The Girl With Glass Feet (38 page)

‘I’m not going to be cured,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s forget about it from this moment on.’

On maps of the islands the sands north of Clammum-on-Drame were an outstretched hand trying in vain to ward off arctic winds. Geologists claimed the sands had long ago been craggy highland plains, which an earthquake in antiquity had humbled to sea level. As evidence, cuboids of granite rose out of grey beaches, flat-topped or sheared at diagonals.

Ida and Midas drove the raised concrete road that traversed the quicksands, leaving tyre tracks in the deep layer of sand blown over the route. Their destination was Clammum Knoll, a gently sloping hillock at the northernmost point of the sands.

They sat huddled close together, on a bench at the tip of the knoll, watching the sea or looking back across the shining beaches dissected by the road and flooded channels of saltwater. Sombre storks and curlews plodded this way and that, and a cormorant croaked on the husk of a wrecked boat that lay on the beach like a whale’s skull.

Northwards was an opaque horizon. This was the wind’s first stop since sweeping over glaciers and pack ice. Today it simply whispered and didn’t dent the water face.

‘I always wanted to go to the North Pole,’ said Ida, pointing into the distance.

‘You will.’

‘I wouldn’t last two seconds.’

‘You don’t know…’

The salt from the ocean dried and cancelled out the salty tears in her eyes. She remembered her father salting a fillet of cod with his mind elsewhere, when the bad feeling between them was
strongest. She surveyed the infinite sea before her and wondered how much salt you’d find if you boiled off all the water.

‘Have you ever seen the seabed?’ she asked, knowing he hadn’t. She wanted to talk about it and relive it through doing so. ‘Deep down it’s like twilight. You can see salt trails in the water like ghosts.’

Midas shook his head, smiling. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that. It always surprises me how much more you’ve managed to do than me.’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘All I’m saying is… I love just sitting with you, like this.’

The world was as monochrome as the day they’d first met, the sea as dark as vinyl. The cormorant on the wrecked hull took off and flew low over the black water.

‘Midas… I’d love to sit like this on a boat with you.’

‘All right.’

‘What?’ She hadn’t expected him to say that.

‘All right,’ he said, slower this time.

She pressed ahead before he had a chance to back out. ‘The weather forecast is clear for tomorrow. We’ll rent the boat and go out as far as we can. As long as the sea’s clear, I should be able to row a bit.’

He gulped. ‘Okay.’

‘Midas! What’s brought out the seafarer in you?’

‘Actually, I’m still terrified, but… a lot of things. Tearing up my father’s book was… liberating. I owe you for that.’

‘Ah, so you want to repay me?’

‘No. Um, well yes, but not with this.’

‘Right?’

‘I don’t think I can repay you enough.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t be so serious.’

‘But…’ He hung his head.

She shoved him playfully. He sat back up, looking hurt, so she shoved him again. This time he shoved her back and she squealed as she toppled over and lay on her side on the grass.

‘Jesus,’ she groaned, ‘I can’t even sit up.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, no, just help me up. My stomach’s cold. Freezing. All around my hips.’

He helped her up.

Their spot was a heightened level of concrete that the tide would have to rise six feet to cover, so the knoll was safe from water. The sunset, like a blacksmith, was beating the sky into glowing red blades.

They sat quietly and watched it glow. She laid her head on his shoulder. He laid his against her crown.

‘I should take a photo.’

‘No. Just remember it, and us in it.’

He swallowed.

She smiled. Here was rightness of place and time.

They kissed. The wind trickled over them.

Before his next shift at Catherine’s, he left Ida a bunch of pale yellow narcissi on the table. She sat among them writing Christmas cards, which she’d asked Midas to choose, since she felt weary at the thought of shopping.

He had tried to pick cards she’d like. She knew, from old ones he’d kept, where his own tastes lay. Black-and-white photos of Christmases past. Stony-faced mothers holding the hands of smock-wearing children on cobbled streets. Gaslight lampposts aglow in reels of snow. Church doors decked with spindly holly wreaths. Despite these monochrome images he loved, the ones he’d selected for her were pretty and colourful. A set of four designs all showed photos of deer in snowy glens. A speckled faun stared wide-eyed from a holly thicket where red berries brought out the ruddy sheen of its fur. A doe stood among a fallen oak’s horizontal branches, wearing a comical cap of blue-tinged snow. A stag and his mate rubbed elegant necks under boughs hung with green mistletoe.

She opened the first Christmas card and plugged an ink cartridge into her fountain pen. Without concentrating she wrote
Mum and Dad
, then tore up the card and opened another to write only
Dad
. She put her pen down, breathing heavily. A hot cramp squeezed her bowels and made blood rush to her head. She concentrated on breathing.

Before Midas had left she’d told him that she was feeling better. She didn’t mention that her hips were filled with a new, hot kind of paralysis. Like an insatiable rash on the underside of her skin. A woolliness in her muscles there was interrupted regularly by
these blazing pains. She could guess what it meant.

Her fingernails scraped the table’s paintwork as the pain flared again. She gritted her teeth. The agony subsided and she wheezed. When she had told Midas about feeling better, the relief on his face got the biggest smile yet out of him and he kissed her freely without hesitation.

It was still true, even though her body might hurt more than ever because of him. Him and her.

She sighed. Imagining turning to glass made her feel as if a trapdoor had opened up inside her and all her courage had fallen through. She thought how young she was, to be suffering like this, and how that made it seem all the more undeserved. Yet she had done all those youthful things, and even when she’d plummeted (the air whistling over her ears, the bungee cable spiralling behind her) she’d felt nothing as compulsive as the will she felt now, to cling to Midas. It would be impossible to break the news that she knew she wasn’t getting better. She could feel the encroachment of the glass like an animal feeling the tremor before an earthquake. He would not understand if she told him.

She had felt a collision with him and known that she had wanted this her whole life: to crash for just one moment into another person at such a velocity as to fuse with him.

That moment had come not at the height of a night’s passion, as she’d expected, but in the morning when their eyes opened at the same time and felt for focus in each other’s. They were newborns, wide-eyed, sharing their first breath of the world. Then it was over as quickly as it had come. Midas had blushed and looked away from her. She had reached out to hold his face.

Now that she had felt that moment, all she wanted was to feel it again. When he had walked out of the door for work that morning she had felt the temperature of the room drop, the ache in her pelvis redouble, the skin across her hips go sore. She supposed in the meantime it would be pleasant enough to
pretend there was a future.

She wrote
Merry Christmas Dad, from Ida
, blew on the ink, put the card in the envelope, then hesitated with her tongue an inch away from licking the gum. She took the card back out of the envelope, the lid back off her pen, and wrote

… also, Dad, there’s a chance we may not see each other for a little while. I wanted to tell you how happy I’ve been lately. I met a man. I don’t know whether you’ll get to meet him any time soon so let me tell you all about him. He was very shy at first, but I saw to that. He has a small house in a small town on an island. You’d like it here. As you’d put it: you can hear yourself think at night. He’s a photographer. Most of all, you should know I’m in love with him. I think you said once that love should be what matters. I wholeheartedly concur.

She blew on the ink, having run out of space on the card. She put it in the envelope, sealed it, and savoured the taste of the stamp on her tongue.

Overnight the head of a fat old rose in Catherine’s had shed petals like burnt bits of ribbon into a glass vase. Midas stared sadly at the warped red planets in the water’s cosmos and thought of Ida’s legs. That morning they’d woken in time with each other and he hadn’t recognized the feel of his own bed or the noise of the street outside. Hadn’t recognized the feel of old blankets soft on his skin. Hadn’t recognized Ida, had seen her as if for the first time. As if she were the first thing he had ever seen.

He put the healthy roses into a new vase and poured the contents of the first into the sink. Petals whirled around the stainless steel then crumpled in the plughole. He went to the window and arranged tubers of bleached wood among satin tulips. There was something conspiratorial about flowers. He
often sensed, when he was alone in a room of them, their petals whispering on a frequency beneath human hearing. Outside, a weak fog contained the street and made it look like a sound stage pumped with dry ice. The town beyond was only imagination.

He sighed. He wanted this shift to end. Wanted to return to Ida. Even though that afternoon they would be going out in a boat (of which he was terrified).

He had felt paranoid all day. First thing that morning he’d erased all the photos he had of Ida. He’d watched her as she slept while he booted up his laptop. Her hair was in a frizz, her lips were chafed. He hoped she was sleeping well. He didn’t want her to wake again groping at her ankles as if trying to disprove a nightmare.

His photos had all been of her feet. They weren’t
Ida
. That was why he’d erased them.

Light didn’t conduct truth as once he’d thought. There was nothing you could do to preserve truth. Light was only of use as a metaphor for the ungraspable moment. Until there was a kind of camera invented that could return you entirely to a moment from your past, pictures such as those were no use. At first he’d felt a thrill upon deleting them. Without them he had only her flesh, hair, glass. Reality had been liberating. Only now, surrounded by the familiar, pollinated air, dealing with the humdrum demands of customers, he was beginning to doubt his wisdom.

The door chimed and opened. A flap of wind quivered the tulips. Midas remembered Ida entering Catherine’s not long ago, with only a slim walking stick to support her. This time it was Gustav, which meant his shift was over.

Gustav looked staggered. ‘What’s got into you?’

Midas was jittering about on the spot. ‘I’m going out to sea. On a boat with Ida,’ he said.

‘This girl’s really done wonders for you. I’d never in a million years think I’d see the day when you get on a boat. It was more
likely you’d get in a bloody spaceship.’

Midas, pulling on his jacket as he passed him in the doorway, grinned with a mixture of happiness and terror, and bolted away back home down the street.

Gustav shook his head and took his seat at the desk, unpacking a sausage and barbecue sauce sandwich and the day’s newspaper. He had been through it cover to cover and was halfway through re-reading the sports pages when the door chimed and a woman in a chic black raincoat stepped timidly in. She had long black hair and wasn’t wearing any make-up to cover the bags under her eyes.

‘I’m looking for Ida Maclaird,’ she said urgently. ‘Do you know where I can find her?’