The Girl With Glass Feet, page 3
‘Would you believe there’s an animal in the woods who turns everything she looks at pure white?’
She sighed. ‘No. I don’t. Believe it.’
He leant back, scratching his beard. Then he tried leaning forward again. ‘Would you believe there are glass bodies here, hidden in the bog water?’
‘No. You’ve got black hair and a healthy complexion for one thing.’
‘I don’t see what that’s got… Ah, wait. I didn’t say she’d seen me.’
She watched his eyes boggle as he drained the gin. He held a hand to his forehead and wagged his finger. ‘You bought me a double…’
‘What kind of animal is she?’
‘She’s white all over, as you’d expect, except for on the back of her head where she can’t see herself.’
Ida had been through three fingers of her pint in the space it had taken him to finish his glass.
‘What colour?’
‘White.’
‘What colour’s the back of her head?’
‘Blue.’
She smiled sweetly. ‘What do you do for a living, Henry?’
‘I’m too occupied with the…’ he snapped his mouth shut and looked suddenly sober. ‘Of course. You think I’m some kind of nut.’
‘It’s not that…’
He stood up, fiddled through his wallet and stacked the cost of the gin on the table in coins.
‘It was on me,’ she said.
He walked out of the pub. After a moment of feeling frustrated at herself, she left the coins and jogged after him, but he was nowhere to be seen in the hot street. White gulls pecked at the remains of fish and chips, gobbling batter and polystyrene tray alike. For a moment she thought the whitest of them had white eyes, but it was only a trick of the light.
5
From an aeroplane the three main islands of the St Hauda’s Land archipelago looked like the swatted corpse of a blob-eyed insect. The thorax was Gurm Island, all marshland and wooded hills. The neck was a natural aqueduct with weathered arches through which the sea flushed, leading to the eye. That was the towering but drowsy hill of Lomdendol Tor on Lomdendol Island, which (local supposition had it) first squirted St Hauda’s Land into being. The legs were six spurs of rock extending from the south-west coast of Gurm Island, trapping the sea in sandy coves between them. The wings were a wind-torn flotilla of uninhabited granite islets in the north. The tail’s sting was the sickle-shaped Ferry Island in the east, the quaint little town of Glamsgallow a drop of poison welling on its tip.
Glamsgallow boasted St Hauda’s Land’s only airport, but most aeroplanes crossed the islands before turning to land, flying over the other settlements. In the north of Gurm, walled off to the public, was Enghem, the private property of Hector Stallows, the local millionaire. Built at the foot of Lomdendol Tor, Martyr’s Pitfall was a town for the elderly. On Sunday afternoons the shadow of the tor covered the buildings and streets. Couples trickled from retirement homes to walk and sit in landscaped graveyards. By contrast, Gurmton attracted the young and nocturnal. Thousands of lights twinkled on its seafront, from the frantic flashes of fruit machines and jukeboxes to the spotlights slicing the sky at night, beaming the rival logos of two sleazy nightclubs on to the clouds.
Behind Gurmton the woods began suddenly. Lost partygoers looking for the seafront sobered up in seconds when they stumbled upon the eaves of the forest at night. Likewise, people driving the shadowy roads inland through the trees became aware of the din of their engines. Stereos would be turned off and conversations postponed. The woods felt like a sleeping monster worth tiptoeing past.
And at the heart of the woods cowered Ettinsford, where leaves and dead branches blew across the streets, where roads disappeared on leaving the town, as if their builders had been seduced from their intended paths. Ettinsford’s river was technically a strait, the narrowest point in the division between Gurm and Ferry islands. An old stone bridge breached the water at the point, as local legend had it, that Saint Hauda himself had been carried from one landmass to the other by a flock of one hundred and one sparrows.
In Ettinsford, in Catherine’s, the island’s florist, the bell chimed as Midas opened the door.
Gustav wiped a fleck of mayonnaise from his lips and looked up. He was red faced and red haired, but his hairline was dissipating faster than it should for a man who had just turned thirty. A cocktail stick pinned together the fat club sandwich on his desk. Three slices of wholemeal bread, rashers of bacon and half a pot of mayonnaise. Midas could smell it through the pollen.
‘Morning,’ he said, rubbing his eyes.
‘Bloody hell.’ Gustav gulped down his mouthful. ‘You okay?’
Midas’s hair stood on end and his eyes had bags beneath them. His whole body felt like collapsing. ‘Slept badly.’
Gustav folded some foil over his sandwich and wiped his hands on an old piece of bouquet paper. ‘What’s up? You going down with a cold? Denver’s got it. Going to be off school by the end of the week, I reckon.’
Gustav scrunched the paper he’d wiped his hands on and tossed it at the bin. It overshot and disappeared into a dense area of sea hollies with regal blue heads.
‘Damn.’
He climbed out from behind the desk and pricked himself on the hollies as he foraged for the litter. He found it and dropped it in the bin, slapping his hands together as he walked back around the desk.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong? Did you get drunk? You have a good night for once?’
Midas played with a lily head. ‘I told you. I couldn’t sleep.’
Gustav opened a drawer and pulled out the clipboard they used for deliveries. ‘But there’s something else, isn’t there?’
Midas hesitated, but they’d been best friends for a long time.
‘A girl.’
Gustav dropped the clipboard. ‘Say again?’
‘I met this girl yesterday and she – ’
‘Midas! That’s great! Secretly I’ve been worried that – ’
Midas shook his hands. ‘Nothing, you know… it wasn’t a romantic encounter. That’s not why I mentioned it. It’s just…’
Gustav grinned deliriously.
‘… just that there was something unusual about her.’
‘There bloody had to be, to keep Midas Crook up all night.’
‘She wore some boots. As large as this vase.’ He tapped it. Blue and tall.
‘She’s… big-boned, then?’
‘That’s the thing. She’s about my height. And thin, almost unhealthily thin.’
Gustav was confused. ‘She’s not one of those weird fashionable chicks from the mainland…’
‘No. I don’t think so. She is from the mainland, but she wasn’t weird, apart from the boots. Gustav, do you know anything about conditions? Foot conditions?’
He didn’t, though he gave him a list of names: Achilles heel, athlete’s foot, fungus nails. None of them seemed right for Ida.
The pair of them carried on with the business of running the florist. Midas drove some bouquets around town and thought about Ida the whole time. Just after midday he came back shaking raindrops off his jacket. Gustav sat at the desk, on the phone, one hand to his ruddy forehead. He glanced up gloomily when the doorbell rang.
‘Yeah, okay,’ he said into the receiver, ‘I’ll see you then.’
The phone clunked as he put it down and puffed out his cheeks. He sighed and ran his hands back through his thinning hair.
‘What are you doing on Saturday, Midas?’
‘You want me to work?’
‘No. That was my mother-in-law. She’s found some old boxes of Catherine’s stuff. Wonders if I want any of it.’
‘Catherine’s mother doesn’t want it?’
He shrugged. ‘She doesn’t like to see it. Said she might throw it away. I told her I’d take anything.’
‘You’re going over to the mainland on Saturday?’
‘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.
