by Allyse Near
‘So you could sweat it out?’ said Isola uncertainly.
‘Lunatics!’ Mother went on. ‘I just wanted to try something different – and then this! Oh, Isola, promise me you’ll never get involved with religious nutters, especially if they’re the kind who think a person can be possessed!’
‘You sent me to a Catholic school,’ Isola pointed out, more bemused than ever. ‘And not a modern one, either. That’s exactly what they think.’
Springling
Spring brought a floaty sense of le féminin to Isola’s wardrobe: exposed shoulders, white dresses and braided hair – she played at being a Virgin Suicide with bare feet and filly legs. The short blonde hairs on her upper thighs glimmered in the sunlight. She smelled like peaches and wore bracelets woven from velvet scraps and pebbles she’d surely found long ago on a forest floor.
Spring brought something else, too.
Edgar plopped the plump pink baby in her arms.
‘Isola Wilde,’ he announced, ‘say hello to Puck Vivien Llewellyn.’
Baby Puck stirred himself awake in the cradle of her arms. He poked his tiny fingers through the cuff of his romper suit. His grey-milk eyes struggled to focus on her face, so he blinked sleepily up at the gold ring swinging from her necklace instead.
‘Puck’s from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Mum reckons Vivien’s a boy’s name, too,’ said Edgar, retrieving a dummy from under the couch. ‘I reckon they’re getting weirder, personally.’
Isola didn’t say anything. She stared down at the baby in something resembling shock.
Edgar surpressed a sigh, feeling frustrated, and then felt guilty for feeling frustrated. Sometimes, talking to Isola was like speaking aloud to a cemetery; it seemed so many different ears were listening, but no ghost voices answered from beneath the ground.
Something was going on with her, but there was no concrete way for him to help, apart from being kind. At least, that’s what Lotus Blossom had said, about their sweet blonde neighbour and women in general, when he confided in her Isola’s increasingly distant behaviour.
Said Lotus Blossom
‘Ah, sweetie. If the poets couldn’t unriddle them, then you certainly can’t. Be kind, and keep your ears on offer if she wants to talk. But you can’t draw out the strangeness, Edgar. It’s not a poison.’
An Already Broken Pact
Vivien’s Wood looked, if possible, even worse than the last time she’d visited.
Isola had not entered it since the disastrous epilogue to Edgar’s birthday party; Father, her princes and her own sense of self-preservation had warned her off.
She had to battle her way through the brambles; she didn’t even recognise half the thorns and weeds that had built up such sturdy walls.
Toxic-red flowers had sprouted along the Bridge of Sighs. Isola averted her eyes from the brilliantly red ring of the Devil’s Tea Party, unwilling to remember that night she’d spent in it. Worst of all was Vigour Mortis – the eternal tree at the forest’s centre was fading fast. Its boughs were bare, and dark, gooey sap seeped through its bark like bloody tears from a churchyard Virgin Mary. The bells Isola had tied to its trunk wouldn’t ring if she shook them in her hands.
Spring rambled down the mountain trails and into the valley below, a steady trickle from a perfumed stream of blossoms and warm weather, but it had not come to Vivien’s queendom. When Isola had escaped the thicket of woolly undergrowth and was heading back to the house, she heard strange noises behind her. She turned back.
With a great unanimous groaning, the border trees leaned sideways, wrapping their boughs around their neighbours in handshakes and pacts, forming a wall too dense for Isola to pass through.
They’d barricaded her out.
A formal rejection at last.
‘It’s not my fault!’ Isola yelled. ‘It’s not my fault she’s here!’
The Midnight Fountain
She had to get out of the house. Between Mother’s turn for the worse and Alejandro’s dour mood and the impenetrable woods like an old friend ignoring her phone calls, and an actual old friend ignoring her phone calls, and Father working longer shifts than ever, and Florence’s singing getting louder, and Grape nervously skirting her gaze – she had to get away.
Grape had tried for so long, and so hard. But she had shied away, fearing being unwanted, and it was like the wolves had circled, bitten in the luna-light, and Grape was a werefriend now, only calling around the full moon. Their conversations were short and mostly consisted of Grape asking if she was all right, if she wanted to talk about anything. Isola felt she was disappointing her when she said everything was fine. Grape always looked rejected when they sat together at school.
Nothing was fine. Isola was living skinless. Everything got to her.
But even then, there was Edgar. He sent a text close to midnight, asking her over in all-capital letters. With her hair in wild pigtails, slept on and curly so they looked more like antlers, and wearing a crown of sticky daisies, she went to meet him.
‘C’mon, I’ve got something to show you.’ He winked, adding, ‘That’s not s’posed to sound dirty.’
He’d just got his licence and borrowed his dad’s shiny black car, and they sped down High Street. For a moment, she thought he was taking her to The G Spot, and was about to say she didn’t have a fake ID and her breasts probably weren’t big enough anyway, but they passed by the club, which thumped on its foundations, a fresh vomit stain on its industrial bolted door.
‘Sorry, Edgar, I know you like Harry Potter, but this ain’t wizarding school,’ said Isola. ‘Saint D’s is closed up at night.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Edgar. ‘For one –’ he swiftly scaled the wrought-iron fence ‘– it’s fairly easy to get in at night. And two –’ he held out his arms, and she gratefully used him as a stepladder as she followed him over ‘– I freaking love Harry Potter.’
Isola laughed, brushing herself down. ‘Breaking and entering. What a date.’
‘It’s not really – we’re not going in, per se. It’s more like . . . climbing and strolling.’
He led her up the garden path towards the gothic convent and continually glanced over his shoulder; Orpheus double-checking for his dead bride.
Isola had the distinct feeling he was purposely blocking her view of the school with his bulky frame. ‘What is it?’ she said, smiling despite her suspicions. ‘Why are we here?’
He stopped her in her tracks, put his hands on her shoulders and spun her around, reversing their positions. She could hear the bubbling of the fountain close behind her. ‘Remember when you said you hated winter?’
‘Because I hate snow.’
‘But you’d like it if it was warm?’ He grinned smugly. ‘I thought, since we didn’t get to spend the winter together, I didn’t get a chance to change your mind. So . . .’
He spun her around again, revealing the surprise: Sister Marie Benedict’s memorial fountain, filled with soap powder, was spewing foam. A palace of bubbles to froth in.
‘D’you like it?’ He grinned nervously. ‘I did so much trespassing for you.’
‘Warm snow,’ said Isola in wonder, cupping a handful of bubbles.
‘And it smells like lavender, and will probably clean your clothes,’ Edgar pointed out, so proud of the fountain, his self-created winter night in April.
Clasping hands, they plunged through the foamy world. They felt their way around blindly until their feet touched stone and they climbed into the fountain.
They made themselves beards of bubbles and tried to have a snowball fight, but the floral-scented froth dissolved in their hands. They laughed and Edgar grabbed Isola’s hands and they danced, and she could faintly hear The Smiths’ ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ playing in his parked car. His smile was so natural and Isola thought he looked like a picture on one of her tarot cards, but she couldn’t remember which omen or from which pack or whether it importuned destiny or death.
‘Why are you d
oing this?’ Her words were like scattered dandelion seeds, white and feathery and searching out updraughts.
‘Doing what?’
She’d stopped dancing, and he stopped laughing. She stood on tiptoes to examine his face.
A boy with monster’s cheekbones and strait-jacket arms. The sort of boy who’d insist on being buried with his lover in a heart-shaped coffin, mummified knee to knee. Romantic even in the face of destruction.
‘Doing what?’ he repeated.
‘Being so good to me. You deserve better than . . .’
‘Than you?’
Isola felt she was teetering on the edge of a black hole, the great unblinking pupil of the universe. She took a deep breath. ‘Than a dead girl.’
Edgar shook his head of curly hair and laughed. ‘What?’
The kiss Edgar had planted on her hand was searing hot. He took the same hand again and touched it to her breast and said loudly, ‘Listen! You hear that?’ He took her other hand and pressed it to his own soaked chest. ‘And that too? You’re alive. We’re alive. Listen.’
‘It’s so loud,’ whispered Isola, and their lips met, and they would have drowned in the springtime snow, she was sure, without each other to breathe in.
Edgar’s body was flawed and warm and fascinating. Hardly any hair on his ankles, his skate shoes had worn them away. Eczema on the back of his knees. Charcoal under his fingernails. Toenails sloppily painted sea-green by Portia. Chicken pox and falling-off-skateboard scars. An old wound on his abdomen.
‘It was a donation,’ he said softly. ‘Someone died – someone young. Only thirty or so.’
Isola raised her head from where it rested on his bare chest. He’d never mentioned a dead donor. She waited for him to speak.
‘I mean, I was happy when I got the news, obviously. It’s the worst, being on those waiting lists; they’d call in the middle of the night and we’d drive to the hospital, I’d get prepped for surgery, and then the doctors come in to tell you it’s diseased, or it’s not a match, or it’s gone to someone who’s dying that little bit faster than you.’
Isola traced the scar, imagining her finger as the scalpel, hating the idea of Edgar flush under surgery lights, drugged to dreaming. ‘No wonder you hate hospitals,’ she said softly.
‘Yeah,’ he sighed, tightening his arm around her shoulder. ‘And, like I said, it was so good to finally get the damn kidney, but . . . I still feel bad about it, sometimes,’ he said, with a groan of frustration, struggling to put it all into words. ‘Like I wished that person dead . . .’ He swallowed hard, looking up at the ceiling.
‘And your wish came true,’ Isola finished quietly. She traced the scar again, as though unzipping it, seeing the stranger’s parts inside. ‘But,’ she whispered, ‘aren’t they still alive, in a way? At least, in pieces.’
She got up at dawn and found Mother Poe meditating on a straw mat in the living room. The vibrations of Isola’s stealthy footsteps must have disturbed her Zen, because when Isola made to sneak past her to the hallway, Mother Poe said cheerfully, without opening her eyes or shifting an inch, ‘Sure you don’t want to stay for breakfast, dear?’
A Hearty Breakfast Prepared by Earth Mother Poe
– A strawberry smoothie
– Half a grapefruit
– Oats
– A free lesson in meditation
– A weirdly chilled conversation about the importance of contraception
Mother Poe let Isola hold Puck while she bustled about in the kitchen. Struck silent by the duel distractions of the adorable, wriggly baby and Mother Poe’s (‘Please, just call me Lotus Blossom’) liberal attitude, Isola didn’t bother correcting her impression. She and Edgar hadn’t had sex. She had considered it, but was ultimately content to lie there, examining him shirtless and moon-lit, rather than let him see her bruises, her moon-markings.
Last Man Standing
There it was, her anchor at last – a tenuous happiness, but at least it stuck fast in the current, something she could hold tightly on to, even when Edgar himself was out of reach.
Isola and Edgar talked for hours, about everything. When the baby was sleeping and they had to whisper, when they lay on the floor and watched movies almost muted – even then they were aware of each other. While she braided a strand of her anime heroine-hair, he clogged his mouth with peach slices. Their fingers entwined, and bells tolled in the distant churchyard, startling them apart.
Father’s only rule – ‘No sleepovers!’ – had been steadily upheld since that first night she’d spent curled in his arms. Of course, Father didn’t know about that – getting up at the crack of dawn had enabled her to sneak home and sufficiently rumple her bedsheets to foster the belief she’d slept in them.
Isola was too shy to tell Alejandro about her relationship with Edgar. Ruslana and Christobelle would have been so excited to gossip with her, and the thought came with a stomach pang, a pricked nerve in the skin.
Alejandro had begun to go missing again, for long hours. She especially hated when he left at night. They would argue and he would always end up leaving, the air cold in his absence and sometimes still in his presence.
On these nights Alejandro insisted on summoning the only nearby Nimue kin who was even vaguely trustworthy. Winsor pouted the whole night, and Isola didn’t feel safer; if she heard about his plans in advance, she’d always stay at Edgar’s.
Winsor was a horrible guard, anyway. One night, when Alejandro went to Scotland to speak with the ghosts of druids about exorcising hauntings, Isola caught Winsor trying to swipe a safety pin from the dresser. Winsor wanted to use it as a faerie bayonet, to defend herself against an aggressive spider, she claimed. Isola was thankful for once that Grandpa Furlong wasn’t around – he would be so disappointed in her for not squashing Winsor there and then.
A Brief Excursion into the Conflicted Mind of the Spaniard
‘I’m so glad you’re back, Ale. Sorry I yelled at you.’
Alejandro, the first and then the last man standing, sat at her bedside and shushed her into silence, fingering the silver buttons on his waistcoat. She had no idea what it cost him to leave her – and what it might cost to stay. He needed a distraction. He tried to mentally drift somewhere as sunny as Spain.
‘I really do hate Winsor, though.’
He smiled, and went to watch the window, steeling his mind, awaiting the worst. But at midnight, as his princess finally dozed and Florence whisper-sang on the lawn, his alien hand tugged loose his cravat and looped it round her throat. He watched as Isola was startled awake by the cold silk and the sudden pressure. Her eyes said it all, iridescent in the moonlight.
It took every ounce of love in his blood not to kill her. His hands went limp, and he sank to the floor, and didn’t speak until morning. Outside, Florence cackled at the top of her bloodied lungs.
When Isola’s eyes had opened and stared straight through him, he was transported to a moment in his past: he lay choking, cold saliva welling up around his pale, bloated pillow-lips. His jerking hands knocked the bottle from its perch, absinthe soaked through his clothes; the girls lifted their skirts from the liquid, hissing in annoyance, while Alejandro drifted away into the Indian silk pillows. Finally he lay unmoving and unblinking, his mouth slightly open, wet and paste-blue. Nobody noticed, not for the longest time.
And time passed around him – those girls were gone, and so were his bones, but still he remained, solid as ever. The house continued to be a haven for people of that kind; the poppy-pipes exchanged for things in little plastic baggies, needlesticks to match their limbs.
How had he ended up dead and rotting in such a place? He had been happy enough; he had loved his sisters but hated himself, for petty reasons he couldn’t recall. The youngest, browner than their mother and full of cheek, wore ribbons in her hair.
It was decades before he snapped from his stupor. The sound woke him. A strange machine was rushing the walls like the enraged bulls men fought in his homeland. Lar
ge metal fork-fingers were peeling back the ceiling and rotted wood was collapsing all around him. Alejandro became aware of the feeling in his limbs again. He blinked, and looked, properly looked, at that thing stretching above, the thing he hadn’t seen in so long – the sky.
And the colour – blue, like a ribbon woven through the black hair of someone small and important. The colour shouted so loudly, louder than the machines. His mouth was so dry, his limbs so stiff. His eyes felt huge and swollen in their eternal unfocused stare.
He sat up, slowly, then stood all at once. There were the ruins, and him, but no remnants of the sinner’s den it had once been, no bones to mark his grave by. Had they come to carry him out? He couldn’t remember. Why had he been there in the first place? The time before the den, the short time where he still felt the cold and warmth and hunger pains – it was hazy, but there was something about three small girls, and something about the smallest one. His fingers curled in muscle memory; in his periphery the visions danced, and he was raking those fingers through brown hair, over a ribbon, blue as the sky. He looked up again, that huge expanse, and remembered Lucía, Jacinta, and his Francesca . . .
It was morning now, in the present moment, and Alejandro found that Isola was still looking at him. Had her eyes always been so blue?
‘Isola? Please, I would like to talk to you.’
Isola was busy preparing for school; she didn’t look at him. ‘I understand, you know. What happened last night. I know you didn’t mean it.’
‘Thank you.’ His voice caught in his throat. ‘That means . . . a great deal to me. But I would like to discuss something else.’
She yanked a brush through her hair, still refusing eye contact.
‘Are you listening, Isola?’
‘No,’ she snapped. She stomped downstairs and out the door, and he followed in her wake.
‘Pardon?’