They’ve been around about the place waiting. First the eyes start squinting for sunglasses,
and the shoulders get rid of sleeves, replaced by fine straps. Freckles come rushing towards the sun galore and,
it’s only natural, that her feet, at one with sheepskin lined boots plodding
around the mountain all winter long, should be itching for a little mercy….some
light relief. She hasn’t been season
shopping, not for years; tends just to sympathise with things getting musty in
her wardrobe until the right weather comes along. So her feet might just have
an inkling that it’s going to be the same old, the same old…
Some years ago she dived in though; dived into the
pool of splashing out, and paid for some very necessary footwear (she does love
her feet after all, where would she be without them?) A pair of simple sandals with a black,
capital lettered, 235-year-old trademark embossed on the inner side. A pair of white
patent leather, beautiful buckled summer shoes.
They were ready, her and her feet - sole cushioned yet mostly bare,
spirits high… and the summer came on…
Not long after there is a picture of her on an English
railway platform, surrounded by three little human ducklings. They are all going back on the next train to
the place she had chosen for their nest.
She had once spent a year wearing wellington boots in the northeast of
England which was enough for even a tame podophile or, indeed, for any mummy
duck who needed sometimes to feel the span of her feet under the sun, or hop to
the shade, soles slightly braised. It
was a choice she had made and so there they were on platform 1, waiting for the
train which would take her, with six little soles following, back to the warmer
country next door, leaving the lady behind the camera to her winters with
grandpa and her looking lovely in thick, red jumpers.
She doesn’t look like a duck in the photo despite her
gloriously comfortable large feet bedecked in her wonderful flat sandals. She looks more like a giraffe bending over
trying to get into the frame of the photo aimed at three little versions of
herself.
(They do look
good, go well with what she is wearing, go well with everything and they really do fit like paws. Honestly.
She was even tempted to write a little piece about them. She wasn’t pandering. She wasn’t on any well-known German shoe
company’s pay roll! But she did dream
sometimes about getting a little recompense for something she loved doing more
than anything in the world. She felt it might give her the validation, the blessing, to sit there and tap, tap, suffering for art - a pay
check wouldn’t go so far as buying
happiness- whilst being quietly catered for…well, that was just a Birken dream that she’d have to Stock with the others.[1] The imagination can run wild sometimes. Let’s get back to her sandals… )
As a ferreter of second hand shops, bundles of clothes
in the market place, and a smile in return for a plastic bag full of ironed
rejects, why was she even tempted to go for these sandals that, on that day
when she dived in, weren’t exactly flaunting themselves in the display. I will
tell you. They are the brother sister
lover cousin of another of her trusted steeds, they simply reminded her of
something else she knew and loved. Like
a cousin may remind you of a parent, or a new lover of an old…Or like the
summer reminds you of a spring just gone. And so she loved them too,
straightaway. They were of her clog’s
family, her fantastic romping red clogs that belonged first to the German
company and then to her. Now this was
fashion! London in the nineties, a warm spring and we all felt as young as we
were. Her curly girly friend showed up in
a lime green pair and she had to go take a look. How long did she spend in the store
deliberating over colours, walking up and down the floating parquet, a feast of
choosing in the full length mirror? Her
purple sari skirt piping up for orange, her dark long dreadlocks swaying for blue,
and her knowing in her heart, inside her skinny cage of bones, that it would be
red.
And that was that. Spring in clogs. She gallivanted about. She wore them for everything – soirées, early
morning milk bottle wanders, the city, the sea.
You couldn’t ignore them. They
weren’t wooden, but wonderfully rubber.
They exaggerated her enormous (for a girl) feet, but with such curves
that she was proud. She swung her leg
and loved the way her ankle looked. She
never took them off and they defiantly threw off each season as it came. Wherever she went, they went too. One would have been forgiven for thinking that they were attached to her blue flaired
dungarees, but they weren’t. There they
all had been with their trademarked clogs, and their messy hair, and their
going this way only to find themselves there.
Years later. Ok. Or saved. Functioning.
Or not. They had been pretty and
talented, and their clogs came with them, and they even swapped.
Both lie now in disrepair, separately. The dungarees worn until the holes conquered
decency, and her clogs in the big cupboard at the bottom of the stairs, along
with pairs of “too big” shoes-in-abeyance for her growing tribe of six
feet. Her old, red friends peek out from
the end of the highest shelf, their sole grave.
She could still wear them, in the garden, or about the house, but the
black has become ingrained in the ersatz snake skin red rubber, and the
comfortable inner soles got lost along the way; she prefers to leave them in
the cupboard, a relic of her spring in clogs.
So how could she walk past , when it was there on her
list and her feet ached and the capital lettered familiar name was calling out
Remember?... Yet it was summer this time and she was ripe and they were more
classical than clogs and so a perfect replacement for her grown up feet and they
had stepped onto her path just at the right moment. And so fatefully, a bit
worried that the cheque might bounce, she hot stepped it away with them. And they are on her feet now, years later,
flippy floppy, the swirls of the sole wearing thin. Dog chews or dumb bells? Or simply abstract? Not one to remember to buy after care
products, the white patent leather has been patched up with tip-ex and the
beautiful buckle pulled as tight as it can go.
Still they are a bit baggy. Living
in this lovely warm country she has been lucky to be able to wear them an awful
lot. But they have not quite lasted as
long as her clogs. She hopes this isn’t
a decline in production quality. Maybe
she should write to the German company…She fears more likely that she is
heavier on the ground, not as light as she used to be. Anyway, they really are in a state. If they weren’t attached to her feet, the
first person along would throw them in the bin.
But she is loath to move onto the next pair. Loath for the disappointment of slight
changes. Loath for that quick flurry of
desire as a whole array of unimagined beatitude dallies before her, all with
the terrific possibility of entering into her life and meaning something. No, she thinks, I’ll suffer them through this
summer – the flapping soul prevents her natural rhythm, trips her up a bit - see
them to the grave. Then maybe she’ll
scribble her next shy cheque as an ode to some sensible shoes for the autumn….
Time is quick now. The seasons are like one song.
I won’t mention slippers, or twigs that have grown to
trunks. I won’t mention snow falling,
when she pulls on her sheep skin boots.
She won’t go gallivanting and her summer will be all sandal
souvenirs. This summer seems so much
shorter than the others. Bare footed at the end, after all. Naked.
A sheet will do. At the very
end. So she won’t be faced with two
constant companions losing faith in her, wondering why they’re sticking up, and
where they would be without her.
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