The Girl With Glass Feet, page 26
She leant one crutch against the wall and used the hand it had freed to take one of his. She stepped into the centre of the pen and told him to stand very still.
The herd adjusted their flight to stream around them, a musty-smelling cascade of fur and wing. Ida gasped when a bull landed on her scalp and combed its horns through her hair. Another settled down beside it, and one on Midas’s shoulder, and another and another until the whole herd bristled on their shoulders and scalps, snorting and shaking their little heads, flitting their wings and stamping their match-head hoofs.
Then they began to low musically across the gap between them. She pulled him closer by the hand until they stood within inches of each other, the cows humming and the bulls snorting in symphony. A calf with bluebell-coloured wings leant against its mother, tilted back its head and gave a moo like the note of a flute.
‘I’m not going to be cured,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s forget about it from this moment on.’
38
On maps of the islands the sands north of Clammum-on-Drame were an outstretched hand trying in vain to ward off arctic winds. Geologists claimed the sands had long ago been craggy highland plains, which an earthquake in antiquity had humbled to sea level. As evidence, cuboids of granite rose out of grey beaches, flat-topped or sheared at diagonals.
Ida and Midas drove the raised concrete road that traversed the quicksands, leaving tyre tracks in the deep layer of sand blown over the route. Their destination was Clammum Knoll, a gently sloping hillock at the northernmost point of the sands.
They sat huddled close together, on a bench at the tip of the knoll, watching the sea or looking back across the shining beaches dissected by the road and flooded channels of saltwater. Sombre storks and curlews plodded this way and that, and a cormorant croaked on the husk of a wrecked boat that lay on the beach like a whale’s skull.
Northwards was an opaque horizon. This was the wind’s first stop since sweeping over glaciers and pack ice. Today it simply whispered and didn’t dent the water face.
‘I always wanted to go to the North Pole,’ said Ida, pointing into the distance.
‘You will.’
‘I wouldn’t last two seconds.’
‘You don’t know…’
The salt from the ocean dried and cancelled out the salty tears in her eyes. She remembered her father salting a fillet of cod with his mind elsewhere, when the bad feeling between them was strongest. She surveyed the infinite sea before her and wondered how much salt you’d find if you boiled off all the water.
‘Have you ever seen the seabed?’ she asked, knowing he hadn’t. She wanted to talk about it and relive it through doing so. ‘Deep down it’s like twilight. You can see salt trails in the water like ghosts.’
Midas shook his head, smiling. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that. It always surprises me how much more you’ve managed to do than me.’
‘Not for much longer.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘All I’m saying is… I love just sitting with you, like this.’
The world was as monochrome as the day they’d first met, the sea as dark as vinyl. The cormorant on the wrecked hull took off and flew low over the black water.
‘Midas… I’d love to sit like this on a boat with you.’
‘All right.’
‘What?’ She hadn’t expected him to say that.
‘All right,’ he said, slower this time.
She pressed ahead before he had a chance to back out. ‘The weather forecast is clear for tomorrow. We’ll rent the boat and go out as far as we can. As long as the sea’s clear, I should be able to row a bit.’
He gulped. ‘Okay.’
‘Midas! What’s brought out the seafarer in you?’
‘Actually, I’m still terrified, but… a lot of things. Tearing up my father’s book was… liberating. I owe you for that.’
‘Ah, so you want to repay me?’
‘No. Um, well yes, but not with this.’
‘Right?’
‘I don’t think I can repay you enough.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t be so serious.’
‘But…’ He hung his head.
She shoved him playfully. He sat back up, looking hurt, so she shoved him again. This time he shoved her back and she squealed as she toppled over and lay on her side on the grass.
‘Jesus,’ she groaned, ‘I can’t even sit up.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No, no, just help me up. My stomach’s cold. Freezing. All around my hips.’
He helped her up.
Their spot was a heightened level of concrete that the tide would have to rise six feet to cover, so the knoll was safe from water. The sunset, like a blacksmith, was beating the sky into glowing red blades.
They sat quietly and watched it glow. She laid her head on his shoulder. He laid his against her crown.
‘I should take a photo.’
‘No. Just remember it, and us in it.’
He swallowed.
She smiled. Here was rightness of place and time.
They kissed. The wind trickled over them.
39
Before his next shift at Catherine’s, he left Ida a bunch of pale yellow narcissi on the table. She sat among them writing Christmas cards, which she’d asked Midas to choose, since she felt weary at the thought of shopping.
He had tried to pick cards she’d like. She knew, from old ones he’d kept, where his own tastes lay. Black-and-white photos of Christmases past. Stony-faced mothers holding the hands of smock-wearing children on cobbled streets. Gaslight lampposts aglow in reels of snow. Church doors decked with spindly holly wreaths. Despite these monochrome images he loved, the ones he’d selected for her were pretty and colourful. A set of four designs all showed photos of deer in snowy glens. A speckled faun stared wide-eyed from a holly thicket where red berries brought out the ruddy sheen of its fur. A doe stood among a fallen oak’s horizontal branches, wearing a comical cap of blue-tinged snow. A stag and his mate rubbed elegant necks under boughs hung with green mistletoe.
She opened the first Christmas card and plugged an ink cartridge into her fountain pen. Without concentrating she wrote Mum and Dad, then tore up the card and opened another to write only Dad. She put her pen down, breathing heavily. A hot cramp squeezed her bowels and made blood rush to her head. She concentrated on breathing.
Before Midas had left she’d told him that she was feeling better. She didn’t mention that her hips were filled with a new, hot kind of paralysis. Like an insatiable rash on the underside of her skin. A woolliness in her muscles there was interrupted regularly by these blazing pains. She could guess what it meant.
Her fingernails scraped the table’s paintwork as the pain flared again. She gritted her teeth. The agony subsided and she wheezed. When she had told Midas about feeling better, the relief on his face got the biggest smile yet out of him and he kissed her freely without hesitation.
It was still true, even though her body might hurt more than ever because of him. Him and her.
She sighed. Imagining turning to glass made her feel as if a trapdoor had opened up inside her and all her courage had fallen through. She thought how young she was, to be suffering like this, and how that made it seem all the more undeserved. Yet she had done all those youthful things, and even when she’d plummeted (the air whistling over her ears, the bungee cable spiralling behind her) she’d felt nothing as compulsive as the will she felt now, to cling to Midas. It would be impossible to break the news that she knew she wasn’t getting better. She could feel the encroachment of the glass like an animal feeling the tremor before an earthquake. He would not understand if she told him.
She had felt a collision with him and known that she had wanted this her whole life: to crash for just one moment into another person at such a velocity as to fuse with him.
That moment had come not at the height of a night’s passion, as she’d expected, but in the morning when their eyes opened at the same time and felt for focus in each other’s. They were newborns, wide-eyed, sharing their first breath of the world. Then it was over as quickly as it had come. Midas had blushed and looked away from her. She had reached out to hold his face.
Now that she had felt that moment, all she wanted was to feel it again. When he had walked out of the door for work that morning she had felt the temperature of the room drop, the ache in her pelvis redouble, the skin across her hips go sore. She supposed in the meantime it would be pleasant enough to pretend there was a future.
She wrote Merry Christmas Dad, from Ida, blew on the ink, put the card in the envelope, then hesitated with her tongue an inch away from licking the gum. She took the card back out of the envelope, the lid back off her pen, and wrote
… also, Dad, there’s a chance we may not see each other for a little while. I wanted to tell you how happy I’ve been lately. I met a man. I don’t know whether you’ll get to meet him any time soon so let me tell you all about him. He was very shy at first, but I saw to that. He has a small house in a small town on an island. You’d like it here. As you’d put it: you can hear yourself think at night. He’s a photographer. Most of all, you should know I’m in love with him. I think you said once that love should be what matters. I wholeheartedly concur.
She blew on the ink, having run out of space on the card. She put it in the envelope, sealed it, and savoured the taste of the stamp on her tongue.
Overnight the head of a fat old rose in Catherine’s had shed petals like burnt bits of ribbon into a glass vase. Midas stared sadly at the warped red planets in the water’s cosmos and thought of Ida’s legs. That morning they’d woken in time with each other and he hadn’t recognized the feel of his own bed or the noise of the street outside. Hadn’t recognized the feel of old blankets soft on his skin. Hadn’t recognized Ida, had seen her as if for the first time. As if she were the first thing he had ever seen.
He put the healthy roses into a new vase and poured the contents of the first into the sink. Petals whirled around the stainless steel then crumpled in the plughole. He went to the window and arranged tubers of bleached wood among satin tulips. There was something conspiratorial about flowers. He often sensed, when he was alone in a room of them, their petals whispering on a frequency beneath human hearing. Outside, a weak fog contained the street and made it look like a sound stage pumped with dry ice. The town beyond was only imagination.
He sighed. He wanted this shift to end. Wanted to return to Ida. Even though that afternoon they would be going out in a boat (of which he was terrified).
He had felt paranoid all day. First thing that morning he’d erased all the photos he had of Ida. He’d watched her as she slept while he booted up his laptop. Her hair was in a frizz, her lips were chafed. He hoped she was sleeping well. He didn’t want her to wake again groping at her ankles as if trying to disprove a nightmare.
His photos had all been of her feet. They weren’t Ida. That was why he’d erased them.
Light didn’t conduct truth as once he’d thought. There was nothing you could do to preserve truth. Light was only of use as a metaphor for the ungraspable moment. Until there was a kind of camera invented that could return you entirely to a moment from your past, pictures such as those were no use. At first he’d felt a thrill upon deleting them. Without them he had only her flesh, hair, glass. Reality had been liberating. Only now, surrounded by the familiar, pollinated air, dealing with the humdrum demands of customers, he was beginning to doubt his wisdom.
The door chimed and opened. A flap of wind quivered the tulips. Midas remembered Ida entering Catherine’s not long ago, with only a slim walking stick to support her. This time it was Gustav, which meant his shift was over.
Gustav looked staggered. ‘What’s got into you?’
Midas was jittering about on the spot. ‘I’m going out to sea. On a boat with Ida,’ he said.
‘This girl’s really done wonders for you. I’d never in a million years think I’d see the day when you get on a boat. It was more likely you’d get in a bloody spaceship.’
Midas, pulling on his jacket as he passed him in the doorway, grinned with a mixture of happiness and terror, and bolted away back home down the street.
Gustav shook his head and took his seat at the desk, unpacking a sausage and barbecue sauce sandwich and the day’s newspaper. He had been through it cover to cover and was halfway through re-reading the sports pages when the door chimed and a woman in a chic black raincoat stepped timidly in. She had long black hair and wasn’t wearing any make-up to cover the bags under her eyes.
‘I’m looking for Ida Maclaird,’ she said urgently. ‘Do you know where I can find her?’
Emiliana Stallows had spent the past few days on the mainland. After she had left Enghem she had telephoned a seafront hotel in Glamsgallow to book a night’s accommodation, but she changed her mind the moment she checked in. She had stood for a minute or two at the reception desk in the cosy lobby, ignoring the receptionist’s questions, unable to think about anyone except Ida Maclaird. Then she had asked for the return of her credit card, shouldered her bag and headed out along the rain-soaked promenade to the ferry terminal.
She hadn’t enjoyed the crossing. The ferry had rocked from side to side so severely that, looking out of the window, the dark sea seemed parallel to the glass. The saving grace was the small feeling of purpose the journey gave her. All the time she held, tight in her fist, the crumpled address of Saffron Jeuck’s family.
Their home was hard to find, in a residential estate in a newly built town whose roads were narrow and whose houses were compressed in ordered rows of clean brick. There was an awkward moment when Mr Jeuck answered the door, the first of an entirely awkward afternoon.
Emiliana had known that Saffron took her own life because of the glass. That had always seemed a ghastly enough end to the story, and to pry into the details of the girl’s final acts seemed cruel. Only now was Emiliana gripped by the hope that something could be learnt from the whole sorry tale. Something for Ida.
Leaving the Jeuck house, having heard the opposite of what she’d hoped for, she burst into tears. In her last hours, Saffron had yelled for her father, and he had run to her to sit with her body propped up against his. Together they had watched an unexpected final phase of the transformation into glass. In the days preceding, Saffron had complained of a feeling of weakness, as if her body had been engaged in a long battle which it was now, through sheer exhaustion, surrendering. As the flesh gave in, the glass entered at unprecedented speed. Long before, father and daughter had discussed what they would do in such circumstances, but Mr Jeuck’s hands were too shaky to open the safety cap on the little white bottle of pills. Saffron had to open them herself, tip them on to her tongue, and swallow with a dry gurgle.
‘You’ve got to tell me where Ida is,’ Emiliana insisted, leaning over the counter in Catherine’s. ‘It’s urgent that I speak to her. Or Midas. Can I speak to Midas?’
‘Slow down,’ said Gustav calmly. ‘They’ve taken a boat out to sea. They could be anywhere, as long as it’s on the ocean.’
She thumped the counter. ‘It’s just…’ she said despairingly, ‘she’s very unwell. And I have some terrible news she has to know…’
‘There’s no way to tell her. And even if there was, are you sure she’d really want to hear it?’
The cliffs here had been torn open recently, leaving chalky caves where blocks of debris had fallen on to the beach. Two dilapidated jetties poked into the water, one of them broken in two, with a scuttled and rusting whaling yacht beside it. Sheets of its hull jagged from the water ahead of its snapped mast.
Ida reclined in a rowing boat and watched Midas pace up and down on the intact jetty, its planks juddering with each step. She watched in admiration. His neuroses were still there, only now he was going to defy them. He just needed his warm-up. He growled, bent himself around to face the boat and bent away again, scared like a ghost to cross water. She held out a hand. He took such a deep breath she swore she saw the air bend as it surged into him. Then he leapt and the boat bucked as he landed in a heap. He clung to the wood with his nails, like a drenched cat, not realizing this was what he had been struggling towards, not trusting water enough to let it keep the boat upright. Only when the vessel was floating peaceful as a sheet of paper did he experimentally remove his hands from its sides.
After that he sat quietly with knees huddled to his chest while Ida rowed. She’d worried she’d not be able to brace herself without legs, but the glass anchored her and gave her a centre to heave from. They headed out to sea. The shore became a chalk line on a stone wall.
The sandy seabed looked like it was smelting into the water. The clear vault turned into hazy depths as they rowed further out. Fine sea mist phased the horizon into a blank atmosphere smelling of salt.
She was content just to look at him while he, dumbly grateful, responded in kind. She suspected that brotherhoods of monks in shadowy abbeys felt the same electricity of kinship in the air.
To use his own father’s analogy, that Carl had repeated to her on a day not so long ago when snow had cooped them inside his cottage: there were still garments to be shed. She smiled at the idea that she had at least got Midas down to his socks and his Y-fronts. There were more layers to a person than an analogy of vests and anoraks could sustain, and she suspected that while you were peeling the outer layers away, new ones were being stitched together on the inside.
A pattern of spume, frothed up by the oars, floated behind the boat like a wedding dress. She wondered if she would ever have married him, and that surprised her so much she felt the idea of it almost rock her out of the boat. She’d never thought of marriage like that before, never felt comfortable picturing herself in a dress with a hanging train and a suited groom offering a ring.
