Page 14 of Someone Else's Shoes
‘What? Why?’
‘Because I had a call from Michael Frampton’s office. He said you turned up to the meeting drunk.’
She stares at him in disbelief. ‘Are you serious? Oh, for goodness’ sake.’
Simon puts his hands in his pockets and tilts his groin forward slightly. He does that a lot when he’s talking to women.
‘Oh, God, that man. I wasn’t drunk in the slightest. There was a mix-up before work and I had to wear high heels that weren’t mine and there was an uneven surface in the loading area and I –’
‘What are those?’ She is interrupted by his finger pointing towards her feet. ‘What have you got on your feet?’
She follows the line of his finger. ‘Oh … flip-flops?’
‘I hope you didn’t go to the meetings in those. They’re hardly professional footwear.’ His shoes, she notices, are perfectly shiny lace-ups. Slightly pointed at the ends, in a nod to fashion. She thinks about what Miriam Price said: something about Simon’s shoes tells her everything she has ever needed to know about him.
‘Of course I didn’t, Simon. I was just telling you that –’
‘I mean if you’re meant to be representing our company– and I would remind you that it is a very different matter now you’re representing Uberprint too – then you need to be doing it in the utmost professional manner. At all times. Not slopping about wearing bloody flip-flops.’
‘Simon, if you let me finish, I told you I –’
‘I haven’t got time for this, Sam. It’s not just Grayside now. I hope you can conduct yourself in a more professional manner in future. I can’t be worrying about whether I’m going to have more clients calling up to complain about you being drunk, or whatever it is you’re wearing on your feet. You’ve put me in a very awkward position today.’
‘But I – I wasn’t …’ she begins, but he has already turned and left the cubicle.
Sam stares at the space where he had been, her mouth hanging slightly open.
Then she shuts it abruptly. Knowing Simon, he will suddenly reappear and accuse her of wearing an unprofessional facial expression.
‘He’s a grade-A wanker,’ says Ted, shaking his head so that his jowls wobble. ‘A proper waste of skin.’
She had been so shaken by the exchange that she had nearly gone home. She should stop off at the gym after all. But Marina had come past just as she was packing the cream Chanel jacket into her bag and told her there was no way she was letting her go straight home tonight. She was the one who had brought in all the money. She could drop off the bag in the morning. ‘Don’t let that little scrote ruin your day. Don’t give him what he wants. C’mon, Sam. Just for one drink.’
So she has come next door to the White Horse, surrounded by the workmates she has known for more than a decade, a family of sorts. She knows the names of their partners and children, the various pets of the child-free, and often, thesedays, people’s ailments. She used to bake birthday cakes and bring them in, but the first time she had done that after Uberprint took over, Simon had walked into the breakout area as they gathered round to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and said he really couldn’t believe they thought they had time for this. What was it? A kindergarten?
‘How’s Phil?’ Marina puts another glass of white wine on the table in front of her and settles in. ‘Has he found another job yet?’
She does not want to talk about Phil tonight so she utters a bright ‘Not yet!’, the kind that suggests she has every confidence that this is the most temporary state of affairs, and changes the subject swiftly. ‘Hey, you’ll never guess what happened to me this morning.’
Marina is agog. ‘Show me,’ she demands, as Sam tells the story, and Sam reaches under the bench and pulls out the kitbag, unzipping it to show her one of the shoes.
‘I should really have taken them back instead of coming here,’ she says. ‘I’ll have to do it tomorrow.’
But Marina isn’t listening. ‘Oh, my God. You did a whole day in these? I wouldn’t have been able to walk five steps.’
‘I nearly didn’t. But, Marina, by the end of the day I wasworkingit. I swear it was wearing them that got me the deals.’
‘Well, what are you doing?’
Sam looks at her blankly.
‘You’re not celebrating in those bloody awful flip-flops. Put them on! I want to see!’
Marina is exclaiming about the beauty of the shoes (‘I bet they cost the same as my mortgage!’) when Lenny from Accounts asks what they’re talking about, and before she knows it, Joel is telling the other end of the table, and her workmates are demanding that she parade up and down in the shoes. She is three glasses of wine in now, and despite the acidwarning in her stomach that she will pay for this, especially on an empty stomach, she finds herself doing a fake catwalk-type strut up and down in front of her colleagues, while they hoot and clap approvingly.
‘You should wear heels every day!’ says Ted.
‘Yeah, we will if you boys do, too,’ says Marina, and throws a peanut at him.
