‘I half-expected your leg to turn green and fall off.’

  He blushed. ‘Sorry I made you do that. When Mum went for a scan, Dad helped me sneak into the doctor’s office next door. I needed some antibiotics, but the doc thought it was really excellent work. She kept asking me whether I knew cross-stitching.’ He made a face, turning his scabbing wound away from her when Isola caught a glimpse of a tattoo on his bared ankle. She bent forward to look at it: a shapely mermaid reclining on the rock of his ankle bone, starfish over her nipples.

  ‘That,’ said Isola, pointing, ‘is amazing.’

  ‘Amazingly hideous,’ Edgar said, grimacing. ‘It’ll be gone soon enough.’

  ‘Sorry to break it to you,’ said Isola, ‘but soap won’t cut it.’

  ‘What about a cheese grater?’ Edgar grinned at her appalled expression. ‘It’s not permanent, I swear. I just drew it on. I was drunk and my mate Pip convinced me it’d improve my collection. Look.’ He rolled his jeans up to his knees. Above the mermaid was a rocketship, a Celtic cross, a tiger, an ankh, and an octopus sucking on the mast of a doubloon pirate ship.

  ‘Wow! You drew all that?’ Isola’s eyes traced a suction cup on an octopus tentacle, the whiskers on the haughty tiger’s face. ‘You’re brilliant. Really brilliant.’

  ‘Cheers.’ Edgar shrugged as through tossing off the weight of her compliment. ‘I wanted to show you something else while you were here.’ He opened his laptop, clicked the mouse a few times. ‘You know Oscar Wilde wrote a poem about his sister Isola? It’s called Requiescat – do you know it?’

  Isola shook her head, and he read aloud from the screen:

  Tread lightly, she is near

  Under the snow,

  Speak gently, she can hear

  The daises grow.

  All her bright golden hair

  Tarnished with rust

  She that was young and fair

  Fallen to dust.

  Lily-like, white as snow,

  She hardly knew

  She was a woman, so

  Sweetly she grew.

  Coffin-board, heavy stone,

  Lie on her breast;

  I vex my heart alone,

  She is at rest.

  Peace, peace; she cannot hear

  Lyre or sonnet;

  All my life’s buried here,

  Heap earth upon it.

  Her eyes gazed into the future, and she said in a voice that seemed to emerge from deep water, ‘I might’ve heard it before. But I can’t remember where.’

  She went to the precarious Leaning Tower of Sketchbooks beside his unmade bed and riffled through a book without invitation. She made an accidental charcoal fingerprint. His drawings were as intricate and beautiful as his impermanent tattoos, the sketchbooks filled with apocalyptic cityscapes, imperial horsemen and burnt-out suns. Gladiators with antlers. Strange blonde girls dressed in glass.

  A graphite sketch of a wild woman in bulletproof underwear perched on the ridged crown of a dragon’s head caught Isola’s attention.

  She smiled. ‘Ruslana . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She tapped the sketch. ‘I like her outfit. She reminds me of someone.’

  ‘The Whore?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Whore of Babylon.’ Edgar tossed pillows haphazardly on the bed and started stacking up half-finished canvases to give the appearance of a clean room. ‘She’s from the Bible. Pip put me on to it. I love that kind of mad stuff.’

  ‘You’d really like Lileo Pardieu’s stories, then,’ said Isola mildly, tracing the Whore’s wicked pencilled grin.

  Suddenly the bedroom door opened, and Mrs Llewellyn entered, a rattling tub under her arm. Both Edgar and Isola sat up straighter and Isola shut the sketchbook, as though they’d been caught doing something wrong.

  ‘Hello, there,’ she said warmly, smiling at Isola.

  Isola ducked her head, unable to shake the feeling that a scandalously intimate moment had been suspended between her and Edgar like a spiderweb, then broken with the scraping of doorframe on carpet.

  ‘You always forget,’ Mrs Llewellyn said under her breath as she dropped the tub in front of her son. Edgar’s cheeks reddened and he muttered something unintelligible back. His mother gave an exasperated sigh and whispered, ‘Well, there’s no need to be embarrassed.’

  As Mrs Llewellyn left, Isola peered into the tub with interest, barely suppressing a flinch when she realised what was inside.

  Pills. Packs, bottles and boxes of them, all with Edgar’s name on the labels. He was busily popping tablets from their blister packaging at an incredible speed, chasing them down with a glass of water, which had been precariously placed atop a tray of watercolours. He didn’t speak and Isola didn’t question him as she was momentarily trapped in the ugly past, back to when Mother was double-dosing, to the rattling that echoed down the hallway between her room and her mother’s, the bulging bathroom cabinet, the tablets swept surreptitiously under tongues.

  Finally, Edgar seemed to have taken the last of his pills. He looked at her, his brow furrowed, his cheeks still flushed. He gulped down the rest of the water, and said quickly, smothering a burp, ‘They’re legal.’

  ‘You take more tablets than my mum,’ said Isola.

  He shrugged. ‘I had a transplant. Kidney. I was entirely yellow for, like, all of last year.’

  She imagined him then, with skin like the pages of an old, unpopular book. Surprised at his forthrightness, she asked, ‘And you take all these every day?’

  ‘Yep.’ He hiked up the front of his shirt, and her eyes flashed down and back to meet his in an instant.

  Isola avoided gazing at the ugly scar across his belly, instead noticing the blush had spread to his elf-like ears. With a start, she realised he really was embarrassed to be telling her this, as though it were something to be ashamed of.

  ‘I think it looks quite rugged,’ Isola told him, and he grinned awkwardly, snorting when she added, ‘it’s like a hardcore tattoo. Done with a knife.’

  As Isola ran her mother’s bath and Christobelle showed up to gossip, as usual, Isola described Edgar’s inky skin to the mermaid, who flicked her fin and listened with bright-eyed interest.

  ‘Starfish on her tits?’Christobelle giggled and cupped her breasts in bemusement. Stretched out in the bathtub Isola was filling for Mother, the mermaid wore nothing but reams of red and white pearls woven through her hair and looping ove
r her chest. Isola was well used to her voluptuous nudity. ‘How would you get them to stick?’

  That night, before she fell asleep, Isola wrote ‘starfish tits’ on the desecrated pink wall behind her bed. She kept her journal not in notebooks but on her walls, out in the open, in a room that no-one ever came to visit. Father never even came upstairs where Mother and Isola lived, allowing their femininity to grow and tangle and choke up the rooms, girlishness running unchecked.

  Nearly all of the scribbles were illegible now, years of strange-tasting foreign phrases, bad teenage poetry and cemetery epigraphs jostling for space. She wrote down everything her mother ever bade her to remember; ‘Don’t eat my time’ was still shining in glossy navy paint over an older, favoured Plath quote. One day, she was certain, no trace of pink would be visible under the words, the manic scrawl having turned the wall a uniform black, resembling what she imagined writer’s block to feel like. All those words, reduced to meaning-lessness without the pure spaces between.

  Isola would scrawl her diary in the perfect blue slate above with a skywriter if she could, or with the Wicked Witch’s broomstick, Surrender Dorothy-style. She didn’t mind if people saw, if they knew.

  But if she ever etched her thoughts in the sky, no-one in the world would look up. The more she wanted to tell people, the more they determined themselves to look away.

  Viking

  The embattled plum tree emerged from the melting snow, officially dead. She slotted two silver coins amongst its wizened tendrils.

  It had been coming for so long, but Isola was still struck silent, shocked. Father Wilde had taken it upon himself to dig up the twisted remains. Isola had watched him from the kitchen window as he sweated and struggled to thrust the shovel through the hard ground. She and the brother-princes had then gathered to give it a Viking’s funeral. They’d found the driest patch of earth and had lit a bonfire in the backyard. Spots of firelight had danced on the window of Mother’s room, but she hadn’t come down.

  Isola hadn’t seen true fire in years, not unless it was twining itself around the tip of James’s cigarette. There was a fantastically ornate fireplace in their house, but it was never lit. Isola didn’t allow it. She was too afraid.

  ‘What d’you mean? Why are you scared?’ Father had asked.

  ‘Because,’ a five-year-old Isola had said, jutting out her chin and stamping a Lilliput foot, ‘there’s a scary dragon living in the chimney!’

  ‘There’s no such thing as dragons,’ Father had replied gruffly.

  ‘Yes there is! And you can’t light a fire there ’cause the dragons like dark cramped places, and if we wake him up he’ll get mad!’

  Only Mother could settle her. She would gather Isola on her lap and strike the match against the brick wall, the red plume dancing witch-like in her palm. As she magicked into life a roaring fire, she would explain to Isola that the ashy chimney was devoid of slumbering dragons, just like how were no monsters in the attic, how innocent shadows didn’t mean to make shapes, how only shoes lived under her bed.

  Now that Mother had trapped herself under blankets upstairs, spiders spun webs in the fireplace, and if Isola listened hard enough, she thought she could hear something in the chimney.

  Isola Juvenalia

  Christmas break was almost over; Edgar had been sending her updates on his holiday – they were somewhere repulsively warm, and he teased her about Avalon’s cold snap, and sent her blurry photos of all the Llewellyns. Isola smiled at the images of a grumpy Portia peeling patches of sunburnt skin off her forehead, the cheap plastic tourist souvenirs of which Mother Poe had bought ten, the hapless teen graffiti on priceless monuments.

  There hadn’t been any more signs from the dead girl, and Isola wondered whether it was the lack of Edgar that had prompted it. Still, she couldn’t help but feel he was safer when they were apart, whatever country he walked in, and the thought that she, Isola, was somehow worsening Edgar’s life, twinged like a proper ache at the back of her mind.

  ‘She only turned up when Edgar moved in,’ Isola said, restless fingers picking grout out of the roof tiling. ‘Maybe it’s better for him to stay away from me.’

  ‘Remember, Blue Eyes,’ Grandpa Furlong said as they perched on the roof once again, ‘they can be jealous, these creatures, split down the middle of their very souls. Maybe she doesn’t want y’ to have somethin’ she never will ’gain. However, that doesn’t mean y’ have to give up this Mr Llewellyn.’ He blew a turquoise smoke ring, looking suddenly uncomfortable. ‘If you ever want to talk to me ’bout, y’know, men, or ’bout takin’ a lover –’

  Isola gave a shocked yelp and nearly fell of the roof. ‘Grandpa! Edgar’s just – I mean, you don’t need to give me The Talk. I’m sixteen and a half!’

  ‘Y’right,’ said Grandpa Furlong gruffly, his keen eyes watching from under his hat as the smoke escaped Aurora County, almost as though fleeing the awkward conversation. Isola supressed a sigh of relief, but the old man wasn’t finished: ‘Y’right, Isola. Y’ Papa’ll teach y’ ’bout that when y’r older.’

  On the first day of term, she pulled back the curtains, her eyes watering at the painfully bright sun glaring on the slick roads. Edgar’s car was in his driveway, and she smiled tiredly, glad he was back.

  She stumbled to the bathroom and promptly slipped in the puddle of water streaming under the door.

  ‘What – oh, Christ, Mum,’ muttered Isola, climbing to her feet. The soaked hallway carpet wafted musty air. Water snaked towards the stairs.

  Isola pulled open the door. The bright chandelier blinded her again, but through the black vision-spots loomed the familiar sight of Mother languishing in the bathtub.

  Her head lolled at the edge. Her eyes were closed and still.

  ‘Mum!’ shrieked Isola. ‘Mum, wake up!’

  Isola tripped at the tub’s side, wrapped her arms around Mother’s naked torso and hauled her upright. The water was ice-cold. She drew back her hand and slapped Mother as hard as she could, and was rewarded with a cry of pain.

  ‘Ouch, Sola,’ murmured Mother, twisting her red-marked face away as she emerged from her unconscious state.

  ‘Mum!’ Isola felt as though cold fingers were squeezing her heart, strangling the small red bird that slumbered there. Instead of relief, she felt unbridled rage overcome her. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she yelled. ‘Have you been in here all bloody night? You could have drowned! What were you thinking?’

  ‘You can’t talk to me like that,’ Mother said thickly, her eyelashes flickering like butterfly wings. ‘I’m your mother.’

  ‘So act like it! Jesus, Mum – what is the matter with you?’

  Isola reached down and ripped the plug out by its chain. The water gurgled towards the drain.

  ‘I came in for a bath last night . . . must’ve fallen asleep . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it!’ Isola threw her hands over her ears childishly as the wretched tightness in her chest worsened. The fright had passed; Mother was all right, but why was she feeling worse with every passing second? ‘Just shut up and try to stand.’ Isola tried to tug her upright, but Mother continued to loll helplessly. ‘Mum, this is ridiculous. You could have died – oh, where’s Dad when you need him?’

  She knew as she spoke that, even if he was still home, he wouldn’t bother running upstairs to help. He had hauled Mother to her feet one too many times, both literally and figuratively.

  With a last groan of effort, Isola got Mother standing. She wrapped her in white towels, frantically rubbing her prunish skin.

  ‘Sorry, Isola.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Isola distractedly, although she was tired of hearing those two words put together. ‘I just don’t know how you could have slept here, what with the cold and the noise – maybe your medication’s too strong. When did you last see Dr Aziz?’

  ‘So sorry, Sola,’ Mother repeated weakly.

  Isola helped Mother down the hall to the master bedroom. She st
ill thought of it as her parents’ room, even though Mother slept here alone. Father had spent the past five years sleeping in the guestroom downstairs. He never even came up to visit her.

  She bundled Mother in her dressing gown and tucked her under the bedcovers. She switched on the electric blanket, and checked the labels on the bedside pills: May cause drowsiness. If affected, do not drive or operate heavy machinery.

  ‘Or bathe, or get out of bed, or be the adult,’ she said to the bottle, her voice soundtracked by Mother’s gentle sleep-breaths, and she left the door ajar.

  Downstairs: Father had already left for work. Isola overdosed on coffee and collected all the sharp objects around the house: knives, razors, scissors, a mother-of-pearl oyster fork, a letter opener topped with Nefertiti in her headdress.

  Back upstairs: she rolled Mother into the recovery position, like she’d seen done to drunks at parties to stop them swallowing their tongues or choking on vomit. Then Isola read her stories even though she couldn’t hear, made soup for when she eventually woke. She even called a poisons information hotline to be safe.

  She wore her school uniform all day. It only took creases to fool Father upon his return home that evening.

  The next morning, Isola stood dutifully with her head down, careful not to interrupt Sister K’s tirade. The nun practically blew steam out of her nostrils; an elderly cartoon bull.

  ‘Disrespectful, arrogant, disgusting!’ The nun stamped her cane against the flagstones for extra emphasis. ‘Missing school for no good reason is one thing, but not bothering to call – or being contactable, either – is worse! As far as I’m concerned,’ said Sister K, waggling a bony finger at Isola, ‘you’re on your last legs – and they’re getting wobblier!’

  The bell rang, and Bridget McKayde swanned past in the corridor crush, accompanied by her usual posse of time-eaters. Bridget smirked. Isola repressed the urge to give her a mocking heil.

  In Isola’s second year at St Dymphna’s, the vicious back-and-forth between Bridget and herself had got so bad that Sister K had rung Number Thirty-six to discuss it. Father had taken the call, and had spent the evening yelling at Isola – he worked so hard to make up the tuition money, and why did it always seem to be her who escalated the situation, and why couldn’t she just ignore those girls?