One crisp fall morning my childhood friend, we’ll call him Jez, set off for work, worried. As the door to the flat share slammed behind him, Jez concentrated on the patterned paving slabs under his tread, the leaves spattered across them. He then thought how ‘leaf textured’ would have been more autumnal, more “seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness” than “spattered”, which sounded like a fatality in a video game. As Jez loved video games however, his mind offered “spattered”, which brought him back to worrying.
Passing over irregular cobbles where the street met the main road, Jez thought of us all outside the pub a few short years before. The bulls eyed windows, their small ledges underneath for our glasses in a post-exam summer. A summer partly spent thrashing us all gaming Jez thought, which then reminded him of “spattered” and made the cobbles suddenly sinister, like the uniquely awful stumbles they could inflict where your ankle bends sideways and your splayed form patterns the pavement. Jez stepped clear of the cobbles and joined the stiffly speeding throng to work on featureless tarmac.
My friend was anxious because he was 21 and starting his first job since graduating. He was anxious also because he’d moved to London only days prior and adjusting to a major international city is hard when you’re from a rural backwater. Where we’d both grown up, you’d greet and thank your bus driver and the bus would be numbered 1 or perhaps 1a. Now my friend was headed to the 430 stop before he’d change to the Piccadilly Line and grate toward the City underground with millions of other people. Only then would he arrive at his new employer's office, an office unlike any of the places we’d secured work.
Jez had a hallowed graduate position within the tech department of a finance firm. The firm was in essence a bank but a bank so hyper-professional, so intimidating, so ruthlessly effective, they’d seemingly evolved past this definition, possibly out of sheer contempt. Banks sat on a high street and welcomed you with a collectable porcelain piggy bank and hopes of a prudent future. The name of Jez’s new employer alone sounded like the word ‘hope’ being fed into a shredder. Our cohort weren’t naive but we weren’t mean either, and the employer we’ll call Shredders sounded like it valued meanness quite a bit. Pondering this, Jez glumly felt an era of gaming and consoles pixelating from his mind and joyless office appliances rematerializing in their place.
On the Tube, crammed tightly between silent commuters, Jez closed his eyes against a sense of inadequacy. He wanted to vanish. But also he wanted to be paid. Vanish from the possibility of being shredded professionally if not literally but not vanish so much that he couldn’t claim a wage. Jez opened his eyes. People around him, everyone it seemed, looked indifferent to the vulnerability he was feeling. Immediately in front of him, a smartly dressed woman only a few years older, radiated confidence from the coolness of her gaze to the venomous heel of her stiletto. Pulling into Earl’s Court my friend prayed madly that he could live as this unperturbable corporate ideal for the duration of his first day.
Jez remained on board as, like stock released, other commuters shouldered and stamped their way off the Tube carriage. The woman was among them, headed to the District Line and an alternate route toward The City Jez imagined. He was watching the back of her head retreat from him in the steady pack of shuffling and shoving, when suddenly there was a break in rhythm. Without any apparent cause, the woman seemed to stagger. Out of sight the stiletto of her right high heel had landed, with incredible accidental marksmanship, square in the narrow gutter for the carriage’s sliding doors. The stiletto stuck fast but the pack of commuters kept moving and the woman with them, taking a clean step out of her wedged shoe and being carried away from it onto the platform.
Back on the carriage, even if anyone had noticed any of this, they didn’t react. Shocked out of his reverie though, Jez leapt forward to help like the well brought up country lad he was. Pulling hard on the heel while its owner tried to move back through the crowd toward him, Jez freed the shoe but with an effort that carried him back a pace. This was unfortunate as it was the exact distance he needed to stop the doors slamming shut, which with unusual alacrity for the Piccadilly Line at Earl’s Court, they now did. In the awful silence of the mostly empty carriage, the remaining passengers stared at my friend as he conspicuously pinched a delicate high heel between his thumb and forefinger.
Jez looked through the slammed Tube door. The half shod woman looked back at him. Between their gaze was plexiglass and the shoe, which Jez continued to hold aloft in an absurd ‘did you drop this?’ gesture. Everyone on the Tube continued to look at my friend, who tried to work out what he should do. He felt both blameless for the predicament and entirely responsible at the same time. He also felt he had limited options and again, that this wasn’t his fault but also again, that everyone expected him to do something. Instead the Tube began to move out of the station, the muffled sounds of the platform receding. With a pained expression, my friend locked eyes with the woman one last time. Her own eyes no longer cool, were instead hardening into the unmistakable beginnings of hostility.
None of us know what happened to the woman on the platform. Or even to the shoe. My friend never saw the one again and can’t remember the other. We do know that he arrived at his new job in a less than relaxed state. We also know that he worked there in a state of lightly compliant terror for a while, before breaking into the video game industry he’s now a leader in. His first studio was owned by Disney. If the shoe fits.