Morning

Morning

I T IS A

perfect summer morning. The sun is illuminating Corporation Street and I watch through the window as people walk about blessed by the light.

It has been a quiet morning in the shop. Marjie is taking the day off and there’s only been a customer or two. I’m listening to the radio and wondering what I shall read to pleasantly pass the day away.

And then Bella comes through the shop door wearing a yellow sundress. It is unlike anything I have seen her wear before.

In she walks, shoulders level, hair pinned back in a neat bun. I have never seen her hair like this.

Something quiet and melodic is playing on the radio.

And Bella walks up to the till, takes a deep breath, looks me in the eye and says:

‘I’m ready.’

We go to our favourite bench in Pigeon Park. It seems to be a fitting place for the handover. Among all these birds and departed souls.

I wrote ‘Back in a tick’ on a scrap of notepaper, stuck it to the door of the charity shop and closed up, which was definitely not what I was supposed to do, but this

is what I was supposed to do. I was always meant to reunite Bella with Jake’s things, when she was ready. I’ve been keeping his notebook and his shoes in the staff-room cupboard lately, because I had a little hope that, together, we might find this day.

Bella sits down beside me on the bench. ‘You’re sure?’ I ask her.

‘I’m sure,’ she says.

I hand her Jake’s notebook. Bella’s face lights up. She turns the crinkling pages.

‘I didn’t read it,’ I assure her.

The photographs slip out from the back page.

‘God, my hair!’ she says, pulling out the top photograph. Jake looks so happy in it, standing with his arms wrapped around Bella’s shoulders outside a pub.

She smiles as she carousels through the pictures, ‘I remember this one,’ she says, of a photograph of them in school uniform beneath a staircase. ‘We were skiving off Music.’

She crinkles through to the final pages of Jake’s notebook, which have ‘the end’ written in his frantic black biro. She closes the book.

‘Thank you, Eddie.’

‘Of course, my dear.’

‘Next is a little something from me,’ I tell her, and I hand her the shoebox I bought on Etsy. It’s a black shoebox with a hand-drawn, swirling pattern of white stars. Just the thing to keep his shoes safe from dust or damage. Up on a high shelf or deep within a cupboard. And this way, she can look

at them any time she wants to – pull them out when she is lonely and think of him. That’s what I would do.

She smiles. ‘Thank you, Eddie,’ she says. ‘This will be perfect.’

And then it is time.

Holding them as carefully as I can, I place in her hands the white Converse trainers covered with all the words of love she once wrote. So that he would have love wherever he went.

‘Hello, old friends,’ she says with a smile. A tear slips from her left eye and she lets it fall without batting it away. There are smudged letters from where he must have stepped into water. Scuffs from the places he travelled, grey stains on the laces. These shoes were well loved. Bella traces her finger across the letters on the back of the heels that say so clearly ‘Bella and Jake forever’.

‘He wore these every bloody day of his life,’ she says, another tear falling. ‘Except for prom, when he had to borrow a pair of his dad’s work shoes, and they looked so weird on him. Too smart. Way too shiny.’

They’re still set to the shape of his feet, and she runs her finger along the outer edge. Hers again. A reminder of Jake to look at whenever she wants. To keep nestled in the pretty box. Perfectly preserved.

Except, she reaches down and unstraps her white sandals at the buckles that hold them to her feet. And it is her sandals that she puts into the shoebox I have gifted her.

Then she takes Jake’s left shoe, pulls gently on the laces, opens it wide and slides her foot inside. She begins lacing as I watch in quiet wonder.

Oh, she is a mighty woman, this one.

‘I always said these would fall apart one day,’ she says as she laces up Jake’s left shoe. ‘But I think they’ll have to fall apart on my feet, instead of his.’

‘Are you sure?’ I ask as she laces up the right shoe. ‘They might never be the same.’

She nods. ‘Where I go, he goes.’

‘I think that was true anyway, my dear.’

I stand and offer her both my hands. She takes them and she rises.

‘Come on, Eddie,’ she says, gathering up the notebook and her sandals, now safely stored in the pretty shoebox.

And she begins walking.

Jake and Bella forever

, her heels tell the shining paving slabs and all the pigeons who are nipping at the ground and anyone who cares to look. And onwards she walks.

And she will have love, wherever she goes.