The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw Page B

snowman’s twig-fingers.
    A bittersweet afternoon with his friends was still better than sitting alone in his kitchen. For the past couple of days he’d suppressed the guilt he felt for hiding what he knew about Henry Fuwa from Ida. Now it had returned he worried whether his only release would be to own up to her. Then he wondered what good that would do, because although Fuwa’s name had been familiar,he had no better clue than Ida as to which hiding hole on St Hauda’s Land Fuwa called his own. He’d scoured his walls of photos for distraction, but photos churned up all manner of memories, sometimes creating new ones. He’d fled his kitchen, locked his front door and raced down slippery pavements to Gustav’s house. He knew he was suppressing something else now. Although he didn’t know Fuwa’s whereabouts himself, he suspected he knew somebody who might.
    ‘We’re going to make mince pies tomorrow,’ said Denver when they were back in the house and Gustav was forcing her to get changed into dry clothes. She was an earnest child with a whiz of ginger hair, eyes too big for her freckled face and newly grown adult teeth overlapping like a hand of cards. ‘Dad’s promised to find some cutters so we can make biscuits. Will you help?’
    Midas was staring out at the whitening world.
    ‘Midas!’
    ‘Sorry, what was that, Den?’
    Gustav butted in with a remark about her wet hair. He shooed her out of the kitchen. She left without complaint, looking back worriedly over her shoulder at Midas. Gustav closed the door after her. ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘It’s Ida.’
    ‘
Ah
. You want a beer? ’
    ‘I’m really not in the mood.’
    ‘Midas… I know there are a hundred things you’d never tell me about and that’s fine, but if you want to offload some of your melancholy, then muggins here is happy to help. What about a brandy? Some festive cheer?’
    ‘Um. Gus, I don’t mean romantic troubles. Just… You ever heard of this man called Henry Fuwa? He lives on the island.’
    ‘Well…
pfff
. No. We could check the phone book, and the customer records at the florist.’
    ‘I already have.’
    ‘Has she
hired
you? Are you her private eye or something?’
    ‘I, er, I… deleted him from the customer records.’
    ‘Come again?’
    The phone rang. Midas gestured for Gustav to go ahead and answer. Gustav looked at the caller’s number on the phone’s display. ‘Catherine’s mum again. She’s really going through a phase about it.’
    ‘You’d better answer.’
    Gustav picked up and began another weary conversation with his mother-in-law about where they would spend Christmas. Gustav didn’t want to travel to the mainland to see Catherine’s parents, who’d moved there after her accident. Nor did Catherine’s parents want to make the trip to St Hauda’s Land, which they hadn’t returned to since. It would end, many phone calls later, with stalemate, and then one or the other party would suggest they all got together the following year.
    The door opened and Denver came back in. She grabbed Midas’s hand and towed him into the sitting room.
    ‘This game,’ she said, kneeling behind a stack of shoeboxes on the carpet, ‘is one I invented. I reckon it’s pretty good.’
    Behind them stood Gustav’s freshly cut, undecorated Christmas tree. It had filled the room with the scent of pine needles.
    ‘Right…’ She lifted the lid off the first shoebox. Inside, folded in beige sugar paper, were baubles and delicate wooden decorations. Midas thought of last Christmas-time, when he had watched Gustav smash a snow globe with a hammer while he thought no one was watching. He had said it had reminded him of the air up on Lomdendol Tor.
    ‘The rules are easy. What you have to do is decide what each decoration is before you hang it on the tree. Like this…’ She reached into the shoebox and pulled out a blue metallic orb. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is the world when God flooded it. And if youlook super,