The Girl With Glass Feet (36 page)

He had written almost exclusively about the glass blooming in his heart. About the empty noise of his heartbeat, like a wineglass struck by a fork. About the pain he experienced when labouring up a flight of stairs, or walking too briskly down the street to buy a newspaper. The same pain that stabbed him whenever his pulse was set racing. A stroke from his wife’s hand could do it, could make his chest fill with spikes. A photograph of a library that his boy had left as a gift on his study desk had done it, had wrung his oesophagus and dug claws in his lungs.

He leant back in his chair and wondered what should now become of these new pages. It was plainly too late to hand them over: it risked the formation of an emotional moment, and such a thing might deter him from his course of action. No, a better idea had already come to him. He tapped his forefinger along the spines on one bookshelf until he found the first draft of
On Beauty
, which he’d had bound in leather that was dark as black treacle. It was useless returning to bed, for now both the pain in
his chest and his excitement were keeping him a-buzz. He put on his tweed jacket and corduroys and went to the car with
On Beauty
in one hand and his newly scrawled letter in the other. Books. Reading. Magic of pen and paper. His boy had yet to discover it, but perhaps reading this letter would be the turning point. He’d written of everything that had terrified him and more. He had described the X-rays, the moment he first confronted that dark, transparent cartography of himself. He believed this letter would be the connection between father and son he had always dreamt would spark, since the day the boy was concocted.

He drove out under the stars, along dead-of-night roads, all the way to Glamsgallow. He parked outside the little college bookbinder, the letter and the leather-bound draft readied on his lap: waiting for daybreak, opening time, a chance to set things right.

Midas and Ida drove south towards Gurmton, picking up the high, cliff-top road. A fog was heaped on the sea, making it hard to tell how high they were. When they parked at a deserted viewpoint and Midas dragged the boxes to the very cusp of the land, he looked as if he were standing on the banks of a lake of clouds. Puffed white pillows stretched to the horizon. It was more heavenly than he would have liked.

The first thing he pulled from the boxes was his father’s morning suit. He held it up to the wind, which grabbed it before he had even let go, whipping the trousers out of his grip then stealing the jacket. The clothes flailed away into the fog. His father’s spectacles followed, catching in the air like a spinning top. A set of whalebone poker dice, rattling away into the clouds. An old neckerchief he had never seen his father wear, ducking down through the vapour like a waterlogged butterfly. Piece by piece he
let his father’s remains ghost away, and when they had all been tossed over the cliff into the clouds, he hurled the cardboard boxes after them.

Finally, there was the book, which Ida handed to him with some ceremony. For a moment he had second thoughts and wondered whether, if he could bear to decipher its academic scribble, he might somehow know why its author had abandoned life. But as he held it in his hands, ran a finger over the cover, was careful not to bend the spine as he opened it for the first time on to still crisp pages, he had a vivid memory of his father performing the exact same ritual motions. He ripped the pages from their binding and chucked them furiously into the air. They battled the wind like terrified creatures, flapping against each other.

Then an unexpected thing happened: he yelled involuntarily. ‘No!’ was what he yelled. He reached for the madly dancing pages, his father’s weird script jiggling in the sky, but they were already blowing far out of reach, away across clouds. He tripped forward as he lurched after them, and Ida had to grab him to stop him from blundering over the edge. She yanked him back from the cliff and he lost his footing and fell sideways towards the grass, grabbing at her arm and accidentally pulling her with him. She shrieked as she fell, but his body cushioned her landing, and although she puffed and wheezed for a few minutes, she couldn’t have been too distraught, for she then laid her cheek against his and remained on top of him, their faces pressed together looking seaward, at an endless terrain of clouds.

They lay like that for he didn’t know how long, him marvelling at how light her body was, except for down around her knees, where he could feel the way the glass bound her to the ground.

Then he felt a tear against his face. Alarmed, he reached to wipe her cheek. Her skin was soft and dry. She smiled. It had only been a raindrop. Another plopped into the grass beside them.
Pillars of the sea mist had risen into the air above them and were expanding into clouds of rain. Ida, carefully, sat herself up. He got to his feet, helped her to hers, and was leading her back to the car when she stopped him with a gentle tap on the hip from one of her crutches. She pointed with it to a spot in the grass where a crumpled page of paper was caught. The rain tip-toed around it.

He remembered how he had choked up as the pages of the book had flown into the clouds. He approached this remaining page nervously, then snatched it up.

The rain and moisture on the grass had blurred the ink, spreading every letter into a watery blotch of blue and black. It was indecipherable, apart from the first two words, set apart at the top left of the page.

Dear Midas.

It brought a lump to his throat. By now the other pages would be miles away, through the opaque mist, but it didn’t matter what was written on them – his father’s effort and secrecy were enough. If the words were hurtful, his father would have spoken them freely, never going to such covert trouble. Midas, very deliberately, screwed up the page. But he didn’t throw it after the others. He pressed it into his shirt pocket, turned to Ida, and dredged up a smile that turned genuine when she pressed her lips to his.

Unlike the southern coast where Midas and Ida now lay, the eastern shores of the archipelago were clear, and the cliff tops overlooked a cove of spiky rocks and wrecked ships. Henry Fuwa sat with legs dangling over the cliff and the wind flapping his trouser legs. He took Midas Crook’s glass heart from its carrier bag, which the wind dragged at once high into the air, scrunched
up and revolved on the spot before puffing out like a blowfish to send soaring towards the rocking horizon.

He laid the heart on his lap. The colour of his trousers shimmered through it.

‘You and I rarely met,’ he said, ‘but even so I have tried hard to understand you.’

Puffins hollered on a distant pyramid of rocks.

‘I realize now it hasn’t been
you
that’s nagged me through the years, but what was
happening
to you.’

He tapped the glass heart with his fingernails.

‘Of course, you handled it badly, took it out on others. Never faced it. So I’d hate you to think I kept this out of sympathy. Your hold on me was just… A delay while I tried to understand. Now that I do… I’ve realized what a coward you were in the end. For killing yourself rather than fighting. Because…
What if
?’

He picked up the cold glass heart and judged its weight on his palms. He could sense the cliff drop through his wellington boots. The wind swept back his hair, smattered his face with sleet and plied his lips from his gums.

He thought about the body from the bog. ‘You stopped hoping, didn’t you, a very long time ago, that there was a “what if ”? So
what if
, even had you transformed entirely into glass, you could turn back again?’

He didn’t believe in it himself. But his point was that there was little more than belief to be had.

He casually tossed the heart over the cliff. It plummeted. It smashed in time with enraged waves. An explosion of froth twinkled below as a thousand studs of glass and water expanded and shrank in a final vapid heartbeat, before pattering into the sea.

He sighed. His thoughts were full of orbiting Evalines. ‘I don’t think there’s a
what if
either,’ he said, ‘but I still hope to find one, somewhere.’

With Midas out, working at Catherine’s, Ida didn’t find his home so cosy. She realized she was simply awaiting his return and decided to get out of the house. She laboured uphill against snowflakes wending their way down, and came to the nearest place she could think of to sit undisturbed. The trees in the graveyard of the church of Saint Hauda reached clawed arms towards their brethren in the woods further uphill.

The only soul in the church, she sat on a cushioned pew and breathed the smell of old candle wax. A stained-glass window portrayed the heavenly host impassively observing Saint Hauda’s flight across the Ettinsford strait, carried over the water by a flock of sparrows. The colour had faded from the glass and it was lit now, as she supposed was inevitable, in monochrome. White flowers bloomed in a vase on the altar. She presumed the flowers had come from Catherine’s.

A vicar crept from a vestry door into the church hall, swiped the hymn numbers from their board and vanished again. A bible lay on the shelf attached to the back of the pew in front of her. She slid it gently aside and laid, in its place, her head on the wood.

As a kid she had witnessed a landslide. A cliff giving in to the water. She had been picnicking with her mother and father on the opposite side of the bay where it happened, looking on as the brilliant sunlight found the warm gold in the cliffs. It had been a calm day and the sea was flat and azure. Then suddenly the rocks across the bay were sliding seaward, as if they had been chopped up by a cheese wire. Cubic boulders came free of the coast in slow motion, trailing a yellow glitter of sandstone met by
a spray of froth in midair. In the space of thirty seconds the shape of the cliff had changed to a mangle of rubble and grass, and the sea stroked over the amber stone the land had given up on.

She had sometimes wondered what had happened invisibly to the insides of that cliff. What hairline cracks and hidden chasms had stealthily prepared it for its final surrender. In the last few days there had been aches in parts of her body that had never ached before. A pain in the inside of a rib. A pain up the length of her spine. A pain in her inside thigh that had felt the size of a cavern.

She looked up at the other stained-glass windows in the church. A variety of saints had all faded out of colour, just like Saint Hauda had. It would take someone with biblical knowledge on the level of her father’s to know which figure was which; to Ida they were all impassive. Beautiful ghosts. A virginal woman with an urn was nearest. Looking through her face and robes, Ida could make out the motion of a tree in the graveyard beyond, shaking its branches in the wind.

She shook herself, then; struggled up and left the church on her crutches, the echoes of their placements tapping off the roof above her.