Someone Else's Shoes(106)

“What are we going to do?” Jasmine hisses, anguished.

Sam cannot bear it any longer. She flaps her hands, trying to think. She closes her eyes, then opens them and scoots back down the corridor until she spies what she’s looking for. She glances back at Jasmine, slips her Marks & Spencer navy dress shoe from her foot, and whacks the fire alarm button with it—two, three times—until the glass shatters. Then she slams the button with the heel of her hand. The noise is immediate and ear-splitting.

“What the hell are you doing?” yells Jasmine.

“Run!” says Sam, and bolts toward the fire escape.





thirty-two


The recorded message booms into every one of the Bentley Hotel’s 310 bedrooms. Please do not panic. The fire alarm has been triggered. Please make your way to the nearest fire exit.

Darren, halted at what might possibly be an inopportune moment, takes a second longer to comprehend what is happening than Liz does. She is already out of bed, her bare feet on the floor.

“Fire? Darren, there’s a fire! A fire!”

He says, breathing hard: “It’ll be a false alarm.”

“I can hear people going down the corridor. Darren, get up! We have to go!”

“I don’t believe this.” Darren’s feet, still in his socks, land on the floor beside Nisha’s head. She is frozen, deafened by the noise. She fumbles for the shoes by her right thigh and winds her fingers into the straps. She can hear the Frobishers struggling into their clothes, bickering, gathering their things, the urgent voices and footsteps outside in the corridor. And over it all the piercing, intermittent ring of the fire alarm.

“Bag, where’s my handbag?”

“We’ll get downstairs and it’ll stop, babe.”

“Where are the shoes?”

“Don’t worry about the bloody shoes. Just get your—”

“Darren, everyone is leaving the hotel. Come ON.”

She hears the panic in Liz Frobisher’s voice. Some distant part of her wonders if this fire is real, whether she will be able to get out in time or burn here, under the bed, and be found in the aftermath, like some human relic from Pompeii.

She hears the click of the hotel door opening, the abrupt noise of a hundred people emerging from their rooms, bleary and confused, a baby crying. Then the door closes and the noise becomes muffled again. There is a brief lull. Nisha waits a moment, then wriggles out from under the bed, coughing and brushing dust from her clothes, her eyes watering as she gags. The photograph. She mustn’t forget the photograph. She whips out the printed screenshot, places it on the bedside table, then tiptoes to the door, peers out and, clutching the shoes to her chest, is instantly swept into the moving river of anxious guests heading for the fire-escape stairs, no longer even caring if she is about to be consumed by flames.

It has to be a better fate than remaining in that room.



* * *



? ? ?

Sam and Jasmine huddle by the back entrance, where staff are emerging in small clumps, still unsure whether they should be leaving their posts. Some have lit cigarettes, blind to the irony, and a series of white-jacketed chefs stand in a shivering huddle, bemoaning ruined soufflés, burned fish portions and the wrath of the ma?tre d’.

“She’s not answering any texts. Do you think we should call?”

“Maybe give it another five minutes. Just in case.”

“I’ll call Aleks. Maybe he knows.”

Sam’s heart is beating hard. She feels elated and terrified. She did this. She created this epic state of chaos and havoc. She hears the alarm ringing in the air, the voices of senior managers as they try to establish where the fire is. The hotel is emptying, hundreds of people spilling out of the main entrance onto the pavement, parents trying to shepherd crying children, jet-lagged tourists blinking in the sodium light. Her life has turned to chaos, and now she is creating it herself. She has stopped this enormous machine with one hand. Over the shrill noise, she can see Jasmine talking urgently into the phone, her hand pressed against her other ear. Around her the street is coming to a halt as guests, some in dressing-gowns, some in hastily grabbed coats start to spread into the road, the taxi horns blaring as they navigate in the dark around them.

Sam watches it all, disbelieving, and finds that something strange is happening. A bubble of something unfamiliar is rising in her chest, pushing upward so that she cannot control it. Sam begins to laugh. She leans her head back against the wall, feeling the cold of the brick against her scalp, the rough texture against her hands, and she starts to laugh at the insane chaos of it all. Sam laughs, and laughs until she’s crying, tears leaking from her eyes, clutching her sides. And she sees Jasmine staring at her, frowning in disbelief, and this makes her laugh even more.

“Have you lost your mind?” Jasmine says, shoving her phone into her pocket.

Sam wipes at her eyes, and nods, still laughing. “Maybe. Yes. Yes, I think maybe I have.”



* * *



? ? ?

    Nisha makes her way along the corridor in the thick of the throng, slowed at the entrance to the emergency stairs as the crowd begins to bottleneck at the fire door. A large group of young people are laughing and joking, and behind her an elderly couple complain about the noise, holding crêpey hands to their ears. She clasps the shoes to her chest, unable to believe she has made it. She finally has them. She watches the crowd funnel slowly down the narrow stairway, and glances behind her just to see if Jasmine or Sam are nearby. And it is then that she sees him: Ari.