A Town like Alice

'un. They mostly run about thirty to thirty-six inch-width of skin, that is. That's a 'gator about eleven foot long."
    Jean said, "Will you sell me this one, Jeff?"
    "What do you want it for?"
    She laughed. "I want to make myself a pair of shoes out of it." She paused. "That's if Tim Whelan can make up a pair of lasts for me."
    He looked embarrassed. "I don't want nothing for it," he said gruffly. "I'll give it to you."
    She argued with him for a little while, and then accepted gracefully. "We'll want a bit of calf skin for the soles," she said, "and some thicker stuff for building up the heels."
    She fondled the skin in her hands. "It's beautifully soft," she said, "I'll show you what to do with this."

Chapter 7
    Jean made that pair of shoes working upon the dressing-table of her bedroom; to be more exact, she made three pairs before she got a pair that she could wear.
    She started off upon Tim Whelan. Tim had made lasts for shoes from time to time, working for various cobblers; the outback woodworker must turn his hand to anything. Jean lent him one of her shoes and lent him her foot to measure in his carpenter's shop, and he made a pair of lasts for her in mulga wood in a couple of days. She asked Pete Fletcher about leather for the soles and heels, and he produced some pieces of tanned cow-skin which were about the right thickness for the soles, and a piece of bull's skin for building up the heels. The lining was a major difficulty at first till somebody suggested a young wallaby skin. Pete Fletcher went out and shot the wallaby and skinned it, and the tanning was carried out by a committee of Pete Fletcher and Al Burns and Don Duncan, working in the back of Bill Duncan's store. The business of this pair of shoes assumed such an importance in the life of Willstown that Jean put off her trip to Cairns for a week, and then another week.
    The wallaby skin for the lining was not ready, so Jean made up the first pair with a white satin lining that she bought in the store. She knew every process of shoe-making intimately from the point of view of an onlooker, and from the office end, but she had never done it herself before, and the first pair of shoes were terrible. They were shoes of a sort, but they pinched her toes and the heels were too large by a quarter of an inch, and they hurt her instep. The satin lining was not a success, and the whole job was messy with the streaming perspiration of her fingers. Still, they were shoes, and wearable by anyone whose feet happened to be that shape.
    She could not show shoes like that to the men downstairs, and so she set to work to make another pair. She got Tim to alter the lasts for her, bought another knife and a small carborundum stone from the store, and started again. For fixative she was using small tubes of Durofix, also from the store.
    In all this work Annie took a great interest. She used to come and sit and watch Jean working as she trimmed and filed the soles or stretched the wet alligator hides carefully upon the lasts. "I do think you're clever to be able to do that," she said. "They're almost as good as you could buy in a shop."
    The second pair were better. They fitted Jean moderately well, but the wallaby-skin lining was uneven and lumpy, and the whole job was still messy and fingermarked with sweat. Undaunted, she began upon a third pair. This time she used portions of the wallaby skin that were of even thickness, having no means of trimming the skin down, and when it came to the final assembly of the shoes she worked in the early morning when the perspiration of her hands was least. The final result was quite a creditable shoe with rather an ugly coloured lining, but a shoe that she could have worn anywhere.
    She took the three pairs downstairs and showed them to Al Burns on the veranda; Al fetched two or three of the other men, and Mrs Connor came to have a look at them. "That's what happens to the alligator skins in England," Jean said. "They make them up into shoes like that. Pretty, aren't they?"
    One of the men said, "You made them yourself, Miss Paget?"
    She laughed. "Ask Mrs Connor. She knows the mess I've been making in the bedroom."
    The man turned the shoe over in his hand. "Oh my word," he said slowly. "It's as good as you'd buy in a shop."
    Jean shook her head. "It's not," she said. "It's not really." She pointed out the defects to him. "I haven't got the proper brads or the proper fixative. And the whole thing's messy, too. I just made it up