The Girl With Glass Feet (14 page)

His father’s annotated map of the island: crammed with so many handwritten remarks on the aesthetics of the landscape that the terrain itself was confused with the words. Contours made trails between separate sentences. Midas could trace them with his little finger, following cross-sections of his father’s thoughts:

splintered tree was hydra looking

coombe was memorable

frozen lake was coffin ice

Now grown up, Midas tried to keep his bearings with the map on his lap. Paper-clipped to it were the directions his mother had scribbled for him. It was odd seeing the two sets of handwriting together.

On the way out of Martyr’s Pitfall the shadow of the tor had been loose, hanging in clusters around boulders and striping the roadside crags. A whole piece of shadow seemed to fill the interior of his car like black liquid. He expected it would gush out if he opened the door.

He drove down the slope and into the tunnel that left Lomdendol Island and crossed the girdered bridges to Gurm.

Across the bridges, Gurmton could be seen lazing along the coast to the south, before the road entered a different kind of tunnel: a dark shaft running uphill between pine trees. Inland, the dormant woods grew denser. Beeches stood aghast in pools of shed leaves. Silver poplars looked like moonbeams. These trees could be anything: he passed a crone, an elk and a hunting cat crouched in the undergrowth.

And then it was over the strait and on to Ferry Island, where the trees thinned out into expanding mere. He was in the bog, and the bog… Well, that always looked the same. He’d been brought here once or twice as a child, to stare into glutinous water. He’d always hated seeing his reflection made unwashed by the brown pools. For days after a visit he’d wake with the breath of the bog on his lips and rising itches from gnat bites all over his skin.

There were many paths through the bog, but slush and snow-thatched reed banks concealed the routes. At one point he passed a rusting car caught vertical in a pit of black mud. No doubt the road had sprung a pit trap, where bog had congealed to look like tarmac. Eventually the mere’s mastication would swallow it under the surface for ever. Midas wondered what had befallen the driver.

A mist hung heavy and soon, when his bearings were gone entirely, he got out and gagged at the foul air. A skin of fluid on the dented road clung to his shoes with each step. He watched a bird the size and colour of a penny fly across the road and disappear between tall canes.

He looked at his father’s old map. He hoped it was old enough to mark roads now hidden by slush. He got back in and started to drive.

A pattern of reeds and pitted peat grottoes continued for some time. Then the road came to a halt. A brook splashed across it. Midas checked the map as best he could and was certain that a road had progressed here, back when the map was new.

His mother had described a bridge that no roads now crossed, and up ahead was a peculiar mound of moss and slime. Midas got out of the car and hopped along a bank of the brook to get closer to it. Reeds and mud gauzed its sides, so he used a stick to poke them back. Beneath the mosses and lichens the mound was made of cracked old bricks. He kept clearing the brickwork until he saw the very top of a tide marker.
This
was the last of the bridge. He jumped back into his car and revved through the brook, sheets of parting water flashing through the air.

He had to drive carefully from there, for the track kept dropping down into sluggish rivulets. He came to a ford, drove through it and had been going only a few minutes more when he saw the silhouette of a lonely house ahead. Covered in ivy so dense and old its vines were thick as wrists, the house’s bent chimney was a neck throttled by the creepers. The ivy had been hacked roughly back around the windows and a low door had been painted newt green.

The plants in the garden were strangling things with thread-like stalks. At the end of a plot that could loosely be described as a lawn the fence cut straight through a quagmire bordered with flints and made into a kind of pond. On one of the flints stood a curious bird with a long, curving bill like a straw. Midas watched it break the water’s surface and suck up green fluid. Toads watched him from blinkless eyeballs. At the end of the garden was an old slate outbuilding with a padlocked, mossy door.

It had not been so hard to find his way here, and he envisaged
it being a lot easier to make his way back. The whole journey had taken little over an hour, which again made him angry at Fuwa, for never finding an hour of his own to go to Martyr’s Pitfall and the house of his mother. Right now, however, there was something more pressing. He resolved to knock on the door and greet Fuwa solely in his capacity as the man to help Ida.

He knocked.

Henry Fuwa sat at his bedroom desk, changing the bedding hay in an old brass lantern. When he had finished he poured fresh water into a saucer, gently placed this in the lantern, then turned around and whistled to the moth-winged cow who was flying slow circles over the bed, her belly fat as a grape. At his whistle she veered and floated down to Henry’s desk, landing softly and folding her lapis lazuli moth-wings. She plodded up to the lantern door, the weight of her full belly swaying from side to side with each hoof step. Henry smiled proudly and lightly stroked the curls of fur on her shoulders.

Getting the cattle to breed was a constant struggle. They were a species set against survival, he often felt. They took mates for life, but the bulls still sometimes grew fickle and harassed the younger heifers, distressing those with calf. Back when he started caring for them, Henry had often found mothers crooning over thimblefuls of miscarried matter and crumpled, half-formed wings.

Now he brought pregnant cows inside. Reintroducing her and her calf to the herd would be a tough job, but better the calf were born here than never at all.

He looked up to see a black-haired stranger leaping the stepping-stones towards his cottage. He gasped and swung backwards in his chair, nearly knocking the lantern off the desk as he did so. The pregnant cow lowed in alarm.

He took up post at the window, concealing himself with a
curtain. He’d been shocked to see someone appear at his hideaway.

He’d been even more shocked to see a dead man.

Could this be happening? He had been to Crook’s grave in Tinterl churchyard!

Wait… Of course, it was the boy.

Henry bit his fingertips. If he let him in, would the boy shake his hand, and what would that feel like? It had been a long time since he had touched another human being. This alone was nearly enough to dissuade him from going down to the door. In the past, he had let himself imagine this first encounter. It would be a welcoming occasion, in a room of warmth. The boy’s mother would make the introduction and pour the three of them a glass of gin. Henry combed his beard with his fingernails. He had never imagined
this
. He had made great efforts, moving to the middle of nowhere, letting bog flood roads and unruly mere paint over milestones.

It was so unthinkable and ridiculous that he should be discovered here he felt like laughing. Only (his heartbeat speeding up) the boy really
was
here. Looking at him was like looking at a drawing whose sketch work had not been rubbed out. There were dark finalized lines, unmistakably that of a young man, but there were fainter shades from pencils, dupes of his mother that hung about him in movements and the scared look in his eyes. To keep life simple the Crook boy should remain ignored.

The boy was already knocking on the door.
Knock knock knock
. It thudded through the cottage. Should he pretend to be out?

He had cupped furred bodies against the winter wind, dozed with a heifer curled against his forehead on a pillow, her wings trembling in his breath, but the thought of such proximity to a human being was as terrifying as a trip into space. It was true he had felt alien around every one he had ever met, except for Evaline Crook. When he had seen her for the first time he
couldn’t believe the attraction that impaled him. He was shocked not only that he would want to be with a married woman, but that he would want to be with another human being at all.

After seeing her, he remembered returning to tend a grizzled moth-winged bull without a partner, the odd digit at the end of the headcount, who had grown old, rheumatic and despondent without a mate.

So absorbed was he in these thoughts as he tiptoed down the stairs, that he left the pregnant cow’s brass lantern open. He loped through the hall and leant against the wall, letting Midas’s knocking pass through him as an amendment to the beat of his heart.

Fourteen years back now, Evaline had smiled at him. He had sat with her, talked, and there had been an understanding. Like insects they had engaged on frequencies without the need for words or body language.

He rushed forward and opened the door.

He had no idea what to say. He was too tall for the door frame. He held out his hand.

‘Um,’ said Midas, not taking it. ‘Um.’

Henry looked him up and down, wagging his head as he did so.

‘I,’ said Midas, ‘um… I’m Midas Crook. I… believe you, um, knew my parents once.’

‘Um,’ said Henry.

‘Um.’

‘
Ahk
.’

‘
Err
… May I come in?’

Henry puffed out his cheeks, then stepped aside to let Midas enter. His hallway had a low ceiling and creaking wooden floor, on which his ancient box files and bundles of paper tied with string were stacked untidily. He noticed Midas noticing the framed sketches of insects, dissected or in flight, hanging on the hallway walls, and this concept of a stranger noticing these things
that he had seen every day for years made his skin tingle uneasily.

He ushered Midas into a sitting room decorated with more thoraxes, wings and multifaceted eyes. Preserved butterflies were pinned to a board in a cabinet. In a glass tank, ribbed leaves crawled with ants. Two thick candles made wavering flames in paper lanterns, moving the room’s shadows in stop-motion. There was a low, antique table, with four padded stools.

Henry tugged anxiously at his beard. ‘So… I’m… Henry.’ The words as he spoke them sounded strange. He did not often use his voice. His tonsils were mothballs and his tongue a creaking door.

‘I know.’

‘Oh.’

He held out his hand again but received only a queasy look in return. Was this an insult, this refusal to shake the offered hand, or was he himself being offensive? Henry couldn’t be sure.

‘So,’ he said, trawling his memory for niceties, ‘tea?’

‘Do you… um, have coffee?’

‘Sorry, only tea. Green tea.’

‘Then yes. Please.’

Henry hesitated, then hurried off to the kitchen.

Midas got up, surprised at how simply the exchange had been navigated. The house smelt of dry parchment, but under that was the odour of the mere. He examined some photos on display in wooden frames. They showed the sea from the air. There was some kind of solar flare, but when he looked closer he saw this was no effect playing across a lens, but something tangible in the water, just beneath its surface. Alongside this photo stood a framed sketch of a jellyfish, tendrils labelled in Latin. Midas thought of his father chuckling to himself, reading books in the dead language.

Henry came back with green tea in delicate china cups, red petals painted along their rims. He caught Midas looking at the jellyfish sketch as he set down the tea.