The Girl With Glass Feet (9 page)

‘I’ve already got my shoes on.’

‘Ah. Ah-hah. Then let’s go. The car’s in the road. I was, er, using the garage.’

‘What were you doing with those bin liners?’

His father checked his pockets for his car keys but stopped before he opened the door, fingers on the handle. ‘Don’t worry, Midas. You can take them down this afternoon.’

‘But what were you—’

‘Midas. Please?’ He opened the door. Rain flew in and slapped his face. ‘Good Lord, you’d think the world was flooding.’

They stared up at the black clouds.

‘I don’t want to go back to school. If I do, Freddy Clare will either beat me up or stab me to death. Depending on whether he gets his knife back.’

‘Yes,’ murmured his father, watching plumes of water jump in puddles.

‘I’m serious,’ Midas said, ‘and so is Freddy. He’s crazy.’

‘Come on then, into the car. Bring a bucket if you like, to bail
us out as we go.’ He chuckled to himself. Midas followed him through the rain, still holding the dishcloth, and climbed into the passenger seat. His father stopped, his keys halfway to the ignition.

‘Your mother would have had you go to Sunday school if I hadn’t objected. Can you believe that?’ He leant back in his seat. ‘I did you a favour, holding you back. Not for my son, the dogmatic belief in a monotheistic deity. No, my son is fully aware of the symbolism of a pantheon – the impossible coexistence of a multitude of ruling drives. Isn’t that so, Midas?’

Would it be a fast puncture, if Freddy had the knife back, or something drawn out? Excruciatingly slow, a sliver at a time…

‘You know, Midas, I’m glad we stumbled across each other this afternoon.’ He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel while the keys still hung, unturned, in the ignition. ‘This talk of Sunday school, and this torrid downpour, has taken me with thoughts of the Flood.’

Rainwater sloshed down the windscreen.

His father began to talk about arks settling on mountain peaks, about snow-white doves and drowned crows floating on oceans. Midas lost himself in worry. Then he realized his father had stopped talking. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. His glasses had slipped halfway down his nose. That was how he got when he was excited. His father was never enthused or merry, but once in a very long while he was thrilled.

A blackbird, pummelled by rain, landed on the car bonnet and staggered over it before hopping down on to the tarmac and stumbling in another direction.

Midas’s father clapped his hands. ‘Boats, Midas! A fine way to do things. Finer than this nonsense with the bin liners.’

‘What
about
the bin liners?’

‘A fool’s business. Boats, Midas! My God, but you’re a stimulant.’

He turned the ignition suddenly. ‘Let’s get you back to school.’

Midas hung his head. He arrived back at school in time for double maths, with only a soaked dishcloth to show for his escape.

When Midas woke, his head hurt and his joints felt stiff. He’d fallen asleep in the armchair in Ida’s room, where it was pitch dark. They’d talked about easier things, books (they figured he’d read one for every twenty of hers), the news (he was out of touch) and cinema (he told her he couldn’t cope with movies: he wanted to study every frame as he would a photo, but the effort made him dizzy). Eventually tiredness caught up with them. They fell asleep where they sat.

They’d left the curtains open and the world outside was visible now in vague blue layers, like looking out of a submarine. Soft breathing came from the bed. Midas’s mouth felt dry and still tasted of white wine. He tried to settle back to sleep but that failed. He reached for the lamp. A spider raced up the wall, away from the soft orange glow that suddenly filled the room. Ida lay on the bed, her silver-dotted blanket folded over and beneath her. Her feet poked off the end of the bed. He watched them for a while, in a kind of doze. She snuffled and turned her head every so often, but her feet didn’t move once. Even when she clenched her fists and drew them protectively to her chest, her toes remained still as stone.

Night-time seemed to upheave his curiosity, like the moon swelling up the tides. His camera nestled in his satchel beside the chair. He took it out, removed the lens cap, then realized what he was thinking and clipped it back on. He put down the camera on the bedside counter and refused to look at it.

It looked so innocent, but with Ida sleeping in the room it also looked weirdly alien, as if it were an accessory. He took hold of
the strap, felt the coarse weave of its threads on his fingertips. He had thought of it for so long as an extension of his body, as others might think of a wheelchair or a pair of spectacles, that to consider acting independently made his shoulders tense and his toes go cold. He’d be blind without its guidance. Looking at Ida’s motionless feet, he doubted he had the courage to investigate them without its cool.

His knees clicked when he got up and crept to the foot of the bed.

The top pair of Ida’s socks were creamy white. He glanced back at the camera, the dull plastic of the lens cap masking its eye. His fingers twitched. He steadied his breathing, then gently placed a thumb on Ida’s big toe. She didn’t notice. The unexpected coolness of her foot meant it didn’t feel like touching another person. She breathed regularly, lips parted, a fleck of saliva in the corner of her mouth. He pressed lightly. Her socks were soft. But her toe was hard like diamond.

He pulled his thumb away at once and stepped back from the bed. The white wine must still be addling him. What he’d touched hadn’t felt like a toe.

He returned to the armchair and cradled his camera. Soon he was happy to believe he’d deceived himself.

He was ninety-nine-per-cent happy to believe that.

Drawing the strap of his camera over his head, he moved back to the end of the bed, took a deep breath and took her big toe between finger and thumb. He squeezed until he couldn’t deny how icy hard it felt. And she surely couldn’t feel it. She mumbled in her sleep. He shoved his cold hands into his pockets. On the ceiling, the spider cantered back and forth, in and out of the arc of the light.

He reached for the top of Ida’s socks and gripped them gently together. Then he rolled them towards her ankle. She mumbled something and he froze, but left his fingers in place. She was still
deep in her dream. He eased the socks down, over her ankle and a few inches of her foot.

He stared.

Kept staring.

Peeled off the socks entirely.

Her toes were pure glass. Smooth, clear, shining glass. Glinting crescents of light edged each toenail and each crease between the joints of each digit. Seen through her toes, the silver spots on the bed sheet diffused into metallic vapours. The ball of her foot was glass too, but murkier, losing its transparency in a gradient until, near her ankle, it reached skin: matt and flesh-toned like any other. And yet… Those few inches of transition astonished him even more than her solid glass toes. Bones materialized faintly inside the ball of her foot, then became lily-white and precise nearer her unaltered ankle, shrouded along the way by translucent red ligaments in denser layers. In the curve of her instep wisps of blood hung trapped like twirls of paint in marbles. And there were places in the glass where the petrification was incomplete. Here was a pinprick mole, there a fine blonde hair.

Still she slept deeply.

His fingers inched their way towards the buttons on his camera.

When he had taken enough photos he stood for a while holding her removed socks. He tried to put them back on her, but as he pulled them up around her ankle she gasped in her sleep and he stopped very still. He hadn’t woken her, but he couldn’t get the sock back on. He left the sock scrunched over her toes and returned to the armchair where he gave careful consideration to running away. She would wake up at some point, notice her socks, and draw the obvious conclusion. He groaned quietly. He was still a little drunk, and very tired. The image of her foot hung in his mind, feeling like the memory of a dream he knew was about to dissolve.

Ida ran with her pulse and hip-hop in her ears. On her left towered giants of concrete and glass: office blocks and tenements whose laundry and hanging baskets brightened their drab sides with a hundred colours. On her right the city’s river laboured under boats and buoys. Ahead a bridge crossed the honey-coloured water, bearing hundreds of pedestrians honked at by traffic. The sun turned each and every windscreen to a plate of opaque orange.

She jogged under the bridge and her footfalls echoed unevenly off girders decorated by graffiti artists and the tide. The echoes were uneven because she couldn’t maintain a steady pace. Each time her right foot struck the pavement something sharp dug into her toe. She’d been trying to ignore it and had already stopped several times to shake stones out of her trainer with no result. She kept running for almost a mile before she tried again, this time sitting on a bench that looked across the river to the city’s cathedral. A web of scaffolding wrapped the church’s twin spires. Builders in hard hats moved across it like spiders. A party boat was moored on the far bank, its guests staggering about hugging each other and hooting across the water.

She removed her shoe and shook it, then did the same to her sock and felt for stones. Still nothing.

Putting it back on she felt something like a splinter and took her foot in her hands to try to find it.

The sun blinked off a speck on her big toe’s underside, picked out an orange twinkle in her flushed skin. She tried to brush it off. It remained. Looking closer, she saw what looked like an embedded crystal. A thin layer of skin had grown over it.

Later, in a steaming bath back at her flat, with the noise of agitated traffic incessant even through closed windows, she tried to pick out the crystal with a needle and tweezers. She got a grip
and yanked. Fiery pain coursed through her foot and she hissed and clamped a hand around her toe, squeezing hard as she waited for it to die out.

The crystal remained in its cushion of reddened flesh. She took a deep breath and tried to pluck it with the tweezers again, but the pain was even fiercer now the flesh was inflamed. A siren started outside and she had a sudden sense of the vastness of the city and the country beyond it, the landscape of the continent, cloud formations above, oceans undermining the land, and herself barely a speck within it all. She shivered. The bathwater had turned cold.

From nowhere she remembered the man from St Hauda’s Land. Henry Fuwa and his jewellery box drilled with air holes.

She woke in the night and pulled the duvet tight around her. Her knees and legs felt bloodless and clammy. She looked at Midas, who slept in the chair with a shrill snore. He had turned the bedside lamp on. She wouldn’t be surprised if this was due to a fear of the night, and she found that endearing. He held his camera on his lap like a teddy bear. Ida wondered whether she could trust him.

Trust him enough to tell him everything about her feet, she’d need to find out more about him.

She sat up and moved stealthily across the bed. The socks on one foot fell to the carpet. She stopped and stared from them to Midas.