Someone Else's Shoes(2)
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She is peeling off her wet swimsuit when the yummy mummies arrive. Glossy and stick thin, they swiftly surround her, talking loudly and across each other, their voices filling the fuggy silence of the changing room, completely oblivious to her presence. Sam feels the brief equilibrium gained by her twenty-length swim evaporating like mist. It has taken her an hour here to remember that she hates these places: the apartheid of hard bodies, the corners where she and the other lumpy people try to hide. She has walked by this place a million times and wondered whether to go in. She realizes that these are the kind of women who leave her feeling worse than if she’d never come in at all.
“Are you going to have time for coffee afterward, Nina? I thought we could go to that lovely café that opened up behind Space NK. The one with the poke bowls.”
“Love to. Got to be away by eleven, though. I’m taking Leonie to the orthodontist. Ems?”
“Oh, God, yes. I need some girl time!”
These are women with designer athleisure, perfectly cut hair, and time for coffee. These are women whose kitbags bear designer labels, rather than her fake Marc Jacobs knock-off, and have husbands called Rupe or Tris, who carelessly toss envelopes containing hefty bonuses onto shining Conran Shop kitchen tables. These women drive huge off-roaders that never get muddy, double-park their way through their day and demand babyccinos for querulous children from harassed baristas, tutting when they are not made to their exact specification. They do not lie awake until 4 a.m. worrying about electricity bills, or feel sick about greeting their new boss with his shiny suit and his barely disguised disdain each morning.
They do not have husbands who stay in their pajama bottoms till midday and look hunted whenever their wives mention maybe having another go at that job application.
Sam is at that age, the age where all the wrong things seem somehow to stick, fat, the groove between her eyebrows, anxiety, while everything else—job security, marital happiness, dreams—seems to slip effortlessly away.
“You have no idea how much they’ve put up the prices at Le Méridien this year,” one of the women is saying. She is bent over, toweling her expensively tinted hair. Sam has to wiggle sideways to avoid touching her.
“I know! I tried to book Mauritius for Christmas—our usual villa’s gone up by forty percent.”
“It’s a scandal.”
Yes, it’s a scandal, she thinks. How awful for you all. She thinks of the camper-van that Phil bought two years ago to do up. “We can spend weekends by the coast,” he had said cheerfully, eyeing the huge van now blocking their driveway with its giant sunflower on the side. He never got beyond replacing the back bumper. Since his Year of Carnage, it has sat in front of their house, a nagging, daily reminder of what they have lost.
Sam wriggles into her knickers, trying to hide her pale flesh under the towel. Today she has four meetings with important clients. In half an hour she will meet Ted and Joel from Print and Transport, and they will try to win their company some vital business. And she will try to save her job. Maybe all their jobs.
No pressure there, then.
“I think we’re going to do the Maldives this year. You know, before they sink.”
“Oh, good idea. We loved it. Such a shame, the whole sinking thing.”
Another woman pushes past Sam to open her locker. She is dark-haired, like Sam, maybe a few years younger, but her body has the toned look of someone for whom hard exercise, moisturizing and buffing are daily occurrences. She smells expensive, like it actually oozes from her pores.
Sam pulls her towel tighter around her pale, dimply skin and disappears around the corner to dry her hair. When she returns, they have all gone. She breathes a sigh of relief and slumps onto the damp wooden bench. She thinks she might just go and lie down on one of the heated marble beds in the corner for half an hour. The thought fills her with sudden pleasure: a half-hour of just lying there in blissful silence.
Her phone buzzes in her jacket, hanging in the locker behind her. She reaches into her pocket and pulls it out.
You ready? We’re outside.
What? she types. We’re not due at Framptons till this afternoon.
Didn’t Simon tell you? It got moved up to 10. Come on—we need to leave.
She glances at her phone in horror. This means she is apparently due at the first meeting in twenty-three minutes. She groans, wriggles into her trousers, sweeps the black kitbag from the bench, and stomps off toward the car park.
* * *
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The dirty white van with grayside print solutions on the side is waiting by the loading doors, engine idling. She half runs, half shuffles toward it in the gym flip-flops. She will return them tomorrow but already feels guilty, as if she’s committed some major transgression. Her hair is still damp and she is puffing slightly.
“I think Simon’s gunning for you, sweetheart,” says Ted, as she climbs into the van. He shuffles up the front bench seat to make room for her. He smells of cigarette smoke and Old Spice.
“You think?”
“You want to watch him. Double-check all the meeting times with Genevieve,” says Joel, wrenching the steering wheel around. His dreadlocks are pulled back into a neat ponytail, as if in deference to the day ahead.
“It’s just not the same since they took over, is it?” says Ted, as they pull onto the main road. “Feels like we’re walking on eggshells every day.”