The Girl With the Golden Shoes by Colin Channer Read Free Book Online Page A

“Take it and go. It ain’t have to come to this. Just take you things and go.”
    “Where you get it from?” she asked him as her heart began to pound. Another person lunged toward her. Asif leaned in and used his arms and chest to block the blow.
    “Spare you life,” he told Estrella. He gave a sign and two men hauled off the one who’d attacked her, no doubt for a smack-up down the aisle. “Listen what I say and go. Don’t turn back. Run. Don’t walk. That man you throw down is the most ignorant man I ever see. And the fellow I had to rough up was his son. Listen what I tell you. Go! Pick up you life in you hand and go! And learn to take a joke!”

V.
    Estrella ran out of the market and stampeded past the rusty bull that had been sung to sleep outside the bar.
    Knees pumping almost navel high, she took a bend that led her through an alleyway with doors that opened straight into the street, and swerved around a group of men in undershirts who’d set up stools around a table on the cobbles for their game of dominoes.
    Emerging from the alleyway, she squinted as she headed down a path that led her past the finger-pointing tower of the spired clock, and slanted in a wheeling semicircle round a little park where children played a game of cricket with a two-by-four, then veered off by the courthouse with its large, imposing columns and its curving marble stairs and took the road by which the bus had brought her into town.
    Raised with clannish people, she knew of all that could occur. So although she didn’t hear the sound of feet behind her, or get the sense that all the people who were laughing as she ran were going to gather in a mob, she sprinted, as she’d later tell her children, “like I heard a rumor that a rich old auntie came to visit from abroad.”
    As she came upon the steep ascent, she cursed and tensed her middle, hunching forward, giving greater power to her legs, which labored with the challenge of the slope; and for half a mile she grunted onward till the band of muscles in her middle, which resembled little squares, began to soften like a chocolate bar.
    Tired and hungry, she began to walk. They ain’t coming, she thought, and put her hands against her hips. She glanced across her shoulder down the steeply rising road, which disappeared around a bend into the bush.
    They have better things to do, she told herself. But a coward man keep sound bones, as them old people say. I ain’t able for anybody to gimme a chop or a cuff right now. But anyways, is a good thing it happen, in a way, ’cause you had to get out o’ that damn place. You was only loitering and wasting time when you have important things to do. You have to get to town. And town way, way far away. And you have to get there before night come. ’Cause by 7:30 all them big stores going be closed. And that is the first place you have to go—a store where they sell shoes. ’Cause ain’t nobody giving any sensible job where you ain’t have to wear no shoes. And you have to get a job before tomorrow. ’Cause you ain’t have a soul in town.
    As she spiraled up the lonely road Estrella fantasized about her coming life, and saw an older version of herself creating stares and whispers of excitement when her driver brought her to Salan’s, the island’s most elite department store—two floors, a wooden escalator, a soda fountain, and a cafeteria with a balcony that overlooked the Queens.
    Smiling with a puckered mouth as if she held a secret, Estrella saw herself among the aisles, wearing yellow satin pumps—fancy shoes that had the bag and dress to match, her husband’s black fedora as an accent on her head, and behind her, waiting, a clerk whose arms were filled with boxes, calling her “Madame.”
    The main cross-island road was seven miles away, and Estrella worked toward it at a slow but steady pace. From time to time, small herds of goats would trickle down the road or drip in ones and twos out of the dark encroaching woods,