I get in, pull the curtain, and sit down. My cagoule crinkles loudly. It crinkles louder as I rub my hand over my chest and lean my head against the wobbly dividing wall between my changing cubicle and the next one along. I have already made a mistake because I have come in here to try on what I was hoping would be a new pair of shoes. I realise now, too late, that this is unusual. But I didn't expect to be scrutinised on entry, frowned at, and given a plastic circular tag to take into the cubicle with me. It's put me on edge. I don't feel good about the shoes any more, about being here, about anything. I just didn't want to bare my feet in public. I am not too sure about my socks today.
This is not a communal changing room but it might as well be. There are girls here, wafting their smells about and helping each other into halter necked tops. I can see them through a gap in the curtain. They adjust each other's bra-straps and do up buttons. They straighten hems. They're very natural. They don't look at each other's nipples or stroke each other's hair or anything. It is not that kind of scene – by which I mean, it isn't a porn film. It isn't a wet-dream, not a man's wildest fantasy. I wonder if they wonder what we do in here. There are a few of them, standing outside clutching carrier bags and waiting for the twirl. Wish you were here. Wish I was there.
In here the shoes don't look as nice. They aren't laced up properly, so I am going to have to sit and do that before I can get them on, and then I'm going to need to put my own shoes back on and run the gauntlet of girls and attendants before I can get out of the shop. I want to drink whiskey. I don't know why I didn't go to a proper shoe shop rather than a clothes shop that also sold shoes. I would still have had the problem with the socks though. I hold the shoes in my lap and sit very still.
The thing is, I don't even need new shoes. There's nothing wrong with the ones I've got on. I hate shoe-shopping. Girls are supposed to like it but I hate it. Buying shoes makes me want to have an argument, so I have to do it on my own. If I'm with Oscar, I start shouting.
'They're shoes', I say, 'they're just to stop your feet getting wet. Just get me something black. Size five.' I'd throw my credit cards at him and stomp off to wait outside, smoking furiously. Shoes.
He'd come out, take the roll-up from between my lips, throw it away. He wouldn't say anything, he never does.
'It's stupid that people get so worked up about what they wear,' I'd say. 'It's because they're shallow.'
He'd nod as if he was disagreeing with me, but he isn't, he's just standing.
'People who had confidence in their own intellectual substance wouldn't need to expend energy on what colour shoes they need,' I'd say.
He wouldn't reply. I'd have to try again.
'It is,' I would say, 'practically immoral to have more than one pair of shoes when three quarters of the world's population is starving. On the breadline. In camps. War. Global warming. Famine! The tenth anniversary of the death of the People's Princess!'
He never says anything, that's the thing. I'd rant myself into a corner. He'd wait, and we'd go back in to get the shoes. He's such a fuck. I only wanted to get out of the house. I can hear a mobile phone going off in the next cubicle. The girl answers it.
'Basically, it's all going on tonight,' she says. 'We're shopping now, pub in a bit, meet you later. Yeh, yeh, no. No, no, yeh. She's coming, but only if someone texts her and says Angela's staying in. No way. There's no way I'm telling her that. You can fuck right off. Boss. Right then.' I hear her exhale and I imagine her smiling as she talks.
I can see my face in the mirror. The ratio of gum to tooth is disappointing and I close my mouth and look away. I only came out because he made me.
'It's not good for you,' he said. He snaked his hand under the book and pushed it out of my hand, the bastard. 'People need to get their muscles moving. They need fresh air, exercise. It's why you don't sleep. You need to move something other than your brain.'
He knocked on the top of my head, and then picked up the book.
'Leave me alone,' I said. Already the words were leaking out of my head. I was forgetting what I'd learned, losing weight, getting older, evaporating.
He leaned back, put his hands under his tee-shirt and rubbed his stomach. I don't know why he does that, it's like a little full-stop he acts out. I held out my hands for the book but he was away with it, pulling the blinds up and leaving it out of reach on the windowsill. I don't know if it's true or not, but I could actually feel my pupils shrinking with the light.
He was right: I was sick with reading, my neck sore, my feet stuck with pins and needles. When I stood I had to straighten up slowly: my knees felt like they were going to snap, my stomach sloshing with tea.
The girl next to me stops talking into her mobile phone. She says goodbye, but then the thing starts squeaking again.
'I've only tried on the first one,' she says. I can hear the crackle of a male voice. She's chewing gum. I can hear her jaw snapping.
'I'll come out in a minute. Can you try and find that red one in a size twelve? No, shut up. Twelve. Not the red red one, just the other one. The one with the ruffles. I know I said that, but the light's different in here and I want to have a look at it. I'll come out and get it off you in a minute. Right.'
I don't have a watch, but she takes three more phone calls, has a heated argument, cries with her friends, decides he's a bastard, is comforted, goes out and collects the red top, goes back out and twirls, wonders aloud if it makes her arms look blocky, is reassured, reassures her friends about the relative unblockiness of their arms, goes and collects the same top again, but smaller, and holds a long conversation about someone who isn't there, doesn't know how to dress, and probably thinks she's IT because her boyfriend has a car and drives her anywhere she wants. It all seems to take a long time. Maybe fifteen minutes? I haven't tried on the shoes yet and when I move my hands the folds in the fabric of my trousers have left crinkled impressions on my palms. I can see I am developing a problem.
It's clear I can't just sit here and take up a changing room without trying anything on. Bad enough that it's shoes. Who takes shoes into changing rooms? Who does something like that in public. Some skinny dumb fuck, that's who. I can't just take them back out again. She'll look at the untouched laces and she'll be able to tell. She might think I've come in here to spy or something. To shoot up drugs or have a wank.
I'd much rather be a man. I bet the changing rooms in men's shops are silent. Just the sound of zips and shuffling. The clink of curtain rings along metal pole. Oscar doesn't even go to shops to get his clothes, he gets them all off the internet. And pissing. I'd love to have a dick to piss out of. Sometimes he'll let me stand behind him when he's pissing. I rest my cheek against the flat part between his shoulder blades and reach my hand around and hold his dick in my hand. I can feel the piss throbbing along it. I want him to let me swish it about into the bath but he hasn't done yet. Sometimes he puts his hands on his hips and we giggle, but mainly he just stands there and lets me do it, even lets me do the shaking thing at the end.
'There's a code,' he says, 'a manly code which means if you shake your cock more than once or twice and there's another man in the urinal with you, it's a come on, and if you wanted, he'd come and have sex with you.'
I don't think I believe him, but the truth is, I'll probably never know. I have asked him about urinals.
'I don't think I could go if there was someone standing next to me.'
'It's a problem,' he said, and rubbed his chin to make a crackling noise. 'But you can't go into the cubicle either, because that's like announcing to the whole place that you're going to have a turd.'
'I hadn't thought of that,' I said.
I imagined him standing sheepishly at the porcelain, his hands clutched in front of him. Nothing. Nodding over the partition, trying to think of taps and waterfalls and overflowing cisterns. It could be awkward. But I'm the one trapped in the changing room with a pair of shoes I cannot bring myself to unlace and don't want to buy, listening to those girls.
It's probably because I'm not very pretty – all these clothes and mirrors – these sorts of shops are places to get prettier, but you need to know what kind of things to buy first, and I never do. I don't think, in my case, it really matters. As soon as I buy clothes they become ill fitting and sloppy looking. Stains appear. I should probably get some female friends to take me shopping, to help me out, but the thought of it is terrifying. It would turn me into a lunatic. I would probably end up stealing or starting a fight or snapping hangers or something.
The first time I ever saw a woman's breasts I was in a changing room. It smelt worse than this, nylon gusset all day sunshine kind of worse, and my mother was there, slipping her hand down the waistband of everything I tried on to make sure there was room to grow into. I kept my eyes on the carpet as I struggled with my flies and in the glass around me bare limbs multiplied. The torsos were clad in underwear, fraying and grey, but I'd never seen so much skin before.
My mother held my glasses while I pulled jumpers over my head. I remember the squeak of the wool as I wrenched it over my ears, the smell of my own hot, wet breath caught in the weave. When my head popped out the top I puffed my fringe away, put my face forward for my glasses and opened my eyes. There they were, swinging as she bent over to pick up her top. My mother tutted, and turned me by the shoulders to face the wall. The sight of those browning, under inflated baps must have scarred me for life. That, I think, is why I over intellectualise everything, it is why I am so insecure, it is why I will never have a decent relationship with a man who understands me. I am making do at the moment, I'm settling for someone who doesn't know any better – sooner or later one of us will get bored, and the other one will end up alone, listening to the trains click past the windows at night and watching car headlights trace their way over the ceiling, over, and over, and out.
Or, it is (is it?) because, even though it was 1989, she made me kneel on the floor whenever I tried on a school skirt. If the skirt didn't touch the floor, at least touch the floor, it was back on the hanger. She is a Mormon. Once, I went to church in a skirt that wouldn't have touched the ground if I'd have got on my knees. The Young Ladies Activities Co-ordinator cut a strip of Christmas wrapping paper from a roll and safety-pinned it to the hem of the skirt to hide the shame of twelve-year old knees.
I don't know if he likes me in skirts, or trousers, or bare, or what. I've never asked, I wouldn't dare.
I decide to lace up the shoes so it looks like I have tried them on, then leave. I am not going to buy them. I will just need a minute to compose myself for my walk out past the attendant. It is a compromise solution, and should be acceptable to all of us. A win-win situation. It can't go wrong. I can't sit here feeling like Portnoy - I've have a perfect right to be here. I can try shoes on in private if I want to. I can decide not to buy them if they don't fit, if in this different light the red isn't quite as red and not really for me after all.
I have a job and I earn my own money. I could buy ten pairs of shoes right now if I felt like it. Maybe I will. And anyway, for all they know, I could have a serious medical condition, some kind of private foot problem that means I have to try on shoes in private. On My Own. Yes. That will do.
I fumble lace ends through eyes and then whip the curtain back like I am a woman on a mission, like I have decided about the shoes.
The girls are standing about in the walkway between the rows of cubicles and I read women's magazines in secret. Dimpled, fatty deposits under the skin of the thighs, buttocks and upper arms: orange peel. Too tight jeans causing love handles to erupt over the waistband: muffin top. Ill-fitting bras: four-boobs. Thongs visible over the top of low cut jeans: cheese wire, or The Triangle.
It's not men who make up names like this. I honestly believe that Oscar wouldn't notice any of these things, any of the faults that are in evidence right here.
They're smiling though, and examining material and claiming that this shop has small sizes and a twelve here is like a ten or even an eight somewhere else. And anyway, in America all the numbers are different and you might be a size zero but all that means is something like a six, and fucking hell, you could go to Peacocks and even Mandy could get into one of their sixes, so what does that tell you?
I don't envy a bit of it, although of course I do. I'm about sixty. I'm a million years old. I'm a librarian. I sell insurance. I'm an actuary, an accountant, I'm a mortgage advisor or an estate agent, for Christ's sake. I am holding a pair of black lace-up shoes and my fringe won't lie straight and I want to confess. I don't actually know what bra-size I am. I don't know what empire-line means. I always had the wrong back-pack at school and I don't know if you are supposed to call it a back-pack or a ruck-sack or something else. I still write a diary, and I'm twenty-seven. I've got a sticker on the front of the diary – it's in the shape of a crown, and along the bottom of the crown it says Readers Are Leaders. I once spent three hundred pounds on a portable music player I still don't know how to work because I saw a beautiful girl playing with one on a bus. I called 'My-Space' 'My-Face' for ages, no-one corrected me, and when I found out I'd been getting it wrong I had to take three days off work.
I say it all out loud and those girls circle me, arms like swan's necks around my waist, they take off my clothes and stroke my skin with their tongues and play cats cradle with my hair. They coo and cover my face with green paste and they put cucumbers on my eyes and cotton wool between my toes. I repent. They wash my hands. They dry my hands with their hair. They are gentle with me, they are my best friends.
Someone flicks their fringe out of their eyes, but no-one faints. I think this means I've only thought these things, not said them out loud. I check the shoes. They're still there, and the laces look plausible. I cough and the girls edge away from me and I pass. I know no-one is staring but all the mirrors makes it feel like they are.
The fact is, they don't stop talking and snort through their noses as they pass with the shoes. They don't raise their eyebrows at each other, jerk their heads in my direction, and smirk. They don't. No-one laughs at what I am wearing, or the fact that I am carrying the shoes against my chest like a bible.
My whole head is so hot I feel like I am going to faint. I can only get past the attendant by staring at the floor and thinking about my cheek pressed between his shoulder blades, that little muscle in my hand, the sound of piss arcing into the toilet.
