Page 18 of Someone Else's Shoes
He has come via a friend of a friend of Magda’s husband, who knew people, and has contacts in every country. She had made the arrangements directly on a burner phone six weeks ago so that Magda was involved as little as possible. (She had pleaded to be kept out of it,It is better if I know nothing, Mrs Cantor, I do not want to get into any trouble.) And when the guy had reported back last week, he said the surveillance job had beenembarrassingly easy and that she ‘would not be disappointed’. She had sent him cash, and a Patek Philippe watch that Carl had decided he needed two years ago at the airport in Dubai and had been too drunk to remember buying afterwards.
There was no point in her trying to identify this guy by his looks. They were all the same, these goons, anyhow, with their military haircuts and their thick necks. She’d know him because he’d be the only guy here who wasn’t drunk and spraying saliva halfway around the room.
‘Got a fag, darling?’ A young man appears in front of her. He wears a white polo shirt, and track pants, whose crotch sags down to his knees, and he has a glassy flush to his cheeks that says he has been drinking for some time.
‘No,’ she says.
‘Waiting for someone, are you?’
She looks him up and down. ‘Yes. Waiting for you to get lost.’
‘Whooooh!’ She sees then that a group of other young men are with him, equally well lubricated, nudging each other and howling.
‘You’re sassy. I love a sassy lass,’ he says, and raises his eyebrows suggestively, like she might find that a compliment. ‘American, are you?’
She ignores him and shifts slightly, so that she is facing away from them all.
‘Aww, don’t be arsy. C’mon. Let me buy you a drink, darling. What do you drink? Vodka tonic?’
‘Let him buy you a drink, Yankee Doodle.’
She keeps her face turned away. She can smell his aftershave, something cheap and pungent. ‘I don’t want one. Please go right ahead and enjoy your night.’
‘I won’t enjoy it without you … Come on, darling. Let me buy you a drink. You’re all on your …’
He puts a hand on her arm, and she whips around and hisses, ‘Fuck off, and leave me alone.’
This time thewhooooh!from his friends has a slightly harder tone. They are getting annoying. She needs to focus, to make sure she doesn’t miss her guy.
The young man’s face has flushed and hardened to a blank stare. ‘No need to be rude,’ he says.
‘Yeah. There is, apparently,’ she responds. And then as they shuffle off back into the pub with a couple of sulky backward glances, she walks over to a portly middle-aged guy in a rumpled jacket talking to a friend, leaning against one of the windows.
‘Excuse me, would you happen to have a spare cigarette?’ She smiles sweetly at the man, and he is disarmed immediately. Doesn’t even speak as he rummages hurriedly for his packet. He lights the cigarette, like a gentleman, keeping his hands from hers, and she rewards him with another smile. ‘Actually, you couldn’t give me a couple for later, could you? I’ve left mine at home.’ He gives her the packet, insisting she take them, that he can buy some more. ‘You’re a doll,’ she says, and his ears go pink.
She smokes the cigarette in short, angry puffs, relishing the acrid taste of the smoke, the chance to do something for a few minutes. Where the hell is he? She stubs the last of the cigarette out with her heel.Just hurry up, she wills him. She cannot remember the last time she was on her own in a public bar at night. She is normally insulated from people like this. That snotty kid wouldn’t have approached her if she was in her normal clothes. This is what she’s spent her whole life getting away from.
She checks her watch, then shoves her hands into her pockets, and pulls them out again quickly with an audibleughwhen she remembers what she is wearing.
*
At a quarter past nine she makes her third circuit of the pub, pushing through the groups of increasingly raucous customers, her head dipping and bobbing as she tries to make out who is there. A young woman no longer wearing any shoes offers her a cigarette outside and tells her her hair is beautiful. She says thank you nicely because she wants the cigarette. She suspects the nicotine will give her a headache tomorrow.
Nisha waits as the hours pass and the bar takes a more Bacchanalian turn around her, the voices louder, the glasses sloshing alcohol as people push past her. A group of office workers starts dancing on the tiny, sticky dance-floor and she stares at them, marvelling at people’s willingness to humiliate themselves. The side door is locked at a quarter to eleven, and people begin to spill out of the main doors, laughing, stumbling, stopping to smoke or kiss messily, or wait for taxis. He does not come.
‘Is it closing time?’ she asks a young Asian man, part of the office celebration.
‘Yes, babe,’ he says, saluting. ‘Nearly eleven, innit?’ He slings an arm around the shoulders of a ginger-haired man in an ill-fitting T-shirt and they walk off singing.
She cannot believe it. She turns and peers inside: the place is emptying, barmen wiping tables and stacking chairs. Could she have missed him? He couldn’t have been here without her knowing. He just couldn’t. She curses under her breath, preparing to walk back to the hotel.
She is only a few minutes away from the pub when she hears them behind her, catcalling, their footsteps echoing on the wet pavement.Oi! Yankee Doodle!She turns and recognizes him immediately, pushing forward, like a pustulent boil, from the surface of their little gang.Oh, great.
She picks up her pace, but they pick up theirs too and she knows they are gaining on her. Her heart thumps in her ears with a sudden surge of adrenalin. She runs through the calculations that every woman knows as standard: this street is too dark; there are no other people nearby; the main street, with its strip lights and traffic, is still a hundred, two hundred paces away. She has no Ari, no personal alarm, not even any keys to wedge between her fingers. He is coming. She knows it in her gut.
Three strides, two strides. She hears his approach, feels the hot breath on her neck. Just as his arms surround her in a clumsy bear hug, Nisha squats and drops abruptly, shifts her weight onto her back foot, turns and swings her right forearm up hard between his legs. Just as her Krav Maga tutor had shown her. She hears his high-pitched cry as he collapses onto the pavement behind her, the shocked exclamations of his friends as they reach for him. The curses. Thewhat the f–
But they are drunk, and before they can fully grasp what has happened, she is sprinting away down the unlit back road, all the power of a thousand tedious daily sessions on a treadmill in her feet, suddenly grateful that, for this day in her life at least, she is not wearing a pair of beautifully handmade couture high heels, but a pair of cheap and nasty perfectly flat pumps.
