The Girl With Glass Feet (35 page)

‘I’ll destroy them.’

‘Fine.’

He threw his hands in the air, but soon she had finished unloading the boxes and was getting back in her car. She drove
away, her tyres churning up trenches in the mush of snow. A minute or two later he trudged out to the pavement and began to carry the boxes inside.

Before he died his father had halved everything he owned, packed this half neatly and taken the other half on to the boat. Midas expected these boxes to be full of the same books, journals, diaries and papers that had fuelled the boat’s quick flames. Only they were too light. Each was labelled neatly with a packing date, in his father’s handwriting. By the time he had carried them inside, the hot chocolate he had prepared for Ida was already getting cold.

Ida woke and stretched. Getting out of bed was becoming harder. She considered calling to Midas for help but pictured it and felt pathetic. Instead she dragged herself across the carpet to the mirror.

She lifted her T-shirt the way Saffron Jeuck had in Emiliana’s video. The trails of hardened skin on her belly looked worse this morning. They had creased her flesh as she slept, leaving red lines running vertically towards her breasts.

She turned one leg to see into the patch of glass on the outside of her knee. Through it she could see squirts of blood still shooting over the cross-section of her kneecap, its marrow bubbled purple and grey like a chicken bone.

She sneezed into her hands, then had to wipe them on her T-shirt because she couldn’t get to the tissues in time. She felt disgusting. She took off the T-shirt and tossed it on to Midas’s laundry pile. The motion sent stabbing pains up her sides and into her armpits.

The glass was speeding up. It had spread so fast in the last week that she believed were she to sit like this at the mirror for an hour observing herself, she’d see skin lose its lustre and translucence
become clearer. The glittering marks that had made a whirlpool shape on her tummy would soon fill in, so that her whole belly would be glazed, its skin rubbery. Then it would start to turn transparent, and not long after that things like her kidneys and intestines would turn to glass. She didn’t like to think what would happen to her when they did.

She dwelt for a moment on a memory from girlhood: smearing her tummy with a spiral of glue, then tipping a whole pot of opal glitter across it.

She stretched for her crutches and pulled herself around the bed to the window, twitching back the net curtain. It was Ettinsford’s market day and shoppers trod through the melting snow, headed to and from the stalls. A pair of schoolboys in tatty blazers furtively shared a cigarette. Two elderly ladies watched them from the cover of a postbox, muttering darkly to each other. Ida suddenly felt ancient and decrepit. She let go of the net curtain and covered her face with her hands, grimacing silently into them.

In the end, the thing that made her capable of tying up her hair, putting on a fresh T-shirt and skirt and battling down the stairs, was the man below and the isolation of his lifestyle. With Carl gone and Henry Fuwa right all along about the impossibility of cures, she felt a bittersweet relief in the loneliness of this little terraced house. It had few visitors, no television, hardly any view. It was just her and Midas in here, tucked away from the world. Here she could turn quietly into glass, with only love to distract her.

She found Midas bunched up at the kitchen table, covering a photograph with the flat of his palm.

‘Midas… Good morning… Please don’t pretend everything’s all right.’

He lifted his hand off the picture and held it up for her to see. It was the lone photo of his father, pulled off the wall. The face had been stabbed open by a pencil.

‘You said that was your only copy.’

‘It is. Do you know why I did it?’

She waited.

‘To see if I’d feel bad. And of course I didn’t.’

‘There are boxes stacked in the hallway.’

‘They’re his, of course. My mother’s helper brought them here this morning.’

‘They’re your father’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to tell me what’s in them?’

‘I haven’t looked.’

‘But… Midas… I would have thought…’

He flung his hands up in the air. ‘Thought I’d be so stupid as to look?
God
, Ida! Each one is a fucking Pandora’s box!’

‘That’s the kind of thing your father would say.’

She hoped making that comparison would shake him up, but it only made him look gloomier. If she had her mobility she’d spring across and kiss him violently, but by the time she’d lurched around the table the moment didn’t feel right. ‘Look,’ she said, taking his hand instead (the skin was cold, the fingers limp), ‘I remember when my mum died some of our friends went through her things for us, so all we had to confront were the important bits. Why don’t I get rid of the boxes for you?’

He murmured something and shuffled about in his seat, staring at the kitchen floor.

‘Was that a yes or a no?’

‘You can get rid of them if you promise that’s all you’ll do. Only… your curiosity will get the better of you. You’ll open them. You won’t resist telling me what’s in them.’

‘I’ll resist.’ But he was right, she suspected.

‘No, Ida… they’ll stay closed. Maybe I’ll lock them up somewhere. I never use my sitting room anyway.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘You think so?’

‘Are you snapping at me, Midas?’

‘
Yes
. Because
you
brought all this about.’

Her fists clenched. ‘You can either apologize, or I can just leave.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that. I just—’

‘Are you going to let yourself be beaten by this… by this damned feeling things should never change, however fucked up they become? If you’re angry at me for making your life uncertain, you might as well grow a moustache and put on some fucking spectacles and
become
this figment of your imagination you think you despise.’

‘If it was imagination alone I’d—’

‘No! All you are is the body sitting in that chair! Your dad isn’t with you, Midas, not even in spirit. You keep going back to him so you don’t have to take responsibility for the things you despise in yourself. I’ve
got
to be blunt with you because there’s no time!’

He swallowed. ‘Come on, Ida. There’ll be time for us.’

She rolled her eyes.

‘Ida, wait, where are you going?’ He trotted after her.

She was already among the boxes. She tore savagely at the tape that held the first one shut. With his knuckles in his mouth Midas watched her turn the open box upside down and shake its contents on to the carpet. ‘You can’t…’

She ripped open another box and upended it. Dust and clutter fell in a shower.

One by one she tore through each package. When she picked up the final box she hesitated. ‘This is your last chance.’

He stepped closer and took it from her. He shook it experimentally, but it didn’t rattle. Everything would be compactly arranged inside. He picked off the tape. Smelled the old air as he peeled back the seal. Then he screwed up his eyes and turned the box upside down. Amid a brief rush of falling objects,
something bounced off his toe. He looked down and saw his father’s spare glasses spilled from their case.

Seeing the mess of objects on the floor, he wondered now what he’d expected. A morning suit, which in the box had been neatly folded, lay mangled on the carpet. A yellow rose, dried to a crisp, was still pinned in its lapel. A digital watch had stopped at 2:32 p.m. A toy car lay on its side. Midas gingerly picked it up. The metal was cold and the wheels jammed.
Midas Crook
was handwritten in a boy’s script (not his own) on its underside. He cupped it in his palm. It weighed next to nothing. These items were just his father’s leftovers. He felt no fear of them (he paused for a moment to check he hadn’t missed it). No books, no papers, no communiqué from the afterlife. Just… junk. He looked to Ida, who was smiling proudly. He realized he had expected some kind of pharaoh’s curse but he had not been struck down. He smiled back. It was not so hard, this bravery.

He couldn’t stay upright any more. With a sigh of relief he sat down and lay back, among his father’s old things and their dust.

‘What are you going to do with them?’ she asked after a while.

‘Throw them over a cliff,’ he murmured.

She cackled.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘I hadn’t meant for this morning to be like this.’ He got up. ‘There’s something else, too.’

He went to the cupboard under the stairs and removed a miniature safe. He spun its lock through several combinations, hesitated when it clicked at the right one, then yanked it open with grim determination. He pulled a book from within, as if it were a blockage from a wastepipe.

‘What is it?’

It was bound in black leather, with a grey ribbon stitched into the spine as a bookmark.

‘His filthy book. First draft. Handwritten. Passed down to me.’ He grinned. ‘Never. Even. Opened.’

‘Good,’ she said, ‘that’s good.’

His father woke in the night, heart rattling in his chest, and stumbled into the bathroom to cough into the sink. In the colourless dark he saw only grey fluid sliding grudgingly down the plughole, but he could taste blood and bile and when he pulled the light cord he saw spots of red in the basin, speckled with glass crystals the size of pinheads.

Unable to sleep, he went to the attic to finish taping and stacking his boxes. Then he lay with his hands over his eyes, surrounded by scrunched-up balls of paper: botched attempts at written explanations. All of his words were taped away in that other set of boxes downstairs, packed with his books and papers ready for flame. For a moment a smile floundered on his lips. He enjoyed the idea that life had been halved. His bookish, academic life had been severed from this life boxed in the attic, this remnant collection of experience and feeling.

He ran his cold hands across the surface of his body, feeling the bony arms, the smooth bald scalp, his cock and balls (thinking of their short effort in the creation of his son).

He tried to worry about what Midas would think of him. He didn’t care about worrying for Evaline (she’d find that other man, no doubt, that man who mailed her dead dragonflies) but he wanted to worry for the boy. Yet… every time he tried to he felt the sharp star of glass nuzzling his diaphragm, the pressure of blood forced through his veins. Then he felt fearful and knew what would happen to his body. He had done his research. He did not want to leave a petrified statue for others to gawp over.

At last he wrote
Dear Midas
, and upon writing it felt the other words he wanted to say flowing down his arm and into his pen-
hand, as if these first two were the bung keeping the others at bay.

He wasn’t sure if the Midas he was addressing was his son, or himself, or some amalgam of generations. At times he wondered if it were Evaline he were writing to, or his own gentle father with whom he had ended on such bad terms. Or perhaps his austere mother, or someone as yet a stranger to him: the offspring of his son, who he would never know, or a daughter-in-law, who he would never know. The only thing for certain was that writing had never felt like this: it was confessional, personal, where it had been a procession of theories and criticisms before. Pages filled with black lines like convoys of ants, and even when his heart burned and weighed like molten rock he managed to keep the words flowing. They ended abruptly, but they were exact. He knew he need not redraft these pages. When he tried to put down his pen, the muscles of his hand had cramped in their writing position.