The Girl With Glass Feet (17 page)

He had set eyes on Evaline Crook.

That summer’s day he had been catching eels upriver, enjoying the way they slithered and thrashed in his bucket. Once caught he photographed them, took notes on coloration and size, then poured them back into the water, where they shimmered away like living liquids.

The day was pleasant and he walked aimlessly along the river-bank. Newly winged gnats and crane-flies in their thousands hopped out of the grass and bumbled around his ankles. In
the river, dark dashes flickered: newborn fish ready to be gobbled by scaled pike and greedy toads. He sauntered along beside the water and was led, by meanders and turns, into deep woodland.

And then he saw her up ahead, sitting cross-legged on the bank in a beige summer dress and Panama hat with a fabric rose stitched to its brim. She sprang up when she saw him, but didn’t say anything. She had a fine skeleton, lean limbs and hair floating around her head as if underwater. Her fingers toyed nervously with the lap of her dress, scrunched it into handfuls then let go, scrunched handfuls again, let go. He watched her repeat the action and repeat it until he remembered it wasn’t acceptable to admire women as you would an excitable gnat or a mercurial eel. He bowed his head and apologized for his rudeness.

She laughed and introduced herself. He knew he would never forget her name. He asked her what brought her into the woods. Just wandering, she said. Her family were somewhere nearby, snoozing in a glade. ‘Parents?’ he enquired with hope. No. Son and husband, both dressed in long sleeves and trousers as a precaution against wasps and nettles.

She laughed sadly, then returned the question. ‘What brings you here?’

He shook the bucket of eels as explanation.

When she asked him if he’d mind her company he nearly burst. He kept admiring the way dapples of sunlight through the leaves caught her hat and thin forearms. Her fingers couldn’t keep still, whether illustrating a point or fidgeting in silences. They walked along the river-bank. She walked with a limp.

Suddenly he turned abruptly one hundred and eighty degrees. He shot out an arm and yanked her hat down over her face. She shrieked and leapt fearfully away from him.

He dared a glance over his shoulder.

It had vanished.

It had been kneeling to lap water from the stream. A coarse white coat and a domed head with a flat face pressed against the water’s surface. Its large eyes, thank heavens, had been closed as it drank. What surprised him only slightly less than the sight of it had been its size: barely bigger than a lamb.

He asked Evaline if she had seen it too. She admitted (setting her hat back firmly on her head) seeing something. But had she met its eyes? How could she, with its head bowed? He hopped across the stream to the point where the creature had knelt. Green stalks poking out of the water were laddered with dragonfly nymphs, fully developed and clinging to the greenery. They were all as white as snowflakes. He sat down hard on the bank and bit his lip. He explained to her that the nymphs should be a sooty colour, ideal camouflage in the waters from which they had climbed. Now that they were white they would be easy targets for birds, their legs locking their motionless bodies in place on the stalks while their skin dried out in preparation for transformation into adults.

‘Then we’ll guard them,’ said Evaline, sitting down on the bank opposite, kicking off her shoes and dangling her toes in the cool water. He did the same. His heart beat like crazy because she wanted to do this with him. She told him he was funny, but she liked that about him. They sat in comfortable quiet and watched the white exoskeletons of the nymphs split slowly open, starting behind their eyes. Chalk-coloured heads and thoraxes forced themselves out of the cracks in the skin and dangled half-emerged from their old bodies.

‘If you concentrate,’ said Henry, ‘you can see them breathing. The air swells them up while the sunlight dries them out. Then they’re ready to push clear.’

As if to demonstrate, one of the hatching dragonflies suddenly bent back on its nymph shell and tugged its tail and legs free. Its wings stuck to its back like shrivelled paper. It hung there hugging
its wrinkled old body in stillness while other nymphs on other stalks did the same.

Henry and Evaline looked on in amazed silence while pairs of wings dried out and slowly expanded among the stalks like blooming petals.

The sun was hot on the back of Henry’s neck. From the corner of his eye he watched Evaline enrapt. Light dappled the water. A white newt plopped up for breath between lily pads. Evaline was beautiful, he thought, more beautiful than any of this.

The expanded wings of the nearest dragonfly suddenly fanned out and were held stretched to their limit. The light picked out their crizzled facets. Other dragonflies did the same. The plant stalks were hung with glossy flakes.

A few minutes later the first one took off. It shot up vertically, then zigzagged around their heads. Evaline gasped and covered her mouth. Henry watched her. More dragonflies flung themselves free of their petrified former selves, fizzing into the air like white sparks.

Balls of hard rain dropped through the air around him, bringing him back to the swamp and the present. He closed his eyes while the raindrops squelched against the muddy grass. He adored and feared that memory’s occurrence because although it had been a moment of promise, and the first time in his life he’d been in love, it had turned over the years into the aptest metaphor because he did not know where the Evaline of that day had gone. All that remained of her in Martyr’s Pitfall was a dragonfly’s abandoned nymph skin.

And here he was, standing sodden in the rain, feeling guilty that he’d not been entirely straight with her boy, as if the whole truth could do anyone any good.

He was suddenly outraged. A garden rock was acting as a summit for a meeting of slugs, and he clawed it out of the caked mud and cast it into a puddle. Lurking beneath, among the
scrambling pill bugs and lice, was a beetle like a dot of jade. He drew air into his lungs and stamped on it.

He dropped immediately to his knees beside its pulped remains, choking and scratching his beard so hard that when he regained self-control he saw blood on his fingernails. Getting to his feet he felt monstrously tall. His shoes looked like a giant’s, his hands gnarled and cumbersome.

Nothing was as it should be, because of the Crook boy’s appearance.

‘All right!’ he yelled into the bog, ‘I’ll tell you!’ At once his lungs felt bruised for the shouting, it had been so long since he had raised his voice. He held his sides as he stomped indoors and boiled water in a bubbling saucepan. Then he carried the pan outside where the cold air showed up the steam. Frozen worms of rainwater cracked under his wellington boots as he carried it into the swamp, hot water spilling over its sides and pattering to the ground to fizz in the mud. When he came to a pool the length and shape of a sarcophagus, he used the hot underside of the pan to melt a circle through the ice on its surface, then tipped the hot water on the weeds and dunked the pan into the pond as a kind of fishing net, scraping it along the slushy bottom. Water numbed his fingers. He could feel ice closing up around his wrist. He pulled the pan out of the pool. It was filled with dirty water and a hard lump swaddled in slime.

He carried pan and lump back to the cottage and, inside, drained the water. Then he plugged the sink and ran the hot tap, adding a long squirt of washing-up liquid. He put on his Marigold gloves, took a deep breath and reached into the sink for the mass now hidden under bubbles. He scrubbed it with a brush until the bubbles cleared and he could lift it spotless from the water.

Back when he had unearthed it from Midas Crook’s grave, the stench had made bile leap into his throat. Now Midas Crook’s glass heart shone multifaceted like a giant diamond. For the last
few years pond snails had lived in its transparent atriums and toad spawn had stuffed its see-through ventricles. Clean and sterile again, it filled Henry with shame and terror at what he had done. He had plucked it like a ripe fruit from Midas Crook’s chest, then sped home and scrubbed it clean of its film of dried blood. Examining it on the following nights he had learnt some of its secrets. The glass acted like the nails or hair of a person. It grew on after death for a time, even in the grave, but after that it came to a standstill just like the rest of the human body. He had dwelt on these things, on the enormity of what he had done, every day since he had smuggled it back with him into the bog.

He had heard back then that Crook had died from a growth in his chest, one that defied the understanding of doctors. Around that time he had also discovered, while crabbing in the bogs, the man turned to glass. While he crouched by the poolside staring through the glass man’s chest, he had wondered
what if
.

He had bought and drunk a whole bottle of gin on that night when he shovelled topsoil off Crook’s grave and prised back the rotten wood within. The flowers in the graveyard of Tinterl Church had caught the moon and were white even in the small hours. Lean muscles he’d had then were taut in his arms as he gripped the spade. Tinterl Church stood on an isolated ridge where wind swept away the thinner soil, leaving the earth gritty as a beach. Only once did he catch sight of living company, when he saw a pair of headlights approaching from a distance and cast himself on the earth, panicked by the bright beams as they flashed across the church wall and billowed the shadows of the headstones like black drapes. A cold sweat had covered him by the time the headlights vanished down the Gurmton road. He knew there was a dead man stretched out parallel beneath him and though he hadn’t had time to check which headstone he’d hidden behind, he sensed whose grave it was through the hard soil. He sprung up and fought the cap off the gin to slurp alcohol from the
bottle, smacking his lips before seizing the shovel and tearing the weak-rooted grass from the grave.

He remembered the bare plate of wood he’d unearthed in the autumnal starlight. He’d splintered off the coffin lid and gagged at what rested rotten inside. In the bog, decomposition was complicated. Gases and fluids in the water could preserve a man for centuries, or strip his skin in days like paint. He’d hoped this sandy grave had done enough in seven years to open up its incumbent’s torso. That was all he needed: a view beneath the ribcage to the lingering matter. To the centre of love.

It had done more than enough.

Now, in his cottage kitchen, he put the glass heart in a carrier bag and left it on the coffee table.

If you asked a psychiatrist why a man might kill himself you might receive a hundred reasons, but none of them would be the object in the carrier bag. Henry had thought long and hard about the particular suicide of Dr Crook. He’d contrasted the glass heart with the glass body he’d shown Midas in the bog. If the transformation to glass stopped not long after death, then Crook had cheated it with his suicide. It also followed that the bog man had somehow
not died
. Upon death the glass ground to a halt too soon. It was impossible for the bog man, in life, to have transformed so far into glass that the metamorphosis could have time to complete itself as utterly as it had in his death. If the man had drowned in that pool, the glass would have stopped too soon after the water filled his lungs (pumping lungs good enough to drown him) to complete the transformation. If he had been poisoned by a swamp berry and lain down to die on the banks of the mere, he would have had to have a living stomach, not a glass stomach, to ooze the enzymes needed to digest the berry’s toxins. If he had been murdered (his body showed no signs of injury, but he could have been cracked over the head) he would have needed enough cranium and brain remaining for the murderer to kill
him. And even if the glass itself had finished him, transformed him organ by organ to the crystalline state in which he now lay at rest, it surely would have defeated itself, because come the moment a vital organ turned to hard silica, his body would have shut down, and he would have been dead, and the glass would not be able to spread fast enough to claim him entirely.

To all this Henry could only provide two hypotheses.

One: somehow, even after transforming into glass, the sufferer was still alive. Dr Crook did not seem to believe this theory, or he would not have given up his own life so easily.

Two: that the speed of transformation was not fixed at the steady creep Henry had envisaged. That perhaps it could build momentum, overcome its victim in a sudden burst of alteration. It seemed more likely that Dr Crook had feared this as he laid plans for his suicide. That the bog man had feared it too, as he contemplated his own condition, however many years or centuries ago, until all of a sudden he was turning at breakneck speed into hard and empty mineral, without even the time to be amazed.

Puzzling over this had been of interest to Henry, until now. Now it was different. He barely knew Ida Maclaird, but he knew her well enough not to wish the glass conditions of Dr Midas Crook or the bog man on her.

The only thing he felt like doing with the rest of the afternoon was taking his mind off Ida. To that end he finished his supply of gin, concentrating on tipping back each diamond-clear drop. He thought of Evaline, and white dragonflies skimming by a river, and the husks of the larvae bodies they had left behind in the reeds and green stalks, and the way, back then, he’d thought love had been hatching.

The evening twinkling out behind snow clouds. The roof of the woods a serrated threat to the sky. Snow melting as it fell, settling on the leafy road to be pulped by tyres.