Shoes

From: Emma Lister (jaceandalec@gmail.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Middlesex, England
Source: Form Submission
Date submitted: Wed Dec 22 12:20:08 2010

Five years ago, as a serious and precocious eight-year-old girl living in suburban London with my family, I attended the sixty-eighth birthday party of my great-uncle Jerry.

I don't remember much about the event itself - mostly that I interrupted the conversations of various distant relatives, slid down from an unwelcoming lap to hide under the table and later incompetently shuffle the greater part of a deck of cards behind a large pot-plant. My mother informed my brothers and I, while giggling a little for some unknown reason, that we had behaved badly - in hindsight, indeed we did - as we wound our way down the long, leafy drive leading out of the house and its gardens.

I didn't really listen. I'd liked Uncle Jerry. He was a lively old man, fond of making dirty jokes which - although the falsely conservative, wicked-eyed men and women sitting next to him thought otherwise, and therefore hushed him and made subtle gestures towards me - I understood perfectly well, who dyed his hair a sprightly and very false ginger-red and gave his blunt opinions on the subject at hand whether they were asked for or not. One of the things I really remembered was his pair of enormous brown shoes; he let me sit and fiddle with the laces while he leant back in his armchair, tying them in clumsy knots around my fingers and looping them back around each other. They smelled like new shoes, like fitting rooms and expensive alcohol in greenish bottles. I wanted a pair of my own.

I wanted those shoes.

Three weeks later, he died in that armchair, his cigarette dusting his off-white, old-fashioned shirt with ash and a World War II documentary coming to a close on the television. He never saw the end of it, and that was why I sat and curled into myself, staring down at my hands and their bitten nails, reddening as I interlaced my fingers.

After the wake - which I didn't go to and wasn't aware of until after it had happened - I was in bed, still and sleepless without cause. My eyes were closed, and my legs straight out, almost touching the end of the bed.

My parents were asleep, but I thought it was my father who came in and sat down with a gentle creak next to my feet. Then I realised; oh, it was Uncle Jerry. That cigarette smell. The warm, slightly weary presence.

I nodded off, comforted by the fact that Uncle Jerry had sat on the end of my bed to make sure I was alright. In the morning, I woke up, blinking the dust out of my eyes. Uncle Jerry had been asleep in the ground for a month.

Under my bed, their laces a little rumpled and smelling exactly the same as they had done, a familiar nick on the toe of one, were his shoes.