The new shoes had been a concession to her mother, in the week before Anne flew out of Auckland Airport for her new life in London. She needed shoes with height—to make her legs look better, apparently. Her mother had told the shop assistant this, and she, a woman of the same generation as her mother, had murmured that her ankles were a little thick, yes.
The shoes were black leather with a pleasing point at the front. Anne had thought of power suits and successful women when she first saw them; her mother talked of how her entry-level job could lead to glamorous networking in cocktail bars and, soon, her own office and impressive title. And a London boyfriend, naturally.
She had worn flats for the first two months at the job, unable to focus on the intricacies of work as well as balancing on three-inch heels. She had thought she was ready for them now, but the new shoes had rubbed the backs of her heels all day.
She stood in the swaying train carriage, lifting each foot in turn out of the hard leather back. A drunk man with a stern face and grey stubble was mumbling about the government. The other commuters looked away.
At her Tube station she thought of walking home barefoot, how nice it would be to feel the cold grass and soft dirt beneath her crammed-up arches. It was getting colder now, and there was always broken glass and dog shit on that grass strip by her house. So instead she hobbled slowly to the escalator, wincing. The crowd of commuters surged past her.
She should just suck it up. Stride through it. Put on her big girl pants.
Maybe the Cowgirl would be there today.
She bought a carton of milk and two bananas at the small station kiosk, trying to exude power-woman status to the shopkeeper, who barely lifted his eyes from his phone as he handed back her change in coins. Then, there it was. The rush of cool wind at the exit carried the strumming of the Cowgirl's guitar.
Anne didn't know what else to call her. She was there sporadically, on the small open space outside the station, wearing high American cowgirl boots and a fringed jacket, and playing a sapphire-blue guitar. Each item she wore was frayed and old but put together. She looked amazing. She looked like a star. Long brown hair in shaggy curls; light brown skin. She sang in a warm, low voice, with a half-smile that made you feel like she was enjoying herself just as much as you were.
Anne dropped the coins into the open guitar case. They jingled against the others. Did she notice Anne had dropped a bunch of two-pound coins this time?
“Thanks, doll,” the Cowgirl said and gave a wink that made her feel warm. Anne wanted to just stand there and take it all in, listen to the woman’s smooth voice and watch the way her fingers formed the chords, quick and confident, over the frets. But nobody else stopped at this time of night. She would get in the way of the steady stream of commuters rushing off to their homes.
She turned to leave and staggered slightly as the heel of her shoe pulled at a new side of the blister. The Cowgirl stopped singing.
“You alright?”
She had noticed Anne. A hot blush rushed to her face and she wished she could at least pretend to be more aloof.
"Blisters," Anne said and raised one heel up out of her shoe.
“Here. Sit for a bit.”
The Cowgirl dragged her plastic folding chair over to the side. Anne protested—she thought she should, despite being delighted—but the Cowgirl would have none of it.
“Take a load off,” she said. Then went back to her mic stand and strummed the first few lines of I Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash song. Anne sat, quietly thrilled to be sitting on the Cowgirl’s very own chair.
A tall black man with long dreadlocks dropped a few coins into the open guitar case and flashed a thumbs up.
As each train left the station, for a moment the clickety-clack on the tracks fell into just the right rhythm for the song. Anne wondered if the Cowgirl heard it too.
Her voice was low and resonant. Anne couldn’t understand why no one else was looking, why no one smiled. A group of pigeons fought over half a sandwich. Their flapping and clawing caused the crowd to shift, to bulge out into the Cowgirl’s space. She didn’t budge, just kept up her foot tapping and her steady, low song.
By the end, the commuter crowd was starting to thin a little. Eight o’clock. The final streaks of sun clung to the late summer sky. The Cowgirl unslung her guitar and took a swig from a bottle of water beside her, then peered into her guitar case.
“Is that it?” Anne said. “I mean, will you make much more money tonight?”
The Cowgirl checked her watch. “I’ll stay for another half hour. A bit more if I’m lucky.”
She had a soft American accent that sounded out of place in London.
“It’s getting cold,” Anne said. She should be standing up now, moving along, saying thank you and goodbye, but she didn’t want the moment to end.
“I don’t mind the cold.” The Cowgirl knelt down in front of Anne. “How’re those feet doing?”
Anne felt self-conscious. Her bare feet looked naked out here at night, naked beside the Cowgirl’s boots. Her mother would be shocked to know she didn’t wear pantyhose here.
“I’m okay. I live close by. I might walk barefoot.”
The Cowgirl’s hand was warm on her skin. She picked up Anne’s foot, holding it lightly at the sides, and turned it slightly to see the angry red wound at the back of the heel.
Naked feet. Fat ankles.
“They’ll have plasters in the store back there, if you like,” the Cowgirl said.
Her face was so close that Anne could see her glittery eyeshadow and the thin lines of black eyeliner that flicked across the top of each eyelid. It was too much, how close she was. She smelt like cigarettes and her lips were wet. Anne couldn't look. She slipped her foot away and grabbed her shoes.
“It’s okay; I’ll go now. Thanks,” she said. She straightened her skirt and shirt. There were so many questions she wanted to ask, but they all got stuck in her throat. Where do you live, she wanted to say. Is London lonely for you too? How can you touch a stranger’s feet like that?
The footpath was cold beneath Anne’s feet. She wanted to find a reason to sit back down on the chair and listen. But she was in motion now, smiling nicely and saying goodbye and walking towards home, barefoot, in front of all those other commuters.
The phone was ringing when she got in the door. She dropped her bags and threw the cursed shoes into the hallway cupboard.
“Annie?” her mother said loudly when she picked up the receiver. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Ma, it’s me. How are you?”
“I’m not so good, dear. I hardly slept last night. Did you hear about that young girl who was killed in Birmingham?”
Annie looked down at the raw spot on her heel. It was red and weepy.
“I’ve just got in the door; I need to call you back later.”
“But I—”
She ate last night’s chicken and rice straight out of the Tupperware container in the kitchen with the lights off. She preferred it dark. She could forget about herself in the dark. She chased dinner down with a vodka and soda, and then poured the last of the vodka bottle over ice with a squeeze of lime and took it to the narrow bathtub. Her blisters stung as she stepped into the hot water. Her mother had never taken a bath in her life. Soaking in your own filth, she’d say. In the dark, the passing car lights streaked across the wall like fireworks.
The cheap vodka always gave her a headache in the morning but it made it easier to be alone at night.
Kate, her fourteen-year-old sister, would be asleep by now. She had Anne's old bed, in Anne's old bedroom, and at this time of year she would still have the red blanket on it for extra warmth. Her hair would be in a tight plait, tied by their mother after her evening shower. Anne could remember that tight feeling. She lay back under the water and felt her hair swirl out around her.
This was the best place. Silent, dark. Just the throb of a pulse in her ears. Kate had written her a letter last week, her address in her best handwriting on the front of the envelope. She had sent a sketch of the neighbour's cat and was trying out a new signature for herself.
It was hard to be a power woman in the office when she just wanted to sit and read that letter and laugh at that funny looking cat and write a long letter in reply, making sure to add that the signature with the flower replacing the ‘a’ in Kate was definitely the best one.
In the Tube the next evening she stood in the aisle and listened to two men joke about a woman they both worked with.
“She thinks she’s such fucking hot shit,” one said, a scowl twisting his skinny face.
The other, a bald man with a slight scar across his chin, laughed, leaned in, and muttered something. The skinny man saw Anne looking at them.
“What are you looking at, sweetheart?” he said.
Anne looked away, her face hot and angry. She had to squeeze her hands into fists, deep in the pockets of her jacket. Fucking hot shit. She felt sorry for their colleague. Anne had spent all last week on a data analysis report, only for a male colleague to interrupt constantly during her presentation and then take over the whole thing. A power woman wouldn't let that happen. He was the one who thought he was fucking hot shit.
She was wearing flat shoes today. Flat shoes in which she could stomp up the stairs from the platform.
In the kiosk, the shelf with her normal vodka was empty. She bought a six-pack of Carlsberg instead, cold from the fridge. The shopkeeper was arguing with a friend about some kind of video game. The friend leaned against the candy shelves and watched her as she paid. She wished she was the kind of girl who could say something snarky and cold, timed just right to make his jaw drop.
The Cowgirl was singing an Elvis song in a slow, sweet drawl.
Anne stood back from the crowd, back against the fence of the children’s playground. Between her and the Cowgirl, the commuters flooded out, back to their homes and families. A stream of bobbing heads and dark coats. Don’t Be Cruel; her boot tapping out the beat.
How would she explain to her mother that she was in love with a Cowgirl?
Anne waited till the crowd thinned, the phrase think you’re hot shit, think you’re hot shit on a loop in her mind.
She couldn't believe her own audacity when she stepped up to the Cowgirl between songs and invited her home for a beer.
She smiled. “Sounds good,” she said, then shook Anne’s hand firmly and said, “I’m Maria.”
“Anne.”
When they walked home together, Anne carrying Maria’s amplifier, she felt the happiest she had been in months. Like something had come loose inside. It was a new and secret feeling that she wanted to hold and treasure, like a pet.
Also, she hoped she’d washed her breakfast dishes.
Maria pulled off her boots by the door and her socks were sky blue with tiny white flowers. She rested her guitar case by the door and pointed out Anne’s new shoes in the cupboard.
“They did all the damage the other night,” she said and Anne could only give a nervous flutter of a laugh in reply.
Maria was a student, doing a Masters in Meteorology, of all things. Typhoons. Cumulous clouds. El Niño and La Niña. She was from California but could put on a great Nashville accent. They sat side by side on Anne’s grey IKEA sofa, facing the large window that looked out over the roof of a garden centre. Anne tried not to focus on the distance between their legs.
Maria showed Anne a photo of her parents on her phone: her mother, a tall dark-haired woman from Mexico, standing beside her father, grey-haired, a musician too. They were both retired, living in a caravan on the edge of the desert. Maria had a lot of pictures of the ocean on her phone. Surfing, scuba diving, a trip to Portugal.
“My mum’s parents were from Croatia,” Anne said.
“Mum came over to California as a kid and never went back. Not once,” Maria said.
Anne took out her phone to show Maria her family. The last photo she had taken before she left was of her mother, still wearing her red apron, straight-backed and uncomfortable in front of the camera. She stood beside their dining room table, in the home they’d always lived in, on the outskirts of Dunedin. She had an arm tight around Kate’s shoulders. Anne could hardly look at Kate standing there, smiling, her black hair in a long braid. Anne had left Kate all alone.
She wanted to tell Maria that her mother was cold and mean but also that she meant the whole world to her, and that she spent too much time wondering how the two things could go together.
Maria wanted to order dinner and find YouTube playlists to listen to through Anne’s new Bluetooth speaker.
They ate Chinese noodles with the last two beers, sitting on the floor, singing to Bob Dylan. Anne talked about her job and the men there that she hated. She found a pack of cards and a bottle of sweet wine that had been a gift from the HR department when she first arrived. She felt something like herself finally, like the food and wine and company had cracked through a hard skin that had grown around her since she had moved there.
It was past midnight when she finally leaned over and kissed Maria. Her lips were salty and soft. She stroked her hand down Anne’s arm.
“I wasn’t sure if that was what you wanted,” said Maria.
Anne hadn’t known it herself until recently, but now there was nothing else she wanted as much as this. Her skin was red hot. This was how it should be. This made sense.
It was both a revelation and a validation.
When Maria pushed Anne back on the sofa, she reached out and turned off the lamp. The car lights from the street below washed across them, oblivious.
The next day a male colleague was promoted and transferred. On his desk was a patch of dust where his computer used to be and a circle from his coffee cup. They had started together and she knew she worked faster and smarter than him. She had a crushing headache and tried to ignore it. When she had woken up that morning, Maria had already left.
She wished she’d thought to get her phone number.
On the train home, a tall, dark-skinned woman in a peacock-blue jacket told off a man who was taking up two seats with his bags.
“Don’t be so selfish,” the woman said loudly, and he had bowed his head and pulled the bags to his feet. Anne wanted to stand and give her a round of applause.
She bought two beers at the kiosk, but Maria wasn’t there at the station. The pavement outside was bare and quiet, just the steady footsteps of the crowd. A train left the station on the tracks above, window lights blurring as it gained speed, a light screech of metal on metal as it rounded the first corner.
Anne’s father had left on a train when she was nine. Kate was just a baby. Anne’s mother had said he had left for Auckland, to get a good job, to send money home to them. Later she said it was Australia. He had boarded the train north, with their blue vinyl suitcase and his brown jacket, and they didn’t hear from him again. Anne’s mother had gone back to work in a pharmacy, an assistant to the grey-haired pharmacist who had been there for decades.
Two years later a policeman had come to the house. It was a Saturday and Anne had been doing her homework at the kitchen table. She fetched her mother and a glass of water for the officer, who looked at his shoes as he talked. Her father had been hit by a car and died in a hospital in Perth two months ago. It had taken that long to trace him back to his family.
They never found out much about what he had been doing all that time. Or, if Anne’s mother knew, she never told the girls anything.
Anne thought he was a coward. But she also knew it must have been her mother’s fault. What had she done to make him leave?
The mornings were getting cold now. She strapped three heavy plasters over the back of each ankle and pulled her warm tights up over them. She stepped into the new shoes again. Maybe they weren’t so bad. She liked the way they clacked across the floor of the train station. Like she meant business.
She looked for Maria every evening. She hoped nothing bad had happened to her. Her space outside the train station was occupied by an old accordion player. His music was slow and depressing. Brown leaves blew into piles against the station wall behind him.
Anne played Johnny Cash at home, drinking vodka in the bath, in the dark, and singing along. She passed officially from her probation period at work to what they called a 'full employee' and received a small pay rise, though no change in title. She sent a large sum of money home to her mother, the most she had ever sent. To Kate she sent a smart phone, a basic one, so they could send messages to each other.
- When will you come back? Kate wrote to her.
- Maybe you can come here for your studies, Anne replied. You could stay with me.
- And Mum?
- She’ll be okay, Anne wrote, pretending to be confident.
She tried to imagine Kate here. There was no shortage of universities. Surely they could make it work. She would show Kate what it meant to live a life here. They could picnic in summer. Hyde Park at Christmas. They could go to Europe. They could be free.
She saw the skinny man on her train home again and again. Even alone there was a bitterness to him. He shouted at a kid who tripped over his foot. He wolf-whistled at a teenage girl in a short skirt. Anne wanted to punch him, hard.
Instead, she changed her train route—there was a shorter way, with a change of trains and a long walk between platforms. Click clack across the station floor.
Had her father ever meant to come home? An aunt had once told Anne he was an alcoholic. Her mother wouldn’t hear a bad word said about him. Anne had vague memories of rum bottles in the freeze—his first stop when he got home from work.
The escalator swished smoothly down to the next level; blank faces travelled upwards on the escalator opposite.
She first heard the guitar, faint strumming from the platform, then Maria singing Mr. Tambourine Man.
Anne paused for too long at the bottom of the escalator and the man behind her pushed her forward, out of the way, muttering “For fuck’s sake,” under his breath at her.
She stood to the side until Maria finished the song. She looked just the same, the makeup, the boots. Should she hug her? No, that would be weird.
“You’re wearing the shoes again,” Maria said when she finished.
“I never got your phone number; I wanted to call you,” Anne said, then cursed herself for being so transparent.
“You’ve been alright, then?” Maria asked, but not in a way that meant she really wanted to know.
Anne nodded. “You?”
Maria was looking off down the platform. She strummed her guitar as a new crowd of commuters streamed out of a train and across the platform.
“Look, I’m not looking to get involved right now,” Maria said and Anne didn’t know what to say to that. Involved.
“It’s good to see you,” Maria said, and Anne realised she had been dismissed.
That was that then.
She didn’t know what to do with her face.
She strode away, across the platform, onto her train and sat down, heavy, in an empty seat. She wrapped her scarf tighter around her neck, think you’re such hot shit, think you’re such hot shit on a loop again.
She looked at her reflection in the train window. She had her mother's nose and high forehead. She smoothed her hair down with a flattened hand.
It would be okay.
She had another presentation tomorrow. This one she would keep control of. No interruptions. She would wear the shoes.
Who needs a stupid busking Cowgirl, anyway?
- I miss you, she messaged Kate.
It was just past six in the morning there. The message stayed unread.
- I’m saving up to bring you here, she wrote.
The train doors closed. The woman in the seat behind smelled vaguely of vomit.
- We’ll make a life, she wrote, and the train rolled out of the station.