The Girl With Glass Feet Read online

  Inland, the archipelago had only foul-smelling bogs and haggard woodland to attract holidaymakers. Ida doubted the islands could survive the peddling of this kind of tourism. If anything, the guidebook should trumpet the one thing it was careful to avoid.

  Loneliness. You couldn’t buy company on St Hauda’s Land.

  He’d been an odd one, that boy with the camera. Such a distinctive physique: pale skin so taut on his skeleton, holding himself with a shy hunch, not ugly as such but certainly not handsome, with a demeanour eager to cause no trouble, to attract no attention.

  Made sense. She reckoned photographers wanted you to behave as normal, as if they and their cameras weren’t there.

  She liked him.

  She hesitated, taking her next careful step along the river path. There were more pressing things than one skewed island man. Like finding Henry Fuwa, her first skewed island man.

  Henry Fuwa. The kind of man who was either pitied or scoffed at. The kind of person who might be seen on a bus paired with the only empty seat, while passengers chose to stand in the aisle. A man she had come back all this way – braved the heaving sigh of the ferry deck and the retreat of colour – to pin down. Out of everyone she’d met since what was happening started happening to her, only Henry had offered any clue about the strange transformation beneath her boots and many-layered socks. She had not even known it was a clue when he offered it, because back on that summer trip she had still been able to wriggle her toes and pick the sand out from between them.

  Wind stirred the branches of the firs overhead. The memory of the clue he had given her was like a dripping tap in the dead of night. The moment you blocked out the dripping, you realized you’d done so, and that made you listen again.

  He had said it in the Barnacle, that ugly little pub in Gurmton, six months ago when the earth was baked yellow and the sea aquamarine.

  ‘Would you believe,’ he had said (and back then she had not), ‘there are glass bodies here, hidden in the bog water?’

  Night mustered in the woods. Shadows lengthened across the path and Ida could barely see where track ended and root began. The half-moon looked like it was dissolving in the clouds. A bird called out. Leaves rustled among worm-shapes of trunks. Something shook the branches.

  She hobbled onward in the dark, eager to be inside, to root out colours in the safety of the cottage. Tomorrow she would look again for Henry Fuwa. But how did you find a recluse in a wilderness of recluses?

  3

  After meeting Ida, Midas dawdled back to his car, scrolling through his camera’s image bank as he walked. The photos of the light shafts had worked wondrously, but he’d lost all interest in those. Both Ida pictures were awful. In the first, on the rock, she looked too shadowy. In the second, where she walked carefully away down the path, she looked plain and her boots clumsy. By the time he got back to his home in Ettinsford he’d deleted all the photos of her.

  Ettinsford was one of the few settlements on St Hauda’s Land whose population was dwindling, rather than plunging to desertion. Families on St Hauda’s Land had always been whalers, ever since (it was said) a fatigued Saint Hauda drove his staff into the water at Longhem and was rewarded with the plump corpse of a narwhal calf, whose fire-charred meat kept his mission from starvation. The whaling ban of a decade back ended all that, and with the loss of the whaling families the coastal towns were falling empty. Built on slopes sinking away from the woods on both sides, Ettinsford’s roads led steeply down to a wide body of water, whose banks were designated as parkland due to regular floods rather than the need for green space. On the other side of the river the wooded slopes rose steeply. All attempts to build on these had failed. Root-infested soil gave way under houses, bricks and mortar collapsed and rolled down to splash into the water.

  The town had a grocer, a fishmonger and a clutter of specialist shops with haphazard opening hours, since trade in Ettinsford happened mostly on market days and market days alone. There were two churches, one a whitewashed shack beloved of Midas’s mother before she moved to Martyr’s Pitfall on Lomdendol Island, the other an old stone chapel, the church of Saint Hauda.

  Midas pushed open the gate of his front yard and walked up the path to the door of his narrow, slate-built house. Winter had perished most of the weeds but he kicked a nettle off the path while patting down his pockets for his keys. He went straight through to the kitchen, turned on the kettle and slumped into one of the wooden chairs there. Coffee rings patterned the white table. On its underside hung handfuls of sticky tack like chewing gum under a school desk, convenient when he needed to stick up a picture. He wished he had a perfect picture of Ida.

  The kitchen walls were a hedgerow of black-and-white photographs. Landscapes, strangers, loved ones. A picture of a man trying to ride a bike without tyres, a mongrel cat nursing a baby pit bull to its teat, a burning boat, a streaker at a bullfight. In the only photo of himself, Midas’s hair stuck up like a crow’s wing in the wind while he helped his mother up a frosty hillside. There was another photo of his mother, hanging beside the sole picture of his father. Once he had used his computer to join them together and make it look like they were happy. He couldn’t make it real.

  The kettle wheezed and clicked off. He got up, found the cafetière and rinsed his cracked white mug. Then he crouched by the fridge to get the coffee out of the freezer compartment.

  Denver had stuck one of her narwhal sketches to his fridge door. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He’d asked her to stop sticking things there. She still did it. Hard to get cross with her when she was only just turned seven and had taken the time to sketch him such a beautiful narwhal. But sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory. He was in the kitchen. He had found the cafetière. He was going to open the freezer for the coffee. Then all at once he was finding his father’s suicide note on the door of another fridge, some ten or twelve years ago.

  He carefully unpeeled Denver’s sketch. She’d have come around to see him and let herself in. He hoped she’d had an okay time at school. He hoped those other girls hadn’t been cruel to her that day.

  He found the coffee and spooned some into the cafetière, then added water.

  Something about Ida had caught him off guard. Not just her boots, her hair, her face. It was that strange thing… The way the real Ida was somehow more alluring than the filmic one.

  Old-fashioned film could fix that problem.

  If he had a second chance to shoot Ida, with real film, he’d get a good picture. He knew he could. The digital camera was dimming his instincts. If only he could shoot Ida somewhere brighter: set up lamps, umbrella reflectors, everything.

  He plunged the filter through the cafetière. Coffee swirled inside.

  But she would be company, and he was steering clear of company. It was his recurring New Year’s resolution, and it would seem a shame to break it now December was upon him. Besides, he didn’t have enough intact heartstrings to hand them to people to pull. Ever since he’d split up with Natasha (that was a long time ago now) he’d been chaste, alone. The occasional afternoon with Denver and her daddy, Gustav. All those evenings with only a camera for company.

  It lay on the table with its crappy shots inside. He’d removed the lens cap to clean the glass beneath. The lens gleamed.

  He enjoyed being alone.

  4

  Six months ago, Ida had seen Henry Fuwa lope across a cobbled road. She didn’t know him then, didn’t know anyone on St Hauda’s Land. Just a tourist enjoying some summer sun. All she had known for certain was that there’d be a collision. Henry Fuwa was so focused on his jewellery box he didn’t lift his head to look out for traffic. A cyclist, puffing downhill towards the seafront, yelled as his brakes squealed and his wheels juddered over cobblestones. He was tossed through the air by the impact, the bike upending and clattering into the road with its front wheel spinning. Henry fell backwards with his breath knocked out of him. His jewellery box flew up, turning and opening. He groped after it, then it dropped to the ground where the lid snapped clean from the hinges and the contents scudded into the gutter.

  Ida sprang forward to check that both men were okay. Henry pushed his large pair of spectacles back on to his face and crawled towards his smashed box, but before he could reach its scattered contents the cyclist, who had groaned to his feet, hauled him up by the collar and snarled, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  Ida, trying to be helpful, crouched to scoop up the box’s contents. A little nest of straw, a square of silk and some kind of dried bug, which she picked up with finger and thumb.

  It had butterfly wings, like flakes of patterned wax. Under the wings it had a hairy body with tiny horns. Its fur looked very dry in the hot summer rays. It had an ox’s head, no bigger than her thumbnail, with a pink muzzle drawn into a grimace. A white splodge between its nostrils. The impossible detail of a scar on its bottom lip.

  There was warmth and a heartbeat in its body like that of a newly hatched chick.

  She shook her head and came to her senses. She could no longer feel the heartbeat. She must have imagined it. Likewise she had imagined the warmth of its breath on her fingers, and the rolling back of its eyes in their sockets. It must be a toy, some kind of ornament.

  She looked up with a start when she heard a shout of grief. Henry Fuwa was shoving off the angry cyclist and barging towards her. He snatched the little ornament from her hands and cupped it in his, bowing his head of shaggy hair. His legs buckled under him and he fell to his knees on the cobbles. Tears dripped down the inside lenses of his glasses like droplets down a windowpane. The cyclist stormed away with his bike. Henry Fuwa gathered up the broken jewellery box and laid the ornament inside. He tugged at his beard, moaned, thumped both fists on the road. His shoulders jerked up and down so hard the vertebrae in his bowed neck showed, quivering. A pedestrian skirted wide around him and hurried on her way, but Ida, not knowing what else to do, crouched down and put a hand on his shoulder.

  The road became hushed, the only sounds the distant sea, the tiptoe of gulls’ feet on the eaves of square houses and the snivelling of Henry Fuwa. He was a tall man, even knelt on the cobbles. In his late forties, she’d guess, with a smell about him, not unpleasant, like moist soil.

  Ida looked down the road at a pub sign hanging over a doorway. The Barnacle, with a painting of a shipwreck for its sign. She squeezed his shoulder.

  ‘Come on,’ she soothed, ‘come on. Why don’t you stand up? Why don’t we go inside? I’ll buy you a drink.’

  ‘It’s dead,’ he said.

  She slipped her arm under his and helped him up, then led him like a child into the pub.

  When she had booked her summer holiday on these islands, this little archipelago thirty miles north-west of the mainland, she had reserved two seats on the ferry, one for herself and one for her boyfriend. Then he had dumped her. With a week to go, everything booked in her name, and a forecast of gorgeous summer sun, she took the trip anyway. She enjoyed stretching her legs on the hotel bed, flexing her toes in both bottom corners of the mattress. Not that she’d have been getting terribly intimate if her ex had been there. The boy was the offspring of a preacher mother and a policeman father. Their first conversation sparked from that: how to get by when your parents represented not only domestic law, but between them the laws of the state and the soul. Her own dad had been a lay preacher as well as a copper, so she sympathized. Her mother, thank heavens, had been something of a smuggler, which had helped to ensure that Ida escaped the inhibitions her ex struggled with. Mouth the word sex to him and his neck would retract like a turtle’s into its shell. His teeth would grit, his eyes would bow.

  She guiltily found she didn’t miss him as much as she missed company in general. In most places she’d travelled to she’d quickly found like-minded people with whom to chat long hours away, and socializing had become a vocation. On St Hauda’s Land she found only cautious, secretive people, well-mannered but closed to strangers. In the evenings the little towns and villages became deserted and deathly quiet, but this far north in the world the summer sun didn’t sink until late, and even then light loitered. A summer day here was a long time to spend on your own.

  She led Henry Fuwa to a corner table of the Barnacle, where tracks of dried bitter stained beer mats. She sat him on a stool and asked him what he’d like to drink. He shrugged.

  ‘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.