The Girl With Glass Feet (34 page)

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

The skin of her hips had turned entirely to the dead white of the marks on her belly. Her legs were colourless all over. The inflammation caused by the poultices had mostly died down but the skin was left a rubbery white. Towards her knees the skin seemed translucent. The pink of tendons showed under a membrane of glass. In the transparent lower reaches of her shins, bits of muscle remained like confetti wilting in watery gutters. And on the outside of her right knee, where she had bruised it at Enghem Stead, there was a patch of glass ahead of the rest of the transformation, set into her skin like a little window. It offered a view of crystallized bones like specimens in a jar.

She pulled him back on top of her. It was impossible to feel the flurry of experiences at once. The heat of lips; the feathery weight of her hair; the flash of veined white in an eyeball; chest rising and falling. She swallowed. The fine soft skin of her neck. The tightness of her stomach against his. The cushioning of her breasts. The coldness of her knees. Her inflexible joints. The dead weight of her legs.

At first he thought her pinched expression was one of pleasure,
but when her gasps reached a tortured pitch he slowed down. She covered his face with her hands.

‘It hurts,’ she whispered, ‘like there are knives in my pelvis.’

He withdrew and lay lightly against her.

‘I think there’s glass inside me, Midas.’

She gasped and clutched her stomach.

‘Ida!’

‘I’m okay, I’m okay.’

In a patch of milky translucence on her hip he could see something maroon throbbing… Was that an organ? Her colon, her bladder, her womb? Her torso, arms and face glistened heavily with cold sweat. Amethyst-coloured veins strained on the insides of her thighs. She looked ancient and stretched. In an involuntary movement he reached out and grabbed a handful of her hair.

It was the touch that made him realize he loved her. Warmth from her scalp. Grease from her locks. He entwined his hand in her hair. It shrank through his moving fingers like sand. They lay together for a long time. Somewhere outside, a dog barked. He could barely believe he had lived so long without wanting to touch. Photography had made him forget the necessity of this feeling.

She reached over and stroked his cheek. He flinched, then relaxed. ‘Midas, I want something.’ She took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling. ‘I can’t stand being uncertain any more.’

He waited. Realized that you didn’t always have to speak.

She closed her eyes. ‘I want to stay with you for however long there is left.’

The barking dog outside fell silent. Midas thought he could hear snowflakes touching down on the windowsill, and somewhere in the house a bubble gulping through a water pipe. They lay in this quiet until he heard her breathing slow down. He rolled his head on to its side and saw her eyes moving rapidly
beneath closed eyelids. He stayed awake, thinking how this moment was like the trapped time in a photograph. The moment would stay for ever in stasis. After relishing this for a while, he dozed off to sleep.

The snow was melting in the bogs. Minuscule snow fleas, made dozy by winter, unsealed their chambers of ice and emerged into a morning’s sunlight, preceded by probing forelegs. A lone otter took a cold bath in a pool that had been frozen a week before. The blue of the sky soaked into the unhealthy yellows of the reeds and lilies, turning them muted green. A trio of fish that had been locked in river ice tested their fins and began to swim again.

Henry swept books and insect drawings off his desk and placed the pregnant cow gently in the warm nest of an old bobble hat. She nestled in the fabric to rest her swollen belly while he prepared his things. First he set up an electric heater with red filament aglow on the desk. Then he took a leather wallet from a drawer and opened it, revealing the set of doll-size forceps he’d especially fashioned out of tweezers and pins. The cow moaned and drove her face into the wool of the bobble hat, her tail swishing against her flanks.

He drew the hat gently closer and slid his thumb under her throat and between her front legs to prop her on to her feet. She managed to stand, but her wings kept twitching and needed to be kept clear of Henry’s midwifery. He had a special harness for the occasion, which he fastened lightly around her shoulders. Attached to the harness was a simple card partition that kept her wings spread and safely away from her rear.

He closed his eyes and calmed his heartbeat. There had been accidents in the past, especially in the earlier days, but most of the births in recent years had been a success. And yet… He had been distracted from the herd of late by thoughts of Evaline and Ida,
and he didn’t want that to cause mistakes during such a delicate operation. He took a sip of gin and let its taste set him back at ease. He selected a pair of forceps and held it between thumb and forefinger, concentrating on the metal until his hand was steady. Then with utmost precision, he widened the tiny pincers and slid them into the cow’s rear. You couldn’t judge the forceps’ grip on the calf within, you had to follow a kind of gut feeling about how much pressure to apply. Holding his breath, he drew the calf out and laid it in the light. Placenta drooled behind it. The calf was cocooned in a yellow birthing sac that stretched as it tested its limbs. Its mother, panting with relief, staggered around and began to lick the sac from its head, revealing a black curly head with a white spot on its nose. Across its back, hard to distinguish from the sac, were the lilac membranes of its wings. Henry sat back beaming, folded his hands in his lap and watched.

It always moved him, this licking away the afterbirth. It always hammered home the point that passion wasn’t exclusively human. It always marked its physicality. He toasted the new mother with his gin. Tenderness and emotion went hand in hand with bits of gut and blood.

He wished he had experienced it for himself.

It was odd what a little interaction could do for you. He left some food out for the moth-winged cow and went to the bathroom. He scrubbed himself at the sink, then went downstairs to eat some stale soda bread, in the hope that it would settle his stomach. He was going to drive to Martyr’s Pitfall. Two or three times in the past he had gone there, but he had only got as far as to spy on Evaline. Each time he assured himself that the woman he had known remained absent from the frail body he observed in secret. Not once on those visits had he announced himself, but he planned to do so today. He tried to iron a shirt but couldn’t remember how. He was agitated and ironed heavy creases into the old fabric. Wearing it anyway, he poured himself a
tumbler of gin and drank it hastily before setting off.

Driving towards Martyr’s Pitfall he felt his nerves like war drums, a feeling increasing as Lomdendol Tor’s blunt head grew nearer, capped with dull seams of snow. He crossed the zigzagging bridges on to Lomdendol Island and felt the tor’s shadow like a bad smell. These lower slopes of the giant hill were clustered with weedy trees whose bark was starred with dead fungi. Between them you could spot the austere fronts of houses and retirement homes. He noticed that many more were boarded up since last he came, their FOR SALE signs fallen down and covered in mud and tyre tracks. The younger folk of St Hauda’s Land had left with the whaling trade and the people who remained were sunk into gloom and inactivity. This brought him a smile, since it helped him imagine the archipelago inhabited by moth-winged cattle alone.

Evaline’s helper, Christiana, answered the door and of course didn’t know him. He’d forgotten he’d need to get past her to speak to Evaline. He stood for a moment ignoring her politely concerned enquiries (‘How can I help you? Are you lost?’). Then he leapt into the house, dancing past her and bolting down the hallway, flinging open the sitting-room door and jigging on the spot as if fighting off gnats. Evaline stood and shushed the protesting Christiana with a finger to her lips.

‘Uh,’ licking his lips and tasting the gin. ‘Uh…’

‘H-Henry Fuwa,’ she said.

He had been so preoccupied, he realized, with finding the courage to get here that he had not thought what to say when he arrived.

The room took on a distant quality. He was within an arm’s reach of Evaline, yet he felt as if a glass barrier stood between them. He could no more reach for her than he could reach for her tea tray or crouch to touch the carpet.

She had begun to cry, he realized now. Her default expression
was so close to tears that it took only the subtlest of muscle movement for the ducts themselves to open. Nor did her posture of clasped hands and sloping shoulders change. Really only her cheeks differed. They shone like a bog stone shines where a new brook is born.

So much had happened since they had last seen each other, but only time gave it weight. Life had been routine since the moment he first set eyes on her. Comfortable, yes, but no particular day stood out from the others. The cumulative importance of all those years was nothing compared to their single day together with the dragonflies on the river-bank. Yet somehow those compressed years were responsible for this invisible barrier dividing Evaline’s sitting room into two, apportioning that side to her and this side to him. It was the most tangible thing in the house. He reached up and could feel it in the air. Their faces were no more than two feet apart, but this was as close as his hand could get. She raised a hand of her own, so that their vertical palms were inches away. Their fingers were separated by a pane of air only as thick as a thumbnail, but he couldn’t so much as smell her perfume through it, couldn’t feel her breath.

They stayed posed like this until Henry’s elbow ached, and when he lowered his hand Evaline copied him like a reflection. She returned to her place in the chair, fixed her eyes on the view of her snowy garden, and took her cold teacup in her hands. She held it to her lips and sipped. He exited quietly, shutting each door – to her room, her hallway, her house – with the infinitesimal care he had learnt through years of tending moth-winged cattle.

Outside, Lomdendol Tor’s shadow muffled everything. There was no traffic, and a cat in the road padded into a snowy hedge, careful not to crumple any leaves. His car snorted at the silence as he left Martyr’s Pitfall. He would return to moth-winged cattle and the burr and clickety-clack of swamp sounds, and he wouldn’t come back here again.

On the rooftops of Ettinsford, melting snow let clean patches of slate emerge, plasmic bodies of light agleam where furred white had been for weeks. At St Hauda’s Church, an icicle that had formed hanging from the nose of the statue of the saint dripped away into the brass folds of his robes. The Ettinsford strait swelled as water courses gurgled down the park slopes to join it. Cars drove slowly on wet roads, headlights turning cobbles into light bulbs. In Midas’s yard, a blackbird sprang back and forth under the gutter, then was hit by a bomb of snow. It squawked and indignantly shook its feathers. Droplets fell from gutters and pinged off the dustbin lid, where trickles of water felt their way indecisively across the tin. Lumps of slushy snow fell free of the trees overhanging his fence, sending shivers through shrubs.

Midas hummed to himself as milk to make hot chocolate simmered in a saucepan on the hob. His whole body felt cleaner this morning, as if something toxic had been wrung out of him. It wasn’t sex that had done it. It was something outside of his body, outside of Ida’s. A collision of sorts.

That morning he’d taken five minutes just to climb out of bed because he was so careful not to disturb the sleeping Ida. His bed had always been a functional object to enter when sleepy and exit when rested, but Ida’s head and bare shoulders on its pillows transformed it. Her hand curled up at her chin and her pale hair bunched at her neck were ornamental in ways the glass parts of her body, hidden under bed sheets, could never be.

He had taken the battery out of his clock to ensure its ticking wouldn’t disturb her. He had prayed for silence from the melting
snow outside. When a car honked and her eyelids fluttered and he realized she had to wake at some point, he determined to make it a peaceful awakening. Hence the stealthy breakfast he was preparing for her now.

The doorbell rang. Irked by the interruption, he poured out the hot milk. But it was probably just Gustav and Denver and they’d understand that this morning was one he wanted to keep private.

He found Christiana on the doorstep, fiddling with the cuffs of her coat sleeves. The road behind her had been salted, and mushy snow made it look like an ash waste.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Mr Crook, I’ve come to bring you a few of your things. From your mother.’

‘My mother doesn’t have any of my things.’

Christiana looked irritated. She turned and headed back to her car while Midas watched. He stepped outside and shut the door behind him so the cold couldn’t trespass upstairs and wake Ida. He stuffed his hands into his armpits.

Her car boot was loaded with cardboard boxes.

‘They’re not mine,’ he called, knowing exactly whose they were.

‘But it’s time you had them. They’re gathering dust.’

‘Good. They can gather rot for all I care.’

‘That’s up to you now.’

‘What’s brought this about?’

‘Your mother’s just… getting older, Mr Crook.’

‘Please don’t call me that.’

‘That’s your name, isn’t it?’ She began to unload the boxes on to the pavement.