The Seagulls Laughter by Holly Bidgood

Author:Holly Bidgood [Bidgood, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781916489653
Publisher: Wild Pressed Books
Published: 2019-11-04T22:00:00+00:00

The relentless tread of the pavement had worn a hole in the sole of my sealskin kamiks. Rainwater seeped into the inside of the boot and I shivered from its contact with the bare skin of my foot. When I arrived back at the house I sat for a long while at the kitchen table with the boot in my hand, looking at it. I thought of the wrinkled skin of my late grandmother’s hands, like brown paper; remembered the way in which her increasingly arthritic fingers had held steady as she threaded the bone needle, pulled lengths of sinew through the tough hide, sewed on the minute pieces of brightly-coloured leather in decoration. They had held strong for years, through countless seasons, over ice, snow, rock and arctic tundra. They were not made for the concrete of the city streets, said Eqingaleq as he took a seat beside me.

I nodded, could not speak. I felt paralysed, powerless. I could not mend the worn sole for I had no sealskin nor sinew thread. I did not have a kayak or harpoon with which to hunt the animal for its skin, nor the tools with which to flense it. I did not even know in which direction I would find the sea and its creatures, or how far I would have to walk, barefoot, until I reached its shores.

I glanced up at the sound of the door opening. Judith entered, her hair wet from the rain, a string shopping bag in each hand. She stopped as she saw me, and looked at the boot that I cradled in my hands like a dead thing.

‘My kamiks,’ I said brokenly. I wanted to tell her – to tell someone – what had happened, what this meant: that the soles of my hand-sewn shoes, like the very soul within my body, had been worn down to almost nothing by the mercilessness of the city. But I could say no more. Overcome, I put my head in my hands and sobbed like a child.

I would rather have trodden the pavements barefoot than in Michael’s old boots. Several sizes too big for me, I had to pull on an additional pair of thick woollen socks before I could walk in them with any degree of comfort. They were like weights around my ankles; too heavy, I felt, to allow me to outrun the wolves that hounded my thoughts and the clouds that enveloped my senses. As I trudged along the morning’s usual path to the record shop I experienced the strange sensation that my feet were not my own, that they were not under my control. I feared where they might take me.

As soon as I arrived back at the house that evening, I took the boots off and threw them under the bed. For the rest of the week I feigned illness, unable to bear the thought of slipping my feet into them once more and anchoring myself to the city’s insufferable streets. Instead I

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