The Girl With Glass Feet (27 page)

The others waited on her. After a while, she asked, ‘Poultices?’

Emiliana cleared her throat, but when she didn’t speak Carl took it upon himself. ‘Playing dead would be a more appropriate starting point. Mil, why don’t you tell her what you did for Saffron?’

Emiliana looked miserably from Carl to Ida. ‘We can go into the details tomorrow.’

Carl rolled his eyes. ‘We can begin applying them tomorrow.’

‘Okay.’ She kept her eyes on the empty dishes and oily plates of their meal. ‘To begin with, it came about at the suggestion of Saffron’s father. He was a friend of a friend, but he came to me because at the time I was running a small business in alternative medicine. I had always been interested in it, and Hector enabled me to set up a small surgery of my own. Hay fever remedies were my speciality, and that was what drew Saffron and her family. They already had the idea, you see. They only wanted somebody to carry it out.’

Carl was tapping his foot. ‘You need to explain about the bird in the jar.’

She nodded and cleared her throat a second time. ‘Mr Jeuck brought with him a bird in a jar. It was long dead and quite horrible, quite badly preserved. But it had a tail of glass. A fan of beautifully etched feathers, where all its others had wilted and decayed. He had bought it at great expense from an old widow in Glamsgallow because it was evidence for his idea. The bird had died, she had told him, because it couldn’t feed properly in its condition. What struck Mr Jeuck was this: the bird’s final condition meant the spread of glass did not continue into death.’

Midas closed his eyes and thought of the pure glass body Henry had shown him in the bog.

‘Well… My hay fever remedies were simple things. Honey based. Local bees help cure the fever from local pollen. So you see… Saffron and her family proposed a local remedy, although from the moment Saffron walked through my door, I knew there was something far worse than hay fever afflicting her.’

‘Playing dead was the answer,’ interrupted Carl. ‘The proposed remedy was simple but probably the most brilliant idea a man like Jeuck would have in his lifetime. To paralyse the flesh around the
glass, turn it into a state half dead. And the Jeuck family had already thought of the means.’

‘What was the means?’

‘St Hauda’s Land jellyfish.’

‘Jellyfish,’ murmured Ida.

Midas thought of his mother’s limp.

Carl clasped his hands enthusiastically. ‘Emiliana prepared poultices of jellyfish matter, warmed them and applied them to Saffron’s stomach. They treated her in this way all summer long, and as you can see,’ he gestured theatrically to the screen, ‘the results were successful. The treatment trapped the glass, beat it at its own game. And all thanks to Emiliana.’

Emiliana smiled wistfully.

Ida closed her eyes.

They waited.

‘It looks painful.’

‘Think about it overnight,’ suggested Emiliana.

Ida shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s painful. It’s worth a shot.’

‘That’s my girl,’ said Carl. ‘I’ll let you turn in now. We should make a start in the morning.’

It took Midas several hours to fall asleep that night. In part this was due to the alien double bed in his guest room, so much larger and softer than his sturdy single mattress back home. In part it was the bass moans the house emitted in the wind, and the crunch of the sea mining the shingle of the cove. More than these, it was the thought of Ida sleeping mere rooms away, and the pain this esoteric remedy was likely to bring her. It filled his knees with a weak feeling, made his feet seem impossibly far from his legs.

He rolled on to his side and stared at the moonlight slanting
under the heavy curtains. He knew he had finally got to sleep when a tapping on the door woke him. He sat up stiffly as it swung open and Ida hobbled in, wincing at each clunking placement of her crutch on the floor. Thankfully, Emiliana and Carl were sleeping in bedrooms on the floor above, towards the other side of the house.

‘I can’t sleep,’ she whispered.

‘Nor me.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I mean, I was asleep just then, but before that, nothing…’

She went to the window. ‘Have you seen what’s going on outside?’

He shook his head.

‘Get up.’

It was hot in the guest bedroom, so he had gone to bed in only his Y-fronts. He realized this now, and sat up holding the white duvet to his scrawny chest. She wasn’t wearing night things, she was wearing her coat over a patterned woollen jersey.

‘I’ll look away,’ she laughed, ‘so you can preserve your decency.’

He crawled to the foot of the bed to get the clothes he’d left in a heap. He pulled them on while she opened the curtains, then joined her at the window. The moonlit sea glittered in the cove, and swaying under its subtle waves were dimly glowing lights. He pressed his face against the window. The lights were flickering like candle flames.

‘Midas,’ she said, ‘do you remember when you stayed at Carl’s cottage with me? We heard an owl hoot in the night.’

‘I remember, yes.’

‘You asked if I wanted to go out walking in the woods. To look for it. And I said I was too frightened of tripping. Well… I said that because I didn’t know you well enough. I didn’t know how safe I’d be in the woods with you. Now I know you’d look after me. Let’s go outside and look at the lights.’

‘What? Now?’

‘
Yes
. Put your coat on.’

He pulled it on and followed her out of the room. They moved slowly, in part to make as little noise as possible, in part because Ida had no choice. She had to sit and bump herself carefully down the stairs while Midas cradled her crutches. They found their way out to the wooden deck and leant on the rail, overlooking the high tide that swilled between the stilted houses of Enghem-on-the Water, turning them into arks. The painted timbers reflected weakly on the surface, mingling with the dim, manifold lights that shone beneath it. An armada of jellyfish had floated in on the tide. One or two were large as sails, with bodies rippling just inches under the surface, flying pennants of tentacles. The tiniest ones were the size of thimbles, with crests of violet suckers. One giant orb glowed brighter than the others. Its body was full of a nebula of golden light, as if it had swallowed an angel.

Nearer by floated a swarm of about a hundred lantern-sized jellies. Ida gasped when a spark of electric yellow sputtered momentarily in the body of one. It had been a flash of light like a faulty light bulb. A second spark faltered in another jelly, this time a strobe of pink. Another lit up deeper down, red as a clot of blood. The tide gulped against the stilts of Enghem Stead.

Another jelly flashed, and this one stayed alight. A yellow blaze bobbing in the water. Its emanation kindled the lights of its neighbours. Their bodies sparkled, and the sparkles turned to steady shines: yellow, pink, crimson and cyan. The effect slowly ricocheted across the cove until the water was a multicoloured brilliance. Refracted colour glittered up the walls of the houses.

Midas and Ida leant in silence over the rail of the deck. He noticed how close her hands were to his on the rail. He didn’t move away.

‘Imagine living in a place like this,’ she said, ‘where you could watch this every night.’

He did as he was told. Living in the middle of nowhere, just the two of them, and it made his mind settle, as if all the worry it normally contained could be buoyed away on the idea alone. He felt serene leaning on the railing with her, absorbing the sight of the incandescent sea. They remained like this, side by side, faces lit up by the glow from the water, for ten minutes more. Then the jellies darkened in quick succession, as if something were swimming through the water snuffing them out.

When he had been playing porter and bumping the luggage up the deck, Midas had been jealous of Carl’s arm linked with Ida’s. So when they returned inside after the last jellyfish had fizzled out, leaving only the moon to decorate the night, he whispered, ‘I-I-I’ll help you up the stairs.’

At first he was too busy enjoying her grateful smile to let the enormity of what he had volunteered for sink in. He shifted his weight from foot to foot.

How would he get her upstairs without touching her?

She followed him to the foot of the staircase, then handed him her crutch.

‘Right,’ he said, longing for elevators, escalators, pulleys.

She took his arm and set her other hand on the banister. His joints stiffened. He got a whiff of her scent: something alpine (like vertigo). He felt as if his sleeve had starched involuntarily.

All the way up the stairs, his elbow poked her side and her skin. Her body’s warmth made sweat beads roll down his arm. She didn’t notice any of it, she looked so absorbed in her thoughts.

At the top of the stairs he abruptly tried to let go of her, but she clung on.

‘We’re up now,’ he whispered.

‘Help me to my room.’

He steadied himself. They found their way to her bedroom.
Inside, when she finally let go of his arm, he sank back against the wall.

‘Well… um…’ Midas was dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot more of the jellyfish now.’

She sighed. ‘I think we should forget all about remedies tonight.’

That confused him: he had thought the beautiful spectacle, would excite her with the prospect of a cure. She cleared it up by placing her hand lightly on his chest. His heart started beating hard, like it was trying to drive her away. She tilted her head and leant it towards him. Her lips were parted an inch from his.

He jumped sideways, spluttering half-started excuses for why he’d best leave her to get much-needed sleep. She sat down on the bed and cast her eyes away. He wanted words to speak themselves. When nothing happened, he slipped from the room and closed the door behind him.

Halfway down the stairs he ground to a halt. He had wanted to kiss her but when the moment arose his head had been yanked away as if nerves were a bridle. Remembering his father battling away from his mother’s embraces, he felt a sudden rush of hatred towards the man. He wondered how you could alter your gut reactions when your body overrode your control with the same power it used to jerk back your hand from a burning hot surface or throw you away from an onrushing crash. He clapped his hands to his head and screwed up his eyes.

For a moment, Ida considered returning to bed, but she knew it would only be to lie there wide awake. She decided to take a bath, instead. Back on the mainland she had used to enjoy a blistering hot bath in the middle of the night.