The Girl in the Blue Shoes

by Shaun Hume

  ‘I think it unlikely, dear chap. It’s the information they want, the records. They’re only Oxford professors, after all.’ Bertie said it without distaste and contempt, for he was also one himself. The clarity and simplicity of his last short sentence had struck in my mind like a thunder clap, a mighty fork of lightning that illuminated a single advantageous thought – that whoever may have been following me may not have been a professor. And whoever that had ransacked Bertie’s house may not have been a professor either. However, those who were lighting the fuses and standing back to gape all were. I was certain of that.

  I slept a fitful night. Bertie’s couch was a more than adequate bed, but the atmosphere of my growing thoughts was not once conducive to heedless rest. It was surprising that I was able to find any rest at all, so tumultuous were the little fires in my mind. But sheer exhaustion was my friend in this adventure, for the first time, and in it I put my faith for the moment, falling into its arms with welcome vigour.

  13.

  It was already late afternoon when I finally rose, and an evaporating breeze was rolling in through the already open windows, Bertie seemingly awake and bustling.

  The sun was on a low rung of a ladder of sparse clouds, and the mostly blue sky was looking settled, as it must have been so for most of the day already over.

  I ruffled my hair without much purpose and put on my shoes. They were no longer shiny but soiled with fragments of dirt, accumulated grasses and flecks of the streets. I hadn’t washed in days and it was beginning to show, even if Bertie was too polite to admit it. This could not go on for long, and in fact, another night would not be practical nor permissible at all. Tonight I had to take it to them, I had to get in and find out what they were really up to. After all, it was still only a college, there wouldn’t be much if any real security around it, that sort of thing encouraged questions, questions among people who went to the college for the express reason of asking and seeking the answers for countless queries. They were good at it, and if any new ones arose, they would surely be asked. If I go missing no one will notice the change in the wind, but others, bright young things with steady upper middle class parents waiting on the other line of the Skype call would.

  They would have to hide in plain sight. It was the only feasible way. And I could get into plain sight, I could get into it easily.

  I took a shower and felt like I had passed through a portal, the time under the steady warm water gifting me a settled mind. For a second I had thought I was free, the rest of my anxieties washed away and down the drain with the layers of other grime I had carried the past days. But it was only a second, and after it had passed, back returned the conviction I had taken hold of. The thorn was a sharp reminder of what needed to be done, and how I would never be free until I had discovered the ills I had set out to unearth. I had spent too much of my time idle, thinking and pondering, and my mind now had the stale feeling of inaction. I was desperate to know more, the hunger fed anything it could grapple its claws onto. I knew I had to slice at the flesh, cut the whole thing open and lay it out in the sun, ready to dry or else be devoured by any that cared to do so. And I was sure there would be many a creature with gnashing teeth at the ready indeed.

  But where to strike? There were more colleges in Oxford than you could count on mine and even Bertie’s fingers put together. But there was pattern, there were clues as to who was responsible, whom had the means and the resources to pursue such a thing in the first place. I let all these further thoughts bounce around in my head like fallen marbles until they had finished their ricochet and rolling to become a collection, a consolidation of waggling fingers, all pointing to one thing. Bertie had been overheard at his college, my college. Who was it and what did they know? I had some time ago rather quickly dismissed that the soul of what was happening was at Christ Church, mine and Bertie’s spiritual home. But it may well have been the birthplace of it all. The idea of this was truly a tantalising one, and being that I still had full access and privileges to the college, I could move about it freely in my spying.

  And that is what it would have to be.

  With the full and rapid repercussions of Bertie’s loose words to the air, it had well and truly proved that not only the walls had ears, but agents of the enemy dwelled within them too. And although my presence may not go unnoticed were I to step into Christ Church, I was hopeful that my covert intentions would. What I wanted to do was storm the great cathedral of learning and shout from scholar to scholar, professor to professor, demanding that I be given the answers I sought. But I still had the tiniest enough of grip onto the humdrum of social reality to realise that this would simply not do. My memories shot somewhat to what had happened to Bertie, holding fast to what he believed in, but bowled down, like a blunderbuss to the back, and then well out of breath, wind gone. I wasn’t worried about this fate for myself, I needn’t care a jot. Having already left the academic life behind, to be cast out by the fraternity of robes and tasseled hats was not of great concern.

  What was of great concern was not meeting my goal, as it had been set down for me now. I knew it was bigger than me, the scurrying human sized ants all around had no idea of not only how it all played parts in their tides of life, but also how the particles swarmed amongst them, weaving their way, running their laps, the people so disconnected that they had no chance of telling each other apart, let alone the Duplicates.

  No, it had to be measured, it had to be clean and precise. Decorum was to be observed, and a certain level of control.

  Bertie had said that he hadn’t mentioned my name, but the fact that I had already been followed was sign enough that they knew I was amongst it, poking my nose around as best I could. And The Girl in the Blue Shoes. For sure she had spoken to her superiors … but wait. What she had told me was what they didn’t want me to know, surely? If true then why had she gone out of her way, risked her own position in order to forward my comprehension of the operation? And why had she been so forward about telling me what I wanted to know?

  I hadn’t stopped to think about it at the time, I had been so compelled to go on with reckless energy that it was never a consideration that I wouldn’t find out what I wanted to know. Was it even the truth? Had she purposely thrown me down a road that would lead to nothing? My unfounded accusations and countless winding theories ultimately leading to nothing and be believed by no one? No. Although the convenience of the notion was there, it made too much ready sense to be dismissed as a cunningly concocted red herring. And the eyes, those dark eyes of hers had sung with sincerity when I had approached her, implored with severity that what she had said was the truth. I couldn’t disbelieve the eyes. And the eyes were everything.

  I offered to stay and help Bertie clear up his house but he insisted I go on, that it was worth more to find out as much as I could as fast as I could.

  With my friend’s good tidings I set out on foot for Christ Church. I commenced a gentle amble along the dry pavements that were already thick with warm, caressing my face with gentle waves of heat that seemed to drop my heart rate, a feat I wouldn’t have thought possible in the preliminary moments before the task I was steeling myself to complete. It was not so much the task itself that made my insides ripple but the repercussions of my snooping, as it was no longer my own life that I feared for. It had been a short emotion when the time had first come, the grappling to keep my own skin and bones still pacing the earth, but now I felt for Bertie, an old and passionate man who could surely be broken by the most sinister of aides.

  I cleat my dusty heels a mite quicker as I rounded the edge of Bertie’s street and pointed myself towards the college. I continued along and onto the crunching floor that ran around the edge of the Meadow, the caramel and honey stones fleeing the pointed leather of my scuttling shoes. I held a steady pace towards the shaped stone and twinkling glass, criss crossed with warming lead, as it blinked careful eyes at me while I approached. The canopy of green only swept aside when I was right on the college�
��s doorstep, and I was face to face with my other old friend once more. I skirted his face and made for the side entrance and it felt like I was tapping the college on the shoulder, trying to trick it into turning around to look while I had gone the other way.

  A storm was building in the sky. Massive impinging clouds like cities of dusty cotton wool were looming over every head, pushing lower still as the waves in the atmosphere pitched and rolled them along the landscape below. I made for the St Aldate’s entrance and flashed my out of date college members card at one of the usual suit and hat front men of the college. I did not recognise him from years gone by.

  ‘Hello again, sir,’ said he, ‘it’s been a fine time since we’ve seen you around the quad.’

  I paused at this and looked at the man hard. He was an older chap, one that could possibly have been working on the grounds at Christ Church for more years than I had been alive. Accept that he had not. I had known all of the front men, cleaners and maintenance workers well, being from a working class background it had been second nature to strike up keen conversation and carry the simple idle banter that comes so readily from these often quite personable and usually older gentlemen. But this fellow, with leathery features and a crinkled paper smile, I had no memory of at all. In fact, I was sure I had never seen him in my life, inside nor out of the college.

  14.

  He had dusty grey eyes that never the less sparkled in the liquid twilight twinkle, and I knew he was genuine in his greetings.

  ‘It has been, indeed,’ was all I could muster to say, perhaps a slight droop in the old man’s face forming as I took my time to answer. ‘Just back to see a few old friends,’ I added on as means to cut the conversation short, my mind now stacked with a further brick of curiosity and confusion.

  ‘Good to see you back, professor,’ the man nodded and I went on my way.

  But now I was knocked a little, pushed somewhat off course by his familiarity. Here was someone who certainly knew me, yet I had no clear recollection of them. And what’s more, the way he had spoken had not been of a single passing and polite hellos, but of someone whom I had been in contact with on more than a handful of occasions. Even if the passings had been mere brief ones, it appeared they had been frequent enough to warrant such a personable action. It only troubled me for a moment longer, though, before then continuing on my way.

  As I came to the corner of the quad I quickly realised that I had no clear intention of who or what I was looking for. The sharply beautiful vaulting that grow across much of the ceiling space at the college watched on from above, and I made my best efforts at a rapid contemplation. If the Duplicates and the web they were spun into had truly been born at Christ Church, then there was bound to be a certain whiff of it in the air, an aftertaste that if sampled by the right mind could surely be found out. The origins could be sourced, the trail reawakened.

  With the darkness now falling from the sky and pooling all around me like drops of rain, I slipped into the inner workings of the college with gentle ease. It was no tall task to do so, the place not designed to keep people physically out, nor keep them in. Despite my forethoughts, I had expected some kind of extra tier of security, a mite more precautions put in place to protect what they were getting up to. But it was a quickly perishing flame of musing, as the need to keep out of the eyes of attention was of course far more paramount than the efforts to keep out the few, if any, who knew what was really going on inside these walls and below those floors.

  I had not before then so deeply thought of how much those walls and windows and doors and floors had been more than just a place for me to go in years gone by, they were a part of me. I had been assimilated into them, or they had been assimilated into me, of which I wasn’t entirely certain. Most likely a changing tide, a discrepancy that flowed one way or the other with a shifting wind or a baking sun. Either way it was of no real significance to scruple on such intricacies of one fact, the motor in the brickwork was like blood, the veins of both a conglomerate thing. I had spent enough time there to hear the place wheeze and breathe, stretch and groan, ponder and observe. It was the one place that felt like home more than anywhere else, even my birthplace failing to raise more stirs of roll and bubble in my stomach.

  To think of the dinning hall in full blaze of candle light and buzzing chatter; the clock tower hit by the last rays of a dying November afternoon, shining like a bleeding spike in the air; the glowing quad in all its manicured magnificence at the height of summer. These were memories that inspired feelings not of just a place, but of a living, growing entity. It grew with every new mind that perused its corridors, that sat in its halls, each word and idea and thought that was uttered aloud and internally alike, seeping into its cracks and absorbed like milk into a sponge. While physically the stately old buildings were the same as they had been for countless hundreds of years, in all other aspects they had grown innumerably, each year’s accumulation of accolades adding to the bulk, growing up like a tropical flower, only limited by the physical speed it was possible to reach up and up towards further dizzying heights.

  For all this combined the college felt like a gentle giant, a sprawling sleeping creature that was both friendly and benign, but stern enough to show who was worthy to call it home … and also, most stoutly, who was not.

  But as I settled back into the place, my direct surrounds started to feel like a room, closing in on all sides as if the landscape had walls, and soon I would run into one. The restriction felt soft but it was still there, pushing a firm weight onto my back in the hopes it would drag me down, slow my pace, stem my determinedness for following the steps in front of me. Whoever was controlling the ways, their constant efforts to blow me off my course, to play the scent as cold, were only selling it more strongly. Their resistance proved there was something to resist against. I was right. There was something there.

  The air was keen and warm despite the moisture, and the few faces I passed barely took any notice of me, their heads bowed against the steadily increasing metaphorical rain.

  When I got inside, however, it was a different story.

  The corridors had never been that brightly lit in my memory, and I was sure things hadn’t much changed. The feeling as I had now, a roof over my head, was of spotlights, noisily poking and prodding at me with insisting looks, their fingers peeling back my layers of inconspicuousness. As my eyes had further steps deeper, and second ticking by, to adjust fully to the interior conditions of the college’s innards, then the white glares calmed down, the tone seeping away and into a more regulatory half-light.

  It took me a few more steps of awe before I realised I had no idea of where I was going. It startled my heart, and I inwardly cursed my disorganisation. All I had thought of was getting in, and if it was the right step to take next. No proper plan had I made, no moves plotted towards an achievable end. I could feel the musty college air sizzling with some kind of nervous activity. It was as if the very electrons and neutrons that made up the complete surrounds were apprehensive about what was in their midst. A menacing power grew, that although physics itself allowed it to take place, was also an unwilling participant to the whole shooting match. Aside from the ripple in the air, soon I could also hear a faint hum, and definite evidence that I was close to the epicentre of all of this mystery.

  It was then I decided that now was a good a time as any to contemplate what it was I would actually do when I found what I would find. And I was sure I would find it. All trembling air and mysterious singing machinery aside, it had been a phantom certainty all along. So much so that almost immediately after I had first seen The Girl in the Blue Shoes had I known there was something not right to be uncovered, something lingering under the everyday surface. If I was honest with myself it was truer to say that I was not certain that I would find something, but that there was something to be found. The way the presence of the Duplicates that I had seen cut through the air, as if creating their own atmosphere, a strangely coloured smoke flowing out i
n their wake as they sliced a path through a domain within which they did not belong. This was as much or as little as I knew before any of it, and something I had never needed to be convinced of.

  15.

  I twisted and turned without meeting any human for an indeterminate amount of time, the mouldy sent of old paper clinging to the air ever present in my nostrils, as I strained to pick up any other type of cue, any indication that told me I was either on the right track or needed to get off of the wrong one as quickly as possible.

  A door shut nearby and my back flattened against the rough wall I had been feeling along. No footsteps followed the dull snap of the door down the corridor so I allowed myself to breathe again and continued on my way. I turned down a different hallway, that while feeling faintly familiar, held no strength in my memory that I had even ventured down it in the past.

  I moved further along the way.

  A light, like the glow of the moon if it were captured against its will and shut away in a room, was spilling onto the floor ahead of me from an as yet unknown source, the pearly hue engulfing more and more of my vision as I edged closer. My face too began to be bathed in this misty and ethereal light, the surface of my skin tingling all the more for its presence, my blood racing about my veins like a ramble of rampart steeds, lightning fast and wildly charged.

  It was then that my person took hold of the searing feeling of no longer having any cares for my own jeopardy. All I cared about was finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the end of the chase and the fulfilment to where I had been going and what I was about to uncover. It was as though I no longer existed, my bones into vapour, my skin into smoke, my presence now a mere breath of air, unnoticed, uncared for, unimportant.