Fairytales for Wilde Girls Read online

  About the Book

  There’s a dead girl in a birdcage in the woods. That’s not unusual. Isola Wilde sees a lot of things other people don’t. But when the girl appears at Isola’s window, her every word a threat, Isola needs help. Her real-life friends – Grape, James and new boy Edgar – make her forget for a while. And her brother-princes – magical creatures seemingly lifted from the pages of the French fairytales Isola idolises – will protect her with all the fierce love they possess. It may not be enough. Isola needs to uncover the truth behind the dead girl’s demise . . . before the ghost steals Isola’s last breath.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title

  Dedication

  PART ONE: The Seventh Princess

  Death Meets Isola Wilde

  Curtain Up – A Setting

  Weddings, Parties, Anything

  What Edgar Saw in a Vision, as He First Looked at Isola Wilde

  No Fair

  Body Parts

  A Picture of Isola Wilde as Viewed by a Sober Edgar Allan Poe

  Boy – An Appraisal

  Isola Isolated

  The Dead Girl

  Pretty Up Death and Girls Otherwise

  The Tomb of Sleeping Beauty by Lileo Pardieu

  The Dead Girl – Part Deux

  Little Voices

  Unlocked Hearts

  The Children of Nimue

  Tick Tock

  The Boy – A Second Glance

  Wings and Wanderings

  Wilde Child

  PART TWO: Doll House

  Guinevere’s Rabbits

  Names Exchanged

  To the Waters and the Wilde

  Forever the Girl – Advice from Saint Pip

  The Moon Melodies

  Starring Edgar Llewellyn as Himself

  Isola on the Outer

  The Mermaid’s Tale

  Bloodpearl Girls

  Lady of the Unicorns by Lileo Pardieu

  Isola’s Nursery

  A Heathen’s Prayer

  Hear the Daisies

  Viking

  Isola Juvenalia

  Sharps

  Sleepless Beauty

  Girls and Unicorns

  PART THREE: Bride and Gloom

  Death Wears Curls

  Horrorshow

  Edgar Allan Poe and the Zombie Mona Lisa

  ‘Folie’ Is French for ‘Mad’

  A Shroud of Songbirds

  Edgar and Isola and a Party – Part Deux

  The Clock Strikes Midnight

  No Trail of Breadcrumbs

  Isola Intensive

  Edgar the Ripper

  Sex, Drugs and Grape Tomoyaki

  Mother Wilde’s Lock and Key

  Moon Clue

  Betrayal

  True Nature

  Madame Guillotine

  The Book of Revelation

  PART FOUR: Kill the Cosmic Circus

  Isola Interrupted

  Fair Bright

  His Endless List of Reasons

  Stopped Clock

  Springling

  An Already Broken Pact

  The Midnight Fountain

  Last Man Standing

  Bunny Batman

  Chapel Blitz

  A World without Treasure

  The Gargoyle Commandments

  Snowflake Romantics

  Toxic Pretty

  Dream-weaving

  Meat and Bones

  Teenage Hexorcism

  Cage, Moon, Stripe

  Killers

  Carnivore

  Hair, Meat, Flower

  Water and Stone

  Weaknesses

  Champagne Gone Sour

  Two Isolas

  In the Belly of the Wolf

  PART FIVE: Teenage Exorcism

  Weapons of Bones

  Isola and Dusk Ride Out

  The Bright Eyes of Annabel Lee

  Death Masks

  Daughter of the Séance

  The Girl Who Was a Fairytale

  Silent Heart

  Witch of the Woods

  Killing Loneliness, Eating Time

  Goodbye-blood

  Lost and Found

  Wolverine Queen by Lileo Pardieu

  Lost and Found – Part Deux

  Beautiful Things

  Hearing Daisies

  La Mort d’Isola

  Talisman

  Teenage Exorcism

  The Ever After

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  Dedicated to my dad,

  Peter Near,

  with everlasting love

  And to the memory of

  Isola Francesca Emily Wilde

  1857–1867

  ‘She can hear the daisies grow’

  Death Meets Isola Wilde

  Once upon a time, Isola Wilde was watching late-night television with her eldest brother, Alejandro, when Channel 12 broadcast a live suicide.

  The teenage boy in his leather jacket had hair the colour of desert dust and freckles like actual spots of desert dust. The news camera zoomed, and he blurred then sharpened, a drunken vision.

  Isola Wilde’s shoulders tensed. Her hands curled into sucker-punch fists. Intrinsically, she knew this boy. He knew her.

  They had never met.

  He was at a county fair an hour north of Isola’s hometown, Avalon. The boy had clambered from his fairy-lit gondola at the top of the Ferris wheel and stood amongst the network of steel. He didn’t look frightened. He wasn’t even shaking.

  A crowd had gathered, forming an ouroboros around the Ferris wheel. Some pointed their phones and cameras at him, recording his silent last words. His Aladdin eyes flickered like candlelight – at the earth he’d soon slam into, at the news camera fixed on him – and he stared through the television to Isola, who met his gaze with rapt attention.

  Her: curled up in a pile of pillows, in her striped socks and summery bloomers, gnawing on her necklace chain.

  Him: standing at the precipice.

  Then the boy was falling, and the air whistled around his plummeting body like somebody saying, I love you.

  Too late, Alejandro realised and reacted. He ducked over Isola as though to shield her from the impact, as though he could take the folly of gravity upon himself.

  At the top of the Ferris wheel, the empty carriage rocked with the momentum of his jump. Or maybe that was his ghost, already taking up residence, cursed to ride the glittering Ferris wheel forever.

  There are worse destinies to be had, Isola supposed, as Alejandro apologised profusely for a death he didn’t die, as the crowd’s screams were intercut with shots of frazzled newsreaders pawing loose their ties that seemed suddenly like nooses.

  Isola Wilde was watching television with her brother Alejandro.

  She was an only child.

  Curtain Up – A Setting

  EXT. AVALON, a mousy village on the south-west English coast, sunk at the bottom of a valley, ringed in scrubby woodland and leviathan hills.

  The highest hill was dense with VIVIEN’S WOOD, deigned haunted by superstitious townsfolk and merely creepy by the sceptics. An unpaved road around the woodland was the only means of access, unless one wanted to tackle the hour-long trek through the rambling woods. Nobody did, except ISOLA WILDE.

  VIVIEN, its namesake, was the lovely creature who entombed the wizard Merlin in his tree-casket. Perhaps insects burrowed into the log and munched through his putrefying guts, then spread his enchanted blood as pollen from glittering beetle-wings, or via their tiny dewy footprints on tree-leaves. Vivien trapped all kinds of magic in that f
orest.

  AURORA COURT, the tiny street isolated by the vast woodland. Only four mis-numbered houses stood on the lonely court. At Number Thirty-six lived THE WILDES. Houses one through thirty-five had presumably long since returned to nature, hungry vines having eaten through the rotted floorboards.

  THE THREE OTHER HOUSES OF AURORA COURT: one with a sign ‘To Let’, another with a sign newly stickered ‘Sold’, and the third occupied by an old hermit our heroine called BOO RADLEY, who occasionally shouted Bible verses and doomsday prophecies at her in the garden.

  NUMBER THIRTY-SIX was a weatherboard house: two stories tall; front door crooked from adolescent slamming; a garden hardly tended but thriving nonetheless; the enchanted castle behind the hedge of thorns. On the second storey was the princess’s tower room, candles holding vigil on the sill; the door was only ever locked from the inside.

  Weddings, Parties, Anything

  There was a Big Party happening the last Saturday in August, a welcome round of applause as the gold-dusk curtains closed on another summer’s break. It had been a topic of shark-frenzied discussion for weeks, the streets of Avalon brimming with chunks of meaty gossip and excitement, and no-one was sure whether the Reality of the situation would measure up to the Impossible Expectations.

  At the party was a boy called Edgar. He had been dragged there by his friend Pip Sutcliffe.

  Music blasted from the stereo, and guests haggled to veto the playlist. There was a dry-ice fog machine and blue laser lights, ice cube-cushioned ciders and cranberry vodkas, and stiletto heels sticking to the carpet.

  Edgar was standing over the shiny depression of the kitchen sink, rubbing at his curdling stomach. He’d never been much of a drinker, and the cold beer he clutched was little more than a party prop.

  A boy wearing obnoxious sunglasses was leaning against the nearby fridge, attempting to chat up a girl who was perched on a stool at the breakfast bar.

  ‘You smoke?’ said the boy.

  ‘Only passively,’ said the girl.

  ‘I mean dope.’

  ‘What’d you call me?’

  Edgar snorted into the sink, which was already slick with someone else’s candy-coloured vomit. The boy slouched off; Edgar caught the girl’s eye. She winked.

  What Edgar Saw in a Vision, as He First Looked at Isola Wilde

  Glass heels, glass lips, hands grasping a glass parasol, the draped stiffness of a shatterproof ballgown – a glass Cinderella.

  Music thumped through the floor and travelled up Edgar’s shoes like an electric current, knotting around his spine. No lyrics or discernible tune; just noise, jungle drumming, an aural extension of Edgar’s racing heartbeat.

  She had a great mass of wavy hair so blonde it burned Edgar’s scalp to think about. Rainbow streaks at the roots, like melted Skittles. Navy-blue lipstick to match an oceanic gush of a party frock. On a chain around her neck was what might have been a minuscule golden carriage.

  As the strobes switched back to solid blue jets, and the maybe-chariot turned back into a possible-pumpkin, her gaze held his and something in her face struck twelve; her pupils became the black bells in the clocktower marking midnight.

  ‘Um, hi,’ said Edgar, with a silly sort of wave. The wink had thrown a casual spark in his direction, into the wild grass of his consciousness, and caught ablaze.

  She swung slightly on the stool. ‘I don’t smoke,’ she clarified, ‘but thanks anyway.’

  ‘Um, no – I don’t either,’ said Edgar.

  She shrugged, lifting her drink – a flute of champagne with a dripping lemon slice bayoneted on the rim. ‘Truth is, I can’t. My brother’d kill me.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Edgar, turning to lean his back against the sink. ‘Protective?’

  ‘Like a bulletproof vest.’

  They both looked awkwardly at the floor, taking long slurps of their respective drinks.

  ‘I’m Edgar.’

  ‘Aha.’ She smiled conspiratorially. ‘Thought you looked familiar.’

  What did he look like, all clammy and pale? Edgar pressed the cold beer bottle to his sweat-beaded forehead in the most nonchalant way possible. ‘Oh – do I know you?’

  ‘Nope. But I know you. I’ve read your work.’

  He looked at her blankly as she raised an eyebrow, tracing the rim of her glass as though it were a magic lamp ripe for rubbing. ‘Edgar Allan Poe? Um, you mean, like, The Raven?’

  ‘Sure. Not your best, though.’

  He guffawed, then cringed at the sound. ‘I’m just Edgar.’

  With a hiss, the fog breathed through the room again, shrouding them in alien-blue mist. Through it, she extended her hand to shake his; a flash of bitten-down, glitter-coated nails.

  ‘I’m Annabel Lee.’

  It wasn’t until the party was in its early-morning death throes, after Edgar had stumbled through the maze of entwined legs and deflated balloons to a miraculously free chair, Googling her name on his phone, that he realised.

  ‘For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea – In her tomb by the sounding sea.’

  No Fair

  The bathroom was jungle-fogged, flooded with puddles, piled with soaked towels; cakes of soap with long strands of blonde baked in.

  A girl in pieces: Barbie-thin ankles, a shaving cut on her knee; hipbones she could stab you with; white hands gelled with strawberry body lotion.

  Isola Wilde turbaned her head in a towel and raised a hand to clear the fog from the mirror. She paused, squinting at her cloudy reflection in the glass, and for a moment she felt like a blurred-out identity, a shadow half-glimpsed on a wall. Anonymous Wilde.

  ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’ she breathed around the sticky air in her lungs, ‘who’s the fairest of them all?’

  Words appeared in the fog, letters traced in the mirror by the clever fingers of some old magic trapped in the walls:

  TEENAGE GIRLS ARE ALL UNFAIR

  ‘Dressed or not, I’m coming in, Isola.’

  Isola quickly wiped the mirror as Mother Wilde pushed open the door. The mirror should have named her mother Best and Fairest; even this ill, even practically bed-ridden, with her hair a nest to nurse long-flown dreams, crop circles under her eyes. She still held vestiges of beauty, a sort of glamour gone to seed – like an ageing Monroe might have looked if they’d pumped her guts in time.

  But still, all Isola’s favourite pictures of Mother were from before the diagnosis. Blurry in Polaroid, smattered with freckles, lying on a bed in the late eighties and twisted up in a curly phone cord with no pill bottles on the bedside table.

  ‘Oh good, you’re not naked,’ said Mother. ‘Here, let me help get that hair under control.’

  Isola obediently lowered her hands. Mother gave a wry apple-peel smile. She pulled down Isola’s makeshift turban and started rubbing her daughter’s hair dry, combing her fingers through the bedraggled knots. ‘Did you get in a fight again? Your eyes are all black,’ Mother noted.

  Isola scrubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘No, I slept in my make-up,’ she replied.

  In truth, she’d hardly count that as sleeping. She’d left the party early but lingered late in the woods, and afterwards her sleep had been disrupted by hazy little dreamscapes of carnivals and boys perched to fly, arms outstretched over glittering heights . . .

  ‘That late, huh?’ Mother sounded amused, twisting Isola’s hair off her wet neck. ‘Don’t let your dad know. He still thinks you’re asleep before the a.m., bless. He doesn’t know you saw that dreadful thing on the Friday night news, either.’

  Isola’s eyes widened minutely, and Mother’s fingers stilled mid-braid. Their reflections’ gazes met, and Isola knew it was written plainly on her face as though etched by the magic mirror.

  ‘
It’s all right. Just don’t tell your father,’ said Mother, untangling her hands. She leaned close and thumbed a few flakes of mascara from her daughter’s lower lashes. ‘You know how . . . touchy he is about stuff like that.’

  Mother beat Isola downstairs and stood over the stove, appearing fluffy in her dressing gown, peering into the oven as something baked inside. ‘Afternoon,’ said Mother slyly, winking at the clock.

  ‘Hi,’ replied Isola.

  Father’s face was hidden behind the newspaper, ink-obscured by screaming headlines: odd celebrity baby names and world tragedies. Without looking up, he kicked out a chair at the kitchen table with his dirty boot. ‘Have some breakfast.’

  ‘Want some eggs, Isola?’ asked Mother.

  ‘No thanks.’

  At this, Father peered over the top of his paper, suspicion furrowing his brow. ‘Anything happen last night?’

  ‘Nothing news-worthy,’ said Isola, plopping down on the chair.

  ‘He wants to hear about any special boys,’ said Mother in a stage-whisper. ‘So he can drive around their neighbourhoods and glare, y’know.’

  Isola smiled mischievously. ‘Dad? Didn’t you meet Mum at a party when you were my age?’

  Father Wilde grumbled but said nothing intelligible.

  Mother’s face fell slightly. She turned back to the eggs, popping the yolks with the spatula.

  Isola tried to burn holes in her father’s paper with her stare, urging him telepathically: Acknowledge Mum. Just talk to her.

  ‘School starts back tomorrow,’ he said abruptly. ‘Gotta get used to sleeping with the sun, Isola.’ He slapped the newspaper down on the table and downed the last of his coffee before climbing to his feet.

  Isola heard the tell-tale thunk of his workboots and creased her forehead. ‘You’re not going to work, are you? It’s Sunday.’

  ‘Picked up a few shifts.’

  The school year hadn’t started yet and already he was making arrangements that would take him out of the house; devising ways to stay out as long as Mother was home with him. Longer hours were usually the beginning, then increasingly distant jobs that took days to travel to. Now that Isola’s summer break was over, he didn’t want to be trapped in this house with Mother, not without Isola there to cut through the sad black air.