Fairytales for Wilde Girls

by Allyse Near

  The Fury was crouched over Isola, her red palms wrapped resolutely around her dagger’s handle. She was trembling slightly, not from cold or fear, but in the furious way that heralded her shocking transformation. While one hand was plunging the dagger down, the other seemed to be trying to wrench it upwards, and she huffed with the effort she was exerting into the checkmate.

  ‘Ruslana,’ Isola said again.

  ‘Princess,’ whispered the Fury, and she was shaking all over now, little eruptions racking her entire body as someone else’s anger fought her loyalty.

  Isola raised a hand to shield her face. Ruslana immediately forced the blade nearer, the edge cutting close to Isola’s right eye, hanging Damocles-style, the glinting guillotine.

  ‘No, no, I won’t, I don’t want to,’ Ruslana moaned, her sweat-slicked grip on the dagger increasing. Her wings were arching high over the bed, and a single black feather fluttered down to rest on Isola’s cheek.

  ‘I understand,’ whispered Isola, her breath hitching as the blade shivered closer. ‘I know this isn’t your fault.’

  The cold steel of the blade’s edge bit into the bridge of Isola’s nose. The tip aligned with her wide, watery iris.

  A tiny gasp of horror – but it wasn’t made by Isola. Tears fell thick and fast on Isola’s face; trickled into her hair.

  ‘Oh, Isola,’ came the whisper.

  The dense shadow above her vanished; the weight lifted from the bed.

  ‘What is it, querida?’ asked Alejandro urgently, two minutes too late. ‘Where is Ruslana? Why are you crying?’

  The Seventh Princess: An Instalment

  ‘The fourth dragon was Anger.

  ‘By now, there were only three princes remaining, and none knew what exactly had befallen their younger brothers, but they were certain that they would not be returning, and they each silently swore to escape their brother’s fates.

  ‘They walked closely together, and trod the most well-mapped paths through the rural edge of their kingdom, but as time passed and their quest seemed more futile than before, they began to squabble amongst themselves. They were entering the dragon’s domain now, and none were sure which path would be best to take, though each voraciously voiced his own opinion.’

  A rocking horse in the corner of Isola’s room blinked dolefully whenever she wasn’t looking; she narrowed her eyes, trying to catch it out.

  ‘Tiring of the rowing between his passionate oldest brothers, the third prince, the most calm and levelheaded, opted to walk away rather than engage in another pointless argument. This proved his downfall, for while the brothers shouted, they did not hear his cries for help, and the third prince never settled a discussion again in this world.’

  The Book of Revelation

  Mother Poe’s swollen belly was like a watermelon under her pink shirt, ready to split. She was kneeling in the herb garden, coaxing up the early bloomers.

  ‘Hello, Isola,’ said Lotus Blossom. ‘Would you mind very much if –?’ She held out her hand; Isola helped her upright. She wobbled on her feet. Her body seemed to be a protrusion from her belly, rather than the other way round.

  ‘What are you growing, Mrs P – Llewellyn?’ asked Isola, almost calling her ‘Poe’.

  ‘You mean apart from a baby?’ Lotus Blossom flashed a spark of a smile, then pointed down to the earth. ‘This’ll be basil, and a bit of dill here, and sage, and parsley – oh, parsley. That’s a sweet name.’ Her eyes glazed over, and she wandered back into the house.

  Isola stood a moment in the garden, the toxic waste of panic spilling through her. Lotus Blossom was so lovely. Edgar was lucky to have a mother like her. Her huge belly was beautiful, and her perfect family was whole and intact. What would happen to them if Isola didn’t figure this out? What would happen to him?

  She went upstairs to Edgar’s room, which had been overtaken with canvases, splattered with dark paint like a crime scene. Edgar was preparing a folio of work for his art final, and Isola elected to sit quietly and watch him thumb paint over his chin as he eyed the canvas with consternation.

  Isola flicked through his scattered sketchbooks. Charcoal and paints and chalk and paper-collage. On closer inspection, she decided the Whore didn’t look at all like Ruslana. In fact, her face seemed ugly in that mysterious way beauty could be – like a supermodel with dagger-ribs poking through, a flower with poison lacing its sticky nectar.

  She lingered on the apocalyptic images. Not drawings to her anymore, but prophecies coming true. As she lay awake every morning, deaf to Alejandro’s Spanish comfort, while the red drained out of leukaemia sunrises, she imagined the end of the world. The empty houses on empty roads. Rubble and acid rainstorms. Guillotined tulips, broken musical instruments. A bathtub flooding with black water; a hole in the earth where a tree once grew, now a skylight for the reigning aristocracy of hell. And there, marked by the single candle burning in the window, was the last living girl on the planet, the princess of a dead kingdom alone in her tower.

  Isola Interrupted

  Mother was watching a purportedly real exorcism on television. A punky girl in a black dress writhed on a stripped bed frame. Her ankles twisted like screws. She tore at her hair. Her eyes rolled up, only slick whiteness visible between the lashes.

  ‘How exactly is that helping?’ asked Isola, ever the sceptic.

  ‘They reckon it’s like the flu,’ said Mother, spooning melted ice-cream into her mouth. ‘You’ve got to sweat it out before you get better.’

  The hours ticked by, and neither of them went to bed. Isola waited for some kind of signal from Mother, an indication of normalcy – well, as normal as could be for her – but it was not forthcoming.

  Mother flicked over to an animal cruelty documentary. Cattle writhed on the abattoir floor. Everything twisted. ‘I know how you feel,’ she breathed when she didn’t think Isola could hear her.

  ‘You’re getting worse,’ Isola said, trying her hardest not to make it sound like an accusation.

  More than ever, Mother was coloured outside the sharp lines of her body; her personality and madness were clumsily sketched crayon-bright around her, so Isola could recognise her in a crowd, could sense her in the dark.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sola. I’m trying.’

  Isola believed her. She rang Dr Aziz.

  The appointment was hijacked. Instead of Mother telling the doctor about her own worsening problems, Mother described her worry. She said Isola wasn’t sleeping, that she watched junk television at all hours of the night and read disturbing fairytales, and she had bad dreams that seemed to intrude upon her waking eyes.

  If only they were, Isola thought, but she couldn’t say a word aloud. Not there in the sparkling white consultation room, walled in by the hanging certificate frames and the crayon drawings made by grateful healthy children.

  Concern oozed from both adults in the room. Worry: that most overpowering perfume. The smell of it on other people – the knowledge that they were worrying themselves over her – only made her feel ill.

  Dr Aziz in his slow, calming voice said, ‘It’s all right to feel this way, Isola.’ He was probably the most well-spoken person she knew, after Ruslana.

  Two weeks earlier, Isola had seen her oldest brother cry. When she’d told him why Ruslana had gone – her vision blurred with the Fury’s tears she couldn’t stand to wipe away – Alejandro had shown fear at last. He’d folded into himself, a star collapsing, and had curled at the foot of her bed.

  Fair Bright

  ‘Thanks for coming over, Jamie.’

  He scoffed. ‘You haven’t called me Jamie in six fucking years.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, you haven’t called in about the same.’

  He shrugged. He hid his fingers in his pockets, as if the truth was spelled out in his palms. ‘I’ve been busy.’

  She knew he hadn’t, and he still wasn’t pleased with her, but she sensed something in his voice – something melting between them.

  ‘My place, then? Or you
want to go for a wander in Viv’s Wood?’

  Nausea swept over her, snakes in her belly, as they both got in the car. ‘No. Away. I’m so tired of it here.’

  As Pepito chugged along, James suggested the beach, the local park, The G Spot.

  ‘No, no, and definitely not,’ Isola replied, sliding down in the passenger seat and putting her feet against the windscreen, tights hiding the bruises from view.

  He gave one last suck before spitting the cigarette out the window. ‘Wait – there’s one of those travelling fairs on the other side of town,’ said James. ‘D’you reckon that’d be fun tonight?’

  ‘Sure. She took a leaden breath, steeled herself to say it. ‘Just as friends, though.’

  ‘You’re assuming you’re still my friend?’ Surprisingly, he chuckled. ‘Sure. Whatever we are.’

  Loose change jangled in James’s pocket, a merry calypso ringing out. They had arrived on the carnival’s last night in town.

  Lights blurred even when they were still; long rows of sideshow attractions, all games rigged to win the lesser prizes. Children darted past her legs, shoals of ever-energised fish.

  She bought candy floss from a vendor, and stripped hunks off the wad of pink sugar froth. They dissolved on her tongue, as insubstantial as dreams. Sugar coursed with the heat of heroin through her veins. In seconds her neurons felt fully charged, her spine curling to attention. She could almost feel her pupils dilating, packs of blood cells roaming her ropey veins, her muscles and connective tissues, all the gristle and cartilage that made her up. Inside, she was a carnival of gore.

  Her heart thumped impatiently against her ribcage. Isola and James got in line for the carousel, and she imagined extracting her heart, finally silencing it, what it would feel like nestled in her palm, a damp bird, a royal ruby.

  She could feel eyes on her from some high place but she daren’t look up. She already knew.

  This was the place.

  The fairground where a freckled teenage boy had thrown himself from the top of a luminous Ferris wheel, and Isola’s world had been infiltrated by death. An infection, seeping in through a tiny wound, a crack in her skin – what Dr Aziz called a predisposition. A family history.

  Isola chose a carousel horse that looked vaguely like the leader of the unicorn herd – except last time she’d seen him, when she was nine, he’d been skeletal and starving. Alejandro had promised he was still alive, but not much more than that. She leaned down, wrapped her arms around the cold neck, and squeezed her eyes against the bucking lights like whirling dervishes. Even here, even now, she couldn’t escape the Nimues.

  Averting her eyes from the shadowy figure looming gothic over the Ferris wheel, she pretended it was like old times.

  That night Isola and James lived in delicious pieces – memory broken up like chocolate chunks: rides, slings and carriages and flying compartments, then sideshow games, then they were buying popcorn and toffee apples, then James took her hand and pulled her much too close and Isola couldn’t help but pull away.

  Isola and James: At Last, a Conversation

  ‘I’m so sorry, James. But . . . I can’t. I do like you, of course I like you! You don’t understand, I love you so much – you’re my brother. You’ve been like a brother for so long.’

  ‘And that’s all I’ll ever be.’

  ‘Jamie –’

  ‘That’s all, right?’

  ‘Yes . . . I’m sorry.’

  ‘Spare me.’

  His Endless List of Reasons

  The poison spilled from him, words she couldn’t bear to hear. That she’d led him on, and she always would. She used him when she wanted comfort and company and was never willing to set any distance, any parameter around herself, and it was her fault, why did she have to be so beautiful, why did she want to hurt him so badly?

  Isola didn’t interrupt. James was the second prince – a brother, she’d always told him, though he’d never understood the title, the importance of his role in her imagined hierarchy.

  She wanted desperately to believe that this was James possessed, like she thought Ruslana and Christobelle and Rosekin and Grandpa Furlong had been before they left her. But he wasn’t a Nimue and Florence didn’t know him, couldn’t harm him. James Sommerwell was influenced by nothing but his own feelings, and he couldn’t help it, the same way she couldn’t help not loving him back.

  James gave a yakuza sneer. ‘You’re not a real girl.’ He flicked his cigarette to the dust and stomped out the flame. ‘You’re an illusion. A ghost of the smart, sweet, real girl Isola Wilde could have been.’

  ‘The first Isola,’ she muttered.

  ‘No, you! The only Isola!’

  That set him off again; he was shouting now, and through his open mouth streamed old pains, bats from a gaping cave. At once Isola felt weedy hair creeping down the intricate corridors of her lungs, heard a mandolin willingly accompany a broken singing voice.

  His face was a murderer’s death mask – yet another brother, another switch in loyalties. He would hurt her like the others had with their words and their deeds and sometimes their hands, and she couldn’t bear to face it again, couldn’t stand to be the princess slaughtered not by dragons but by brothers.

  She was lost in the only place she felt at home, a forest she had memorised, and her bruised legs pulsed with blood and her neck burned and her ribs felt as cold as steel and her ears rang from imagined bombs as she flinched away, shouting, ‘No! Please, please don’t hurt me! Don’t kill me!’

  Unfamiliar faces circled them, shocked but entranced, like the witnesses to the Boy’s suicide. They could have been the same spectators.

  Most shocked of all was James. His fists uncurled and his face said it, in a language he didn’t even speak.

  She ran, tearful and blind. She pushed through the line and slammed herself into an empty carriage. As it ascended, accompanied by mechanical groans and the awed exclamations of her fellow passengers, Isola Wilde sat with her eyes squeezed shut. She waited until she reached the top of the Ferris wheel to open them.

  As expected, he was sitting opposite her in the cramped carriage. Their knees brushed. He looked concerned.

  The Boy’s freckles were darker up close, or maybe his skin was milkier. He had long eyelashes and a grinning line of pimples on his chin. A perfectly normal teenage boy. Not possessed by anything but sadness.

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  The Boy lowered his gaze.

  ‘Relationship issues?’ Isola hiccuped, repeating the list of reasons discussed at school. ‘Bullies? Problems at home? Brain chemistry?’

  She looked down at the earth so far away. The taste of immortality bloomed on her tongue and she downed it; a tequila shot sucked straight from Death’s bones, through those little holes we drill to drink from, those risks taken.

  ‘Family history? Best friend abandoned you? Boy you love as a brother loves you a little too much? Your princes ran away?’

  His eyes were prisons, capturing her, locking them inside together. ‘Didn’t matter why. Not really. Not afterwards.’

  Wordlessly, they embraced. Isola and the Boy rode the Ferris wheel, never loosening their hold on each other or mopping up their tears, never looking down.

  The Seventh Princess: An Instalment

  ‘The fifth dragon,’ said Mother in a low voice, ‘was Hatred.’

  ‘Two princes. That’s all that remained in the party of royal siblings that had set out to rescue the seventh princess. Panic had set in. The second brother was the most loving, and that profound love made him passionate; his passion made him reckless. He was desperate to find his sister and get her home before any more evil befell her and their family. He wanted to travel through the most dangerous lands to save time. The oldest brother, who was steadfast and loyal, declared that they would follow the path set out for them by the King. They argued and shouted, and the second prince, so blinded by his love –’

  ‘Don’t do it!’ squealed Isola, beseeching th
e prince in the story.

  ‘– followed his heart, not his brother, which led him into the jaws of the fifth dragon. The second prince never loved another again in this world.’

  Stopped Clock

  Isola had never felt more alone. She was cut off from everyone; she couldn’t unfreeze herself in Grape’s company no matter how hard she tried. She jammed her thumbs under the mask but it wouldn’t slip, and she didn’t feel like herself anymore.

  She avoided Edgar; after what happened with James, she had felt a resurgent desperation to keep him untainted by the wickedness that seemed to follow her, although she knew this new determination would pass; she needed the comfort he offered, and staved off the inevitable trip across the street by clinging to Alejandro, and her room, and the heavy book of fairytales, which almost never left her arms.

  Mother, meanwhile, now spent her days in bed, her nights in the bath, and most of her evenings in between at the Church of the Unlocked Heart.

  Her church-going didn’t seem like the usual concentrated pouring of energy that characterised her manic cycle. Isola suspected she secretly believed that they might have the liquid gold cure hidden somewhere about their church. Scratched around the edges of old coins in the collection plate, perhaps, or frozen in lumps inside the altar candles, or wedged between the confessional doors, or even buried in code amidst the personal revelations of the group therapy sessions.

  Isola couldn’t begrudge her wishful thinking, but she felt resentful nevertheless. How could Mother not notice Isola’s pain, when Isola had spent years tending to hers?

  Father didn’t even notice when Mother was gone from Number Thirty-six.

  They were a household of people, each living alone.

  The inevitable came in March. Returning from the Church, Mother slammed the door a little harder than usual, and threw off her coat with livid gusto.

  ‘You would not believe the audacity of those people!’ she roared. ‘An exorcism, Isola! They tried to perform an exorcism on me!’