The Girl With Glass Feet, page 16
The moss-covered door swung open. He led her into a musty kind of airlock and took an excited breath as he opened the inner door on to the pen proper.
A heater hummed quietly in the centre of a floor smattered by dung. Birdcages and gutted lanterns of all sizes swung from rafters on the ceiling. The herd of moth-winged cattle lapped the pen in a figure-of-eight, swooping and turning sharp angles like a flock of autumn swallows. The blur of so many wings wrapped them in a shimmer. They tossed their heads and kicked their forelegs as they flew. Some of the larger bulls had curving horns and flew with heads bowed as if charging impish matadors. Thread-like tails flowed behind them in a breeze created by their flight. Ida felt it as a faint blowing on her cheeks and laughed in involuntary delight.
Afterwards, in the house, Henry fussed as he helped her into a comfy armchair, ‘Can I offer you some tea? I’ve only green, I’m afraid.’
‘That’d be a refreshing change. Being with Midas all I get is coffee.’
‘So you’re… with… the Crook boy, are you?’
‘The Crook boy? Who would that be? Don’t tell me you’re like that about him.’
Henry’s smile had a knowing twinge to it. ‘I meant no offence. I merely called him that to distinguish him. What happened was tragic.’
‘Concerning his father?’
‘And the way his mother took it.’
She scowled. ‘I don’t see why any of that should impinge on how people treat Midas. He’s been so sweet to me.’
‘You’re young, though, Ida. That’s what you have to remember. People look for patterns in their existences, and one of the patterns they see on these islands is that of families making the same mistakes through generations.’
She huffed and folded her arms. ‘That only happens because the community here’s so tiny. People don’t have the imagination to see Midas as his own man. They file him neatly in the spot his dead dad vacated.’
‘Quite, quite. I couldn’t agree with you more.’
‘Yet you still don’t want him in your house. The two of you fell out, he said.’
‘He hasn’t told you why?’
‘No.’
‘Did he tell you… anything at all?’
‘Only that he’d found you. He said the two of you talked about his mother. He said you knew her once.’
‘I… That is, I…’ He scratched his beard. ‘Did he tell you what I showed him in the bog?’
‘No. What did you show him?’
‘Just… Well it was a bright day. I showed him the light on the meres.’
They were briefly quiet. She knew there was something more, but decided to press Midas for it later. ‘I’ll make the tea,’ he said, forcing a smile and leaving her at the table while he went through to the adjacent kitchen.
He poured simmering water on to the tea leaves. It wouldn’t help to tell Ida what lay in the murky bog pool, which he assumed was also Midas’s reasoning. The poor girl was here because he was her last resort, and he didn’t know how to convince her there was nothing he could do. He had certainly done a bad job with Midas. He watched the tea leaves flex and expand in the water.
Ida hobbled into the kitchen behind him.
‘Forgive me…’ he said. ‘I fear you’ve terribly misunderstood me. I don’t feel any aversion to Midas because of his father. It’s his mother… that’s… what… I must be honest with you.’
‘You mentioned her earlier.’
‘Yes. You must understand that I’m telling you this in the strictest confidence.’
He stared into the steam rising from the pan. She had this power (he recalled feeling it now at their first meeting that summer) to prise open your carapace and get in amongst the gooey mess beneath.
‘You’re in love with her,’ she said.
He hung his head. ‘Yes. And no. Not any more, I think.’ He hoped his honesty would help her accept what he had to say about the glass.
‘Did you have an affair with her?’
‘Not everyone can speak as… freely as you can, Ida.’
‘Sorry, I thought you wanted to discuss it.’
‘I wanted to explain that… Midas offered a route to Evaline. But as a kind of bargaining chip to get me to help you. And you see I could not accept his offer, not only because Evaline… Evaline is something different now… but because I have nothing to bargain with in turn.’
‘I’m turning into glass,’ she said softly.
He wiped sweat from his brow and set the teapot down with a clunk. He felt so hot inside that the thought of drinking it made him swoon. ‘I fancy a glass of something,’ he declared, then covered his mouth shamefaced. ‘I mean, of course, a drink. A… tumbler of something.’
‘It’s all right. It’s everywhere, isn’t it?’
He gave an awkward kind of bow, then went to a cupboard for a bottle of gin. He poured them both a shot, leaving the tea in the saucepan. ‘I don’t really drink. I’ve found myself doing… things while drunk. Yet under pressure… I am weak-willed.’
She nodded.
‘Her husband was an obstacle that nervous people such as she and I could never hope to overcome.’
‘He’s been dead for a decade.’
‘That makes no difference now.’
‘It makes all the difference. Move away. The two of you.’
‘And leave the cattle behind?’
‘Then defy what people think. People here don’t even know you. Bring her here to you.’
He bit his lip. ‘How selfish. Forgive me, Ida, for bringing this up.’
‘Don’t be stupid. You must be so lonely you barely notice any more.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re too young to understand.’
‘Don’t patronize me.’
‘Ahh… I didn’t mean to. I just mean… it’s too late for me and Evaline.’
She looked into her gin. ‘It’s never too late.’
He watched her closely as she said it. ‘See,’ he said sadly, ‘you were surprised by the doubt in your own voice.’ He put his glass down and wiped his palms on his trouser legs. ‘Thank you for your optimism, but it was too late long before Midas Crook died. One day the Evaline I knew was simply… gone. If I had done more back when she was still with us perhaps she would have stayed. But who knows where that woman is now?’
There was silence, broken by one or the other of them slurping gin.
‘Henry,’ she said quietly, ‘if I show you my feet, what are you going to say?’
He held up his hands. ‘I don’t want to see them. Thank you, Ida. I can picture them perfectly.’
She nodded.
‘And as far as talking about them goes… I’ve told you everything there is to tell.’
She put her gin down heavily. ‘But you haven’t told me why. Or how. I’ve always been a really normal person, Henry. How the hell does a person go from a normal life one second to a life like this the next, walking on a stick with no feeling in my toes?’ She had screwed up her fists. Her eyes were bulging. ‘What did I do, to bring this on myself ? Just tell me what I did, where I stepped, who I crossed… Something.’
‘You came all this way, to find me, to ask me that?’
‘Because of the moth-winged cattle. And the creature you said can turn a thing white with one look. You know how these islands work.’
He shrugged meekly. ‘I don’t know anything.’
‘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.
25
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.
