Mia swears she asked.
She didn’t.
The pair I actually care about
I don’t get precious about most of my stuff. Take the black boots. Take the denim jacket that has seen things. Take the gold hoops I leave in the dish by the door and somehow still own. Fine. Communal-ish. That’s flat life.
These were different.
Black, strappy, a proper heel. Not the cheap ones that make that hollow tap on the pavement. These make a sound. I bought them after a good month and I have only worn them when the night had a chance of being photographed. I know how that sounds. I don’t care. Some shoes are just shoes. These ones make my legs look like I planned the whole evening around them.
They live on the second shelf. Not the floor. Not the basket. Second shelf, heel to heel, because I am annoying like that.
Sunday morning they were not on the second shelf.
The conversation we have every month
Mia came out of her room in my old hoodie and a full face of last night. She looked at the heels in my hand and did that little wince people do when they already know they are in it.
“I asked you,” she said.
“You did not.”
“I did. In the kitchen. You were doing your lips.”
I was doing my lips at seven. She left at eight. There is a difference between talking near someone and actually asking them. I told her that. She said I was being dramatic. Sophie, from the sofa, without looking up from her phone, said, “She didn’t ask.”
Sophie is useful like that. She remembers things because she is not trying to get away with them.
Mia made tea as an apology. Weak tea. Then she said the night was mad and the heels were the only thing that worked with the dress and I would have said yes anyway. Which is the worst kind of almost-true. I might have said yes. I like when my things look good on other people. I like a story. I do not like coming into the hall on a Sunday and finding evidence.
What the scuff told me
The scuff is not huge. It is the colour of pavement after rain. Right on the back edge of the left heel, the bit that clips kerbs and taxi running boards and those metal strips in doorways that exist to ruin your life.
I know my own scuffs. This was new.
Mia said they went to that place off Berwick Street first, then someone’s flat in Dalston, then a bar she cannot name because she was already gone by then. She said a boy called Jake or Jack or something with a J bought her a drink and they split an Uber home and he wrote his number on the sole because neither of them had a charger.
I stared at her.
“On the sole,” I said.
“He didn’t have paper.”
“He had a phone.”
“Dead.”
Of course it was dead. Everyone’s phone is dead at the exact moment they need to be interesting.
I ran my thumb over the ink. 07 something. The last few digits smudged where the sole had flexed. A name above it that might have been Tom. Might have been Jon. The J was confident. The rest was a drunk man’s homework.
Why I am keeping the number
Sophie said I should throw the shoe cleaner at the scuff and bin the number. Sensible. Sophie works in PR. She believes in boundaries and unsending messages.
I put the heels back on the second shelf.
I took a photo of the sole first.
Look, I know how this reads. Girl finds a number in her own shoe and keeps it like treasure. It is a bit sad if you want it to be. It is also funny. And it is mine. He wrote on my property. That feels like a loophole.
I have not texted it. I keep meaning to and then I don’t, which is worse, because now it is sitting in my camera roll between a receipt from Pret and a photo of my own mouth in the club toilets. I will probably send something stupid on a Thursday when I am bored. Hi, you wrote on my flatmate’s night. These are actually my heels. Want to explain yourself.
Or I won’t. Sometimes the number is better as an object than a person. People disappoint you. Ink on a sole is just evidence that the night happened.
Flat rules we pretend we have
We have a verbal agreement. Ask before you take anything that cost more than a round. Return it in the state you found it. Do not bring strangers into the living room if someone has a Monday.
None of that is written down. None of it holds after the third drink.
Mia is not a thief. That is the annoying part. She is the friend who will give you her last cigarette and her last fiver and her last bit of concealer. She will also walk into your room like it is a shop. She treats my wardrobe the way some people treat a shared Netflix account. If it is there, it is in play.
I do the same with her leather jacket. I should say that before I get too holy. I wore it to a lunch I did not invite her to and stretched the shoulders. She noticed. She did not write a blog about it. She just hid my hair straightener for two days.
This is the economy. We steal, we sulk, we make tea, we go out again.
The rest of her night, according to her
Mia’s version, once she had caffeine in her:
The dress was too long without a heel. She tried her own pair and they made her walk like she was late for a train. Mine were by the door because I had been deciding whether to go out and then decided not to. I had a deadline and a face mask and a plan to be boring. She saw the straps and thought of me as a yes that had not been asked yet.
They met the J boy near the bar with the bad lighting. He was tall enough. He talked about a wedding he had been to in Richmond. She said he had nice hands. I asked if that was a sex thing. She said it was an observation. Then she grinned and said it was also a sex thing.
They did not sleep together. That is her line and I half believe it. She said he walked her to the door and wrote the number because she would not give him hers. Which is very Mia. She will wear your shoes into the night and then get shy about a contact card.
Sophie asked if he came in. Mia said no. I checked the living room anyway. No extra glass. No jacket I did not recognise. Only the scuff and the biro.
What I did with the shoes after
I cleaned the mark. Not well. You can still see it if you know. It looks like a little secret now, which I hate that I like.
I wore them on Wednesday to a thing in Soho I did not need to attend. They still sound the same on the pavement. A man in the doorway looked at my legs and then at the shoes and I thought, you have no idea someone else’s night is hanging off the back of these.
That is the bit I cannot shake. Clothes hold other people’s evenings. You think you own a pair of heels and then they come home with a story you did not live. A scuff you did not earn. A number that was never meant for you and ended up in your hand anyway.
I stood in the loos of that Soho place and checked my reflection the way I always do. Lip gloss. Hair. The angle. Then I looked down and laughed because it is all so stupid. They are shoes. She is my flatmate. He is a boy with a dead phone. And I am the one writing it up like it is plot.
It is plot. That is the job.
If you live with girls, you already know
There is always one pair. The good jeans. The coat that makes the outfit. The heels that do the thing. Someone will take them on a night you stayed in. They will swear they asked. They will bring them back with a mark and a story and a bit of someone else still on them.
You can start a war about it. You can buy a lock. You can do that speech about respect and shared space that nobody hears after midnight.
Or you can put them back on the shelf, keep the number, and decide the scuff is interest.
I texted Mia from the other room even though she was twelve feet away.
Next time ask properly.
She sent back a photo of her own feet in socks and a single kiss. Then: they looked better on me though.
They did not.
They looked like mine, on her, living a night I missed. Which is almost worse. And almost the whole reason I keep leaving them where she can see them.
I still have the photo of the sole. Tom or Jon or whoever you are. If this finds you, the heels are back where they belong. The number is in my camera roll. I have not decided if I am bored enough yet.
Give it until Thursday.