The Girl With Glass Feet, page 18
Soon they were eating bowls of couscous made floral with herbs; plates of Parma ham and purple chorizo; pots full of olives; trays of peppers and aubergines stuffed with still-bubbling cheese; boards of bread drizzled with olive oil. The other three were surprised to learn that Midas had never tried any of it before.
‘What do you normally eat?’ asked Emiliana, as he chased an olive around his plate with his fork.
‘Fish fingers,’ he admitted. ‘Can-o-Soup.’
He forked the olive and put it on his tongue.
‘Like it?’ asked Carl with a readied smirk.
His mouth felt so full of acid he might as well have kissed a snake. ‘Mm,’ he managed.
The others piled their plates up while Midas remained cautious, suspiciously analysing the stuffed peppers. Strands of cheese dribbled from the dish to his plate as he served himself one. It smelt of goat.
They chatted while they ate, or rather, the other three chatted and Midas sat in baffled silence, hearing Emiliana’s views on an orchestra, or Carl’s on a man called Hemingway. When they had finished eating, Carl ceremoniously laid down his knife and fork and said, ‘I think everyone would appreciate getting straight to the point of this visit.’
Ida blushed and spoke very quietly. ‘You’re right. It’s because of me we’re here. To hell with it, perhaps I should just take my boots off.’
Emiliana leant forward among the cushions, stretching her long legs in front of her.
Fingers aflutter, Ida reached down to her boots. She untied the buckles, then the laces. Her boots slid off gently and she rolled off her socks.
There was a pattern on the rug beneath her like the map of a labyrinth. Her toes moved across it like magnifying glasses, warping the pattern into a three-dimensional maze. The glass had become worse in the week since Midas had first seen it. Ida’s metatarsals, which he had witnessed half visible before, had now vanished in the crystal-clear bodies of her feet. Strands of blood tapered out like frayed cotton around her ankles. Her heel, which had still been made of skin before, was a hard lump with foggy white insides. Aside from these, her feet were now entirely transparent. Raised veins pulsed at the bottom of her shins and calves, as if the blood there were evacuating ahead of what was to come. Hairs on her lower leg trembled as if they were on the back of her neck.
Her inanimate feet, he realized, were no longer a part of her. All the foreign tastes of the night’s meal came back and filled his gullet. Those blocks of glass, though gracefully shaped, were amputations.
Somewhere above him, another floor lowed and creaked.
The others hadn’t moved or made a sound, apart from the noise of Emiliana’s lips parting. She looked as if she’d heard news of a terrible bereavement. Astonishment paused her body and puzzled her eyes. He was surprised because Carl had said she’d seen something like this before. She couldn’t speak until Ida broke the spell by pulling on her socks.
‘Ida,’ she said eventually, locking her fingers together, ‘I’ll… try my very best to help you.’
Carl nodded like a wise old judge. ‘Get the film of Saffron Jeuck.’
Emiliana looked uncomfortable. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait until morning, Carl? Do this bit by bit?’
‘If you’re worried about me,’ said Ida, ‘there’s no need. I can cope.’
‘It’s just…’
Carl glowered at her and she held up her hands. ‘I’ll go and get the tapes.’
As Emiliana left the room, Ida sighed and ran a hand through her hair. Carl put a heavy hand on her shoulder and patted her while Midas watched sullenly. He supposed they were going to see something to make them think how awful it would be, should Ida transform entirely into glass.
Emiliana returned with two chunky old video-tapes, and didn’t make eye contact as she plugged the first into a small television unit.
They all waited in awkward silence as the tape rewound. They could hear the faint squeal of the wheels whirring in the VCR. The house groaned a louder echo.
‘Now,’ said Emiliana, when the rewinding stopped with a clunk. A black screen danced with white bars, and then cut suddenly to a shaky picture.
A girl stood in a sepia field, squinting as she shielded her eyes from summer sunlight. The sky had probably been ultramarine when this was filmed on a doddery handheld recorder, but the age and quality of the film had saturated the colour to a greenish hue. Threads of dirt flickered across the footage.
‘Okay, Saffron,’ said Emiliana’s voice on tape, from behind the camera, ‘lift up your top.’
Saffron wore white shorts over chubby thighs. She was in her late teens, but her haircut indicated that this footage was filmed six or seven years back. She reached down and scrunched up the hem of her top, bunching it beneath her small breasts. Ida glanced warily at Carl, but at that point he sprang up and hit the Pause button, pointing at the screen. ‘See?’ he enthused. ‘Look at her midriff.’
Across Saffron’s belly ran what looked like an awful scar, but the details were lost in twitchy freeze-frame and horizons of interference descending the screen.
‘It zooms in,’ said Carl, pressing Play.
‘Now hold it,’ said Emiliana’s voice from out of shot. The wobbling camera approached Saffron’s belly.
This close, her entire stomach looked discoloured. It was hard to gauge depth on the video, but her abdomen, which was a blushed red, seemed to be set back an inch, as if she were holding her breath in. Midas realized suddenly that the surface of her belly had turned to glass. Her stomach was a glossy viewing screen on to the muscles and organs of her abdomen, although the details were hard to make out in the footage. Ida had covered her mouth with her hand. Midas wished suddenly that Carl had let Emiliana have her way and shown this in the morning, when daylight would comfort through the window.
Ida leant forward in her chair, fingers steepled and lips pursed, intent on the image. Saffron’s shadow on the corn had distended into a yellow wash. A deathly static tinged the audio.
Carl stopped the video again and ejected the tape from the machine. ‘Where’s the second tape, Mil? The one you filmed after you treated her.’
She had it on her lap. Instead of handing it to Carl, she affected a yawn. ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should look in the morning?’
Midas liked her considerably for this.
‘No,’ said Carl, ‘Ida wants to get this over and done with.’
For her part Ida was staring at the blank television, expression impenetrable.
Carl took the tape from Emiliana’s lap and plugged it into the VCR. They waited again while it rewound, Carl’s fingers tapping against the chrome surface of the player. There was a clunk, and the tape started playing. After the curtains of static had lifted the picture settled on an indoor scene, although an open window showed an autumn orchard deep with leaves. The light was weak, and Saffron Jeuck, who sat in a rocking chair by the window with a tartan blanket over her lap, was ill-defined against the walls of the room. It was impossible to say where her hair, tied in a fraught bun, ended and the shadow of her rocking chair began.
‘Saffron,’ said the off-camera Emiliana. ‘Saffron, how are you feeling?’
Saffron took for ever to take her eyes off the loamy orchard and fix them on the camera. The footage was too grainy to define her pupils but Midas knew they were fixed on the lens. Other than to turn her head, she did not respond to the question. Midas chewed his fingernails while the others watched the video intently. He had always believed in a point where a photograph became like a headstone. The photos of the dead had a distant quality about them that the photos of the living didn’t possess. He had a gut feeling that this was a film about a dead woman.
‘Um,’ he began timidly, ‘Saffron is still with us, right?’
‘Of course,’ snapped Carl. ‘Shh!’
The Emiliana behind the camera repeated her question. ‘How are you feeling?’
Saffron opened her mouth. ‘I feel awful.’
‘Will you lift up your blouse?’
Slowly, Saffron’s fingers emerged from the blanket that covered her lap, to undo the bottom buttons of her blouse. She parted the cloth slowly, and the camera zoomed in on her belly as it had before.
Midas noticed two things at once. First, that the glass did not appear to have spread any further or deeper into her belly than it had in the previous, summertime video. Second, that every inch of skin visible around the edge of the glass was a raw red that defied the dim light of the day and the quality of the footage. Her flesh was blistered, wealed and peeling ragged in places, as if she had been flogged.
‘Is it any worse?’ asked the on-film Emiliana.
‘Not the glass,’ said Saffron, and turned back to the orchard.
‘You’re ready for another poultice?’
Saffron took a long breath, but as she did so the wind blew in through the open window, placing dead curled leaves on the carpet and making it hard to tell whether what could be heard was the noise of the air entering Saffron’s lungs, or merely the rustle of the weather. Either way, the filling up of her lungs could be seen through the glass plate of Saffron’s stomach.
The video camera turned off.
Even after Carl took out the tape, Ida’s eyes remained on the screen. Midas recognized that distant look, seen so many times on his mother’s face. An elsewhere look. Ida’s thoughts would be in some other year, no doubt, before all this began.
The others waited on her. After a while, she asked, ‘Poultices?’
Emiliana cleared her throat, but when she didn’t speak Carl took it upon himself. ‘Playing dead would be a more appropriate starting point. Mil, why don’t you tell her what you did for Saffron?’
Emiliana looked miserably from Carl to Ida. ‘We can go into the details tomorrow.’
Carl rolled his eyes. ‘We can begin applying them tomorrow.’
‘Okay.’ She kept her eyes on the empty dishes and oily plates of their meal. ‘To begin with, it came about at the suggestion of Saffron’s father. He was a friend of a friend, but he came to me because at the time I was running a small business in alternative medicine. I had always been interested in it, and Hector enabled me to set up a small surgery of my own. Hay fever remedies were my speciality, and that was what drew Saffron and her family. They already had the idea, you see. They only wanted somebody to carry it out.’
Carl was tapping his foot. ‘You need to explain about the bird in the jar.’
She nodded and cleared her throat a second time. ‘Mr Jeuck brought with him a bird in a jar. It was long dead and quite horrible, quite badly preserved. But it had a tail of glass. A fan of beautifully etched feathers, where all its others had wilted and decayed. He had bought it at great expense from an old widow in Glamsgallow because it was evidence for his idea. The bird had died, she had told him, because it couldn’t feed properly in its condition. What struck Mr Jeuck was this: the bird’s final condition meant the spread of glass did not continue into death.’
Midas closed his eyes and thought of the pure glass body Henry had shown him in the bog.
‘Well… My hay fever remedies were simple things. Honey based. Local bees help cure the fever from local pollen. So you see… Saffron and her family proposed a local remedy, although from the moment Saffron walked through my door, I knew there was something far worse than hay fever afflicting her.’
‘Playing dead was the answer,’ interrupted Carl. ‘The proposed remedy was simple but probably the most brilliant idea a man like Jeuck would have in his lifetime. To paralyse the flesh around the glass, turn it into a state half dead. And the Jeuck family had already thought of the means.’
‘What was the means?’
‘St Hauda’s Land jellyfish.’
‘Jellyfish,’ murmured Ida.
Midas thought of his mother’s limp.
Carl clasped his hands enthusiastically. ‘Emiliana prepared poultices of jellyfish matter, warmed them and applied them to Saffron’s stomach. They treated her in this way all summer long, and as you can see,’ he gestured theatrically to the screen, ‘the results were successful. The treatment trapped the glass, beat it at its own game. And all thanks to Emiliana.’
Emiliana smiled wistfully.
Ida closed her eyes.
They waited.
‘It looks painful.’
‘Think about it overnight,’ suggested Emiliana.
Ida shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s painful. It’s worth a shot.’
‘That’s my girl,’ said Carl. ‘I’ll let you turn in now. We should make a start in the morning.’
It took Midas several hours to fall asleep that night. In part this was due to the alien double bed in his guest room, so much larger and softer than his sturdy single mattress back home. In part it was the bass moans the house emitted in the wind, and the crunch of the sea mining the shingle of the cove. More than these, it was the thought of Ida sleeping mere rooms away, and the pain this esoteric remedy was likely to bring her. It filled his knees with a weak feeling, made his feet seem impossibly far from his legs.
He rolled on to his side and stared at the moonlight slanting under the heavy curtains. He knew he had finally got to sleep when a tapping on the door woke him. He sat up stiffly as it swung open and Ida hobbled in, wincing at each clunking placement of her crutch on the floor. Thankfully, Emiliana and Carl were sleeping in bedrooms on the floor above, towards the other side of the house.
‘I can’t sleep,’ she whispered.
‘Nor me.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I mean, I was asleep just then, but before that, nothing…’
She went to the window. ‘Have you seen what’s going on outside?’
He shook his head.
‘Get up.’
It was hot in the guest bedroom, so he had gone to bed in only his Y-fronts. He realized this now, and sat up holding the white duvet to his scrawny chest. She wasn’t wearing night things, she was wearing her coat over a patterned woollen jersey.
‘I’ll look away,’ she laughed, ‘so you can preserve your decency.’
He crawled to the foot of the bed to get the clothes he’d left in a heap. He pulled them on while she opened the curtains, then joined her at the window. The moonlit sea glittered in the cove, and swaying under its subtle waves were dimly glowing lights. He pressed his face against the window. The lights were flickering like candle flames.
‘Midas,’ she said, ‘do you remember when you stayed at Carl’s cottage with me? We heard an owl hoot in the night.’
‘I remember, yes.’
‘You asked if I wanted to go out walking in the woods. To look for it. And I said I was too frightened of tripping. Well… I said that because I didn’t know you well enough. I didn’t know how safe I’d be in the woods with you. Now I know you’d look after me. Let’s go outside and look at the lights.’
‘What? Now?’
‘Yes. Put your coat on.’
He pulled it on and followed her out of the room. They moved slowly, in part to make as little noise as possible, in part because Ida had no choice. She had to sit and bump herself carefully down the stairs while Midas cradled her crutches. They found their way out to the wooden deck and leant on the rail, overlooking the high tide that swilled between the stilted houses of Enghem-on-the Water, turning them into arks. The painted timbers reflected weakly on the surface, mingling with the dim, manifold lights that shone beneath it. An armada of jellyfish had floated in on the tide. One or two were large as sails, with bodies rippling just inches under the surface, flying pennants of tentacles. The tiniest ones were the size of thimbles, with crests of violet suckers. One giant orb glowed brighter than the others. Its body was full of a nebula of golden light, as if it had swallowed an angel.
Nearer by floated a swarm of about a hundred lantern-sized jellies. Ida gasped when a spark of electric yellow sputtered momentarily in the body of one. It had been a flash of light like a faulty light bulb. A second spark faltered in another jelly, this time a strobe of pink. Another lit up deeper down, red as a clot of blood. The tide gulped against the stilts of Enghem Stead.
Another jelly flashed, and this one stayed alight. A yellow blaze bobbing in the water. Its emanation kindled the lights of its neighbours. Their bodies sparkled, and the sparkles turned to steady shines: yellow, pink, crimson and cyan. The effect slowly ricocheted across the cove until the water was a multicoloured brilliance. Refracted colour glittered up the walls of the houses.
Midas and Ida leant in silence over the rail of the deck. He noticed how close her hands were to his on the rail. He didn’t move away.
‘Imagine living in a place like this,’ she said, ‘where you could watch this every night.’
He did as he was told. Living in the middle of nowhere, just the two of them, and it made his mind settle, as if all the worry it normally contained could be buoyed away on the idea alone. He felt serene leaning on the railing with her, absorbing the sight of the incandescent sea. They remained like this, side by side, faces lit up by the glow from the water, for ten minutes more. Then the jellies darkened in quick succession, as if something were swimming through the water snuffing them out.
When he had been playing porter and bumping the luggage up the deck, Midas had been jealous of Carl’s arm linked with Ida’s. So when they returned inside after the last jellyfish had fizzled out, leaving only the moon to decorate the night, he whispered, ‘I-I-I’ll help you up the stairs.’
At first he was too busy enjoying her grateful smile to let the enormity of what he had volunteered for sink in. He shifted his weight from foot to foot.
How would he get her upstairs without touching her?
She followed him to the foot of the staircase, then handed him her crutch.
‘Right,’ he said, longing for elevators, escalators, pulleys.
She took his arm and set her other hand on the banister. His joints stiffened. He got a whiff of her scent: something alpine (like vertigo). He felt as if his sleeve had starched involuntarily.
