The Girl With Glass Feet Read Online Free PDF

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.
    ‘Would you believe there’s an animal in the woods who turns everything she looks at pure white?’
    She sighed. ‘No. I don’t. Believe it.’
    He leant back, scratching his beard. Then he tried leaning forward again. ‘Would you believe there are glass bodies here, hidden in the bog water?’
    ‘No. You’ve got black hair and a healthy complexion for one thing.’
    ‘I don’t see what that’s got… Ah, wait. I didn’t say she’d seen
me
.’
    She watched his eyes boggle as he drained the gin. He held a hand to his forehead and wagged his finger. ‘You bought me a double…’
    ‘What kind of animal is she?’
    ‘She’s white all over, as you’d expect, except for on the back of her head where she can’t see herself.’
    Ida had been through three fingers of her pint in the space it had taken him to finish his glass.
    ‘What colour?’
    ‘
White
.’
    ‘What colour’s the back of her head?’
    ‘Blue.’
    She smiled sweetly. ‘What do you do for a living, Henry?’
    ‘I’m too occupied with the…’ he snapped his mouth shut and looked suddenly sober. ‘Of course. You think I’m some kind of nut.’
    ‘It’s not that…’
    He stood up, fiddled through his wallet and stacked the cost of the gin on the table in coins.
    ‘It was on me,’ she said.
    He walked out of the pub. After a moment of feeling frustrated at herself, she left the coins and jogged after him, but he was nowhere to be seen in the hot street. White gulls pecked at the remains of fish and chips, gobbling batter and polystyrene tray alike. For a moment she thought the whitest of them had white eyes, but it was only a trick of the light.

5
     
    From an aeroplane the three main islands of the St Hauda’s Land archipelago looked like the swatted corpse of a blob-eyed insect. The thorax was Gurm Island, all marshland and wooded hills. The neck was a natural aqueduct with weathered arches through which the sea flushed, leading to the eye. That was the towering but drowsy hill of Lomdendol Tor on Lomdendol Island, which (local supposition had it) first squirted St Hauda’s Land into being. The legs were six spurs of rock extending from the south-west coast of Gurm Island, trapping the sea in sandy coves between them. The wings were a wind-torn flotilla of uninhabited granite islets in the north. The tail’s sting was the sickle-shaped Ferry Island in the east, the quaint little town of Glamsgallow a drop of poison welling on its tip.
    Glamsgallow boasted St Hauda’s Land’s only airport, but most aeroplanes crossed the islands before turning to land, flying over the other settlements. In the north of Gurm, walled off to the public, was Enghem, the private property of Hector Stallows, the local millionaire. Built at the foot of Lomdendol Tor, Martyr’s Pitfall was a town for the elderly. On Sunday afternoons the shadow of the tor covered the buildings and streets. Couples trickled from retirement homes to walk and sit in landscaped graveyards. By contrast, Gurmton attracted the young and nocturnal. Thousands of lights twinkled on its seafront, from the frantic flashes of fruit machines and jukeboxes to the spotlights slicing the sky at night, beaming the rival logos of two sleazy nightclubs on to the clouds.
    Behind Gurmton the woods began suddenly. Lost partygoerslooking for the seafront sobered up in seconds when they stumbled upon the eaves of the forest at night. Likewise, people driving the shadowy roads inland through the trees became aware of the din of their engines. Stereos would be turned off and conversations postponed. The woods felt like a sleeping monster worth tiptoeing past.
    And at the heart of the woods cowered Ettinsford, where leaves and dead branches blew across the streets,