The Girl With Glass Feet (39 page)

Emiliana Stallows had spent the past few days on the mainland. After she had left Enghem she had telephoned a seafront hotel in Glamsgallow to book a night’s accommodation, but she changed her mind the moment she checked in. She had stood for a minute or two at the reception desk in the cosy lobby, ignoring the receptionist’s questions, unable to think about anyone except Ida Maclaird. Then she had asked for the return of her credit card, shouldered her bag and headed out along the rain-soaked promenade to the ferry terminal.

She hadn’t enjoyed the crossing. The ferry had rocked from side to side so severely that, looking out of the window, the dark sea seemed parallel to the glass. The saving grace was the small feeling of purpose the journey gave her. All the time she held, tight in her fist, the crumpled address of Saffron Jeuck’s family.

Their home was hard to find, in a residential estate in a newly built town whose roads were narrow and whose houses were compressed in ordered rows of clean brick. There was an awkward moment when Mr Jeuck answered the door, the first of an entirely awkward afternoon.

Emiliana had known that Saffron took her own life because of the glass. That had always seemed a ghastly enough end to the story, and to pry into the details of the girl’s final acts seemed cruel. Only now was Emiliana gripped by the hope that something could be learnt from the whole sorry tale. Something for Ida.

Leaving the Jeuck house, having heard the opposite of what she’d hoped for, she burst into tears. In her last hours, Saffron had yelled for her father, and he had run to her to sit with her body propped up against his. Together they had watched an unexpected final phase of the transformation into glass. In the days preceding, Saffron had complained of a feeling of weakness, as if her body had been engaged in a long battle which it was now, through sheer exhaustion, surrendering. As the flesh gave in, the glass entered at unprecedented speed. Long before, father and daughter had discussed what they would do in such circumstances, but Mr Jeuck’s hands were too shaky to open the safety cap on the little white bottle of pills. Saffron had to open them herself, tip them on to her tongue, and swallow with a dry gurgle.

‘You’ve got to tell me where Ida is,’ Emiliana insisted, leaning over the counter in Catherine’s. ‘It’s urgent that I speak to her. Or Midas. Can I speak to Midas?’

‘Slow down,’ said Gustav calmly. ‘They’ve taken a boat out to sea. They could be anywhere, as long as it’s on the ocean.’

She thumped the counter. ‘It’s just…’ she said despairingly, ‘she’s very unwell. And I have some terrible news she has to know…’

‘There’s no way to tell her. And even if there was, are you sure she’d really want to hear it?’

The cliffs here had been torn open recently, leaving chalky caves where blocks of debris had fallen on to the beach. Two dilapidated jetties poked into the water, one of them broken in
two, with a scuttled and rusting whaling yacht beside it. Sheets of its hull jagged from the water ahead of its snapped mast.

Ida reclined in a rowing boat and watched Midas pace up and down on the intact jetty, its planks juddering with each step. She watched in admiration. His neuroses were still there, only now he was going to defy them. He just needed his warm-up. He growled, bent himself around to face the boat and bent away again, scared like a ghost to cross water. She held out a hand. He took such a deep breath she swore she saw the air bend as it surged into him. Then he leapt and the boat bucked as he landed in a heap. He clung to the wood with his nails, like a drenched cat, not realizing this was what he had been struggling towards, not trusting water enough to let it keep the boat upright. Only when the vessel was floating peaceful as a sheet of paper did he experimentally remove his hands from its sides.

After that he sat quietly with knees huddled to his chest while Ida rowed. She’d worried she’d not be able to brace herself without legs, but the glass anchored her and gave her a centre to heave from. They headed out to sea. The shore became a chalk line on a stone wall.

The sandy seabed looked like it was smelting into the water. The clear vault turned into hazy depths as they rowed further out. Fine sea mist phased the horizon into a blank atmosphere smelling of salt.

She was content just to look at him while he, dumbly grateful, responded in kind. She suspected that brotherhoods of monks in shadowy abbeys felt the same electricity of kinship in the air.

To use his own father’s analogy, that Carl had repeated to her on a day not so long ago when snow had cooped them inside his cottage: there were still garments to be shed. She smiled at the idea that she had at least got Midas down to his socks and his Y-fronts. There were more layers to a person than an analogy of
vests and anoraks could sustain, and she suspected that while you were peeling the outer layers away, new ones were being stitched together on the inside.

A pattern of spume, frothed up by the oars, floated behind the boat like a wedding dress. She wondered if she would ever have married him, and that surprised her so much she felt the idea of it almost rock her out of the boat. She’d never thought of marriage like that before, never felt comfortable picturing herself in a dress with a hanging train and a suited groom offering a ring.

‘What’s wrong?’ Midas asked.

‘Nothing.’

It couldn’t have been like that of course, since she’d never have been able to stand at an altar feeling blood in her calves pumping around her wriggling toes. But pretending things were just beginning made her head feel pleasantly light.

‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered.

‘Nothing.’ She held the side of the boat. ‘Just a little seasick. That’s all.’

‘You told me you’d never been seasick in all your life.’

She rubbed her eyes. ‘I suppose there’s a first time for everything.’

In truth, her thighs ached with a new kind of latent numbness. She couldn’t feel anything in her legs, but she had a hunch there was something there, something building up. She shook her head and looked out to sea for a distraction. She saw one at once.

In the water huge, elegant bodies moved. A narwhal pod. Funny, she thought, how invisible such huge creatures could make themselves under only a little water. She remembered she had dived once between a mother humpback and her calf. In cyan equatorial oceans.

The whale bodies grew more defined as they swam higher in
the water.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for coming out here with me.’

He was watching her anxiously.

Not far away, a spiralled spike parted the water and rose like a spear. Another pierced the surface and saluted beside it. The two tusks touched blindly.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said.

‘I’m not frightened. Well… a little.’

The tusks were followed by blunt heads with stargazing, infantile eyes. Whale bodies tore open the sea as if it were wrapping paper. They bulged to the surface crisped with barnacles, their blubber streaked with flashes of black and white like obsidian and quartz. They defied the weight of water for a few moments before grudgingly slipping back under the sea, disappearing in craters of ocean, leaving only a puff of breath hanging in the cold air.

Then tails raked the water. Bubbles fizzed on the surface.

Midas was engrossed. It was dawning on him that he had never considered what the sea was like when it wasn’t set against the land. It was another planet.

The last and largest narwhal tail creaked into a salute and stretched its heart shape against the sky before slipping under. The pod was diving deeper, disappearing where light couldn’t follow.

Midas turned back to Ida with an awestruck smile on his face.

She was leaning over the other side of the boat, making it rock closer to the water. He scrabbled forward and seized the oars she’d left hanging in their sockets.

‘I’m okay,’ she groaned, against the evidence.

‘Just try to, er, breathe. Breathe calmly. This will pass over.’

She rested her forehead against the wood. She ran her hands down her thighs and squeezed her knees.

‘We should get back to land,’ he said.

He tried to row like she had. The boat spun. The oars slapped uselessly and tossed beads of water through the air.

‘Stop,’ she pleaded.

She lifted up her skirt. A half-inch of faultless glass covered her thighs. Beneath it sheets of bruised muscle strained. He let go of the oars and they scraped back into their locks.

She grabbed him so tight that her squeezing fingernails stabbed his skin. Together they stared mutely at her knees. The joints had locked.

She opened her coat and lifted her jersey. Her belly’s surface was losing its details of moles and follicles as they watched. Flesh was receding, leaving a flat screen behind. Purple ligaments within vanished like soil scattered by a brush. The light twinkled in her glass navel. It hinted at the silhouetted mass of her intestines moving beneath layers of hardening fat.

‘We’ll get to shore,’ Midas croaked, reaching again for the oars.

She pawed her hands up his arms and held them tight. When he got the message she felt her way up to his neck and cheeks to force their faces together. They kissed with eyes locked on each other’s. He felt her elbows and forearms tighten. Grip slacken. Warmth of her ribs against his palms go cool.

Her soft skin leadened. He ran his hands through her hair. Held her cheeks.

Her lips plied his. Her tongue counted his teeth. Her eyelashes dripped tears on to his face.

Her grip on his arms went flat. Her lips were a fading clot. She butted her head against his. The lenses of her eyes gelled.

The black dots of her pupils became pinpricks; closed like locks; were gone. For a moment her head was a glaciated rose, then it was empty.

He started to shake and cried, ‘Help!’ for all the good it could do. He was still held in her frozen embrace. When at last he withdrew his hands from her hair, unable to look at her face, he heard snapping. Glass fibres that had been her hairs clung to his fingers and
cut criss-cross lacerations into his skin. Her arms still clutched his shoulders. He would have to contort himself to leave her.

Hidden in a tightening ring of sea mist, he lost track of how much time was passing, although each moment felt long and painful, each intake of breath like lifting a great weight. The mist grew greyer and dimmer. He was not aware of it. He was only aware of the ongoing movements of his body compared to the utter stillness of hers. His stomach rumbled and he loathed it for doing so. His gaze remained locked on his lap, and only after what must have been hours could he summon the courage required to look at Ida again.

Her glass face, transfixed in a kiss, was a mask over nothing. He shuffled closer, feeling the boat lurch and the water slosh beneath. He could see through her empty eyes into solid glass. ‘Where have you gone?’ he asked, desperately reaching out and touching again the laminate surface of her cheek. In this block of cold silica the thoughts and will of a person had been. A will that he’d felt tug his own out of inertia and make him more than he had ever been before. He could not understand where that had gone now. It was not in her body… unless the crossed wires of thought and feeling that made up a person were kept somewhere deeper, in the heart or guts as he had so often felt in himself. He grabbed the bottom of her jersey and raised it to expose her glass waist. The blue of the top she had been wearing showed through her back and out of her stomach. Her belly was as empty as her head.