The Girl With Glass Feet (10 page)

He opened his eyes. A clock ticked somewhere in the darkness. This was the time of night when things seemed unreal, when a thought that could be dismissed in daylight might take hold of the guts and not be uprooted until morning. But he was awake, no doubt about it. He
had
seen what he had seen. He’d dreamt
of lightning striking beaches and fusing sand grains into glass. And… he had not meant to fall asleep again. He had meant to run away before Ida woke up.

He yawned and was about to stretch when he realized his camera wasn’t on his lap. The bedside lamp was still on. His whole body tensed.

Ida was sitting up in bed with her back to him, the camera’s strap dangling from her hand.

He panicked. He feigned sleep. He couldn’t tell which photo he wanted her to see least. That one where he’d filled the shot with the area of transition, so that the crystallised ribbons of blood reminded him of nebulas in photographs of deep space? Or the close-up of her toes, when he’d hovered his free hand behind them so they filled up with the pale pink of his fingers? He faked a snore. After a while, he heard Ida moving closer. He felt the camera’s weight return to his lap. The bed sheets rustled and the mattress creaked. The light went out.

Ida woke him, nudging his arm. Wintry light filled the bedroom. He shut his eyes again.

‘Come on, Midas. I’ve got something to show you.’

She smelt fragrant and her hair was wet. She wore a dove-grey jumper and a black skirt over which she’d tied a white apron. She had her boots back on.

‘Come on.’

He forced himself up and followed her into the kitchen where she stopped by the window, leaving space for him to stand beside her. Fine snow had settled outside, blanketing the fields that sloped up to the tangled woods. Halfway up the slope, deer were walking. A small herd, the closest maybe twenty yards away. A young stag patrolled solemnly among them, occasionally shaking snow from his immature antlers.

‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’

‘Yes.’

Oh
God
, he thought as the memory of Ida hunched over his camera rushed back to him. She knew he’d seen her feet. Why hadn’t she mentioned it? Oh
God.

She went to the cooker. Blue flames on the hob heated a frying pan, bacon and tomatoes sizzling in its oil. She peeled back the plastic cover of a packet of sausages.

‘I’m cooking you a full English,’ she said. ‘To say thanks for staying over last night. Are you hung over?’

He tried to smile.

She flipped the bacon and pushed it around the pan. ‘Coffee or tea?’

‘Coffee please.’

Outside, one of the deer nudged its face against the stag’s.

Ida poured coffee into a big white mug while steam rose in the air.

‘Orange juice?’

‘Listen, Ida…’

She glanced up at him, then back at the bacon. ‘Well?’

‘Coffee, please.’

‘You’ve already got coffee.’

He looked into the black circle in the mug. ‘Yeah. I mean, it’s fine, thanks. No juice. Just coffee’s fine… um.’

She cracked a pink egg and the insides ran into the frying pan. The white hissed and turned cloudy.

‘One egg or two? I got them from a farmer who lives around the corner
.
’

‘Er… Ida?’

She sprinkled a little salt on the egg, then glanced irritably at him. ‘You’re determined to bring it up? I suppose I thought we could pretend it never happened.’

She ran her wooden spatula around the rim of the egg.
Outside, the deer moved across the field in slow motion.

‘Look,’ she said eventually, ‘I thought I’d be angry but I’m not.’ She tapped the spatula against her other palm. ‘At least not very. I don’t understand why, but I actually feel a little relieved.

‘This morning I’ve tried to think of all the reasons why you might be so intrusive. Did you know already? Or perhaps you just have a foot fetish?’ She laughed. ‘But you wanted to take a photo, didn’t you? There was no malice.’

She stirred the bacon. He shuffled.

‘Midas, I
like
you.’ She pointed the spatula at him. ‘But don’t you tell a soul about my feet. I swear to God I’ll kill you if you do.’

‘Okay,’ he said, swallowing.

‘Breakfast’s done. Sit down.’

He pulled out a chair and sat at the table. A checked tablecloth lay diagonally, leaving the wooden corners bare.

‘So,’ she said, ‘do you want this egg?’

‘Do they
hurt
?’

She stared intently at the food as she slapped it on to two plates and dumped them on the table, rattling the knives and forks. Midas shrivelled into the chair.

‘Listen, I’ve told you I trust you. I forgive you for prying, although I still think you’ve been incredibly rude even if you didn’t mean to be. But I’m not sure I want to go into the gory details. I like to forget about them.’

‘They frighten you, don’t they?’

‘When you’ve dug yourself a hole, Midas, and someone offers you a way out, it’s customary to take it, not keep digging.’

‘Sorry.’

She sat down, then stood up again, tore at the apron strings to undo the knot, took off the apron, scrunched it up and threw it across the room. She sat down again. She picked up her knife and fork and sawed into her egg, spilling the yolk everywhere. She
took a deep breath and laid her cutlery against her plate. She put her palms to her eyes and rubbed them. ‘I’m sorry. You’re right. They frighten me.’

‘I won’t tell a soul and I won’t ask questions.’

‘Thanks.’

‘My coffee’s lovely.’ He took another sip and began on his bacon.

‘Midas?’

He chewed. ‘Yes?’

‘The glass is spreading. I’m frightened. One month ago only the very tips of my toes were affected.’

He swallowed. The kitchen seemed so quiet now he’d stopped chewing. ‘Have you… I mean, do you mind if I ask…’

‘If I’ve seen a doctor?’ She shook her head. ‘You think a doctor could help?
Here, take these antibiotics. It’ll clear up in a fortnight.
’

‘Maybe you could find some kind of… alternative treatment?’

‘Like what? Holistic medicine? Acupuncture? I’m in deeper trouble than…’ She stopped speaking because her eyes were brimming.

He looked down at his breakfast. He cut into a fried tomato and watched the seeds float out on its juices.

Ida wiped her eyes and tried her tea but pulled a face because it was getting cold. ‘I’m scared, Midas. Although it won’t stop me.’

He nodded slowly. ‘And what can I do?’

‘I told you. Tell no one.’

‘I want to help.’

He watched her stand up and hobble delicately towards the kettle. He thought she’d tell him to stop interfering again. Outside, the deer were slinking back into the trees.

‘The simplest thing you could do to help… Like I said before… I
am
frightened. I can’t feel my toes, for God’s sake. I don’t know where I end and my socks and boots begin. You could, if it’s not too much trouble, just hang around.’

He stood up. He supposed in a movie this would be the moment where he put his arm around her waist and said something manly. At the very least he’d place a firm hand on her shoulder. But his arms were dead.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘that shouldn’t be a problem.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’

He sat there and poked his bacon while she was gone. This was a big deal. A very big deal. He looked down at his camera and wondered if it had got him into this as some kind of jealous punishment for spending too much time thinking of her. Yet he was relieved that he might still get his chance to photograph her with her consent.

He closed his eyes and felt some happiness for that, set as it was against the unsettling idea that she was turning into glass.

Carl Maulsen gripped the ferry railing and watched the waves rear and spit like cobras. Close fog reduced the world to the painted white metal of boat rocking on sea. Wind brushed him with ribbons of fog that lingered wrapped around his limbs or noosed around his neck.

He took a deep breath of briny cold air. To say that he had been haunted by Freya Maclaird these last few days would not be metaphorical. He didn’t believe in ghosts but he had seen her, like a projection on the wall, one night when drowsy in his room. He thought he had glimpsed her in a crowded street and barged towards her before coming to his senses and glaring back at the strangers he’d elbowed aside. Nevertheless he was sure he had recognized her outfit and the sunburn across her nose from when he was twenty-one and the two of them were on their way back to their university campus from the beach.

Then the other night he had been ill. He had woken up bathed in pins and needles. He squirmed in his bed, knotting himself in his sheets. The blankets were by turns his only shelter from teeth-chattering cold and made of a fabric as hot and sticky as lava. He had thrown himself under his hotel-room shower and sat coughing and sweating under a trickle of tepid water. But after that he had felt better. Stretched, yet refocused. He had not imagined seeing Freya since. He had got a grip.

Now on the ferry, he looked at the white hairs dashing along his forearms and the backs of his hands. A foghorn sounded somewhere in the mists.

Something Midas Crook senior once wrote a paper
concerning, something he had discussed with Carl in his cluttered office, was the wearing of time on a person. He had written the image of a person’s life like a day’s clothing. Beginning with the pulling on of layers on a cold morning, then adjusted to dress and leave the house for work. The change back to casual clothes in the evening, the final stripping away as night came. Crook said each garment was one of many characters a person held in their lifetime.

Carl had argued that the parable worked better if the clothes were those worn across a year, because personalities were not accrued and covered up throughout life, but shed and changed, bought and sold, many times over.

He walked off the ferry with his suitcase clattering behind him and sat in a poky tearoom overlooking the harbour, among used cups and crumb-covered plates the staff were too idle to clear up.

Now he worried that Crook had been right. Carl had always thought of himself as a being changed many times over by life, exchanged and bettered for more agreeable personalities. Just as his body had replaced every cell, he had replaced and rebuilt his entire personality to make it something robustly his own, owing nothing to Freya.

Yet now he felt himself as a man in the mould of Crook’s parable: a man whose working clothes were wearing through, exposing the hidden cloth of the past beneath.

Booking a taxi on the island could leave you with a lengthy wait. Having finished reading
The Odyssey
for the umpteenth time while still on the ferry, the only way to kill time was with a tepid cup of tea (too sweet before adding sugar) and a two-day-old local rag blotted with coffee stains. He chased shades out of his head for thirty minutes, until a taxi honked and he left his teacup with the other dirty crockery and headed outside.

He vaguely recognized the driver as the man who’d taken him to the harbour when he left the island. The driver recognized him
too, asking how the trip had been while they drove. Carl deflected the driver’s conversation with monosyllabic answers. Bare fields passed like chessboards set with white trees and black crows. If you stared up at the low clouds you couldn’t tell whether the fizz you saw was dust on your eyeballs or brewing snowfall.

They pulled up outside the cottage. He unloaded his suitcase, paid, then stood for a minute before the blue door and its ridiculous lucky horseshoe (Freya had given him that). He laid his palm on the dewy paintwork, rolled his neck from side to side so it clicked in a satisfying fashion. He broadened his shoulders, puffed into his hand to check the mint on his breath, then seized the knocker and struck it three times hard against his own front door.

Ida greeted him, leaning with one hand on the wall and the other on a wooden crutch. He recognized that crutch in an instant: he had made it himself. She had no doubt found it leaning on his sitting-room wall and thought nothing of helping herself to it.