The Girl With Glass Feet (32 page)

The wine made his heart flutter. Bravery did not become him and nor would it ever (his DNA guaranteed that). He tried to decide on the bravest thing his father ever did. Kill himself (the waves sloshing quietly while the flames burned)? Or conceive a son? That was a thought. His mother desperate for love, and his father who flinched at the briefest contact (he remembered giving him a leg-up into the boat) coupling together in bed, and all the stickiness
that
entailed.

He stared accusingly at the red wine, then knocked it back and went to the phone. He had been rethinking the time he had spent at Enghem, and the thing that stuck in his mind now was Emiliana: how she had behaved in the guest bedroom when she came to give him the SLR. It had been as if she were trying to confess to something about the remedy. He had been too dimwitted to notice at the time.

He dialled Ida’s number and she picked up in seconds.

‘Ida! It’s me.’

Brief silence on the other end of the line, then a man’s voice, ‘I’m sorry. This isn’t Ida.’

‘Oh. Carl?’

‘Yes. And I don’t think Ida wants to speak to you.’

‘Carl, I… I don’t know whether this remedy is a good thing.’

‘You’ve already made that quite clear.’

‘Will you pass me to Ida?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Please.’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

Carl hung up. Midas tried ringing again, but no one answered
and the tone cut to a voicemail service.

He sulked back to the kitchen feeling rejected. That was that, then. She didn’t want to speak with him.

On the table lay Denver’s sketch of the shell carriage, complete apart from its half-drawn passenger. He thought grimly of Catherine’s frozen body when they pulled it from the murderous water.

He couldn’t give up.

He badly wished there was some wine left.

He had to see Ida again, to tell her things straight.

He took up the phone and called Emiliana Stallows, praying that Carl wouldn’t answer. After a long time ringing, Emiliana picked up.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

He was too scared to say his name, in case she hung up abruptly. ‘I understand now,’ he said instead, ‘what you were trying to tell me when you gave me the SLR.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘It’s not going to work, is it? There’s more to the story of Saffron Jeuck than you told us.’

He thought he could hear Enghem Stead creaking in the time that passed before she answered.

‘It’s not going to work,’ she admitted. ‘It’s only going to delay things.’

‘Delay for how long?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How long did it delay them for Saffron?’

‘Midas… you have to understand that when Saffron left me, we all thought it was working.’

He was winding the cord of the phone so tight around his fingers it was cutting off the blood supply. ‘How long?’

‘Not long.’

‘I’m coming to get her.’

He put down the phone, grabbed his bag and car keys, and was off. Only halfway to Enghem did it strike him that he’d left the roses in their vase on the kitchen table.

Carl was smoking a cigarette on Enghem Stead’s wooden deck when Emiliana tiptoed out to join him. A mist cottoned the hills inland. Earlier in the day it had been a low cloud bank, but inexorably it had sunk on to the hilltops. Later it would roll down over Enghem-on-the-Water and spread north across the quiet ocean.

Emiliana came closer and leant her elbows on the railing beside him, watching the smoke from his cigarette hang in the cold air like a thread, as if the cigarette would float there if he let go.

‘Carl.’

He flicked ash on to the pebbles beneath the deck. ‘What’s up, Mil?’

She took a deep breath. ‘You know… it’s been so busy since you all arrived, I feel like we’ve barely had a chance to catch up.’

‘We stayed up chatting last night.’

‘We did. But…’

He drew a long, snorting breath and stabbed the cigarette out on the railing. He looked at her sideways, as if turning his head was too arduous. Still she felt him seeing into her, that ability he had always had. That thing that had attracted her to him in the first place. Back when they first met, when she’d been young, newly wed and regretting it, such a look from him had seared straight through the barriers of faces and skulls to the top of her spine. He had been in love with Freya back then, which he had confessed early in their brief fling. Back then Emiliana had felt she could compete.

‘I concealed one or two things from you.’

He raised his eyebrows. Unable to bear that slanted look of his, watching instead his fingers drawing casually into a bunch on the wooden rail, she cleared her throat. ‘About Saffron Jeuck.’

He didn’t respond. She watched a sheet of the mist drift slowly off the nearer reaches of the hills and erase the lowlands in the distance. She blinked tears from her eyes. He would never visit again, she supposed, and it was unfair. While he tried to help a girl who was doomed, because he was obsessed with a woman who was dead, here she
was
. She had been prepared to elope with him for the twelve years she had been married.

‘Saffron’s dead,’ she said.

She dared a glance at him. His lower jaw was jutting out, as if he were smarting from a punch. It took him for ever to say anything. Mist appeared in the ditches of the craggy fields between Enghem-on-the-Water and the hills, as if the main body of descending fog was piping it ahead underground.

‘How?’ he asked finally.

‘Suicide.’

‘Not glass?’

‘Because she was turning into glass, yes.’

He closed his eyes and remained motionless, taking it in. In the long while before he next spoke, the mist felt its way closer, groping out of the ditches like an old blind creature coming out for a forage, nibbling boulders, fingering its way through grasses, squatting on an insipid brook.

‘This is news,’ said Carl.

‘I didn’t want things to work out like this. I thought, after all, Ida might be okay where Saffron was not. It’s not that the treatment did no good at all. It kept the glass from spreading for months.’

His fingernails were digging into the wood of the rail. His knuckles were white. Otherwise, he was very still. ‘It wrecked her body. We’ve seen the weals and burns on your video. The logic of
the remedy was to leave flesh that played dead, not flesh without strength.’

She nodded sharply. The hills were beginning to vanish entirely in the thickening air.

‘Is there anything else?’

‘I want things to be different. I would never wish what’s happening to Ida on anyone. And you should know, Carl, that you can be—’

‘Is there anything else about Saffron Jeuck?’

She gulped. ‘I heard the suicide made it very quick for her in the end. I don’t know much more than that. When she left my care it felt like it was
working
, Carl. It was only afterwards that I learnt something was wrong.’

The mist seemed now to billow and expand almost suddenly, as if the earth had exhaled a deep breath on a cold day.

‘Get out of my sight,’ he said.

She trotted down off the deck and away across the broken pottery of shingle and pebble. She rushed away from him, taking fast panicked steps, until her shoes were wet and sinking through spongy ground. She kept going, never looking back, until she found she was treading uphill and the mist was all around her. Then at once she came to a dead halt. How dare he banish her from her own house? Except… in truth it was Hector’s house, and this landscape belonged no more to her than it did to Carl. She turned back to face Enghem Stead, although it was unclear in the mist whether she was facing the right direction. With her next step her foot cracked through an iced-over puddle. She stopped again. She did not want to go back. She wiped her black hair back from her face and took slow breaths to compose herself. She would go somewhere else.

The mists had blossomed as far as Enghem Stead. Vapour swelled so close to the deck that Carl could barely see beyond the handrail.

His mind was elsewhere regardless.

Only when Freya went travelling did he find out what love was. At university he had spent the grim nights when she had returned to her halls or house switching her off in his head using metaphysics, airport thrillers, Gnostic heresy or soft porn. Anything to distract. Then graduation’s knockout blow. Freya left to travel in the Far East: Carl dragged himself into an academic career. Sometimes he went weeks without sleeping, not because he was incapable but because he couldn’t bear to. Exhaustion caught him at inopportune moments. He had waking dreams of Freya washing cuts from her knees. He remembered a walk in the High Street when every pedestrian had bleeding kneecaps. A policewoman prodded him awake on a bench outside a supermarket.

He took to discussing Freya with himself at night, drinking whisky with his reflection. People lived and died for ideas. Wars were fought for their precedence. But he couldn’t look his reflection in the eye as he said that, because he felt in his heart it was degenerate to love simply the idea of a person, the ghostly shape where hot flesh had been.

He sat forward in the chair and stared into the formidable monotony of the mist. He wondered how he was going to break the news about Saffron to Ida, and he had got nowhere with his wonderings when she came out on to the deck to join him.

The other night, when she’d shown them all her feet, Emiliana and Midas had dematerialized as readily as Enghem in this weather. So had the furniture, the walls, the winter and
time
. The shapes of her legs had resurrected feelings in him that felt ancient. He had remembered her mother’s legs.

Last night he had persuaded her to show him the glass again. Her ankles had become almost purely transparent and the surfaces of her shins were insubstantial. The skin was turning from white to translucent, and beneath it were trails of blood in crystallizing veins, like fossilized worms. Seeing them threw him back to the quad in that summer from his youth, the smell of the dying grass and the clatter of Freya’s bike crashing on paving slabs. It was as if he had seen the blood seeping from Freya’s kneecaps with one eye, while the other saw the blood locked under the surface of Ida’s shins. His brain had meshed the two together cruelly.

‘Carl,’ said Ida.

He sprang off his chair to offer it to her. She eased herself into it as an old woman might. He could smell her. A scent much more natural than Emiliana’s, which had been so evidently concocted in a lab. He couldn’t remember Freya’s smell, but he took consolation that she would have smelled like Ida.

‘Carl—’

‘Ida, I’ve had some… bad news from Emiliana.’

She looked concerned. He hung his head.

‘What’s happened, Carl?’

‘You know I’ve always cared for you. That’s been my absolute imperative. Your mother… when she was suffering… I wanted to do what no one did for her.’

Ida drew in an exhausted breath. ‘No one could cure her, Carl.’

‘But I wish I could have been there for her, don’t you? Do you hold it against me that I wasn’t?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Your father didn’t inform me. Hell, Ida,
you
didn’t inform me.’

‘You hadn’t been in touch for a long time. Dad said anyone who wasn’t interested in Mum alive shouldn’t be interested in her dead.’

Carl snorted derisively. The mist moved gently across the deck, making Ida look out of focus.

‘He was going through enough, Carl, and truth be told he never liked you. As I’m sure you know.’

He sat back in his chair, rubbing his jaw. ‘I was made to feel that she would prefer me to stay out of touch… But I brought it up,’ he said, ‘because I wanted you to know I can’t bear the idea of you suffering a drawn-out end like she did. And… and it’s all a sham.’

Ida was as composed as a china doll. ‘What is?’ she asked slowly.

Carl held his hands to his head. His entire life had been shaped by her mother. Everything he had done. What he had become. Here was all that was left of Freya and he had achieved nothing except to deceive her. ‘I wanted to…’ he began, then started again because his voice had sounded puny. ‘I wanted to help you, remember. I wanted to help your mother like this.’

It was very quiet on the deck. ‘Jesus,’ she said faintly. Even her slight movement, reaching for the nearest of her crutches, made a noticeable rustle. ‘This isn’t about my mum.’

‘I
tried
, Ida.’

‘It isn’t about you either, Carl.’

He thought about the glass of her feet. He imagined he could feel her pain in sympathy, the cold burns down her legs.

‘I need you to help me,’ she said, voice quaking.

‘Y-yes,’ he stammered. ‘Of course. I should… I should check your legs. Let me see your legs again.’

Her fingers closed around the wooden handle.

He ran his hands through his hair. He had only two thoughts.
First, that he had to find another way to save her. Second, that he had to see the bloodied knees of Freya Maclaird.