The Girl With Glass Feet (37 page)

Midas spent his morning shift driving bouquet deliveries around Ettinsford and its surrounding hamlets. The last delivery on his list took him up to the granite pillared ridgeway past Tinterl. The ridge was a spine of stubby hilltops leading all the way across the islands to Lomdendol Tor itself. He hadn’t been up here since his father’s funeral and had been surprised when the order came in. The address given stuck in his mind from childhood: the uninhabitable crags around Wodenghyll Force, a vehement waterfall the size of five houses whose spray announced its
presence like the smoke from a bonfire. Driving uphill from Ettinsford, it seemed that every crack in every boulder bled a trickle of crystal water fuelled by the heavy snowfall. Unlike most things on the islands, the grey rock-faces and barren, crow-hunched slopes were as large as the ones he remembered from childhood. Minor falls blew from rock-faces into deep pools, splashing water across dented roads.

The waterfalls of Tinterl ridgeway had never endeared themselves to tourists. Even the gushing fury of Wodenghyll Force couldn’t draw the island’s visitors away from beaches and marine life. It was as dramatic as any great work of nature, but it lacked grandeur in its savagery. On the old island map of his father’s, Wodenghyll had the longest piece of annotation.

a howl echoing off hillsides.

saw thrush once sweep through water then crushed – bones bent

and scrunched.

here nature is self-loathing – every jag of rock an eyesore.

good.

Creepers and juicy black mosses had grown across the viewpoint above Wodenghyll Force. Midas’s tyres burst them like slugs as he parked. The bouquet sat beside him in the car, a narrow sheaf of sticks and flaky petals. Spray from the Force greased the sky, but he could still see a great distance across the island’s cloud-logged woodland. He couldn’t see a single house to which he could deliver the bouquet.

There was, however, a familiar car: the only other vehicle parked at the viewpoint.

Carl Maulsen slouched in the driver’s seat chewing his fingernails. Midas’s first thought was to call the police, but there was something demolished about Carl’s posture. The start of a
scruffy silver beard hung from his chin. Midas awaited the intimidated subordination he’d felt in the past around Carl, but it didn’t materialize. He walked over and tapped lightly on the window, enjoying this new confidence, what Ida said was bravery. Carl hesitated before winding the window down.

‘What’s this?’ asked Midas.

‘An apology.’

The back seats were piled up with rugs and pillows, a rucksack and a suitcase. Body odour wafted from the window.

‘Have you been sleeping in there?’

Carl opened the passenger door. ‘I can’t go back to the cottage. Hop in? Please?’

Midas shook his head. He’d leant closer to hear what Carl had said. Every other time they’d met, Carl’s voice had been bold and treacle-rich. Now the spaces in his sentences were full of the falls’ fury.

‘I’m going away, Midas. Perhaps to America. Away from these islands, that’s for sure.’

Midas was silent.

‘I think places take hold of us and we become mere parts of the landscape, taking on its quirks and follies. There are places on the mainland – perhaps you are too young to understand this – I can’t return to without feeling, without
becoming
, things I had thought tidied up and finished off. My university campus, a particular beach, a certain cinema. Just because of Freya Ingmarsson. She’s why I moved to St Hauda’s Land, don’t you see? Even though she was already dead when I moved here. She was a sun and boats person and this place was nothing like her. It was a good place to get away from her. But I brought bits of her with me. A horseshoe, a Christmas card. I tried to start again, but I brought bits of her with me. When Ida came to stay… Midas, it only served to remind me just how
much
I loved Freya.’ He groaned, covering his face with his bear’s hands. His nicotine
teeth were slanted and saw-like. Midas had remembered them as straight and white.

Midas stared at the monstrous shape of spray rising from Wodenghyll Deep where the falls drilled open the lake. The spray gobbled dainty snowflakes as they fell.

‘You’re a coward, Carl,’ he said, feeling a level of resolution he had barely known even days before. He wondered if this feeling was the one Ida meant when she talked about longing to sit on a boat in steady waters. A feeling steady as a spirit level, supported by great depths of tamed pressure.

‘You’re too afraid to admit the world doesn’t revolve around you. You think even the landscape is subordinate to you. You can get pretty far in life with an attitude like that, I can tell that even though I’ve never had the nerve myself. People respect you when they’re frightened of you. But I don’t think you can be in love and be like that.’

Carl’s hands were shaking where they rested on the steering wheel. ‘I loved Freya.’

‘But nobody could say the two of you were in love, Carl. There’s a difference, and I think in the end the difference was that she was as frightened of you as everyone else.’

Since there was nothing more to say, Midas turned and walked back to his car. He threw the bouquet on the ground and drove over it on his way home to Ida.

Carl remained in his car with the door open. The spray drifted in, making the inside feel like a damp room in an old house. Carl felt like a piece of its furniture rotting from within. He looked at the immediate horizon, the sudden drop into Wodenghyll Deep, and knew all it would take would be a turn of the ignition and a stamp on the accelerator.

He imagined the water slashing around him, pushing him
down to the lake bed, face first, no air, grit in his mouth and bones of fish. It was that or to carry on, move somewhere new, wait for the unappeased feelings in his gut to regurgitate. He couldn’t hope for any end, and if he provided one of his own devising, then what? Carl didn’t believe in an afterlife, even though he had needed one when Freya died. He had been stronger than that.

But suddenly strength seemed to him the failing that Midas had come out and claimed it was. Being strong had misled him, while a weakling like Midas wormed his way towards love, and
found
it. He laughed loud and bitterly, then stopped laughing abruptly.

These emotions had ruined him, this craving for a woman long gone, coming so powerfully from some bottomless well inside him that his best hope seemed now the dispossession of his body. He considered that to drive over Wodenghyll Force would be to go beyond bodies, to the nowhere where Freya was. Where at least Charles Maclaird was not. Yet.

He turned the key in the ignition. The engine fizzed and died. He tried again, but it wouldn’t spark. He climbed out, lifted the bonnet and thumped the machine parts beneath. The engine would not start. He zipped his jacket up tight and felt the spray from the waterfall infiltrating his clothes. He was cold. He tried to start the engine again in desperation. Cursing the car, he took his mobile phone from the glove compartment and turned it on. Its battery had died. He had been sleeping in his car and had not recharged it.

A sudden fury gripped him. He roared, spittle flying into the spray and faint snow then flying back on the wind to hit his jaw. The noise of his outburst swallowed in the never-ending battle cry of the falls.

He would fucking well
walk
down to Tinterl, collar the rector of the church there, or break open the door of some cottage or
other and demand the provision of shelter from the cold. He was not above using force and threats if he had to.

He paced off, staggering slightly in a wind that had begun to howl up the side of the ridgeway, lashing him with even denser spray and freezing drops. He kept walking, thundering along the road, stamping through the trickles from the smaller falls, bounding over deeper rivulets. Then he misjudged one jump and got both feet drenched. His toes went instantly cold and he thought of Ida hobbling away from him at Enghem Stead. He felt sick of being within himself, sick of having done all the things he had done. It was good that the Crook boy had found her.

A brilliant white sky hurt his eyes.

The road rounded a corner. He felt the wind peeling back his eyelids. Darts of sleet stung him and he walked with his shoulders squared against the splattering ice. He plodded on, finding it hard going, skidding on trails of water frozen across the tarmac. He turned another bend and stopped. To his left the hillside sloped away, to his right it rose steeply, and from this height a great sheet of snow had slid down to cake the road. He took a deep breath and tried to climb through it, but his foot sank and he fell. He scrambled onward on all fours, each arm and leg sinking deeper than expected. When finally he rolled out of the snowdrift on the other side, his teeth chattered and his breath crystallized in the air. Wiping moisture from his face, he tried to guess how far he had to go. The road drooped on and on ahead of him, snaking around rocks and crags into the sleet-obscured distance. No sign of Tinterl Church or any other building.

A sickly panic set in. Had he come the wrong way? He couldn’t see back past the snowdrift. He staggered onwards.

The sleet thickened, meshing into a feathery wall. For a moment he thought he saw a woman’s figure made from the particles, her arctic hair fluttering in the gale, but she had her back turned and he couldn’t tell whether it was Freya. She vanished as
quickly as she appeared. His limbs were stiff and unresponsive. He realized he would not make it to Tinterl Church. He wondered whether Ida’s legs felt as numb to her as his did now. He lay down in the snow in the middle of the road.

She watched the vapours from peat flats rise, made visible by cold. The milk-white of the sky reflected in channels of water and a rat that lay dead at the side of the road, tail and hind legs crucified by tyre treads.

They drove in comfortable quiet past trees wrapped in fleecy belts of green moss, past soupy pools and tracks of frosted peat.

It seemed that every time she forgot the absence of flesh beneath socks, forgot about glass locked around her legs by bolts made from her own bones, someone intent on curing her shattered that serenity. Midas had insisted they visit Henry again, to clutch at straws while precious days drained away.

Cures and preservation had been Carl’s talk. All that bullshit he showed her of Saffron Jeuck. Talking in vague terms about containing her condition.

The cottage approached, the ivy leaves on its walls rising in the breeze like shackles. She forced a weak smile for Midas, wanting only to sit with him and drive through endless landscapes.

Henry wasn’t home.

Peering through a grubby window, they could see the cottage was a mess. Books were spilled open on the sitting-room floor amid heaps of paper.

Midas scratched his head. ‘What now?’

A bird cried piercingly somewhere in the bog.

‘Midas,’ she said as they stood side by side in Henry’s garden, ‘to tell you the truth I’m happy Henry’s not here. I don’t want to look for a cure any more.’

‘But…’

‘Shhh,’ she said gently. ‘I want to show you something.’

She led him to the pen of the moth-winged cattle. She tried the handle. It was not locked. He followed her through the outer door and they smelled at once the pungent stink like battery hens. She opened the interior door to reveal the room of jingling birdcages.

She leant one crutch against the wall and used the hand it had freed to take one of his. She stepped into the centre of the pen and told him to stand very still.

The herd adjusted their flight to stream around them, a musty-smelling cascade of fur and wing. Ida gasped when a bull landed on her scalp and combed its horns through her hair. Another settled down beside it, and one on Midas’s shoulder, and another and another until the whole herd bristled on their shoulders and scalps, snorting and shaking their little heads, flitting their wings and stamping their match-head hoofs.

Then they began to low musically across the gap between them. She pulled him closer by the hand until they stood within inches of each other, the cows humming and the bulls snorting in symphony. A calf with bluebell-coloured wings leant against its mother, tilted back its head and gave a moo like the note of a flute.