The Girl With Glass Feet (13 page)

His father shrieked and leapt off the sofa, clutching his chest above the heart. ‘
Evaline!
’

She giggled. She held a bouquet of white roses, wrapped unprofessionally. She’d been tending them in the garden since the previous summer and had now picked the best ones as a gift. While Midas’s father looked on in horror she stammered a corny and rehearsed poem, stumbling over the rhymes.

‘Happy anniversary.’

She thrust the roses into his arms but he twisted away, cutting one palm on a thorn. She flinched and offered the roses again. He snatched them, hauled open a drawer and found a pair of scissors to snip and slash until shreds of white petal were all over the carpet and the room smelt of their perfume. He sulked out of the door, sucking his palm where the thorn had scratched it, and locked himself in his study.

Puberty was the thing incapacitating Midas in those days, leaving his courage as devastated as his father’s. He couldn’t comfort his mother. She sat down on the sofa and bawled.

Then her hands reached for him, grabbed his hair, slithered around his back, pulling him to her. He felt her dry hair on his face, heard her ugly sobbing in his ear and smelt her
breath
. He shrieked,
but her grip was too tight. He had to shove her away to escape. He leapt away and stood there panting while she nodded violently as if in a fit. She clenched her fists and beat them on her knees. He felt guilt for not comforting her, but the horror of her touch was insurmountable. Her skin was so papery, her tears so warm. He simply stood there immobile, clutching his hands to his heart like his father.

Suddenly the door of his mother’s house in Martyr’s Pitfall opened a crack and a young woman peered out. Midas was cold, and on the doorstep, and grown up again.

‘Hello,’ she said slowly, examining his features.

‘Hello. I’ve come to see my mother.’

Recognition spread across her face. ‘Why, Mr Crook! I knew it was you! A pleasure to see you. I’m afraid your mother’s gone out, to walk in the snow. I’ll let her know you called.’

She clung to the door, pushing it a little further closed.

Midas placed his foot on the threshold as politely as he could. ‘Um…’ he said, ‘I’m coming in.’

‘But…’

‘We both know she’s at home.’ He squeezed inside apologetically, took off his shoes and placed them on the mat.

The young woman looked annoyed. ‘Well then… Let me go and tell her you’ve come. I’ll see if she’s available.’

He shook his head and walked down the sparse hallway, stepping over the vacuum cleaner and opening the door to the back room. The girl clapped her hands to her head in frustration. She was the maid his mother employed to look after her, doing her shopping and cooking, sometimes bathing her, mopping her up.

His mother sat on a chair pulled up to a bay window. The room was devoid of any other furniture save a teaset on a table beside
her. Outside, the white lawn and bare trees were as black and white as a photo. Icicles hung from a bird table.

His mother’s hair still kept a bone-yellow tint of its old colour. She wore drooping pearl earrings and a salmon-pink shawl that couldn’t disguise her skeletal shoulder-blades.

‘Good afternoon, Christiana,’ she said, in a croak of a voice, reaching to her tea table with willowy fingers. She selected a brown sugar cube from a pot. Her fingernails were the beigest of pinks. The sugar cube plopped into a cup on her lap.

For a moment he weighed up turning around and leaving. Coming here made his skin too tight for his body. But then he thought of what he owed Ida.

‘I’m not Christiana,’ he said.

Something in her neck clicked as she turned.

‘Hello. Mother.’

She put her tea on the table shakily, spilling a little into her lap. She didn’t notice: dried tea stains already marred her dress.

‘You… you should have phoned. Given me time to prepare.’

‘You would have made sure you weren’t around.’

‘I would never have. We would have gone to the beach. Had a nice day out. My goodness, you are like your father.’

She turned back to stare at the window. Not, he felt, at the snowy world outside, nor even her reflection, but at the glass pane itself.

‘So,’ she said, ‘why have you come?’

‘I brought your Christmas presents.’ He opened his satchel and drew out a carrier bag of gifts he’d wrapped in black-and-white paper.

‘Oh. Of course. It’s that time of year already. I’m afraid I haven’t done Christmas shopping this year.’

‘That doesn’t matter. I’ll put these here shall I?’

‘Yes. Christiana will deal with them when you’re gone.’

He placed them carefully on the carpet. ‘I’m going to Gustav’s this Christmas. Denver’s getting bigger. You’re invited.’

‘Didn’t you go last year?’

‘I go every year. It’s fun.’

‘Yes, well.’ She looked down at her lap. ‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Okay. Do that.’

‘So… Was there anything else?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

‘Mm?’

He steadied himself. He had planned out his line of questioning to come gently to his main enquiry, in the hope she would weather it better. They had never talked about Henry Fuwa, or the occasional presents he had sent her while Midas was a child. Midas had been happy to leave the topic with all the others. Until now.

‘When I was a child, parcels arrived for you. Gifts. One time there was a frame of white dragonflies, another time some photographs. Father destroyed them. But you tried to hide them from him.’

She sat up, wary like a rabbit.

‘Why did you try to hide them, Mother?’

She plopped another sugar cube into her tea and stirred it determinedly. The sugar didn’t melt because the tea was tepid.

‘Please tell me.’

‘What’s it to you? These things happened so long ago. Why stir them up?’

‘Someone’s in trouble.’

‘What does that mean? What do you mean by that?’

‘Please just tell me who they were from.’

She set down the teaspoon and slurped the tea. ‘They were pleasant, weren’t they?’

‘Please, Mother.’

‘From your father.’

‘No. He hated them. He tore them up.’

‘He was a contradictory man. He did worse things, things you don’t know about. He stole my wedding dress, did I ever tell you that?’

‘No.’

‘One day it had vanished. He denied it of course, but I know it went the way of the dragonflies.’

Midas heard the moistness of his tongue click in his mouth. ‘So… why are you pretending the gifts were from him?’

She fiddled with the spotted lap of her dress. He might as well have been pulling out her hair, for all the joy this visit was bringing her.

Her breath sounded like wind through dead wood. ‘Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous?’

He didn’t answer.

‘They were chosen for me. They were what
I
wanted. They were hand-picked for me.’ She shook herself and tugged on the strands of her shawl. ‘Forget it. Let’s forget all of it. If they weren’t from your father they can’t have been intended for me. That would have been inappropriate.’

In the polished window their reflections were translucent doppelgängers. She looked him up and down. ‘Your father,’ she mouthed. ‘My word, you are like your father.’

He licked his dried-out lips. ‘Mother… You… I know you were having an affair.’

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

She broke down in tears and clenched her fists and hammered them on her knees. He looked away from the sight of her so wretched. With no second chair, he folded himself cross-legged on the carpet. He remembered his mother crying like this when he was a schoolboy: when his father had snipped up the roses she’d grown for him. And here Midas Crook the younger
sat, still as helpless to comfort her as he’d been all those years ago.

His mother sobbed. Tears traced the cracked skin of her palms.

He knew the father test would have him be the opposite of what he was being, but it was impotent to compel him, it only condemned him.

And then to his surprise he thought of Ida, and wondered what she might do.

He forced himself to his feet and moved stiffly to his mother’s side. He placed a palm on her bony shoulder and her head, like an old statue crumbling down, lolled to the side. Thinning hair draped his skin.

‘He was in love with me,’ she gulped.

Midas fought a surprise distraction: anger. He had never met Fuwa, but he suddenly felt outraged at the man. Standing in this stale little room, it was clear why his mother had confined herself to Martyr’s Pitfall. When his father had died he had cleared the way for her to be unguardedly in love with Fuwa but after eighteen years of strength-sapping marriage she didn’t have anything left in her. All she could do was wait for Fuwa to come and rescue her. Nothing happened.

‘It’s okay, Mother. I just…’

‘Of course you’re appalled at my affair. You have every right to be, every right. But you don’t know the half of it like I do. Marriage is
long
.’

‘I’m not appalled. I understand entirely. In fact I was… glad for you.’

‘Listen, have you… ever had a girlfriend?’

He nodded.

‘What was her name?’

‘Natasha.’

‘You never introduced me.’

‘We weren’t going out for long.’

‘And did you… feel anything for her?’

‘Yes.’

She cowered back in her chair. ‘Good. Your father… was never much cut out for love. Or perhaps love wasn’t cut out for him. But Henry was cut out for love. I’m sure he was.’

‘Do you know where he is now?’

‘Shh!’ She held up both her hands. ‘It didn’t last, son.’

‘Where did he live, then?’

‘In the mere.’

‘Where? Precisely.’

‘Why on earth do you want to know all this? Why do you come here after
nothing
and insist on knowing all this?’

He felt an overbearing urge to leave, to flee the suffocating house and its dweller, but there were Ida’s feet in the back of his thoughts, giving him a need to stay.

‘I…’ he croaked, ‘… am trying to help.’

Her head wobbled as if it would spin off her neck. She looked up at him searchingly. There was so much white in her eyes. ‘Help? It’s late for that.’

‘Not you,’ he said, feeling callous, ‘I’m trying to help someone else.’

At this she seemed to relax. ‘There’s a place I once watched him fishing. Under an old bridge the road doesn’t lead to any more. Bog ivy hanging off the stone like curtains in the theatre. And him in his cagoule fishing in the shallow water with his bare hands. Amazing man. He pulled the fish out by their tails. They stopped flapping because they trusted he’d put them back.’

‘Why don’t you go and knock on his door?’

‘I’ve not spoken to him for a very long time.’

He shoved his hands in his pockets and stayed in silence near her.

In the garden a white cat sprinted across the lawn, leaving
dimpled footprints in the snow. Midas’s heart was beating hard. ‘It’s a shame,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’

She nodded. ‘It’s all a shame, Midas. Nothing good ever came from my marriage to your father.’

His father left only a pile of boxes when he died. After his funeral, Midas and his mother tucked them away unopened, and when she moved house they travelled from a dark spot in her old attic to a dark spot in her new one. The boxes were thoroughly packed (his father had been a perfectionist, after all) and it was months before Midas or his mother stumbled upon the first of his oversights. Under the carpet they found a whalebone poker dice etched and inked with the suites of playing cards instead of numbered pips. Beneath the cooker, Midas’s mother discovered a stained toothpick inscribed with her husband’s initials in minuscule letters. When Midas tossed old books into the bin, a map slipped out from flapping pages.