My Big Fat Blue Trainers

My mother fetched a couple of tattered shoeboxes down out of the attic.

“What about last year’s? Can you not fit into them? Or at least give yours to your brother?”

I was horrified. “No way!" I gasped at her, "mine are too small for me. And they can’t go on David anyway, there’s a big hole in the toe.” A hole which David was rapidly making even bigger with a pencil, for fear he might be forced to wear something that wasn't new. My mother stood in the kitchen on the worn bit of the lino and sighed, rubbing her big toe against the sole of the beige sandals she had had since, well, forever. Her Pink Pearl nail polish wasn't up to much as it was flaking off all over the place.

It was the same every summer, we'd have to wait and wait and wait for my mother to choose the day when we could go and buy our summer shoes. Loitering around the kitchen, sighing and picking at the countertops. Wondering when the best time would be to ask. The very first day of the school holidays, or maybe a week later? First thing in the morning before she got busy, or while she was having a coffee break with a Jacob's Club Milk and in a good mood? While Granny was there, for encouragement. Not while Granny was there. In and out of the house like grasshoppers. Barefoot and scabby, drowning wasps in jamjars and all the time hoping for the jangle of the car keys. Bored by the afternoon, scuffing at loose stones in the driveway and pulling faces at the cars that passed by. The longing, the tedious tension of waiting for someone else to get you what you wanted, needed, desperately, before the summer could start properly. Even the sun hadn't really come out yet. Can we go today? Everyone else has them already. Did Daddy give you the money? I want to go now!

And then I suppose it all got a bit much and we heard her rattling around in the garage, looking for the lawnmower fuel to put in the car. My father loved to mow the grass. He would do a couple of lines and then strip off, and in his vest he had brown arms up to his elbows and white arms up to his neck and he looked a bit like a Milky Way bar, somehow, and that always made me hungry for chocolate, but then my father said I was always hungry, with a stomach like a bottomless pit. He would surely start yelling those words that he wasn't allowed to say in the house when he found out that the petrol was gone, but at least we were on our way to Tommy Kelly's.

Tommy Kelly’s shoe shop was at the wrong end of our nearest town. Making a trip there had a certain edginess about it. My mother would only park the car directly outside the shop window where she could see it, and even then we weren’t allowed to stay inside too long. There were no other shops on the street, only a rough pub opposite, and a scrap merchant’s behind that. Beside it was an old handball alley, not used anymore, except for people dumping rubbish and what looked like old underpants.

Tommy Kelly’s was one of those old shops, like Magee’s Drapers, where all the fixtures and fittings are brown and everything smells of dust. I didn’t know what a draper was, afraid to go in, in case all the old ladies in there in their blue nylon housecoats and bright pink lipstick might drape themselves over you as you went in the door, but my mother said no, a draper’s was just another word for a clothes shop, but I didn’t understand why they didn’t just call it what it was then and say Magee’s Clothes Shop. But then I didn’t understand either why Howlin’s Town & Country Casuals did not have casual clothes in there but only suits.

Inside Tommy Kelly’s shop it was very dark and it took a while for your eyes to figure out where you were going. It was great for hide and seek though, because all the shoeboxes were stacked up on really high shelves up to the ceiling and you could run in between them and no-one could find you. To get to the shoeboxes Tommy Kelly had to climb up on one of those long slidey ladders, like they have in the library. I wasn't allowed to go up there, but I wanted to. If you stood at the bottom and looked all the way up it gave you a crick in your neck, which you shouldn’t do, because if you still had a pain afterwards and you needed some Hedex there would be none there because my father would have eaten them all, like Smarties. Sometimes the shoes were not on the high shelves but were hidden in the back storeroom and there was an even bigger thrill at getting a box from in there.

Nothing was actually out on display. If you were looking for your Bubblegummers for the summer that was ok, because you knew what you wanted, but if you went in for winter shoes for example you had to go in and ask, kind of like imagining the sort of shoe you wanted, and hope that Tommy Kelly could read your mind almost, a bit like a magician. He even had the fuzzy white hair, but he didn’t seem all that magic, although once he wore a lavender shirt, which my mother said, surely meant he was a confirmed bachelor. Also, he was tanned, so that was a bit exotic for where we lived, people said he had a bit of the Spanish Armada in him, but I really didn’t understand that, because that would have meant he’d swallowed a ship or something and that didn’t make sense.

So anyway, if it was winter shoes you were after then box after box might come out of the back room and you didn’t know what you were getting until you took off the lid, and sometimes he had some lovely shoes and sometimes they were just plain ugly but if he had nothing else I had to have them anyway, even though everyone else at school always managed to get nice ones, but I didn’t know where they went, not Tommy Kelly’s anyway, I never saw any other customers in there.

It was always better if I got in first before David and chose my shoes before he did. Then there was spare time for me to sneak off and explore. My mother would always want me to sit on the chair with the puffy cushion and the shiny legs but after a few minutes I could sneak away because my brother was always being difficult and that meant she couldn’t watch me as well.

There was crinkly yellow cellophane in the window of the shop to stop the golf shirts on the dummies fading, and it cast a funny light over the rest of the clothes inside. The dummies had no heads or arms, which meant they must have been seconds but at least they did have feet, because it would have been a bit odd to have shoe shop dummies with no feet, even though the shoes didn’t actually go on their feet but on a shelf in the window, but still it wouldn’t have looked right. The clothes in the shop weren’t the kind of thing I would wear, they were for people who had horses or farms or went fishing. I tried on a big green coat once and it came all the way down even over my toes and I started laughing and so did David but my mother yelled at me to take it off and go wait in the car.

The lady who worked behind the counter for Tommy Kelly wasn’t right in the head. She was the one who took your money and my mother always thought it a bit queer that you would have someone like that in charge of money. I suppose she wasn’t bright enough to steal it. She had a name badge that said ‘Annie’ but her name was Mary. She always wore a big yellow cardigan, no matter what time of the year it was. Maybe she was always cold. Mary had long black hair which could have looked nice, but it was a bit greasy, like she didn't know how to wash it properly and it had a funny parting right down the middle. She had small gold hairslides to keep it clipped back but it still fell a bit draggly over her face. They were old fuddy duddy slides too, nobody had them anymore. Everyone had snip-snap coloured ones with Hello Kitty and plastic flowers. And anyway, grownups didn’t have hairslides full stop as my father would say. Grown-ups had their hair cut, in a style. I wasn’t allowed to have mine in a style, only sit in the chair after my mother was finished and have a bit taken off the ends. There was a big bowl of golf tees on the counter by Mary’s calculator, and sometimes I would stick my hand in the bowl and swish it all around to mix up the colours and never once did Mary shout at me, although come to think of it I’m not sure she could talk. I always smiled at her anyway when my mother had finished paying and it was time to go out to the car, although we never went out to the car without the absolutely best bit about getting our summer Bubblegummers from Tommy Kelly’s - right at the end when everything was paid for he would produce a lollipop each from somewhere under the counter (I don’t think it was Mary’s lunch) so that we went out with a lollipop in one hand and a box of new shoes in the other and that was a good way to start the day.

M y big fat blue Bubblegummers were absolutely the best thing about the summer holidays. I never put mine on in the shop. I would clutch the box all the way home in the car, sniffing at them and fondling the tissue paper; take out the rainbow stickers that came with them and think about where I would put them. Once, for a joke, I stuck one to the back of David's head but of course he screeched like a beansí when he finally noticed it and then he tried to pull it out but a chunk of his hair came out at the same time. I got a slap on the legs for that, but the Bubblegummers weren't taken away, thank God. I would stroke those shoes before I put them on. There was something about them that was just so…Sesame Street. All we needed was a yellow bus. I traced my finger around the raised logo. Even the name was right. The thing was, we weren't actually allowed to eat bubblegum, or chewing gum, or even candyfloss now that I think about it, so while all our friends swaggered around smelling of Juicy Fruit or Pink Hubba Bubba with a faint crust around their lips, we had to make do with the Bubblegummers on our feet. The name made them a little bit wrong somehow, and that was exciting.

Bubblegummers were light and spacey like an Aero bar. They were much better than ordinary trainers, that's for sure. You could definitely jump a bit higher and run a lot faster when had them on your feet. The rims of them were white, but it didn't take too many goes of riding the Space Hopper round the lawn and over obstacles like they did on the Horse Show at the RDS to get the white bits all streaked with green. You could give them a bit of a wipe with the dishcloth if no-one was looking, but it didn't really get the marks off, not even if you used a bit of Fairy Liquid, so in the end you just left the green streaks, like battle wounds. One year I tore my left trainer, jumping down off a branch. Packy Lyons had left an old bit of barbed wire under the tree trunk, and now snaggled in it along with some sheep wool was a raggy patch of denim. You had to be careful not to get in any muck either, white laces never stayed white for very long after they'd been in a puddle. One time I tried to put the laces in the washing machine but one of them got swallowed down one of the holes in the drum and made a right loobawn and I never heard the end of it.

You could pull pretty good wheelies on your bike too, if you had the big fat blue trainers. They somehow stuck to the pedals better, gave you a stronger grip. Of course one time I fell off, but it totally had nothing to do with the fact that Ronan O'Neill was watching me; I must have been blinded by the sun or something, but I ended up in the ditch with my good shirt ruined and that was the end of that as my mother said when she saw it, even though I had tried to sneak into my room without her seeing the rip, but she had eyes like a hawk and I think I was walking a bit funny anyway from the big lump on my knee so I suppose she suspected something was up.

The only time we weren’t allowed to wear the Bubblegummers in the summer was to Mass on a Sunday. Then our feet were jammed into hard leather sandals. David and I would leave it until the very last minute to put them on, tearing around the lawn, on the swing, in our big fat blue trainers until my father already had the car out the gate, blowing the horn, and my mother was starting to get mad. At Mass we paid scant attention to what was being said by Fr O’ Rathallaigh, whose big red nose was a sure sign apparently. The grown-ups listened very carefully to him though, and you could hear the ladies make little ‘oh!’s whenever his words went a bit funny. As long as David and I didn’t make it too obvious that we were looking anywhere but at the altar we only got a few slaps. Mass for us was nothing but a countdown to our weekly trip to the sweet shop and the appointed hour when we could take the sandals off again. Mine were white, with holes punched out of them, they must have had some machine in the factory for doing that, and David’s were brown and hard and if he kicked me in them it left a very big bruise.

After Mass my father would rush in to buy the paper before the crowds came and inside the paper he’d roll up a couple of Mars bars. Once, though, he forgot to buy any chocolate and David roared all the way home.

Sometimes I left on my good dress with my Bubblegummers, and then I thought I looked like Laura Ingalls Wilder on Little House On The Prairie, except she wore boots and a big dress, but then they probably didn’t have trainers in those days. Little House On The Prairie was on the telly on a Sunday evening and Granny thought Michael Landon was very handsome. I read the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder but they were not as good as on the telly.

The Bubblegummers were especially good for getting a grip on a straw bale. The first summer that round bales appeared in the back fields instead of square ones, none of us knew what to do. With square bales you could build houses and forts and jumps and everything, but what could you do with a round bale that towered over you? We thought they were too high to climb up on, but that's when the big fat blue trainers came in handy. You see you could poke a foothold in the middle of the bale; then you stood back, took an almighty run at it, dug your foot in and swung up on top. Not everyone managed to copy me and David though, because they didn't have the right shoes. The bales usually got a bit trashed, but nobody ever really troubled us about it. You could lie on top of one, and watch the stars come out and feel the heat of the day slowly drain out of your skin and know that there'd be no Toffypops for you that evening because you'd missed your tea, again. You could hear the straw talking to you, crackling and shushing, and small ladybirds tickling your freckles. Then one day we would get up and the field would be cleared; a forklift came fierce early in the morning and took all the bales away.

We started to pick blackberries at the dwindly end of summer, and it could be a little bit sad sometimes. Not at the beginning, when we had competitions to see who could get the purplest tongue, and Ronan O'Neill would always eat some green ones because he would do anything for a bet, and then he'd spend the rest of the day chasing Margaret Moran around the hedges and pretending he was going to puke on her, but towards the end, when some of the other kids had already been dragged in, told the holidays were over, carted off to buy new copybooks and pencils; at the end it was always only me and David, and by then we knew the summer was coming to a close for another year. By the time our stained fingers had destroyed the last of the bales of straw, the Bubblegummers were wrecked, and no matter how many furtive wipes we made with the J-Cloth they were well and truly worn out, and to be honest they were fairly stinky too, and would have to be put up and the hard school shoes would come out again. And then we would have to wait another year for the next lot.

But that day my mother took the petrol that was for the lawnmower and we went to Tommy Kelly's, he couldn’t get the trainers to fit me and that was the beginning of the end really.

To start with he fiddled around a bit with the big Clark’s foot thing, but the numbers kept reading the same and he tutted a bit under his breath down by my feet where my mother couldn’t hear him. Tommy Kelly always wore a tie, which I thought looked funny. My father worked in a shop too, but he never wore a tie. I liked the feel of the machine, the various slides snuggled up tight against your socks, the click-clack as they slotted into place. Don’t scrunch your toes up. I thought that Tommy Kelly was very lucky not to catch his tie in that machine. Bubblegummers weren’t made by Clark’s. I wondered if you were supposed to measure people’s feet for other shoes on the Clark’s machine, and if you weren’t what Clark’s would do if they found out. Would they take Tommy Kelly’s machine away, and if they did how would he measure people’s feet then?

“Sorry love, I haven’t got a size 5 in them now.”

I looked at Tommy Kelly and I felt panicked, sure that my mother had somehow left it too late to take us to town, they’d run out of trainers to fit me and now I would be expected to wear vile leather sandals every day and not just on Sunday, and they would trip me up and not go with anything, and you couldn’t wear socks with sandals and how could I climb trees with bare toes? Well I could, and I might, but I didn’t want to be like Paula Doyle whose father drove over her toe and now she couldn’t walk properly. I needed all my toes. I felt my cheeks redden with anger at my mother. Why did she have to ruin everything?

“Ok, can you try the next size up please,” I said to Tommy Kelly. “You could look in the back, there might be a box there.”

“No, I mean size 4 is the biggest they do. They don’t go up any higher than that now.”

“Pardon?” I felt sick. What did that mean, the biggest they did?

“They finish making the kids’ sizes at 4, they don’t go up any higher. Sure you’re a big girl now.” He winked at me. It didn’t make me feel any better. “I’ll bring out some others, sure we’ll get you something.”

Around me began to pile up a tower of boxes; other trainers which were just not the same, light footwear rejected immediately as even worse than white sandals, jelly shoes (which sent my mother into shock at the sight of them), even flip-flops. I felt shut down, they were all wrong. Nothing else would do only the Bubblegummers and why didn’t they make them any bigger? Or why couldn’t my feet be smaller? Boats Granddad called them. It wasn’t fair.

Meanwhile David was busily running around the shop in his new trainers, making airplane noises. He had thrown his winter shoes into the Bubblegummers’ box, not caring if they came home with him again or not. He found a small patch of tiling in the clothes section and began to make the trainers squeak, but then he tripped over and one of the dummies began to wobble quite a bit and I heard him say 'uh-oh' even if everyone else pretended not to.

My mother's face tightened, annoyed that it was all going horribly wrong.
“Right so, we’ll leave it then. Maybe we’ll try somewhere else.” She handed the money for David’s pair over to Mary on the till who was not quite right and we had to wait for ages while she counted the change five times and blew her nose twice. On the way home I sat in the back and cried, but I didn’t let anybody see me.

The next weekend my mother took me into the big town. A new Superstore had opened and it had a shoe section apparently. The shoes were cheaper, my mother said, and you could choose them yourself, you didn’t have to keep asking for different pairs to be brought out to you or make anybody climb ladders or look for things in a back room. I wondered how she knew all that, one of the neighbours had told her I suppose, probably Nan Flanagan, always the first with what was new. My father always said that she was mutton dressed as lamb, although I didn’t know what that meant, but even Granny thought that her orange lipstick was a bit much.

Once we got to the new store I didn't really want to get to the shoes. I dawdled along as much as I could, fingering lurex t-shirts, Bermuda shorts and hot pink knee socks, none of which I would ever wear but crikey you didn't get that kind of stuff in Tommy Kelly's. I could see that my mother was going a bit funny with all the bright lights and the railings of clothes everywhere blocking the way so in the end I marched her over to the shelves with a big '5' over them. I got a pair of trainers in that shop, but I didn't really want them. All that would fit me now were ladies’ trainers, like what Mrs Brennan wore to aerobics class, on account of putting on a few pounds over the Christmas and Mr Brennan sleeping on the sofa because of it. Those ladies’ trainers were not like Sesame Street and yellow buses at all and the soles weren't bouncy, and there were certainly no stickers in the box they came in; only two sachets of silica gel which you weren’t supposed to eat but put in the bin the minute you got home. When I got the shoes home though I didn't really feel like running around in the fields in those ladies’ trainers; I just wanted to stay inside and finish the Danielle Steel book I'd checked out of the library on Granny's ticket. It was too hot for mucking about anyway, and since Danny Mullins had been taken off for playing with Fiona Downs, on account of him being 25 and her only 10, nobody's ma and da really wanted them off out roaming around. We never did go back to Tommy Kelly’s again either, even David got his summer shoes from the superstore after that.

Years later when we drove through that town I peered out of the car window at where Tommy Kelly’s shoe shop used to be. To one side of the building it was all boarded up, while in the shop itself a single red Wellington lay abandoned in the corner of the window, with the yellow cellophane peeling and torn. They said he had moved on, retired by the seaside somewhere. Everyone knew he'd been squeezed out though. No-one knows what happened to Mary. On the other side of the building was a chip shop.