Clarks shoes: one pound, eighteen shillings and sixpence.
Bata shoes: one pound fifteen shillings.
I remember the prices exactly.
We went to Bata.
Well, I did not want those shoes. Not at all. So I claimed they didn’t fit. I pushed my toes together and walked like a crow. I hopped up and down, as though the floor was burning. The saleswoman knitted her brow, pursed her lips and drew in her chin. She pressed at the ends of my toes with her fingertips, measured my feet a second time. Lengthways. Widthways. She brought down a second pair, then a third. Still no luck. After a while she stood back and shrugged her shoulders, turned to my grandmother and said: ‘Once they are worn in the leather will soften, you’ll see.’
Hali!
What did I do? I threw myself on the floor and wept. What do you think I did? I begged my grandmother to take me to the store where they sold Clarks shoes. My grandmother was a stern woman. In the market she sent me to the stall holders to ask their best price. Once. Twice. The traders complained to me they were barely making a profit, but always they lowered their prices. Only after the third time would she come over, exchange greetings and watch them closely while they packed her purchases.
But Bata Shoes was a shop with assistants and a ceiling fan.
She gave in so quickly, I was surprised. My tears dried on my face. And yet as we walked to Clarks Shoe Outlet she held my arm with a grip so tight I could feel the flesh squeezing through her fingers.
Once inside the store I was terrified my grandmother might change her mind. So I forced my foot inside the first pair of Clarks shoes I was given and jumped to my feet. I strode up and down like a soldier on parade. My grandmother ordered the shoes wrapped. She paid and we walked to the door. I tucked my new shoes under my arm and carried them home. I tried to keep a straight face. I tried not to do anything that might annoy my grandmother. And I tried not to think about the way the shoes had pinched slightly across the arch, and how I could feel the ends with my toes.
Lord have mercy! But those shoes gave me so much grief. Even to wear them a little each evening left me hobbling.
So I lent them to the girl who helped in the kitchen. She had broad, strong feet. Rice planter’s feet. It was her job to wash us; she used to scrub our hands and the soles of our feet using blue soap and the brush with which she scoured the floor and walls. She was silent, resolute and almost impossible to please. The loan of my shoes she regarded as a singular favour. By the time I packed them in my box ready to go back to school they were a size bigger.
Sundays was the single day footwear was permitted on the school grounds. Between those times I practised walking until I was about the best in the school. At the end of that term my feet had already outgrown my shoes. Still I wore them for four more months before I was ready to give them up. I knew I’d never get another pair so soon. I simply learned to live with the pain.
Now, how did it go? It went like this:
Back to back,
Belly to belly;
I don’t give a damn
‘Cos I done dead already.
After dark we used to sneak away from my grandmother’s house and gather outside the home of the half-Lebanese son of the garage owner, the only person in that place who owned a gramophone. It was he who used to play the Zombie Jamboree. Only certain kinds of women went to his house. Women who wore tight dresses and smoked cigarettes, who looked each other up and down and sideways beneath heavy lids and kept sullen faces, so they always looked like nothing around them was good enough. We called them High Life women.
A floating population of us lived in my grandmother’s house. I really don’t have any idea who some of them were, but each child arrived with a claim of kinship, no matter how fragile. Parents who were short on funds sent their children to stay. And in return, my grandmother never sent their offspring back. She raised us well, though I don’t remember any active upbringing as such. No. Rather, we were like a collection of differently coloured and shaped bottles left out to collect rainwater, some half-filled, some almost empty. You learned from being around her what would earn a nod of approval or awaken a furious rage. I don’t remember her ever touching us, not even when we cried. And certainly we could not imagine her young, no matter how we tried. Yet somehow she left us all with the impression, like the afterglow of a radiant dream, of having been thoroughly loved.
Still, we ran away from her when we could. First to watch the High Life women and strut to the Zombie Jamboree on our dance floor of dust, in the square of yellow light beneath the window of the garage owner’s son. Later, when the Lakindo clubs started to be held among the stalls of the empty marketplace, and before the elders banned them because so many men complained their youngest wives were disappearing at night to attend the dances, we used to hide and watch the couples dancing in the dark.
We didn’t celebrate birthdays. We didn’t know when we had been born. Presents came occasionally, always unannounced, which made them all the sweeter. The year I turned approximately sixteen my grandmother returned from the market with a pair of red patent-leather shoes with real heels. The choice seemed so utterly unlike her in any way I wonder if later, when she looked with a different eye, she didn’t disapprove of her earlier self in buying those shoes. But I guess at the time she thought they were as smart as I did.
I wore them to my graduation. And later to my first dance. In those days the dances began at four o’ clock in the afternoon. Yaya and I walked the three miles from home barefoot, we washed our feet at the standpipe and clumped into the dance in our shoes. The first time was a disaster. My feet sweated in the heat. Inside the plastic shoes they slipped and slid like eels in a bucket. Our dance routine collapsed, we stumbled over each other’s feet, bruises like purple and black pansies bloomed on our shins.
From then on we wore our shoes to rehearse. At the next dance we rhumba’d like professionals. And for the first time I danced with somebody other than my brother.
Janneh was five years older than me. A student at the university in the South. He had a voice the colour of deep water, tapered fingers, long legs with high calves and two scoops of muscle and flesh for his buttocks. He owned a motorbike. A motorbike! In those days few people even had bicycles, though you could hire one outside the petrol station. You couldn’t actually ride away on it, though. You sat on the back and they pedalled you to your destination.
The Honda’s engine was as loud as the roar of a forest beast, it drowned out my screams. My skirt was bunched up between my legs, I pressed my knees together and held on to the padded seat between us. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, to actually put my arms around his waist. Going up a hill I felt myself sliding dangerously backwards. At the last moment I reached out and grabbed Janneh’s shirt, slid my arms around him. Down the other side my body was pushed against his. I felt my stomach flip. Just for a moment I pressed my nose against his shirt and breathed in. A warm, pungent smell, cloudy and pure at the same time. Like the smell of crumbled chocolate. Or new puppies.
My legs were trembling as I let myself into the house. From gripping with my thighs on to the motorbike, I told myself. Only once I was in bed did I remember Yaya, who walked all the way home alone. My brother did not dance with me for days.