The Girl With Glass Feet (4 page)

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘it’s on me.’

‘Ugh… ’ he wiped his eyes with his wrists. ‘A gin, if you please. Just a neat single gin with ice.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Henry Fuwa.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Henry Fuwa. I’m Ida Maclaird.’

He dried his glasses on a tatty sweater. ‘Thank you for your kindness, Ida.’

The Barnacle’s landlady leant one flabby arm on the bar while the other gesticulated in time with blurred vowels as she held forth to two regulars. The regulars sat on stools at the bar, dressed in short trousers and identical pairs of red socks stitched with white anchors. Pictures of St Hauda’s Land’s football team through the ages hung in chronological order along the walls. A sepia band of moustachioed, felt-cap-wearing gents morphed slowly down the years into a mix of spiky-haired and gap-toothed lads dressed in the club’s ice-blue strip.

The jukebox played guitar solos from the seventies, and Ida thought how badly aged some of the tracks sounded, trapped like flies in the jam jar of the pub. Broken air-conditioning snored behind the bar and did nothing about the muggy summer. She glanced back at the table where Henry Fuwa sat motionless with his head in his hands.

She wondered what her ex would make of this, proposing drinks with oddballs off the street. She sometimes wished she possessed the flawed kind of taste that drew girls to arseholes who wanted that one thing alone. You knew that kind of guy, that breed of ox-necked brute who would not be averse to wearing the same football shirt every day of the week. Who had a glamour model screensaver that made him fiddle in his pants each time it was displayed.

Not that this was a romantic endeavour. This guy was nearly as old as her dad. She took a long draught of her lager while she waited for Henry’s gin to be served.

She wasn’t that kind of girl. Instead (at times it seemed uncontrollably) she went after blokes who were wound into knots over who they were and how they tied into the world. The first time she’d lured her ex to a restaurant it had been all she could do to snap him out of the reverie he entered, only for him to emerge spouting nonsense about how she was a princess, a goddess, even a fucking mermaid one time he called her.

And now he had ditched her. He was too introverted for her, he’d said, swallowing between every word. Sweet idiot.
A girl like you shouldn’t be hanging out with a guy like me. I’m worried I’m holding you back.

She carried the drinks to the table. Henry Fuwa looked a little more composed. He rubbed his sleeve across his nose.

‘So,’ she began, ‘are you from around here?’

‘Some miles away. But I live on St Hauda’s Land, yes.’

‘Did you make that ornament? Is that why you’re sad? A lot of work went into it, I bet.’

‘No. It was an old jewellery box that belonged to my mother.’

‘I mean… the figurine inside. Did you make that?’

His lips began to wobble again.

‘It was a kind of music-box, right? Such a shame. I thought it was pretty. How did you get the wings to stay attached to the little bull’s body?’

He studied her for a moment, then gave a dejected shrug. ‘I raised it.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘But the most unfortunate thing happened. They like to fly down to the water – to the beach near where I keep them. If they ever escape I know that’s where they’ll head. It’s the salt, or something in the make-up of the ocean. They weigh very little, you see. Little enough to stand on the surface like that fruitfly floating in your beer.’

The sight of the bug, all six legs cycling in the dissolving head
of her drink, distracted her for a moment from her incredulity.

‘But yesterday… the tide was in. And there were jellyfish in the shallows. The bull in that box landed on the surface and, as I explained, they love to…’ He ran his hands through his hair and stared ashen-faced into his gin.

She fished out the fruitfly and wiped it on to her beer mat.

He started up again. ‘The sting… it received…
People
don’t always recover from jellyfish attacks, so what hope is there for a moth-winged bull? My last resort was a clinic down by the seafront, set up to treat jellyfish victims. I would have had to explain
everything
but…’

He took an unpractised slurp of his gin and put it back down with a lick of his lips.

She had yet to decide whether he was lying (to try to impress her?) or just nuts. The latest tune from the jukebox was a tedious soppy love song. She sipped her lager. ‘I take it this… moth-winged bull… was the only one in existence?’

‘No. There are sixty-one in known existence. All back at my pen. Sorry… There are only sixty now.’

‘That’s… incredible.’

She knew he could tell she didn’t believe him. He shrugged gloomily. ‘They eat and shit and get themselves killed like everything else.’

‘And you’re the only person in the world who knows about them?’

‘They’re my secret.’ He took a longer sip of his gin and blinked hard as he swallowed it, his expression describing the descent of the alcohol in his throat. She wondered when he’d last had a drink, then wondered if he were plain drunk. He leant across the table as earnest as hobos she’d seen in her dad’s police cells.

‘Would you believe there’s an animal in the woods who turns everything she looks at pure white?’

She sighed. ‘No. I don’t. Believe it.’

He leant back, scratching his beard. Then he tried leaning forward again. ‘Would you believe there are glass bodies here, hidden in the bog water?’

‘No. You’ve got black hair and a healthy complexion for one thing.’

‘I don’t see what that’s got… Ah, wait. I didn’t say she’d seen
me
.’

She watched his eyes boggle as he drained the gin. He held a hand to his forehead and wagged his finger. ‘You bought me a double…’

‘What kind of animal is she?’

‘She’s white all over, as you’d expect, except for on the back of her head where she can’t see herself.’

Ida had been through three fingers of her pint in the space it had taken him to finish his glass.

‘What colour?’

‘
White
.’

‘What colour’s the back of her head?’

‘Blue.’

She smiled sweetly. ‘What do you do for a living, Henry?’

‘I’m too occupied with the…’ he snapped his mouth shut and looked suddenly sober. ‘Of course. You think I’m some kind of nut.’

‘It’s not that…’

He stood up, fiddled through his wallet and stacked the cost of the gin on the table in coins.

‘It was on me,’ she said.

He walked out of the pub. After a moment of feeling frustrated at herself, she left the coins and jogged after him, but he was nowhere to be seen in the hot street. White gulls pecked at the remains of fish and chips, gobbling batter and polystyrene tray alike. For a moment she thought the whitest of them had white eyes, but it was only a trick of the light.

From an aeroplane the three main islands of the St Hauda’s Land archipelago looked like the swatted corpse of a blob-eyed insect. The thorax was Gurm Island, all marshland and wooded hills. The neck was a natural aqueduct with weathered arches through which the sea flushed, leading to the eye. That was the towering but drowsy hill of Lomdendol Tor on Lomdendol Island, which (local supposition had it) first squirted St Hauda’s Land into being. The legs were six spurs of rock extending from the south-west coast of Gurm Island, trapping the sea in sandy coves between them. The wings were a wind-torn flotilla of uninhabited granite islets in the north. The tail’s sting was the sickle-shaped Ferry Island in the east, the quaint little town of Glamsgallow a drop of poison welling on its tip.

Glamsgallow boasted St Hauda’s Land’s only airport, but most aeroplanes crossed the islands before turning to land, flying over the other settlements. In the north of Gurm, walled off to the public, was Enghem, the private property of Hector Stallows, the local millionaire. Built at the foot of Lomdendol Tor, Martyr’s Pitfall was a town for the elderly. On Sunday afternoons the shadow of the tor covered the buildings and streets. Couples trickled from retirement homes to walk and sit in landscaped graveyards. By contrast, Gurmton attracted the young and nocturnal. Thousands of lights twinkled on its seafront, from the frantic flashes of fruit machines and jukeboxes to the spotlights slicing the sky at night, beaming the rival logos of two sleazy nightclubs on to the clouds.

Behind Gurmton the woods began suddenly. Lost partygoers
looking for the seafront sobered up in seconds when they stumbled upon the eaves of the forest at night. Likewise, people driving the shadowy roads inland through the trees became aware of the din of their engines. Stereos would be turned off and conversations postponed. The woods felt like a sleeping monster worth tiptoeing past.

And at the heart of the woods cowered Ettinsford, where leaves and dead branches blew across the streets, where roads disappeared on leaving the town, as if their builders had been seduced from their intended paths. Ettinsford’s river was technically a strait, the narrowest point in the division between Gurm and Ferry islands. An old stone bridge breached the water at the point, as local legend had it, that Saint Hauda himself had been carried from one landmass to the other by a flock of one hundred and one sparrows.

In Ettinsford, in Catherine’s, the island’s florist, the bell chimed as Midas opened the door.

Gustav wiped a fleck of mayonnaise from his lips and looked up. He was red faced and red haired, but his hairline was dissipating faster than it should for a man who had just turned thirty. A cocktail stick pinned together the fat club sandwich on his desk. Three slices of wholemeal bread, rashers of bacon and half a pot of mayonnaise. Midas could smell it through the pollen.

‘Morning,’ he said, rubbing his eyes.

‘Bloody hell.’ Gustav gulped down his mouthful. ‘You okay?’

Midas’s hair stood on end and his eyes had bags beneath them. His whole body felt like collapsing. ‘Slept badly.’

Gustav folded some foil over his sandwich and wiped his hands on an old piece of bouquet paper. ‘What’s up? You going down with a cold? Denver’s got it. Going to be off school by the end of the week, I reckon.’

Gustav scrunched the paper he’d wiped his hands on and
tossed it at the bin. It overshot and disappeared into a dense area of sea hollies with regal blue heads.

‘Damn.’

He climbed out from behind the desk and pricked himself on the hollies as he foraged for the litter. He found it and dropped it in the bin, slapping his hands together as he walked back around the desk.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong? Did you get drunk? You have a
good
night for once?’

Midas played with a lily head. ‘I told you. I couldn’t sleep.’

Gustav opened a drawer and pulled out the clipboard they used for deliveries. ‘But there’s something else, isn’t there?’

Midas hesitated, but they’d been best friends for a long time.

‘A girl.’

Gustav dropped the clipboard. ‘Say again?’

‘I met this girl yesterday and she – ’

‘Midas! That’s great! Secretly I’ve been worried that – ’

Midas shook his hands. ‘Nothing, you know… it wasn’t a romantic encounter. That’s not why I mentioned it. It’s just…’

Gustav grinned deliriously.

‘… just that there was something unusual about her.’

‘There bloody had to be, to keep Midas Crook up all night.’

‘She wore some boots. As large as this vase.’ He tapped it. Blue and tall.

‘She’s… big-boned, then?’

‘That’s the thing. She’s about my height. And thin, almost unhealthily thin.’

Gustav was confused. ‘She’s not one of those weird fashionable chicks from the mainland…’

‘No. I don’t think so. She
is
from the mainland, but she wasn’t weird, apart from the boots. Gustav, do you know anything about conditions? Foot conditions?’

He didn’t, though he gave him a list of names: Achilles heel,
athlete’s foot, fungus nails. None of them seemed right for Ida.

The pair of them carried on with the business of running the florist. Midas drove some bouquets around town and thought about Ida the whole time. Just after midday he came back shaking raindrops off his jacket. Gustav sat at the desk, on the phone, one hand to his ruddy forehead. He glanced up gloomily when the doorbell rang.

‘Yeah, okay,’ he said into the receiver, ‘I’ll see you then.’

The phone clunked as he put it down and puffed out his cheeks. He sighed and ran his hands back through his thinning hair.

‘What are you doing on Saturday, Midas?’

‘You want me to work?’

‘No. That was my mother-in-law. She’s found some old boxes of Catherine’s stuff. Wonders if I want any of it.’

‘Catherine’s
mother
doesn’t want it?’

He shrugged. ‘She doesn’t like to see it. Said she might throw it away. I told her I’d take anything.’

‘You’re going over to the mainland on Saturday?’