Someone Else's Shoes(37)

Nisha straightens up as Jasmine laughs, wipes her warm brow with the back of her arm. “Sure.”

It’s her fifth day at the hotel. Five days in which she has arrived at the narrow alleyway at 8 a.m., changed into the hotel-issue black clothes, eaten good pastries and cleaned disgusting rooms, all the while her mind humming with resentment. Today she will be paid, and she is not sure what she will do beyond that. The locker-room chat is full of stories of Immigration raids, of canceled visas. People come for one shift and are never seen again. Some stay weeks but never speak to another soul, their eyes darting away from contact as if they would prefer to be invisible. She sees a whole army of people who remain under the radar, living hand-to-mouth as they, like her, try to work out what to do next.

And Nisha has not yet worked out what to do next. She does not want this job, but it brings her daily proximity to her suite, and is still the best chance she has of recovering her things. Every floor that carries them closer she feels her heart beat faster as she tries to work out how she can get in. But undocumented maids do not get to work on the sixth and seventh floors. They are restricted to the cheaper rooms, the ones where business travelers and people who have booked on discount internet sites tend to spend one night. Jasmine says housekeeping staff need to be there for at least a few months before they are considered experienced or trustworthy enough to be allowed to the more exclusive floors.

She will get in there, she knows. But until she works out how, she must play a waiting game.

“Hey, baby.” She logs on to the hotel Wi-Fi (everyone does it) and calls Ray at two; she and Jasmine are on a late lunch break and she knows it will wake him far earlier than he’s used to, but she’s on her last night’s paid-for stay and she cannot work out what to do next.

“Mom? Why are you calling so early?” His voice is thick with sleep.

She tries to smile reassuringly as she speaks. “Darling—I need a favor. I need to borrow some more money. It’s a little complicated but I’ll explain everything when I’m home.”

“More money?” She hears him shift in his bed.

“Yes. Another five hundred. Do you think you could wire it to me today? The same place as last time would be great.”

“I can’t, Mom.”

“You don’t have to do it right now. I just wanted to call early so that you could plan your day around it.”

“No, I literally can’t. Dad has frozen my account. Apparently there’s been fraudulent activity on it. Didn’t he tell you?”

“What?”

“I can’t buy anything. Not clothes, not games, not even deodorant. He says I have to put any requests in an email to Charlotte. They pay with his card and have it sent to me.”

Oh, God. Carl had worked it out.

“Don’t you have anything you can use?” she says desperately. “Your savings card? What happened to your savings account?”

“Ugh. Frozen too. He’s so mean. I literally have no access to my own money just now. Can you talk to him about it, Mom? He only speaks to me through Charlotte.”

“I will, darling. I’ll do that. I’m so sorry. I’ll—I’ll speak to you later.”

She ends the call, lets out a low groan and slumps on the bench. Across the room Jasmine is chatting in low tones to Viktor. When Nisha looks up she is staring at her. “You okay, Nish?”

“My—my ex has frozen our bank accounts. It’s . . . it’s a mess.”

Jasmine raises her eyebrows. “Your ex? What is he? A deadbeat dad? Don’t tell me, has he cleared you out?”

“Something like that.”

“Ugh!” she exclaims. “I knew something like that was going on. You know what my mum once said to me? ‘Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.’ My ex, he’s good as gold. Pays his share on the fifteenth regular as. Shows up for Gracie. Always speaks respectfully. Mind you, I do wonder if it’s because he’s still soft on me.” She shrugs, gestures to her face. “I am a lot to get over.” She laughs suddenly, so that Nisha is unsure whether she’s joking. “He got a job? Your bloke?”

“Carl? Kind of.”

“What does he do?”

“Um. Import-export. That kind of thing.”

“Oh, like my friend Sanjay. He runs a warehouse out near Southall. Buys up stuff on the docks that’s fallen out of containers and sells it to the market traders. One minute he’s living high, next he doesn’t have a pot to piss in. What about your folks?”

“I don’t—I don’t speak to my family.”

“Oh, mate. You got kids?”

“One boy. But he’s in New York. He’s—he’s fine.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess. Though you must miss him. How are you getting by?”

“Payday today, right?”

Jasmine pulls a face. “It is, babe, but you won’t be getting a taxi to Louis Vuitton. You know what I’m saying?”

She’s not wrong. At the end of the day Nisha receives an envelope with a barely comprehensible handwritten payslip and ?425 for her week of ten-hour shifts. The undocumented maids get eight pounds fifty an hour. Fifty has been deducted for the use of the uniform. She stares at it, unable to believe this paltry amount is the result of all those hours of work. It takes her a moment to calculate that at that rate she will not be able to afford to stay at the Tower Primavera while she waits to reclaim her life, cheap as it is. In a matter of days she will have nowhere left to go.