Page 17 of Someone Else's Shoes
The walk is interminable. Magda is clearly useless at judging distances on a map. Nisha slaps along the grey pavement in the too-large flip-flops, as the skies darken and lower and eventually it starts to spit with the kind of chill, malevolent rain that you seem to get only in London. Nisha stops briefly and, admitting defeat, takes out the shoes from the bag. There is, at least, a clean pair of socks in there. She puts them on and then, wincing, puts on the black clumpy, tired-looking shoes. They fit reasonably well, but possess the unnerving contours of someone else’s long-term use.I will not think about them, she tells herself.These are not me.Then she puts on the jacket, feeling the cheap fabric weld to her shoulders, and pushes away feelings that suddenly threaten to swamp her. Her walk becomes something like a stomp, the unfamiliar flat heels changing the way even her hips move. There has always been a car waiting like a shadow outside whichever building she happened to be in, and to be out here without one in a city that is suddenly unfamiliar makes her feel untethered, as if she is just floating wildly in the atmosphere. ‘Keep it together,’ she mutters to herself, as shepowers on, scowling at anyone who has the temerity to look at her. She will get what she needs and she will be back in the penthouse by this evening. Or some other penthouse. Either way, Carl will pay for this.
The hotel is a squat, modern building in cheap burgundy brick, with a plasticky illuminated sign over the sliding doors and when she finally reaches the street she pauses, double-checking that she has the name right. As she gazes up, a man in a football shirt walks out holding a can of beer. He stops to shout something at his companion, who is eating from a packet of potato chips held high up to her nose, like a pig in a trough. She watches as they veer off, yelling about needing a Big Mac.
The receptionist has a note against her room, and repeats several times that she will not be able to have the minibar, so sorry, given that they are not able to take a card.
‘We wouldn’t even normally accept the booking,’ she says. ‘But we’re not that busy today, and your friend was so sweet and worried about you. I’m sorry about your stolen bag.’
‘Thank you. I won’t be staying long.’
She hesitates before pressing the elevator button to the fourth floor, not wanting to touch the button. She jabs at it once, twice when it fails to register, then wipes her finger several times on her sleeve. When she arrives at Room 414, having navigated a long stretch of bright swirling carpet clearly designed by someone who wanted an entire customer base to pass out from nausea, she opens the door and stops. The room is small, with a double bed facing a tired fake-wood sideboard on which a flat-screen television sits. The carpet and the drapes are turquoise and brown. It smells of cigarettes and synthetic air-freshener, with notes of something sour and Clorox-like underneath, like the aftermath ofa crime scene clean-up. What terrible thing has happened in here? The bathroom, while apparently clean, houses its shampoo and conditioner in locked canisters on the wall, as if its clientele cannot be trusted even with that.
She takes off the jacket and tosses it onto the bed, then washes her face and arms thoroughly with the cheap soap. She checks the thin, slightly rough towels – apparently laundered – then dries off with them. She sees herself in the mirror, her hair still scraped back in the ponytail from her shower at the gym, her face free of makeup. She looks ten years older, furious, exhausted. She sits on the edge of the bed (hotel bedspreads make her shudder. Have youseenwhat shows up under ultraviolet light?) and waits for Magda to call.
‘He says somewhere low key and busy so that he doesn’t attract attention. He is worried about Ari finding out. He wants to meet in a British pub.’
‘A pub. Okay.’ She remembers a pub she had stopped outside to refasten the awful shoes. ‘The White Horse. Tell him to meet me at the White Horse. How will I know who he is?’
‘He knows what you look like. He will find you. He says you must be there from eight p.m.’
‘Eight o’clock tonight? That’s four hours away. Can’t he get here sooner?’
‘He says eight o’clock. He will be there with what you want. Wait inside. He will find you.’
Nisha stares at the carpet. Her voice, when it emerges, is less confident. ‘Can I trust him, Magda? Do we know what he has?’
There is a short silence.
‘He says he will be there, Mrs Cantor. I just tell you what he told me.’
*
It takes sixteen paces to go fully backwards and forwards around the bed in the little room. It is thirteen hundred and forty-eight paces before she finally stops. Her heart is racing, a Rolodex of thoughts spinning as she registers what Carl has done, what he has tried to do to her. She has witnessed Carl’s ruthlessness with his business enemies, the way he would summarily bring down a guillotine on even long-standing relationships without turning a hair. One minute they were embedded in the inner circle, lunched handsomely, lent a driver or consulted over late-night cognac with jokes and bonhomie, the next it was as if they had simply been erased. He would pick up and drop people as they suited him, and it was as if he could barely remember their names afterwards. Carl has never worried about parking tickets, legal problems or employment tribunals. He always says that’s why he employs other people, to sort out life’s ‘messes’.
She realizes that she, his wife, has suddenly morphed into one of his messes.
There is a tight knot in Nisha’s stomach that just keeps getting tighter, as if someone were pulling a cord around her waist. Every time she stops walking, she feels as if she can’t breathe properly, as if the air won’t reach the bottom of her lungs. She needs a drink, but she doesn’t want to drink the water (what might be lurking in those pipes?), and she doesn’t want to leave the room to get a bottled water in case Magda calls, so she deliberates and finally makes herself an instant coffee, boiling the kettle three times with fresh water before she feels safe drinking it. (She had once watched aMorning Showitem when they said some guests had used kettles toboil-wash their underwear.It had actually given her nightmares.)
And what was she going to tell Ray? He’d have to know eventually, of course. They would concoct somemealy-mouthed statement about people changing, not being able to live together any more, but Mummy and Daddy still loved each other blah-blah-blah. Carl would probably get a lawyer to write his. And she would have to put on a brave face, pretend that this was what she had wanted too. Make it as easy and light as possible so that Ray could cope with it.
Who was it? That’s the question, a drumbeat running through her head underneath every new thought. She runs through a mental list of eligible women who had raised her internal red flag in the past months: a little too much attention, a casual hand on an arm at a fundraising dinner, a whispered joke through heavily glossed lips. There were always women, and she has watched them carefully, always closely monitoring the vibrations in the atmosphere. She had known something was off, but she couldn’t think who might be behind it. Or that Carl, reliably – sometimes annoyingly – libidinous, was suddenly tired more often than he was not. It wasn’t that she enjoyed the morning attentions she was obliged to give him, but it unnerved her more when they stopped. She never asked him what was wrong – she was not the kind of woman to beneedy –but she’d bought new, outrageous, lingerie, and taken charge of matters when he got back from his last trip, using tricks she knew he couldn’t resist. He was less tired then. Of course he was. But even as she held him in the sweaty aftermath there was something different, a discordant note humming away in the background. She had known,oh, she had known, and that was what had finally persuaded her to seek insurance.
Well, thank God she had.
She’s hungry. That’s not unusual: Nisha has been hungry her whole adult life (you think you could maintain a figure like hers otherwise?). But she thinks back and realizes suddenly that she has eaten nothing at all today. She goes to the tray with the plastic kettle and there, in a brightly coloured wrapper, aretwo packets of cheap cookies with something unidentifiable and creamy in them. She scans one of the little packets suspiciously. Carbs have been the enemy for so many decades that it requires a huge mental leap to persuade herself that on this occasion she needs to consume them. God, what she really wants is a cigarette. She hasn’t wanted a cigarette for five years, but she would actually kill for one right now.
To distract herself, she boils the kettle three times again, makes a black tea and drinks that. And finally, when she can take the clawing hunger pains no longer, she rips open the little packet and puts a cookie into her mouth. The pale cookie manages to be both dry and claggy at the same time. But it might be one of the most delicious things she has ever tasted. Oh, God, it’s so good. So full of crap and so damn good. Nisha closes her eyes and savours every mouthful of the two small cookies, letting out little noises of pleasure. Then she eats the second packet. She shakes it onto her palm, to retrieve the last few tiny crumbs, rips it open and licks the inside. Then, when there is definitely nothing left, she throws it into the bin.
Nisha sits, and checks her watch.
And she waits.
She has been to an English pub once before, in the Cotswolds, with one of Carl’s associates who owned a sprawling shooting estate and thought it would be fun for them to partake in the English tradition of ‘sinking a pint’. The building had been straight out of the history books, full of beams and wonky ceilings, suffused with the smell of woodsmoke, with a cute hand-painted antique sign outside and the door surrounded by roses. The landlord had known everyone by name, and had even allowed entry to dogs, which lay at the feet of men in tweed with bad teeth and braying voices, the car park a mixof mud-spattered old four-wheel drives and the immaculate Porsches and Mercedes of weekenders.
A bar girl served up little plates of cubed cheese (you wanted to see the lab bacterial results on shared plates – ugh) and small brown pies with unidentifiable meat that she had pretended to nibble at. The bottled water was lukewarm. She smiled at the raucous jokes, and wished she had stayed back at the house. But she had made it a habit to be at Carl’s side at all times.
This is not that kind of pub. This is like the bars in roadside joints several miles off the highway where she had grown up, where girls wore vest tops and short shorts and men wished they were in a branch of Hooters and behaved as if they were. She walks into the White Horse and is instantly enveloped in a sea of bodies and noise, groups of people yelling beery fumes at each other over thumping music that is just a few decibels too loud. She pushes her way through the crowd, trying to shrink to avoid the men who are lurching around aimlessly, apparently already drunk at seven thirty in the evening.
She had hoped to sit quietly in a corner somewhere, but all the seats are taken, people elbowing their way in as soon as a table vacated, like some kind of muscular game of musical chairs. She waits instead in a porch area by a door, as if she were thinking of going for a smoke, and shaking her head at the guys who asked her if she ‘has a spare fag’. All the while she scans the crowd, waiting for a man who will give her a nod of recognition.
