The Girl With Glass Feet, page 20
‘It startled me, that’s all.’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘It’s freezing out here. I’m going to go inside and get warm.’
Carl held out his packet of cigarettes. ‘Help yourself.’
Midas shook his head.
‘Don’t be a sissy. We haven’t finished talking.’
He offered the cigarette again and Midas took one with blue fingers. He held it awkwardly, trying to remember the last time he’d smoked. Probably as a kid when playground bullies called him a sissy if he refused. He put it between his lips. Carl took a match from a packet, struck it and reached over to light Midas’s cigarette. Midas flinched at the proximity of the flame and the bigger man’s hand.
Carl deftly tipped out a cigarette of his own and lit it before the match went out. ‘I wanted to ask you something. Concerning your father.’
The cigarette smoke became a frost on Midas’s tonsils. ‘What about him?’
‘See if I can jog your memory. His work. What do you think of it?’
‘Do you mean what do I think of it now, or what did I think of it? When I was a very little boy I naturally thought he was a genius. My father was the cleverest scholar on the earth. Whereas now…’
‘I understand that I’m being impertinent, but your father’s thoughts have always exerted quite a hold over me.’ He flicked ash from his cigarette. ‘I credit them, in fact, with the birth of my own academic career. But your father could be… difficult.’
Midas swallowed hard. ‘Well. It’s easier to come across as eloquent when you only have to do it in writing.’
‘I’m not criticizing him.’ He puffed at his cigarette. ‘I bring it up because that kind of difficulty is the last thing Ida needs.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘He had the finest academic brain I’ve known. He could dissect a thought like a physician dissecting a body. So I’m not saying he was lacking as a person. But I never even saw a glimmer of romance in him. In fact, even his studies, to which he devoted so much, didn’t seem to move him or inspire him one jot. I don’t know what kept him going, really.’
‘He didn’t keep going, did he?’
Carl raised his hands. ‘Sure. Whatever. I can clearly see it’s too raw for you.’
‘Yes,’ said Midas, ‘it is.’
Carl shifted his position. ‘He said once that the personalities of a person throughout their lifetime are like clothes worn over the course of a day, layered up to preserve dignity or weather the environment. He said it was possible for a person to be caught out this way. Imagine, if you will, the man who has put on a heavy coat, mittens, warm hat and scarf to brave a blizzard. His mind and body are attuned to the task ahead – that is, stepping out into the snowstorm. So if he doesn’t hear through his earmuffs a whispered voice behind him pleading for him not to go, or feel a gentle tug at one of the layers of thick clothing he’s put on, he can hardly be blamed. He has simply made one adaptation at the expense of another.’
‘Look, I don’t understand any of that stuff of my father’s,’ said Midas. His teeth were beginning to chatter.
Carl reached across and cuffed him playfully on the shoulder. ‘Listen, about Ida… She needs to focus on getting better right now, that’s all I’m saying. Not on anything else, okay? Don’t feel bad about letting her down like you did this morning, just make sure she doesn’t have to deal with your problems on top of hers.’
Midas felt like he’d swallowed a jug of ice. Fists clenched in his pockets, he told Carl as forcefully as he could manage that he was going inside.
28
Midas would need to load the photograph on to his computer to zoom in on the white bird’s eye in perfect detail, but he sat on the corner of his bed in the Stallowses’ house and he already knew he hadn’t been mistaken. The eye and the eyelid were white as the snow outside. It made him think about his run-in with Hector, which had felt strange, dreamlike. And the strangest thing of all was what Hector had made him say. I might be in love.
He got up to look out of the window. He wanted to escape the house again. Earlier, at lunch with Carl and Emiliana, eating fresh white fish from the cove, Ida hadn’t even looked at him and he couldn’t manage a word to anyone. She had seemed worn out from the poultices Carl and Emiliana had spent the morning applying. When she had come to the table she had done so even more slowly than she normally would, as if both the crutch he had bought her and her old one together were no match for her body. Afterwards Emiliana disappeared and Carl took Ida aside to talk to her in serious tones. Midas had washed up, thinking about his father’s forearms covered in dishwater bubbles.
Now in his guest bedroom, with its whitewashed walls and sheer white sheets, he tried to remember that Ida had invited him here. As moral support. But as something else? Her lips had approached his, too delightful to meet. She would think he had shunned her, and now he wanted a second chance, to receive those lips and reach around her waist. He could fantasize about it, but he wasn’t sure, given that chance, he would take it.
He heard a brittle knock on the bedroom door. He spun around, straightening his hair, terrified at once of Ida stepping in to confront him. If she were coming to tell him he had blown it and should make his way home, well… He suddenly realized he wanted to put off that moment for as long as he could. He kept quiet, not daring to make another movement, hoping she’d think he wasn’t in.
After a second knock the door opened anyway. It was Emiliana.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. You didn’t answer so I didn’t think you were here. May I come in?’
‘Um. Of course. Yes.’ He hung his head. So Ida’s verdict would not even be delivered in person. It was Emiliana’s house, so it made sense that she would be the one to tell him to leave. She pushed the bedroom door shut behind her.
‘I brought you this.’ She held out a scratched leather satchel covered with pouches and poppers. He took it and guessed its contents at once from its weight.
‘Um…’ he said.
‘It’s for you.’
‘Th-thank you.’
Emiliana sat down slowly on the bed, smoothing her skirt over her thighs.
‘Open it, then.’
He unzipped the main compartment and took out the camera. It was the kind of old SLR that would have cost thousands of pounds in its day. The bag juggled with lenses and attachments. The camera’s grip was made from worn snakeskin.
‘It was Hector’s. Photography was a hobby of his, once upon a time. He hasn’t touched that camera in years. Nor will he. Don’t worry, I’ve had it looked after, like so many of the other things he’s abandoned. I’m a human broom, tidying things up in his wake. I took it to a specialist on the mainland, thinking I might play around with it, but I don’t seem capable of finding the time. And it’s such a terrible waste to have it lying around. Perhaps you’ll make better use of it.’
A childish grin spread across his face. He turned it on and played with the aperture dial, using Emiliana’s sharp profile and the black of her hair as his subject. It was so easy to forget the pleasures of older cameras: the trust you had to place in instinct instead of display screens. ‘Stop photographing me,’ she said, with mild irritation.
‘I was just… experimenting.’
‘I know. I just… don’t like having my photo taken these days.’
He slung it over his neck so it hung side by side with his digital, the two lens caps nuzzling each other.
‘So,’ said Emiliana, ‘you have time for a little chat?’
He swallowed, suddenly feeling the weight of both cameras tugging on his neck. God, this was it.
‘Midas, why don’t you sit with me?’
He did as he was told. The mattress was soft as he sat down beside her. He could smell her perfume, something shocking and alcoholic that ghosted through his lungs into his gut. He wondered what the SLR she’d given him would have done in the test shots he had just taken. It would have recorded truthfully the crow’s feet she’d painted closed with her make-up.
‘It’s about Ida,’ she said.
‘You’ve started curing her.’
‘Ye-es. It might not be as easy as that.’
He shook his head, becoming cautiously optimistic that he wasn’t being told to leave the house, becoming anxious that he was being told something worse.
‘It might be difficult.’
‘Why? You cured Saffron Jeuck.’
‘That was different.’ She sighed. ‘In my youth I was of course in better shape than I am now. I was approached several times by scouts who saw modelling potential in me. I’m only telling you this because… I hope it’ll help you understand, when you’ve heard it all.
‘At this time I first met Carl. I had been married two years and was already realizing that, in Hector, I had a very different sort of husband to the one I had anticipated. I loved him, you must understand. And I still do. But it was a love born out of great comfort and not out of…’ She sighed and threw her head back, her black hair tossing. He felt the mattress move beneath them. The cameras clinked on his chest.
‘There was no sex, to put it bluntly. Because Hector, although he is a man of passions, is most peculiar. Amber in the trees. The quartz room. The aviary of birds born mute. As I say, I love him, Midas, as one might love one’s brother. But for a young woman like I was at the time, who had been commended for her looks and who was hungry to… make the most of them…’ She looked Midas dead in the eye. ‘Well, I needed more than that. So. That was when I met Carl Maulsen. In those days the idea of an open relationship was still rather new. People were naïve about it, hadn’t foreseen the inevitable emotional entanglements.’
Midas nodded to appear understanding, even though this frank talk of Emiliana’s sex life was making his palms itch and his back sweat. Worse, he’d had no idea that she and Carl had once had… an involvement. What else had he been too naïve to pick up on? He wanted to bolt out of the door. Ten times already he had pictured himself crashing through the window and plunging to the snowy garden beneath. All the same he was rooted to the spot. He examined the topography of her as she talked, the wrinkles across her neck that traced its length into three equal segments. The contours from her collarbone, over her chest and then out over the tops of her breasts, the skin that would once have been tight now lax. Her scent lay heavy in his stomach like a sheet of iron.
‘What I’m trying to say, Midas, is that when a person feels imprisoned by their circumstances, they make mistakes.’
‘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.’
29
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.
