‘She Danced Across the Wastelands’ by Aoife Casby

I stole the boot. It is definitely a boot, and I stole it.

Just the one.

It’s up there in my wardrobe now.

It smells of need.

I take it out occasionally, more often than I used to. Sometimes I take it out to try and get rid of it. Sometimes I take it out to just …

… it’s a high, red, leather boot with a zip. Heels that do things to the instep, and to the curve in your back. You know the type, the sort of boot other women wear.

*

I stole the boot from an old friend; a woman who used to be a friend. I met her on, hang on, her name is Uma. I met Uma on that leafy street by St. Peter’s.

- Hi Jane, she says.

Jane, that’s my name.

- Hi, I say. This is a coincidence.

- How are you? Uma says.

- Well this is a coincidence, I say, again, without really meaning that it is a coincidence. We have a hug, the kind that neither of us wants to have but that we’re both thinking the other expects. Then, quite suddenly, we separate and let the blush spread between us. I talk again although, at this point, I should really have just walked on.

But I didn’t.

I can’t remember the name of that street; it had full leafy trees. It was summer and the traffic hummed rather than blared. For some reason I remember a yellow car, a Volkswagen Beetle. You don’t expect them in that colour.

- So, where are you off to then? I ask, because I don’t know what else to say, and I eye the shopping bags Uma has hanging from her hands. Oh so labelly, I think.

- Well I live here, Uma says, and she points up the sunny tiled steps, keys in hand real awkward-like, and the bags bang against her breast.

Then she says, shopping bags, like I had asked her about them and she gives a smile that twists her nose and jostles about her top lip in a way that would make you want to stop her smiling.

- Treated myself, she says with pre-recession style and flicks her head, which shifts her golden hair and exposes her eyes. I like Uma. She’s just, well, she’s just that type, you know – she’d be easy to dislike if you had that attitude where any blond city girl with a bit of money and that accent is fair game, an airhead. It’s better to make up your mind about her before she speaks.

- What are you doing here? Uma continues, meaning what was I doing in this part of town, and I don’t tell her that I was going to see a dentist that I picked from the Golden Pages because I liked the sound of his name.

- Visiting friends, I tell her, you wouldn’t know them.

- Coffee? asks Uma, a little reluctantly I think, and she starts her waddle on up the steps. I shadow her as if it were the most natural thing to do. She’s smaller than me.

*

We used to live together. As students. We weren’t two girls that in the normal scheme of things would be naturally thrown together. Oh yeah, we got drunk together loads of times and shared men and even kissed and groped one another more than a few times. I reckon it’s the first thing both of us remember when we meet and we’ll never talk about those lovely kisses which is a pity, really, because I think we’d probably get a great laugh out of it – or more. Yeah, I’d love to talk about it.

- You have to see these boots, Uma says, and she grabs a bag from the floor and flurries out of the room, leaving me in the kitchen feeling a little bit more relaxed now that we’ve gotten over the first round of small talk. I walk around the kitchen, touching her things and opening the neat filled cupboards.

Managing a restaurant, she had said. A funny thing for a woman who studied French and English to do, I thought, but didn’t say it. A high class sort of place though; I looked it up. They had lobster on the menu and put real gold into delicate desserts.

I told her I’m in personnel and that I see it as a stepping stone or as, you know like, a filler in, a way to make money. In fairness I don’t make a lot but I needed her to know I had plans. I must have embarrassed her with all my talk of positions and careers. Neither of us was going to talk about men or marriage (or kissing). That was clear and when the conversation got dangerous, that was when she went to try on the boots.

Anyway, there’s no sign of her with the boots so I go to look for her. Without thinking about it too much, without any agenda or intention, I just walk into the corridor. There are no carpets in her place. All of the floors are wooden and it looks like nice wood too but it gives the whole apartment a sort of controlled feel to it, like an empty home.

I’m creeping about the place. I say creeping, but it’s just that at this stage I don’t call for Uma or anything – just go down the wide hallway testing all the doors. Don’t ask me why I don’t call her name. Uma. Such a full fleshy mouthful, but I don’t call. It’s a big place. Four doors off the corridor so I just open the first, peep in and whisper her name so that even if she is in the room she might not hear me. My heart is beating so that it talks to me. And then the second door, and there’s still no sign of Uma.

The door at the end, the one that faces the front door, is slightly ajar so I go to it and push, mouthing her name, without saying it aloud. It’s kind of creepy when people do that, even if they don’t mean it. You see it in the movies the whole time, people stopping outside doors and listening and you know that something bad is going to happen. Well, that’s the way I am at the door and I know at this stage that Uma’s behind it and I open it a little more, just a soft push with my hot fingers, and Uma doesn’t see me. I watch her in the red boots and their smooth, sure zips.

I just stand there watching her in her fuck-me boots that give off more of an I’ll Fuck You thing and I can see that Uma knows that. I stand there, breathing, so alive, waiting for Uma to see me watching. As I gaze, I realise too that Uma was never ever going to come to the kitchen with the boots. It is way too private. But I see her anyway. There she is, with her double chin and her chafed thighs and her having this look on her face. All golden and delighted. And all she did was put on red boots.

It’s the movement of the mirror that does it.

I watch her standing there in her surprisingly old-fashioned, not-white bra, her new boots, tight, up to the middle of her shaven calf. It’s the movement of the mirror; that’s when she notices me. Uma is strutting, half naked, with the boots on, up and down in front of her short reflection, her knickers and the rest of her clothes in an ugly pile on the floor, and then she reaches out and moves the mirror on the wardrobe door to get a better view of herself and catches me with my eyes full of things I can’t say.

There’s a moment where the universe cleaves passionately open, reveals itself and its opportunity but I am ill-equipped for this.

I am ill-equipped.

Her cheeks are as red as the leather that is holding her up. She reaches to pull her clothes from the ground and as she does she falls – topples from the unzipped boots – and lands on her plump thighs and arse, with her legs open and her coiffed vagina facing me. It’s such a stupid situation. I should help her to her feet, I think. I should grab her dressing gown, lead her to the bed, meet her eyes and, oh so wordlessly, communicate harmony to her.

Uma sits still on the floor.

I try to laugh it away, and instead of all the things I could have done like smile at her gently, go forward and admire the boots, whisper to her about my blood, my heart, my tight throat, her eyes, her smell, instead of any of that I say stupidly and with a question that I should not have asked:

- They’re for himself, not you, I think?

I don’t move.

Uma stays on the floor, splayed, then glances down at her exposed self and looks at me. Her face is vaguely disappointed for a moment, and then simply blank.

- Coffee, I gabble, we’ll have to have more coffee.

I turn away from her and go back to the kitchen where I put on the kettle. There is a short circuit in my vision, my hearing is all static and obscurity and all I can smell is the musk of the bedroom. After a few short and heart-breaking seconds, Uma is there too and we act as if none of it ever happened.

- There’s such a lot to catch up on really, she says earnestly, words tumbling out faster and faster. You have to come over for dinner. It’d be nice to have company, to talk to someone, you know, it’s all waiters and headaches and rosters and sometimes, sometimes it is just too much. Company, yes. But not this evening, no, not this evening.

I feel sorry for her (and for me). I haven’t said anything about coming back although I would have, and would have enjoyed it, but she must have panicked or something. Anyway I tell her that that’s fine, that we’ll exchange numbers and any time she wants a bit of company I’ll be only too glad, that I’d like to catch up. I’m feeling all happy with myself even on top of the awkwardness. I even settle into the silence and its fantasies.

After the dregs of the coffee have gone cold and cloudy I say that I have to get going, dentist you know, and ask may I use the loo.

- Of course, she says, it’s the second on the right.

Both of us know that I know this already.

I take my bag and close the door of the kitchen carefully behind me. As the door closes she catches my eye. I’m unable to identify what I see in hers. The bathroom is a little cooler than the kitchen, and is full of things that let you know the type of person who uses it. There are pills and vitamins and expensive shampoos, a man’s shaving equipment, extra toothbrush. I’m sure that what I feel is regret.

There is no weighing scale. Soft towels, the sort they sell on the top floor in Brown Thomas, are rolled into identical coils. It is neat and clean. I have a pee and can’t stop thinking about the boots. Before I go back to the kitchen I sneak into the bedroom and take one of them.

In the room that smells of her (vaguely floral and citrus and grapefruit), one of the boots lies on the floor, unused but crumpled, and the other is kneeling in an almost sacred pose on top of the bed – in the space where she sat to take it off. I pick this one up and fold it quickly, knowing as I do that I am putting unnecessary creases into the leather. I stuff it in my bag, my heart is banging and my mouth is so wet and even as I do it, even as I am in the middle of taking this, I know that she will know. Like, who else took the stupid thing.

I took the boot.

A few minutes later I do leave and we have another awkward hug at the door. I can’t wait to get away from there because the boot, (like in the movies again, when the camera keeps going back to it) is heavy and throbbing in my bag and so many times over those last few moments I think that I’ll blurt it out, that I’ll baldly and wonderfully confess Ha! Look! Look what I have here in my bag, but I don’t. I so badly want to confess that when we’re exchanging phone numbers I say:

- You know something Uma …

And she looks at me with this curious dance of her eyebrows and I can’t finish whatever it was I was going to say, so I walk away.

For the next few minutes, as I walk to the bus stop, I am almost at the point of returning truthfully to her door. But I don’t. I walk to the bus stop and completely forget about the dentist. I am dying to go to the loo again and I know it’s probably because of nerves but I’m also hungry. I am a lot of things, and as I sit on the bus, I play in my mind what could have happened if I had confessed.

*

I stole the boot. It needs me.

*

I like to remember the way Uma talked about shoes. She said it shhoooooh. Like a word that evolved in her mouth, out of privilege and money. Her mouth in a wrinkled O with the wet pink of her lips inside peeping out, and the white, tight skin on her mid chin, dimpled like something old. It made you want to touch her in some way. Shooooozzzze. And her mouth did that same thing. Pouted. And when you tried to do it yourself, the word, it tickled your tongue and you had to rub the watery tip on the back of your bottom teeth, to get rid of the zees.

Is it actually possible for a woman to worship a boot? I’m not sure. The smell of the boot is special, singular, unique to Uma. I have this in my head anyway. The smell of the leather came out of the bag even as I was sitting on the bus and my heart exploding against my bones. I licked it when I got home.

The taste of polish would make you sick if you thought about it too much, but this wasn’t polished yet. It still had the exciting newness of the shelf, of Uma, and I liked the way my tongue felt on the leather. It was real, pulpy, ready.

I pulled the boot onto my own foot, no tights, no socks, just to see how it felt. I had my own shoe on the other foot and I went into the small garden out the back of the house and walked on the grass. A little bit of the earth adhered to the heel and when I took it inside, I licked that too. There are people who feed on soil, on the clay, on humus and all the skeletons of dead animals. Earth-eating people. Geophages.

Things continued like that, as if I intended them to, but I told myself that the whole thing was some sort of weird accident. The flat became small with the smell of the boot, the bedroom had its scent and presence in the way the sun swaggered through the curtain in the evening, in the creases from my sleeping on the sheets, on the duvet. It was waiting for me when I came home from work, it was there for long twilights, an after-dinner anticipation.

Every time the phone buzzed, I was newly startled. I thought it might be Uma looking for the boot, so when I answered the phone I didn’t say:

- Hello?

Instead, I waited for the other person to say something first, so I’d know who it was and if I wanted to speak. People get annoyed very easily. I had to make excuses and say there was something wrong with the mouthpiece when the person at the other end thought I was weird for staying silent.

And every day, I picked up the phone to ring Uma and say:

- Hi. I took your boot. So sorry.

Every day I picked it up and I never even dialled the number. That would have been too close. Uma. Uma. Uma.

*

For the rest of the short summer I took to walking down her street, the long route home. It seemed to me that it would be easier that way, easier if I accidentally bumped into her again, easier than talking to a disembodied, eyeless voice.

I made another appointment with the nice-named dentist. I didn’t turn up for that one either but I got off the bus and strolled slowly down the leafy footpath, across the road from hers.

It was inevitable that I meet her. It was strange that it was the dental appointment day but I’ve given up searching for reasons for things. You have to in the end.

- I’ve been meaning to call you, she said, and her voice was smooth with a sharpness in it, a tone that had purpose. The closeness beneath the shedding trees was damp, and there was that faint mushroomy odour in the air, of rotting leaves. Her face was pink from exertion, the effort of walking against a directionless autumn breeze. I was warm.

I said something innocuous in reply and stuck my unreliable wobbly hands deeper into my pocket.

- Do you remember the last time we met and –

- How’ve you been? I interrupted, more than asked.

- Well, she hesitated, fairly okay.

She did appear a little flustered and I wasn’t sure why this was but I think I was glad. I couldn’t figure out if she wanted me to go or stay. I was unsure what I wanted myself, and all my body was focused on was the bloody boot. The lovely fucking boot. The queer boot.

- That’s good, I said, and I began to open and close my mouth like a goldfish, completely gormless, looking for nothings to say. Oh God.

I shuffled around her, turning my toes into the soft pulp of the leaves, deflecting her words with harmless phrases and then extravagantly looked at my watch and said I had to go.

- I got back together with my man, she blurted out.

That threw me. The whole street shivered like it does in one of those sudden cool blasts of air on a warm day.

- Yes, I did.

- Oh, I didn’t know you were …

- I didn’t tell you, she exclaimed. Oh yes, it’s going on a long time. He owns the restaurant.

She took a deep breath, made a shifty movement with her hips.

- The day I met you, you remember, well, he wasn’t returning my calls, Harry, I mean, it was pathetic really.

Uma was scanning my whole face as she spoke and I swear, my skin bruised from the way her eyes were blazing. She continued:

- I was catching glimpses of him, Harry, now and again in town with his wife or once or twice I passed by his house on a bus and saw him in the garden, looking rich and happy. I couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understand how he could want me all one minute and then go back to that padded out, sweaty, woman.

She paused and pulled at her hair like she was leaving a space for something to happen.

I said nothing.

Uma sighed.

- So I went out to buy something for myself, shoes or something, and I bought the boots.

She said the word. Shoooze. There was a melting sensation at the top of my gut. I wanted to urinate.

- What boots? I said, looking at where my toe was making complaints against the pavement.

-The red ones. I showed you that day, she said and then added in the little pause before I raised my head, I can’t find one of them.

- That’s strange, were you wearing two? I heard myself and the way I said it. There was no way that she’d believe me. She knew. Oh, she knew.

She didn’t ask me up for coffee.

*

That night, I tried to put the boot out with the rubbish. I took it, the cow-hide symbol of my failure, from the wardrobe when I got home but it was now repulsive to me. I had the boot, I had his name. Harry. A history of the boot that wasn’t mine, and an image of a dimpled fat man crawling all over Uma, the red leather like an invitation on her calves.

It plagued me.

The boot.

I tried to sleep but I knew it was there in the wardrobe, listening, and I was torn between the desire to give it back to her and to get rid of it and its disgusting actuality forever. At this stage, deep down, it was reasonable to think that giving it back, that truth, would release me. Wouldn’t it?

*

The next evening I tried, really really tried, to cast the boot out with the rubbish. I held it in the crook of my arm and I swear, it was just as comfortable as a baby, and I went down to the row of cowardly bins and lifted the lid of that with my number on it. Seven. The ugly breath from the bins was cruel. The sky refused to give up its rain and everything, the concrete, the bins, the cars, the lamp-posts, the walls, had the patina of city dirt. I couldn’t give the boot over. I think what really bothered me was how it would be so close to me in its abandonment. I’d hear it cry out until they took it off for landfill. And then what? But till that happened, if I dumped it, I knew, I knew, I’d be upstairs in my nightclothes, pacing barefoot, and I’d simply have to come down and pluck the boot from among the stinking fruit and plastic. So I didn’t dump it. It was wrong. Anyway. Yeah. I couldn’t desert it so close to me without telling Uma.

*

But it wasn’t over.

I could smell Uma everywhere. Coffee. Uma. Exhaust fumes. Uma. The warm chemistry of the photocopier. Uma. Shoes by Anthony. Uma. The fecking church with its snuffed candle, dead lily, wet coat breath. Bloody Uma.

On Thursday.

I left the house just after dusk.

Left smelling the damp, the river in the distance, the violent scent of urban squirrels every so often, my own sweat, and took Uma’s red boot with me in a plastic bag, one of those blue and white striped ones that you used to get with every little bit of meaningless shopping. I put my gorgeous theft down into it, and looped a simple knot in the top. There was a skip three streets away (there is always a skip when you need one) and it was this I went to. I passed back and over in front of this crouching orange skip maybe five or six times, enough to be conspicuous, and when I could take the uncertainty no more I threw it, bag and boot, in a lurching arc over my head and walked away.

It was too good to be true.

And not far enough away.

*

I went back a little over two hours later and in the accusing carroty street light, clambered up the rusty side of the skip using a pile of cracked timber as support. My heart, my breath, my skin were harassing me. Thank Jesus it was still there. I don’t want to think what it would have been like had it not been. Whatever about any him, it is my connection to her. Those minutes of anticipation, hoping that I wouldn’t be too late, were painful.

I rescued it, pulled it onto my eager foot before I hauled myself back out of the skip, and then, feeling safe again, I planted myself and my booted foot directly in the earth, between the mud and a puddle. I walked home in it. My trainer on the other foot. I didn’t care. I knew I’d never try to get rid of the boot again.

*

I fantasise about meeting her and bringing things back to the way they should be. I’m not sure where it will happen but I can’t get the street by St. Peter’s out of my head. It’ll be a breezy day where the air just around you feels tight and warm and the cold underneath it is obstinate in your nose. And all the things I’ll say, and all the things I could say…they rattle round my head. Her hair will be untied, smell of peaches and it will tangle underneath her chin in the silly light wind. She’ll use her middle finger to scrape wayward strands from her mouth.

We’ll see one another coming from a distance, like in a movie, and we’ll talk like adults.

I often try to imagine what it might feel like to be Uma. To have her ordinariness, to live in her day-to-day-ness. Yes. I do, and I try to imagine telling the truth.

I’ll meet her, but she might be with him, she probably will, with his middle-aged walk and his wife in the background of his smile, and after a few cosy attempts at conversation (which will be awkward because he’s there), I’ll say something like:

- Yes, yes, yes, you were right. I went into your room when you weren’t looking and I took one boot.

And she’ll say:

- I don’t know what you’re talking about, and grip his arm tighter and try to walk away.

I’ll say, looking at him:

- No really, I did, you understand, Harry, how it is with red boots.

And I’ll give him a conspiratorial look that neither of them will understand, but that she will be afraid of. Her bottom lip will be white from the way her teeth are digging into it and I’ll say:

- Now, was it the left one or the right one?

*

My foot is hot.

I have developed blisters; the skin is red and raw where the tight leather chafes. Each wound, each new puffiness is a confession waiting to happen.

It is a punishment.

From issue #3: autumn/winter 2016

About the Author
Aoife Casby works as a writer, editor and visual artist and is currently studying towards a PhD at Goldsmiths University. She was shortlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize 2016 and is completing a collection of short fiction. She has been awarded literature bursaries by the Arts Council and Galway County Council.