School Shoes

by Daisy Hunter

2009, black T-bars.
My dad always complained about how fast I broke my school shoes.
The first pair he put on for me, showing me how to tie the buckles, making sure I could run a full lap of the room without them falling off. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was an exercise he’d make me do whenever I bought new shoes. I hated them at first, the way they rubbed against my heels until they were red and raw and blistered. Each day I’d slump on the sofa, dangling my feet in the air as if I’d walked on hot coals, and in turn my dad would sigh in that way he often did and hand me another band-aid, “you have to wear them in, then they won’t hurt anymore.” He always believed that anything could be patched up. Being five meant a lot of things, like discovering that I couldn’t force left-handed scissors to mould themselves to my right hand, that being dropped at school meant I had to leave my dad behind, and that when I was nervous I would pick at the buckles on my new school shoes.

2014, brown T-bars.
The new shoes were brown. They were flatter than the other ones, I thought, less tight too. Perfect for running. When I had gone to my first track meet that year my dad drove me. It was two hours in the car, through winding country roads in which the trees seemed to shiver and we always moved a little too fast. My dad would never call me anxious, only say that he knew we were alike. He liked to focus on the positive, before I was anything else I was smart, and creative, and a talented runner. He didn’t know what the encouragement of this talent would mean for the school shoes. When I moved schools later that year, started wearing my new brown school shoes, I began to run every lunchtime. Playing tag was like being in an action movie. I’d form a plan with my accomplices on how to outmanoeuvre our opponent, run through treacherous landscapes of red brick, and inevitably return home with cuts and grazes to brag about the day’s accomplishments. One night after a particularly nasty fall my dad picked up my shoes. “You need new ones,” he said.
“No I don’t.”
“There’s no grip on them anymore, there’s holes in the soles too.” Like my dad, I stubbornly believed that anything could be patched up. I’d wear those shoes until the buckle snapped, my toes poking out the sides as if I was wearing sandals – I’d wear them until my dad went and bought me a new pair without me knowing.

2021, brown T-bars.
I no longer broke my shoes. I no longer ran at lunch. By the time I graduated high school, the school shoes I’d worn for the last three years looked exactly as they had when I first bought them. Each year my dad had offered to buy me new ones and I had promised him that I was taking care of the ones I had, and that if I needed new ones I would pay for them so he didn’t have to. When I took them off for the last time, they were placed in the back of my closet. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out, maybe I’d need them someday. My dad and I were both hoarders my mum said, never knew how to let anything go. It was one of those things we had in common, the ones that you only notice as you get older. We had the same soft spot for awful reality television, were both sensitive and not sure how to handle it, and never knew the right way to say goodbye. I couldn’t look him in the eyes when I left for college, just clutched the letter he had written for me and promised I would take care of it.

2024, those trainers that dads like.
I got the call on a Wednesday and was home by Saturday. My dad looked different than before; thinner, bruised, his hair wispier. It was a good thing he’d joke, he needed to lose weight anyway. I never thought he did. He would ask me for the first time on a particularly cold morning: “I can’t put socks and shoes on, can you help me?”. I sat on the kitchen floor and moved his feet into woolly socks, straightening them before tying up his shoes, those ones that every dad seemed to have. “I’m sorry you have to do this.”
“Don’t be sorry, it’s what I’m here for.”