AUDACIOUS

We have been best friends since our perverse third grade teacher thought it a good joke to have us share a desk. She was tall, taller than most. I was small, smaller than everyone else.

The nicknames came thick and fast. They were funny, even clever, to start with. By our teenage years they were plain hurtful and vicious. We stood together. Together we made each other normal, we evened each other out.

She made me measure her height every day for years. Smiles burst out when there was a day without noticeable growth; tears ran when there was. I knew what she wanted. 

She wanted to be dainty, have a smaller footprint and wear pants that did not finish above her ankles. Her fervent desire was to be reborn as a fairy, light as air, quick but sure, content to live in a tree.

Her mother and I said she was statuesque. She felt awkward and lumbering. She wore sneakers all the time. 

Her mum’s mantra was for her to stand up straight, be proud of her height and satisfied with herself. Her dad would make all the obvious dad jokes - like not needing a ladder because he had her. They tried, in their way, none of it helped. 

We both took up musical instruments. She agonised between the double bass or the cello, neither of them an option for me. I wanted to play the viola but had to settle for the smaller violin. We practiced, we played, and we were welcomed into the school orchestra. Music it seems is not height prejudiced, mostly, such a discovery for us.

I waited, patience personified, for the growth spurt my mother promised me would happen. All I wanted was to eyeball people rather than address their navels. I wanted to stop obsessing about what the top of my head looked like. 

I did get a bit of a wriggle on in my late teens and exchanged my violin for the viola. It was too late though to curb my entrenched fixation with high heels. It was also too late to stop my near psychotic hatred of hearing ‘good things come in small packages’.

Years went by and we both stopped growing. The final outcome was not that different to what it had always been - she was tall and I was not. 

After we left school she trained as a zookeeper. No surprise, she ended up looking after the giraffes. We laughed together hysterically and often over how she had been ‘born’ for that job. 

The zoo was renovating the giraffe enclosure and scaffolding and ladders could not reach some parts of it. She explained to me how tricky it all was and how they had hired a specialist. That was when she met him, and his stilts. 

He was agile and lithe on those long, skinny legs. He was like the giraffes, completely unlike her.

She confessed to me that she was spending every spare moment watching him work, waiting for a chance to speak with him. I heard of nothing else whenever we got together. She practiced, on me, what she was going to say to him. She obsessed about sounding casual, not too interested, not too cheeky. I thought it was about him, got that wrong, to start off with anyway.

Her chance came when she had to pass gear up to him.

‘Hi, love your work.’

‘Thanks.’ He replied.

‘So, seriously, how do you get up on those things? Do you have to be born on them or can anyone have a go?’ 

‘You mean the stilts?’ He said. She nodded.

‘If you want I can show you how to get on them.’ She nodded again.

She complained to me that he was annoying nonchalant about it all. I asked if she minded him inspecting the top of her head, such a novelty for her.

Long sessions of practice on the stilts followed. She soon realised that she needed more than her physical strength to control them.

‘You must own your balance, your whole balance. You have to be quiet in the air, not cause a disturbance. Think small and delicate so the air can take care of you.’ He explained. 

Her falls were often, regular, far from pretty and from ever-increasing heights. She got up. She regained her composure, hands on hips, sucking in air, ready to go again. She stuck in there. She didn’t want to duck under the trees anymore; she wanted to be in amongst them, in the air.

She kept all this from her parents. I was sworn to secrecy of course. Not until she was confident enough to work in the giraffe enclosure would she tell them. Her reason, she told me, was her fear of her father’s jokes. She could hear them already, thick and fast. So could I and thought her most wise to keep her exploits hidden.

Never had I seen her so intense. Not true, as she is often intense, not this intense in a good way.

She was chasing, and chasing hard, something I had never thought possible of her – she wanted to be taller. She was leaving me further below her than I had ever been.

She works on stilts now, with him. 

He too is ridiculously tall, even off his stilts. Needless to say so are their children, who I hope all find a short friend like their mother did. They will need evening out, whether they know it or not yet.

Her dad still tells his tall jokes but he gets a better reception these days. She claims that her life long goal ‘to shame me into flat shoes’ remains undiminished and dear to her heart.

She, being an audacious cello playing fairy and all, still has big feet.  I like to remind her of that, after kicking off my high heels so I can run.