Walking Night
The first October I lived on Carrick, my mother-in-law came to the house with a pair of men’s boots in a carrier bag.
“For the step,” Morag said, and when I looked blank she looked at Tom, and Tom looked at his feet, and I understood that there was something he’d meant to tell me before the wedding and hadn’t.
Carrick is a small island. Four hundred people, a ferry twice a day in summer and twice a week in winter, a shop, a church, a school with eleven children in it. I’d met Tom in Glasgow, where he was doing a course and I was working in a bookshop, and I’d come out to the island for him with my eyes open, or so I thought. I knew about the weather. I knew about the gossip. I didn’t know about Walking Night.
It’s the last night of October. Not Halloween; the islanders are very particular that it has nothing to do with Halloween, which they regard as a mainland thing for children. On Walking Night, at dusk, every house on Carrick sets its shoes out on the front step. One pair for each person who lives there. And one pair more.
Then you go inside, and you shut the door, and you don’t open it again until it’s light.
“And in the morning?” I asked.
“In the morning the spare pair’s gone,” Morag said, “and that’s a good year.”
“Gone where?”
Morag set the boots down on the table. They were old work boots, the leather cracked, the laces replaced with baler twine. “Walking,” she said.
I thought it was charming. I really did. I thought it was the kind of thing I’d write home about. On the night, Tom set out his boots and my walking shoes, and beside them Morag’s spare pair, neatly, toes to the path, and we went in and locked the door and Tom drew the curtains on the front windows, which he never did.
I woke at three. I knew it was three because of the church clock, which you can hear all over the island when the wind’s right.
There were footsteps on the gravel outside. Slow ones. Many of them. Not just on our path: on the road, on the paths of all the houses down the hill, all over the island, a soft, uneven crunch, like a great many people walking a long way at the end of a long day. Under it was a sound like water running out of wet cloth.
I started to get up, and Tom caught my wrist in the dark. He wasn’t asleep. I don’t think he’d slept at all.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t look. You don’t look, on Walking Night.”
The steps came up our path. They stopped at the door. There was a long, careful pause, the sound of someone sitting down on a doorstep. A creak of old leather. Then the steps went away again, and they sounded different. They sounded shod.
In the morning Tom’s boots and my walking shoes were exactly where we’d left them, dry and untouched. Morag’s spare pair was gone.
They come back. I didn’t know that, the first year. Over the winter, after storms, the spare shoes wash up along the shore. Boots, brogues, children’s trainers, the islanders’ cast-offs, one at a time, filled with sand, their soles worn clean through as if they’d been walked a thousand miles. Nobody picks them up. They’re left above the tideline until the sea takes them back. It’s considered very bad manners to touch them.
I asked Morag, once, who walks. She was gutting mackerel at her sink and didn’t look round.
“Carrick’s had boats for six hundred years,” she said. “That’s a lot of men who never came home. They’re owed one night ashore. And it’s a long way, where they’re going, and they’ve nothing on their feet.”
Tom went out with the Isla Grace in March of our sixth year, with his cousin Neil, and a squall came out of nowhere off the Gannet Stack, and they didn’t come back. Neil was found. Tom wasn’t. That’s not unusual, off Carrick. The currents there go a long way down.
I stayed. I don’t know if that was brave or stupid. I had the house and the job at the school, and I couldn’t stand the thought of the ferry pulling out and the island shrinking behind it with him somewhere under the water off its shore.
That October, Morag came round with a carrier bag again, and I took it from her and said I’d do it properly, and she held my hand a long moment at the door.
“One for you,” she said. “One spare. That’s all now.”
I’d thought about it for weeks. I didn’t use her bag. I set out my own shoes, and beside them, as the spare, Tom’s good shoes. His wedding shoes. The ones he’d worn to church. I suppose I thought he’d come. I suppose I thought that if anyone walking Carrick that night needed shoes, it should be him, and that he’d find his own on his own step and be glad.
I was due any day by then, and I didn’t sleep. At three, the footsteps came, slow and soft and wet, up and down the island. They came up my path. They stopped at the door.
The pause was much longer than the year before. I sat in the dark at the top of the stairs, with my hands over my mouth, and I listened to someone sitting on my doorstep, very still. Then I heard him say my name. It was Tom’s voice, but full of water, as if he were speaking up through the sea.
And then he said, quite gently, Not these.
In the morning his wedding shoes were still on the step, untouched. Mine were gone.
I went to Morag. I couldn’t stop shaking. She sat me down at her kitchen table and made tea and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“They can’t wear their own,” she said finally. “Not after. They need a living pair. Something from a living house.” She put her hand over mine. “He wanted yours, love. He didn’t want to walk in anyone else’s.”
“Will he bring them back?”
She didn’t answer. My shoes were not on the shore that winter. They’re not on the shore now. I look for them every morning on my way to the school.
It’s Walking Night tonight. I’ve done as Morag told me: set out the shoes on the step, at dusk, toes to the path. One spare pair, a stranger’s, from the church jumble box, the way you’re supposed to. And a pair of my own.
And a third pair. Morag brought them round this afternoon and set them beside mine without a word, and held my hand at the door again, a long time, and then walked home without looking back.
They’re very small. Soft brown leather, with a button strap. Ewan’s first shoes, though he can’t walk in them yet; he’ll be a year old next week, and he’s asleep in his cot in the back bedroom, and he has his father’s hands. One pair for every soul in the house, that’s the rule. I was seven weeks along when the Isla Grace went out. Tom never knew.
I’m writing this at the top of the stairs. It’s just gone three. I can hear them on the road, all over the island, slow and wet and patient.
They’ve come up the path. They’ve stopped at the step.
I can hear him sitting down. I can hear him take a long time over it, the way he used to over anything small and well made, turning it over and over in his big careful hands. I can hear him setting aside the stranger’s pair, and setting aside mine.
I can hear him pick up something very small.
And from the back bedroom, very softly, I can hear Ewan start to laugh, the way he does when someone he loves leans down over the cot.