Someone Else's Shoes(13)

“Simon, if you let me finish, I told you I—”

“I haven’t got time for this, Sam. It’s not just Grayside now. I hope you can conduct yourself in a more professional manner in future. I can’t be worrying about whether I’m going to have more clients calling up to complain about you being drunk, or whatever it is you’re wearing on your feet. You’ve put me in a very awkward position today.”

“But I—I wasn’t . . .” she begins, but he has already turned and left the cubicle.

Sam stares at the space where he had been, her mouth hanging slightly open.

Then she shuts it abruptly. Knowing Simon, he will suddenly reappear and accuse her of wearing an unprofessional facial expression.



* * *



? ? ?

“He’s a grade-A wanker,” says Ted, shaking his head so that his jowls wobble. “A proper waste of skin.”

She had been so shaken by the exchange that she had nearly gone home. She should stop off at the gym after all. But Marina had come past just as she was packing the cream Chanel jacket into her bag and told her there was no way she was letting her go straight home tonight. She was the one who had brought in all the money. She could drop off the bag in the morning. “Don’t let that little scrote ruin your day. Don’t give him what he wants. C’mon, Sam. Just for one drink.”

So she has come next door to the White Horse, surrounded by the workmates she has known for more than a decade, a family of sorts. She knows the names of their partners and children, the various pets of the child-free, and often, these days, people’s ailments. She used to bake birthday cakes and bring them in, but the first time she had done that after Uberprint took over, Simon had walked into the breakout area as they gathered round to sing “Happy Birthday” and said he really couldn’t believe they thought they had time for this. What was it? A kindergarten?

“How’s Phil?” Marina puts another glass of white wine on the table in front of her and settles in. “Has he found another job yet?”

She does not want to talk about Phil tonight so she utters a bright “Not yet!,” the kind that suggests she has every confidence that this is the most temporary state of affairs, and changes the subject swiftly. “Hey, you’ll never guess what happened to me this morning.”

Marina is agog. “Show me,” she demands, as Sam tells the story, and Sam reaches under the bench and pulls out the kitbag, unzipping it to show her one of the shoes.

“I should really have taken them back instead of coming here,” she says. “I’ll have to do it tomorrow.”

But Marina isn’t listening. “Oh, my God. You did a whole day in these? I wouldn’t have been able to walk five steps.”

“I nearly didn’t. But, Marina, by the end of the day I was working it. I swear it was wearing them that got me the deals.”

“Well, what are you doing?”

Sam looks at her blankly.

“You’re not celebrating in those bloody awful flip-flops. Put them on! I want to see!”

Marina is exclaiming about the beauty of the shoes (“I bet they cost the same as my mortgage!”) when Lenny from Accounts asks what they’re talking about, and before she knows it, Joel is telling the other end of the table, and her workmates are demanding that she parade up and down in the shoes. She is three glasses of wine in now, and despite the acid warning in her stomach that she will pay for this, especially on an empty stomach, she finds herself doing a fake catwalk-type strut up and down in front of her colleagues, while they hoot and clap approvingly.

“You should wear heels every day!” says Ted.

“Yeah, we will if you boys do, too,” says Marina, and throws a peanut at him.

Someone has put on music and the pub is now packed with people competing for space on the little square dance-floor, office workers marking their survival through the stress of another week, those with quiet crushes on colleagues looking to alcohol to ease their way forward, those unwilling immediately to embrace the responsibilities, the dread silences, of a weekend at home. Marina grabs her hand and they are suddenly in the throng, arms up, clapping to the music, dancing in the way that middle-aged people do, badly, but with the confidence that comes from the fact that they no longer care, that sometimes just the act of dancing, letting go in a room of people while a beat thumps through your veins, is an act of rebellion against the dark, against the tough times that will inevitably come tomorrow. Sam dances, closes her eyes and enjoys the clench of her thighs, the feel of the heels on the hard floor. She feels powerful, defiant, sexy. She dances until her hair sticks in strands to her face, and sweat runs into the small of her back. She feels Joel’s hand around her waist, and he takes hers and lifts it so that she twirls under his arm. “You looked absolutely gorgeous in those shoes today,” he murmurs into her ear, as she spins. She laughs and blushes.

She has just sat down, still pink and giddy, when the man appears.

“Blimey, you’ve pulled,” Marina mutters, as he stops in front of her. Tall, wearing the kind of dark uniform and muscular bulk that shows this is a person who takes themselves very seriously indeed. He looks her up and down.

“Um . . . hello?” she says, half laughing, when he does not speak. She wonders briefly if the shoes have gifted her some strange new sexual potency.