The Girl With Glass Feet (24 page)

‘What… what does that mean?’

‘There’s no why. No how. Things happen, and all we can do is try to live with them.’

‘How am I supposed to live with a body made of glass? I can’t accept it.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said softly, ‘what you accept and what you don’t. The glass is there regardless.’

‘You think there’s no hope for me.’ She puffed out a long breath. ‘Well, then. You should know that my friend Carl is taking me to Enghem Stead, Hector Stallows’s house. He says Hector’s wife can help me. So you see, it’s not as hopeless as all that. He says she’s seen something like my feet before.’

Henry looked suspicious. ‘Why don’t we cook those crabs while we talk?’

He began to boil water in a large green cooking pot. He put the bucket of crabs on the counter, their claws tapping inside.

‘Look, Ida… I couldn’t sleep after Midas visited. I so terribly hoped I could help you.’

She shrugged despondently. ‘It’s not your fault. I can’t feel them, Henry, but sometimes I can feel the dead ends in my ankles. If you’re… if it turns out there’s no… no cure or
anything, what will I still be able to feel at the end?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will it be painful?’

He stirred the crabs. ‘I don’t know.’

‘So what are you saying I should do in the meantime? I’ve come all this way to find you.’

‘It’ll sound crass.’

‘Go on.’

‘Carry on with things. Living your life. Don’t indulge in any mumbo-jumbo.’

She looked angry for a split second, but reined it back in. ‘I’ve
had
wild nights. Partied. Done all that thrill-seeking stuff. That was all bullshit. I thought those experiences would be vivid and life-changing. They were just in the mind. Here I am bungee jumping. Here I am sky diving. Beneath all the adrenalin there’s the same old sense of self-awareness.’

‘I didn’t mean go on a parachute jump. I didn’t mean anything of the sort.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve never done those things, Ida, so I can only conjecture. But I’ve been thrilled in my own way. I’ve been mobbed by moth-winged cattle. When I first found them they swarmed all over me, with their wings humming so hard I thought for a moment I’d be lifted from the ground. I remember the hot musk of the herd more startlingly than I remember my mother’s smile, but you
see
… The only time I’ve really felt alive in the gut… which is to say…’ he patted his chest, level with his diaphragm… ‘in the heart… was the time I spent with Evaline Crook.’

‘Recently…’ The boiling crabs screamed in the pan. ‘Recently, with Midas…’

Henry hadn’t been paying attention to the crabs. A claw had broken off and was floating in circles.

‘Recently, with Midas, I’ve felt… I don’t know what I’ve felt, but it’s… different…’

‘Exactly.’

She straightened her shoulders. ‘But I have to go to see Emiliana Stallows. It’s my only shot.’

He had never been as frank as this, but he owed it to her. ‘You have only a short while left, Ida. Maybe less than that. It depends when the point comes where your body can’t cope with what’s turned to glass. It could happen in an instant! You could simply cave in.’

Her lip trembled. ‘How long is a short while?’

‘It’s impossible to say.’

‘How long, Henry? Tell me that at least.’

He thought of the glass bog body and his hypothesis that its transformation could have accelerated in an instant to leave it as a statue, but he had no clear evidence for that, and didn’t want to alarm her any more than was necessary. He compromised. ‘Months,’ he said, ‘if you’re lucky. Probably more like weeks.’

There was an iron kitchen chair behind her. She lowered herself into it.

‘Wow,’ she said, ‘that was a bolt from the blue.’

‘I don’t mean to discredit what your friend and Emiliana have found out up there in Enghem, but anything they put you through will only be a… a false promise.’

They sat down to eat at the table, over which he threw a cloth patterned with brown butterflies. Henry served the crabs, and Ida thought they tasted of the swamp.

Eventually she booked a taxi back to Ettinsford. When Henry objected that he should be the one to drive her, as promised, she pointed politely to his emptying bottle of gin.

The trees on the journey back were the bowed white heads of old women. Snow came down at a lazy pace and coated the hackles of a tomcat Ida saw dragging a blackbird along the road.
Her taxi drove down Shale Lane, coming into the town via a bridge over frozen water. People plodded the streets in wellington boots, their hoods and umbrellas all gone white with snow. Outside the church, someone had wrapped a lilac scarf around the neck of the statue of Saint Hauda.

The taxi dropped her off outside Midas’s house and she moved so slowly through his gate and yard that a laughing kid yelled in passing, ‘Cheer up Granny!’ then saw her youthful face and looked confused.

Midas wanted to know how things had gone with Henry, but she didn’t feel like talking about it.

‘He didn’t say anything new, let’s put it that way. I want to forget about it for a bit. Can we do something? Can you take me somewhere?’

So he drove her out to Toalhem Head. It was the gorge where the Ettinsford strait opened on to the sea. There was a viewpoint atop a cliff here, near an old dead lighthouse whose paintwork the wind had stripped on one side only, replacing it with the white stains of salt deposits. They stood in the snow at arm’s length, wrapped in scarves and bracing themselves against the air. On rocks in the cliff, and all the way down to the sea, puffins stood like skittles on their perches, occasionally honking and clacking their bills.

Midas had imagined he and Ida might look down into the water and see jellyfish turning into living lights, but there were different kinds of drifters in the water that afternoon. Icebergs the size of chapels, cloaked in a fizz of snowfall, were sailing into the warmer water flowing from the gorge, to melt into a hundred white chunks.

‘Did I tell you I found out about your dad?’ she asked.

‘Found out what about him?’

‘About what happened to his grave.’

He remained silent.

She watched an iceberg crash in on itself as it entered the
currents surging out of the gorge. It cracked and dissolved like bubbles in a sink.

‘You don’t like to talk about what happened? I thought it was a terrible story, but I understood him better.’

Midas opened his mouth and a dry croak came out, wrapped around a word. ‘Understood?’

‘Him. Your father.’

‘What do you want to understand him for?’

‘I thought it might help me better understand y—’ She forced her mouth shut too late.

‘You thought knowing about him would make you know me better? You never even met him, and already you think I’m like him!’

‘It’s not like that, Midas. He’s in your thoughts so often. I figured that… well…’

Plates of broken iceberg forced underwater by currents resurfaced further out to sea. The waves mashed around them. Truth was she felt some kind of empathy for Midas’s father. It had always been that way with her. She found time for inhibited men, and in doing so found excuses for them. There must be some excuse for the way his father left an inheritance of inhibitions for his son.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘Don’t be. You’ve forgiven
me
enough times since we met…’

She laughed. ‘Is that how it works? We’re even now?’

‘No, no, I didn’t mean… Oh God.’

‘Midas, it’s all right. It’s good that we’re even.’

‘Good. Phew.’

‘Yes…’ She took a deep breath. She watched a puffin jump into the water down below, at once straining to swim against the current.

‘So now I’m going to ask you a favour. Tell me what Henry
showed you in the bog. The thing you’ve both been coy about.’

The puffin struggled back out of the water and rested with its head bowed on the rock it had come from.

He raised his eyebrows and puffed out his cheeks. ‘I’m not sure…’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Just tell me.’

He threw his hands in the air. ‘A glass body. A man turned entirely to glass.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

He looked at her. She was nearly as white as the icebergs.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

She shook herself. He was amazed at how she took a moment to encounter the fear, then shouldered it and moved on. She stepped towards him. The space between them seemed to shrink by a mile, every snowflake falling around them looking large as a feather. The salt air made his lips feel chafed. She came even closer, her mouth slightly open.

He stepped backwards.

With the tide out, the smooth sands were dotted with pebbles and shells.

‘Here we are,’ Midas’s father said, dropping his bag on the white beach. ‘And a fine day for it.’

Both father and son stank of sun protection cream and were dressed like members of an orthodox sect, while Midas’s mother wore her old, beige summer dress. She crouched to unravel a faded towel. Midas rolled up his sleeves and undid a few shirt buttons. His father looked perfectly comfortable in a starched shirt tucked into his trousers. Bright reflections shone off his shoes, imitations of a million bright reflections on the turquoise sea.

Low, crumbling cliffs were full of cracks and the echoes of caves.

‘You’re not to go in those.’

The caves were like blast holes in the cliff ’s chalk fortress wall. Midas loved the way shadows cowered within. ‘But, Father…’

‘Too dangerous. You see those boulders, all along the beach? They’re bits of cliff that fell suddenly, unannounced. It takes only an echo to bring them crashing down on your head.’

Midas folded his arms and looked back at the sea. ‘May I go paddling?’

His father shook his head. ‘You’re not to take your shirt and trousers off because you’ll burn. Your skin will fry up and turn red. And you’re not to get your clothes wet because saltwater ruins fabric and your poor mother shan’t cope. Your poor mother. Think about her.’

Midas looked at her. She lay face down on the beach towel, greying hair swept over her face. A dead crab lay not far from her, claws crossed in comic piety on its sun-bleached chest.

‘What about that rock? May I climb on that rock?’

Midas’s father followed his pointing finger. Among the gently breaking shallows stood a chunk of tall stone the height of a lamppost. His father rubbed his moustache.

‘You’ll have to give me your word – your word – that you shan’t climb to the top. And you shall be extra careful.’

‘I promise.’

He snorted and unfurled his blue beach towel, flapping it out then laying it gently on the sand some distance from his wife. Midas opened his satchel and pulled out his camera, the little silver compact one he’d got for Christmas. He wrapped the cord handle around his wrist and started to unlace his shoes.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m taking my shoes and socks off, to paddle out to the rock.’

His father laughed. ‘Not yet. First you must read a book.’

‘But look,’ Midas said, pointing haplessly to the sky.

His father looked puzzled. ‘Look at what?’

‘The sun. It’s right up. Above the sea.’

He wanted to explain that the light would change soon and shouldn’t be missed. All he could do was point at the swollen sun.

His father pulled books out of his bag and lined them up on the sand. Book after book after book. On the first day of their seaside holiday near Gurmton they’d spent a whole morning in a bookshop while his father leafed through nearly every tome on every shelf, finding what he called the
most pertinent.

When he’d lined up his selection on the beach he asked, ‘Which takes your fancy?’

Midas pointed desperately out at the rock he longed to climb. A proud white gull had settled on its pinnacle, watching the water. Suddenly it took off, flew seaward for two wing-beats and
dived. It surfaced in an arc of droplets.

‘
Mermaids, Sirens and Capricorns
, that sounds appropriate.’ His father turned it over and read from the back cover. ‘
A thought provoking collection of essays examining the fantasies and nightmares of sailors.
Hm. What do you think?’