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Sport 26: Autumn 2001
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At six-thirty a woman strode into the shop, followed by a valet. She was small with thick, dark brown hair pulled into a high bun, and she wore a red and yellow striped trouser suit.
‘Ms Lapeeta!” gushed Mr Pompey. ‘Welcome. I'd like you to meet the newest addition to our team, Pearl Pink.’
Leeta Lapeeta smiled at me. It was the kind of smile that compelled you to return it, and then to stay smiling for some time afterwards.
‘Oh, look at these,’ she purred as I handed her a pair of gold sequinned dance shoes.
Leeta Lapeeta shut her eyes. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘ I see them still glowing through my lids like some radioactive material.’
Kneeling in front of her, I noticed how pale her toenails were in contrast to her dark skin, and how perfectly smooth they were, quite unlike the lumpy ridged deposits that my own toes put forth. With the shoehorn, I guided her feet carefully into the shoes.
‘They feel wonderful,’ she said, flexing her feet.
‘She buys a lot of shoes, does she?’ I asked after she'd swept out, her valet behind her carrying six boxes.
‘Oh yes,’ Mr Pompey said. ‘At least thirty pairs a year. And it does our image wonders to have her wearing our shoes exclusively.’
When the store manager left to try his fortune overseas, Mr Pompey appointed me to the position. I was thrilled the afternoon he told me, and after work as I walked along the track by the stream, I looked up through the trees at the night sky covered in a silvery fur coat of cloud, and I barely felt my feet at all.
I didn't want to dream of Soss that night, so I sat in the kitchen until dawn thinking about how much I could do with my new job.
Mr Pompey approved of my idea for a new range, and I set to work on it straight away, contracting well-known artists to decorate plain shoes with wonderful mini-murals.
I organised a launch party, and invited our most important clients.
I felt sleek and successful that evening. I'd bought myself a new page 40 suit for the occasion, vivid purple with gold buttons, and slicked my hair back so it gleamed like my black patent leather shoes. However, it wasn't long before I was upstaged.
Her hair was a clump of thin braids entwined with orange silk ribbons. She wore a flowing orange dress with jets of flame-coloured plumage spurting from the sleeves and neckline, and her shoes were covered with fake orange and yellow jewels. From the instant she walked into the shop, Leeta Lapeeta seemed to be the star around which everyone else orbited. But how could I begrudge her this, when at every opportunity she effused so sincerely over the range of shoes, and my brilliance in dreaming it up?
By nine o'clock everyone had left. I was clearing away the lipstick-stained glasses and the plates of used toothpicks, and I must have left the back door open, because suddenly there she was, beside me. ‘Why don't you leave that and come in early tomorrow instead?’
Night had fallen; the air had cooled. But the sunroom at Leeta's mansion had obviously been hoarding warmth all day, and now as I sat in a wicker chair looking out of the huge windows at the blackness, I still felt the day's balminess.
Leeta sat in a chair beside me and raised her glass. ‘To Pompey and Pshaw's most gorgeous range of shoes yet.’
I leaned forward and touched my glass to hers. Clink. It was as an intimate sound.
‘Of course, I like these too.’ She lifted one foot a few inches into the air.
I recognised the first pair of shoes that I had ever helped onto her feet.
‘They're very sexy, these dancing shoes,’ she said. ‘Of course all shoes can be sexy. It's how you wear them.’ She smiled. ‘And how you take them off. Don't you think so?’
I wondered what to say. I wondered if I should admit to her that I never took my shoes off except to change them. And should I then describe the untethered feeling that came over me, even in those few seconds when my feet were naked and between pairs of shoes?
In my mind I heard again the clink of our glasses. ‘I would never page 41 take my shoes off to make love,’ I said at last. ‘They're too important.’
Leeta laughed.
I laughed too. Watching her I saw the twists of her hair that radiated from her head as being like the sun's prominences, fiery tongues lapping at the space around them. I thought about saying, ‘I don't adore them, I need them,’ but I stopped myself in time.
I would stay for only one drink, I decided.
I loved my waking life. However, after bedtime nothing had changed, and night after night I continued to chase Soss's receding figure through my dreams.
It was midwinter, no one had much money, and we weren't selling as many shoes as usual. Then one afternoon I had an idea.
‘Brilliant!’ cried Mr Pompey when I told him. ‘But…you will contact her, of course?’
I looked at the phone.
Do you know what a pearl really is? asked Soss in my head.
I made a pot of coffee.
I made a list of things I had to do that day.
The coffee was cold. I made some more.
I looked at the phone.
A little piece of grit, irritating as hell…came Soss's voice again.
Go on, do it, I told myself.
Before Soss could say any more, I picked up the receiver and dialled Leeta's number.
I selected one of the most expensive fur-trimmed boots in the shop, and then I designed a poster.
THE SEARCH IS ON! THE FIRST PERSON TO FIT THE BOOT PERFECTLY WINS A NIGHT OUT WITH LEETA LAPEETA
page 42The Search would last seven days. We were looking for someone whose left heel, toes, instep, ankle and calf fitted it so exactly that they could have been the boot's last.
On Monday morning I looked nervously through the glass door at the crowd clamouring outside. I'd imagined a steady flow of people throughout the day, not such an immediate crush.
In one corner of the shop I'd set up a booth which people could enter to try on the boot. I'd hired a scrutineer to be there at all times, and at this moment I could hear him getting comfortable in his chair. I checked my watch; it was half past eight. I unlocked the door.
People burst in around me. ‘Line up! Line up!’ I yelled, to little effect.
By lunchtime the shop was still packed, but I'd instituted a makeshift system: everyone who wanted to try on the boot was given a numbered ticket from a pile that I'd had one of the assistants hastily cut up. Each hopeful then had to wait for their number to be called.
At the end of the afternoon we were all exhausted. However, we'd sold more shoes in that day than in the whole of the past fortnight. As I closed up shop, I felt a thrill of hope. I was going to pull Pompey and Pshaw out of their slump.
The second day of The Search went more smoothly than the first because I'd hired to extra sales assistants, just for the week. A few troubles remained inevitable though. For example, the scrutineer was always having to make sure that people whose feet were slightly too big didn't try to pull the boot on too hard. Despite our best efforts, one woman forced her foot in and then couldn't get it out. The scrutineer and I spent ten minutes kneeling in front of her, easing it off millimetre by millimetre. Then of course there were people with very small feet who slid their foot in and joyously announced, ‘It fits!’ only to have the scrutineer press round the heel and toes and say, ‘Actually…’ You can imagine those people's disappointment.
As the week went on the crowds and the sales never waned, but on Friday a terrible thought occurred to me: what if no one perfectly fitted the boot?
*
page 43It was Sunday morning. The Search was due to end at five o'clock that afternoon. I stood at the counter and observed the hordes, my heart sinking. I'd generated the publicity I wanted, I knew, but it would all backfire if no one won; people would feel cheated.
Just then there was a yell, and around the booth a commotion broke loose. Some of the people in the shop were trying to run away from it, while others tried to rush towards it to see what was happening. I pushed through them all.
Inside the booth stood a man, his mouth and eyes open wide. In one hand he gripped a knife, and in the other he held a handful of toes. A puddle of blood poured from his toeless right foot and spread across the floor. The boot lay on its side nearby. The scrutineer was nowhere to be seen.
I felt as if all the heat in my body was being sucked out through the soles of my feet. I yelled to the manager, ‘Call an ambulance!’ Then noticing how the man was clutching his knife with white, quivering knuckles, I called, ‘And police!’
I tried to shunt the crowds out of the shop, but it was like chasing mercury. I shouted at the other shop assistants to help me.
When we'd finally herded everyone onto the pavement, I locked the shop door behind us. People were still knocking and pushing each other, trying to get close to the window to stare at the man, who just stood there in the doorway of the booth, holding his knife and his toes and bellowing into the air.
I turned and saw Mr Pompey staring at me through the crowd, his face purple with rage.
Later that night, after half an hour of police questioning and two hours of media interrogation, I returned to the shop.
The police had blacked out the windows with sheets of material, but a mob of people continued to jostle each other, trying to peep between cracks. I stopped when I saw them and hurried through the adjacent alley and round the back way.
I switched on the shop light and saw that the main puddle of blood was still fresh and red. The adrenaline of being caught up in a crisis had drained from my body, and I knew with miserable certainty page 44 that I wouldn't be welcome back here next week.
I shut my eyes and concentrated on the soles of my shoes.
I picked up the boot from near the blood puddle. Aside from a few dried brown spatters clinging to the fur, it looked fine. I put it to one side, then started mopping. Silence rang in my ears. Once the puddle was soaked up and I'd rinsed the mop in the sink out the back, I began to work at the remaining stain with a scrubbing brush. The blood had collected in little cracks so that the floor looked like the white of bloodshot eye.
There was a knock at the back door. I stood stiffly and went to look through the peephole. My gut shifted. It was Leeta, her face murderous. I steadied my feet in my shoes and opened the door.
She brushed past me. ‘That lunatic! I should have warned you.’
I shut the door and followed her into the shop. I was so relieved not to be the object of her rage that my knees nearly gave way. ‘Warned me what?’
‘Crazy people, obsessed with me. This one's been writing me letters for years.’
I sank back onto the floor and continued to scrub limply at the stain.
‘What are you doing that for?’ she asked, still sounding angry. ‘I've ordered a professional cleaner.’
She shook her head. ‘I can't believe I didn't think of something like this happening.’
She wore heavy black boots that I'd never seen her in before, and it touched me to think that she armoured her feet in a crisis.
I put the scrubbing brush down. ‘Just because someone writes you weird letters doesn't mean they're going to do something like this.’
Leeta sighed. She picked up the boot and crouched beside me. ‘Do you think it actually fitted anyone?’ she asked.
I felt tired and reckless. I took off my left shoe, removed the boot from her hands, and slid it on. Leeta looked at me expressionlessly.
‘I was sure there'd be at least one other person it would fit,’ I offered.
page 45Leeta put her hand slowly up to her mouth.
I looked down at the boot on my foot. Something has to happen now, I thought, but nothing did. Not until at least a minute later, when Leeta's arms slipped around me, and my body began crawling with desire.
The moonlight coming in the open window set Leeta's sleeping face aglow, and a breeze fanned the deep-blue veils that hung around the bed so that they licked at us like cool flames. I had never imagined Leeta asleep before, and the sight filled me with amazement. But now and again unease crept over me as, ghostlike, the image of Soss at the cottage doorway hovered in my mind. Whenever this happened I looked at the end of the bed, saw my still-shod feet protruding from the bottom of the sheet, and felt reassured.
I think of the months that followed as ‘the slide’—a time when everything fell away and apart.
For a start, my dreams of Soss took on a new intensity. The colours were brighter and more vicious; my need to see Soss's face was more desperate, and my desire to speak to her more urgent. Sometimes, waking in the night and feeling someone beside me, I thought at first that it must be Soss. Then as my mind sharpened into complete wakefulness and I realised the person was Leeta, one part of me breathed a sigh of relief while another began to weep.
Autumn came with its slanting shadows and its air clear and chilled as a glass of water. The last occasional glows of sunlight were like small melting sweets, to be savoured. Being in love at this time of year was almost unbearably poignant.
At night, I often lay gazing at Leeta's sleeping face without touching her, feeling that however much of her skin I covered with my own, and however hard I pushed my flesh into hers, I would never be close enough.
It was as if all the solid ground around me was sliding away, with just a single miraculous patch left where she and I stood together. But before long, that ground was uncertain too.
Since my firing, Leeta had supported me. I'd looked for other page 46 jobs, but who would have me now, knowing that I'd single-handedly orchestrated such a catastrophe? I hadn't been back to Birdsong Cottage for weeks.
‘I hate living off you,’ I said to Leeta. ‘I hate it that our relationship is about economics.’
‘Pearl,’ said Leeta, ‘all relationships are about economics—even when the currency isn't money.’
Soss made her presence known increasingly often. I would put my face close to Leeta's and her blur of eyes and nose would turn into Soss's. Or Leeta would begin peeling my clothes off, and suddenly it would be Soss trying to get me ready for bed, her fingers fumbling at my collar and yanking at my sleeves.
Then, early one morning, Leeta ambushed me.
The waving blue veils around the bed, our damp flesh—everything was deceptively soft, even her voice. ‘Pearl, can't you take your shoes off just once?’
My heart stopped.
‘And let's stay at your tonight,’ she continued.
‘But it's so small and shabby,’ I said. ‘It's nothing like yours.’
‘What does that matter?’
‘I'm embarrassed.’
‘I lived in a shabby house once too, you know,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I replied, ‘I know.’
‘Of course you do.’ Irritation was starting to reveal itself. ‘Everyone does. But I don't know anything about your life. Is that fair?’
I thought about Birdsong Cottage and about Soss's rock. My guilt at having never needed Soss seemed to ooze blackly through that patch of bush. It dripped from the leaves, and filled the air. I didn't want to take Leeta into that. In fact, doing so would make the guilt thicker and uglier: I needed Leeta, and by taking her to the rock I would be flaunting that in front of Soss. It was not that I didn't need anybody, I would be announcing, it was just that I never needed Soss.
‘Well?’ asked Leeta.
I put my hand out and fiddled with a veil, curling an edge of it round my finger, and then releasing it.
page 47Leeta's voice grew low and angry. ‘I don't know anything about your family, you won't let me come to your house, and I've never seen your feet.’ She waited several more seconds for me to say something, then snorted disgustedly and stood to dress.
There was Soss's voice again. Do you know what a pearl really is?
Autumn deepened. Though Leeta didn't press me for answers again, the questions now hung over our relationship like the low clouds that were gathering above the winged sandal island. And then the storms came.
One wild evening I decided to return to Birdsong Cottage. I climbed the ladder, hauled myself onto the rough, cold carpet of the front hall, and threw off my dripping raincoat. The air smelt of damp wood and stale food. ‘Hello!’ I called to the insects.
I went to the kitchen and switched on the light. Beetles, now unaccustomed to the sudden blaze of artificial light, darted out of sight.
Birdsong Cottage shook in the storm, and I heard the whoosh and crackle of earth from the bank crumbling into the stream below.
It was no use. I didn't want to be here. Pulling my coat tight around myself, I descended the ladder again and hurried back through the rain into town, my shoes no protection against Leeta's pull.
In her bed I slept fitfully. First I dreamed I was sucking at Soss's breast, my cheek against her forearm, my neck tense because her arm wasn't holding me comfortably. Her milk dribbled into my mouth like water from a tap with no pressure, and I pumped my tongue furiously to try and increase the flow. Then I was being pulled away—Soss was sick of sitting still and irritated with the cannibal tugging at her nipple. I craned my neck forward to try and stay latched on, but my lips popped off and Soss's blonde hair swung over her breast like the curtain falling on a show.
Then everything froze, the hair dematerialised, and the breast was in front of me again. I nuzzled my face closer, until I realised this breast didn't belong to Soss at all. It was smaller, firmer, muskier-smelling. It was Leeta's, and I was awake.
page 48I lay motionless, concentrating on the shoes on my feet, then drew back from Leeta and watched her sleeping. Moonlight fell at such an angle that I could see minuscule grooves in her skin leading away from her closed eyes like a network of roads on a map. Each time she breathed, her chest rose slowly, her breath came out in a huff, then there was a stillness before her lungs again heaved.
I listened to the rain on the window, and sleep soon reclaimed me. Once again I was a baby, this time stretching my limbs up towards Soss. I was trying to part the wall of her hair, to reach for her eyes and mouth. To my joy her arms began curving towards me. They moulded around me, and pulled me upwards. I felt elation. But then her hands melted, and I was falling. ‘Mother!’ I yelled.
This time when I woke, my heart was pounding. The word seemed to hang in the air. Had I really yelled? And then I stared wide-eyed into the darkness, struck by a new thought: maybe I had needed Soss.
Maybe I had.
I looked across at Leeta. Her eyelids flickered and I thought that I detected a change in her breathing.
I got up very gently, pulled on my dressing gown, and padded down the stairs. Through the dimly lit hallways I went, my mind alive with my new realisation. I opened the back door and looked out through the sheets of rain at Leeta's expansive lawn. It was painstakingly well manicured, and even outside her mansion, there were no insects visible. There were just worms, lots of them, oozing onto the path, washed from the earth by the downpour.
I sat on the doorstep. For months I'd imagined Leeta was gouging out caverns of need within me—needs that only she could fill. Now I knew that they'd been there all along, and all she had done was shovel away the rubble blocking their entrances.
I'd been born with these needs, but Soss, weak and shifting as she was, had been so incapable of meeting them that I'd had no chance to even become aware of what they were. In their place I was left with the amorphous drifting feeling. Until Leeta.
I heard footsteps behind me, and turned.
Leeta glowered at me.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right.’
page 49By morning the rain had stopped and the sun glowed fitfully through the clouds like a lightbulb nearing the end of its life.
The forest smelt richly of rotting leaves, and the stream rushed passed us swollen and gushing.
‘How far in's your house?’ Leeta asked.
‘Not far.’My mouth grew dryer as she and Soss came closer to meeting. We rounded the last bend in the path and I looked at Soss's rock.
It wasn't there anymore.
In its place was what looked like a truckload of rubbish. I looked up at the cliff, and Birdsong Cottage wasn't there either. In fact, it didn't look like my clifftop at all; it was just a mess of raw, crumbling earth. I wondered how I could have lost my way. But as I looked down again at the heap of smashed wood and glass with dark, sodden dirt piled on top of it, I saw clearly what had happened.
I noticed a corner of my kitchen bench poking up through the debris. Then I saw a crushed lampshade and, a few seconds later, an old grey shoe. I stood stunned while the stream continued to rush round the wreckage, as if this was just another troublesome obstruction to its journey.
‘Pearl,’ gasped Leeta, ‘don't you want to do something?’
I shook my head dumbly. Nothing could fall any further.
Leeta waded into the stream and began clambering over the ruins, scooping dirt away with her hands. She dragged out the grey shoe, then a saucepan, a soggy purse, and another shoe. I wondered why she was bothering. The damage was done. I pictured Soss bursting from beneath the rock and, in a decisive act, reaching up and pulling the cottage down on top of herself.
And what of Soss? I stood beside where the rock had been, trying to feel her presence, but I couldn't. Maybe she'd been shattered, and piece by piece she'd be washed away, or perhaps she was now buried so deeply under the wreckage that, like a distant radio signal, she could no longer exert any perceptible influence.
*
page 50‘Pearl,’ Leeta said, and I looked up. The tenderness on her face made me catch my breath. She removed her jacket and placed it on the log, then helped me it down on it. She put her arms around me, resting her cheek against mine, and after a while she knelt. She kissed my thighs and my knees. She rolled up my dripping wet trouser legs and kissed my ankles.
As my shoes came off in her hands I felt terrified, then dizzied and released. I slid off the log into the mud and lay there, looking at the bare clifftop, feeling my feet wave in the air, covered in her kisses.
I was in the middle of lake, not of water but of rippling blonde hair. There was a beach up ahead with shining brown sand. I swam towards it, until its smooth skin was just before me. I reached out my hand to touch it but the pale hair entangled my legs and tugged me back. I fought it off and clambered ashore. I rolled in the hot, wet, sugary sand, gouged ditches in it, held handfuls of it, and let it ooze between my fingers. It got in my mouth, in my ears, and in my eyes.
Over the next nine months my stomach rose like a new island. My body tipped and rearranged itself, and the fizzing inside my womb came to a rolling boil.
There was plenty to do. I borrowed piles of books from the library, so that at any time I could tell Leeta exactly what the foetus looked like and what its capabilities were. I bought scores of booties, and each night when Leeta came home from work, I diligently showed her the latest pairs. And I made myself birth shoes of black silk.
I went into labour late one autumn night. Pain curled through my abdomen, and my insides heaved. I held my breath and felt myself sucked into the pain. Hours passed, and then there was numbness. ‘You might want to start to push soon,’ said the midwife. But I didn't want to push at all. Soon I felt the baby moving through me of its own volition, like an air bubble surfacing after being trapped underwater in a cup. If Leeta hadn't been there to catch that baby, I think it would have flown up to the ceiling and bobbed there—a shiny, surprised angel, tethered by a twisting balloon cord.
*
page 51Later, I held Seraph in my arms, and Leeta and I stood in front of the mirror, gazing at ourselves with this flyaway creature. Leeta stroked our baby's pale face and ruffled her halo of white hair. She looked into her own dark eyes in the mirror, and then into mine. ‘People are going to wonder who the mother is,’ she said.
For the first week of Seraph's life, I couldn't bring myself to take her outside into fresh air. It seemed to me that she herself was air, and she might simply dissipate. When, eight days after the birth, Leeta finally managed to coax me out of the mansion, I stood there on the doorstep, close to tears, looking up at the high roaming clouds, and holding my bundled-up baby as tightly as I could—unable to describe how if felt to so expose her to the world and all its possibilities.
Now Seraph is five months old. I carry her with me everywhere, hugged close to my body in a sling. I'll keep her with me for as long as she needs me to. One day the holes inside her will be filled, and she'll weigh enough to walk firmly on this earth by herself. I don't mean her body, for that will walk very soon. I mean her spirit, which will take longer. And as that happens, as she gradually comes down to earth, she will begin to move away from me of her own accord. But for now I am her ground, and I must be solid and constant.
I wear sturdy shoes for Seraph, and I look forward to the day when I will buy or make her some of her own. Sometimes when I change her booties, I pause to gaze at her naked feet, small and curled as autumn leaves, and I shiver, just as I still do when I see my own feet.
Never again have I been able to feel the same rapture upon having my shoes taken off that I felt in the bush with Leeta; I feel only the familiar drifting sensation, and I now think of that one afternoon's exhilaration as a kind of perishable gift, the true gift being not the thing itself, but the memory of it.
As I think about this, sometimes I listen for Soss's voice in my head…Do you know what a pearl really is? But there is only a glorious silence.