The Sisters Grimm

by Menna Van Praag

  4:34 p.m.—Liyana

  “I still think it’ll implode.”

  “Maybe not,” Liyana says, holding out her hand to catch the falling rain. Her hands are free since Kumiko, arms folded across her chest as she walks, has silently rebuffed Liyana’s overtures at hand holding.

  They’d sat inside Ottolenghi for three hours—making two lemon brûlée tarts last longer than anyone thought possible—analysing the potential problems of the proposal from every possible angle. Finally, Liyana persuaded Kumiko that they needed fresh air.

  “I think it might work.”

  “Is that what your aunt says?” Kumiko says, for the thirtieth time that afternoon, and more bitterly every time.

  “Let’s just see what he says.”

  Liyana follows Kumiko across Shillingford Street.

  “You never know, we might be able to work it out in a way to suit everyone.”

  “Then you’re more naive than your aunt,” Kumiko says. “What if he’s not content simply to sleep around. What if he wants kids?”

  “Then he’ll have to have them with someone else.”

  “He’s rich. He’ll want a legitimate heir,” Kumiko says. “He’ll want family photos and ridiculous Christmas cards with his fat squalling babies dressed as cherubs. He’ll want—”

  “We don’t know what he’ll want until I ask him,” Liyana says, for the twentieth time, though it feels like the fiftieth.

  “And who will I be in this cosy scenario?” Kumiko snorts. “The nanny?”

  “Oh, don’t be so melodramatic.” Liyana won’t admit it to Kumiko, but the idea of not having to work night shifts at Tesco—she’s been invited for an interview next Saturday—to fund three years at the Slade, the thought of graduating with no debt, makes her quite giddy. “It won’t be that bad. It won’t need to change anything at all.”

  “If you think that,” Kumiko snaps, “then you’re the naivest girl in London.”

  “Trust me,” Liyana says, desperate to step off the exhausting merry-go-round of an unwinnable argument. “All that matters is he agrees to a platonic arrangement. I won’t sleep with him. I won’t even kiss him, I promise.”

  “I should bloody well hope not.”

  Liyana sighs, thinking of BlackBird and how differently the conversation might be going if she had her heroine’s gumption. What happened to no longer being a pale ghost of herself, to being brave, to being bold? What happened to being fearless? Except that Liyana can’t pretend she’s not terrified of losing Kumiko. “It might not be so bad. It’s . . . suggesting the possibility of something, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, keep telling yourself that,” Kumiko says. “You just wait, you’ll see.”

  “But we don’t have to worry about all that yet, do we?” Liyana says. “It’s still early days. He hasn’t even agreed to anything yet.” She hasn’t told Kumiko about her trip to the priest. Nor the voice or its directive to find her sisters. She wants to, but her girlfriend is hardly in a receptive mood.

  Kumiko shakes her head. “You’re playing with fire, Ana.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  4:58 p.m.—Bea

  Bea sits in the University Library opposite Vali, who has his nose pressed up against Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while Bea studies Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction.

  “Jesus!” Bea slaps her hand down hard on the table, then looks slightly embarrassed. “Sorry,” she hisses, not directing this at Vali so much as the library itself. “Sorry.”

  Fortunately, it’s empty except for the two of them, although the librarian does throw an admonishing glare in her direction.

  “What did you do that for?” Vali hisses back.

  Bea, glancing at the librarian, leans across the table. “Bertrand Russell is a fucking genius,” she says in a high whisper. “I tell you, if he was alive today, I’d—have you ever had sex with someone just because they’re so fucking clever it blows your fucking mind?”

  Vali gives Bea his own softer, admonishing glare. “Hardly suitable discourse under present conditions, do you think?”

  “Why? Who am I going to offend?” Bea hisses. “You’re the only one here.”

  Vali shrugs. “Respect the sanctity of the church, perhaps.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bea frowns. “We’re not in church.”

  Vali nods at the vast bookshelves surrounding them in every direction, raising his eyebrows as if to suggest the books are parishioners huddled in their pews.

  “Right,” Bea concedes, giving a nominal nod at the books. “Sorry. But why are you suddenly so puritanical? What’s wrong with a bit of fucking now and then?”

  She eyes Vali—who’s now staring at Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with renewed purpose—scrutinizing him like she’s trying to fathom a particularly problematic philosophical theorem.

  “Oh, Christ.” Bea sighs. “I get it. You’re a virgin.”

  Vali remains glued to the page.

  “You are,” Bea persists. “Aren’t you?”

  Vali looks up, fixing her with a valiant stare that quickly, under her eagle eye, crumbles into a conceding shrug.

  “Oh, Val, we’re going to have to do something about that.”

  Vali attempts a smile but manages only a mournful gaze. Bea frowns, as fresh recognition dawns. She can read the truth on his chubby, hairy face as easily as she can read the truth in Principles of Social Reconstruction. Bertrand Russell is a fucking genius and Vali has never even been kissed.

  “Really?” Bea says. “Nothing, never? Not a blow job, not a peck on the lips?”

  Vali closes Wittgenstein, failing at a nonchalant shrug.

  Bea sighs. “Jesus, Val, just when I think you couldn’t be any more pitiful, you go and outdo yourself yet again.”

  6:26 p.m.—Scarlet

  Walking into the café, having nipped to M&S for a fish pie—it’s about time she fed her grandmother some nutrients—Scarlet stops. She hears music coming from the kitchen. And laughter. Hurrying across the creaking floorboards, she pauses at the open door.

  In the kitchen Esme is dancing, waltzing across the linoleum floor with Walt. He whispers in her ear and she giggles. On the radio Bessie Smith is singing “Back-Water Blues.” Scarlet knows every word to this song and every other Smith ever sang. She was raised on Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone . . . Now, seeing her grandmother happy, carefree, herself again, gives Scarlet more joy than she could have imagined possible.

  “Hey, boss,” Walt says, as Scarlet steps into the kitchen. “You never told me your grandma was so swift on her toes.”

  “Oh, yes, she’s a mover,” Scarlet says, wondering why he’s still here, since the recalcitrant dishwasher has, for a small fortune, finally been resurrected and all shelves now installed. “Taught me everything I know.”

  “Is that right?” Walt says, giving Esme a quick dip that makes her giggle. “Then will you give me the next dance?”

  “Oh, no.” Scarlet shakes her head. “No, she’s the dancer, not me.”

  Walt grins, reaching out his hand. “We’ll have no false modesty here,” he says. “Come on.”

  With a shrug, and only because Esme’s still smiling, Scarlet concedes, letting him pull her onto the dance floor. Nina Simone snatches up the next song, and the accelerating notes of “Sinnerman” fill the kitchen.

  “We can’t dance to this,” Scarlet protests. “It’s too fast.”

  “Pish,” Walt says. “Don’t be so defeatist. Anyway, you’ve got cause to celebrate.”

  “I have?”

  Drawing Scarlet to his chest, Walt starts to twirl her across the kitchen floor. “I’ve left your invoice on top of the till,” he says. “I’ve just come from fixing the air-con at Pembroke and . . .”

  Scarlet slows, pulling back. “How’s that cause for celebration?”

  Walt smiles. “Because I only charged you for parts, no labour. A hundred and forty-five pounds tot
al.”

  “No, but I . . .” Scarlet stops. “You can’t do that.”

  “I can and I did.” Walt shifts his feet. “So come on, let’s dance.”

  “But . . .” Scarlet says, still dragging hers. “But how?”

  Walt shrugs. “It’s my company, I can do what I like. Now, shut up and dance!”

  Scarlet squeals as he twirls her, around and around and around. Her grandmother claps. If I could be any happier right now, Scarlet thinks, I can’t imagine how. As Simone starts to sing “Go to the Devil, the Lord said . . .” Walt reaches out for Esme and brings Scarlet into her grandmother’s arms. Throwing him a grateful smile, Scarlet starts to slowly waltz across the kitchen with her grandmother.

  “Rube used to do that sometimes,” Esme whispers.

  Scarlet frowns. “What?”

  “That,” Esme says, nodding at the sparks firing from Scarlet’s fingertips.

  “Oh, sh—” Scarlet glances to Walt.

  Mercifully, the electrician isn’t watching but sneaking a cinnamon bun from an open tin on the counter. Mercifully too, Esme doesn’t seem remotely surprised or troubled by the phenomenon.

  “Did she—this happened to her too?” Scarlet whispers. “Are you sure?”

  “What?” Esme asks.

  “This,” Scarlet says, nodding at her hands. But the sparks have gone and her fingers are cool. And no matter how hard she tries, Scarlet cannot will them to spark again.

  11:48 p.m.—Leo

  Leo still plans how he’ll kill Goldie, even though, paradoxically, he now feels he can’t bear to hurt her. Lately, he finds himself increasingly thinking of the night he killed Goldie’s mother. He can’t tell Goldie, since it’ll cause her such pain and it’s the one thing that’ll ensure she’ll never love him in return.

  He’d done nothing unusual. Most mothers meet the same fate, since they’re defenceless when they come unwittingly to Everwhere on the coattails of their daughters’ dreams. Just as Goldie’s mother had done—her body remaining on Earth, her auric form in Everwhere—though teenage Goldie could, of course, no longer join her. So, once their spirit is extinguished in one world, their body simply dies in another. The soldiers kill them for sport, for practice. Or because their light is low and a mother’s death will buy them another month of life.

  However, since these kills are so unsporting, Leo has never taken any particular pleasure in extinguishing those flames. And he disagrees with his demonic father’s belief that the sainted mothers pose any great influential threat for the good—didn’t most daughters rebel against their mothers anyway? So their deaths tended to weigh on him, as the deaths of their daughters never had. Although he couldn’t have known that he’d have cause to regret one death so much.

  There’d been nothing remarkable about that night. Nothing special, nothing different, nothing strange. He’d been given his target. He’d heard her name, closed his eyes and seen her.

  Leo was fourteen. The nearest gate was in the grounds of the British Museum, fifteen minutes’ walk from home. He knew the way by heart, every street, every stone step. He followed streetlamps, golden breadcrumbs in the moonlight, his path curling past darkened windows and silent doors. The gateway stood behind the museum, a small side entrance on Bloomsbury Street. It was locked and looked as if it had been for the best part of two hundred years. It’d been Leo’s birthday three months earlier and his father had bought him a Patek Philippe watch at, as Charles Penry-Jones was always at pains to point out, great expense. Its intricate and delicate platinum cogs glinted in the silvery light. Leo kept his eyes fixed to its hands as they ticked towards the half hour. At 3:33 a.m., the silver light illuminated the ancient rusty gate and Leo pushed it open and walked through.

  He stepped not onto the clipped lawn of the museum’s grounds but into a place of falling leaves and rapacious ivy, of mist and fog, of moonlight and ice; a place always shifting but always still.

  It didn’t take Leo long to find her. Even as a child, his senses were stronger than any other soldier’s, including those who’d been around for centuries. He did it without question or hesitation. It was effortless. When Leo had placed his hand over her heart, when he’d taken the light from her, when her final breath had etched the seventh star onto his skin, he’d never given it a second thought.

  16th October

  Sixteen days . . .

  3:33 a.m.—Liyana

  Liyana wakes, hair sticky with sweat, T-shirt clinging to her chest. Her heart is beating so fast that the tips of her fingers throb with the pulse, and her lungs hurt as if she’s burst to the surface, taking her first breath after holding it underwater for far too long.

  She has just seen her sister.

  11:11 a.m.—Goldie

  “I’ve always loved gardens,” I say. We’re walking through the botanic gardens, over the rock gardens, towards the lake.

  “Me too,” Leo says.

  “Some of the trees are over five hundred years old.”

  “Magnificent,” Leo says. “You know, Pliny the Younger wrote that gardens feel so spiritual because the trees used to be the temples of the gods and neither the trees nor the gods have forgotten this.”

  “Who’s Pliny?” With anyone else I wouldn’t ask, I’d let the conversation continue, pretending by omission that I knew. I never feel embarrassed or ashamed by my ignorance with Leo.

  “A clever Roman chap who wrote a lot of stuff,” Leo says. “When can I meet your brother?”

  “What?”

  “You heard.”

  I’m silent. “I—I don’t know.”

  “You’re protecting him from me?”

  I shrug, unwilling to admit it. We reach the edge of the lake. Five flattened raised rocks, half submerged in the water, lie between us and the other bank.

  “Why?” Leo asks.

  “Not only from you,” I say. “From us.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I shrug again. “Well, if we . . . I mean, I don’t want him to meet you and love you and . . .”

  “And what?” Leo asks. “And then I leave and he never sees me again?”

  I’m silent.

  “Oh, Goldie,” Leo says, cupping my chin in his hands. “Of everything, of all the awful things that could possibly happen, I promise you, I swear, it won’t be that.”

  I smile. Then frown. “What awful things?”

  This time it’s Leo who’s silent.

  2:34 p.m.—Bea

  “I like that you think I’m nice. Or that you think I’ve got the potential to be nice,” Bea says. “You’re the first person who’s ever . . .”

  “Thought so?”

  Bea nods.

  “Then it sounds like your mother’s as much of a bitch as mine,” Vali says.

  “Yeah,” Bea says. “Except that mine’s proud of it.”

  “She sounds like a challenging parent.”

  Bea smiles. “I’m not telling you some sob story about my childhood, if that’s what you’re hoping for. You can look for your kicks elsewhere.”

  “Oh, go on,” Vali says, tugging at his beard. “Just a short one.”

  “Piss off.”

  Vali grins. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

  “No thanks.”

  Vali meets Bea’s eye. “You’re impenetrable.”

  “Too right. I’m not having you fishing around in my psyche. It’d give you nightmares.”

  “You underestimate me.”

  “You could get three Ph.D.s in behavioural psychology, moral philosophy, and theoretical politics,” Bea says, glancing away, “and you still wouldn’t be qualified to delve into my mind.”

  Vali smooths his jumper over his stomach. “Don’t you ever tire of being mean?”

  “You love it,” Bea says. “I remind you of your mamá. And all men fall in love with their mamá, don’t they? That’s primary school psychology. If I was any nicer, you wouldn’t love me anymore.”

  Vali smiles, stroking his beard
between forefinger and thumb. “Who said I was in love with you?”

  “You’re mad about me.”

  “Well, I’d certainly be mad if I was.”

  “You’re certifiable.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think I’m the only one.”

  Bea smiles, catching his eye. This time she doesn’t look away.

  8:07 p.m.—Scarlet

  Scarlet puts down the book she’s been hiding behind—retreating into the words, the world of Middle Earth, when she can’t stand the silences anymore. “What’s wrong, Grandma? You don’t like the chicken?”

  Scarlet made an effort today to prepare a decent meal, but her grandmother hasn’t touched her food. Now she holds a glass of water and is frowning at it, as if she not only cannot recall picking it up but cannot understand why she would’ve done so in the first place.

  “Grandma?”

  Esme blinks at her granddaughter.

  “Is everything okay?” Scarlet asks, suddenly paranoid that her grandmother somehow knows that she’s selling the café. She’s dearly hoping that, when she finally confesses, the loss won’t mean anything to Esme anymore. “Would you like something else?”

  “Your mother was conceived in this café,” Esme says, almost to herself. “Did you know that?”

  Scarlet brightens. “Really?”

  “Behind the counter, after we closed one night.” Esme gazes at the counter, as if seeing something Scarlet can’t. “Harry brought me cinnamon buns afterwards.”

  “You’ve never told me that.”

  “One day you’ll teach your daughter how to make them. And perhaps your husband will bring you cinnamon buns afterwards too.”

  “But I don’t have a daughter, Grandma. I don’t want children.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” her grandmother says with a smile. “When you were a little girl you told me: you’ll have a daughter and you’ll call her Red. Remember?”

  She tries to remember, to sniff out the trail of breadcrumbs that might lead her back to this unknown. A memory tugs at the edges of Scarlet’s mind: pretending to have a baby girl, stroking her soft tufts of red hair, plump cheeks, tight curled fists . . .