The Girl With Glass Feet (33 page)

‘Carl. Just drive me to Ettinsford. That’s all I want you to do.’

He scowled. ‘Where’s the good in that?’ He clapped his hands. ‘Come on, show me your legs. Take off your boots and your socks. I’ll help you, Ida, I’ll help you better now it’s just the two of us.’

‘Please drive me to Ettinsford.’

He bunched his fists. ‘Get a grip on yourself, girl! We need to figure this out. You and me! There’s no time for that wretched little boy.’

She slapped him.

He felt it all rush to his head. He lunged towards her skirt. She shrieked and lashed at him but her blows felt faint as raindrops. He pinned her in the chair with one arm.

‘Let go of me!’ he heard her scream, as if from a distance. Likewise a glob of spit that hit his chin felt intangible like a memory. Breathing hard, focusing on her skirt and the body beneath, he reached down with his free hand and lifted the fabric up to her hips. She wormed in his grip, but his strength and the immobile weight of her legs fastened her to the chair.

Her legs. The skin of her thighs was a battleground of swollen red weals and tough white skin, but he had eyes only for the faint shadows of blood preserved behind her shins.

He heard Freya yelling. Her head thrashed about. Again it seemed far off.

She cracked the crutch against the side of his head.

He let go of Ida’s hands and she struck him with both bunched fists, cuffing him hard on the jaw. He barely felt it, took a step back from her and sat down with a thud on the wooden planks. He held both hands up in surrender. The world shrank.

She grabbed her crutches, white-faced and sobbing hysterically, and swung down the steps of the deck, making painstaking
progress away across the shingle. Carl watched her tumble into it and clamber back up. The mist closed around her.

He bowed his head, aware of his life repeating itself with a sad reprise. He had remembered so much about Freya since Ida had first arrived on St Hauda’s Land. Now the things he had not remembered came back to him. Ugly and insecure moments. When he had seen her lips working a deep kiss on another man on a dance floor, and the feeling when she had opened her eyes and met his fraught expression with a scowl. The time, after he had walked her home one night and they were both fuzzy with alcohol, when he tried to put his arm around her waist, and she gently patted it away, and he tried again, and she slapped it aside and stormed into her house. The words she had said to him that night, that he had inked out of his memory. He wondered how much of his life he had secretly blotted away in this fashion. How much of his world he could really be sure of.

He closed his eyes and listened to his heartbeat, getting older inside him. He heard Enghem Stead creaking. He felt the throb of his pulses, the slight wheeze that accompanied his breath these days.

After a long spell had passed, and the mist had begun to thin, he heard footsteps. He looked up to see Midas Crook, out of breath.

‘What do you want?’ asked Carl with bile.

He spluttered in surprise when Midas grabbed him by the collar and yanked him so hard it nearly budged him off the deck. ‘Where is she, Carl?’

He swatted Midas away with a backhand punch, flipping him on to his back. ‘What are you talking about?’

Midas clambered back up. ‘Ida! What did you do with her?’

‘Fuck off,’ he said.

Midas leapt forward and grabbed Carl’s collar again. ‘Look
at me,’ he hissed, ‘and tell me what you did to her.’

Carl realized he had never looked this particular Midas Crook in the eye. He had always put that down to the boy’s tiresome shyness, but now he couldn’t be sure. Because there was a raw, unpredictable look of desperation in Midas’s taut grey irises and pinprick pupils. He had never seen anything like it, in father or son.

‘I-I was not myself,’ he said carefully, ‘so… I tried to… She went outside.’

Midas spat out his disgust and raced from the house and into the white mist.

Ida surely couldn’t have got far, but he was terrified she somehow had. The bitter cold made a blue haze on puddles before his sprinting feet shattered them into fountains of ice. Particles of snow explored the mist. There would be more soon, the heaviest of the winter. Clouds of it would lay themselves down to die on the earth. He cast his head left and right, imagining Ida under a frozen sheet of ice, snow and fog whitening her out of existence.

The snow swarmed against the translucent curtain of the mist, and suddenly, as if it were made from this interplay of weather, he saw something cantering through the haze. It sprang like a gazelle, its white legs as thin and supple as saplings. It paused and he stumbled after it, nearly catching it. There were packed muscles under its coat, muscles that rippled on its haunches as it bounded away again. He fancied he saw an elegant head and a flash of steely blue where its head met its neck.

He sprinted after it, tearing through a sudden screen of undergrowth that appeared out of the mist. His footprints crunched over those left by its pinched hoofs.

His path was suddenly blocked by a toppled tree, blooms of fungi covering it like cork roses. The creature leapt, cleared the
dead trunk in one bound, and vanished into the mist on the other side. Midas jogged to a halt in its wake and stared around him. Somehow he had been led into thick woodland. The fog was thinnest here, perhaps absorbed by the trees that stood close together with interlocked arms, cracked bark and hollow trunks.

Then he saw the animals.

A robin tweeting on a branch was paling from chestnut brown to fine white. Its legs became white wires and its eyes became hailstones. Its breast remained a red thumbprint for a second, then that also faded, through pink to crisp white.

It fluttered to another tree where it snatched up a white spider in its beak. Moments before, the spider had been an invisible brown against the bark. A white squirrel, which had been hopping through the loam, darted up the tree and sat on a bough, clasping its paws as if in prayer.

Further up ahead, someone lay in a coat powdered with snow. He rushed towards her.

‘Ida?’ he hissed, ‘Ida, can you hear me?’

She opened her eyes. Her teeth rattled. ‘Midas, I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t say stupid things. God. Are you hurt?’

The winter was inside his coat and under his shirt, frosting his lungs, but even in the freezing anxiety of the moment the fact that he had found her made his heart hot. ‘Put my anorak on. Don’t lie down or it’ll get wet and you’ll get even colder.’

‘Don’t leave me.’

He helped her up so she could lean on him. She was as cold and heavy as ice, her dragging feet leaving a dented trail in the snow. It took them some time to make their painstaking way back to the car over unkind roots and spongy earth. They followed the footprints he had left in snow or mud, until Enghem Stead appeared like a mirage out of the mist, although all he cared about was his muddy little car, parked nearby. There was no sign of Carl. Her feet clinked on the car door as he helped her in, but
by the time he had propped her on the back seat a tinge of colour had returned to her cheeks, and this made him glance up at the opaque sky, grateful it had held back its heavier snows. He got in beside her and closed the door.

‘Sh-shit it’s cold,’ she said.

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

She nodded drowsily. ‘Your coat. Thanks.’

‘It’ll warm up in the car.’

‘Hug me.’

‘I… I’m sorry?’

She opened her eyes a crack. They couldn’t focus. Her irises were ash between red eyelids. ‘Put your arms around me.’

Carefully, he reached around her with both arms so his fingers locked across her back.

‘You have to squeeze,’ she whispered, ‘or it’s not a hug.’

He squeezed gently. They leant like that against the seat for a while, the warmth from each other’s bodies sustaining them until the car’s heater took over. ‘We’d best get going,’ said Midas, pulling away.

She whispered something he couldn’t quite hear. He bowed his head to her lips to listen. ‘You have to be bolder,’ she whispered, ‘
please
.’ Then she pushed her face into his. All his features seemed to spasm and twitch as she squeezed his lips with hers and touched his teeth with her tongue. Although her skin was freezing, her salty breath and saliva were piping hot. He couldn’t move his own lips while she kissed him. He could only jerk them open and shut like a wooden dummy. But to his amazement, it felt good.

Midas was doing everything he could do to appear natural and confident as he helped Ida into his house, even though her whole body was pressed up against his and he could feel with his chest the shape of her ribs and breasts. She held him as he helped her into the sitting room, setting her down in an armchair.

That evening, when she’d changed, it struck him how unhealthy she was
.
The shadows cast by her high cheekbones had climbed into darkness around her eyes. Her lips were chafed and her hair organized in an artless tie. She wore a knitted jersey and a long grey skirt that made her legs look like a chunk of flint.

Midas puffed up the sofa cushions, on which he planned to sleep tonight. ‘The weatherman says tomorrow will be brighter. We can start finding a way to fix you again.’

‘That’s kind of you, Midas. But really…’

‘We’ll think of something. Some new lead will crop up.’

‘I’m sure we will, but as far as I’m concerned tomorrow can wait as long as for ever.’

‘Okay. You take my bed, I’ll sleep down here.’

‘Will you help me up the stairs?’

He felt the soft delicacy of her fingers as he took her hands and lifted her from the armchair. Her waist was thin and firm. Being so close to her still made him tense, but it was tempered by a nervy excitement. Her legs scraped on the wooden stairs as he hauled her up them one by one. Then he dashed back down, grabbed her things and rushed them up to her, finding her leaning on the bedroom wall.

‘I’m too cold to get changed,’ she said.

He helped her on to the bed and tucked the duvet over her.

She grabbed his collar and yanked him on to her. Her lips pressed his, springy and desperate. When he tried to speak she kissed harder. One of her hands sank into his hair and her nails scratched his scalp. Her other hand ran down his spine. He was immobile atop her not because he was petrified but because he was enthralled. After a while her kisses slowed and they parted lips.

He battled with his tongue to be the first to say something. He managed, ‘
Wuhhmmm
.’

‘Kick off your shoes, Midas.’

He did as he was told. She started to kiss him again, grabbing his thigh and driving in her fingertips. His hands lay limp at his sides.
Oh God
, he thought, happily. One of her hands got under his vest, then scraped past his tight belt… He made a gargling noise. ‘Relax,’ she hushed, unbuttoning his shirt. ‘What’s the matter?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Honestly.’

She removed his shirt and he felt the first rumours of relaxation: muscles turning to jelly. Instead of lying like a toppled statue he flopped like a rag doll. His lungs filled up with Ida. She led his hand up her silky waist. He inched his fingers over her flesh, over the grooves between ribs. She snatched his hand and pulled it under her bra where it seized up again like a gauntlet. She kneaded his fingers. They were supple again. There was soft tissue under his thumb.

She slipped off her top and unfastened her bra. For a moment the motes of shadow her breasts made hypnotized him, but then he noticed tears in her eyes and rolled off her. She blinked the tears away, but he’d noticed the marks on her stomach.

The flesh around her navel was patterned with swirls of
cod-white skin. They reached up from her waist and traced over her belly, drawing a whirlpool around her belly button. They accentuated the pitted texture of skin until it looked more like citrus rind. Each pore treasured a speck that sparkled in the moonlight. They were the blueprints for glass, a boast of transformation to come. He wondered, terrified, what alterations glass had worked beneath the cover of underwear, dresses and skirts.

He was still staring when her hand pressed against his groin. She looked at him for approval. He nodded. She removed her skirt. He gulped.