The Girl With Glass Feet (30 page)

‘You… made a mistake with Carl?’

‘No. Yes. The mistake wasn’t being with Carl. It was trying too hard to hold on to his interest in me. The mistake was making
myself seem… more interesting than I really ought. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

They sat side by side in silence, knees lined up. He couldn’t see what this had to do with Ida, poultices and the rest of it. ‘I just,’ he said, fiddling with the SLR, ‘I just don’t. No. Uhhm… sorry.’

Emiliana was blushing hard. She took a deep breath. ‘I have been very foolish, with my life, simply by never going out on a limb. I think about it every day. And I have been very naïve. Because I have always been comfortable, physically and circumstantially, you understand?’

To be polite, he refrained from shaking his head.

‘I wonder whether I am transparent, sometimes. I feel… flimsy and insubstantial.’

She paused, studying his expression, which he tried to lend an air of compassion and wisdom.

She sighed and brushed her hair back off her shoulders. ‘Let me put it another way. I feel like a half-exposed photograph. I can make out what it portrays, but it doesn’t have any depth.’

This he understood.

‘I don’t feel I have much substance. I have struggled for substance. And once, a long time ago now, Carl appeared, and just one look from him felt like the last exposing light that photograph needed. It sounds pathetic recounting it now, but it filled in the details, created new depths I had not known existed. For that, I felt I owed him everything, and to
let him down
would mean to jeopardize everything I was. I still find it very hard to let Carl down. So… you’re still wondering how this relates to poor Ida, and the poultices, and so forth.’

Midas was about to say yes when the door opened and Carl stepped in. ‘Good morning,’ he said, and waited, as if their presence here demanded an explanation.

‘We were just chatting,’ obliged Emiliana, ‘and Midas was photographing me with his new camera.’

Ida sat alone beside the log fireplace in Emiliana’s sitting room, deep in an armchair with a book on her lap, flames clicking and snapping behind her. The parts of her legs that were still skin and bone below her knees – her calves and shins and the bastions in her ankles that weren’t yet glass – were all as numb now as the glass itself. Above her knees, where the flesh wasn’t paralysed but the venom had lanced, she could feel a pain like a burn near heat. She summoned the courage to peek again at her inflamed skin. Her lower thighs looked like joints in a butcher’s shop. Her knees were puffed up, elephantine. To think it had
receded
since the treatment that morning, when she had hitched up her skirt and watched Emiliana tie with tight threads the poultices of warmed jellyfish matter. The pain had been fierce and instantaneous, like a needle in every skin cell. Her eyes had watered so fast that within a minute they had dried out and blinking felt like peeling them. She had screwed them up and wished that Midas had been there so she could clamp his hand in hers as the pain flared. That had been her plan the night before. The attempted kiss would have cleared the way for it.

The patterns on the walls swung in and out of focus at the whim of the firelight. The door creaked as it opened.

She picked up her book again when she saw Midas enter. He tiptoed over and sat on a cushion opposite.

‘Is now a good time to talk?’

She kept quiet. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him lick his lips. He’d want to blurt out every excuse for his jumbled-up
shock when she’d tried to kiss him. All that rubbish about an inherited phobia of touch.

‘So, um…’ he managed, ‘what are you reading?’

She laid the book down open on her lap and laughed curtly. ‘I don’t know. I just picked it up the moment you came in to give you the cold shoulder.’

‘Ah. Um.’

‘So what are we, Midas? Close friends? Aspiring lovers? That kind of talk gets you jumpy, doesn’t it?’ She snapped the book shut. ‘But you see, Midas, and I don’t mean to be cruel, you’ve more time than me to give heed to your insecurities. I need to know where we stand.’

The fire crackled. She worried she’d said too much, defeated his droplet words with a river of her own. She carried on. ‘Can’t you just… write me a note or something? Or just… say it from the heart.’

His jaw wagged as he tried to eject something.

‘Stop thinking so hard about what you’ll say. Just spit it out.’

‘I-I’m sorry.’

She thumped the arm of the chair. ‘You’re bloody well forgiven, Midas. That doesn’t matter. What about
us
?’

‘I wasn’t to… I want to…’ He was almost bent double. She noticed the second camera hanging from his neck, as if forcing his posture into a bow.

‘Where did you get that camera?’

‘Em-Emiliana. I was t-taking her photo.’

She felt a sudden clamminess in her gullet, an oyster swallowed wrong, dropping through her stomach and into her bowels, becoming a numbing absence beneath her knees. He just sat there looking concerned. He had said before that he wanted to take her own photograph and she had avoided the topic because she didn’t want him to. She knew what photographs did to her these days and she hated the idea of being recorded in one. All the
same she had been flattered that he
wanted
to take one. She had read it as a sign that he was interested in her. Idiot, she was an idiot. She looked away from him. Of course he had never made a promise to abstain from photographing someone else until she was ready, and yes, she was being irrational, but she was so exhausted and her legs were so sore.

‘I-Ida?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Midas. If nothing’s going to become of us, what are you even doing here?’

He got up. Ducking and bowing subserviently, he backed out of the room.

‘Midas! Come back!’ But he didn’t. She heaved herself up and hurried after him, but the thick rug snared one of her crutches and she tripped forward. Her hands rushed out before her (she had rehearsed this fall a thousand times in her nightmares). She screwed up her face and had time to remember parachutes and bungee jumps (she had to hit the floor first with anything but her feet). The impact against her face was silenced by the rug, but she felt every inch of the hard floor hit her. Her neck twisted with a click. Her shoulder-blades and vertebrae jarred. She lowered her legs slowly and pressed her face hard into the rug, trying to hide the pain in its smell of carpet and the softness of tassels. Her body remained intact.

Lying still on the rug, hoping that Midas would return, she wondered what it would be like to lie on top of him. She wondered whether his hair would feel soft like the rug. She wondered whether when he made love his heartbeat was frantic like a shrew’s and whether his skin became slippery like a fish. These were implausible thoughts, implausible enough to distract her from the hunch that he would not come back to help her to her feet.

Boys and their dashing about… made no sense to her. Midas laboriously working through his emotional gauntlet. Henry
distant and non-committal. Carl somewhere else in this house, promising remedies and protection. The fire puffed out smoke. She could put her feet in that fire and not be harmed, should she wish, yet she couldn’t do so little as jump on the spot… That morning the first thing she had done on waking up was to examine the bruise on her knee. It had turned from grey to transparent, like a little pool of clear water in the white geography of her leg.

She was being shut down, paralysed, physical avenues cordoned off. Thank goodness, she thought, she had done what she had when she had. She had waded in the Ganges, felt downy snow fill her mouth in the Alps, breathed deep to get the last of the oxygen from the high altitude of mountains. Swum. She had once swum.

How she wanted patiently to explore Midas’s caution, make inch-by-inch gains on his emotions, but she lacked that kind of time. She might wait for ever for his return. She might wait for ever for his dithering affections.

And her feet… these fragile shackles she lugged around. She could feel their emptiness. If she tried to bunch up her toes in fury… nothing happened. Her nervous system fizzled out somewhere beyond her shins. She looked back at her boots stretched out behind her on the rug. Dad’s old policeman’s boots. She remembered her own shoes, her pretty dancing shoes and her mud-caked hiking boots. She had left them all on the mainland, neatly packed in tissue paper in boxes.

She was coming to terms with it now: that some things were behind her. Life now would be an adventure of the mind, and perhaps of some other part of her body as yet unaffected, something interior.

The door creaked slowly open.

She reached towards it involuntarily. ‘Midas, thank goodness you came back… Oh.’

‘Bloody hell, Ida, what’s happened?’

Carl rushed across the carpet. She winced as his thick arms slid under her armpits and sat her slowly up. He crouched beside her, made her head rest against his chest. She heard his heartbeat speeding up beneath his shirt.

‘I’m okay,’ she said stiffly, trying to push him away.

He didn’t let go or say anything. His grip tightened almost imperceptibly. The heat of his palms seared through her blouse.

She pushed him more forcefully. He let go, sprang up and stepped away from her, taking a deep breath.

‘I’m okay,’ she said steadily, forcing herself back up and into the armchair.

He nodded without looking at her.

‘Actually, I’d like to be alone. Sorry, Carl.’

He nodded and headed out of the room. In the doorway he paused. ‘Where is Midas going?’

‘What?’

‘I just watched him packing his bags. He’s driven away.’

She held her head in her hands. It took all her effort to speak with any volume. ‘Like I said, I want to be alone.’

He nodded and closed the door softly behind him.

The air was filled with a million flakes, sinking slowly like ocean sediment. Snow flew across St Hauda’s Land’s roads and heaped on shrubs. A bird with broad wings coasted on the air currents above like a stingray. Midas was in no hurry to get home (he had a foreboding that home would remind him of Ida) so he drove back by a long scenic route.

He stopped in a car park at a viewpoint, looking out across low valleys cut into squares by drystone walls. A brook ran past the viewpoint, and after a while Midas took off his shoes and socks and dipped his toes into the cold current. Something stung him and he hopped out of the stream. A little leech hung from his big toe, sucking blood. He had a lighter in the car, so sat on the bonnet while he burnt the leech off. It shrivelled and smelt noxious. He held its burnt body in his hand and was going to take a photo, but the moment he touched the camera he felt nauseous. A sudden revulsion came over him and he pulled the bag off his shoulder and locked the camera in the boot. Then he stood over a bush, hands on his knees, feeling the need to vomit. Nothing came. He drove home listening to traffic reports and corny seventies love songs. The heater hummed as a creeping snowfall came down. Snowflakes stuck to his windscreen and shrivelled there like dying starfish.

Getting back at dusk he sat at the table with coffee in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other. He’d spent a perplexed half-hour in the off-licence trying to understand the differences between all the available bottles. The taste was as vile as he remembered, but he drank it anyway. On the radio, a
distinguished actor was reading an adaptation of
The Wizard of Oz
. The Lion was drinking his courage, the Tin Man had his heart, and the Scarecrow’s head was stuffed with what he took for brains.

Midas lashed out and knocked the radio off the table. It lay on the floor with its reception lost, the actor’s voice slurred into an alien gargle.

He had known that mixing with people wouldn’t work out. He’d told himself that when he first met Ida, repeated it like a mantra as he’d lain awake at night thinking about her. He was plainly incapable of social interaction. And what did he have instead? His eyes came to rest on his camera, which he must have pulled out of the bag without thinking because it sat, smug, lens cap dangling off, on the table. He imagined dying and being cut open and there were all his bones and muscles and his bared arteries and capillaries leading to a cavity in his chest where instead of a heart he had his camera.

He grabbed it by the strap and flung it after the radio. It hit the fridge and clunked on to the kitchen tiles. He drained the wine, topped up his glass and lowered his head on to the table. It was strong wine: at point-blank the table’s coffee rings orbited through his vision. He managed to regain focus, but when he looked up it was like being on a roundabout with the walls swirling around. All those pictures he’d pinned up there, grubby fingerprints of the past, black-and-white memories. He groaned and closed his eyes, but the memories remained. His father crunching dragonfly carapaces in his fists, his mother crying with a bundle of tattered roses on her lap, a swarm of jellyfish floating in the sea around him, Ida entering the florist with wet hair stuck to her head.