The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

thought of Freya. In the coach on the mainland he thought of Freya. In the hotel lobby, waiting for his keys, he thought of Freya.
    In the morning he went to the mainland university at which he was giving his lecture. Afterwards, the professors who had invited him wined and dined him, then went back to their studies and left him to find his way back to the coach stop, where now he waited, alone by a main road, screwing up his nose at the artificial wind from the traffic. He saw his coach approaching, his booked return to the port and from there the boat to St Hauda’s Land. It pulled up. Its doors juddered open. The driver, in a tie and shirt with yellowing collar, peered down at Carl and waited for a moment before rolling his eyes and asking, ‘You getting on today?’
    Carl thought about Ida staying in his little cottage. The feeling that had ambushed him yesterday, how in his arms she had brought back his time with her mother, had dulled with the mundanity of a chain hotel, bus stops, lecture halls and microphones testing, on and off, fire-escape signs glimmeringgreen… But it had not vanished. It was burrowed somewhere inside him. He needed to brace himself before seeing her again.
    The coach doors closed, and only when the vehicle was moving did the driver flip his middle finger.
    Carl crossed the road. A truck honked at him and swerved to avoid collision. On the other side of the road, he sat down on the pavement beside the coach stop, waiting for the bus that went south. Deeper into the mainland.
    He had first entertained the idea while he ate lunch, while the literature professor who was his chaperone had droned on and on about the Romantics. He had growled assent to her opinions and chewed the meat from the deep-fried chicken he had ordered. He never intended to find himself blathering to bored students or idolized by eccentric professors. He had stood in that lecture theatre and looked into the vacant eyes of a hundred porous undergrads. His lecture had faltered. He couldn’t think about the classics. He could only think of Freya.
    But when he tried to picture her, he thought of her headstone and the boxed bones six feet under. He had to think of Ida’s alive and breathing face to displace them.
    The southbound coach arrived and Carl barged to the back, to a seat with little leg room beside a commuter in a khaki trench coat, whose glowing laptop bugged him. He made his discomfort known by spreading his legs and sticking out his elbow.
    He had called Ida by Freya’s maiden name when last he wrote to her. Ida Ingmarsson. All my love from Carl. He realized his mistake the moment the letter dropped through the slot in the postbox, then made several unsuccessful attempts to prevent it being sent. Of course it had passed without comment, but it had been there in looks when he next saw her, nearly a year after the event. How premonitory that seemed now.
    What love he had possessed he had thought dead a long time back, leaving only remorse and a heart like dried meat. But seeingIda fully grown had saturated it and made it beat again. This image of his undead love amused him briefly, before the social formula of their relationship returned. She had called him uncle as a girl. Of course he should never have let himself get to know her. He shouldn’t have kept in touch with her mother. As if you could terminate love abruptly because the one you loved signed papers with someone else in a church.
    Outside, suburbs and towns repeated. Then came heavily worked farmland, arable acres and fields of spotted cows. Evening came, traffic thickened. They drove through a city of tower blocks with windows lit yellow and so many telephone cables, wires and aerials that the buildings looked caught in a net. The man beside him snored. A dangle of drool strung his mouth to the knot of his tie.
    Carl got off the coach in a town communist in architecture. In the distance, hills and a power station cast a protective cloud over the streets.