A SINGLE SHOE IN THE STREET
A short story from YA MUM and Other Stories from the Backstreets of Britain book. Available October 2020.
I was upside down in a hedge outside Aldi supermarket.
The gentle patter of rain on the leaves around me was just about audible given that even the taxi drivers had called it a night.
Here, right in amongst the beer cans, chocolate wrappers and rats, the soil reeked of sin. I couldn’t move, so I laughed, having managed to muster just about enough presence of mind in my drunken state to know that this would one day be a story worth recounting.
I listened.
For a minute, just the drizzle. Then the clang and squelch of Will’s shoes as he tried to scale the treacherously slippery railing and follow me in. His girlfriend was on the verge of tears, screaming that ‘it’ would be over if he jumped again.
Alex was somewhere in the road, shouting about how he kept on missing his mouth, wasting the strips of cheap takeaway meat.
I fell asleep.
Only for a minute, but long enough to wake up cold and confused, the rain drops now a little nastier, each one hissing at me to get home and go to bed. I couldn’t hear the others. Like a dog in for its jabs, I writhed and thrashed; got it in my head someone was trying to pull off my shoe.‘Fucking get off of me!’ I slurred. My shout reverberated around an empty can of Stella near my shoulder, under the hedge, but there was no one to hear it outside of this seedy Eden.
The others had set off home, forgetting I was in there.
My shoe was caught on a root and came off as I tried to pull my foot away from this phantom assailant. I dared not feel around for it in the soil for fear of disturbing a used needle or condom. Or the rats. Suddenly my once-Olympic-standard bush jump didn’t feel worthy of the rapture with which it had been met a mere ten minutes previous.
Eventually I made it to my feet and hopped just over a mile home. I could hear myself out of breath the whole way as the sun came up.
The next morning I went back for the shoe.
Aldi was right across the street from Blockbuster Video, where I worked, so it wasn’t much of a detour. I knew exactly where it would be and it was still there, dry as a ‘90s rock star, sheltered by the hedge. There was a curved dent where I’d been.
When I came up with a relieved smile on my face, my parents just happened to be walking past, on their way to the train station. I held up the shoe as if it would explain my strange behaviour.
They took me aside for a quiet word when I dragged myself in from work that evening, still picking splinters from my skin, but an age-old urban riddle was solved for me: until then, I’d never been able to fathom how the single shoes I’d occasionally see in the street came to be there. The mystery was over.