The Girl With Glass Feet (11 page)

She moved to hug him. He stepped timidly into her embrace and he felt her grip on his sides, as if there were a yawning drop beneath her. When in his frenzy to leave the cottage he had remarked on the walking stick she’d been using, she had blurted out an explanation, a broken bone nearly healed, that he had no time to doubt. Now he noticed her enforced stillness and doubted whether she was being honest with him.

Entering the cottage behind her he saw the sink full of popping washing-up bubbles. The washing had barely begun and steam still rose from the sink. There were two dishes, two sets of cutlery, two coffee mugs.

‘You’ve had a guest,’ he said flatly. He was surprised to feel riled at that.

She shrugged. ‘You just missed him.’

He raised his eyebrows. She hit him with the tea towel.

‘Sorry, Ida. Just sticking my nose in.’

‘Snap out of it, Carl. We didn’t do anything.’

He held up his hands and forced an amicable smile. ‘It’s none of my business if you did. He’s a local lad?’

‘Yes, of course. I met him in Ettinsford. He’s a photographer.’

Then not a successful man. There was no room for a successful photographer on St Hauda’s Land. ‘Does he have a name?’

‘Of course.’

Carl kept beaming. ‘You’re not going to tell me what it is?’

She wrung the tea towel.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

‘No. It’s funny. I think you’ll know him. His name’s Midas.’

He should have known it was the boy at once, but it was the father he thought of first.

‘You knew his father, didn’t you? There’s a picture of him on your bookshelf.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then.’

They’d got the doctorates in a gale. The photographer had to keep retaking the shot, since every time he took it the wind buffeted Midas Crook and he staggered out of shot.

He saw them all jumbled up in his mind’s eye. Freya and Midas Crook. Ida and himself. Ida and his younger self. Ida and Crook. He snorted and shook his head.

‘What’s up, Carl?’

He had played carpenter. Chopped the wood and tasted sawdust in the air when he made the crutch Ida now leant on. Knocked in the nails. Tested it with his whole weight. Then driven at breakneck speed to the hospital where Freya lay laughing in Casualty with fractured ribs and a broken leg from an abseiling accident. She had recovered with her body weight on that crutch. Then, one summer morning rich with blossom scent, he had answered the door to a sneezing postman and a narrow
parcel. No explanation beyond the return of the gift itself and a saccharine card from Freya Maclaird, where she’d always signed herself plain Freya before. He’d unpacked the crutch and inhaled hard along the length of the wood, hoping for a whiff of her. All he’d smelt was the blossom in the air.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I… greatly admired him. He was something of a mentor to me. How is his boy?’

She laughed. ‘He’s a bit of a weirdo. But I think he’s sweet. He didn’t like his father.’

‘That’s no surprise. Only a few of us did.’

As a small boy, sitting on the bottom step in the shadows in the house of his parents, Midas admired it. He’d have thought it would ooze or pour, but it blazed and was gone in the blink of an eye. Really it migrated. At six million miles an hour. And if you shut it out…

He closed the heavy curtains and drew the blinds behind them. The photos on the walls became sheets of paper again, their tones reduced by darkness to an average of grey. He could just as easily have been sitting on a rock in the murk of a cave. But then he plugged the wire into his flashgun.

And there it was, dashing itself on the curtains. Picking out the criss-cross of their navy threads, then vanishing as dramatically as it had appeared. Everything was darker after the flash. He waited in awe for dim traces of light to worm their way back into the hall. When darkness had reverted to near-darkness, he plugged the wire in again. The flashgun purred.

The photos on the walls changed from grey nothings to streets and stiff figures in formal dress, then back to nothings. The blue imprint of light on his eyelids faded and he was ready to press the button for more flash when the front door sprang open and the hall filled with colour and noise.

He squinted to see his mother limp inside, a cardboard box held to her chest by her freckled arms. Muggy air followed her, along with the rumble of traffic and the chirrup of a songbird. She wiped her feet briskly on the mat, then jumped with fright.

‘Oh,’ she whispered, relaxing, ‘it’s you. I didn’t see you, it’s that gloomy.’

The front door swung shut behind her, restoring the soft gloom. She smiled at Midas and pushed open the dining-room door with her backside. It was dark in there too. He plugged the wire into the flashgun and she shrieked and nearly dropped the box. She held it closer to her breasts, stroking it protectively with one hand.

‘Son, you shouldn’t surprise me like that.’

She limped into the dining room. He stood up and walked in after her. She placed the box on the table and clapped her hands.

‘Your father’s not in? Your father’s not in, is he?’

He shook his head.

She grinned and clapped her hands again, then spun around and tore open the dining-room curtains so that sunlight poured through the windowpanes. She pulled a clip from her hair and shook out her crimped locks. The light shone through them and brightened the beige fabric of her dress. Humming like a music-box, she tore a strip of tape from the parcel. Dust particles panicked and swarmed in the light.

The parcel was full of polystyrene figure-of-eights that she pulled out in eager handfuls that flew through the air, turning the dining room into a kind of snow globe. Then she stopped and lifted a smaller box from the first. She took a craft knife and made a tender incision through its tape. Inside were a few more figure-of-eights and something wrapped in tissue paper that scratched and scrunched as it came undone in her fingers.

A deep frame with a glass front. When she turned it to show him he saw five insects pinned inside. They were dragonflies, each the size of his fist and each the purest white. Their milky wings were stretched and pinned. Their ghostly, unpigmented eyes were the size of pearls. There was an inscription accompanying them, but Midas couldn’t read it.

Midas’s mother closed her eyes and started to tremble. She swallowed loud lungfuls of air to steady herself.

‘Now, son,’ she said when her eyes reopened, ‘run the box and all these bits of packaging down to the tip. I’ll give you some money. You can get some sweets on the way back.’

He looked warily at the sun on the lawn, all sickly green. ‘Can’t you take it? You can drive.’

‘Be a good boy.’

‘I don’t want to go outside.’

‘Listen… I have to… hide these. Before your father returns. He won’t understand. Be a good boy, son.’

They gathered up the polystyrene and stuffed it back into the parcel. Then his mother gave him some coins and he grudgingly carried the box out of the house. But he went no farther, creeping back inside to spy on her.

He watched her strutting about in the hallway with an imaginary dancing partner, her bad leg making her moves lopsided. Without hesitation he sneaked to the cupboard where his parents kept their Polaroid and tiptoed back to use his mother as subject, taking photos one by one, loving the whirr as they slid out undeveloped. He laid them on the kitchen floor while she hummed a ballroom tune in the hallway. They emerged from the white like explorers returning from a blizzard. He was so engrossed by this enchantment that he didn’t hear his mother’s humming stop. She caught him poring over the photographs.

‘Son!’ she hissed, bustling over to the photos he’d taken. She put a hand to her forehead when she saw them and moaned.

‘Mother?’

There was a noise at the front door. She turned to Midas, suddenly alarmed. He watched her eyes widen. ‘Quick!’ she hissed, but the noise was only the afternoon paper dropping through the letterbox. She held a hand to her heart. Then she became agitated again. ‘I must hide the dragonflies,’ she said to herself as much as to him. She picked up the pile of photos. ‘And now I must hide these. But Midas, please deliver this box to the
tip as you said you would. I beg you: do that for me.’

He shrugged and went back outside, picking up the box to carry it a few paces down the street before turning into a leafy alley. The hot sun drew sweat beneath his jumper. Birds screeched and fled as he passed. A black-and-yellow caterpillar dangled from a stalk, building a cocoon to melt itself into something else. Searing light was everywhere and blinding, and he jogged to get the trip to the dump over with. Soon he could smell rot. The alley took a right turn into a ring of skips and growling machines. Muscular workers in neon jackets frowned at him as he scampered up the steps of a skip and tossed the box on to a bed of litter. When he climbed down, one of the workers said something about his haircut. He hurried back up the shady alley towards the house.

Just as he was opening the front garden gate, somebody called, ‘Midas!’

His father, walking down the street, a burgundy sweater over a cream shirt and black tie. Not a drop of sweat on him. The light gleamed on his glasses and bald head and buried itself in his dense moustache. He nodded to Midas at the gate.

‘You’ve been playing in the street?’

‘No. I… went to buy a film for my camera.’

His father shook his head and pushed through the gate. ‘You should spend your pocket money on books. You know that?
Books
, Midas.’ He paused, twitched his fingers and crouched down by the verge of the lawn. ‘Ah… What have we here?’

He held up a polystyrene figure-of-eight as if it were a rare gem. He turned it round and round, rubbing his moustache. ‘Hmm. Well now.’

Dinginess had returned to the house. Midas’s mother, having redrawn the curtains and blinds, stood in the hallway as his father
wiped his shoes on the mat and crouched to slowly unfasten his laces.

‘Good afternoon, dear,’ he said sweetly.

‘Good afternoon. Hello, dear.’

She hovered closer, restless. He slid off his shoes and passed them to Midas, who put them on the rack and handed back his father’s slippers. These his father pulled over his argyle-patterned socks. Then he took her hand, turned it over and pressed the figure-of-eight into her palm.

‘Litter. Cast by some troublemaker, no doubt, into our front garden.’

The colour – what there had been of it in the gloom – drained from her face. She shot a desperate, sideways glance at Midas. But what could he do?

‘Litter,’ repeated his father, ‘unless, of course, one of your parcels was delivered today.’

She bit her trembling lip into stillness. Her eyes flicked from left to right.

‘Listen,’ he said, rubbing his moustache, ‘I don’t want to go through this routine again. But you promised me no more parcels.’

She tried to stammer something but gave up.

‘I appreciate, darling, that there’s nothing you can do to prevent these parcels being
sent
to you. And though you’ve raised our objections, still the Post Office retains these packages for you. Naturally the staff there are rushed off their feet, they forget that you want these items returned to sender.’

‘Th-there’s no item, dear. It was just, j-just a normal parcel.’

‘Containing what?’

‘A… a…’

He sighed. ‘Where did you hide it? I don’t want to turn the house over. I’d hoped to finish my Pliny before suppertime.’

‘I… I’ve not… Hidden…’

He shrugged and wearily turned to climb the stairs. Midas’s mother followed him up to their bedroom. Midas watched from the doorway as his father went one by one through their drawers, turning on a lamp to see better. The bottom drawer housed underwear and night things. He plucked each item out individually. Simple grey briefs and, deeper down, frayed lace knickers and a bra bearing crumpled fabric flowers.

‘
Ahh
,’ he said, long fingers closing on the framed dragonflies. Her shoulders sank. He beamed up at her and popped the back off the frame, plucking the pins so the dead insects fell on the bed.

‘Fascinating,’ he said, ‘if a little macabre.’