The Girl With Glass Feet (12 page)

‘You… They’re pretty. Please don’t destroy them.’

‘My dear Evaline, the validation of their beauty is irrelevant. My question remains: who are they from?’

She was silent.

He nodded and carefully picked up the first dragonfly. ‘The bin please, Midas.’

Midas skulked into the bedroom and lifted the bin up to his father, who didn’t take it from him. The dragonfly crunched like tissue paper in his closing fist, and Midas’s mother flinched at the noise. He opened his hand and wriggled his fingers. Bits of white wing and bent leg spiralled down to the bin on their last flight.

He ground the dragonflies one by one, with Midas’s mother slumped heavily on the bed. Then he plodded back to his study. Midas loitered for a moment, then crept back to the bottom of the stairs where everything was pleasantly dark, to toy with his flashgun.

An afternoon of snow lay deep in Gustav’s garden. Denver (zipped, buttoned and toggled) scooped armfuls into a lump for a snowman’s base. She was a mouse-haired seven-year-old with a grin full of disorganized teeth and a winter daisy in her hair. Gustav helped, doing donkey-work on his daughter’s orders, while Midas provided the details: a carrot, a faded felt beret and a bag of nuts to make buttons.

He closed his eyes and felt bitter snow particles landing on his face. He sometimes felt like an impostor in these little family moments. Gustav had joked the other day that Midas was now Denver’s surrogate mother. Then, seeing Midas worrying about that, he’d explained that this was no bad thing: he couldn’t run the florist and look after Den if he didn’t have an old friend to count on.

That made it worse because it was true. Of course Midas loved their company. It was just… If Catherine was here she’d be the one plugging in the snowman’s eyes, not him, so with each nut pressed into the flaky snow he thought of what had happened to her up on Lomdendol Tor, and wished like crazy he could turn around and see her shaking a carrot or bringing out gloves for the snowman’s twig-fingers.

A bittersweet afternoon with his friends was still better than sitting alone in his kitchen. For the past couple of days he’d suppressed the guilt he felt for hiding what he knew about Henry Fuwa from Ida. Now it had returned he worried whether his only release would be to own up to her. Then he wondered what good that would do, because although Fuwa’s name had been familiar,
he had no better clue than Ida as to which hiding hole on St Hauda’s Land Fuwa called his own. He’d scoured his walls of photos for distraction, but photos churned up all manner of memories, sometimes creating new ones. He’d fled his kitchen, locked his front door and raced down slippery pavements to Gustav’s house. He knew he was suppressing something else now. Although he didn’t know Fuwa’s whereabouts himself, he suspected he knew somebody who might.

‘We’re going to make mince pies tomorrow,’ said Denver when they were back in the house and Gustav was forcing her to get changed into dry clothes. She was an earnest child with a whiz of ginger hair, eyes too big for her freckled face and newly grown adult teeth overlapping like a hand of cards. ‘Dad’s promised to find some cutters so we can make biscuits. Will you help?’

Midas was staring out at the whitening world.

‘Midas!’

‘Sorry, what was that, Den?’

Gustav butted in with a remark about her wet hair. He shooed her out of the kitchen. She left without complaint, looking back worriedly over her shoulder at Midas. Gustav closed the door after her. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Ida.’

‘
Ah
. You want a beer?
’

‘I’m really not in the mood.’

‘Midas… I know there are a hundred things you’d never tell me about and that’s fine, but if you want to offload some of your melancholy, then muggins here is happy to help. What about a brandy? Some festive cheer?’

‘Um. Gus, I don’t mean romantic troubles. Just… You ever heard of this man called Henry Fuwa? He lives on the island.’

‘Well…
pfff
. No. We could check the phone book, and the customer records at the florist.’

‘I already have.’

‘Has she
hired
you? Are you her private eye or something?’

‘I, er, I… deleted him from the customer records.’

‘Come again?’

The phone rang. Midas gestured for Gustav to go ahead and answer. Gustav looked at the caller’s number on the phone’s display. ‘Catherine’s mum again. She’s really going through a phase about it.’

‘You’d better answer.’

Gustav picked up and began another weary conversation with his mother-in-law about where they would spend Christmas. Gustav didn’t want to travel to the mainland to see Catherine’s parents, who’d moved there after her accident. Nor did Catherine’s parents want to make the trip to St Hauda’s Land, which they hadn’t returned to since. It would end, many phone calls later, with stalemate, and then one or the other party would suggest they all got together the following year.

The door opened and Denver came back in. She grabbed Midas’s hand and towed him into the sitting room.

‘This game,’ she said, kneeling behind a stack of shoeboxes on the carpet, ‘is one I invented. I reckon it’s pretty good.’

Behind them stood Gustav’s freshly cut, undecorated Christmas tree. It had filled the room with the scent of pine needles.

‘Right…’ She lifted the lid off the first shoebox. Inside, folded in beige sugar paper, were baubles and delicate wooden decorations. Midas thought of last Christmas-time, when he had watched Gustav smash a snow globe with a hammer while he thought no one was watching. He had said it had reminded him of the air up on Lomdendol Tor.

‘The rules are easy. What you have to do is decide what each decoration is before you hang it on the tree. Like this…’ She reached into the shoebox and pulled out a blue metallic orb. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is the world when God flooded it. And if you
look super, super close,’ she pressed the decoration to her eye, ‘you can just about see the ark. And Noah. Who’s bald. And narwhals swimming.’ She hooked the bauble’s thread over a branch and held the shoebox towards Midas. ‘Your turn.’

He reached into the shoebox and pulled out an orange bauble sparkling with rainbow glitter. ‘This is a pumpkin coach,’ he said after a while, ‘but they’ve yet to find it wheels.’

Denver nodded her approval. ‘Do you want me to put it on the tree for you?’

‘No. I’m doing it.’ He found a nice spot beneath where the star would go.

Denver picked another bauble from the shoebox. It was blood red, dusted with ruby glitter. ‘This,’ she proclaimed, ‘is Father Christmas when he’s had too much to eat.’

Midas scratched his head. ‘I don’t understand what the point of the game—’

‘
Shh
!’ She glanced back into the kitchen, where Gustav leant in resignation against the wall, rubbing his forehead with his free hand, tapping his foot on the floor. ‘I was spying… The point of the game is to trick yourself for a moment. So things aren’t what they are.’

‘Uh?’

‘It’s
your go
.’

He pulled out a perfectly clear glass orb.

‘Go on,’ prompted Denver, ‘you have to decide what it is.’

His palm distorted in its sphere. He shuddered. ‘It’s a crystal ball,’ he said, seeing his reflection warping on the surface, made leaner and more bug-eyed: more like his mother. Then, when he rotated it, scrawny and sallow-cheeked: more like his father. He kept it revolving and watched himself oscillate between genetic codes. He could remember the smell of peat; his mother humming happier than she’d ever been; dragonflies from the bog; a bouquet of flowers crumpled in a bin; Nihongo inscriptions;
water dripping from cut stalks; ink running illegible.

‘Yes!’ hissed Denver, her wild grin packed with teeth. ‘I knew it would work!’

He gawped at her. ‘What?’

‘Because you were ignoring what was in the back of your head. And this is how I spend time in the back of
my
head, by doing things like this.’

He looked at her in admiration: ‘How did you get to be so brave, Den?’

She shrugged. ‘Shit happens, Dad says.’ She stood up and adjusted a bauble on the tree. ‘I don’t think there is being brave, anyway. I used to not tread in puddles in case I fell in them and died like Mummy did. But then in the autumn when it flooded I got stuck and had to splash through one. It didn’t feel safer or worser. I just had to splash through it or wait until the sun came up and it all dried out.’

He stood up. ‘Den,’ he said, ‘you’re right. At least, yeah, sometimes you have to scrap being brave and get on with things. I’ve got to go. Will you say goodbye to your dad for me?’

The bridges from Gurm to Lomdendol Island always reminded Midas of toppled pylons. Old girders of steel coated with the sea’s white tartar zigzagged between rocky islets across a space of chopping ocean. On the Lomdendol side of the crossing they plunged into a tunnel in a rock face. This was in fact the lowest reach of the tor. On the other side of the tunnel the road emerged uphill, strafing up snow-covered ledges. In summer the shadow of the hill falling across the island was starkly defined. The slopes would be grey, the sea between the bridges dark and deep even though, in the distance, the water would be bright blue where the sun shone unobstructed. Come autumn, it was as if the tor’s shadow was unbound. It became like a gas in the air. Nothing on Lomdendol Island was free of the dark. The land responded with breeds of fungi and pebble-grey mushrooms. Slugs, snails and amphibians enjoyed the damp shade and could often be found crossing the pavements of Martyr’s Pitfall, Lomdendol’s principal village. Come winter, the shadow trapped the land in invisible coats of ice, made slides out of pavements and mirrors out of puddles.

In Midas’s view, Martyr’s Pitfall was old age’s Death Row. Houses were built cannily out of sight from each other, to give the illusion that they were isolated homes in the countryside. Midas parked his car and tasted the tor’s shadow on his tongue like a copper coin. He shivered. Somewhere up there on the foggy peak was the hidden pool that had swallowed Catherine.

Snow covered the front lawn and muted the chimes that hung in his mother’s garden. Midas stomped about on the doorstep,
rubbing his gloved hands together. A brass cherub gnawed the ring of a knocker, which he grabbed and banged again on the door. The house was only a few years old, the brick still characterless and the garden a square imposition on the landscape. Midas hated it: hated the tacky cherub knocker, hated the tacky garden fountain like a Grecian nymph, hated the tacky sundial inscribed with faux Latin. Granted, he wasn’t the most adventurous man in the world, but his mother wasn’t even sixty and he felt she should still have been busying herself with work, not consigning herself to a village that was little more than a dispersed care home. He always questioned why, when his father died, she seemed so incapable of unfettering herself of his ghost and living the life he had denied her. Instead she had checked in here, happy to skip her grey-haired days and cut straight to toothless ones.

He remembered his father’s wake, picking at the drab food his aunt had bought and made. Tasteless pastries, sandwiches like something from a pond, little cakes with squashed glazed cherries in their icing. Dead man food. He had put slices of cucumber and an oatcake on to a paper plate and looked around for a corner where he could avoid the guests. His mother had found the best one. He could still picture her on the windowsill in her black lace dress, the net curtains stirring behind her in the draught, letting in the smell of rain on tarmac. Her fingers had tapped against a glass of untouched water. She hadn’t moved all afternoon. Nor had she drunk any of her water or eaten any food. None of the scant few guests in attendance spoke to her.
He
didn’t speak to her. But he remembered wailing at her, inside his head, to begin again.

He knocked a second time. A vacuum cleaner was whirring inside. Nobody answered. The wind gusted through the spindly plants in his mother’s garden. They were rosebushes but he could tell from working at Catherine’s that these were too unhealthy to
bloom. His mother had given up tending white roses some years ago. He pressed his ear to the door and heard the vacuum cleaner’s murmur.

He remembered, after his father’s first suicide attempt, his mother redoubling her efforts to bind the three of them together as a family. Sitting inside on a drizzling afternoon, at the opposite end of the sofa to his father, he had fiddled with his camera while the old man pored over a huge book with yellowing pages. Then his mother tiptoed up to his father, bent stealthily over his shoulder, and kissed his cheek.