Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (6 page)

There was no name over the door, which wasn’t unusual in this part of town. Some of the more upscale designers seemed to think that the harder it was to find your store, the more exclusive it became, and there was certainly an element of truth in that. But even so, what shop could possibly survive here, where even the plant life struggled to exist?

Willow peered through the dirty glass. The window display was bare except for a single pair of shoes, toes turned in, on an upturned wine crate, as if they were just about to click their heels together and wish for home. Willow felt her pulse quicken again. Shoes, that made sense—this was not a shop but a
workshop,
and in the window a single example of . . . Willow pulled the sleeve of her shirt over her wrist and
rubbed a small clean circle in the center of the film of grime. She gasped. They were quite simply the most beautiful pair of shoes Willow had ever seen. Unwittingly, she pressed her palm against the glass, the tip of her nose grazing its surface as she admired them. Whatever material they were made from, Willow had never seen a finish like it. They were black at first glance, but when you looked closely, myriad colors shimmered under the surface, like a rainbow reflected in rippling water. They seemed to sparkle somehow, deep-set with their own infinite universe of stars. Best of all, the high, elegant heels, which looked as if they could have been made from crystal glass, were shaped just like the stem of a champagne glass.

“Oh, I want you,” Willow found herself whispering out loud, the endless chasm in her chest opening up like a yawning mouth demanding to be fed again. Willow knew Victoria would be waiting for her back at the office, she knew that India Torrance was due to arrive any minute and Victoria would be furious with her if she was late. But stumbling across Bleeding Heart Yard, finding these shoes—this was what the good feeling fizzing in her veins was all about. This was fate; the universe had brought her here to find these shoes and they were surely her soul mates.

Willow tried the door, expecting to find it locked, and was surprised when it opened with a jingle of a brass bell. She paused, some small dark memory nibbling at the edges of her thoughts holding her back for a moment, and then entered.

The shop had a distinct smell that brought to mind damp and yellowed pages, dog-eared corners and cracked spines. What books and shoes were doing in the same shop she couldn’t fathom, but her longing for the shoes outweighed her instinctive reservations.

Willow looked around. There was a glass cabinet half filled with an assortment of rings, a handwritten sign taped
to the lid that read “secondhand engagement rings”; a rack of clothes hung along one wall, jam-packed with a collection of colors and fabrics that seemed to span decades of bad taste, including one flea-bitten, ankle-length fur coat that looked like it should be hanging in the back of the wardrobe leading to Narnia. There were shelves of grubby paperbacks, piles of sheet music and possibly manuscripts stacked in precarious leaning towers all around the door, display cabinets laden with dusty ornaments, figurines of rosy-cheeked dancing girls, big-eyed puppy dogs and chubby, gurgling babies that Willow knew, just by looking at them, had once been someone’s pride and joy, cherished objects carefully dusted and admired on a regular basis until somehow they found their way here, to this curious place.

Willow chewed her bottom lip. She was experiencing the oddest feeling of déjà vu, although she was certain she had never been here before.

“Hello?” Willow called out. There was no reply. “Hello? I was just passing and I wanted to look at the pair of shoes in your window.”

Willow waited for a few moments, but there was no sign of life from behind the multicolored plastic beaded curtain that hung perfectly still, shrouding whatever mysteries lay behind it.

Serial killer, maybe,
Willow thought.
Maybe all these things are trophies of the victims lured back here to be hacked to bits with a chain saw, never to be seen again.
Willow looked at the door. She could just leave. But on the other hand, those shoes were worth a skirmish with a psychopath, and besides she was a pretty big girl—it would take a whole lot of killer to floor her without a fight.

“I’ll just try them on if that’s okay?” Willow called out again, feeling a cloud of butterflies rise in her tummy as she approached the shoes.

“Please be my size, please be my size, please be my size,” she whispered as she picked one up and turned it over. The smooth leather sole was naked, and on closer inspection so was the velvet-lined interior of the shoe, with no sign of a size. They looked about right, Willow thought, wondering, even as she slipped off the shoes she was wearing, how much in denial she was prepared to be about how cramped her toes were, if it came to it. There was no seating, so, carefully avoiding the piles of paper, she bent over and slipped on one shoe. Her foot slotted perfectly into the pointed toe, but Willow did not breathe out just yet. One of her feet—she could never remember which—was half a size bigger than the other. What if the shoes only fit the small foot? What if she’d put her small foot in first and bitter disappointment was still a certainty? Glancing briefly over her shoulder at the static bead curtain, Willow put the other shoe on. They fit perfectly.

“Oh,” Willow said, as she looked down at her feet, pressing her breasts out of the way with one hand so that she could get a better look. “Oh, oh, I love
you
.”

“Would you like a mirror?” Willow whipped round to find an old lady regarding her from behind the counter, the bead curtain as still and silent as it had been a moment before.

“Pardon?” Willow croaked, feeling a lot like she had been caught out in some kind of criminal act.

“A mirror, so you can get a good look at them? Without having to . . .” The old lady grabbed her own breasts in demonstration. “Juggle.”

“Er, yes please, if you’ve got one,” Willow said, unhanding her breasts rather sheepishly. The woman was short and squat, with long black hair tied into a bun on the nape of her neck, an inch of white roots fanning out on either side of a center part. She was wearing something that looked like it had once hung on the clothes rack, a full-length kaftan dyed a multitude of
colors in thick bands, like a walking rainbow. She waddled out from behind the counter and pulled a tie-dyed sheet off a full-length mirror that had been hiding in the corner behind an assortment of odd Wellington boots.

“Keeps the dust off,” the woman told her, gesturing for Willow to look in the mirror. “I like to keep the place tidy.”

Anxiously, Willow made her way to meet her reflection. Trying on anything, particularly clothes, was always fraught with anxiety. Every shopping expedition was a double-edged sword. First there would be the fear that she wouldn’t find anything that would suit her demanding frame, then the worry that once she had found something, they wouldn’t have it in her size, followed by the fear that even if they did have it in her size, it would be made for a different kind of her size, the kind without any bust or hips, and she wouldn’t be able to get it on anyway. Finally, there was always the deadly possibility that even if it did fit, she would look awful in it. This happened less often with shoes, which was partly why Willow loved them so much, but it did happen. Sometimes she did just have to look at her generous figure teetering on the brink of four inches of heel and acknowledge that she looked like a fat woman in a posh pair of shoes. Briefly Willow closed her eyes just as she approached the mirror. When she opened them, she could not have been more pleased.

There was something about the shoes, something more than their style or finish, that suited her quite literally down to the ground. They seemed to be perfectly proportioned, making her feet look smaller, her calves longer and, as Willow hitched up her wide-legged trousers to her knees, maybe even just a little bit slimmer. In fact, as she turned this way and that to get a full view of the shoes, Willow thought that her bottom looked a good deal less tightly packed into the trousers than it had this morning, before leaving for work, when she’d
considered the very real risk of a seam malfunction on the tube. It must have been some kind of optical illusion, because now she felt almost weightless, hovering above the floor as if she’d discovered the secret to defying gravity.

“So these are secondhand then?” Willow asked the old lady, who leaned against the counter, her shelf of a bosom resting on her folded arms.

“Or second-footed.” The old lady chuckled. “Yes, a young lady brought them in last week, or the week before . . . or possibly last year. Time doesn’t mean much when you get to my age, you just wake up surprised to still be alive.”

Reluctantly Willow slipped the shoes off, feeling the traction of grit under her stockinged feet as she picked them up and turned them over, looking for some indication as to where they came from. Their basic shape was so classic that it was impossible to age them; they could be anything up to fifty years old, perhaps even older, and there were no identifying marks on them at all. Perhaps they were prototypes, Willow thought, feeling the same sort of excitement that she imagined Howard Carter must have felt when uncovering the steps to Tutankhamun’s tomb. One-offs that never made it into mass production.

“They look like they’ve never been worn,” Willow said, stroking the smooth leather of the sole with the palm of her hand. “Did the woman who brought them in tell you anything about them? The designer’s name, how much they cost new?”

The old lady tipped her head to one side as if perplexed by Willow’s questions. “Nope, just that she didn’t need them anymore and that she wanted them to go to someone who did, or something like that. I don’t know, I forget a lot these days.”

She gestured at Willow’s prize. “I can tell you they are shoes.”

Willow hugged them to her chest.

“Well, I’m going to take them. How much are they?”

The woman held out her hand, beckoning for them, and grudgingly Willow parted with the shoes, half afraid that this strange old lady in this strange little shop might change her mind about selling her the shoes at all. Mentally she calculated exactly how much she was prepared to pay for the shoes and settled rather extravagantly on anything under five hundred pounds.

The woman sniffed, puckering her lips as she examined the shoes.

“Do you read?” she asked Willow. Confused, but sensing that her fortunes relied rather heavily on her answer, Willow nodded noncommittally.

“Right, well, you can have ’em for twenty quid if you take twenty of them books. I can’t shift them books and I’ve read them all now, none of them’s worth a light.”

“Twenty pounds?” Willow repeated. “Are you sure?”

“And them books,” the old lady nodded emphatically at the row of abandoned paperbacks. Willow wanted to bite her chewy old arm off, but her conscience would not let her.

“It’s just, well, that doesn’t seem like enough,” she said.

“All right, take that china dog then too, you drive a hard bargain, missy!” the old lady said with a chuckle.

“No, I mean . . . it doesn’t seem like enough for
me
to pay. How about I give you . . . fifty?”

“But you’ll still take the books, and the dog, yeah?” the old lady pressed her. “And you can have that fur coat too, if you’re going to give me fifty.”

“But I—” Willow caught the look in the old woman’s eyes and didn’t want to risk offending her by turning down a coat that she absolutely did not want.

“Okay,” she complied. “Whatever you say.”

“You’ve made the right decision,” the woman said cheerfully,
dragging the heavy coat off its hanger and stuffing it into a black bin liner. “Funny, isn’t it, how a wrong turn can change everything. You’ll be a different person from today, you’ll see, and when you’re finished with them, bring them back and pass them on to the next one who’s lost her way.”

“Okay.” Willow humored her. “I suppose you don’t get much passing trade down here. How do you keep going?”

“I don’t need passing trade, love, this is a destination store.” The old woman winked at her as she took an indiscriminate wedge of paperbacks off the shelf and dumped them on top of the coat. Much stronger than she looked, she lifted the bag, testing its durability. “They don’t make these like they used to anymore, all that global warming nonsense, but it should hold, you haven’t got far to go.”

“Thank you so much, I’ll tell everyone at the office about you, it’s like . . . like a grotto of treasures!” Willow smiled warmly when finally the old lady handed her her shoes and she slipped them toe first into her handbag, alongside her new china dog.

“You don’t need to tell anyone about me, love, people find me when they have to, that’s always been the way of it.”

“Well then, thank you and good-bye.”

“I’ll see you again.” The woman nodded at Willow’s bag. “When you’re done with them, I’ll see you again.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be done with them!” Willow laughed, but the look of conviction on the woman’s face didn’t waver.

Feeling a little bit like she might be about to commit daylight robbery, Willow pressed her fifty pounds down on the counter and headed for the door, her heavy burden toppling a hat rack just as she was about to make her escape.