Someone Else's Shoes(44)

She jumps as the door opens and Joel climbs in, bringing with him the chill air of outside and a warm scent of citrus. He closes the door and she sees he has his petrol-station cheese sandwiches in his hand. He is wearing his puffy coat and his tiny neat dreadlocks are tied back in a low ponytail.

“At least run the engine and get some heat in here, Sam. Jesus, it’s freezing!”

“I just—”

“I couldn’t work out where you’d been the last few lunch breaks. Simon sent that idiot Franklin out with us to pitch for the Cameron job. God knows how he brought that in. And I came to see if you wanted to grab a coffee, but they said you weren’t in there. And then I saw your car windows had steamed up so—”

Franklin. Young, swaggering Franklin with his shiny suit and his perma-grin. So that was it. She lets out a slow breath. “I . . . prefer it out here just at the moment.”

His smile fades. He studies her face. “Want to talk about it?”

“Not really.” If she says a word about it right now she will cry. And not even normal tears: she feels as if she is permanently on the verge of huge, terrifying sobs that will engulf her and leave her red-nosed, snotty and heaving. And Joel witnessing that will be almost the worst part.

“Ah, babe . . .” He shakes his head in disgust. “Ted said Simon gave you a hard time in yesterday’s budget meeting.”

She is so conscious of the proximity of Joel in her little car. Of the smooth skin on the back of his hands, so close to her thigh, of the male scent of him. His wet eyelashes curl up in tiny starry points. She has never seen an adult with eyelashes like that. She feels as if she could touch each one and she would feel its spiky imprint on her fingertip. They have known each other for eight years and she is not sure she has ever noticed his eyelashes before.

She thinks suddenly about Phil rejecting her the previous evening, the way she had viewed her sleepless reflection in the mirror that morning: old, baggy, unwanted. It is too hard to have Joel being nice to her. Because, of course, he is not sweet on her. That was just her getting overexcited in those stupid shoes. He probably sees her as some geriatric auntie figure. Let’s make sure poor old Sam is okay.

She is suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that he needs to leave her car immediately. “Actually,” she says, “I’m fine. By myself, I mean.”

She cannot look at him as she says this, doesn’t want to see the sympathetic look, the head tilt. She keeps staring at her knees, a peculiar smile on her face. “Really. I’m just going to listen to some music and chill out for a bit.”

He says, after a moment: “I could just eat my sandwiches and keep you company.”

“No,” she says, glancing over. “They’re cheese. I don’t like cheese.”

They sit in the heavy silence. I don’t like cheese? she thinks. Since when?

“Okay,” he says, after a short pause. “I was just . . . checking in. Just . . . wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m fine. It’s all good. You don’t need to check on me. I’m a grown woman!” She looks up then, an awful wonky smile on her face, and she sees something in his expression that makes her stomach turn itself inward into a tight knot. “Really. It’s very kind of you. But you should go. You should go.” Her voice is harder than she had intended.

He waits a moment longer, and then, without a word, he picks up his unopened sandwiches and climbs out of the car.





sixteen


Jasmine is off. Nisha checks the rota and sees the other woman is owed several days, perhaps because she is working through the weekend. Much as she misses cheerful conversation, she is glad Jasmine isn’t there. Anger—and guilt at what she almost cost her—have permeated her so completely she thinks she might combust.

She completes her shifts in a silent fury, powering her way through the filthy bathrooms, scowling at anyone who asks her for an extra roll of toilet paper or hair conditioner. She knows there may be complaints from guests about her attitude, so she pretends she cannot speak English, adopts a half-smile that is faintly threatening and carries in her demeanor at least the vague suggestion that she might return to murder annoying guests in their beds.

Nisha has tried six top divorce lawyers back in New York, only three of whom would take her call, and two who said they had already been retained by Carl. She calls her bank, and Jeff, its relationship manager, promises he will get back to her but doesn’t. Four times. Carl. She tries to take out a credit card so she can at least live, but the application fails because she does not have a permanent address in the UK, and the US credit-card company will only send it to her home address in New York. Which will clearly not be forwarding her post. Carl.

She calls Ray every day and talks to him of trivial things: of what he had for lunch, his conviction that one of his roommates is secretly a Mormon, his despair at not being able to stop biting his nails, and she knows she has no vocabulary with which to explain to him what has happened to their family. Her boy. Her gorgeous, fragile boy, who makes her heart ache and bleed at a distance of five thousand miles. She will have to tell him soon, but she is afraid of inflicting this wound on him when she cannot be there to comfort him. It is too soon after the Thing.

She hates Carl for this perhaps most of all.

When she hides out in the kitchen for her mid-afternoon breaks, Aleks is there, sometimes prepping for evening service, sometimes sitting in the corner reading a tattered paperback, usually something about food. He doesn’t speak to her, but when he sees her he puts his book down, moves to his station and cooks wild mushroom omelets with fines herbes, toasted sandwiches with chicken and truffle mayonnaise. He places these in front of her and leaves her to eat, his manner unobtrusive as if he understands that this is a woman in the middle of a raging inferno, and he merely wishes to leave her a small fire hose. He has hair that always looks as if he has just woken up, and tired eyes, and there does not appear to be an ounce of fat on his body. It’s not that she has noticed this particularly, but she has always unconsciously registered people’s apparent fitness or body-fat ratios and he looks . . . fit. Tired, like all the chefs (the long hours and inferno-like conditions of the kitchen mean they seem to age at twice the rate of anyone else), but fit.