The Girl With Glass Feet (5 page)

‘Yeah.’

‘And you want me to look after Denver?’

He nodded. ‘Just for the morning, if the traffic’s light. I don’t want to bring her with me. I’ll be in fucking floods of tears.’

It had been three years that felt like nothing. Sitting in Gustav’s car with cold cups of coffee in plastic thermos mugs. The green and neon jackets of paramedics.

Clearly Gustav was remembering too. After a while he pushed himself out of the chair and shambled over to the tap at the back of the shop. He turned it on. Water drummed into a watering can.

And it had been what? Only eight years since that hot day when Midas was best man and his collar bit into his sweaty neck and he played with the ring in its box – so easy to lose in his pocket – and
he watched the noxious wedding photographer going about everything wrong and then… he was swept away by how beautiful Catherine looked and all the whiteness of her wedding dress.

He had been friends with Gustav since he was little, when they lived at opposite ends of the same street. Gustav had been an overweight, unambitious child more interested in football stickers than homework, but he had been several years older than Midas and that had made him an invaluable friend to the unpopular weirdo who answered to the name of Crooky in the playground. Countless times the sheer height and bulk of the bigger, older boy had saved Midas’s wallet and his lunch money, or his skin from the punches of other children. Even when Gustav had left school (at the earliest opportunity) and was working for his keep, he had arrived after-hours to mind Midas on his way home, and to talk knowledgeably to the smaller boy about football leagues, a subject Midas had never been able to grasp. In return, Midas had been Gustav’s sounding board, listening intently to his romantic woes and his morose talk of being washed up and in crisis aged only twenty.

Then Gustav fell in love. Midas had worried it would mean the end of their friendship, but instead it led to the second friend of his young life. Catherine was sparkling, ambitious, and the new owner of the town’s florist. Gustav had been working in a newsagent’s for half a decade since leaving school; this hadn’t equipped him with an extensive knowledge of botany, but through a sheer lack of other applicants he was successful in securing a job at the florist’s. Over the course of two years among curling arum lilies and brilliant yellow arctic poppies, Catherine slowly but surely fell as much in love with Gustav as he had with her in their first instant together. Denver arrived almost at once, a happy accident. They married soon after Catherine discovered she was pregnant, and for a short while their home had been the
warmest, most welcoming place Midas could think of on St Hauda’s Land.

Gustav twirled a strand of raffia. ‘I could phone around and try to get you the afternoon off. Today. To make up for the short notice. And apologies in advance if I’m late getting back. You know how Catherine’s mum likes a natter.’

‘You don’t have to give me the afternoon off. I love looking after Denver. You know I’ll help.’

They stood side by side in silence. Midas remembered how they had stood side by side over Catherine’s body, with the policewoman insisting they said it out loud when the sheer looks on their faces should have been enough.
Yes
, Gustav had croaked,
it’s her
.

Gustav cleared his throat and turned off the tap. ‘I tell you something. Listen. Don’t mess up with this new girlfriend of yours.’

‘But… She’s not a girlfriend… I only met her yesterday. It’s because of her boots that she sticks in my mind. It’s nothing to do with attraction. If anything, I thought her peculiar. Flimsy. Easily snapped.’

Gustav raised his eyebrows. Midas blushed. He hadn’t meant to sound derogatory.

The bell above the door rang and a customer came in.

Midas’s guts clenched. A drop from the tap splashed into the watering can.

Ida, hair stuck to her head by rain, entered the florist. She carried a white umbrella blown inside out by the wind, and wore a knee-length coat over a black woollen dress. She wiped her nose and cheeks dry with one hand, the other resting on the handle of her stick.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Gustav. ‘Can I help…’ he faltered because he’d seen her boots ‘… you. With, um, anything?’

She blushed. ‘I just sort of came in. To see Midas.’ She gestured
back to the doorway. ‘I recognized the name on the sign. Catherine’s
.
Um. Hello, Midas. You remember you told me you worked here.’

Gustav drummed his hands on the table and sat up straight. ‘That’s
great
. Great. Wow. And you two, you two are doing what? Going for a coffee, or something?’

During the silence that followed a moment’s sunlight broke on the street outside, made even brighter by the still falling rain and the wet sheen on buildings.

‘I just came in…’ Ida mumbled. ‘Just, you know.’ She drew herself up. ‘Well. You’re both busy. Midas is working.’ She waved at Midas.

‘H-hello,’ he said.

‘Actually,’ said Gustav, ‘I just gave him the afternoon off.’

The sunlight vanished.

‘Midas,’ said Ida, ‘would you… would you like to go for a coffee?’

She ended up drinking lemonade, while Midas sipped an Americano in a café with steamed-up windows and a murmuring black-and-white television on the counter. They’d been drenched on the short route from the florist to the café (Ida hobbled so slowly). When they sat down his trouser legs clung damp to his thighs. It was a typical Ettinsford café, with a patterned carpet and plastic tablecloths. Watercolours by a local artist portrayed the town not as the pit of sagging masonry that Midas had photographic proof of, but as a citadel of stone flushed peach in improbable light. Were this artist’s eyes designed differently to his? He cleared a salt shaker and blocked pepper pot from the table, then settled back to let Ida do most of the talking. He thought about panel lights and umbrella reflectors. Then she shifted about in her seat to get comfy and Midas felt her boot
brush his shoe beneath the table. Touch made him shudder, like hearing a bump at night. He swung his legs back tight beneath his chair and screwed up his eyes.

When he opened them she was sipping lemonade and regarding him curiously. He tried to stop himself from examining her. Bags under her eyes: dark as bruises. Skin thin and veined like set glue. But even looking unwell he itched to have a photo of her, to pore over it in magnification.

‘So how long have you lived here?’

‘All my life,’ mumbled Midas, looking down at the table. He wondered whether she’d think he should have been more adventurous. ‘What about you? Where are you from?’

‘I’ve travelled around a lot. I’m staying at my mum’s friend’s cottage just outside of Ettinsford. He’s gone to the mainland for a few days.’

‘Are you having a holiday?’

She shook her head. ‘I came here to find someone I met once on the islands. Only, I’ve got nothing to go on.’ She stirred her lemonade with a black straw. Bubbles drifted to its surface. Hazy ice cubes clinked against each other.

‘My mum’s friend Carl – the man whose cottage I’m staying at – he said the island was so incestuous you could ask nearly anyone about anyone else’s business. Do you think that’s true?’

‘No. You can find out what they
think
of each other’s business…’ ‘That’s not the same, is it? Carl didn’t know where I should look, that’s for sure.’

This Carl was right. There was something incestuous about the place. Midas knew of three Carls on the island, and hoped none of them were friends of Ida’s. ‘What does Carl do?’

‘He’s a professor of classics.’

Midas screwed up his face. His father had been a professor of classics.

‘But he’s not stuffy, like you think. He’s very hands-on. He works with archaeologists on his research – he travels around. I helped him on one project when I was a teenager – when my parents wanted to offload me for a week or two. I did a lot of diving. That was my speciality. Recently he’s done something at the causeway at Lomdendol. A lot of diving there I imagine.’

He filed the character description. It sounded worryingly familiar, but conversations were like marathons and you had to press on regardless. Especially when they were flowing with such rarity as this one. ‘You… like diving?’

‘I won medals when I was a kid. In fact… It’s kind of embarrassing now I think of it… I brought another photo to show you.’

She opened her bag and removed a creased colour photograph of her in her diving gear, giving a double thumbs-up and grinning behind a neon-pink snorkelling mask. In the background the ocean was an impossible ultramarine. He’d never seen sea like that. Even in summer the islands’ waters remained secretive, opaque and grey.

‘The Med,’ she explained. ‘Off the coast of Spain.’

‘Oh.’ To imagine her as he did now (tanned by roasting Spanish sun, leaving footprints in the golden sand, laughing her watery laugh, in nothing but a neon-pink bikini) spoiled her. He tried to focus on the present, her modest dress sense, her elegant monochrome complexion. ‘I… I… take it you can’t dive at the moment? With your foot condition.’

She shook her head. On the counter, the black-and-white TV lost its reception and made a cracking sound like a whip. She obviously didn’t like to talk about her feet, but it was all he could think of to keep the conversation running. He accidentally slurped his coffee and felt embarrassed at the bubbling noise. The television reception settled. A news anchor was reading a finance report about ascending shares in companies owned by Hector Stallows, known infamously on St Hauda’s Land as ‘the perfume
man’, since scent was how he’d amassed his fortune.

‘So,’ she said, pushing her straw around the glass, ‘this man I’m looking for… His father was Japanese. There can’t be many Japanese names on the island. His name is Henry Fuwa.’

Midas looked at her eager, fascinating face, and wanted to turn into a wave so he could spill away.

‘Well? Have you heard of him? He’s got a mop of black hair and a thick black beard. Gangly. Bug-eye glasses.’

Midas hung his head. The television news report went to the weather. On the islands’ limited-service television they still stuck card cutouts of clouds to a poster map. He closed his eyes and remembered Henry Fuwa on local TV, something he’d watched on a damp afternoon a few years back. Henry Fuwa crouched on a riverbank, wearing a checked shirt and battered broad-brimmed hat. Dressed and dirtied like a prospector panning for gold, mannered like a bank vole. He’d looked wild-eyed into the camera, his name flashing across the bottom of the screen, and Midas then remembered Nihongo characters written on a bouquet tag. An order for white orchids in the florist. To be delivered. He remembered his shocked and shaking hands as he held, in his left, the inscription and, in his right, the delivery address Mr Henry Fuwa had requested.

The bouquet was to be delivered to Midas’s mother.

‘Well,
have you
?’

He shook his head quick.

‘That’s to be expected, I suppose. Nobody has. I met him in Gurmton, but he said he lived some miles away. I had no luck in Gurmton, so I thought Ettinsford was my next-best bet.’

‘I don’t think he lives here.’

She sighed. ‘Any suggestions?’

‘Maybe in the countryside.’

‘This whole place is the countryside!’

Midas drew composure back from the four winds, and looked up. ‘To… to someone from the mainland it might look like
countryside, but I’ve never, um, thought of Ettinsford like that. It’s town. In the countryside there are a hundred nooks with cottages secluded in them.’

‘But short of driving to
every single one
…’

‘You wouldn’t even find them all on the map…’

‘Great.’ She tapped her fingers on the table. ‘I’ve nothing else to go on. I’ve got his name, and his smell.’

He didn’t ask her to elaborate, but she did.

‘Of peat.’

Midas’s nostrils twitched and conjured a whiff of it. She’d said it flippantly, but it had prompted… The air that came from opened packages in his childhood.
This is the time
, he told himself,
to finish your coffee and never see this girl again
.

‘Well,’ she puffed, ‘this investigation’s going nowhere. Tell me about you. You and your family must be close.’

‘No,’ he wiped his forehead, grateful this conversation was going elsewhere. ‘Why? Why do you ask?’

‘If you’ve lived in Ettinsford all your life. You must have strong roots here.’

‘Well…’ The truth was he lay awake some nights asking himself why he’d never moved away. He normally concluded he was a coward: too much like his father. But once in a while he believed that moving away would be cowardly. He could have left after Catherine’s death, after his father’s death. But ties remained. There remained Gustav and Denver. There remained his mother…

He blinked and the bouquet from Henry Fuwa was waiting as if it were a photo on the insides of his eyelids.

‘I suppose,’ he said carefully, ‘there are roots.’

‘Family?’

‘My mother lives near Martyr’s Pitfall. It’s not a long way away. But I don’t see her.’

Ida raised her eyebrows.

He drank his coffee.

‘The raised eyebrows mean carry on.’