The Girl With Glass Feet (20 page)

He had only one smoke left in his pocket, which he lit and puffed especially slowly. He felt a little triumph, but beyond that only apprehension. Charles Maclaird had denied him the knowledge of Freya’s cancer. Carl didn’t know what he would have done if he’d had that knowledge, but he’d fucking well have done something. And he would do something about Ida.

When she was a girl, Mum bought her a puppy against Dad’s wishes. It was a scrappy spaniel and Mum, upon seeing its nose wrinkle at the sight of her, burst out laughing and fell in love with it, christening it Long John.

Long John grew one part at a time. First his tail lengthened so that, wagging it hard, his momentum rocked him over. Then his legs grew and he’d race off so quick he surprised himself and they found him yelping from a pothole or ditch. His ears got so big they became secondary eyelids and he wore himself out flapping them back off his face.

Her dad was the one who walked Long John when Ida wasn’t
there. His objection to owning a puppy had been the expense but now he studied the labels on tins and bought only the most nutritious dog food. As Long John became a panting thing who sniffed the arseholes of other canines, Ida’s mum lost interest. Her dad took him to the vet when he got feverish, fussed over him with plastic bones, and converted a lobster pot into a dog basket.

One day thirteen-year-old Ida walked Long John, as she had a hundred times along the coastal path where the cliff tops were ravaged. Long gashes in the soil exposed networks of flinty crags descending to where the sea infiltrated the land. Sometimes she would lie with her head over a crag, her hair dangling in its pit trap, hearing the sea whispering her name.

This afternoon, walking Long John, she discovered a brand-new crag that had opened in the path like a split opens in a rope. She could have walked inland a little, hopped a fence and come back on the other side. She should have turned back and phoned the coastguard to close off the path. Instead of either, she decided to jump it. She paced out her run-up, turned and sprinted to the crag, her final step a bound that launched her into the air. For a second she felt the malice of the sea in the depths of the opened cliff beneath her. She landed safely on the other side, her laughter echoing faintly in the fissure.

Eager to join the fun, Long John yapped and raced towards her. His jump came short. His paws scratched at the soil on her side then he skidded backwards into the crag. She darted to the edge too late. He was out of sight. Only his confused noises remained. His yapping could have come from any one of the shadowy downward passageways. It was followed by a scuffling and whining, the sibilant sea, a bark (an earthworm wriggled from the earth and plopped after him into the dark), the clap of a hidden wave, more yapping, a puff of salt air cold as caves.

When she got back home, teenage make-up melting down her
cheeks, she found her mum in the front garden, reading poetry in her hammock. She sprang up to try to hug her distressed daughter, but Ida twisted away and struggled to explain what had happened.

‘Hush, hush Ida,’ said Mum. ‘His life force has gone back to nature. It’s like what I told you about nirvana. It’s the way of all things. Dust to dust. In a way we can be glad for him.’

Ida sobbed and ran inside, slamming the door behind her. Her dad met her in the hall and sat her on the bottom step of the stairs. She brushed his hands off her and explained falteringly what had happened.

‘Shh,’ he said, ‘shh. God in heaven has a time and place for all things. It can be hard to comprehend… But if God calls a soul back to Him… rest assured He has a place in His kingdom prepared.’

Her sense of betrayal came as a sharp gasp. She squirmed loose and hammered up the stairs. Halfway along the corridor Carl Maulsen stepped out of the bathroom, zipping up his flies, the toilet flushing behind him.

He had come unannounced to visit the family the night before. Since he had driven a long way, Mum had insisted he stay in the guest bedroom. Dad had said nothing and gone to bed early. Ida hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d crept downstairs and listened through a closed door to Carl and Mum’s conversation. They talked about places they’d been to. Other countries, nights slept in the freezing wastes of deserts and days spent diving through the barnacled ruins of sunken cities.

On the landing she found herself blurting out the story all over again, adding the epilogue of how her parents had tried to comfort her. He listened carefully, then leant back against the wall with arms folded.

‘And what do you think happened?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’ She started to cry again.

‘I’ll tell you. He fell a long way. Probably some bones broke. He would have been in great pain. Then the sea would take him. If he was lucky it would sweep him out quickly and dash him on rocks as it did so. More likely he drowned in slow increments in pitch dark. Now his body’s either wedged down there or already floating to the seabed on the ocean current, to be nibbled by carrion fish or torn to scraps by sharks.’

She struggled to speak. ‘And then?’

He shrugged. ‘Then the parts of him rot, matter breaks down and disperses in the water. His bones build up a covering of sand.’

‘But his… his spirit?’

He shrugged again. ‘Sorry, Ida. We don’t know about that. Anything I could say would be fiction. Maybe his skull will shelter crabs from predators.’

She lunged forwards and hugged him tightly, pressing her face into his shirt and the hard width of his stomach beneath it.

Now grown up and leaving Carl’s bath, watching the blue morning’s reluctant transition to day, she compared his indifference then to what he had offered her now.

She opened the window to let the steam out. Her movement disturbed an owl that wheeled out of the trees then swerved silently back into them. She sat down on the toilet seat to dry, and thought of Midas, who had wanted to watch owls with her. That was the sort of thing she supposed she had no time for, in Carl’s view of things. But she was incensed that Midas had told Carl about her feet.

Midas could go back to that horrible gadget hanging around his neck, the one that bent his posture into that of an old man. Except… Midas might seem as grey as his landscape, but she couldn’t remember any guy who’d appeared in her thoughts unprompted as many times as he had over these last few days. She
wasn’t sure she’d have the will to take Carl’s advice if it meant losing the one thing on St Hauda’s Land that seemed vivid to her.

The bath was an antique old tub, raised from the floor on legs with feet shaped like lion paws. Studying her own bare feet, she saw a ghastly similarity in their ornamental neatness. Only, she could imagine those cat paws padding through a far-off desert, could picture more movement in their leaden claws than she could in her own toes. She looked at each glass digit in turn, then at the condensation slowly lifting from their enamelled surfaces. She tried not to check them like this too often because they always looked worse. They had become noticeably so since last she checked. They were a mirage on the bathroom floor. Her left little toe twinkled in the dawn light from the window. Her metatarsals, encased in the forepart of her feet, were as fine as the nibs of quill pens, but they seemed a half-inch shorter than last time she had looked. The skin around her heel had turned a gummy white, preparing for the transformation. She mopped her feet quickly with her towel and pulled on her first pair of socks in a hurry. It didn’t matter if her toes were still damp. Her socks would sponge up the moisture, and she’d never know they weren’t as dry as bone.

Sleet fell in a rain of white arrows over Ettinsford. A sneaking wind stole at pedestrians’ umbrellas and pulled back their hoods in the High Street where Midas sat in his car, waiting for a red light to switch to green. The sleet could turn direction at will, one moment lashing the car from the left, then spearing sharply from the right. He could see the despairing look on a young woman’s face as she swung her umbrella this way and that like a shield.

The light turned green and he drove. Downhill past the old church, past Catherine’s, past the park beside the icy strait. Across the bridge, past where Ettinsford ended. One unfinished house stood on the far bank of the strait, half built since Midas could remember. He’d watched it change from a promise of red brick to a broken ring of rubble. He didn’t know why work had been abandoned, but he knew he shouldn’t like to live under the first branches of the wood.

The canopy of Gurm’s woodland reminded Midas of a beetle he had found curled up dead on his doorstep that morning. The endless tiers of angular branches were like manifold legs. The light-starved shrubs of the undergrowth had thin, veined leaves like bug wings.

He sped on, concentrating on remembering the route he and Ida had driven before. He didn’t want to take a wrong turn and become lost in insectile groves.

Then he found it. The cottage with its newt-green door, horseshoe hanging above the letterbox. The trees thinned out to make glades for its front and back gardens, which were spotted with snow.

She opened the door before he reached it and stood in the door frame, leaning on the wall with her arms folded.

‘Are we, um, going inside?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘Oh. Is Carl at home?’

‘No, Midas, he’s driven down to Glamsgallow on work.’

‘So…’

‘We’re not going inside because you’re not one hundred per cent welcome.’

He took a step back and scratched his head.

‘Don’t be coy, Midas. You told Carl about my feet.’

There was a controlled resentment in her voice. It frightened him. He wanted to run back to his car and drive away fast. He blinked a lump of snow off an eyelash. ‘Er, Ida, I… he came to my house and saw the photo. I didn’t
tell
him.’

‘You had that fucking photo on display? Jesus Christ, Midas, that’s one hell of a way to keep a secret. I expected you to delete it.’

‘I… don’t get visitors. Normally. Um…’ He wrung his hands.

‘Fucking pathetic,’ she muttered, and slammed the door.

He stood with the wind buffeting his hair, slapping snow against his cheeks (inside, Ida leant with her back against the door). He supposed she was right, he should have deleted that photo like all the others. Still he felt in part the victim, hoodwinked somehow by Carl (she felt all her anger puff away, doubting he had intended to betray her trust). And he hadn’t managed to tell her that he’d found Henry Fuwa. He knocked on the door again, hoping she’d open it and he could at least give her the address in the bog (she very nearly answered, doubting he even understood how he’d hurt her), but she didn’t open the door. He trudged back to his car (she decided that anger was pointless when he was the closest thing to a friend she had on St Hauda’s Land. She opened the door). Dots of snow streaked through the empty garden. Midas and his car were gone.

Midas was washing up with his eyes closed. Often it was best to do it this way, cleaning the knives and the coffee cups by touch. He found it strange that among any number of unpleasant impressions of his father, the most vivid was of the man washing up. That was why he washed up blind, because his own arms dipping into the dishwater, the trails of bubbles on his skin, the purple the water turned his fingers, the involuntary mannerism he used to pull a plate from the bowl and hold it up to drain, all dug the memory up. Dishwater was a crystal ball on his childhood.