The Sisters Grimm

by Menna Van Praag

  “Oh,” Leo says. “But that’s all right, I can get you a job.”

  “Really?” I look up, instantly caught by those green eyes and unable to look away. I should be speaking, should be enquiring as to the details, relaying my qualifications, but I can’t form a coherent sentence or thought.

  Leo smiles.

  I smile back. He steps towards me. I hold my breath.

  He reaches out. I lean forward.

  Then I stumble back again, bumped by an errant tourist with a selfie stick. I trip, then right myself, catching his eye again. “So, um, this job sounds great. What does it involve exactly?”

  “Well”—Leo casts a glance at the oblivious tourist—“My father owns a chain of hotels, he’s here opening a new one—”

  “Your father?” I say, feeling the great canyon of wealth and class between us deepen. “I hardly think he would hire me to—”

  Leo laughs. “Oh, don’t worry about that. He won’t remember you—he doesn’t pay any attention to the staff. Anyway, he doesn’t do the hiring, I do.”

  “You do?” I can’t keep the note of surprise from my voice, though I stop short of revealing that I know plenty of other things about him, such as can only be gleaned from reading a person’s private diary.

  “I’m only helping him out. I’m studying here, so . . .” Leo trails off, perhaps not wanting to further highlight the gulf in our circumstances. “Anyway, he’s just acquired the Hotel Clamart, the one on—”

  “I know it,” I say. “It’s . . . fancy.”

  “Well, if you want a job there, it’s yours.”

  “Really?” I ask, trying not to sound quite as desperate as I am. “That’d be a—but you already know, I’m not . . .”

  “Oh, I don’t think we’ll have a problem with that.” Leo smiles, as if we’re sharing a particularly pleasing secret. “So long as you’re discreet.”

  I look at him, but he shrugs.

  “Minimum wage is scandalous, especially as reparation for cleaning toilets. Our guests are richer than they deserve. I don’t see that a little . . . redistribution of wealth is going to hurt anyone.”

  I grin. “You must be the most understanding boss I’ve ever had.”

  “Does that mean you’ll take the job?” He smiles and, all at once, I want to kiss him. “I felt so guilty for getting you fired, and now—”

  “It wasn’t your fault. If I hadn’t been . . .” I glance at the strangers milling around us, though no one’s listening. “. . . stealing from you in the first place, then . . .”

  Leo’s smile deepens. “Oh, we both know you weren’t doing anything of the sort.”

  “No, I—”

  “You were reading my diary.”

  Now I wish I’d run. “Oh, God, I—I’m s-sorry,” I say, unable to deny it. “I never should have, it’s . . . unforgivable. It’s . . . after I saw you, I felt . . . And I couldn’t, I just couldn’t . . .”

  “Nothing is unforgivable,” Leo says, lifting his hand to settle lightly on my shoulder. “Especially not something as small as that.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  He looks at me with such tenderness then that all I can think is: I’ll be working in his hotel. I’ll see him every day. I can hardly believe my luck.

  4:34 p.m.—Leo

  Leo knew what had happened at the hotel. He knew about the finger, the firing, and the fact that the greasy manager had tried to set the police on Goldie. But since Garrick had been unwilling to divulge the circumstances of how exactly his finger had found its way into her mouth in the first place, that particular investigation had died a quick death.

  Now Leo wonders if he can finagle a few more management shifts from his father at the hotel. It shouldn’t be a problem, since his father is such a great believer in hard work, in “getting one’s hands dirty.” A pretence, since naturally his father never expects him to go anywhere near a begrimed lavatory.

  God, how he’d wanted to hold her, to kiss her . . . He wonders how Goldie would react if she knew a day hasn’t passed when he hasn’t thought about her. He felt how much she wanted to touch him too, how much effort she’d exerted to hold back. Seducing her will be far easier even than he’d imagined. Though he’ll have to be careful not to unbalance this strange alchemy of desire and death that he sustains within himself. For regardless of how lustful he feels towards his opponent, in twenty-three days they must fight to the death. And no matter how Leo might feel for Goldie, he would still rather live than die.

  6:40 p.m.—Bea

  Bea has been feeling uneasy, as if she’s being watched, as if she’s being stalked by something or someone who half wants to be seen. Now and then she turns to catch sight of him, to give shape to the shadow flickering at the edges of her eye line. But whenever she looks, the shadow has gone.

  Several times, it feels as if this shifting is happening from within, as if something is creeping up inside her by stealth. Bea tells herself she’s probably caught the flu, that she’d benefit from taking a break from the library and spending a few days in bed. Though nothing short of the bubonic plague will keep Bea from her desk. It’s a testament to how bad she feels that lately she hasn’t been able to even countenance going up in a glider. So she settles into the fuzzy-headed unease, an ache she will wait out.

  When staring at pages of dense philosophical text begins to hurt her eyes, Bea rests her head on her book, the paper cool on her skin; she feels a sudden need for the comfort of company. Since the death of her abuela three years ago, Bea has no one whose company brings cheer. Her mamá’s certainly doesn’t.

  She closes her eyes, clothing herself with a blanket of longing. A few minutes later, she sees him: a man standing in front of her. A man with golden eyes, white hair, and a face wrinkled as a dried plum.

  “Beauty,” he says. “What a pleasure to see you again, my love.”

  Her father. There is no one else he can be, since she feels a sudden, reluctant affinity with him that she’s only ever felt before with her mamá. And he says her name as if he was the one who gave it to her.

  “You can do anything you wish, Bea,” he says, as if replying to a question. “You are bound by nothing—not the laws of gravity, nor the properties of the physical world. Only the limits of your own imagination.”

  When Bea doesn’t respond, he holds out his left hand, palm up, as if making an offering. Then he raises his arm. Bea watches as, all at once, an entire library shelf is stripped clean of books that lift into the air as one, cover to cover, spine to spine. They hover there for a moment, then begin to separate, displaying a concertina of pages. Bea stares open-mouthed as the pages become feathers and the feathers become wings, and the spines of the books shift and fatten into the bodies of birds.

  Her father nods: an instruction. Bea pushes back her chair, climbs onto it, and stands on the table as she’d done before. Then she outstretches her left arm, opens her hand, palm up, and begins curling and uncurling her fingers.

  “That’s right, good girl.”

  Bea imagines herself tapping on invisible keys, as if she’d learned to play the piano long ago and is trying to recall her favourite sonata. But the book-birds don’t move. They hover in the air, waiting. Bea’s about to drop her hand when her father gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head. So her fingers continue searching for something, until she strikes the first note of the sonata and, all at once, the book-birds begin to transform.

  The leather-bound volumes stretch and shift into eagles that soar to the library ceiling, circling in long, elegant loops, stirring the stale air with the beat of their wings. Slight, yellowed paperbacks become flittering, twittering canaries; dense textbooks grow into magpies, ravens, or jays, according to subject. Oversized manuscripts assume the shape of swans that glide so effortlessly past every other bird they might be entirely alone. Every first edition floats elegantly to the wooden floor, as white pages elongate into emerald-sapphire feathers to adorn peacocks that strut
proudly along the library aisles.

  Bea gawps, awestruck, at her creations. She is Hera, Isis, Gaia. She is all the goddesses of birth, of life, of all that she surveys. She feels her father’s smile of pride, the sudden warmth of the sun on her cheek. And, in that moment, she will do anything to keep that smile, to evoke it again.

  “Yes,” he says. “And now what?”

  Without asking, she knows what he wants. So, under his gaze, Bea shifts and transforms until she is Kali, Nephthys, Athena. The goddesses of death and war.

  With a single snap of forefinger and thumb, Bea brings the eagles swooping down from the ceiling, screeching through the air, their talons ripping through feathers, their beaks snapping through bone in a riot of colour and blood. Until at last the library is a silent battlefield with the victors feasting on the dead and the feathers of the slain still floating to the floorboards like the perpetually falling leaves of Everwhere.

  Bea catches her father’s eye and mirrors his smile. She has fulfilled his wish and made him proud. She is his protégée, his legacy. She will execute his every desire.

  Her father nods. “Yes, you are, my love. And I know you will.”

  Then he’s gone. Before he has a chance to tell her what his desires are. Still, the echo of his voice remains, along with the shimmer of his smile. But it’s not this that freezes Bea when she opens her eyes, not the shock nor the stain of blood. It’s her growing sense that the massacre wasn’t a dream but a memory.

  Over a decade ago

  Goldie

  I wanted to grow up quickly, to leave home and find my own way in the world. Maybe other children felt secure in the clutches of their parents, tethered to the ground, rooted in the soil. But I didn’t; I longed to drift through life like an unplanted seed, a lucky puff of dandelion or milkweed, no one watching, no one telling me what to do.

  In Everwhere it was different. There I could be a floating seed in a place full of floating seeds and falling leaves. There we could go where we wished, before being brought together on currents of water and air. We didn’t need a meeting place or a map. We were drawn to one another, like spawning salmon or migrating birds. As soon as I stepped into Everwhere something inside me switched on—a radar that resonated with my sisters. The feeling I had there of belonging, of connecting, was not a feeling I’d ever known before. But the first time I felt it, I knew what it was. And every night I followed this beacon until I found them.

  Most of the time we’d stick together, but sometimes we’d split up. One night I sat with Bea in the glade, while Scarlet and Ana searched for a river and a midnight swim. I’d conjured up an elaborate excuse not to go; Bea simply said she couldn’t be bothered.

  “This place is real, you know. You’re not dreaming.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Mamá told me,” Bea said. “She’s a Grimm too, so she knows.”

  I frowned. “What’s a Grimm?”

  Bea laughed. Her full name, and I don’t know how I knew, since I’d never asked, was “Beauty.” Personally, I’d be mortified to have such a name, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “Don’t you know?” Bea asked, still laughing. “How don’t you know that?”

  I shrugged, trying to pretend it didn’t matter to me either way.

  But Bea, seeing straight through me, gave a self-satisfied grin. “I can’t believe you don’t know what you are,” she said. “You’re a Grimm. So am I, my mamá too.” Her smile shifted then into something else: a little nice, a little nasty—as if she loved and hated me both. “Your mamá isn’t, or she’d have told you. So you’re not pure Grimm like me.”

  I tried to shrug again, but I couldn’t. “Okay,” I persisted, wishing I didn’t have to ask again. “But what’s a Grimm?”

  Liyana

  “I have news.”

  Liyana looked up at her mummy, excited by the promise in her voice.

  Isisa smiled. “Auntie Nya’s coming to stay for a few days.”

  Liyana’s excitement evaporated. “Boring,” she said, returning to her drawing.

  “Don’t say that, Ana. You love your auntie.”

  Liyana picked a red crayon out of her box. “She’s only coming to visit because she’s lonely, because she’s getting divorced again. She never visits otherwise.”

  “That’s not . . . Well, anyway we’ll cheer her up. She’ll be happy to see you. You can help heal her broken heart. That’s what family is for, Ana.”

  Liyana bit down the sudden anger that swelled in her like a gathering wave. She didn’t want to be responsible for healing anyone’s heart—the burden of her mummy’s expectations was enough, without adding her aunt’s hopes on top.

  “Dagã doesn’t have a broken heart.” Liyana reached for an orange crayon to capture Scarlet’s hair and the fire sparking in her hands. “She loves money, not husbands.”

  “Hush,” her mummy said. “And you shouldn’t be so contemptuous of money, only people who have it do that. Aunt Nya’s money is the reason we’re here.”

  Liyana wanted to say that she didn’t think that was such a great thing. She wanted to ask the meaning of “contemptuous” but didn’t, in case her mummy scolded her for not already knowing.

  Biting the end of her orange crayon, Liyana also wanted to ask why her mummy had never had even one husband, skirting a sneaky side street into the question of her own father. But timing was everything with her mummy and now was not the right time. Perhaps when she was drunk with Aunt Nya.

  “Maybe you could find a husband, Da— Mummy, then you might be—”

  “Hush!” Isisa’s simmering anger suddenly boiled over. “Don’t talk nonsense, vinye.”

  “But maybe he’d be better than Daddy,” Liyana persisted. “Maybe—”

  She stopped as if she’d just been slapped. Her mummy narrowed her eyes. Silence shifted the air like static before a storm.

  Liyana fixed her eyes on her drawing, trying to think of something to say to make everything better again. “I, um . . . do you like my picture?” Liyana held it up, hiding her face behind the page.

  Her mummy glanced at it. “Colour inside the lines, Ana,” she said. “You’re not a baby anymore.”

  Scarlet

  Scarlet stared into the flames. She stood as close as she could to the fire, closer than anyone else, her gloveless hands clutching the protection rail, glowing in the firelight. She wished Bonfire Night was celebrated every day, instead of once a year. She wished her mother would light fires in their fireplace at home; she wished she was allowed to do it alone. Sometimes Scarlet found herself gazing into the empty grate, conjuring imaginary flames. Sometimes she did this so well she could feel their heat on her cheeks.

  For a moment Scarlet pulled her gaze from the bonfire to her mother standing behind her. There she was, gazing intently into the fire. But, strangely, Scarlet also felt as if she weren’t there, as if she’d wandered off to find toffee apples, perhaps. The chance to watch her mother like this, unseen, to stare as long as she wanted, was rare. So she did. And as she did, Scarlet wished she could tether Ruby to the ground, to stop her taking flight.

  Finally, Scarlet took a step back and reached up to slip her bare hand into her mother’s gloved one. When their fingers touched, Ruby flinched. She glanced down, frowning as if she’d thought she was alone, as if she’d forgotten her daughter was there, as if she’d forgotten she had a daughter at all.

  Bea

  “You flew again?” Liyana asked. “Higher than the first time?”

  Bea nodded. “Above the trees, into the clouds.”

  “Are you sure?” Liyana asked. “You didn’t imagine it?”

  Bea scowled at the impertinent question, not dignifying it with an answer.

  “But how?” Liyana persisted. “How did you do it?”

  Bea shrugged. “Flying here is simple. You just have to want it enough, et voilà.” All at once she’s hovering above the ground, grinning down at us.

  “You’re so lucky.” Liy
ana sighed, gazing up at her elevated sister. “Can you teach me?”

  “I told you,” Bea said. “This place is created from thoughts, from . . . bright-white wishing, from black-edged desire. All you have to do is want to fly, and you will.”

  Liyana’s frown deepened, as did Bea’s smile.

  “We’re here to discover how powerful we are,” she said, rising higher. “And, once we’re able to do anything we want—in this world and the other—then we get to choose.”

  Liyana tipped her head back to stare up at Bea, though she could now only see the soles of her shoes.

  “Choose what?” Scarlet said, stepping forward into the clearing, her own feet bare on the moss.

  Bea’s laughter tumbled down, as if she’d just emptied a bucket of water onto their heads. She rose higher still and, when she spoke again, they strained to hear, only catching occasional words they couldn’t string into comprehensible sentences.

  Though she delighted in teasing her sisters, Bea looked forward to seeing them. Every morning and afternoon she ticked each dreary daylight hour off on her fingertips, and she never fought bedtime. Sometimes she’d even fall asleep before seven, in order to visit Everwhere all the sooner. But, in addition to seeing her sisters, Bea loved Everwhere because here she felt her father more vividly than anywhere else. Here was the only place she didn’t miss him, for his imprint was on every falling leaf, every drop of rain, every gust of wind. Sometimes Bea felt him watching her. Sometimes she whispered to him; sometimes he whispered back.

  Sometimes Bea guiltily wished that she didn’t have sisters, that she was the only daughter for her absent father to love.

  Leo

  “Leave him alone!”

  “Oh, yeah? And what are you going to do about it, Penury-Holmes?”

  Instead of answering, Leo strode up to the captain of the rugby team, who was pinning Christopher up against the school gates, and kicked him hard in the shin.