Shoe Mountain

An Extract From: Let Helen Like Snow

Theo felt the music in his back. It smacked vibrations through the pipes of the radiator he sat against. A mountain of shoes surrounded him, maybe forty to fifty pairs. Most of the Sixth Form were present. Theo had a hole in his sock. A huge, gaping, gargantuan hole. It was on his right foot, at the very tip of the big toe. The big toe refused to hide. Like a tortoise in need of a tan, it stuck out the hole. The toe was ugly. Big, uncut, obtuse. So naked, so forward, so insistent. Despite many twists and turns of the sock, the toe clearly wanted to breathe. He sat amongst the pile of shoes. He looked at the other people at the party. Good socks, preened socks, holeless, clean, unnoteworthy socks. God, Theo would kill for unnoteworthy socks. Their smiling faces. Like how you only acknowledge not having a cold for about ten minutes on the first post-cold morning. Clear-nostriled breaths, thanking God for life and birds and trees and air. Best damn oxygen you’ll taste in your life. They all took their holeless socks for granted. The string of the cotton gripped the toe. Deep irritation. Blood-stopping vice-like squeeze. It was weird. It made him weird. Necessary self-consciousness. He saw his shoes. They teased him. He hadn’t expected a shoes-off party. How could he? There’s so many people here, after all. It seemed odd to him that so many people would collectively remove their shoes. Now he’d have to recalibrate his shoe on/off expectations. Clearly he wasn’t as wise to these things as he was maybe starting to allow himself to believe. He felt the air hang on his big toe. The cold breeze forming around its boundaries. He was lost in a pile of trainers and boots, condemned to live with holed socks. The toe nail was a bit too long. This humiliated him. Maybe it was the cause of the hole. He felt the shagged carpet caress his toe. It was rough, it was uninviting. It was a carpet that demanded socks. It wasn’t his carpet to experience with bare feet. That felt rude. It felt intrusive. His nail ploughed the carpet’s top-soil. Make yourself at home, why don’t you, Theo? He hardly even knew the host. He hardly even knew who the host was. Whose house was he even in? Whoever’s house it was, the carpet was very clean. Beige, likely new. Probably why it’s a shoes off party. He stared at his toe.

“I hate you!”, he thought. So he hid his right foot under his left thigh, trying to hide the toe. He was stuck. No man should walk around with socks like that. The shoe mountain got bigger and he began to feel suffocated. He nursed the dregs of his beer. Better to look bored than insane. Better to sit still than walk around with his toe on display like that. Canyon-sized hole. It was an end of year type deal, the party. He couldn’t recall receiving any form of invite. He sure as shit prayed he didn’t need one. That was usually the case, with most end of year parties, right? At least he hoped. Christ, if some of the people here had received invites, well. It wouldn’t reflect well on Theo’s social standing. Now he wasn’t sure. Did whoever the host was even know he was here? Would they care? Had they already seen him and thought to themselves, “Who the fuck is that? Who that fuck is that loner with a massive hole in his sock?”, before racing to grab their sunglasses, to avoid toe-blindness on account of his pasty, white, unavoidable, grotesque, exposed big toe. Maybe. Imagine the nicknames that would emerge, should that happen. He realised his name was anagrammatic of the word ‘toe’, with only an H to spare. Oh dear. The toe was pronounced. As a child, he’d named his toes. He couldn’t remember what he named them, though. Above him lay a beer-bottle lined windowsill, and the glass rattled as the beat thumped.

Theo recognised his friend James, and gestured him over. He laughed at Theo,

“Mate, what are you doing down there? Just go and talk to her for fuck sake.” He was of course referring to Jess. My GOD, Theo thought. Does James realise how lucky he is? How easy that was for him to say? With all ten of his toes all lovely and cosy, all tucked in and warm, all fully aware of their place, not overstepping their mark, not rubbing nails on a stranger’s carpet. Good lord, yeah why the hell not James?

“Mate seriously, I’m not arsed. I’m too pissed anyway. If she comes over to me then yeah whatever,” Theo played up his drunken state, “is she even here anyway? Haven’t seen her?” He had seen her. She was here.

“Oh my fucking God Theo,” James was chuckling to himself, “she’s literally over there”, he pointed to the other side of the room, to Jess. “You’re such a pussy sometimes mate.”

“Yeah man, he isn’t kidding, you are a pussy,” another so-called friend of Theo’s, Matty, chirped up, “plus it’s fucking obvious she’s into you, for some reason.”

Matty was one of those guys. The ‘for some reason’-esque comment was just him, all over. Oddly arrogant, kind of annoying. And, if you’ll believe this, actually had his shoes on. That’s Matty, and his utter insurrectional, civil-disobedient tendencies. How Theo envied it. Dirty trainers scuffing the carpet. Mud was clinging to the lip of the soles, still kind of wet - scuff-provoking. It’d be pretty tricky to lift. Theo didn’t really like Matty, didn’t like the way he deliberately tried to lower the mood of his acquaintances to suit his personal agendas. How he’d love to prove him wrong. To stand up and walk toe first in the direction of Jess. To put his arms around her, profess his feelings, kiss her, take her home; the rest of the room applauding, racing to cut holes in their own socks, it’d become a new trend. We’ve had fingerless gloves, afterall. He’d never speak to Matty again if that happened. It didn’t.

“Okay.” Theo responded to Matty.

Theo chose to ignore the comments. But it encouraged him that even Matty thought Jess was into him. His blood was cut off by the string. His toe felt cold. He felt it push at the edges of the hole. Fabric pinching at his bare skin. The toe had a post-ejaculatory sort of twitch, in time with his heartbeat. He was too ashamed to move.

“I know what I’ll do. I’ll go and get her, tell her you’re too much of a pussy to go up to her yourself!” Matty looked at James as he said this, with self-congratulatory mischief eyes.

“Oh just fuck off Matty. Do you even know what she looks like?” At this comment, Matty sprang upon Theo and started poking at the pressure points on his waist and shoulders. James laughed.

“Oh, now I’m definitely doing it”, Matty said whilst prodding Theo, who guarded his hands to try and stop him. Some shoes fell from the peak of the shoe landslide. They hit Theo on the back of the head.

“Oi Matty, grab us a beer while you’re at it.” James said.

Matty wandered off, into the fog of drunken teenage bodies and laughter. Theo had never attacked a fellow human’s pressure points. He doubted very much he ever would. He didn’t know why he liked Matty. He didn’t, is what he concluded.

Time elapsed, perhaps ten minutes. Theo stayed chatting with James, which alleviated most of his anxiety. At the very least, it distracted him from it. Matty had not returned. Theo looked around and saw that Jess was standing pretty close, in calling distance, perhaps. James gave him the eye, encouraged him to do so.

Theo, still sitting with intent upon his right foot, mumbled a sort of noise that was supposed to be a word. The word was Jess. Somehow she caught wind, and turned to face him.

“Oh hi stranger! There you are. Was starting to wonder if you were even here!” Theo was no body language expert, but even he could identify the genuine joy that had overcome Jess at the sight of him, “Some dickhead came and said you were looking for me.”

James smiled to himself, and resumed his mingling elsewhere.

“Oh yeah, Matty. He is a dick, you’re right”, he felt a bit guilty admitting this out loud, “come and sit down.” Theo patted the floor next to him, which forced light tremors deep within Shoe Mountain.

That was the first time Theo had truly spoken to Jess, deep within the caverns of Shoe Mountain. They sat side by side, shoeless stalagmites, exchanging trivialities amidst a blurred crowd of somewhat familiar faces. Theo spoiled in the cadences of her silences, the inflections he wanted so sorely to know more about, to allow them to enter his own realm of second nature.

“So, what’s the deal with the no shoe policy?” Jess said whilst making constitutionally prolonged eye contact, which Theo indulged, as he watched her supernova pupils fission in the increasing light, elapsing through the treeline of Shoe Mountain’s depleting peak, eroding as the crowd thinned. The overhead lights shone sunrise-like, glowing, shimmering directly onto their faces, as the background chatter faded to nothing and the music stopped vibrating in their backs.

“I don’t know, but it’s been pissing me off all night”, to which he uncrossed his legs, revealing the now apocalyptic hole.

“Shit Theo, you need new socks”.

They laughed, and he decided to love her.