The wrong shoe

This story won the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition 2006

Ella flies into New York City on September 17, six days after the Twin Towers come down. It's a strange time to come. There are shrines everywhere, and stories that people intone like prayers. The blisters from the high-heeled walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, the smoke viewed from rooftops, the suburban storms of burnt paper, fragments of lost memorandums. I saw the second plane hit, they say. Candles from the Latin American specialty aisles in supermarkets flicker on the streets under heapings of roses, beside hand-crayoned notes. I miss you, Jimmy, big brother. God Bless America. Fire engines drive as slowly as hearses; cars tie flags to their aerials. Ella feels odd, then under suspicion, excluded by an event that she'd only viewed on television.

But then she's always felt like that. Even in the streets of Wellington. She saw the fires lit in other people's living rooms and she wanted to be eating chocolate biscuits in their armchairs. She saw girls in bars with black coils of hair and wanted to be them. She'd want to go home with their handsome boys, who would pull off the girls' painted-on dresses, the inkiness staining their pale carpets. Ella would turn back to her table of friends, her own boy that she may or may not take home, and feel so mismatched, her body a too-small shoe pinching her soul.

But she's here now, in a place she thought was vacuum-sealed in movie screens. It's a quieter, more fearful version of itself, but the people who have moved to Westchester to hide and have babies have made room for her. Soon she will be pinning Carrie Bradshaw-roses to her lapel and writing witty columns for the New Yorker. Her ratty Brooklyn sublet is temporary. The bagel and cream cheese her diminishing funds afford her is slimming. She's sacrificed three lunches and $5.43 on peroxide. It will strip away her former-self, making her blonde and new.

Ella rides the subway to Manhattan, her résumés for bartender/nanny/literary assistant/MTV host filed in her bag. An evangelist gets on at Dekalb Avenue. He has a strong West Indian accent, and chants "you gotta believe in Jeeee-sus, you gotta believe in Jeee-sus, you gotta let 'im into yo heart." It sounds like a reggae song to Ella's ears. As the train bursts out of the tunnel and onto the bridge, the evangelist points at the places where the twin towers used to be. "You tink da people knew dat day would be deir last? Da people in da plane? Da people in da street? Da people in da tower? You tink da people knew dat judgement day was 'ere? You gotta believe in Jeee-sus, let 'im into yo heart." Ella takes a little brochure from the man. It's a cartoon, like her childhood Archie comics. The non-believers are poo-smeared, wafts of stink rising from their bodies. They become clean and sweet-smelling when they open the door to the Kingdom of God. Ella turns the brochure over, half-expecting sea monkeys and X-ray specs. There's a number for a church. She thinks of the girls from school who went to Youth Group to find boyfriends. They went to camps together and cried and fainted, spoke in tongues. They returned home exorcised and exfoliated. Ella always thought demon-casting was selfish. The devils would only find another adolescent girl to possess. It was like dropping your gum on the pavement.

Ella gets off at Union Square, and pushes through the people, past the stalls of chives and arugula, yellow cheddar and crusty bread.   She stops to try some homemade jam on a cracker, and as she's sampling another flavour, trying to recast her hunger as curiosity, someone touches her shoulder. "Heather, is that you?"

She turns and looks. A tall, delicate man with spiky black hair is staring at her. "Remember? 1998. The train from Vienna to Barcelona? You sat next to me. We talked all the way?"

Ella has never been to Barcelona, but she has seen a movie about it and she owns a book on Gaudí. She smiles, wondering what kind of girl she is about to become. And how long it will take him to realise something's up. "Yes," she says. "Barcelona was beautiful."

"What are you doing here?" the man asks. "On vacation?"

"No, I live here."

"I thought you lived in London."

No one can pick her accent here. And she's heard her friends' London stories so often, she feels like she can fake it. "No, I moved. Just after September 11."

"Oh. Terrible time to come. But New York's still a great city. Why move, though? I thought you loved London."

"I do, I do, but sometimes you get sick of blowing your nose and seeing your snot come out black. Sometimes you can't take another vindaloo after a big night out on the turps."

"It's the little things, huh? Oh my god, Heather, I can't believe it's you. Do you wanna go for a drink?"

Ella looks at her watch. It's 2.00 in the afternoon. The job-hunt can wait another day. "Alright," she says.

The man takes her to a bar on Fourteenth Street. It used to be a beauty parlour and the old-fashioned hair dryers are still screwed to the wall. He asks her what she wants and she knows she should ask for a cosmopolitan. It comes with a mariscino cherry and an orange slice. He orders a beer.