Boots

Archived 2014

I’ll admit to a fleeting desire to change places with Sharon once, but otherwise I've always thought her welcome to her ugly life. I lived in the ugliest town in the Pilbara, and if my bulimic best friend forever hadn’t knocked herself out when she stumbled weakly in her laundry, I wouldn’t have watched Sharon try to force her ugly foot into my boot.

Hand tooled leather, they had gaped at the calf and rendered me knock kneed with a Cuban heel. I was never more proud of my tiny feet while I watched Sharon grunt in despair. I’d had some concern because the boots were a little too big for me, but on her, there was no way she was getting her long kangaroo foot around the ankle bend.

Sharon had invited herself around, then informed me we were going to the fair. They’d set up in a vacant lot close by, and I could see the ferris wheel rotating above the ridge of company houses at the end of my street.

I didn’t want to go, not at the time she bashed on my window, or even after, if her urgency to deface public property had allowed me the luxury of throwing up the large slice of cream sponge I’d shoveled with a small spoon.

Sharon was the type of friend who would throw stones at you if walked in front her, so I took up the rear, dragging my heels so I didn’t step out of my boots.

In the time it took me to knot, untie, then reknot tighter above the waist of my pencil skirt, Sharon had thrown a stone at a dog, spat on a mailbox and sworn at a plane souring six miles above in the air.

It was already afternoon, so the swillers from the fair ground beer garden were already laying on the ground, using the long shadows of the temporary hessian walls as shelter from the fitfully hot Pilbara sun.

The dodgem cars were bashed front, back and sides down to the bare metal and the ferris wheel tumbled round with the benefit of the thick black grease that had oozed in streaks from the joints. I liked the look of the dodgem car attendant who danced across the back of dodgem cars, with one filthy fingered fair ground hand around each electric pole.

Sharon’s older siblings were there, all tangled in a shrieking, slop of denim and thin cotton shirts.

I’d sat on the edge of the crowd, partly because my skirt was so tight, I needed room to stretch my legs in front of me, with crossing them an impossibility. And because I didnt like to sit too close to Sharon in case she got fidgety and carved her name into my thigh with one of her dirty vitamin deficient finger nails.

‘I like your boots’ he'd said.

He looked friendly, and didn’t have the red faced stare of the other drunks. 

I clicked the sides together and Sharon's head snapped – it rotated half way and locked into position – while she glared at me.

I clicked them again, twice this time.

‘Do you want to ride the ferris wheel? They’re closing down soon…’ he asked, with the confidence of a much older man. He had to be at least 25 maybe, 27.

He was right, the old man wasn’t even bothering to time the rides now, and people were staying on so long, they looked like penned in sheep, waiting patentintly to be let loose.

In my mind I’d already calculated the way to get to my feet with my knees together and shuffled home for more cake and a return to a historical romance novel that was fast approaching the 'I hate you, no I love you, oh no, I’m so confused' scene.

But before I could say anything, Sharon leapt in – 'she’s afraid of heights, she doesn’t want to'.

In hindsight, if I had still been able to feel the swell above the waist band of three servings of sponge cake I might have felt the pull towards vomiting at home. But all I was dealing with was Sharon’s dirty heeled, toe jam encrusted big footed triumph at my knee trembling fear of heights.

‘Ok', I'd said and the cherry on top was the sweet maneuver of him using a hand around my wrist that yanked me upright, knees together.

Now Sharon was in the danger position, behind me, peppering me with ‘you’ll be sick'

(if only)

 'you wont like it'

(oh, I will now)

 'it might break down'

(highly possible and then I will hate you even more).

Sharon’s sister had an automatic camera, and in studying the photo years later I see a smiling, tanned girl with long hair grinning with teeth too big for her head, and a man who managed to arrange himself around me in the small bucket without actually coming into contact with me.  Some teenage encounters you recall the feel of a leg pressed against a thigh, their hand brushing against yours, even the feel of the taut skin between the shoulder blades of a well executed punch, but I could have been sitting next to a ghost for all the presence he had.

I hadn’t noticed what he looked like when he’d invited me, and looking at the photo he still merged into the background. My eyes were constantly drawn to me, and the life bursting out of my body.

From the ferris wheel bucket, all I could see was Sharon, her face at every rotation, waving her arm at me like she was bashing a poker machine late on pension day. It kept my mind off being scared. The bucket rocked and lurched as it rotated, and felt flimsier with each circuit. I could see bolts that looked loose, and hairline cracks in the fibre glass casings. The paint had worn off the bucket’s handle and jiggled around in it’s casing. With just the right conditions, and the bucket tipping just so, and I would have thinly slipped out.  And then it was over and Sharon was helping me out of the bucket by wrenching the bar back and pulling me out by my sleeve.

I never did ask her why she wanted to be my friend, of the pinching, scratching, grasping torturous companionship kind. I was the avoidance kind, which is why I accepted a lift home on his motorbike.

My brother had a motorbike and that scared me more than a busted ass ferris wheel, but I wanted to get away from Sharon. Seeing her face in a slide show with every rotation is still in my dreams. Her thick lips jutting in displeasure, her nostrils flared as she inflated her outrage, her eyes sinking into the creases of her lower lids, like they’d slid into a swamp. I didn’t want to hear her or talk to her or dodge ricocheting rocks as she threw them against any surface within throwing range, mindless that they might bounce back at an odd angle and hit me.  I didn’t want to hear her stupid questions and her drop dead comments about anyone she imagined felt superior to her.

I leapt on to the back of the motorbike, the split in my skirt, thigh baring high, Sharon’s lips moving no doubt to coordinate some kind of meet up. But I'd stared back through the visor not bothering to hand sign that I couldn’t hear. I didn’t even look back as we motored out of the car park.

Only minutes later it was obvious we were going the wrong way. But I knew that would make Sharon so angry because she’d have no idea where we were going. How could she, when I didn’t know. Even when we left the road and took off down a track towards the part of the beach that mangroves deter even the dog walkers.  We’d gone miles past the ten mile marker before he stopped and turning the bike off made climbing off the back natural.

I’d stepped away, a little up the dune but still with no hope of seeing above the mangroves to the water and turned round to see a strange man standing in front of me.

Two reasons why he was strange – I didn’t recognise him, and with his jeans pulled up on one leg, I could see where the large knife had come from.  A leather scabbard was strapped to his leg from ankle to just below the knee. The knife was a knife.  All jagged blade and thick black handle. He was holding it, pointed skyward. There’s a reason why some survivors find it difficult to describe their attacker. They don’t recognise them. He had the same clothes on, was the only one that I could see for miles of beach stretching out in both directions, and I had never seen him before in my life. Another time I will describe exactly what he looked like because maybe you have seen him too, but at the time, my first thought was disbelief.

Disbelief, because I was over ten miles from town and there was no way I was walking home. And if I needed a reason to sever myself from Sharon, this friend of her sister, or brother, I wasn’t really sure, was more than ample. He had pulled a knife on me for gods sake. In his faded clothes and shapeless adidas, his wire rimmed glasses and mid length curly brown hair, he was not cool.

And I had really had enough. There was sponge cake at home waiting to be vomited, there was a stack of formulaic romance novels waiting for me to imagine myself reluctantly being drawn into the long armed embrace of a moody squire.

Boots sinking slightly, I stepped towards him, and as I said with slight exasperation, ‘that’s a nice knife’ his face disappeared into his glasses and stubble. He hadn’t spoken since he’d offered me a lift and didn’t say a single word  as he returned his knife to it’s dark leather holster, pulled the wide leg of his jeans down to conceal it, and hopped back onto his bike. I easily slid on behind him, fingers spread across my thighs, bracing myself for the slight fishtail as his bike got traction on the sand.

He dropped me off from the pick up point, for me to shuffle foot it home and argue with my brother over where the rest of the cake had disappeared. Not wanting to be friends with Sharon didn’t prevent me from my nightly phone call. My bulimic best friend forever had lost phone privileges so I needed to ring someone to talk for an hour about nothing. But I had something on my mind.

‘Who was that man?’ I asked.

‘What man,’ she'd responded without even pretending to make it sound like a question. Typical annoying trait. The entire time I’d been reluctantly subjected to her burr of a friendship, there had never been a man of any consequence to ask about.

Eight questions and a shrieking exchange with her sister later, and she confirmed, no one knew who he was.

In those days it wasn’t strange at all for new comers to just turn up on the long highway that went only one way to where most people would rather have been heading. As the company towns opened up with their identical houses and monuments glorifying boulders, all sorts would drift through. Easy friendships amongst young people looking for work and hard partying, and prepared to stick or just keep traveling through. The Pilbara was also one of two routes out of the state. It’s still the only way of two major thoroughfares to get out of the state by road. A person intent on avoiding attention would go the least traveled, through the company towns that guaranteed minor scrutiny and indifference.

Years later, from time to time, a body would be found along the beach. Some tethered to mangroves, others revealed amongst the sand dunes, after a rare king tide. They found two down at the nudist beach one year, which was yet another reason to avoid the middle aged turtle skinned men and ageless women held together by their wrinkles.

A decade after my encounter, I got the shakes when I realized how close I’d come to being interred in an unmarked sandy grave. I became scared of every stranger, I worried over my child and everyone seemed capable of concealing a weapon. I even wished it had been Sharon who’d been offered the lift home, if only to stop the anxiety attacks that kept me house bound. I still had the photo and maybe one day the police will reconnect to say, it had been the missing link that solved the serial Pilbara crime wave of the 1980s. Now I see  it was separating from a useless man, that restored a balance of what was fair and what I could live with.

Two decades passed, and those times when I felt disconnected from the life I’d never imagined I’d end up with, I’d wonder if maybe I had died. If I was as invisible to people as they treated me, because only I didn’t realize I hadn’t survived. If that brief internal ripple across his face had merely been a gear shift before he swung his blade at me, and not a complete reversal.

Three decades later and I was wondering what had saved me. Was it the life that radiated, had he seen I was destined to do something, and would I ever know what it was? And now, thirty five years later and the discovery of half a dozen skeletal remains have accumulated over the intervening years, and I only have one question, and it’s the obvious one.

I want to know and probably never will - why me and not Sharon? Sharon was horrible. She threw stones and scratched her name into things before that made sense to anyone. She once spat on the glass on a telephone booth, on the INSIDE! Why wasn’t she the obvious victim? Why me? What had I done? Was I too thin? Sharon was a loud mouthed, vicious, nasty piece of work, so why was I the one who had been marked for premature death? Was it my boots? My beautiful leather boots that had given me the confidence to countenance such boldness from a dark mysterious stranger? If Sharon had managed to get her bony, dirty feet inside my boots, she might have died wearing them.