The Girl With Glass Feet (16 page)

Henry crept around the edge of the pool. The only thing visible within was a floating snail shell. He found a long branch, curved like a scythe. The water belched as he dipped it gently under the surface and combed the pool until it snagged on something. Steadying himself, he used the stick to lever out his find, his feet skidding slightly on the slushy bank.

The waters parted and something smooth and shiny emerged for a moment before Henry grunted and the object submerged again.

‘You’ll have to help,’ said Henry. ‘Take the stick.’

Midas took the branch from Henry and could feel from a weight on its other end that it was hooked under something in the water.

Henry waded into the pool until water came up to his thighs. ‘Now pull,’ he said.

Midas struggled with the branch, straining to lever out the object in the water, while Henry grappled with its weight in the pool. Slowly they lifted it.

Midas gasped.

It was a man. The water drained off him and spattered into the pool. Yet still the light passed through his torso, through his elegant face and the intricate hatching of his chest hair. Light emerged broken from his body and scattered in a hundred rainbows across the pool. Every inch of him was made of glass. Snails stuck to his skin like warts and he wore a skullcap of green algae. Henry grimaced under the weight and eased the body back under the water. It submerged as in a baptism.

Midas sat down heavily on a rotten stump, not caring that it
made his arse wet. He put his head in his hands, marking his cheeks with silt palm-prints.

Henry climbed out of the pool and watched the ripples settle. ‘No words for it, are there?’

‘Are you saying this will happen to Ida?’

Henry looked grave. ‘You mean you hadn’t thought of that already?’

Midas nodded feebly. He felt aches all over from the hard walk here. ‘Why is this in the bog?’

Henry shrugged. ‘As good a grave as any.’

‘You put it here?’

‘No. I stumbled upon it while collecting toad spawn. I don’t know who he was or how long he’s been here. Could be years, could be hundreds. I’ve found glass hands in the bog, and a glass shape like a model of a glacier that turned out to be the hind leg of a fox or a dog. This bog is a glass graveyard. Sift the sediment from the bottom of these pools and you’ll see flecks sparkling in your pan.’

‘When can I bring Ida to see you?’

He’d thought Henry would accept without hesitation. Instead he fidgeted with the toggles of his cagoule. ‘The thing is, Midas… The reason I brought
you
here…’

Midas closed his eyes and tried to expunge the sulphuric stink from his insides. ‘You can’t cure her can you?’

Henry picked a bulrush and started tearing it into strips. ‘No. No one can cure her, because she’s not ill. This isn’t a disease. The glass is now a part of her, if you will. Like fingernails or the hair on her head.’

‘Then can’t she just… cut it out?’

‘It would do no good. It would only grow back.’

Henry scattered the pieces of torn bulrush into the pool. Midas thought he saw a fish rise to the surface to gulp at them.

Henry sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Midas.’

Things moved in Midas’s gut: tectonic feelings he had never known. He spluttered all of a sudden at the idea of losing Ida before the two of them had even…

He glared at the caged black of the water. For a second time he saw widening gums break the surface.

‘You
can
find a way to help. You said yourself you had unique insights.’

Henry shrugged. ‘I would only be wasting your time and giving her hope where really there’s none.’

Midas clasped his muddy hands together. ‘My mother,’ he said, ‘what about my mother? I know all about it! I know she wants to be with you and I’ll help you be with her. But you have to help Ida.’

Henry hung his head. ‘I can’t, Midas, don’t you see? It’s simply not possible. In fact, it’s the perfect analogy. I can no more do one thing than I can the other.’

‘
Why
didn’t you go to her, after my father died?’

Henry looked pale. ‘Where was she, Midas?’

‘In our house! And now in Martyr’s Pitfall.’

Henry shook his head. ‘She had already left before your father died.’

In a flash of anger, Midas grabbed a sod of earth and hurled it at the water, which broke into a hundred chained circles. Picturing Ida like the body in the bog made his heart seem to wilt and blow away. His face screwed through expressions. He turned to Henry and for a bleary-eyed moment saw him as that other lonely academic. How could he shirk the idea of helping Ida? Had he considered it even for a millisecond?

‘So what now?’ he demanded.

‘There isn’t anything we can do now, except console ourselves that there never was.’

‘Never was? You’re just going to give up? Even now, when we’ve seen here what’s to become of her?’

Birds laughed elsewhere in the bog. Midas’s anger left him abruptly like electric earthing in the glade around the pool. He was left feeling cold and inanimate. Insects buzzed and reeds quivered.

They walked back to Henry’s cottage and Midas’s car without speaking and with a stone’s throw distance between them. Henry stood in his cottage doorway. Midas left the borrowed wellington boots to weep mud on the path, got into his car and drove away.

Midas’s father sat in his study, bent over a heavy book. He licked his fingers before turning each thick page. Midas knocked on the open door, waited, then knocked again. He was a small boy and the door handle was at head height.

Slowly, his father’s eyelids closed. He drew a long breath. His shoulders sagged. A weary expression seeped across his face.

When he acknowledged Midas with a protracted, ‘
Hmm?
’ it sounded like the groan of a branch in a forest.

‘Mother’s crying.’

He sighed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Mother’s crying. In your bedroom.’

‘Oh
God
, Midas…’

‘Sorry… Have I done something wrong?’

‘Did you ask her what the trouble was?’

‘You said I wasn’t to enter the bedroom. You said I wasn’t…’

‘Yes, yes. Oh, Midas, I was reading.’

He rubbed his moustache with one long, clean finger, then looked longingly down at the pages on his lap. ‘Didn’t she see you?’

‘The door’s closed.’

‘Mm. Why were you listening?’

‘She… She was crying quite loudly.’

There was a photograph in his father’s book. Midas moved to try and glimpse it, but his father pulled it shut, his thumbs wedged between the pages.

‘You didn’t knock?’

‘I did. I got no answer.’

His father stared down at the closed book. It was a different
sort of book to the ones he normally read. A large anatomy book with a diagram of a cross-sectioned ribcage on its cover.

‘Midas?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell her… Tell her I’ve got six pages. Then I’ll go up and comfort her.’

Nodding, Midas left him alone and went upstairs. The door to his parents’ bedroom was taller than the other doors in the house. It looked like a stone door, with slate-blue paint, dented and chipped.

‘Mother?’

He heard a sob and pushed open the door. Light fell through a chink in the heavy net curtains, drawing a dazzling white bar down his mother. She sat facing a full-length mirror on the other side of the bed. She wore her hair loose, fine ivory locks hanging to the shoulders of a cardigan.

In the mirror, her reflection held a photo to her stomach and stared at it. Her. As a young woman, not so thin or slouched. Posing on a river-bank, one hand in her hair, tangled branches above and behind her. A reflection (not hers) broken on the water. In the foreground white blurs, although they couldn’t be snow for this was a summer scene. Blossom perhaps. Midas fancied they were fairy-shaped.

‘Son,’ she sniffed when she saw him, ‘these photos are your mother. When she was younger. Would you like to look?’

She picked up more prints from the bed. There were five in all, each a slightly different pose behind a different configuration of white blurs. Midas took one from her.

‘Careful,’ she said, ‘these were all that were sent to me. I don’t have the negatives.’

Even so young, he’d begun to think of negatives as light snares: the light burns in a negative as a physical remnant of the past. Memories made of light. A print was a wonderful thing, but it
was the negative that should be treasured. Without them you held only a simulacrum; with them he would have held a fragment of his mother’s past, as real as a piece of recovered hair or nail.

‘Midas!’ she hissed.

She was wild-eyed. He quickly realized what was wrong: footfalls coming up the stairs. Before she could do anything his father was in the bedroom and for a moment all three of them were frozen and white-faced. Then his father darted forward and snatched the photos from his mother’s lap.

His eyes roved over them, back and forth, as if they were words. Then he made a choking noise. He hadn’t noticed the photo Midas held because the boy had slipped it under his shirt.

‘Out, please, Midas.’ He tugged the door shut behind him. But Midas listened.

‘Darling…’ said his father, ‘what are these? What can these be? You told me you’d destroyed these. You made assurances.’

‘But… darling, it’s not that
he
took them. It’s not that at all. It’s me. These photos are
me
.’

Midas heard the tearing of paper. Again. Over and over again. When the door swung open he pressed himself to the wall. His father swept past, cupping a pile of white shreds in his hands. When he’d gone downstairs, Midas peered around the door frame.

She held a thumbnail-sized scrap in her palm. Midas watched her shoulders shaking, then tapped gingerly on the door until she looked up. He offered her the photo he’d hidden up his shirt.

Her mouth twitched at the corners and she stifled a noise. He watched her pupils widen as she saw herself in the image, their lenses adjusting like the lens of his camera.

‘Keep it, Midas,’ she said. ‘So your father never finds it.’

And he did.

A wind was coming from the north, blowing rain clouds like dust until they coated the sky grey. Henry sat on his cottage doorstep, the wind filling his mouth and nostrils, blowing the compost smells of the bog into his stomach.

He couldn’t help Ida. He knew it in the same guts squeezed tight by the frustration it caused. He couldn’t help her, and the Crook boy’s demand that he should had been unfair. Of all the sacrifices he’d made to earn his privacy, the biggest was turning his back on the woman he had loved. So it was also unfair that her son had emerged fully grown from the sealing bog mists, demanding help and answers Henry didn’t have.

In the distance the rain was a grey woollen join between the land and the sky. He couldn’t help Ida, but… He covered his face with his hands. He hadn’t been entirely straight with Midas.

As a boy, Henry had sold his bicycle for a chemistry set. It had seemed like a sensible idea at the time, putting childish things behind him in the name of mature study. Then he saw the boy who bought his bicycle pedalling gleefully in the evenings, while
he
poked crystals between Petri dishes with a spatula. It seemed that there were two Henry Fuwas inside him. Henry Fuwa the scientist, living in his head and aspiring to read biology and anatomy, and another Henry Fuwa sheltering somewhere beneath his ribcage, curling up remorsefully at the sight of that bicycle ridden by another boy, longing only for the push and give of pedals circling in time with feet.

Years later he had left Osaka with only a small pack and a feel for lifting the right stone to find an undiscovered bug. The Henry
Fuwa who had pined for the bicycle feared leaving, but the other Henry Fuwa had always known there was no future in living above his parents’ restaurant near Dotonbori, where he woke every day to the smell of steamed rice and felt his lungs starched. He knew he was making no mistake by leaving, that an isolated life among reeds and swamp lilies, where he could study in peace and diligence, was the right life for him. Only, when news filtered through of his mother’s death, he was amazed at how peaceful he remained. He’d looked then for that boyish Henry Fuwa curled up in his chest, hoping he could help choke out some grief at her passing, but he couldn’t find him. In truth, he had not been able to find him for some time. Perhaps in the course of the great journey over the oceans he had been lost or forgotten, in an airport terminal among unclaimed suitcases or misdirected airmail. And so Henry felt nothing at the death of the woman who had raised him in Osaka. He couldn’t even remember what it had been like being her son. Bog life continued its cycles: mustard flowers made a yellow cosmos across marsh soil in spring, summer heat made viscous skins on pools, autumn birthed a million insects and sticky beetles.

But one afternoon, after many such cycles, that other Henry Fuwa came back, and he was now fully grown, and he had become something insatiable. He had ambushed him. Taken revenge. Overpowered him.