The children's shoe department has a fitting gauge, the sliding kind, that logs each measurement to the stock system so the right size is brought. After close it logs a measurement. A child's size, a small one, with a note for a narrow fit. The fitter's chair, on the camera, creaks as a weight goes into it. A box comes off the shelf, that size, narrow, and in the morning the box is on the shelf and the shoes in it have been tried on and put back with the tissue tucked, the way a fitter does it.
I am the childrenswear manager at a department store and the shoe department is the corner of it that parents dread, and one child does not.
The gauge.
A sliding measure on a stand. The child stands on it, the fitter slides the bar to the toe and reads the length and the width, and the gauge sends the measurement to the stock system so the fitter can see what is in that size on the shelves behind. It is the last thing in the store that a child stands still for.
After close, it measures a foot.
The measurement.
A child's nine. Narrow. The note field, which the fitter fills in, says, growing, allow room, in the way a fitter writes it, and the note is in the system in the morning with no fitter logged in.
The camera on the department shows the fitter's chair, the low one, creak, and go down on its springs, and the gauge beside it, on the floor, with nothing on it, and the bar of the gauge slide, on its own, to a length, and stop. And then a box comes off the shelf behind. The right size, the right width, one of the school shoes, the plain black kind. It comes down and it is opened, and the tissue moves, and the shoes come out, and for a minute there is the sequence of a fitting, which anybody who has done it knows, the shoe going on, the thumb pressing the toe, the child asked to walk, and then the shoes go back in the box, in the tissue, tucked, and the box goes back on the shelf.
And the measurement is logged as, fitted, no sale.
What has been checked.
The gauge, replaced. It measures a nine.
The department, after close, by me, in the fitter's chair. It went down under me and then it went down more, on one side, the way it does when a child is helped onto your knee to have the shoe put on, and there was a weight, a small one, and a foot, I felt it, in my hands, a small foot in a sock, and I did what you do, because I was a fitter before I was a manager, I held it and I felt for the toe, and I said, walk up and down for me, and the weight got off my knee and there were footsteps on the carpet, small ones, the careful walk of a child in shoes that are being judged, and they came back, and I said, how do they feel, and a voice said, they pinch.
I said, we'll try the next size. And the weight came back onto my knee.
Who.
The department has fitted children for eighty years and there is no story, that I have found, of a child who did not leave it. What there is, in the staff records, is a fitter. Forty years in that chair. Known for it. The kind of fitter that families came back to for three generations, and who had, the record says, a rule, which was that she never sold a shoe that pinched, and had once refused to sell a pair to a mother who insisted, and the mother had gone elsewhere.
She died in the nineties. The record does not say what happened to the child whose shoes pinched. I think it is the child. I think a child who was taken elsewhere and put in shoes that pinched, by a mother in a hurry, has come back to the fitter who would not do it, every night, to have it done properly, and it is never right, because the fitter cannot sell her a pair, because the fitter is not here to.
What is done about it.
The measurement is logged every night as a fitting with no sale and the department's conversion rate has one lost sale a night on it that head office has asked me about, and I have said it is a child who cannot find a pair that fits, and they have asked what I am doing about it, and I have said, trying the next size.
What I do.
I manage childrenswear.
A fitter who cannot find a pair says so. That is the rule, the other half of it: you do not sell a shoe that pinches, and you do not let a child leave thinking it is their fault. You say, we haven't got the right one in today, come back next week, and you mean it.
So I say it. When the weight gets off my knee and the voice says they pinch, I say, that's not your feet, love, that's the shoe, and I say, we'll get some in, and I say, come back next week. And the box goes back on the shelf, tucked, and the chair comes up, and the gauge logs, fitted, no sale, and I go home.
I have ordered a pair. Nine, narrow, in a make the store did not carry, from a place that still does the old lasts, and they are in a box under the counter with tissue in them, and when they come I am going to put them on the shelf in the gap where the child's box goes, and I am going to sit in the chair, and I do not know what happens if they fit, and I am a shoe fitter, and I have to find out.