Someone Else's Shoes(15)

Nisha sits in the coffee shop, ignoring the curious stares of the other customers, and tries to think. She needs something to wear, she needs somewhere to stay and she needs a lawyer. Without money she can access none of these things. She could ask Ray to wire some, but then this will be out there, irreversible, and she does not want to drag her son into it. Not just yet. Not with everything else he has gone through this year.

“Hello?” She snatches up the phone.

“It’s me. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Cantor.” Magda’s voice is hushed. “I had to use my husband’s phone because mine was cut off.”

“Did you speak to your guy?”

“Yes. He’s got it. He’s going to call me shortly and tell me where to meet you. He doesn’t want to call you directly . . . in case. This is why it’s taken me so long to get back to you.”

She sounds genuinely apologetic.

“When is he going to call? I need help here, Magda. I’ve got nothing.”

“He says within the next hour or so.”

“I am literally wearing a bathrobe. Carl won’t let me get my things. Can you send some clothes? And I’m going to need my jewelry FedExed, and some cash. And, oh, my laptop—”

“This is the other thing, Mrs. Cantor.” Magda sniffs noisily down the phone and Nisha shudders slightly. “Mr. Cantor fired me. I didn’t do anything and they say he fired me.”

Nisha knows she should say something comforting. But all she can think is fuck fuck fuck.

“The housekeeper shut me out of the house and they said he’s paid me off with immediate effect. I don’t know what we’re going to do because Laney’s medical bills—”

“You can’t even get in the house?”

“No! I had to get the subway all the way to Janos’s work to use his phone because they took the phone off me before I left. I got there seven a.m. as usual and they threw me out by seven fifteen. Luckily I knew your number by heart so I could still call you.”

She must write down every number in her phone book, she thinks suddenly. He will cancel her phone, too, as soon as he remembers to.

“I need money, Magda. I need a lawyer.”

But Magda has started to cry. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Cantor. I couldn’t get any of your jewelry, your photographs, anything. They said they would get the cops if I tried to remove anything, it would be theft, and they would get Immigration involved. They literally pushed me out of the door! I tried to get your—”

“Yes, yes. Look, call me as soon as you hear back. I need to know where to meet him. This is really important.”

“I will, Mrs. Cantor. I’m so sorry.” She is sobbing now. A ringing sound has started in Nisha’s head. She has to get off the phone.

“Don’t worry. Okay? Don’t worry. We’ll fix this and then I’ll rehire you. Okay?” She has no idea if this is possible, but it makes Magda stop crying. She ends the call with Magda’s grateful exclamations still echoing over the line.



* * *



? ? ?

The stares of the people around her are becoming unbearable. Nisha is used to being looked at—she has always drawn attention—but it is for being fit and beautiful and privileged. These looks, she sees, are suffused with pity, or wariness, or even revulsion. What is that crazy lady doing in her robe? She has to get hold of some clothes.

She has avoided looking at the shop across the road the whole time she has sat here nursing her soy latte, but now she knows she has little choice. She gets up, tucks her phone into the pocket of her dressing-gown, and makes her way across the road to the Global Cat Foundation goodwill store.



* * *



? ? ?

The smell. Dear God, the smell. The very air in the shop is a stale perfume of scraping by, of a singular lack of beauty, and of despair. She walks in, turns on her heel and walks straight out again, standing on the roadside breathing gulps of the relative freshness of traffic-filled Brompton Road. She waits a minute, composes herself, then turns and walks back in. “It’s only for a few hours,” she mutters, under her breath. She just needs something that will get her through a few hours.

The barrel-shaped woman with turquoise hair looks at her as she walks in and she ignores her slightly challenging “Hello.” Everything in here looks and feels cheap. She doesn’t even want to touch the blouses on their rails, the nylon shirts and market-stall sweaters. There is an old woman two rails away looking at the shoes, her face screwed up in concentration as she examines each for size and condition. She is going to have to wear the kind of clothes a woman like this is buying.

Just for a few hours, she tells herself. You can do this.

She picks through the rails with the tips of her fingernails until she finds a jacket that looks barely worn, a pair of trousers that look like they might be a US 4. The jacket is seven pounds and fifty pence, and the trousers eleven.

“Get locked out, did you?”

She doesn’t want to speak to this woman with her blue hair, but she forces a half-smile. “Something like that.”

“Do you want to try them on?”

“No,” she says, curtly. No, I do not want to try them on. No, I do not want to go into your horrible, reeking, curtained-off corner cubicle. I do not want to be in the same zip code as these cheap, stale-smelling clothes that have been worn by God knows who, but my husband is having some kind of mid-life crisis and trying to destroy me so that he can get a divorce, and I cannot fight him in a bathrobe.