Authors: Julie Frayn
Goody One Shoe
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This
book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of
the author’s imagination or are used strictly for fictional purposes. Any
resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events or locales is purely
coincidental.
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Copyright
2015 Julie Frayn
All
rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-988042-01-5
This
is for the odd ones. The nerds, the geeks, and the weirdos. You know, for
everyone.
BILLIE FULLALOVE
sat on an
upturned crate and shifted her attention to the man at her feet. She slid the
knife into his abdomen, between his ribs and into his cold, dead heart.
Adam Ant ear-wormed his way into Billie’s subconscious. All
it took was a few notes to cross her mind, that unmistakable guitar riff and
those screeching horns. What were those, trumpets? Taunts and jibes reached out
from her childhood. More than two decades later, she couldn’t escape feeling
like a bullied third-grader.
“Goody two shoes! Goody two shoes!”
If only they could see her now. Sure, she still had one shoe
firmly planted in good-girl ground, fertile with etiquette and kindness and
prayer. But the other foot dangled over the pier and dipped into the evil pool.
Evil with a purpose. Evil with a heart. Or at least, half a heart.
And one goody shoe.
The city skyline shone in the distance. The lights of downtown
reflected in the wide expanse of the Grantham River, sparkling against the
muck, each twinkle of wattage oblivious to the stench of dead fish, spilled
fuel, and rotted flesh.
The justice system couldn’t deliver the punishment the
corpse on the dock deserved. They would never be able to prove he was guilty of
the crime he’d committed. How he’d ruined Billie’s life before she was old
enough to live at all. She’d righted an atrocious miscarriage and delivered
justice on the eve of a super moon. Carried out his death sentence under its
eerie glow.
He would never kill another innocent victim.
Billie ran her fingers along the bars of the gold crucifix
that hung from her neck. She closed her eyes and found her father’s face. A
breeze picked up, tossed strands of her long, chocolate hair about her face,
and cooled her cheeks where tears wet them.
Five months earlier
BILLIE GRABBED A PENCIL
from
her desk and rammed it between layers of stockings and the foam cover of her
prosthesis. It was always at the height of frustration when her stump itched.
Perhaps the stub on the end of where her calf used to be was the outlet for
words she couldn’t scream into the open office space. Words like “
they’re
,
not
there
, you stupid fucking asshole writers!”
Not that she’d ever say the F-word. Not out loud anyway. Her
private cussing was between her and God. He understood that even good girls
needed to be profane on occasion.
She glanced around at the green-tinged fluorescent lighting
bouncing off shiny foreheads, at the shoulders scrunched up near everyone’s
ears, scowls on their faces. Did they all hate their jobs as much as she did?
It hadn’t always been this way. Her heart used to quicken
when she was assigned a new author, a new manuscript. Maybe this one would be
that
one — the one that put her on the publishing map. The one that elevated her out
of the proofing primordial soup and onto the evolved editorial beach. But it
never was. How could she take a pile of crap and elevate it to anything more
than less-than-crap without just writing it herself?
“Ah, to heck with it.” She tugged her plaid skirt above her
knee, pushed down the foam cover — the thing that was supposed to make the
average passerby think she had two functioning legs — slid the black
compression sock off, and popped her leg free of the socket. She stripped the
rubber sheath and two layers of soft stocking from her stump, scratched and
rubbed the end until it stopped screaming. She leaned back in her chair and
closed her eyes. “Oh yeah. Much better.”
“Gross! Billie, cover that thing up.”
She slit her eyes open to find the office whiner staring at
her vacant calf. “If you’re so disgusted by it, why do you always look?”
He pushed his thick-framed hipster glasses up higher on his
pointed nose and blinked. “It’s like a train wreck, complete with dismembered
body parts. Awful. Disgusting. But you can’t look away.”
Her mental red pen appeared and drew little mouse ears on
either side of his head. “You’re an idiot, Jeffrey.” She added whiskers and
tiny buckteeth, then scratched out a thought bubble with “squeak, squeak” in
the centre.
“Wilhelmina Fullalove. We’ve talked about this.” Katherine
Busby stood behind Jeffrey. She put one hand on his shoulder and jerked her
head at his desk. He obeyed in that silent way he had of ingratiating himself
at every opportunity. Like an annoying little brother who always got the last
word, always got the biggest slice of pie, always got mother’s full love and
attention. Katherine crossed her arms and glared at Billie’s stump. “Cover it
up. Keep it covered. Respect your fellow workers or you’ll find yourself
freelancing. And let me tell you, that’s no walk in the park. Even if you were
walking on two legs.”
Billie winced. Her mouth said “Yes, Katherine,” but she
screamed all manner of profanities on the inside. Even a few threats against
the safety of Taffy, Katherine’s prized Chiweenie and provider of incessant
yapping. Billie couldn’t air out her own skin, but the boss brought her little
urine-spewing, ankle-nipping, piss-poor excuse for a dog to the office every
day and expected her minions to take it out to the two-by-three foot piece of
grass that supported the only city-planted tree on the entire block to do its
business. And clean up after it too. Handle its little steaming shit piles with
plastic gloves so thin the heat from the dog’s excrement warmed her fingers.
And then there were days when the gloves split open.
Katherine turned her back so fast, Billie imagined the sound
of a whip snapping in her ear. She massaged and scratched her scars and mangled
flesh one last time. Her body had grown in the twenty-two years since she lost
her leg, but the skin on her stump hadn’t kept up. It simply stretched. She
sighed, reassembled the layers of her fake leg, and slid her sensible skirt back
over her knees.
She turned to the manuscript on her monitor. The one she’d
opened on Monday morning, full of promise and potential. Now, three days later,
laden with spelling corrections and grammar edits, it sat there staring back at
her with the vacant eyes of a corpse.
Her body swayed and jerked against the plastic seat. The
subway rocketed underneath the streets of Grantham. Each time her shoulder
crashed against the four-hundred-pound man beside her, she cringed and clenched
her fingers around the handle of her briefcase. Garlic and cheese and sweat and
feet crawled into her nostrils and poked at her sanity.
Freelancing. Not a one-legged walk in the park. But not a
gut-turning, nose-plugging ride in a hurtling metal tube either.
Maybe it was time. Not to quit her job or anything, that was
professional suicide. Or maybe just regular suicide, since she’d have no
regular income, no regular way of feeding herself. Or supporting Peg Leg. She
kept her smile inside but allowed a flash of her three-legged cat to brighten
her commute.
They’d found each other eight years before. Billie was two
years out of university and had been living on her own a mere six months, in a
tiny, walk-up apartment. Peg Leg was hobbling through the alley behind her
building, scrounging around the Dumpsters for any scraps that hadn’t landed in
the bin. She’d just gotten her latest prosthesis, one that looked more like a
real leg, with a foot that would fit into kitten heels. It was one of her
desperate periods where she yearned to meet a man, to find love, to be
transformed into someone feminine and pretty. That was tough to accomplish with
a foot that only fit into runners or ballet flats. No flip-flops, no stiletto
heels. Not even open-toed sandals. She forked over a ton of cash for that leg,
added it to her growing collection, like normal women would add to their shoe
closets.
But that damn thing hurt. Her real toes ached inside the
snug little pumps. The fake toes didn’t quite fit the pointed shoe so she had
trimmed them. Not the nails. Not corns or callouses. The toes. She hacked off
the pinky and filed down the big toe until the pointed patent pump slid on. Too
bad she couldn’t do the same to her real toes. Maybe then, those heels would
have been comfortable.
So there he was, a three-legged cat, struggling and failing
to bound up the crates and into the garbage bins. And Billie, her fake leg
strong, her real leg crippled by the kitten heel and her need to be normal, to
be pretty, to be a real woman. She approached the cat, his inky fur matted and
bald in patches. He hissed at her, bared a declawed paw and swatted at the air.
She cooed and poured milk from a grocery bag into her palm. The cat lapped it
up, his eyes on her face, assessing her trustworthiness with each tickle of his
raspy tongue against the soft skin of her hand. In the end, he followed her.
And she took him into her home. Into her life. Into her heart.
There was a lot of available space.
The subway car lurched and convulsed, then shuddered to a
stop. The fat man laboured to his feet and left two empty seats behind. A new
crowd of commuters poured in through the doors.
Billie said a silent prayer that they would choose to sit
somewhere else. She tugged the shank of her prosthesis up to expose a foam foot
and titanium tibia. Each rider that eyed the empty spot to her right glanced at
her leg and moved along. The car thrust forward. She kept her eyes trained on
the pole resting against her thigh and kept her satisfied grin internal.
That moment she made her choice. Time to dip a toe in the
freelance water, find a few clients outside of the publishing house. Perhaps
she could muster enough work to never have to step foot on the subway again,
never sit on a seat thousands of passengers before her had farted on.
Was she allowed to take on private clients? She made a
mental note to check her contract when she finally, blessedly, got back home.
Four stops later, Billie walked two blocks and stood at the
threshold of her building, her little apartment three flights up, overlooking
the roofs of a two-story business block. The deli smells, though garlicky and
cheesy, were enticing, now that feet and sweat weren’t mixed into the aromatic
soup. She climbed the stairs, nodded at Mrs. Rogerson, always sitting outside
her apartment door, spying on the comings and goings of the inhabitants. Billie
felt like an ant in a farm, stared at through the glass as she went about her
day, scrabbling through the tunnels of her life.
She tossed her keys into the pottery bowl next to the phone.
“Peg Leg. Where are you, sweetheart?”
The cat mewed from his favourite perch on the window ledge.
Did he stay there all day, his tail swishing in the sunlight, his amber eyes
trained on the bustling crowd below, like so many mice just waiting for him to
snatch them up and stuff them into his watering mouth? She imagined him
lounging on the couch, the television clicker in one paw, the other paw wrapped
around a cold beer, one eye on the clock.
Five twenty-seven. TV off, assume
the cat position at the window. Don’t tip human off to the reality of cat life.
Must maintain the façade.
Billie joined him at the window, cooed at him, and scratched
between his ears. His eyes became slits and a rumble of satisfaction shook his
body. She gave his stump a rub and a scratch before tossing her briefcase onto
the sofa. A plate of last night’s remains from Thai-Bow, her favourite take out
place just up the block, heated in the microwave while Billie poured a rare
glass of chardonnay. She deserved it. It had been a long week.
She sipped the wine and flipped through the mail until three
beeps announced that Tom Yum soup and satay chicken skewers over coconut rice
were ready. She salivated like Pavlov’s bloody dog. Maybe it was time for a
change, to shake up the routine. Learn to cook her own meals. It would save
some money.
Cutting expenses ─ a good first step on the path to
freelance heaven.