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Hi. My name’s Ali Shaw and this is my novel, “The girl with glass feet.”
It’s a love story and in many ways a fairy story for adults, about a young woman called
Ida MacLaird who is slowly transforming into glass.
She sets off to a strange chain of islands somewhere in the northern hemisphere called
Saint Hauda’s Land and then she meets a young man called Midas Crook, who she believes
can help her to find a cure for the condition afflicting her.
I’m going to read some of it to you; starting at chapter two.
She’d developed a particular way of walking to accommodate her condition.
Step, pause, step, instead of step, step, step.
You needed that moment’s pause to make sure you’d set your foot straight.
Like the opening gambits of a dance.
Her boots were thick and padded, but one accidental fall or careless stumble could do irreparable
damage that would finish her off for good, she supposed.
That would be that.
And what was it like, walking on bone and muscle, on heels and soles?
She couldn’t remember.
Now walking felt like levitation, only an inch off the ground.
The river stayed quiet, here pattering down a short cascade, there brushing over a weed-covered
rock that looked like a head of green hair.
Ida kept hobbling, occasional raindrops dissolving into her coat and making the wool of her hat
wet.
That was another problem with this bloody stupid way of getting about: you couldn’t
move fast enough to keep warm.
She pulled her scarf up over her chin and ice-cold nose.
Thickets of holly dipped branches in the river.
A moth landed on a cluster of bright berries.
She stopped walking as it fanned its wings.
They were furred brown and speckled with lush greens.
“Hi,” she said to the moth.
It flew away
She walked on.
She wanted the moth back.
Sometimes when she closed her eyes she saw more colour than she could in a whole day
on St Hauda’s Land with them open.
She had always liked to be in places where tightly packed hips, shoulders and backsides
danced against yours, a dazzle of colours whirling on dresses and shirts.
She’d held off sleep using the sheer pleasure of company, be it huddled in a freezing tent
wearing a thick jumper or trading stories over card games in friends’ flats until
morning came.
There was none of that to be had on these islands.
She had with her the tatty St Hauda’s Lands guidebook she had bought on her trip to the
archipelago in the summer.
When she had opened it that winter, for the first time since the trip, grains of white
sand fell from its spine.
She’d had more enthusiasm for the place in summertime.
She had read, with pity for the islanders, about the lurching industrial fishing boats
that trawled from the mainland to intrude in the archipelago’s waters, scooping whole
pods of speared whales from the water and turning them to blubber and red slop on their
slaughterhouse decks.
She had read of local whalers who sailed farther and farther out to sea in little boats their
fathers and grandfathers had fished in.
Some had not returned, either when storms blew up or generations-old vessels failed
them.
She had read of how, when they returned with dismal catches, the market was already saturated
by the meat from the mainland.
Whaling families began to move away, taking their youngsters with them.
Ida’s guidebook tried to draw a line under this, but it sounded delirious instead.
Tourists would never be attracted, as the authors hoped, by the drab architecture of
Glamsgallow’s seafront.
Nor by the plain rock walls of Ettinsford’s church.
Nor by the fishery guildhall at Gurmton, whose painted ceiling of *** and sea creatures,
all depicted with underwhelming skill in the muted colours of the ocean, was optimistically
compared to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
It was wrong to count on the landscape, although it could be impressive at times.
Other island destinations had more dramatic coastlines than St Hauda’s Land, which showcased
more than anything the insidious sea.
Ida had wondered when the guidebook’s map was sketched, for entire beaches shown on
it were these days buried under the weight of water.
An impressive natural rock tower called Grem Forst (known locally as the Giant’s Lamphouse)
was described in flowery prose as a star attraction.
But the lumberjack sea had been at work, cutting away at the rock with its adze of waves.
Unwitnessed one evening, the Lamphouse toppled. It broke into a string of boulders peeking
meek faces out of the tide.
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 she’d met 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 man 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 sight of the ferry deck
and the retreat of colour – to pin down.
Out of everyone she’d met since what was happening to her started happening to her,
only Henry had offered any clue about the strange transformation happening 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 to St Hauda’s Land 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 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?”
Thank you for listening.
I’ve been Ali Shaw and this is “The girl with glass feet”.