Someone Else's Shoes(3)

There are two empty, sugar-strewn paper bags on the dashboard, and Ted hands her a third, containing a huge, still-warm jam doughnut.

“There you go,” he says. “Breakfast of champions.”

She should not eat it. It contains at least twice as many calories as she has just burned off swimming. She can hear Cat’s sigh of disapproval from here. But she hesitates, then stuffs it into her mouth and closes her eyes at the warm, sugary comfort. These days, Sam takes her pleasures where she can.

“Genevieve heard him talking on the phone about redundancies again,” says Joel. “She says when she walked into his office he changed the subject.”

Every time she hears “redundancy,” a word that now flutters around the office like a trapped moth, her stomach clenches. She doesn’t know what they will do if she loses her job too. Phil is refusing to take the anti-depressants the doctor prescribed. He says they make him sleepy, as if he doesn’t sleep most days till eleven anyway.

“It won’t come to that,” says Ted, unconvincingly. “Sam’s going to bring in the business today, aren’t you?”

She realizes they’re both looking at her. “Yes,” she says. And then, more positively, “Yes!”

She does her makeup in the small vanity mirror, cursing quietly every time Joel goes over a bump, and rubbing off the resulting smudges with a licked finger. She checks her hair, which has not dried too badly, all things considered. She flicks through the file of paperwork, making sure she has all the figures at her fingertips. She has a vague memory of when she felt confident about all this stuff, when she could walk into a room and know that she was good at her job. Come on, Sam, just try to be that person again, she tells herself silently. And then she slips her feet out of the flip-flops and reaches into her kitbag for her shoes.

“Five minutes away,” says Joel.

It is only then she realizes that although the kitbag looks like hers it is not hers. This bag does not contain her comfortable black pumps, suitable for pounding pavements and negotiating print deals. This bag contains a pair of vertiginous red crocodile-skin Christian Louboutin slingbacks.

She pulls out a shoe and stares at it, its strappy, unfamiliar weight dangling in her hand.

“Blimey,” says Ted. “Is the first meeting at Stringfellows?”

Sam bends down and rifles through the bag, coming up with the other shoe, a pair of jeans and then a neatly folded pale Chanel jacket.

“Oh, my God,” she says. “This isn’t mine. I’ve picked up the wrong bag. We have to go back.”

“No time,” says Joel, staring straight ahead at the road. “We’re pushing it already.”

“But I need my bag.”

“Sorry, Sam,” he says. “We’ll go back later. Wear what you wore to the gym?”

“I can’t wear flip-flops to a business meeting.”

“Wear the shoes that are in there?”

“You’re kidding me.”

Ted takes the shoe from her. “She has a point, Joel. Those shoes aren’t very . . . Sam.”

“Why? What’s very ‘me’?”

“Well. Plain. You like plain stuff.” He pauses. “Sensible stuff.”

“You know what they say about shoes like that,” says Joel.

“What?”

“They’re not for standing up in.”

They nudge each other, chuckling.

Sam snatches the shoe back from him. It’s half a size too small. She eases her foot into it and fastens the strap.

“Great,” she says, looking at her foot. “I get to pitch to Framptons looking like a call-girl.”

“At least it’s an expensive call-girl,” says Ted.

“What?”

“You know. Rather than the five-quid-no-teeth-blowjob kind . . .”

Sam waits for Joel’s laughter to die down. “Well, thanks, Ted,” she says, staring out of the window. “I feel so much better now.”



* * *



? ? ?

The meeting isn’t in an office, as she had expected. There is a problem in Transport, and they will have to pitch in the loading area, where Michael Frampton is going to be overseeing some issue with a botched hydraulic system. Sam tries to walk in the heels, feeling the cold air on her feet. She wishes she had had a pedicure, maybe some time since 2009. Her ankles keep wobbling, as if they’re made of rubber, and she wonders how on earth anyone is expected to walk normally in footwear like this. Joel was right. These are not shoes for standing up in.

“You okay?” says Ted, as they draw closer to the group of men.

“No,” she mutters. “I feel like I’m walking on chopsticks.”

A forklift truck carries a huge bale of paper in front of them, causing them to swerve, and her to stumble, its beep a warning that sounds almost deafening in the cavernous space. She watches as every man around the lorry swivels his head to look at her. And then down at her shoes.

“Thought you weren’t coming.”

Michael Frampton is a dour Yorkshireman, the kind who will let you know how hard he’s had it, and simultaneously imply that you haven’t, in any conversational exchange.

Sam musters a smile. “So sorry,” she says, her voice bright. “We had another meeting which—”