Page 6 of Someone Else's Shoes
‘What, darling?’
‘My eyebrows. I sent a picture. Did you look?’
Nisha holds out her phone and flicks through her messages until she finds the picture he has sent. ‘You have beautiful eyebrows, sweetheart,’ she says reassuringly, putting the phone back to her ear.
‘They’re terrible. I just feel really down. I saw this programme on, like, the dolphin trade and there were all these dolphins just being made to do tricks and stuff and I felt so guilty because we went to that place and swam with them inMexico, remember? I felt so bad I couldn’t leave my room and then I thought I’d tidy up my eyebrows and it was a disaster because now I look like mid-nineties Madonna.’
A woman has started drying her hair nearby and Nisha briefly considers wrenching the hairdryer out of her hand and clubbing her to death with it. ‘Sweetheart, I can’t hear you in here. Hold on.’
She walks out into the corridor. Takes a deep breath. ‘They look perfect,’ she says, into the muffled silence. ‘Gorgeous. And mid-nineties Madonna is a totally hot look.’
She can picture him, cross-legged on his bed back in Westchester, the way he has sat since he was tiny.
‘They don’t look gorgeous, Mom. It’s adisaster.’
A woman comes out of the changing area and passes her, her feet slopping in flip-flops, her head down as she hurries past in her cheap jacket. Why don’t women stand up straight? The woman’s shoulders are slumped, her head dipped into her neck like a turtle’s, and Nisha is immediately irritated. If you look like a victim, why are you surprised when people treat you badly? ‘Then we’ll get them microbladed when you come home.’
‘So theydolook terrible.’
‘No! No, you look gorgeous. But, sweetheart, I really need to go. I’m right in the middle of something. I’ll call you.’
‘Not until three my time, earliest. I have to sleep and then we have self-care. It’s so dumb. They make you do all this mindfulness stuff like it wasn’t being stuck in my head that got me here in the first place.’
‘I know, darling. I’ll call you after that. I love you.’
Nisha ends the call and dials again. ‘Magda? Magda? Did you get my message? Call me as soon as you get this. Okay?’
She is ending the call when the door opens. A gym attendant walks in and spies her holding her phone.
‘Ma’am, I’m sorry but –’
‘Don’t. Even,’ she snarls, and he closes his mouth over the words. There are some advantages to being an American woman over forty who no longer has any fucks left on the shelf, and he can see it. It is the first thing she has felt glad about all week.
Nisha showers, moisturizes her limbs with the gym’s inferior products (she will smell like an Amtrak restroom all day), ties her wet hair into a knot and then, her feet safely on a towel (changing-room floors make her nauseous – the skin cells! The verrucas!), checks her phone for the eighteenth time to see if Magda has responded.
Trying to suppress the giant ball of fury and anxiety that is swelling in her chest is getting harder. She takes her silk blouse off the hanger, feeling the liquid fall of it sticking to her warm damp skin as she pulls it over her head.Where is Magda, for God’s sake?She sits and glances at her phone again, reaching absent-mindedly into her kitbag for jeans and shoes. She feels around and finally pulls out a very tired, ugly, block-heeled black pump. She turns and blinks at her hand for a moment before dropping the shoe with a little gasp of horror. She wipes her fingers on a towel, then slowly opens the bag with a corner of it, peering inside. It takes her a moment to grasp what she is looking at. This bag is not her bag. This is fake leather, its plastic covering already peeling at the seams, and what should be a brass ‘Marc Jacobs’ tag has tarnished its way to a dull silver.
Nisha peers under the bench. Then behind her. Most of the annoying women have gone now, and there are no other bags, just a few gaping lockers. There are no other bags. This bag looks like her bag – same size, same colour, similar handles – but it definitely isn’t hers.
‘Who took my bag?’ she says aloud, to nobody in particular. ‘Who the hell took my bag?’ The few women in the changing room glance over at her but look blank.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No no no no no. Not today. Not now.’
The girl at the desk doesn’t blink.
‘Where’s the CCTV?’
‘Madam, there’s no CCTV in the ladies’ changing room. It would be against the law.’
‘So how am I meant to find out who stole my bag?’
‘I don’t think it’s been stolen, madam. From what you said, it seems like an accidental switch, if the bags were so similar –’
‘You really think anyone would “accidentally” pick up my Chanel jacket and custom-made Louboutin heels made by Christian himself when they dress themselves normally in …’ she peers into the bag, grimaces ‘…Primark?’
The receptionist’s face doesn’t shift a muscle.
‘We can go through the CCTV at the entrance but we’ll have to get clearance from head office.’
