The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  My grandmother’s smile was sad and fragile. “Little Red Riding Hood. I told it to her when she was small. It was almost the first thing I said to her, the day we got her. I told her the story. For almost a year, she wanted it every night before she slept. My tiny brown baby, curled in one of the box-beds we kept the smallest in. None of my own kids ever wanted stories as much as she wanted them. She’d make up her own ways of telling it, when she grew up bigger. I’d put her with the littler kids to keep them quiet, and she’d tell the strangest ways. Red Riding Hood marrying the wolf, killing the woodcutter. Weird stuff. She wrote some of them down, though I’ve no notion as to why she bothered. She liked stories better when they got spoken to a crowd than when they were on paper.

  “I’ve got one of them here. You can have it to keep with her diary, if you want.”

  And I wanted. I wanted more than I knew how to say, so I just nodded my head. My grandmother went to fetch it, this precious treasure, and left me with our forgotten drinks.

  I looked at the jube bowl and the sugar bowl.

  After a long time, my grandmother came back. The papers in her hands were folded in the same careless, uneven way my mother’s linens always ended up, and I had to swallow hard to keep from crying again.

  “You can sleep in the spare room at the end of the hall. There’s a candle by the bed if you can’t wait for morning before reading,” my grandmother told me. She sounded so tired.

  I couldn’t wait. Of course I couldn’t. My mother had been gone four years then, and I would have cut my own hands off to hear her voice again.

  Once upon a time, little Annie Pegg began, speaking down the years to a daughter she didn’t expect.

  A wolf lived in the forest with a girl, and they had many children. One day a hunter found them.

  The hunter said ‘I will take these baby wolf-girls and I will tie ropes to their necks, and the ropes will wear welts into their beautiful fur, and they will learn to be obedient.’

  And the wolf snarled and bared his teeth and said ‘You’ll do no such thing.’

  And the girl snarled and raised her old, notched knife and said ‘You’ll do no such thing.’

  And the hunter said ‘I can do as I please. How can you stop me?’

  And the wolf and the girl looked at each other, and their eyes were full of sadness because they knew this was the end of all that came before and the beginning of something else. And beginnings can be joyful things, but ends are often sad.

  And the wolf and the girl looked at each other, and in their eyes they shared a plan.

  The wolf pounced, the girl ran. She picked her wolf-girl babies up in her arms, and she ran and ran and ran and ran, out into the dark with her hair streaming golden in the night and her feet bare and cut on the rocks. They kept away from the paths, even though the paths did not cut. The girl had sworn long ago that no child of hers would walk that path, down through the trees to the cleared land of the village and the lights of the houses. She had come from there; she would not go back.

  The wolf and the hunter wrestled through a day and a night, and in the end the hunter won, as the wolf and the girl knew he would. The hunter wins; the wolf is defeated. That’s how the ending always comes.

  And the hunter tied a rope around the wolf’s neck and wore a welt in the wolf’s grey fur and made him a dog.

  But the girl found a cave, safe and dark and far from the path, out near the cliff’s edge where the waves crash and whisper all through the darkest hours before the sunlight starts again. And there she laid her wolf-girl babies to sleep and stood at the mouth on the rocky sand and watched the moon go down.

  She didn’t howl. She’d need her voice for stories.

  There’s more than one meaning in a tale like that. Maybe my mother wrote it about herself, about what she maybe wished had happened: a mother who ran, who wouldn’t let her babies be stolen and taken to the village along the path. I wish I could ask her, but I never can. I’ve only got the words she left.

  In the spare bedroom of my grandmother’s house, I dreamt I was that running girl, a notched knife at her hip, in love with a wolf and racing through the whipping branches of old, dry trees.

  I think that’s why I liked Amy the moment I saw her this afternoon, when we met there on that roadside. Me with too much henna in my hair (the blonde I cover with dyes is the only legacy my fair-skinned father left me that I can’t outrun with distance), the Little Red lost in the wilds of a country she should feel a tie to but doesn’t (does that mean something?).

  And here was a girl not much older than me, with eyes like a wolf’s, all tawny and intent. I’m sure that we’re meant to stick together. It feels like fate, which I’ve never much believed in before but will give a try for once.

  We’re in the back of a car now, the two of us together, while a husband and a wife bicker in the front. The wife’s belly’s big and round under her dress, and I wonder if the baby can hear the snappy words between his mum and dad. I hope so. Better to get the disappointment done with early.

  Amy’s staring at me like she’s got a question she wants to ask or a puzzle she plans to solve. I smile back, and she blinks her goldy-green eyes in surprise. Like she’d forgotten that I can see her, too.

  CHARLOTTE

  From Reign in Hell: Two Weeks in the Life of HUSH, by Charlotte Waterhouse, Amplify Press, Australia, 2011:

  “Fuck that flight. That flight was fucking brutal.”

  Few people are at their best at five-thirty in the morning after a fourteen-hour flight, but Tash Vrenna may be among that few. Fresh from the customs crush, she stands beside the doors leading back into Melbourne Airport and smokes like a mountain climber taking hits of oxygen.

  It’s not that she isn’t rumpled and grimy from the travel; it’s simply that she wears it like she’s woken from a good night’s sleep on feather pillows. I get the sense she’s slept in far less comfortable places and long ago learned the trick of emerging clean and new.

  The rest of her band and their crew are inside, ordering coffee while we all wait for the van to the hotel.

  “I’d tour Australia five times a year if it wasn’t for that fucking flight,” Tash says. Her voice is quieter than expected, soft beneath the smoker’s gravel. She looks a little older than her years, a hard growing-up leaving its mark. She’s beautiful, but it is a damaged beauty.

  Tash isn’t wearing any makeup, her hair is tangled and dull, and the tomato-red polish on her nails is chipped to slivers. In her oversized sunglasses and rumpled black clothes, every aspect of her screams ‘rock star.’

  “The seats in economy kill at least half the nerves in your ass, the flight attendants leave the lights off for about ten fucking hours so they don’t need to cope with you, and you’re breathing in other people’s germs the whole time. I always get sick after that fucking ordeal. Give it two weeks, and I’ll be dying of fucking swine flu or bird flu or whatever. Plane flu, that’s what it really fucking is. A long-distance airlock full of coughs and sneezes. And I love Australia. It’s fucking awesome here. But there’s no country in the fucking world that’s good enough to justify that flight multiple times in a year.”

  Her guitar tech, Gabriel, joins us and steals a long drag from Tash’s cigarette. The knuckles of his hand read ‘BURN.’ Compact and dark, he has quite a bit of that rock-star aura himself.

  “Tour manager says we should just get some cabs, and she’ll have the label comp it,” he tells Tash. “I think she’s scared that Cherry’s getting pissed.”

  He turns to me, explaining, “Last time Cherry lost her temper, she made a roadie cry and got thrown out of the venue. Two hours before the show. I practically had to promise all the kingdoms of the world to the bouncer to get him to let her back in.”

  Tash snorts. “If she’s had her coffee, Cherry’s practically a zen master,” she explains to me. “She wouldn’t care if we were stuck in the airport forever so long as there was espresso to be had.”

  ---


  I ride with Jacqui and Ben to the hotel, with them in the back and me in the front of the taxi, because I’m the only one of us who knows Melbourne and can help with directions. I point out that the cab is equipped with GPS, but they’ve spent the last two months in Los Angeles and refuse to trust the little computer.

  “Fuckin’ LA,” Jacqui says derisively as we drive through the early morning toward the city. “It’s the most bullshit place in the world. Did you know almost four thousand people die there every year just from the pollution? Their life expectancy’s cut by fourteen years from the exhaust fumes in the air. Wrap your head around that for a second. Next time you sort your cardboard from your plastic before you put your trash out, think to yourself: the air in LA is twice as deadly as getting hit by a car.

  “Kind of make you feel like you’re trying to bail water on the Titanic with a thimble, doesn’t it? What difference can any of us make, when LA exists? It’s an evil fuckin’ vortex of shit and superficiality and glossy plastic garbage in every color of the fuckin’ rainbow.”

  Ben clears his throat as Jacqui’s rant winds down to discontented grumbling. “Jacq and I are from Brooklyn. We’re contractually obligated to hate the West Coast.”

  As well as similar accents and the rockstar-standard black wardrobe, Jacqui and Ben share a steely sort of melancholy in their mannerisms. I’m sure that most people who meet them assume that their sibling bond is by blood rather than adoption.

  I tell Ben that Australia has a rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne that’s very like the LA/NY divide, with Sydney as the Los Angeles and Melbourne as the New York.

  “But Sydney’s not as bad as you make LA sound, I guess,” I grudgingly admit.

  “You’re from Melbourne?” he guesses with a smirk. I nod and say yes, I’ve lived here almost eight years.

  “What do you love about it?”

  I have to think for a moment, not because I’m unsure but because I want to phrase it properly. Putting words together is meant to be my job, after all.

  “I love the way that people here will open a bar literally anywhere there are two square feet of space together. I love the art galleries with their abstract stained-glass ceilings and whitewash-clean hallways. I love the state library’s panopticon reading room and the collage of eras in its architecture. I love the stencil art in alleyways and side streets, the riot of thought and message and design and brashness that spills over itself in a sublime tangle. I love the restored movie theatres that show blockbusters and sell cheap popcorn. I love its romantic buildings and facades.”

  “And where are you from before that?” Ben presses, quietly inquisitive. I laugh, a little defensively, and remind him that I’m supposed to be the one asking the questions.

  As the cab draws closer to Melbourne, the skyline of the buildings greeting us in the pale blue dawn, I admit that I grew up in Brisbane. Brisbane’s literacy rate is one of the lowest in Australia. It didn’t have a proper sewerage system until the 1960s.

  I have my own, personal reasons for having left Brisbane, but it doesn’t take more than a general overview of the place to get people to understand why I don’t live in the city where I grew up.

  “I think that’s where Jo’s from,” Jacqui says. “Sometimes, anyway.”

  Jo Domremy, the band’s recalcitrant drummer, is known for giving inconsistent and contradictory life stories to different interviewers. She tends to choose small towns and places known for their dark histories when asked about where she was born. It’s not hard to believe she’d count Brisbane among such places.

  Jacqui goes on, speaking mostly to herself at this point. “And Cherry and Tash are from Colorado, of course. Colorado has the lowest rate of obesity in the USA, which sounds impressive as shit until you find out that it’s also rated as the third best state for business out of the whole country. Anywhere populated by a whole bunch of rich corporate fucks is gonna be able to afford healthy food and lots of outdoorsy shit, isn’t it?”

  “It’s too early for soapboxing,” Ben replies in a mild voice. Jacqui snorts. “I’m jetlagged as fuck, so I don’t feel like it’s early at all.”

  ---

  Much of the band’s earliest publicity focused on Cherry and Tash, to the point where it seemed for a while that their ‘celebrity’ might overwhelm any chance the band had at a real career. After a while, once it became clear that HUSH’s songs contained neither evangelical messages of hope and faith nor dark whispers encouraging evil — except for the regular amounts of evil that some people are determined to hear in any and all rock music — the novelty of the band’s Cobweb connection died down.

  Now it seems the band has accepted their dubious birthright of notoriety as best they can, confronting it head-on and getting it out of the way: ‘And Cherry and Tash are from Colorado, of course.’

  JO

  Excerpt from the article “Boom! Crash! HUSH!: We talk to drumming sensation Jo Domremy,” Revolutions Per Minute Magazine, October 2009:

  Jo Domremy is going to be one hell of a hard-assed middle-aged musician in a few more decades. You know the kind, the ones who look like they’re half a beer away from breaking a chair over the bar and spending the night in lock-up while the rest of their band scrapes bail together. She’s got the gutsy no-bull look that some ladies get when they’ve lived hard and fast for fifty good years of bad judgment. She’s well on her way to that future self already: killer burn scars that she mostly keeps covered with long sleeves, a tendency to interrupt if she thinks you’re bullshitting on too long, and a steely glare that’d suit a soldier’s face better than a rock drummer’s.

  Jo: “All four of them have essentially the same attitude to art and music. They willingly invite chaos. They use that raw energy as the fuel for what they create.

  “It doesn’t always look that way. But the chaos is there. It’s always there underneath. They thrive on it. I don’t know if they’d cope with normal lives half as well as they do with the craziness.

  “Cherry’s the example I use when I explain this to people. Cherry’s perfect. It’s vile. She spent her high school years doing volunteer work in a hospital. Her handsome, successful boyfriend adores her. And, she’s in a rock band that gets good reviews and makes money. Even I hate her when I describe her out loud like that.

  “However, the reality isn’t anything like it sounds. Cherry opens herself up to pain and horror. She’s always staring down the abyss. What 14-year-old kid decides to spend her free time sponging diarrhea off the terminally ill? Her boyfriend’s a great guy, but he’s Andrew fucking Davenport, you know? There’s no white picket fence and babies and a dog at the end of that story. Not when the guy you’re dating is a warzone photographer who gets halfway killed practically nonstop.

  “Cherry is at her best when she’s up against misery and chaos. And I’m one of the chaotic elements that they left their lives open to.

  “HUSH had a practice space in Chicago. They were all living there. Summer break was on for schools and colleges. Jacqui was a junior, but she was the only one of them who actually made it to college, let alone graduated. Ben had just finished high school, and one of their grandfather’s art friends offered this studio space they weren’t using as a summer hang-out for the kids. Give them a summer in a new city, something wild and fun, you know? I’m sure that the art friend and the grandfather expected that Jacqui and Ben were going to just dick around and do stupid shit.

  “And, I mean, they did. Of course they did. Jacqui was old enough to buy all the alcohol they wanted, and there’s nowhere in the world like Chicago if you’re a kid who loves music and culture. There just isn’t.

  “But it wasn’t pointless, aimless dicking around.

  “That’s one of the things I found most interesting about them, right from the start. I…”

  Jo stops for a minute, like she’s choosing her next words. “I never had much of a childhood. I had to start making hard choices early. So I appreciate that quality in other people, tha
t ability to get on with shit without too much fucking around. A little fucking around is okay —fuck knows I’m no saint —” Jo pauses and smirks here, her eyes a little naughty and a lot hard. “But not too much.

  “Jacqui and Ben had known Cherry and Tash on and off for two or three years by that stage, and the four of them had talked more than once about starting a rock band with the kind of dark, fucked-up blues they all loved — ‘Hellhound on My Trail,’ ‘Shave ‘Em Dry,’ ‘Mad Mama Blues,’ all that crazy shit.

  “So when they got to Chicago, Jacqui and Ben phoned Cherry and Tash to come, too, so they could, you know, get this band started. Cherry and Tash were only fifteen! It was nuts!

  “But their dad is really permissive. He puts a lot of trust in the girls, even though I think he knows that they always dance as close to the edge of the apocalypse as they can, just out of habit. He said they could go live in Chicago with the others over the vacation.

  “So they’ve got space, they’ve got time, they’ve got freedom… but they don’t have a drummer. So instead of asking around or seeing if any of their friends want to learn to play — and Cherry and Tash were basically flying blind anyway, so it wasn’t that the standard was too high to get in someone still learning — or any of the ways most people would go about it, what these four kids do is buy an old restaurant chalk board from a junk shop, the kind with a wood carving of a jolly old Italian chef on one side holding up the part you write on. They wrote ‘Wanted: One Drummer’ on it and dumped it in front of their studio. Inside they had mattresses on the floor and pizza boxes; the only thing they took any care with was their instruments.

  “I happened to be the first passer-by who saw the sign and rang their doorbell. It’s coincidental that I like to play drums. They would’ve taken anyone who applied, I think. They really were just inviting chaos in, and then they’d work with whatever answered the invitation.”

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