The Girl With Glass Feet (18 page)

Carl Maulsen drove.

Time, that was what he lacked. You didn’t have to have years under your belt: you had to have unlived ones, yet to be stored. Because when you got older, things broke. He wished his first serious brush with death had been with someone, anyone else. It felt perverse that his mother and father were sticking to life far off in Arizona. It should have been one of them who went first, not Freya. Anybody but her, to make him realize he didn’t have all the time in the world, didn’t have the luxury of outlasting Charles Maclaird, strategizing and making his move in some perfect future.

He felt his gullet tighten and a burning wetness on his lower eyelids. Surprised, he choked it back. He was feeling old and sentimental. Maybe it was the charm of the woods bringing it out. Silver thistles were shivering on the roadside. His headlights turned a hare’s eyeballs a startling white.

Tonight, vividly, he saw her dancing in her ball gown on the last night of university, her dress and waist-length hair shimmering like the hare’s eyes. He remembered her acknowledgement across the dance floor, a wry smile on just one side of her mouth. But to go to her was to make memory a fantasy, since he hadn’t done it. He’d played it cool, approaching her only later to find her in the arms of another man.

He cut back to the start of the memory and reshaped it. This
time he stepped on to the dance floor and strode towards her, dazzled by the radiance of her hair in the blinking disco lights. He took her outstretched hand and felt the soft fingers lock through his.

He hit the brakes too late. There was a doe in his headlights.

The deer crunched at the impact, leaving a dent in the bonnet and snuffing out one lamp. It fell away, flashing pale undersides. Cursing, Carl jumped from the car and inspected the dent in the metalwork. One of the lights was punched out, and the bonnet was rippled. He let out a tirade at the doe’s corpse, then opened the boot, grabbed the deer and slung it over his shoulder. If he had to pay for his car to be fixed, he and Ida would eat venison for a week.

Impact had snapped the doe’s neck, but as he dumped it in the boot he saw one rear leg had snapped in several places so that broken bones hung bulging in the fur like the toys in a Christmas stocking.

He stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets. The surprise of the roadkill and the sparkling of ice on every leaf and every thistle spike, made his thoughts fanciful.

Thirty years previous, summer had parched neat grass in quads between college buildings. Yellowing lawns had looked like shredded parchments rotting into the earth. Carl stood in the shade of a sandstone university building, hands in his pockets, a frown on his forehead. He took out a comb and ran it several times through his jet-black hair. Other students skirted clear of him as they ascended the steps to the airless corridors behind.

How he loathed them: their lack of vision. Not one of them possessed drive or ambition. They rushed about in earnest coteries or sauntered along, blithely accepting their impending academic failure. Be they fanatical about their studies or indifferent, not one had drive, not one had passion like he had. They cared more for lounging in the insufferable sunlight than for
learning. He snorted like a boar, frightening a plump student who pushed her glasses nervously up her nose and tottered away. He tucked the comb into his pocket and folded his arms.

A girl rode into the quad on a bicycle. She looked hurried, riding fast, but as she drove over a cracked paving slab her bike jolted, the chain came loose and the girl tipped on to the path, legs twisting up with her bike. Carl smirked as she untangled herself and rose to her feet.

He stopped smirking. She was beautiful.

The girl had cut her knees. Dark blood wriggled down her shins like misplaced stigmata. Trying to tidy her arctic blonde hair, she got ruby blood in it. She abandoned the bike and rushed up the steps into the university, leaving Carl with the bitter perfumes of her scent and blood.

She’d made something tense in his loins. He’d thought himself above that drive, here for academic devotion alone. But now… he was shocked to find himself trotting into the quad to rescue the girl’s abandoned bike. She needed a new one, he realized as he propped it up and noticed the rust on its frame. He set it gently against the wall and laid the palm of his hand on the saddle, hoping for residual warmth. He felt none, although he remained there for some time.

Later he fantasized about applying plasters to her split knees.

‘Freya,’ he said, and the word seemed to lead him out of his memory and back to the mute trees, the icy road, and the dead doe in the boot of his car. He turned away and looked into the banked thistles and the silver woods behind them.

‘Freya,’ he said forlornly.

Her name was dead on the air. It was no longer the name of anything more than the nourishment for roots of grass in a mainland graveyard. He had felt a premonition of this when her maiden name became an antique, but he had not acted to stop it from happening. He would never have insisted she take the name
Maulsen. He grabbed at his hair and pulled so hard it brought tears to his eyes. How he envied those roots that supped on her body, the filaments growing where her skin had been hot and soft.

He turned back and shut the boot on the roadkill doe. Ida Maclaird: a name that still meant something. It gave him the first smile for days to think how she had once emerged from the body that was now interned in grass. The sheer reality of Ida was delightful.

Which made it all the harder to bear that she was unwell. He had watched her around the house and his suspicions had quickly developed that hers was a serious illness.

He was no stranger to injuries. In his time he had broken a metatarsal in his right foot and cracked the shin-bone of his left leg. Ida’s wasn’t that kind of injury. She moved about the cottage so delicately that her feet could have been ceramics. That comparison had brought to mind Emiliana Stallows, wife of Hector, who with the help of her husband’s fortune had run for a time a small alternative medicine business up in Enghem on the north coast of Gurm. As far as Carl was concerned that stuff was all gypsy remedies and superstitious trinkets, but he had humoured her while they had been seeing each other. Their affair had meant more to Emiliana than it ever could to him, but she had been beautiful in her day and he had wrongly speculated that if any woman could break his futile desire for Freya it would be someone as glamorous as her.

He racked his brains to remember what she had told him. Something she had said when he had only been half listening, that had put him in mind of her now. They had been lying together in bed one morning, and he had been relishing the first cigarette of the day while she nattered on about the current bores of her life. Emiliana was always feeling sorry for some patient or another of hers, but the story of one girl – the details of which
eluded him right now – was unusual. Emiliana had said she felt out of her depth with it.

He would have to dust off her phone number or make the trip up to Enghem, since he hadn’t made contact with her for several years.

First, though, he had another visit to make. The Crook boy had crossed his mind on one or two occasions since Dr Crook’s death. Carl was as curious about how he had turned out as he was about whether he was suitable company for Ida. If there was one bad thing to inherit from Freya, and Ida had certainly managed it, it was her taste in men. Just the other day, Ida had told him about ex-boyfriends of hers, leaving him stupefied as to what she saw in them.

She needed a helping hand, and Carl was all too glad to reach out to her.

‘You’ll like him,’ she’d said of Carl Maulsen. ‘And he’ll be interested in you.’

But the point was he didn’t like people and they weren’t interested in him. Midas, sitting alone at his kitchen table, put his head in his hands. That was the way things worked. For the best.

‘I’m getting too involved with Ida,’ he confessed to his camera on the table. ‘I should bail out right now.’

He looked fondly around his kitchen, the cosy life he’d made for himself. He should phone her and call off seeing her again. What good was it doing?

He stood up. ‘I like things undisturbed.’

He strode to the phone, grabbed the handset and punched in the first digits of her number (realizing he’d memorized it). He faltered, then dumped the handset back on the phone. She hadn’t disturbed things too much. He thought of her feet. The glow of the light passing through them, making her crystallized blood
sparkle. His promise to her to
hang around
. How heartless would he be to abandon her now?

‘If,’ he resolved, returning to the kettle, ‘things get untidy, I’ll jump ship just like that. And I won’t feel bad about it.’

He shuddered. He’d never really got to grips with people, especially with women. The only relationship he’d ever had convinced him of that. He gave Natasha the full studio treatment, even rented some wardrobe. She enjoyed posing, said it made her feel good about herself. Since he enjoyed the camerawork, it seemed a perfect match. She was stunning… but only in photos. It became hard for him to go out with her. He preferred to feign illness so he could stay at home and look through folders of pictures he’d taken. Her dense and glossy hair in photographs turned dry and stank of spray outside them. Her luscious eyes became burnt bits of wood when he closed the album. It took enormous courage to break up with her, to have to sit down and
explain
that he was only attracted to the version of her he’d caught on film.

He had felt bad about it for a few years, while she moved on to find someone who loved her for what she really was, not for what silver nitrate and slow light made her. She wrote him a letter he had read so many times he knew it word for word.

You always seemed happier with flat things, with two dimensions. I never managed to drag you away from that. I never made you see in three dimensions. To this day, I don’t know that you’ve discovered depth, or distance, but I desperately wanted to be the one who showed you that. Be careful, Midas.

It made him feel terrible, partly because he’d hurt her, partly because she’d misunderstood him. So ludicrous to say he didn’t know about depth and distance. Every photographer knew about depth and distance. He wasn’t blinkered like his father had been;
he’d made certain to develop a healthy perspective on his place in the world. Which was why he stuck with his camera.

It was time for Denver to arrive. He enjoyed the girl’s company because she preferred to be quiet. She was perplexed by unnecessary chatter of any kind. The pair of them would sit for hours at the table while Midas worked through his photographs and Denver drew.

And yet, since the other day when she had shown him the Christmas baubles and spoken frankly about time spent in the back of her head, he’d been worrying about her. Gustav had taken pains to usher her into the external world of objects, violence and weather. He’d tricked her into walking on cracks in the pavement, to help her see that nothing bad would happen (afterwards she’d done a kind of penance, hopping for hours back and forth from slab to slab). He’d faked power cuts to help her cope with darkness (although since then she’d hoarded candles in a box beneath her bed). It had taken him ages to cure her fear of water. At school she’d stabbed her water-wings with a fountain pen. The teachers punished her with lines, but she wrote them with patient acceptance and the teachers reported the futility of the situation to Gustav. Midas didn’t like water either, so had silently approved of that particular defiance, but since the other day, he had worried that he’d been subtly undoing all Gustav’s hard work. He’d encouraged her introversion as a part of her identity. He’d always thought that was a good thing. When had he stopped thinking that was a good thing?

Right now she was drawing a horn-nosed narwhal with golden fins, while he stuck new photos to the kitchen walls. A wet moor in bright sunlight, with soil like a million inky fingerprints on a white sheet. A snail with a shell like black marble and antennae straining at the sky. An albino cat with one eye that he’d photographed outside Catherine’s. All these he would have been pleased with a week before. He could have spent an hour
fascinated by their depth of shadow and brilliance of light, only now they seemed like a waste of the wall space he was tacking them to. Instead, the select photos he spread across the table were the only ones to pique his interest. They were the pictures of Ida’s feet he’d taken as she slept. He selected one, pinned it up, and filed the others away. Then he stood with hands in pockets, regarding it on the wall.