The Girl With Glass Feet (25 page)

Midas’s pointing arm sagged. He sat down and began to retie his laces.

‘What about this one? More immediate, perhaps.
Below Her Midriff: Dogs!
This’ll perk your interest, Midas.
This splendid book, complete with twelve full-colour plates, traces the coastlines of Greece in search of the mythical beast Scylla, whose legs were famously transformed into dogs by the sorceress Circe.
That sounds just your cup of tea.’

Midas sat and leafed through
Below Her Midriff: Dogs!
while his father watched proudly. He flicked past the dedications and contents pages.

‘No, no, no!’ said his father, waving his hands, ‘Don’t go straight to the colour plates, you’ll spoil your enjoyment. You look at them when you
reach
them, savour them once you’ve a contextual understanding.’

Midas turned back to page one, a dense prologue, and stared at the words without reading them until his father stopped watching and took out his own book, which was a brick of a hardback. After a while Midas turned the page and stared at the next, occasionally glancing up, until his father settled into his own read. Then he took off his shoes and socks, stood up and crept away from him, past his inert mother and down the beach to the shallows. On his way he found a fabulous branch, crooked and taller than himself. This he carried like an adventurer’s staff, dragging a line through the sand behind him. He paddled through the breakers towards the rock. Cool, crystal-clear water lapped back and forth over his feet. Stepping on a sharp shell made him stifle a hoot of pain, and something like hair stroked
his ankles. He looked down to see loops of green weed coiled around his shins. They were heavier and slimier when he lifted them dangling from the water. The hush of breakers sifted the smell of bone-dry salt.

The rock’s gnarled surface made an easy climb. He pulled up to a barnacled spot and sat with feet dangling towards his reflection in a rock pool. He wriggled his toes in the pool’s warm water to clear out the sand and scraps of weed, but retracted his feet when he saw the many poppy-red arms of an anemone swaying between burgundy tendrils of seaweed.

He glanced back at the beach. His father hadn’t budged, except to turn his book’s pages. Nor had his mother, still lying face down precisely unmoved. He trained his camera on her and wondered whether she were happy. She looked at least content, basking in the sunbeams.

He waited on the rock spire, as immobile as his parents, for pictures to come. With only one spare film for the holiday, he had to bide his time. The sea lost some of its lustre. The sun moved across the sky. He kept waiting, and in the space of three hot hours he took only that many photographs. Then, when the light no longer glared, a movement on a rock further out to sea brought his camera to his eyes.

He thought it was some kind of seabird, but its flight was too chaotic. It would flitter out from behind the rock then flitter back again. He suspected it had a perch obscured from sight and waited with his camera on his knee, ready for it to fly into his sights. When it did it was so fast he suspected all he’d capture was a blur. He prayed madly for God to enhance his frame rate.

When it whooshed into sight he realized it was a dragonfly, big as his fist and white as milk.

It was late afternoon when his father called to him from the beach. He stood on the edge of the shallows, using his book to shield his eyes from the sun. The tide had come in and was several
feet deep around the rock. Midas started to take off his shirt and trousers, to tie them in a dry bundle around his camera then hang them on the end of his stick so he could carry it above his head and paddle with his free arm. He was about to knot his shirtsleeves around the wood when he saw something drifting below the water’s surface, buoyed on each wave. Translucent, with a violet rim and flowing tentacles. He’d never seen anything like it. He climbed closer to the water…

‘What are you doing, Midas?’

His father was pacing up and down. Midas reached into the sea with the stick and hooked out the floating thing. It sagged as it left the water: a gluey, deflated lump with droplets streaming from it.

‘Look what I’ve caught!’

His father froze and gasped, ‘Don’t touch it, Midas!’ A creeping wave sloshed over his ankle and he hopped backwards on to the beach with a yelp.

It slid off Midas’s stick and landed with a slap in the water, where it unfurled gracefully.

‘Oh
God
… They’ll paralyse you!’

There were others floating in the water now, violet haloes picked out by shimmering light.

‘What are they?’

‘Medusae! Jellyfish!’

Midas climbed a little higher up the rock, clinging tight now. He didn’t dare look down at them.

‘What happens if they see me, Father? Will I turn to stone?’

‘Oh God, Midas! Good
God
!’

For a while there was only the sound of the waves and a pair of gulls swooping overhead. Then Midas’s mother walked down to the sea with her dress fluttering in the breeze. She dragged a plank of blackened driftwood by a cord of rotting rope. She kept going when she got to the shallows, the tiny waves splashing up her bare legs. When she was close enough she broke a piece of
wood from the corner of the plank and tossed it into the water. They watched it drift out to Midas’s rock on the current. Having performed this test, she pushed the plank out. Midas climbed down the side of the stone and jabbed his stick through the loop in the rope as the plank passed. It was heavy and he clung hard to the rock face as he pulled it closer.

‘Lie flat!’ urged his mother, ‘like a surfer!’

Midas hesitated. He couldn’t take his clothes, or the camera they were bundled around, back to the beach. With a gut-wrenching feeling, he placed them on a shelf of the rock.

He climbed on to the driftwood board. It lurched and nearly flipped over. Water frothed across its surface and a jellyfish bobbed dangerously close. He held tight as the breakers rushed him to shore. But just when he thought he was clear he heard the sea slurp beneath him and it hauled him back from the beach towards the open ocean. He screamed as he felt the board betray him, screwing up his eyes awaiting submersion and venomous death. But he didn’t go under. When he dared open his eyes he was being lowered on to the beach, and his mother was lowering herself down beside him, her dress soaked through so he could see her scrawny body and ancient underwear. She bit her lip and covered her eyes with one hand while the other itched a swelling red mound on her calf. His father strutted about like a frightened hen nearby.

In the hospital they said the paralysis in her left leg would heal within a week. But it never quite left her, and from that day forth she walked with a limp.

A black seabird dipped into the ocean like a nib dipping into an inkwell. A boat lurched horizon-bound with engines chugging, tearing frothy furrows into the water. The coast road had the cliff drop for its kerb, and Midas was so terrified of veering off it that he wouldn’t take his eyes off the tarmac. When Ida looked out into the greyness and something horned poked its head through the sea’s surface, she couldn’t persuade him to look up at it. It kept the horn raised as if it were a finger testing the wind.

The road descended. Two gulls swept across, pecking each other in midair, and she caught a flash of their yellow eyes. Soon they had driven down to sea level, where breakers were up close and salt spray fogged their way. Further out the ocean surged over hooks of granite and drained through channels in flats of black rock.

In the rear-view mirror the gloomy silhouettes of hills rose like the shoulder-blades of giants. Through the windscreen the landscape, when not occluded by sea spray, was a plain of brown rock and water channels. One or two trees stood trailing branches on the ground. Knotted shrubs looked so black they could have been hauled from an oil slick.

There were all sorts of myths about Enghem, this territory of Hector Stallows’s in the north of Gurm Island, circulated since the perfume man bought the land, and born out of resentment at a swathe of landscape suddenly privatized.

He had been a captain of industry, obliterating livelihoods in the name of competition. No wonder people said he always got what he wanted. Now as a retired man of leisure, he was said to
be mercurial with his wealth. His reasons for once hanging the woodlands of inland Enghem with amber baubles were not understood, but locals knew those sap tombs of ancient insects were not dangling from the trees for
their
pleasure. There was an incident when a boy from Tinterl stole a bauble – a single specimen among hundreds – from the branches of a willow tree. The following night he woke up itching furiously and thinking something had got into an eardrum, because there was a dry hum in the air of his bedroom. He turned on the lamp and cried out for his mother (he was seventeen) because the walls, the ceiling and his bare arms and chest were speckled with mosquitoes. The drawer where he had hidden the bauble was open: the bauble was gone. Or so the story went.

After a time, fickle Hector Stallows got tired of the sight of golden orbs glowing warm in the woods at twilight, so cut them down, packed them away and sold them to a bidder in Shanghai. In their place he bought quartz (locals watched trucks carry iceberg-sized blocks through his gates, watched helicopters rattle overhead). It was said he had quartz spruces cut for the gardens of Enghem Stead, his home. Quartz walls were inlaid in his house, bookshelves chiselled with the names of authors. His mainlander guests ate from quartz plates clunking on quartz tables.

And then, it was held, the quartz had been seen leaving the estate: sold to a collector somewhere in Russia. As it moved in lorry-loads across St Hauda’s Land towards the docks of Glamsgallow, smaller vehicles were seen travelling in the opposite direction and passing into Enghem. Soon rumours circulated that Hector had purchased birds of a hundred species, canaries and cockatoos and nightingales, but that every single one was silent. An aviary of mute birds. Those who had entered the gardens told of an eerie quiet, the opening and closing of a hundred beaks without a single warble or tweet on the air.

The road ran here through a stone archway, crumbling and ivycovered.
There was no wall, the archway standing all alone in a clump of trees. This land was full of deathtraps: Ida saw in the drive of the only cottage they passed a tree hung with both Christmas lights and dead moles. Beyond it the road turned in from the sea and climbed a series of zigzags back to higher ground where, at the very summit, Gurm Island’s last headlands were laid out below to the north, like bones cast on the ground by a soothsayer. No defined shoreline separated land and sea at Enghem. Instead, shale beds, inlets, rock pools and saltwater creeks made up the ragged scenery between here and the coast. The tide poured into it and retreated like a gigantic grey comb. Somewhere in this landscape were built the four tidy houses of Enghem-on-the-Water, their destination.

That Midas was prepared to come all this way touched Ida. But did he want to be with her or was he just playing at being a photojournalist and tagging along until he got bored? Her conversation with Henry, and his verdict that she could withstand her condition for weeks or months, not years, had accelerated her thinking. So, while they drove in comfortable silence, Ida’s brain ticked through what to do about her relationship with Midas Crook.

Midas drove carefully along the threatening wintry roads. A sudden skid on black ice would plunge them into a dark pool or crash them into a horned rock. The headlights swung across the green-grey corpse of a pike lying in the road, and launched a crow screeching and flapping into the air.

Midas had bought her a second crutch. Her balance had become awry and she needed one before she had an accident, but she’d joked he could make it her Christmas present to delay it for a few more weeks. Then that morning he’d presented her with a long package wrapped in silver crêpe paper. It was tied by florist’s twine and had a fastening made from a sprig of star-shaped chincherinchee flowers. She unwrapped it and found a polished
shaft of diamond willow, elegant where her other crutch was sturdy, patterned with brown rhombuses where Carl’s was planed and even-textured.

She watched Midas fondly from the corner of her eye. Was there something embryonic between them, or had she simply misunderstood him?

He held the wheel tight when he drove, his knuckles and elbows all sharp angles. She loved the way his shirtsleeves were too short for him, the cuffs buttoned tight around his scrawny wrists, showing off the plastic schoolboy watch he wore. He chewed the inside of his cheek. His Adam’s apple bulged in his throat. He had washed his hair that morning for the first time in days and it stood up in a black ruff.

She wondered what he would do if she reached out to touch him. He’d probably crash the car. Yet she had to hurry things along somehow. Not now, but at the first chance she had.

Suddenly the road rounded a bank of sandy soil, on to a snowy track at the end of which was Enghem-on-the-Water. Only the largest of the four houses had lights in its windows: this was Enghem Stead. Beyond it the sea shuffled in and out, and as they drove closer Ida saw that all the houses were built on sturdy wooden stilts that high tide could pass beneath. The houses were also made of wood, their slats painted pastel blue or white, although the paint had flaked to show greening timbers beneath. She knew from local say-so that only Enghem Stead was inhabited. Hector had bought the entire hamlet to guarantee privacy.