Romilly Phillips is a London based writer and contemporary art specialist. She has completed a fiction course at Faber Academy and is currently pursuing a Masters in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her short story practice explores themes including gender, identity and the visual arts. She is working on a novel about the impacts of intergenerational trauma.
Email: romillyphillips@hotmail.com
Boots
After my relationship broke down, I moved somewhere that nobody knew me. I settled on New York as a place I could become someone else. A colleague at the café set me up with a trial shift in an Italian restaurant on West 119th Street, and I agreed to a shared apartment in Harlem after minimal research, persuaded by the discounted April rent in return for immediate occupancy. The previous tenant had left without warning.
When I finally pulled into Grand Central station after the eight-hour journey, it looked to me as if everyone had rubbed their faces in sandpaper. Premature lines hung on pollution-soaked skin, cheeks rubbed raw by the wind. Eyes glazed over when they met my own, blinking like the flicking characters on the train boards displaying delays and platform announcements.
I took a cab that I couldn’t afford to the apartment. The tower block was taller than nearly everything in my hometown. I dragged my feet on the stairs to the sixth floor. The room was white and sparsely furnished. When I opened the wardrobe doors and saw the old pair of boots, they felt like the only things that were real – toes pointed slightly apart, laces splayed open, black leather at the ankles curling gently over as if greeting me with a bow. I left the boots where they were.
They weren’t the only things the previous tenant had left behind. Stains in the mattress captured her nocturnal movements. Scratches marked the paintwork by the window. A wear to the varnish traced corridors across the floorboards. Corners were filled with her dust.
Her presence continued to grow in the months that I was there, both as she came to consume my thoughts, and physically through the post addressed to Alicia Calliste which would arrive every week or so, often with the red letters U-R-G-E-N-T stamped across the envelopes. I kept her letters in a drawer, having the feeling that at any moment she could walk into the room and claim back everything that was hers. That first night I slept on a towel laid over the mattress and used my coat as a blanket.
A week later, I failed the waitressing trial that I was relying on passing to cover the rent. I lay in lukewarm water. When I arrived at the apartment, my roommates, Tasha and Ruby, gave me a short tour and said that no one used the bath, a quick wave towards the grubby non-slip pads and looping red ring stains at the water line providing explanation. I could tell they were wary of me, eyeing up my one rucksack of belongings and repeating the rent deadline more than necessary. Avoiding my questions about why the previous tenant had to leave in such a hurry.
I pressed my thumb into the blunt blades of my razor and watched the bubbles that had attached to my arm. Fabrizio had said I didn’t understand the pace – he clicked his fingers in emphasis – of the restaurant business. I spat in the tip jar on the way out, practicing feeling anger rather than sadness. I hadn’t told my roommates about the job, but if I didn’t leave the apartment again soon they would begin to suspect. With a detached sense of curiosity, I pulled the razor across the hairs on my forearm, leaving alternate stripes of bubble lined hair and smooth, shining skin.
“Gabby!” I flinched to cover myself. Three unnecessary knocks on the door.
“Yes?”
“I need to piss!” And then mumbling, “You’ve been in there for forever.”
“Out in a second.” I heard the falsity of sing-song cheeriness in my voice before sinking my head under the water to listen for my heartbeat.
I was here because I couldn’t be at home anymore. Flo and I had been together our whole adult lives. We met the summer she came to stay with her grandma at Lake Erie in Pennsylvania. She fell for quiet waters of my hometown and I fell for her outlook on life. She didn’t go home that September, and I didn’t turn up at college. We didn’t leave Erie until two years later when we pooled our savings and bought a campervan. We spent the next few years travelling around Pennsylvania’s forests – craggy Rothrock, shimmering Allegheny, the reds of Susquehannock. We picked up work in the towns where we could, and a stray dog who scratched at our door each morning at a campsite near Clearfield before somersaulting for belly rubs. We named him Rolo. Everything was perfect.
Winter was coming and we were pulling the last beets of the season when Flo received the call. The gardening glove was too big for her to keep hold of the phone and I watched it bounce off her muddied knee to the wet smelling earth. She withdrew after her grandma died. She stopped cooking, ate little, slept through our morning walks. I think she felt guilty. As time passed, my concerns escalated from anxiety to fear to panic. I begged her to talk to me, then demanded it. The more she shut down the more provoked I got. I saw all the worst parts of my mother that I thought I had avoided inheriting come out of me, surprised at how fluently her words would spill from my lips. Rolo barked. I crippled myself with the shame.
I ended things for her sake, letting her have the campervan and the dog. She interpreted me punishing myself as not caring.
“You’re not you,” she said as I packed.
I remembered the hurt in her eyes and smiling at her cruelly. The truth is, I didn’t know who I was without Flo. We were four feet on the shower mat, two spoons in a dessert, one bucket list taped inside the clothes cupboard.
I moved back to Erie and stayed with my cousin. Mark tried his best to pull me together until he got the message that all I wanted was for him to leave me alone. He hooked me up with a waitressing job and drove me in silence each morning to the café on a small fishing lake outside of town. I tried to start over, but it soon became too painful to stay. Everything reminded me of Flo and the burning match that I had taken to my life. The first relief I felt was when I decided to leave the state. I imagined myself living the life of a stranger. How much can a person change?
To stay here, I needed to learn who to be to survive. I thought about Alicia.
Tasha was sniffing spring onions and broccoli spears before chopping and tossing them into a wok roughly in sync with the music. Ruby sat at the table watching the music video on her phone, her fork stabbing at a plate of spaghetti. I hovered by the counter waiting for my toast to pop.
“What was Alicia like?” I asked.
“A bitch.” Tasha answered without hesitation.
“Tasha!” Ruby objected. I looked at her for more information and she shrugged. “A bitch.” They both laughed.
“Why did she move out?” I flipped the toast even though it hadn’t started to brown yet. A tinny chorus began and they both sung, drowning out the original music.
“I love this song! You know who it reminds me of? –” Tasha used the wooden spoon to point to Ruby.
“– Where did she move to?” I interjected, determined to get answers this time.
Tasha turned back to the stove and shook soy sauce into the wok. She raised her voice over the sizzling. “I don’t know. Arizona or Alabama or somewhere.”
Ruby laughed, again. “Arizona and Alabama are hardly the same, Tash.”
“Oh hang on, she went to Phoenix. Which is in Arizona. She said she got some kind of artist residency.” Sarcasm crawled through her words. Ruby scoffed. I was impressed. “Left us with the bills in a mess.”
“Understatement.”
“We ended up having to pick them up for her.”
I pictured the growing pile of her post in her drawer, my drawer.
When they went to Ruby’s room to watch videos on YouTube I put down another slice of toast and lathered it with Tasha’s jam. Crunching through the sticky sweetness,
I dropped pins on google street view and walked myself through the arid roads of Phoenix, lined with palm trees, trailer trucks and electricity cables.
Alicia Calliste: About 523,000 results (0.34 seconds).
I scrolled through the first page before trying again.
“Alicia Calliste”: About 2,460 results (0.29 seconds).
Multiple social media profiles. I clicked through google images to locate women around my age, and then ruled them out due to geography. I wondered where she was from originally.
Calliste: daughter of the sea-god Triton who was given to the Argonauts as a clod of earth that transformed into the island Calliste.
Perhaps Greek? I tried to picture her face but she just became a composite of everyone I was trying to forget.
“Alicia Calliste” “New York” “Art”: 4 results (0.33 seconds).
Two pages relating to a nail salon and one to an older woman. The top result sent a tingling into my fingertips. www.aliciakcallisteart.com. I took a breath and clicked on the link. The page took a moment to load. This page can’t be displayed. Cursing, I flicked my laptop closed.
Flo followed me to New York in my nightmares. I woke with a grip tightening around my throat, tears spilling over my cheeks as I waited for my heartrate to settle. An ambulance wailed down the street outside of the window. I pressed my fingers into the scratches Alicia had carved into the wall, crumbling small areas of paint and pushing it into the spaces where she once was, spaces that I could fill, focusing on the feeling in my fingertips.
At first, I thought the boots fit perfectly, but when I walked around the room the balls of my feet slipped down their soles. I folded and carefully moulded tissues against the front of each shoe before sliding my feet back in and drumming my toes against the grooves shaped by Alicia. The leather was soft and supple, worn enough to fold like a glove around me, whilst retaining thickness and warmth. They smelt of soil and smoke. I threaded the laces and tied them snug around my ankles. In the mirror, my reflection stood an inch or so higher. The high tops had bunched my cargo pants up around my calves, making my legs look thicker, more rooted. I had just over two weeks until the rent deadline and I hadn’t left the apartment in days. Finally, I was ready.
Rolling drink cans and chip packets painted colours onto the monochrome sidewalk. I passed a man with sad, wild eyes and dirtied bare feet. I left my CV in every diner, restaurant and store I could, pressing paper into the un-wanting hands of servers and maître d’s. Clerks in the vintage and shoe stores excused themselves to speak to customers who did not want their attention. Baristas in the coffee bars were too busy to talk. Check-out staff across the Fine Fare and CTown supermarkets pointed towards managers who repeated that there were no vacancies.
I walked from 129th to 89th Street, watching people change with the numeric value of the street names. Closer to the park more people held coffee cups instead of roll-ups, thrusting their hands into the air alongside a whistle, preferring the honking lines of overground traffic to the leaps and shudders of the subway. I watched little dogs in littler coats cock their legs against manicured flower beds. Overhead, someone brave enough to open their window to the early spring air spilled out the smooth sounds of jazz. As I continued south, restaurants became marked by tuxedo-clad doormen who guarded tables draped in pressed, white tablecloths. The menus revealed increasing prices for decreasingly comprehensible orders. I found myself skipping more places than I dared enter.
I turned on to the road lining the perimeter of the park and sat at a bench. I let my head roll back. If I blocked out the buildings from the edges of my vision, the treetops could have passed for the ones back home. Instinctively I reached for my phone, then stopped. A cruel imagination: “Rolo says good luck with the job hunt. We love you –”
I changed my intention to check for anything from potential employers: no new messages. I had promised myself not to return to the apartment until I had something concrete, but a tiredness aching beyond just my legs threatened me otherwise. A dog barked and I distracted myself by thinking about Alicia. Where did she work to pay for the room? I pictured her in a studio somewhere nearby, focusing on a new series of paintings, and then standing in our room, fingers trembling as she held the residency acceptance letter. She had somehow made it in this city. And more than that, she had made it out again. I rubbed my head into my hand and then considered the building in front of me.
“What are you wearing?” The receptionist peered over his neon green glasses from behind the sweeping counter of the Guggenheim. I hesitated and he tugged at his starched, oversized collar.
“Oh, right.” I stepped back and pulled down my zip, avoiding the runaway threads, to display my black jumper, cargo pants and Alicia’s boots. I hadn’t been in many galleries. I recognised the building’s oculus from the pictures and now felt it’s eye on me like a spotlight. I held my breath and wished I had run my fingers through my hair before I came in. The receptionist surveyed me with an unimpressed down-up glance.
“Ruth had another invigilator no-show this morning.” He sighed as if I were the problem. “I can offer you a trial shift this afternoon.”
A feeling of lightness washed over me. “That’s amazing. Yes please. What –”
“Name?” He pulled out a form and poised his biro.
“Gabby – Abigail. Abigail Grey.” I spelled it for him.
“$15 an hour non-negotiable. Trial period for four hours today and then we’ll see how it goes.”
I beamed before attempting to pacify my reaction. “Thank you. That would be great.”
He plucked a press release from the counter and handed it to me whilst dialling the number for HR. I calculated how many hours I needed to work to cover my rent shortfall and knew I would be able to stay. I concentrated hard on appearing as if I were engaged in the reading. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is delighted to present the work of the artist-philosopher… I’m getting paid I’m getting paid I’m getting paid.
The most difficult part of doing the job became all the not doing that came along with it. For eight hours a day, I perched on a tall, wooden stool displaying a company lanyard. The first task was to get comfortable enough to bear the stillness. The invigilator positions were slipped against a wall, but the tapering stool legs meant that you were too far away to lean against it. My feet couldn’t touch the ground unless I pointed my boot and caught the floor with my toes. I slotted my feet behind the bar that ran around the stool legs and tucked myself in for the shift.
From this position, I became an occasional approach point for visitors. We had a short list of statements that could be recited for those interested, each ending in a variation on “my colleague at the information desk has further information.” I skipped out delivering the more proactive encouragements – “you can walk on it,” “please do take one.” I took pleasure in directing those who complained to me, about graphic content or access requirements, in the long and wrong direction to the restrooms.
Broken only by these few interactions, my days were spent mastering invisibility and reaping the voyeuristic benefits that came with it. I learnt to disappear. Shifts in darkened film exhibitions allowed my eyes to adjust more than any fondling teenagers or nose-picking businessmen. In quieter, lighted spaces, I listened to whispered confessions from gallery corners, caught flirtatious glances by those hand in hand with another, and watched whispered arguments unfold, revelling when someone stormed off. I turned my head away from loved-up couples, but got to know a group of regulars through the fictitious lives that I built for them.
I read fervently. With time to kill and a book swap in the invigilator kitchen, I transformed into the lives of others. I left myself and moved this way from Lagos to Nsukka; Busan to Osaka; Amsterdam to Las Vegas to neighbourhoods so close to mine that the narrators could have been reading over my shoulder. I experienced loveless sex, war, escape and reunion, loss of love, loss of mind, loss of life. I mourned the loss of the characters as the books ended.
Finally, I learned to escape into the art. I memorised the entire script of a looping 22-minute-long Bruce Nauman video installation, using the voices to imitate the melodic drawl of a southern accent when no one was listening. In the photography wing, I studied the black and white photographs, maps and letters of Sophie Calle’s faux-detective journal, documenting the disguised pursuit of a stranger around Venice. I allowed myself to feel the kind of artist that Alicia may be. On a swapped shift to the second floor, abstract canvas’ soared around the windowless gallery, breathing squares of red paint into advancing hazes of blues and greys. The wall text read:
“I don’t express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.”
Mark Rothko
As I moved my eyes between the canvases it seemed as if each were pulsing in a shared rhythm. I focused on breathing in everything they emitted, shivers raising the unevenly lined hairs across my arms. At the end of the shift, when the galleries emptied, I walked slowly up to the largest painting until I was close enough not to be able to see its edges, close enough to feel the restraint of the safety wire against my shins, close enough I felt it could swallow me.
The rent deadline came, I paid, and Ruby arranged a dinner for the following Friday. By the time the evening came around I still hadn’t thought of an excuse to get out of it. They were cooking when I got back from work.
“News.” I heard Ruby say as I was hanging up my coat. “You know I saw Julie for lunch? Well, guess who she said is moving back to New York?” My arms hovered mid-air.
“She’s not!” Tasha exclaimed. “How does Jules know?”
“They stayed in touch, apparently.” A pause. “I know, I know…”
I joined them. “Who? Who’s moving back?”
Ruby looked surprised to see me. “Ah, you’re home.” She slipped on the oven gloves and pulled a loaf of garlic bread out of the oven. I stared at her until she answered. “The girl who used to rent your room. Alicia.” The shock must have been visible on my face. “Don’t worry!” She waved a hand. “She’s not coming back here here.”
Tasha grimaced. “As if we’d ever let that happen.”
“But what about her residency?” They both looked at me and I felt my face redden.
“I don’t even know if that was real.” Tasha watched me with suspicion. “She got some boyfriend out in Phoenix, some guy she’d never even met before. Apparently an artist. Surprise-surprise that didn’t work out.”
Something swung in my stomach. When would she be back? Would I meet her?
“Anyway.” Ruby sat at the table and motioned for us to do the same. Tasha set down the salad and joined her. “Forget her. This dinner isn’t about Alicia. We want to know more about you.”
The floor seemed to shift a little under my feet, and I suddenly wished I was still out walking circles round the block. I was doing everything I could to forget myself. I shuffled into the chair by the wall. “Well…” My voice wavered, sounding unfamiliar. “What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know, anything. Like, what were you doing before you moved here? Where was it that you said you were from?” She tossed balsamic through cubes of butternut squash and arugula then held out the salad spoons towards me.
I looked at the spoons. They were a glossy wood with ceramic ends that were printed with ripe, yellow lemons, so round they looked as if they would burst. Sicily! was painted on the back of each handle.
“Yeah, Gabby.” Tasha folded her arms, mock-interview serious. “Tell us about you.”
I thought about what to say. I tried to picture my life in Pennsylvania but all I could see was Flo, hair tucked behind an ear on one side and falling slightly in front of her eye on the other. The memory stung and I automatically diverted my thoughts to Alicia, but I still couldn’t picture her face. The residency may not be real. Really, I knew nothing about her. The lemons dangled. I searched deeper. I imagined my insides as a painted wash of pulsing reds, but there was something else that frightened me, something darker approaching around the edges.
Ruby waved the spoons again. The lemons shuddered. They weren’t Sicilian at all. I realised I didn’t know how to answer.