Someone Else's Shoes(31)
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She is nineteen-year-old Anita, just off a Greyhound bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, who blinked, gritty-eyed, at the towering buildings around her, and asked for a job at the first place she came to, a narrow, tired-looking three-star hotel near 42nd Street. It had taken her ten weeks of cleaning hotel rooms to get a better housekeeping job working for a wealthy family. Ten interminable weeks of disgusting bathrooms, leering male guests, who decided to stay in their room while she cleaned, ten weeks of bedbugs and stained linen and foul spillages and chemicals so strong they stripped all the moisture from her hands. After eighteen months with the family, she got a job working reception at the Soho gallery of a friend of that family, and the moment she had donned her anonymous uniform of black sweater and trousers, and greeted the first slightly distracted customer, Anita had become Nisha and swore that she was never going to clean again.
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They do eleven more rooms in the next two hours. It is backbreaking work, lifting mattresses to make the beds, replacing furniture (why do guests move tables and armchairs?) and vacuuming. There is a used condom in one room, and bloodstained sheets in another. Both make her gag, and her eyes water almost constantly. “People are animals,” Jasmine mutters, ripping the undersheet from the mattress. “They come in here and from the moment they check in it’s like they turn into savages.” She harrumphs as she heads off to find a new protector.
As Jasmine chats and occasionally hums alongside her, Nisha tells herself repeatedly just to get through it. That this will soon be over. She thinks of the many ways in which she will make Carl pay, only a few of which involve a swift and merciful death. At eleven they are allowed a tea break, and take their place in the tiny locker room, where a heavily made-up receptionist called Tiffany and a bell-boy sit and vape on the little wooden benches. Nearly everyone she meets smokes, either cigarettes outside or gulping thirstily from vapes. Nisha accepts a cigarette from the bell-boy, grateful that the acrid smell of smoke briefly makes her forget the worse human scents she has just left behind.
“You okay, Nisha? You’ve gone a bit quiet.” Jasmine refills her tea and hands it over to her.
“Just . . . I’ve not done this for a while.”
“You don’t say.” Jasmine’s laugh bursts into the room. “You’re doing fine, babe. You’re going to have to speed up a little but you’re all good.” She looks up. “Those nails ain’t going to last long. I stopped getting normal manicures some time around 2005. They’ve got to be armor-plated to survive this.”
Nisha looks down at her nails, the beautiful dark red edges now chipped from the endless scrubbing and rubbing, even with the latex gloves they are given. She can feel the sweat drying on her skin. Just a day, she thinks, and then she will work out how to get into the suite and never have to do this again.
In the meantime she finds herself listening to the workers chat around her. Jasmine, she observes, is a life force, sunny and opinionated. She laughs often, as if almost everything is amusing, and although in normal life Nisha might have found this irritating, today she is grateful for it. She has had so little human contact in the last forty-eight hours that listening to normal conversation is almost pleasurable. The workers chat about bus routes, about canceled benefits and dysfunctional families. She says little, because what can she say? To these people she is just Anita, another temporary worker, who may or may not be here tomorrow.
At lunchtime—which takes place at two—they are given sandwiches by Aleks, the man who was in the kitchen at breakfast. She had suspected they would be the same kind of cheap bread and filling that she has seen at the Tower Primavera, but they are beautiful soft sourdough bread filled with cheese, cured meats and butterhead lettuce. He hands them over with exaggerated politesse, as if they are cherished guests. She would normally ask for salad, but she is so hungry after the morning’s physical work that she just puts her head down and eats, taking huge, indelicate bites.
“Aleks says food is for the soul, so he ignores the management and does us the same he would do for the guests,” says Jasmine, chewing. “I worship that man.” As she takes another huge soft mouthful, Nisha thinks she probably worships him too.
“Jasmine? When . . . when will we be doing the penthouse?”
“The penthouse? Oh, no, babes. They’re picky up there, so it’s got to be senior housekeepers like me, people the hotel knows they can rely on. Mind you, those arseholes never tip. It’s not a gig you want.”
Nisha blinks, and focuses extra hard on her sandwich.
And then, at six, as her lower back twinges and the ache in her shoulders switches from intermittent to a nonstop, pulsing protest, the day is over. Jasmine calls her daughter, tells her she is on her way, asks her to tell Nana to leave her some stew, and hopes the buses will sort themselves out this evening. Her gait is a little wearier now, her laugh a little less ready. Nisha can barely move. She has pains in muscles she didn’t know she had. She puts on the horrible jacket and sits slumped on the wooden bench, wondering how she’ll pluck up the energy to walk back to the hotel. She’ll get a taxi, she thinks, then remembers she has no cash for a taxi.
“How far you got to go, babe?” says Jasmine, who is checking her appearance in the small speckled mirror on the back of the door, reapplying lipstick with a connoisseur’s slow, sure hand.