The Girl in Silver Boots

The comic cost more than Jude had paid for her first bicycle. It lay behind glass at a collector’s fair, its cover showing a woman in silver boots escaping a collapsing tower. Jude recognised the torn corner before she recognised the title.

It was not the same copy. She knew that. Still, she asked to examine it, and the seller put on cotton gloves with a gravity that made the whole transaction feel faintly medical.

“A gift?” he asked.

“Possibly.”

He showed her the price again. She paid before she could reconsider, then spent the train journey home holding the package flat on her knees.

Thirty-one years earlier, she and Saffy had collected the series together. They were fourteen, lived three doors apart and believed the heroine’s escape plans contained advice applicable to school. They shared copies because neither could afford the whole run. Saffy kept them in a shoebox beneath her bed. Jude borrowed them with permission until the summer she borrowed the entire box without asking.

She sold it to a second-hand dealer for enough money to buy a jacket and two tickets to a concert. She intended to buy the comics back before Saffy returned from visiting her grandmother. By then the dealer had sold them. Jude said she left the box on a bus.

Saffy found out three months later. Someone mentioned the concert. Someone else remembered seeing Jude at the dealer’s stall. When Saffy asked, Jude denied it badly, then accused her of caring more about stupid magazines than their friendship.

They never repaired the argument. They finished school, left town and became people who occasionally recognised each other’s names without contacting each other. Jude could remember every detail of the jacket. She no longer remembered a single song from the concert.

Now she was forty-five, a printer’s production supervisor, recently back in the town to help her father after a knee operation. Saffy ran a shoe repair shop on the high street. Jude had passed it six times before entering, each time carrying a pair of boots that did not yet require urgent attention.

The comic gave her a reason. That was what she told herself on Monday morning, standing outside the shop while Saffy finished speaking to a customer.

Inside, there was a smell of leather and warm machinery. Saffy looked older in exactly the way Jude knew she did herself: the same person, with life more visible around the eyes.

“Hello,” Saffy said. “Back visiting?”

Jude explained about her father. Saffy remembered him and asked how he was. They managed nearly five minutes of ordinary conversation before Jude put the package on the counter.

“I found this,” she said.

Saffy looked through the wrapping. Her expression changed, but not in the way Jude hoped.

“Why?”

“I thought you might like it.”

“Now?”

Jude felt the old defensiveness rising. She had travelled, spent money and carried the thing carefully through three crowded train carriages. Saffy had done none of those things and was still, somehow, the person being wronged.

Recognising the thought embarrassed her enough to be quiet.

“I stole your comics,” she said. “I lied, and then I was horrible when you found out. I’m sorry.”

Outside, a delivery van reversed with a shrill repeated warning. Saffy waited until it stopped before answering.

“You stole our comics. Some of them were yours. That’s what made it so difficult to explain.”

Jude looked down. She had rehearsed an apology that made the injury simpler than it was.

“You’re right.”

“Did you think I’d kept a space for that one?”

“I didn’t know.”

“I stopped collecting.”

The sentence was quiet. Jude wished Saffy had shouted. She could have met shouting with the energy she had brought to defend her expensive gesture.

Instead she asked whether Saffy wanted her to take it away. Saffy said yes. Jude put the comic back in its wrapping and left with the boots still over her arm.

At her father’s house she hid the package in a cupboard. He was doing his exercises beside the dining table and asked whether she had bought anything interesting. She said no, then corrected herself and told him the story.

He remembered the argument. He had thought they fell out over a boy. Jude said everybody thought that because she let them. Her father sat down slowly.

“I asked your mother why Saffy stopped coming,” he said. “You said she was being difficult.”

Jude closed her eyes. She had treated the theft as one ugly afternoon. It had also been a story she repeated until other people helped her believe it.

She wrote Saffy a letter. She did not mention the price of the comic or the good intentions of buying it. She described what she had done, including telling people Saffy was difficult. She offered to repay the value of the lost collection, acknowledging that she did not know how to calculate it and did not expect money to restore the friendship.

She delivered it through the shop’s letterbox after closing. Then she left Saffy alone.

Three weeks passed. Jude drove her father to appointments, worked remotely from his spare bedroom and learned that he had been pretending to enjoy the frozen meals she bought. They argued about that and ordered a curry. The ordinary world continued without supplying an answer to the letter.

One Friday Saffy called. She had found an old list of the comics. There were twenty-three. They could never establish what those particular copies might be worth now, she said. But she remembered the money they had spent, and she had a suggestion.

They met at a café, deliberately away from the shop counter. Saffy brought the list. Jude recognised the handwriting: her own rounded numbers, Saffy’s taller capitals. Beside one title they had drawn three stars and a skull.

“Worst issue,” Saffy said.

“The villain turned out to be his own uncle.”

“Without any explanation.”

They both smiled, then stopped because the smile had reached the wrong part of the conversation too soon.

Saffy proposed an amount based on their old purchases, adjusted in a way they both agreed felt reasonable rather than exact. It was less than Jude spent on the rare comic. She resisted offering more. That would have made her own guilt the measure again.

“I can pay it today.”

“Fine.”

Jude made the transfer while they sat there. Saffy checked her phone and put the list back in her bag.

“That’s the money dealt with,” she said.

Jude nodded. She had wanted the sentence to contain more. It did not.

They talked for another fifteen minutes. Saffy’s marriage had ended years ago. Her daughter was sixteen and wanted to study furniture design. Jude had no children and a partner who lived two hours away from the town. They discussed work, old teachers and the loss of the sweet shop where they once bought their comics.

When they left, Saffy said she would see her around. Jude did not ask when.

The friendship began again through something unimportant. Jude saw a poster for an exhibition of absurd inventions and sent Saffy a photograph because it reminded her of their elaborate plans to escape school assemblies. Saffy answered two days later with a drawing of a chair on wheels propelled by umbrellas.

They exchanged occasional messages. Sometimes Saffy answered quickly. Sometimes she didn’t. Jude learned to let a joke remain a joke instead of using every reply as evidence that she had been forgiven.

In February her father could manage more on his own. Jude began arranging her return home. She told Saffy over coffee. For the first time, Saffy looked disappointed.

“I thought you were staying longer.”

“I could come back.”

“You don’t have to arrange your life around a coffee.”

“I know. I’d like another one, though.”

Saffy stirred her tea. “So would I.”

Before leaving, Jude took her boots into the shop. This time they genuinely needed new heels. Saffy wrote a ticket and gave a collection date. Jude paid the normal price. She liked the transaction more than she expected. Trust could include the simple assumption that someone would do a job and someone else would collect it.

While Saffy examined the soles, her daughter came in carrying a folder of furniture drawings. Jude admired a low chair with curved arms. The girl explained how she planned to build it, then disappeared upstairs to find a ruler. Saffy watched her go and said she had been drawing variations for months. Jude asked which one was her favourite. They spent ten minutes discussing chairs rather than the past. Later Jude realised she had learned something about Saffy’s present without having to earn the information through another apology. She wanted more conversations like that, ordinary enough to have no hidden purpose.

On the morning she was due to leave town, her father slipped while reaching for a saucepan. He was shaken rather than seriously hurt, but Jude stayed to help him settle and arrange for a neighbour to visit later. She forgot the boots until she was on the motorway.

Her first impulse was to invent a less embarrassing explanation. She had promised to collect them. Saffy had opened early so she could. All the careful months seemed suddenly fragile beneath one missed appointment.

Jude pulled into a service station and called. She explained exactly what happened and apologised for forgetting to tell her. Saffy said the boots would keep.

“I know, but you came in early.”

“Yes. That was annoying.”

Jude waited for the rest.

“Are you expecting me to end the friendship over a pair of boots?” Saffy asked.

“Possibly.”

“You told me what happened. That’s a considerable improvement.”

Jude laughed with relief, then felt tears coming. She managed to keep her voice ordinary. They arranged for her father to collect them the following week. He was delighted to have an errand that did not involve an appointment.

At home the expensive comic remained in its wrapping. Jude finally took it out and read it. The story was almost exactly as foolish as she remembered. The heroine escaped through a ventilation shaft that could not possibly have fitted her silver boots. Jude photographed the panel and sent it to Saffy.

Saffy replied, We had excellent taste.

Jude asked whether she wanted to borrow it. Not keep it, not receive it as payment for a childhood she could not restore. Borrow it, as they once borrowed things from each other before Jude decided that wanting something entitled her to take it.

The answer came the next morning. Yes. But write your name inside, so there’s no confusion.

Jude stared at the message for a moment before laughing. Then she found a pencil. She wrote her name on a small slip rather than the valuable page, tucked it carefully inside, and put the comic by the door for her next visit. This time she knew exactly what she was giving, and exactly what she hoped to get back.