Pule Hill, Marsden — Ladies' Heeled Shoe, Red, On the Wall

I'd a day owed at the merchant's so I took the Tuesday. Stuart said go on then, it's quiet, the kitchen units aren't in till Thursday. I'd had Pule Hill in mind a while. It's the hill above Marsden with the gritstone edge on it that you can see from the train, and there's an old packhorse track and a bit of drystone wall along the top that's mostly down now but for one good stretch. I've not done a proper report off Pule Hill. It felt like it were time.

Our Linda were up before me, which were not usual. I heard her in the kitchen doing summat with the fridge. When I came down she had the carrier bag ready on the side and a look on her face like she'd done a thing and were waiting to see how I took it.

The dinner

She said, "I've done you summat different for your dinner." I said oh aye. She said, "you've had the same lunch since 1988, Keith, egg and cress and a Penguin, and I read a thing in the magazine at the hairdresser's about widening your horizons, so I've widened them." Then she handed me the bag like it were settled.

I didn't open it till I were up the hill. I'll come to it. But I want to say now that I did not, stood in the kitchen, know what were in the bag, and I want that on the record, because what come later were two things I did not understand in the one day and I'd not had that before.

Up the hill

Parked by the station and walked up the old track. It's a pull, that, and I stopped twice and called it taking in the view both times. The wind were proper up on the tops, the sort that comes at you sideways and finds the gap between your collar and your hat. I had the good jacket on. A curlew were going over the moor the whole way up, doing that long bubbling call they do, the one that sounds like it's coming up out of the ground rather than down out of the bird. I stopped and watched it a bit. You don't get curlews everywhere any more. I were glad of it.

The curlew. It came down on the grass for a bit before I got to the top. Not a shoe, I know. But you'd put it up an' all if you'd heard it.

I came up over the last rise to where the good bit of wall is, and there it were on top of the wall, and I stopped dead.

The shoe

It were a red shoe. A lady's shoe. And it had a heel on it the like of which I have not, in seventeen years and three hundred and twenty findings, ever come up against.

I am going to do my best to describe it because that is the job, but I want to say plainly that this is outside what I know. I document boots and brogues and trainers and the odd sandal. I know a Vibram sole and I know an eyelet from a hook. I do not know the words for this and I am not going to pretend I do.

Right foot. Red — a proper bright red, shiny, the sort of shiny that catches the light even under a flat sky. The front of it come to a point, more of a point than a foot is, so I don't know where the toes are meant to go. And the heel. The heel were a thin spike, near enough straight up and down, that I made to be four inches and very possibly more. There were near enough nothing of it where it met the floor. How a person stands on it I could not tell you. How a person walks on it I cannot begin to. You would not get ten yards in it up Pule Hill. You'd not get ten yards in it down Marsden. It is not a shoe for getting anywhere. It is a shoe for being somewhere, I think, and that is a different thing to what I usually find, because the shoes I find have nearly all been somewhere on their way to somewhere else.

It were stood upright on the wall, balanced on that little spike and the point of the toe, facing out across the valley towards the railway. The wind were up and it weren't moving. I'll be honest, I didn't like how it weren't moving. A thing balanced on a spike that thin should have gone over in that wind and it hadn't. I looked at it a good while before I got the camera out.

I did not touch it. I want to be clear after the business at Beaumont Park that I am back to not touching them. I took the photographs from the front and from the side, and I got down low for one to get the heel against the sky, because the heel is the thing, the heel is what I will not forget about this one.

My dinner, which I did not understand either

I set the folding stool up a bit along from the shoe, out of the worst of the wind behind the standing bit of wall, and I got the carrier bag out, because by now it were gone one and I'd had nowt since the toast.

Inside the greaseproof there were not a sandwich. There were a little tray with a clear lid, and inside the tray were a row of small round things and a few other small things, all very neat, very tidy, all wrapped about with a black wrapper that I now know is a seaweed but did not know then. There were rice in them. There were a green paste in a corner that I took for a relish. There were a tiny plastic fish, about the size of my thumb, full of a brown liquid, and a pair of wooden sticks joined at the top in a paper sleeve that said to snap them apart. There were a note from Our Linda in the bag that said "it's called sushi, the fish is the soy sauce not for eating the fish on its own, the green is hot so go careful, love L."

My dinner. The sushi. The little fish is the sauce. The sticks I could not work and ate it with my fingers, which I think is allowed up a hill where nobody can see you.

I will say this for it. I had a go. I have widened, as Our Linda intended. The round ones with the rice I got on with. There were one had a pink fish on top that were not cooked, which I were not sure about, but I'd come this far so I had it and it were not bad, cold, with the wind going. The green paste I did not go careful with because I did not properly believe Our Linda about a relish that small being that hot, and I were wrong, and I had a few minutes there on the stool that I will not describe except to say the curlew had it easier than me. I drank the flask. The flask were tea, milk in, the same as always, and I have never been more glad of a thing I understood.

I sat there with the shoe on the wall in front of me and the empty sushi tray on my knee and I thought, there's two things in front of me today I've not got the measure of, and one's my dinner and one's a shoe, and Our Linda's behind the both of them in a manner of speaking, and I don't know what to make of any of it but the tea. Then I had the Penguin. She'd put a Penguin in as well, underneath, blue wrapper. She knows me. The horizons can only go so wide.

What it goes down as

Main sequence. Number 320. I want to say that quick because I've spent enough of this last month not knowing what column things go in, and this one I do know. It is a lone shoe, found out in the field — well, on the wall — in Huddersfield and the surrounding areas, Marsden being well within the line. It does not matter that it's a red heeled shoe and not a boot. A shoe is a shoe. I have got three hundred and twenty of them now and I am not going to start telling some of them they don't count because I don't know the word for the heel. That road leads to more ledgers and I have said where I stand on more ledgers.

It is the third lady's shoe I have come to. The first were Nerja. The second were the bench at Beaumont Park, the one with the key in it that I still think about. This is the third, and it's the first of the three I'd call a going-out shoe, if that's the term. The other two you could picture on a person walking about an ordinary day. This one you could not. I keep coming back to that. Somebody owned a shoe you cannot walk in, and it has ended up on a drystone wall on top of a hill above Marsden, which is about the last place on God's earth you'd wear it, and I do not know how those two facts sit together and I am not going to force them.

I asked Our Linda when I got in. I described the heel. She said, "that's a stiletto, Keith." Just like that, straight off, no thinking about it. I said how do you know that. She said, "everybody knows that." I did not know that. I have written the word down. Stiletto. I have a feeling I've heard it about a knife. I'll not look into that part.

Aye. A red stiletto on the wall up Pule Hill, balanced on a spike in a wind that should've had it over. And sushi for my dinner. I learned two words today off Our Linda and one of them were a shoe. Not a bad day out, all told. The curlew were the best of it.