by Allyse Near
And now her tears fell purple, the colour of Alejandro’s cravat, then dust-orange, like the land his mother came from, then grey as the haze of harbour London, and finally green as the graves in which his sisters three were slumbering.
He planted a goodbye kiss on each of her tear-streaked cheeks, another on the back of her limp hand. A gentlemen to the end.
‘And three: no, I am not afraid of Florence. I fear nothing but a world without treasure – without you, my bella querida, my séptima pequeña princesa.’
The Gargoyle Commandments
‘Rules are: No water,’ Bunny said imperiously.
‘Why?’
‘Water make I weak. Too much water kill,’ Bunny said ominously. ‘Rule number next: No Mama.’
‘What? But – but she’s ill, she’s relying on me!’
‘How long she been ill?’ he demanded.
‘Since . . . since before I was born.’
‘Then she can live without.’
‘No, I’m telling you, she can’t! She got worse when I turned ten – she needs me, she’s not like she was –’
‘What happened? When Solawile was ten?’
‘I . . . I . . .’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know!’ yelled Isola. ‘All I remember was that she was happy enough, and then it all turned rubbish – Dad was a mess, he wouldn’t sleep in the same room as her, Mother wouldn’t even get out of bed. She stopped wearing her wedding ring . . .’
She remembered going into the master bedroom, to check again that Mother hadn’t died in her sleep. She remembered drawn curtains, musty air, and the steady rise and fall of Mother’s chest like rolling mountains. Then a glint on the bedside table. The golden wedding band, cold without the contact of skin to survive off. Isola stole it and wore it every day and night on a chain around her neck. If Mother had noticed, she never mentioned it.
Bunny huffed and didn’t even glance at the wedding-ring necklace she wore. ‘Rule number last,’ he snapped. ‘No argue.’
Be kind to the smallest, Alejandro had told her, and if it hadn’t been for those words echoing from some distant unmapped constellation of her brain, Isola would have lost her temper hours ago. He’d only been in her room a day, and she was already battling a near-hatred for the rabbit-creature. He was snappish and inconsiderate; he had intruded upon the last stabilities in her life – her Alejandro, her upstairs-and-down-the-hall kingdom of Wilde Girl. Despite seeming to possess an intelligence equal to a human’s, he gnawed incessantly on the furniture, snuffled and burrowed through her things, and took great pleasure in moving items from their rightful places, upsetting the careful disarray.
Upon discovering that he had taken each of her bras from the drawers and playfully tossed them about the room, fang-marks obvious in all the clasps, she clamped down on her tongue and offered him food.
The gargoyle crinkled his black nose over the tea saucer set in front of him. ‘What this?’
‘Canned plums,’ said Isola, waggling her finger at him. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten. You were eating them last autumn, when the tree was still around.’ He bared his teeth at her, and she added, ‘I’d recognise those fangs anywhere.’
Nosing the saucer and its purple muck away, he said loudly, ‘Don’t eat plums.’
‘Thyme, then?’
‘Don’t eat thyme.’
‘This isn’t a restaurant, Peter Rabbit.’
‘Gargoyle!’
‘Fine! What the hell do gargoyles eat?’
The gargoyle showed his long black teeth again and ran his tongue over them. ‘Rare meat.’
‘Rare, like raw?’ said Isola uncertainly.
‘Rare like hard-to-find.’ He smacked his lips but didn’t elaborate.
She tried to tell Bunny the story of why exactly she was being haunted and her brothers possessed. He seemed intent on morphing the fault as her own, whatever way she spun the tale – Bunny had already passed his judgement.
‘Little ghosties,’ muttered Bunny. ‘Little house full of little ghosties. Garden with pesties. Big forest with lotsa Nim bratties, oh yes. And girly wants to keep them! Fool girl Solawile wants to make friends . . .’
‘What’s that s’posed to mean?’
Bunny wrinkled his nose at her. ‘Little fooly girl makes friends with Nim bratties, then is surprised when make Nim enemies, too?’
Bunny spent the next few hours bouncing about the room, getting used to the sponginess of his surroundings. He leapt from the bed to the chest of drawers, to the desk, to the windowsill, to the top of Isola’s head when she wasn’t looking.
Perched serenely, he said, ‘Ghostie Florey. Daughter of wood witch. Why you give her name?’
Isola stopped trying to push him off her head and considered his question. ‘Because she’s a girl,’ she finally answered, shrugging. ‘She was like me, once upon a time. She deserves a name, at the very least.’
Bunny leaned over her forehead so they were eye-to-eye; beady reds into blue marbles. ‘You are strange one, Solawile.’
Then, something wonderful. Bunny gave Isola her first music-less night.
She heard so much without Florence’s songs – owls moaning battlecries to the mice and crickets roaming the night.
Alejandro wouldn’t come back. She hadn’t tried to summon the others; if he wouldn’t return, none of them would.
Snowflake Romantics
Her house, for a change; the screaming baby at Number Thirty-seven had ruined the mood. Bunny grumbled about being made to hide in the garden. Father insisted they keep the lights on and the door wide open; they drew a single sheet over them and kept their conversation to whispers.
Together Isola and Edgar made grand plans for travels around the world, on foot through the Amazon sludge and aboard a hot air balloon over Nepal. They plotted to get Ellie Blythe Nettle and Grape, who obviously liked one another, together at last. In the bliss of togetherness, they now regarded all singledom as a social tragedy. When they kissed Edgar accidentally hooked his finger in the golden ring around her neck, and this time when he asked a question, she didn’t hesitate to tell the truth. That when she was ten, Mother had stopped wearing her wedding ring, and now Isola wore it as an amulet – a reminder that she needed to protect her mother.
‘How very Lord of the Rings of you,’ he observed, and she made a face, tucking the ring under her collar.
‘I’ve heard some of the girls at school laughing about it,’ Isola said, in a tone of faux nonchalance. ‘They’ve said . . . It’ll make me crazy, like it did her.’
Edgar went very still.
Isola held her breath. They never talked about Mother; Isola didn’t talk about what had been going on in her house all these years with anyone – not Grape, not James, not even the trees in Vivien’s Wood, who could never spill the secrets she whispered into their knotholes.
‘Isola Wilde. It’s not a crime to be different, and you’re not crazy.’ He traced her collarbone, the cold necklace chain, then leaned in close to whisper the truth. ‘You’re magic.’
Just like that, Isola was teetering; the emotional, irrational voice inside her that spoke like Rosekin immediately demanded she tell him everything, everything, and he would understand. She could scoop Bunny out of the garden and he’d recognise him for what he was, she could drag him by his hand through a graveyard until she found a freshly unearthed spirit to take haunting, and together they’d live, nesting in the rotted rafters of reality.
Almost immediately, Rosekin-Isola was drowned out by a suspiciously Bunny-like voice. Fool, the memory called her, and she remembered the disbelieving way James stared at her these days, his head tilting and eyes narrowing, lips crushing a cigarette, and knew she couldn’t tell Edgar all of her truths – maybe not ever.
Stiffening, Isola dropped her head, unwilling to meet his eyes as he smiled so lovingly at her. Her gaze travelled down the freeway of his jawline marked with shiny black-stubble cars, the graffiti that adorned
his skin, spray-painted, sloganised, and knew Edgar was a city, a place she’d like to live.
‘You should design a tattoo for me,’ suggested Isola.
‘Easy.’ Edgar uncapped a pen from the side table and drew the bedsheet down. She started giggling and closed her eyes, feeling the glide of the felt-tip, the suck of her sponge-skin as the ink blotted through. ‘Snow-flakes, right here, near your inner elbow. Maybe one here.’ He sketched a beautiful webby flake on her hip bone. ‘A secret snowflake.’
‘How did you know?’ Isola the Ice Girl whispered. She pressed her mouth against his before he could form an answer, but quickly pulled away. She’d shredded her lower lip on his braces; she held a tissue to the cut patch while he apologised over and over.
‘I hate my braces, but I hate crooked teeth more. See?’ he fingered the roof of his mouth, showing Isola the crowding molars.
‘I don’t know,’ Isola said, smiling. ‘I think crooked teeth are pretty rock and roll.’
When they brought their lips together again, her mouth was sticky with the day’s remains of cherry lipstick, and a secret she’d almost told him – and maybe a little blood.
Crooked teeth and rock and roll, Edgar painted on the diary-wall before he left in the morning.
Toxic Pretty
Isola heard sharp feet kicking at her window.
‘What is it?’ she hissed, opening the window a crack. ‘What do you want, Winsor?’
The faerie was slumped on the windowsill. She didn’t answer; her green glow had dulled to a sickly rinse.
‘Winsor?’ Isola picked her up tentatively, and the faerie took a stuttering breath.
‘Poison . . . flowers,’ she moaned.
‘What?’ Isola cupped the faerie in her palm.
‘What . . . did you do?’ wheezed Winsor. ‘Did you spray toxins . . . did you want . . . to kill me . . .’ Part of Winsor’s face was sketched with glittering green veins; her right eye was white and gooey.
‘No, no, of course not! I –’
The faerie stilled in her hand.
Bunny hopped up to the windowsill. ‘Who she?’ he asked interestedly.
‘Winsor, she said she’d been poisoned. Bunny, what do I do?’
‘Cut out infected eye,’ Bunny ordered.
‘What?’
‘She got toxin in eye, see? Cut out eye, or faerie die.’
Isola hesitated. She felt for a pulse and it was like an ant under her fingertip. ‘How did this happen?’
Bunny grunted mysteriously.
Nothing was small enough except for the safety pin Winsor had tried to steal. Isola used the pin and the silly booklet about amputations, thought of Christobelle’s sailor, King Lear.
Bunny sat in her lap to watch the impromptu operation with keen interest.
Like a balloon the eyeball popped and flooded, and she scooped it out, washing the hollow with the last drops in a vodka flask, hoping it was enough to save a faerie she didn’t even like.
Dream-weaving
That night, she heard Mother crying in the bathtub.
When Isola shifted, Bunny leapt up from the floor and settled on her chest. His nails contracted over her heart. ‘You stay,’ he growled.
‘But Mum –’
‘Her or me, girly.’
‘Why?’ whispered Isola. ‘Why do I have to choose?’
Later she dreamed she held a bow carved from the bones of people she loved. She raised the bow, drew back the string, and released a flaming arrow like an insult. The arrow hit her target, and the full moon caught ablaze, a fireball shrieking heat and ash in the night sky.
She dreamed of the school gardens like Versailles; Mother on the mend, hospital-gown clad but smiling, strolling in the garden, an IV drip full of champagne rolling beside her. Then Mother turned, smiled at her. The sun caught her canine teeth and the reflecting light exploded, enveloping Isola, then the door, the room, then always the blinding light, the molten golden terror. Gasping awake to a room without princes made her wish she hadn’t woken at all.
The house was too quiet. Mother was sleeping. Father was working. Bunny watched Winsor snooze in her little matchbox bed, an oddly hungry gleam in the gargoyle’s red eyes.
Isola decided to go outside and taste a blade of grass by the herb patch. Sure enough, it fizzed on her tongue, a definite toxin.
DID YOU SPRAY SOMETHING ON THE GARDEN? she texted her father.
YEAH. I WAS SICK OF THOSE RABBITS TEARING UP EVERYTHING. COULDNT FIND WHAT U USED SO I BOUGHT SUM PESTICIDE STUFF. IF U R COOKING VEGETABLES, MAKE SURE U CLEAN THEM OFF. BETTER YET, GO GET SUM OFF MRS LLEWELYN.
Isola turned her phone off, flushed out her mouth and went to check on Mother. It was clear now, why she’d cried all night – Father had poisoned her garden. He’d poisoned Winsor, and who knew how many rabbits and flowers and birds and fae-kind.
Isola went up to the attic.
It was a proper Anne Frank-attic, with hidden staircases and boxes and whole lives packed between foam and cardboard.
So much of her mother lived only in boxes now. Diaries, little snippets of her personality, dried and preserved like animal foetuses in jars, like pressed petals dissolving between old photographs and scribbled-in notebooks. There was a home video of Mother Wilde in her wild heyday, eight months pregnant and bikini-clad at the beach, marching with her stomach protruding like a prize. Dried pieces from the top tier of a wedding cake. Things of baby Isola’s, too: moth-chewed romper suits and frilly bows to disguise baby baldness. A Spanish-to-English dictionary and a tarnished silver flute. Images of Father beardless, and, even stranger to her gaze, happy.
She found Mother’s old medical files, expired prescriptions and X-rays of a broken arm, a stretching spine. There was an ultrasound of Isola, as well as another solemn little creature that didn’t quite make it.
She took the X-rays back to her room and arranged them on the window, churchly artworks that filtered the light through Mother’s insides.
Florence and Christobelle and now Winsor – all these girls with missing eyes, and where did they go? She imagined a forest of eyes sprouting right out of the rich earth of Vivien’s Wood, snaking towards the canopy on stalks of eyelashes; blinking lids, irises centering the flowers, another set of watchers. Isola rubbed and paranoid-picked at her own right eye, and overnight it grew bloody and inflamed, shot through with red veins like channels on Mars.
Winsor awoke after three days. Sitting up in her tissue-lined matchbox, she raised her hands to rub her eyes, and found the empty socket.
It was a hellish tantrum. Screaming, she beat her fists, tore at her hair. Isola thought the faerie would rage until her glow went out.
Winsor scrabbled at the windowsill, carving grooves in the wood with her sharp hands. When she tried to rip the delicate fabric of her own wings, Isola opened the window in a panic and Winsor zipped away.
‘Winsor, come back!’ Isola called desperately. ‘I’m sorry about what happened, but I need to check if you’re healing!’
‘I HATE YOU!’ howled the tiny voice. ‘You poisoned me and ruined my face and I can’t wait till she kills you!’
Meat and Bones
By May the whole lunar cycle ringed her neck – markings like the strangled birds had, but larger, clearer, like love bites. That’s what the girls at school would see, anyway. Isola examined the perfect crescent moon nesting in the hollow of her throat, the half-moon at her collarbone. She dusted her neck with nude foundation and drew her tie as tightly as she could.
At the rosebush, something glittered in Dame Furlong’s web. She had knitted a kiss goodbye. Isola smiled, and it reached her eyes.
Grape had taped pictures of Olympians up in her locker, determined to lose her non-existent belly fat in time for the Spring Swimming Carnival.
Isola wrapped her arms around her middle and watched as Grape rifled through the book stacks, searching for homework she was half-certain she’d done. They were pretending the event in the chapel hadn’t h
appened, but it was clear on her friend’s face that Grape was actually worried for her – and that was comforting, even though Isola wished she needn’t worry at all.
‘You don’t seem yourself,’ said Grape hesitantly. ‘Are you getting sick?’
Getting sick and tired of that question, actually, Isola thought. ‘I’m fine.’
‘If you say so . . .’ Grape’s face fell. ‘It’s just, Isola, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve gotten so skinny . . .’
‘And look at you,’ Isola said quickly, hoping to steer the conversation away from its dangerous waters. ‘You’re a regular Xena Warrior Princess.’
Grape smiled at that.
Isola knew she had been working extra hard in the pool, developing her upper-body muscles in preparation for the upcoming Spring Swimming Carnival, and had been flashing ‘the gun show’ at her, at James, at Ellie Blythe, whenever she found an opportune moment in conversation.
‘Do you reckon if I win enough ribbons, Sister K will let me trade them in for good grades?’ Grape joked.
‘Yeah, and maybe your parents’ll give up on the whole “academics” thing once you win at the Olympics,’ said Isola.
Aside from the Guinevere and Arthur houses at St Dymphna’s, there were also Lancelot (yellow) and Merlin (green). A red plastic crown, which all the Arthur house girls had to wear, sat innocently at the back of Grape’s locker. Bridget McKayde was in Arthur house. They won every event because they were more talented, which was fair enough, but they wore the crowns as though they’d earned them.
Isola and Edgar jumped up and down on Number Thirty-seven’s backyard trampoline, absorbing different views of one another. Isola, her hair fanning even wilder around her; Edgar, topsy-turvy, doing a backflip, his huge feet over his head.
They tried to kiss while they bounced, a pair of anti-gravity Valentines.
‘If you really don’t like Guinevere,’ Edgar was saying against her lips, ‘you could always go solo – make up your own house.’