Best Foot Forward

By Andy Jones

Sue flirts with me, and it’s difficult to know how to take it. It’s flattering and it’s depressing, it’s embarrassing and it’s funny, it’s tempting… but only just. Her face is a paradox of geometry; her eyebrows have been applied rather than grown, this done, it would seem, with the aid of a black crayon, a ruler and a spirit level. Her teeth bring to mind the aftermath of a game of Jenga – a mouthful of discoloured, overlapping pegs, no two of which point in the same direction. So, rather than look Sue in the eye, I talk to her chest, and rather than complain, Sue flirts. I wonder if getting my leg over constitutes good physiotherapy.

“What are you grinning at?” Sue asks.

“Private joke,” I say, as I continue to inch along the parallel bars.

Sue pinches me around the left bicep, “Your arms are getting quite muscley.”

“All the better to sweep you off your feet,” I tell her chest.

“Ha ha,” she says, “Just make sure you’re not taking too much weight off your leg.”

Sue and I meet once a week now, and it’s strictly professional – she is teaching me how to walk again. Maybe I should concentrate on that before I try to run.

By the time we’re finished, the stump of my ex-leg is sore from chaffing against the prosthetic; talk about a bad fit, it’s not even the right colour. Farley thinks this is hysterical and has taken to calling me the Minstrel. Look on the bright side, he says, all you brothers walk with a limp anyway, keep it covered and no-one’ll know the difference.

Any other white guy called me a brother, and I’d kick his arse – one leg or not. But Farley and I have more than a missing leg in common. We’re more or less the same age, into the same films, the same music, the same drink. We’re one-legged brothers-in-arms, as Farley says, and his sense of humour is a welcome, if occasionally tactless, relief. If it wasn’t for Farley, I’d be stuck in these rehab gangbangs with just old Mrs Griffiths and that scary Ukranian bloke for company.

It’s up to you to be happy, Dr O’Shea says in group counselling. He told us about a study comparing a wad of lottery winners and a ward of accident victims. Miserable types whose numbers came up, they just end being miserable types in flashy cars. And your cheeky chirpy car-crash victims, they’re the one’s who think it’s funny to drop a glass eye into your champagne.

Besides the counselling, the role-playing, and the group hugs, Dr O’Shea believes in the ‘positive power of play’. Cards, Connect 4, chess, snakes ‘n’ ladders, they’re all part of the Doctor’s prescription. This medicine, though, is past its best-before date. These games have seen happier times. The dice are mismatched, pawns and queens have given way to pen tops and buttons, the boards are held together by Sellotape. Pieces are missing.

Dr O’Shea’s particular favourite is Jenga. Behind the fun of that simple game, he says, there lies a valuable lesson. Jenga teaches us that nothing is permanent, says Dr O’Shea. But, if we are prepared to pick up the pieces and start over, even the greatest disaster has the potential to grow into a towering success. I think the Dr O’S is particularly proud of that one.

So it’s up to you, says Dr O’Shea, a smile is a frown turned upside down.

Easy for him to say with his job, his wife and his two legs.

“Nice trainer,” Farley says as we change out of our sweat pants after the session, “I never seen you in the same one twice, man? What you do with the leftover rights?”

“I’m making a shoe tree,” I tell him.

“I’d have ‘em,” he says, as my words sail clean over his shaved head, “What do you want with a right?” I ask him. “You’re a lefty.”

He shrugs, “I dunno. Swap it, sell it?”

“Sell it,” I repeat, sucking my teeth, “Who to?”

“How about a swifty?” Farley says, just like I knew he would. “I’m buying.”

I’m more than half tempted, but I tell him I have to be somewhere. It’s not that I couldn’t murder a pint of Guinness, or even that I mind spending his money – not at all, I’d be doing him a favour – but Farley is bad news, and I’m easily led.

Smack, crack, coke, weed, speed and E’s, Farely’s had ‘em. Mushrooms morphine, ketamine, roofy, glue and gabba, yabba dabba Farley’s done it. And don’t forget the sedatives; according to Farley, injecting temazepam is the next best thing to a good armful of heroin. The drug companies produce the bright yellow capsules in a semi-solid gel form, to be taken orally. But some resourceful junkie, some genius needle freak, figured out that, if you melt the ‘jellies’ down first, you can inject them straight into your arm, leg, tongue or toe. Anywhere you can still find a decent vein.

So far so brilliant. But here’s the rub: the molten gel has a tendency to solidify once it’s in your bloodstream, and that leads to all sorts of problems like gangrene, which leads to all sorts of problems like having your leg amputated.

And just like the lottery winners and the cripples, it didn’t take Farley long to fall back into his familiar routine. The first time I met him we went for a ‘swifty’ and didn’t surface for three days. It was the most fun I could remember since the night a drunk driver knocked me down, and I woke up three days later and six kilos lighter.

It stopped being fun nearly three months ago – the night Farley produced my ‘birthday surprise’. We were making serious headway into a litre of vodka, when Farley emerged from his kitchen singing happy birthday and carrying a burning candle.

When I opened my tiny clingfilm-wrapped present, I found myself holding what looked like four yellow jellybeans. Surpri-ise! I watched in mute shock as Farley folded a sheet of tinfoil into a square-sided bowl, dropped the temazepam capsules inside, and held the make-shift canteen over the flame of my birthday candle.

Watching Farley stick a syringe full of molten temazepam into his remaining leg was horrific e-fucking-nough, but when I realised I was rolling up my own trouser leg as Farley loaded a fresh needle… that’s right about the time the whole novelty wore off for me. I injected the whole dose into the sofa, and my one-legged brother-in-arms was too bombed to even notice.

So, thirsty as I am after two hours of hopping up and down the parallel bars, I tell Farley, maybe another time. Come on, he says, and he mimes necking a pint. Sometimes I think he only comes to these sessions to test me; he sure doesn’t seem interested in getting better. I’ll be taking my leg (a brown one hopefully) home in a couple of months, but Farley’s lagging way behind. I’ll miss him, but we won’t be keeping in touch.

I’ve got things to do, I tell Farley, and I crutch myself out of there. I’ve got a new trainer to steal; I’m a sneaker thief, and today I’m stealing white Nike Shox with red stitching and a silver swoosh.

One of the gymnasium walls is a long stretch of floor-to-ceiling windows, and, as I wait for the lift to arrive, I watch Sue cross the room, carrying a leg under each arm. I tap-tap my crutch against the glass and blow her a kiss. Sue smiles her carnage smile and blows the kiss right back.

The sooner this place is behind me the better.

Even on my crutches I could walk to town in ten minutes, but I take the bus because I’m saving shoe leather. Sitting on the Number 40 into Oxford Circus, a memory comes to me uninvited:

During the summer before I started sixth-form college, I was caught shoplifting a CD from WH Smiths. I can’t remember the face of the man who collared me as I stepped outside with Bananarama down the back of my jeans, I can’t remember the faces of the policemen who escorted me from the manager’s office to the station, but I do remember the tears and the snot running down my mother’s face as we drove home in silence.

I tap my lonely foot on the floor and imagine some gazzilion-dollar basketball star with more free trainers than he could possibly wear. I imagine this seven-foot slam-dunker lacing up the sneakers with his name hand-stitched onto the sides, I imagine him drawing back his perfect leg and, wham, slamming the toe end right up some sweatshop worker’s bony yellow arse. I imagine all of this and know that I’m doing the right thing. I’m Robin Hood, robbing the rich and giving to poor old me.

If they made your Nikes over here they’d cost you twenty pounds extra, or so they say. Luckily for us, Mrs Chin is happy to work her fingers to the bone for a dollar a day. Still, who said life was fair? If it was I’d be stealing two trainers instead of one.

The bus has pretty much filled up by now and there are no double seats left. The new arrivals have a choice: they can squash up next to a stranger or they can stand. The pretty woman in the business suit heads for the empty seat next to me and goes to sit. Her arse is two inches above the seat before she spots the space where my leg used to be. She looks away, makes like she’s just smoothing her skirt and opts to stand. If the bus driver has to brake suddenly she’ll go tottering down the aisle on those fuck-me stilettos and she might just break her own pretty pins. I’m gritting my teeth and I ask myself, would I choose to squash up next to some stump of a leg if I had the option of standing up on two of my own? I want to say yes.

The next stop is still a five-minute hop to Footlocker, but I get off anyway, and nod Stilettos towards the empty seat. She smiles awkwardly and mumbles a thanks-a-lot.

The people that work in these Beijing sweatshops, they can’t even sell the surplus footwear that they bring home; every doormat in the tenement is piled high with pair upon pair of designer trainers. Two by two by two by two. These shoemaker’s elves, they keep trainers in the cupboard above the sink – the one where you keep your baked beans. The highstreet shops, they only display single trainers. These trainers cost less than a pound to make, retail for a hundred times that, and the shops hide half of it away in the basement, afraid that you’ll run away with their merchandise.

Two days after my surprise birthday party at Farley’s, a card arrived from my father. Embossed onto the front was a football-playing teddy bear above the line: Hoping your birthday is a winner!! Sometimes I think my old man forgets how old I am. And how many legs I keep in my tracksuit. Inside the card was a crumpled twenty-pound -note, and a short message – ‘Happy Birthday, Son. Don’t spend it all at once. Best wishes, Dad.’

“Don’t spend it all at once.” Right-O, Dad. I’ll invest half in bonds, half in property, and the other half I’ll just fritter away on the FTSE 100. I’d resolved to invest the lot in vodka, when I looked again at the footballing bear on the front of the card. And I just laughed. Not a snigger, or a snort; not an ironic huff, or a despondent nasal exhalation. This was proper out-loud laughter. This cartoon bear had smarter trainers than me. There’s me with one good leg left, and I’ve got a scuffed up piece of tattered, soul-hanging-off leather jammed on the end of it. That is no way to treat your last leg, I thought, and I laughed until my belly cramped

Twenty quid would barely cover the laces in a new pair of trainers, but hey, it was my birthday. Maybe a spot of retail therapy would work where Doctor O’Shea’s play therapy had failed.

I asked the kid behind the counter if he could sell me a single trainer for half the price of a pair. When this kid looked at me like I was retarded, I slapped my stump on the counter, and asked to speak to the manager. And this boy, with constellation acne and zirconium earrings the size of a sugar lumps, this boy said, I am the manager, sir, maybe you should write to head office. Pull the other one, I told him, I want fifty percent off, not a pen-pal.

And just like that, I had something far better than half a pair of trainers. I had a mission.

That’s what I tell myself now, to control my nerves and hush my doubts as I crutch into Footlocker. You’re on a mission. Redressing the balance. Picking up pieces.

Inside the shop, some kid dressed as a baseball referee asks me if I need any help. Just looking, I tell him, and I wonder what’s the singular of Shox. Shoc perhaps, or maybe Shok? I came in yesterday, so I already know they have a left in my size, it’s balanced on a little Perspex shelf like a work of art, or a trophy. I’m a nine and they almost always display a nine.

Lucky me.

This kid wanders off to help to help a trendy type who’s waving a red Converse in the air. The trendy guy – his mates probably call him Lurch, or Streaky – he towers above the shop assistant, and if I had to guess I’d say he was a size eleven, maybe even a twelve. The kid takes the Converse and disappears into the cellar. When he resurfaces I’ll be long gone. But I’ll be back. And I’ll keep coming back until hell freezes over, Jesus grows me another leg, or I get arrested for shoplifting.

And I’ve got a pretty good idea which is going to happen first. But I won’t call my mother this time. This time I’m going to need an agent. This time I’ll be leaving the police station in a limo instead of in disgrace.

Picture the headline: One-legged bandit hops it from Footlocker.

After that it’s talk-show and exclusive-interview city. A book deal. Maybe a BBC drama. Perhaps an advertising contract with Adidas, K-Swiss or, better yet, New Balance.

Yes indeed, things are most definitely looking up. Just thinking about it, I can feel that frown turning upside down.

__________________________________________________________________________

Andy P. Jones lives in London, working as an advertising copywriter. Writing fiction without jingles is his attempt at redemption. Like everyone else in advertising, Andy is working on a novel.


	Best Foot Forward By Andy Jones Sue flirts with me, and it’s difficult to know how to take it. It’s flattering and it’s depressing, it’s embarrassing and it’s funny, it’s tempting… but only just. Her face is a paradox of geometry; her eyebrows have been applied rather than grown, this done, it would seem, with the aid of a black crayon, a ruler and a spirit level. Her teeth bring to mind the aftermath of a game of Jenga – a mouthful of discoloured, overlapping pegs, no two of which point in the same direction. So, rather than look Sue in the eye, I talk to her chest, and rather than complain, Sue flirts. I wonder if getting my leg over constitutes good physiotherapy. “What are you grinning at?” Sue asks. “Private joke,” I say, as I continue to inch along the parallel bars. Sue pinches me around the left bicep, “Your arms are getting quite muscley.” “All the better to sweep you off your feet,” I tell her chest. “Ha ha,” she says, “Just make sure you’re not taking too much weight off your leg.” Sue and I meet once a week now, and it’s strictly professional – she is teaching me how to walk again. Maybe I should concentrate on that before I try to run. By the time we’re finished, the stump of my ex-leg is sore from chaffing against the prosthetic; talk about a bad fit, it’s not even the right colour. Farley thinks this is hysterical and has taken to calling me the Minstrel. Look on the bright side, he says, all you brothers walk with a limp anyway, keep it covered and no-one’ll know the difference. Any other white guy called me a brother, and I’d kick his arse – one leg or not. But Farley and I have more than a missing leg in common. We’re more or less the same age, into the same films, the same music, the same drink. We’re one-legged brothers-in-arms, as Farley says, and his sense of humour is a welcome, if occasionally tactless, relief. If it wasn’t for Farley, I’d be stuck in these rehab gangbangs with just old Mrs Griffiths and that scary Ukranian bloke for company. It’s up to you to be happy, Dr O’Shea says in group counselling. He told us about a study comparing a wad of lottery winners and a ward of accident victims. Miserable types whose numbers came up, they just end being miserable types in flashy cars. And your cheeky chirpy car-crash victims, they’re the one’s who think it’s funny to drop a glass eye into your champagne. Besides the counselling, the role-playing, and the group hugs, Dr O’Shea believes in the ‘positive power of play’. Cards, Connect 4, chess, snakes ‘n’ ladders, they’re all part of the Doctor’s prescription. This medicine, though, is past its best-before date. These games have seen happier times. The dice are mismatched, pawns and queens have given way to pen tops and buttons, the boards are held together by Sellotape. Pieces are missing. Dr O’Shea’s particular favourite is Jenga. Behind the fun of that simple game, he says, there lies a valuable lesson. Jenga teaches us that nothing is permanent, says Dr O’Shea. But, if we are prepared to pick up the pieces and start over, even the greatest disaster has the potential to grow into a towering success. I think the Dr O’S is particularly proud of that one. So it’s up to you, says Dr O’Shea, a smile is a frown turned upside down. Easy for him to say with his job, his wife and his two legs. * “Nice trainer,” Farley says as we change out of our sweat pants after the session, “I never seen you in the same one twice, man? What you do with the leftover rights?” “I’m making a shoe tree,” I tell him. “I’d have ‘em,” he says, as my words sail clean over his shaved head, “What do you want with a right?” I ask him. “You’re a lefty.” He shrugs, “I dunno. Swap it, sell it?” “Sell it,” I repeat, sucking my teeth, “Who to?” “How about a swifty?” Farley says, just like I knew he would. “I’m buying.” I’m more than half tempted, but I tell him I have to be somewhere. It’s not that I couldn’t murder a pint of Guinness, or even that I mind spending his money – not at all, I’d be doing him a favour – but Farley is bad news, and I’m easily led. Smack, crack, coke, weed, speed and E’s, Farely’s had ‘em. Mushrooms morphine, ketamine, roofy, glue and gabba, yabba dabba Farley’s done it. And don’t forget the sedatives; according to Farley, injecting temazepam is the next best thing to a good armful of heroin. The drug companies produce the bright yellow capsules in a semi-solid gel form, to be taken orally. But some resourceful junkie, some genius needle freak, figured out that, if you melt the ‘jellies’ down first, you can inject them straight into your arm, leg, tongue or toe. Anywhere you can still find a decent vein. So far so brilliant. But here’s the rub: the molten gel has a tendency to solidify once it’s in your bloodstream, and that leads to all sorts of problems like gangrene, which leads to all sorts of problems like having your leg amputated. And just like the lottery winners and the cripples, it didn’t take Farley long to fall back into his familiar routine. The first time I met him we went for a ‘swifty’ and didn’t surface for three days. It was the most fun I could remember since the night a drunk driver knocked me down, and I woke up three days later and six kilos lighter. It stopped being fun nearly three months ago – the night Farley produced my ‘birthday surprise’. We were making serious headway into a litre of vodka, when Farley emerged from his kitchen singing happy birthday and carrying a burning candle. When I opened my tiny clingfilm-wrapped present, I found myself holding what looked like four yellow jellybeans. Surpri-ise! I watched in mute shock as Farley folded a sheet of tinfoil into a square-sided bowl, dropped the temazepam capsules inside, and held the make-shift canteen over the flame of my birthday candle. Watching Farley stick a syringe full of molten temazepam into his remaining leg was horrific e-fucking-nough, but when I realised I was rolling up my own trouser leg as Farley loaded a fresh needle… that’s right about the time the whole novelty wore off for me. I injected the whole dose into the sofa, and my one-legged brother-in-arms was too bombed to even notice. So, thirsty as I am after two hours of hopping up and down the parallel bars, I tell Farley, maybe another time. Come on, he says, and he mimes necking a pint. Sometimes I think he only comes to these sessions to test me; he sure doesn’t seem interested in getting better. I’ll be taking my leg (a brown one hopefully) home in a couple of months, but Farley’s lagging way behind. I’ll miss him, but we won’t be keeping in touch. I’ve got things to do, I tell Farley, and I crutch myself out of there. I’ve got a new trainer to steal; I’m a sneaker thief, and today I’m stealing white Nike Shox with red stitching and a silver swoosh. One of the gymnasium walls is a long stretch of floor-to-ceiling windows, and, as I wait for the lift to arrive, I watch Sue cross the room, carrying a leg under each arm. I tap-tap my crutch against the glass and blow her a kiss. Sue smiles her carnage smile and blows the kiss right back. The sooner this place is behind me the better. * Even on my crutches I could walk to town in ten minutes, but I take the bus because I’m saving shoe leather. Sitting on the Number 40 into Oxford Circus, a memory comes to me uninvited: During the summer before I started sixth-form college, I was caught shoplifting a CD from WH Smiths. I can’t remember the face of the man who collared me as I stepped outside with Bananarama down the back of my jeans, I can’t remember the faces of the policemen who escorted me from the manager’s office to the station, but I do remember the tears and the snot running down my mother’s face as we drove home in silence. I tap my lonely foot on the floor and imagine some gazzilion-dollar basketball star with more free trainers than he could possibly wear. I imagine this seven-foot slam-dunker lacing up the sneakers with his name hand-stitched onto the sides, I imagine him drawing back his perfect leg and, wham, slamming the toe end right up some sweatshop worker’s bony yellow arse. I imagine all of this and know that I’m doing the right thing. I’m Robin Hood, robbing the rich and giving to poor old me. If they made your Nikes over here they’d cost you twenty pounds extra, or so they say. Luckily for us, Mrs Chin is happy to work her fingers to the bone for a dollar a day. Still, who said life was fair? If it was I’d be stealing two trainers instead of one. The bus has pretty much filled up by now and there are no double seats left. The new arrivals have a choice: they can squash up next to a stranger or they can stand. The pretty woman in the business suit heads for the empty seat next to me and goes to sit. Her arse is two inches above the seat before she spots the space where my leg used to be. She looks away, makes like she’s just smoothing her skirt and opts to stand. If the bus driver has to brake suddenly she’ll go tottering down the aisle on those fuck-me stilettos and she might just break her own pretty pins. I’m gritting my teeth and I ask myself, would I choose to squash up next to some stump of a leg if I had the option of standing up on two of my own? I want to say yes. The next stop is still a five-minute hop to Footlocker, but I get off anyway, and nod Stilettos towards the empty seat. She smiles awkwardly and mumbles a thanks-a-lot. The people that work in these Beijing sweatshops, they can’t even sell the surplus footwear that they bring home; every doormat in the tenement is piled high with pair upon pair of designer trainers. Two by two by two by two. These shoemaker’s elves, they keep trainers in the cupboard above the sink – the one where you keep your baked beans. The highstreet shops, they only display single trainers. These trainers cost less than a pound to make, retail for a hundred times that, and the shops hide half of it away in the basement, afraid that you’ll run away with their merchandise. Two days after my surprise birthday party at Farley’s, a card arrived from my father. Embossed onto the front was a football-playing teddy bear above the line: Hoping your birthday is a winner!! Sometimes I think my old man forgets how old I am. And how many legs I keep in my tracksuit. Inside the card was a crumpled twenty-pound -note, and a short message – ‘Happy Birthday, Son. Don’t spend it all at once. Best wishes, Dad.’ “Don’t spend it all at once.” Right-O, Dad. I’ll invest half in bonds, half in property, and the other half I’ll just fritter away on the FTSE 100. I’d resolved to invest the lot in vodka, when I looked again at the footballing bear on the front of the card. And I just laughed. Not a snigger, or a snort; not an ironic huff, or a despondent nasal exhalation. This was proper out-loud laughter. This cartoon bear had smarter trainers than me. There’s me with one good leg left, and I’ve got a scuffed up piece of tattered, soul-hanging-off leather jammed on the end of it. That is no way to treat your last leg, I thought, and I laughed until my belly cramped Twenty quid would barely cover the laces in a new pair of trainers, but hey, it was my birthday. Maybe a spot of retail therapy would work where Doctor O’Shea’s play therapy had failed. I asked the kid behind the counter if he could sell me a single trainer for half the price of a pair. When this kid looked at me like I was retarded, I slapped my stump on the counter, and asked to speak to the manager. And this boy, with constellation acne and zirconium earrings the size of a sugar lumps, this boy said, I am the manager, sir, maybe you should write to head office. Pull the other one, I told him, I want fifty percent off, not a pen-pal. And just like that, I had something far better than half a pair of trainers. I had a mission. That’s what I tell myself now, to control my nerves and hush my doubts as I crutch into Footlocker. You’re on a mission. Redressing the balance. Picking up pieces. Inside the shop, some kid dressed as a baseball referee asks me if I need any help. Just looking, I tell him, and I wonder what’s the singular of Shox. Shoc perhaps, or maybe Shok? I came in yesterday, so I already know they have a left in my size, it’s balanced on a little Perspex shelf like a work of art, or a trophy. I’m a nine and they almost always display a nine. Lucky me. This kid wanders off to help to help a trendy type who’s waving a red Converse in the air. The trendy guy – his mates probably call him Lurch, or Streaky – he towers above the shop assistant, and if I had to guess I’d say he was a size eleven, maybe even a twelve. The kid takes the Converse and disappears into the cellar. When he resurfaces I’ll be long gone. But I’ll be back. And I’ll keep coming back until hell freezes over, Jesus grows me another leg, or I get arrested for shoplifting. And I’ve got a pretty good idea which is going to happen first. But I won’t call my mother this time. This time I’m going to need an agent. This time I’ll be leaving the police station in a limo instead of in disgrace. Picture the headline: One-legged bandit hops it from Footlocker. After that it’s talk-show and exclusive-interview city. A book deal. Maybe a BBC drama. Perhaps an advertising contract with Adidas, K-Swiss or, better yet, New Balance. Yes indeed, things are most definitely looking up. Just thinking about it, I can feel that frown turning upside down. __________________________________________________________________________ Andy P. Jones lives in London, working as an advertising copywriter. Writing fiction without jingles is his attempt at redemption. Like everyone else in advertising, Andy is working on a novel.