The Girl With Glass Feet (8 page)

‘Yes. I heard them. When I couldn’t sleep the other night.’

‘We should go out and look for one.’

She seemed surprised. ‘You’d like to do that?’

‘Yes.’

She chewed thoughtfully, finished her mouthful and wiped her lips. ‘When I was a kid I used to go down to the beach and look
for dolphins in the moonlight. Don’t think I’ve ever gone owl watching. But now… it’s hard for me to walk in the dark.’

‘We won’t go far.’

‘Sorry.’ She blushed. ‘Sorry, Midas. I’m too frightened I’ll trip.’

He was surprised. He’d seen her superior confidence in every matter, and the sudden role reversal made her look, for a moment, younger, almost a kid.

It was getting colder inside. Ida closed the window, cranked up the heating and got Midas to bring them a bottle of white wine from the fridge, moisture all up its green neck.

‘You’ve got a lot of bottles in that fridge.’

She grinned. ‘They’re Carl’s. But, you know, he told me to help myself.’

She put the wine firmly on a counter beside the sofa bed, along with two glasses, then took a corkscrew, which she brandished like a knife.

‘He’s been really good to me, down the years. A sort of uncle figure.’

‘Are you actually related?’

‘No. My mother just knew him from way back.’ She jabbed the corkscrew into the cork and twisted it absent-mindedly. ‘That’s him. In that framed cutting.’

There was a yellowing newspaper column in a small frame on the end of the bookshelf. Midas got up and took it off the shelf. The headline read LOCAL DUO EARN HONORARY MAINLAND FELLOWSHIP and there was a grainy picture at the bottom of the article. Of the two men it showed in crisp suits, the first was undoubtedly Maulsen, squarely built with a dashing grin and silver hair.

‘Shit,’ said Midas, grip tightening on the photo frame.

Ida looked up, worried. The cork crumbled into the bottle and bobbed in the wine.

He staggered to the armchair and collapsed backwards into it.

‘Midas, what’s wrong?’

He shook his head quickly. She narrowed her eyes when he looked at her. He thought of how he’d concealed what he knew about Henry Fuwa, and couldn’t bear to disguise this too. He handed her the picture frame.

‘Read the names.’

She skimmed the article, then squinted at the image. ‘Is this
you
?’

‘My father.’

‘You have the same
name
?’

‘Yes.’

She put the photo down. ‘You didn’t know about this, did you?’

He shook his head. ‘I mean, I knew about the fellowship, but not Carl Maulsen.’

‘Well… it’s great news! You said you didn’t know much about your father. Carl might be able to help you.’

‘I don’t want to find out more about my father. And to see a new photo of him after all these years…’

She stayed quiet. He wondered whether a mainlander like her could understand the tangles of life here. The gossip chains more powerful than television. The snooping neighbours who could detect secrets like crows detecting carrion. Almost worse than that (because you could ignore people): the way the
place
regurgitated unwanted details. He wanted death to have transformed his father into ashes and dust, as the priest had promised it would at his funeral. Maybe the soil was too thin on St Hauda’s Land. ‘
God
,’ he blurted out, ‘these islands! They’re so incestuous!’

‘Why don’t you move away?’ she asked gently, as if he’d been thinking out loud.

‘Because…’ he puffed out his cheeks, ‘it wouldn’t make what’s happened go away. I have to… overcome it.’

She nodded slowly. ‘What’s happened, exactly?’

He pointed to the newspaper cutting. ‘If you went to the
Echo
’s archives you’d find maybe two or three incidents of note from the last ten years. Life is so sleepy… When something tragic happens its effects are compounded. You can’t walk down the street without people recognizing you as the poor bastard from the paper. And worse – since there’s only one thing to talk about some of those looks you get are ugly. Distorted.’

Ida picked her words carefully. ‘Something bad happened. To you?’

‘My friend drowned. Before that, my father killed himself. And there have been other things…’

‘Shit. I’m sorry, Midas.’

He smiled weakly at her. ‘I’m okay. It’s only the first thing that’s still a problem.’

‘I meant I’m sorry for gabbling on and on about how everyone here knows everybody else’s business.’ She looked at the emerald bottle in her hand. ‘I’m also sorry I corked the wine.’

He smiled at her. ‘It doesn’t matter. We can strain it out.’

He found a tea strainer in the kitchen (his
father’s colleague’s
kitchen). Wine glugged from the bottle and sieved through the strainer.

‘Cheers,’ said Ida, looking at him fondly as she handed him his glass.

On a quiet summer’s evening, Midas’s father tumbled from his chair and lay twisted on his study floor. Midas’s mother found him and phoned for an ambulance, which arrived shortly and rushed him to hospital, where he spent three days. Examinations revealed an anomalous growth beneath his heart. There was no chance of a cure.

‘He may feel fine for weeks, even months,’ said the doctor flatly, thumb jittering on the button of a pen. ‘Then in all probability he’ll have a seizure similar to the one he’s just suffered, or worse. There’ll come a point where his body won’t be able to restore complete control. He’ll lose sensation and motor function in the body parts affected. We hope this will occur primarily in appendages but, you understand, if it spreads to a major artery or his digestive system there’s not much we can do.’

The doctor twirled the pen between his fingers, then brought it up to his lips and tapped it against his chin.

‘If he fights it,’ said Midas’s mother after a while, hands clasped tightly. ‘If he fights it for long enough. If he holds out.’

The doctor gnawed his pen.

Then (on the day when his father stuck the note to the fridge) Midas ran away from school. It was a large school to which children from across St Hauda’s Land were bussed every day, yet he could neither fit in nor find anonymity. While other pupils slept with each other and smoked cannabis at the fringe of the playing field he sat in the library studying heavy books of photographs. The teachers had banned his camera as prevention of theft, but at break-time that day he was dreaming about the
new zoom lens his aunt had bought him. Still in its shiny box back at home. Still smelling of polystyrene. He had been desperate to tell somebody about it, but there was nobody who would listen. Heavy rain broke over the school, banging off the rooftops and driving the other children inside. And that brought Freddy Clare to the library.

‘Hello, Crooky,’ he said, sidling onto the chair opposite Midas. His hair stuck to his neck, soaked by rain.

‘Hello, Freddy.’

‘Look at this, Crooky.’ Something silver flashed in his pocket as he opened his blazer. It looked like the handle of a spoon.

‘What’s that, Freddy?’

Freddy looked around furtively, then pulled it from his pocket. A flick knife, blade folded into the handle. ‘Like in
The Godfather
, Crooky. Do you like it?’

‘It’s very nice.’

‘Damn right. Now, you got any money on you?’

‘No.’

Freddy gritted his teeth. ‘Don’t be a silly boy, Crooky. Being a silly boy could land you in trouble. Let’s not forget, I know where you live.’

Midas watched Freddy toy with the knife. He had plasters on three fingers and one thumb. There were no librarians in sight and though other kids had noticed, their noses were buried resolutely in books.

‘I don’t have any money, Freddy.’

‘Of course not.’ Smiling, he pulled the blade from its handle.

‘I… I’m not lying.’

‘Of course not. Like in
The Godfather
, Crooky.’

To Midas’s relief, a librarian appeared from behind the Ancient History section. She saw Freddy’s knife and looked horrified, opening and closing her mouth, fiddling with her cardigan buttons.

Freddy sighed and folded the blade back into the handle. ‘It’s all right, Miss, I was just showing Crooky my new toy.’

He slipped off his chair and looked ruefully at the knife. Rain battered the library windows.

‘But I suppose you’ll want to confiscate it. Won’t you, Miss?’

He held it out to her. She snatched it up.

‘Well!’ she puffed, ‘thank goodness you boys have been responsible about this!’

Freddy beamed. ‘No problem, Miss. You caught me fair and square.’

The librarian held the knife between finger and thumb, as if it might contaminate her. ‘You realize I shall be obliged to report this breach of school regulations?’

Freddy shrugged amicably. ‘Just doing your job, Miss.’ He stuffed his hands into his pockets and checked the big library clock.

‘What do you know? Break-time’s nearly over. Time flies, doesn’t it, Crooky? See you after school.’

Midas and the librarian watched him saunter off. The school bell rang.

Midas hid in the library toilets until lessons began. Then he made his escape, slipping out of school with his jacket collar turned up, the rain and wind so heavy he had to force his way home. When he got in he was soaked through. He called out to see if his father was home but got no reply. Then, while he made coffee, he saw a note tacked to the fridge door:

In garage. Sorry about mess.

M.

Midas left the coffee and pulled his drenched jacket back on. He
went out through the back door, jogged through the yard and down the alleyway to the street’s block of garages. Rain fell at a sharp angle, fired up by the wind.

Light shone an outline around the edge of the garage door. Drops drummed on the metal and echoed off windows. Midas splashed over and hauled the door open, ducking inside as soon as there was space.

His father stood on a stepladder, a pale moustached man in a sweater and smart trousers, tearing at a strip of tape with his teeth. He was sticking bin liners to one wall. His nervous hunch was pronounced, even on the ladder.

‘What are you doing?’ Midas asked.

His father almost fell off the ladder in surprise, then held a hand to his heart. ‘
My God,
Midas, you frightened the wits out of me.’ He hurried down the stepladder and kicked shut a case in which lay some sort of tool, something L-shaped and black-handled. Midas didn’t see it for long enough to tell what it was, although he noticed a bag of tiny metal cylinders beside it in the case.

His father put his hands on his hips. ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in school.’

‘I ran away.’

‘Oh…
Midas
!’ He plodded over, looking his son up and down. ‘You’re going to get pneumonia if you don’t dry yourself off. You picked a filthy day to run away. Let’s go and get you a towel.’

‘What are you doing with those bin liners?’

His father looked over his shoulder at the black bags on the walls and floor. ‘Those? Well… Shall we get you that towel?’

He turned off the garage light. Midas opened the door and they dashed back to the house together, their feet kicking up puddles. They leapt through the back door.

‘Towel, towel…’ murmured his father.

‘I can find you one,’ Midas said.

‘I’m trying to find
you
one. Here.’ He passed him one of the dishcloths. ‘Now. You can’t just run away from school.’

Midas rubbed the dishcloth over his hair.

‘They’ll be worrying about you.’

‘They won’t miss me.’

‘Oh, they
will
, Midas. Institutions like that, they never miss a beat. They’ll have the police out by now, I’m sure.’

The phone rang. Midas’s father rubbed his moustache with forefinger and thumb.

‘That’ll probably be them now,’ he said. ‘Phoning to let me know you’re gone. Come on.’ He walked into the hallway and lifted the phone off the wall. ‘Crook household. Mr Crook speaking. How may I help you? Yes. Yes, I’m afraid so. With me, yes. Oh, I will. Hm, well, good day.’ He put the phone down firmly and sighed. ‘Put your shoes on. I’ll drive you back.’