Someone Else's Shoes(50)
“Babe, that’s all you’ve got right now.”
Nisha watches as Charlotte steps into the gold elevator with her friend. She can remember buying that coat in the store in New York, the way it felt the first time she slid it over her shoulders in the private dressing room, the gorgeous cut, the comforting, faintly leathery scent of the shearling. The way the shop assistants smiled at her as she gazed at her reflection in the mirror. The softness. The beautiful, luxurious softness of it.
“I hate you,” she says to Jasmine, as Charlotte disappears behind the sliding gold doors.
“I know,” says Jasmine. “Come on. Let’s get you a sandwich.”
* * *
? ? ?
“I feel like fucking Cinderella. Except the Ugly Sister has got my fucking dress, my pumpkins, the fucking blind mice and the whole lot.” Nisha takes a bite from the sandwich that Aleks has prepared, then pushes the plate away.
“I don’t think the mice were blind. But okay.” Jasmine sips her tea. “I hear you, babe. I hear you. Oh. Hang on.” She glances at her phone. “Sandra wants me in the office. It’ll be about that carpet stain in two oh three. You stay here. I’ll be back.”
Nisha is so locked into her rant of injustice that it takes her several minutes to notice that Jasmine has disappeared. She eyes the sandwich—it’s prawn and mango, delicious—but her stomach has gone into cramps and she doesn’t think she can eat any more.
Aleks gets up from his chair slowly. He puts down his book—something about slow cooking in the Nordic highlands—and reaches into his pocket for a packet of cigarettes. He shakes out the package and offers it to her, flipping one into his mouth with an easy gesture.
“I don’t smoke,” she says irritably.
“I know,” he says.
He walks out of the back door where the bins are and, after a moment, she follows him. It’s not that she wants to be with him, but she doesn’t think she can be alone, without someone to witness what she is going through. He has lit his cigarette and is standing by the low wall. There is a vague, cabbagy smell seeping from the huge plastic food bins but, like the other members of staff, she barely notices it.
“My husband,” she says. “He’s turned me over. Stripped everything I own from me. And I have no fucking way of getting my life back.”
“That’s not good . . .” He exhales a long plume of smoke thoughtfully. “I believe the English expression is: he has done you up like a kipper.”
She is so startled by this that she lets out a laugh. “Are you kidding me? A kipper? What does that even mean?”
He laughs. “I have no idea. English expressions are very strange. A guest told me last week I was ‘yanking his chain.’ I definitely never touched his chain.” His smile is slightly too knowing for him to be completely serious.
He holds out his cigarette packet again and this time she takes one. When he lights it for her he takes care that his scarred hands, cupped around the flame, do not touch hers. She inhales with the guilty nihilistic pleasure that comes with every cigarette she has smoked.
“So what are you going to do?”
She deflates. She takes another drag. Then she shrugs, and suddenly she is speaking, unsure why she feels she must explain. “I have no clue. I’m staying in Jasmine’s tiny apartment. Her kid hates me because I’m in her room, which has barely enough room for her as it is. I’m cleaning toilets. Actual toilets. It’s basically all my worst nightmares and I have no idea how I’m going to get out of it.”
“But you haven’t spoken to him?”
“Not since the day it happened. He’s not taking my calls.”
He nods, as if he understands. They sit and smoke in silence for a while.
“If you cannot fix it,” he says, “maybe you have to look at it differently.”
She frowns at him. He keeps gazing out at the alleyway. Two pigeons are tussling over a chicken bone, snatching and tossing it, before hobbling after it on deformed claws.
“Maybe you have to think about all the things about your old life that you didn’t enjoy and say, ‘Okay, so here is an opportunity to start again. Perfect freedom. No ties. Maybe this is the dream.’ Maybe one day you will even be happier than you were.”
“With no money, no home and none of my things? That’s the biggest bunch of Hallmark greetings-card self-help crap I’ve ever heard.” She inhales angrily.
“Perhaps. But if you cannot change your situation, then you have no choice. You can only change how you think about it.”
“And you like working eighteen-hour shifts here, do you? Till you’re dead on your feet? Being yelled at by Michel because some guest says you haven’t cooked the bacon just right? Catching a bus home in the small hours only to do it all again the next day with a double shift because they didn’t pay the last guy properly and he fucked off somewhere else?”
He looks at her then, and his eyes crinkle with amusement. “I do. Besides, I always cook the bacon perfectly.”
She makes a scoffing sound. “Don’t give me that bullshit.”
“I get to make people happy with my food.”
“These guests wouldn’t know happiness if it whacked them in the face with a dumbbell. The people who eat in this hotel eat for fuel, or for status. The women eat with half their brain cells calculating the calorie count of every mouthful. The food is an agony for them as much as a pleasure. It’s something they’re never allowed to fully enjoy. Which is why half of it gets left on their plates.”