The Girl With Glass Feet (21 page)

In the memory, Midas was small enough to spy through keyholes without crouching down. He’d watched his father wash the dishes, reciting something moribund under his breath, until his mother crept into the kitchen and touched the small of his back with her fingertips. Midas watched her touch flow into his father like wax setting in a mould. The plate he was holding dropped back into the bowl. His back went upright, his knees locked. She turned him around, foam dripping off his hands to spot the floor. She dried them on her skirt, then pulled them apart and laid them on her hips as she pressed her body tight against his. His lips trembled and he stared over her shoulder.

‘The, the…’ he stammered after a while… ‘the washing-up water will get cold, dear.’

She drew her hands away from him and stepped back. Midas ducked out of sight as she left the kitchen and climbed the stairs. Then he went in and stood beside his father, who removed the plate for a second time, watched the water run half-circles around
it, and put it on the rack for hot bubbles to pop on its surface.

‘Midas,’ he said, dipping the next plate in the bowl.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you ever feel… No, let me think of an example. At school, if you do well in class, you feel elated, don’t you?’

‘What’s elated?’

‘Feeling good, really good. What do you
feel
, Midas? For example, when you do well at school.’

‘Er… pleased? Proud?’

His father looked wistful. ‘And you don’t feel anticlimactic?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Somewhat the opposite of elated.’

‘What’s elated again?’

‘Good feelings. That is to say, very good. You can feel, can’t you? That’s what I’m driving at. You don’t ever wonder… where feeling went?’

While Midas did his dishes, Ida was huddled in a chair in the centre of Carl Maulsen’s lawn, the cottage to her back and the woods beginning abruptly at the top of the slope where the garden ended. Carl had no flowerbeds, no tended bushes, just hacked growth and a glade of mowed turf in the summer. That was invisible now, buried under two inches of snow that had creaked like floorboards when she laboured across it with her crutch and the chair. The snow was as stiff as the rest of St Hauda’s Land. The awkward bending of branches in the wind, the brittle leaves that broke like ancient parchments. Even a falcon she had watched fly without grace, with mechanical beats of its wings. As if that was the way of these islands, to seize things up, to weather away their vitality.

That was what the place was doing to her.

It was good to get outside. She would rather feel cold in her
body than in her heart. She lifted hot tomato soup in a thermos mug to her lips, enjoying its sour steam inside her nostrils. She’d put on scarlet woollen mittens and scarf to fight the island’s blacks and whites. But that was the story of this place and its people, as stilted and monochrome as sets and stars of pre-colour TV. Take Midas: what made a person rigid in every way? Years had made her mum rigid. Religion had done it to her dad. She remembered the only time she’d seen him cry, on the night before their relationship morphed from that of father and daughter to that of courteous housemates. He’d caught her in bed with Josiah, a South African exchange student staying in the house for a month (a tenure cut short by that incident), but the crying the night before came about when her dad, who’d been edgy for weeks leading up to Josiah’s arrival, tried to address him in Afrikaans. He’d been learning Afrikaans for three years and she had no reason to believe him anything less than accomplished. Then when he cleared his throat at the dinner table to address Josiah he met a blank stare. He took it with blushing grace, although as she spied on him later (when he thought he was alone unnoticed in their garden of dusty dandelion clocks) she saw him cry. Slow-worm tears as he held a half-blown dandelion clock to his heart. That was rigidity like Midas’s.

In a sudden flush of anger she dashed her tomato soup across the garden. She watched the red arc sink through the snow like a healing burn. A flash again of Dad. His craggy face turned childishly awestruck while he took communion. And seeing him pray with the stain of the budget sacrament wine on his bottom lip, crossing himself over and over. When he opened his eyes the first thing they had tearfully fixed on was her.

Midas had said he hoped his father would be in hell. He had described his character and told her about recollections from his childhood. From everything she heard, Ida got the clear impression that Midas Crook senior was vindictive, fickle,
manipulative. She pictured him as a kind of goblin, and Midas’s childhood home as a storm-racked cave in the mountains, like one she had once sheltered in with her mother when a dust storm blew up on a trip to the Middle East. All the same, there was something about the accounts of him that resonated. It was strange, but she fancied she would have understood him better than Midas had. Yet she doubted she would ever understand her own father, whose behaviour was far less severe than that of Mr Crook’s.

Without her soup to warm her and feeling the bite of the snow in the air (remembering the hot dust storm blowing into that cave and flapping the tails of her multicoloured headscarf ), she began the laborious retreat to the confines of Carl’s cottage.

At the end of a street of town houses painted in crisp blues, stood Ettinsford Public Library. In contrast to the smart town houses, the little library’s plaster walls sagged in on themselves. Buckled window frames looked like driftwood. Panes were tarnished with sooty dirt. It was an overcast evening and the windows threw orange projections on to wet pavements. Seagulls bickered, perched in lines along gutters, squawking at Ida as she toiled up the steps to the front door, gripping a slippery handrail and leaning all her weight on her crutch.

The smell inside reminded her of a school classroom: a chalky smell mixed with disinfectants and something bubblegum sweet. The bookshelves were chrome, the walls beige and undecorated save in a kids’ corner piled with stained beanbags. There the wall was covered in children’s drawings of fictional characters, clothes brightly coloured and hands too cumbersome for their bodies.

She approached the librarian at a counter, a man in a bright shirt and novelty tie, with a ruddy double chin and blond centre parting. When she asked where the newspaper archive was he
didn’t answer, only raised his arm to point with an expression of pained ennui.

It shouldn’t have taken long to sort through the tiny archive. Carl had given her what he assured her was an accurate estimate of the date when the suicide had occurred. Unfortunately the issues of the local paper were out of order and the system had been maintained with the same lethargy that the librarian betrayed at reception. Ida had little choice but to organize the issues anew, beginning by putting August through to October into their correct order. As she filed a newspaper from late September (too late a date to keep company with Carl’s estimates) she saw a picture she recognized on the cover.

It was the same image Carl had framed in the cottage, only this time it had been reproduced from what would have been archive footage at the time. The accompanying article concerned only Midas’s father. The headline read:
SUICIDE PROFESSOR EXHUMED BY VANDALS
and made her put down the paper and cover her mouth. The grave, the article explained, had been spoilt and the coffin tampered with. She searched impatiently through the editions for the rest of September, and combed the October issues again. Several follow-up stories reported no progress with the investigation. Then the story vanished. She looked through the jumbled issues from November onward but realized that the story could resurface at any time in the years since the event had occurred. Asking the librarian for assistance would surely get her nowhere, so she decided to give Carl a call. Then she realized that he would have
known
.

He had been eager to impart the failings of Midas’s family but he’d elected not to mention an event as dramatic as this.

She returned the newspapers to their correct shelves and quietly left the library. There was only one person she could safely ask about the news story.

That person’s father and namesake, the person the story concerned, sat at his oak desk many years previous, resting his head on its scratched surface, smelling ink and pencil shavings.

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write.

Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow, the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind. And,
God
, what blessed relief to lose one’s turgid thoughts and anxieties in a gush of imagery and symbols. He was a man of words first and foremost: a man of flesh and blood second. Indeed (he massaged the ribs on the left side of his chest, easing the deep burn there with slow, circular strokes), the flesh had always failed him. In physical feats he’d always fallen short, be it racing laps of painted grass tracks on school sports days; be it the shameful way he’d fainted at the birth of his wriggling son, battled the swoon and lost, the ceiling blurring upwards and blacking out; the way he came to with an infant’s weeping in his ears and was convinced for a second it was his own.

He rubbed his pained chest, his body’s final failure, and wrote.

After an hour he set down his pen. His fingers flickered over his files, pinched out the manila envelope in which the X-rays were kept.

Years old, the doctor had concluded, of the growth between his diaphragm and his heart. The doctor was also keen to stress how hard it was to be certain, since he had never seen anything like it before.

Midas Crook ceremoniously opened the envelope and drew out the first X-ray. The bulb of his heart and the half-inch shoot of something crystalline. It looked like a mark on the print and sometimes, possessed by fanatical hope, he tried to scratch it off the paper and prove that the whole thing was a silly joke. Prove that he would be better soon and would have feelings again: base emotion long derided and now lost. That he would take his boy under the arms and lift him up, spinning him around until they both collapsed dizzy and laughing under bright skies.