Nothing's Free
This one could be longer but isn't far off finished I don't think
Kay hadn’t been working at JD Sports for long before she started bringing home free shoes.
“They gave me these,” she said, arriving home late one day after no more than two weeks in the job. “Just gave them to me.”
Shedding her bags in the hallway, dropping the one that contained her new company laptop with a clunk, she hurried into the kitchen and placed a bright orange box on the counter. Leaning over it, removing the new staff pass from around her neck – tugging the lanyard free of her hair so the laminated card at its end with her face on wouldn’t dangle in her way – she placed an index finger at each corner of the lid and gently rubbed the sharp angles with her thumbs.
“Is that laptop okay?” I asked, glancing down the hallway with concern.
“They said I’d have to have Nikes for when I have meetings with Nike,” she continued. “How crazy is that?”
“Really crazy,” I replied, nodding. “It’s mental if you think about it…”
“And Adidas for when I have meetings with Adidas!”
I tried to think of a company that would be funny to ask if she’d have meetings with, but all that came to mind in the moment was Andrex; this wasn’t worth putting to her, but I did for myself imagine a big boardroom table surrounded by people wrapped in toilet paper like Egyptian mummies – or dressed normally in nice suits and dresses but with wodges of tissues shoved up their arses.
With me peering over her shoulder she examined the shoebox slowly, smoothing her hand over the distinctive white tick on the top and blowing away imaginary dust, all with the reverence and seriousness of an archaeologist.
“Shall I find you a little brush?” I asked.
She turned to me and opened her mouth wide in mock giddiness before very gently, and very slowly, lifting the lid.
The unboxing was a careful, deliberate action, like watching a young girl opening a music box, and as the pristine white trainers were revealed I thought about humming the Song of the Swans – but already she was tearing through the tissue paper inside and removing cardboard cones from each shoe.
“They’re alright, aren’t they!” she exclaimed, turning one over in her hands before resting it on the flat of her palm. What they were was a pair of white Nike Air Force Ones, so clean and uncrinkled that they could’ve been made from ceramic.
“Yeah, nice,” I said, taking hold of the other and giving it that awkward new-shoe fumble, turning it upside down, looking at the chunky tread and the toe and pulling the tongue rigid behind the narrow lattice of laces.
“I think they’ll be fine for meetings,” she said, dropping one on the floor and gesturing for me to do the same before wiggling her socked toes into them.
“And besides, I fucking love free stuff!”
The two of us had never really been ‘trainer people’; Kay mostly wore Doc Martens and Vans, while I owned battered Converse and no-name pumps – a hangover from both being wildly unpopular moshers in our teens. But with her free shoes, and the many boxes that followed, I watched as she was reborn, an urban ballerina, like Channing Tatum.
The months tripped by, a probation period was passed, and more and more meetings were had with Nike and Adidas, and New Balance and Puma and FILA, all requiring new pairs of the latest trainers, gifted or purchased at a heavy discount. Where once we had a couple of tatty pairs of shoes apiece lined up by the front door, piles upon piles of brand spankers grew, no longer plain white either but mixed like Liquorice Allsorts, with black leather and luminous accents and colourful laces and patterned soles and shrill Velcro.
On one evening I counted nine sets of trainers, all piled up by the door.
“Do you know,” I said, crouching down and sorting them into pairs. “I sometimes feel like I’m working in a bowling alley.”
It’s quite an unusual sensation to have such a sudden excess of something that implies a presence – that there are other, unfamiliar people in your house. On arriving home each day from work, stumbling over shoes I didn’t recognise, I’d assume that we had company, that someone was round, and would stall to listen for voices before poking my head tentatively into the living room, expecting to say hello, and finding only Kay sat on the sofa, frowning back at me.
“What are you creeping around for?”
I began to attribute different personalities to each pair of shoes, as if they were themselves guests, which would in turn impact how I’d treat them whenever I encountered them in my day. Checkerboard Vans with leopard print laces – bought for a meeting with Vans – I’d place heel-and-toe together by the radiator in the hall, ready for wearing, while charcoal Nike TNs with lime green piping I’d roughly stuff into the back of her wardrobe with gusto because they reminded me of a stupid mean boy from school. It wasn’t uncommon for me to tell a particularly egregious pair to fuck off as I tidied them away, and more than once when Kay called from the next room to ask who I was talking to, I’d say your shoes.
Good at her job, it wasn’t long before she knew all the words for them, and worse still the numbers – so not just the make of shoe, but the model and product variation too. Like people who know about aeroplanes or Porsches will rattle off digits like 747, A380 or 911, soon she was dropping the brand name altogether and speaking to me in code.
“Where are my Max 90s?” she’d shout from upstairs.
“Have you seen my yellow 1080s?”
“Did you move my U571s?”
“Have you put my Hasting 1066s somewhere?”