Page 60 of Someone Else's Shoes
Nisha feels the blood rush to her head. ‘Hey. It’s not my fault if you’re too damn big for this space. But I sure as hell don’t have to sit here and take it while you sit on my lap with your stinking coat.’
The woman is actually squashing her into the seat. She is so close Nisha can smell her deodorant and it makes her want to gag.Oh, my God, she’s so close I’ll be breathing in little cells of this woman.
‘Move over!’ she demands.
They have caught the attention of the other passengers now. Nisha is dimly aware of the low buzz of interest that passes round the seats, the wary glance of the driver in the rear-view mirror.
‘You don’t like it,’ says the woman, impassively, ‘you move.’
‘I was herefirst.’
‘You own this bus, do you? Go back to your own country if you don’t like it here.’
‘My owncountry? MOVE YOUR ASS.’ Nisha cannot believe this woman. The audacity. She is a dead weight, andNisha realizes she cannot physically move her. She elbows her hard and the woman elbows her back. When the woman stares mulishly ahead, Nisha reaches down, grabs the woman’s handbag from her lap and hurls it towards the front of the bus, where its contents scatter, sending lipsticks and bits of paper reeling under the other seats. The woman stares at her in shock.
‘Pick up my bag!’
The two women are standing now. Nisha feels the woman shove her, but can tell despite her heft that she has little real strength and so she pushes back, hard, with both arms. There is a collectiveoooh!on the bus as the woman loses her balance and falls heavily against the seat opposite with a scream. She is scrambling to her feet when the bus stops abruptly. The driver opens the barrier between the driver’s area and the aisle and looks at them. ‘Oi! You two! Off!’
‘I’m not getting off!’ says the woman, scrabbling for her bag. ‘She pushed me!’
‘She sat on me! She was literally suffocating me!’
‘Off!’ says the driver. ‘Or I’m calling the police!’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ says Nisha, sitting down firmly. ‘I am staying until my stop.’
‘You think I’m scared of the police? You got another think coming. This bitch is going to get her head smacked before I –’
Ten minutes later Nisha is standing on the kerb while the bus finally pulls away, her skin burning from the radioactive looks of the delayed passengers still on board. Her ears are ringing with the sound of the warning given to her by the police officers, who didn’t seem to care whose fault it was, bored – and possibly a little amused – by the sight of two women going at it over bum space on a bus seat. She is already calculatinghow long it will be before the next bus arrives and she will be able to pick up Grace. This goddamn country.
It is twenty-two minutes later, as she finally climbs furiously onto the next bus – it’s packed, of course, and she has to stand – that she realizes the beautiful organic duck, with all its carefully picked accompaniments and dressings, is still tucked neatly under the seat of the bus she was removed from.
Grace doesn’t talk to her the whole way home. Nisha doesn’t even try. Grace plugs in her earphones and gets on and off the two buses in silence, so that they walk alongside each other without acknowledging each other’s presence. When they finally reach the apartment Grace mumbles that she’s not hungry, she had something at Nana’s, and disappears into her bedroom with a slammed door.
Nisha has had enough. She makes a cheese sandwich out of the remaining slices of bread in the bread bin, and swallows its two claggy halves, trying not to think about the duck, which is probably still en route to a depot somewhere. There is no hot water, so she puts on the electric immersion heater and twenty minutes later shuts herself into the bathroom, pouring shampoo into the bath in place of decent bath oils or scented bubbles.
She lies there, submerged to her chin, for an hour and a half, her thoughts pinging between errant ducks, Louboutin shoes and the annoying enigma that is Aleks, half trying to suppress the desire to kill the entire world, half working out the various ways in which she could do it. There was barely a time in Nisha’s life when she couldn’t remember being angry, but now it’s as if her eyes have been opened to the myriad ways in which just being female is like being dealt some infinitely crappier hand – a hand nobody else evenacknowledges. She thinks of her teens, the endless daily trail of men who tried to touch her or leered at her, the many ways in which she could not go about her daily life without unwanted attention. The man at the feed shop who offered her a dollar when she was twelve if she’d let him put his hand down her top. The guy at the garage who used to make obscene gestures when she bought her gas. The creeps on subways, the men who followed her back to her shared apartment, the subtler, more expensive hands on her ass when she worked at the gallery. She thinks about the ways in which she has been expected to conform to some ideal that takes endless, endless effort just to stay married: keep your figure, create a perfect home environment, be interesting, have great hair every day (but none anywhere else), wear shoes that make your feet hurt, lacy underwear that cuts your hoo-ha in two, make sure your bedroom antics are porn-star level (even if your husband seems to think the act of getting a hard-on should be enough for his side). She tries to imagine Carl getting his pubic hair lasered to make sure he was attractive enough for her, and it’s so unthinkable she laughs out loud. And now, because she is female and did all the things expected of her, she’s been discarded for a younger, supposedly sweeter model.
And then, of course, laugh off all this unfairness or be deemed a humourless witch.
These thoughts, which she has suppressed for years (what good would have come from acknowledging them anyway?), are popping up to the surface, like the bubbles in the bath, irrepressible, relentless.
She lies there hearing Grace’s insistent music through the closed doors until her fingers and toes wrinkle, the tiny mirror is obscured by steam and the water becomes uncomfortably chilly. She is just emerging from the bathroom when Jasminereturns. The door slams and she is walking up the narrow hallway, unwinding a scarf from her neck when she spies Nisha. She walks straight past her into the kitchen.
‘Babe! So where’s this surprise? I’m so hungry my mouth was watering the whole way home.’
Nisha stops in her tracks. ‘Oh.’ She pulls a face. ‘Yeah, the thing is I had a problem on the bus. Some stupid woman pretty much sat on my lap and –’
‘But what is it? You told me not to eat.’ Jasmine is opening the oven door, and lifting the lids on empty pots that sit on the hob.
Nisha’s heart sinks. ‘Sorry. It – The food thing didn’t happen.’
There is a brief silence.
‘So – what … You made nothing?’
She stares at Nisha, then closes her eyes slowly, as if she is trying hard to quell some imminent eruption. ‘I turned down coconut chicken curry for this.’
