T H E P L O T T H I C K E N S

ADMIRING FEET

From this angle you really only notice people's feet. As though one can judge character in the state of a persons feet, or whether they walk on the cracks in the pavement. But they stand the walking judged. Click heeled stockinged feet; matching the bangra wailing tinnily from taxi radio. Patent leather grey-suit-trouser shoes. Fast trainer shoes no-one notices and slow fat footed old women's tartan slippers. Bare legs, accompanied whispy stubble. Heavy boots or calf length heels pushing perambulators. And his shoes?

If he stood up he wouldn't notice them so much. But from here they are at the bottom of every shot, they smell a little. Worn out greying trainers, fraying at the large toe; perhaps London's most common footwear.

From this angle hardly ever a barefoot. Except through Indian orange saris glimpse sandaled toes, African women sometimes too. Stronger feet than his own. Inside his shoes his feet are tired and pale, sweating, he can feel them.

From this angle he ponders the delicacy of the female foot. Naked feet are an obsession, women's feet in hours of anatomical analysis. How they fit to the ankle; descriptive angling. If you have ever tried to draw feet you will remember.

Abandoned shoes pose for him the most interesting problem. How they came into being, their history; why they were neglected; how the walker continued without the said shoes – whether barefoot or changing shoes in which case why, if the empty shoes are in reasonable repair, did the wearer not keep both pairs? The position of the abandoned shoes. One shoe is never as interesting as two. A pair abandoned neatly intimating usefulness to a future wearer. Parted, lost seemingly in flight, mid-pace, or left as though the wearer had simply vanished, disappeared into thin air or another dimension, leaving only their shoes.

He grew up by the sea, never wore shoes. And he knew the value in beach-combing, where you could find so many things amongst the coloured pebbles, shells, drift wood, torn solitary marigold gloves, cuttlefish, fishing nets, and if he looked long enough ensuing tunnel vision, and he would almost forget the vast expanse of the sea undulating beside him. And old boots. He had made a collection of washed up shoes, housed in a cave with a particularly small entrance. Each alcove was soon shelving a relic, and he would imagine the heritage of the particular shoe in minute detail. Thus the cave was filled with histories until he was too old, around the age of 12, to fit through the mouth.

From this angle, slouched against Worth's bakery, drinking sherry, not long after midday. If the judged were to be rounded up and their shoes taken away, it had happened before. It didn't even matter who judged, all that would remain, a pile of 11.8 million pairs of shoes. And if some fragment of memory were to linger on in each shoe, if shoes retained something of one's essence, then how much could be learnt from such a mountain. And his own shoes?

He began to consider the previous wearer. He had found this pair outside the Mission, and given his own to the dustbin, having long outlived their function. Slightly fatter feet than his own, it had been necessary to tighten the laces considerably from their ingrained indents. Not that dirty; intact soles. They had been a good find. Or so he had thought. But now he wasn't sure. It was possible that these shoes had judged him, maintaining the attitude of their original owner, perhaps an accountant or a devout Christian. Red shoes cross through his angle. And if these shoes had him judged, then perhaps they were the cause of this slow day. A half empty sugar packet blows past in the wind, rhythmically shaking the granules to a swing beat, like the opening to his number. Sliding his feet out of the shoes with his heels, he places them pigeon toed to each other in the corner of the doorway of Worth's, and stands up. He glances back at them only once, as un-shod, his new born feet walk away to be lost in the crowd.

By Megan Eve George

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