Someone Else's Shoes(60)

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Grace doesn’t talk to her the whole way home. Nisha doesn’t even try. Grace plugs in her earphones and gets on and off the two buses in silence, so that they walk alongside each other without acknowledging each other’s presence. When they finally reach the apartment Grace mumbles that she’s not hungry, she had something at Nana’s, and disappears into her bedroom with a slammed door.

Nisha has had enough. She makes a cheese sandwich out of the remaining slices of bread in the bread bin, and swallows its two claggy halves, trying not to think about the duck, which is probably still en route to a depot somewhere. There is no hot water, so she puts on the electric immersion heater and twenty minutes later shuts herself into the bathroom, pouring shampoo into the bath in place of decent bath oils or scented bubbles.

She lies there, submerged to her chin, for an hour and a half, her thoughts pinging between errant ducks, Louboutin shoes and the annoying enigma that is Aleks, half trying to suppress the desire to kill the entire world, half working out the various ways in which she could do it. There was barely a time in Nisha’s life when she couldn’t remember being angry, but now it’s as if her eyes have been opened to the myriad ways in which just being female is like being dealt some infinitely crappier hand—a hand nobody else even acknowledges. She thinks of her teens, the endless daily trail of men who tried to touch her or leered at her, the many ways in which she could not go about her daily life without unwanted attention. The man at the feed shop who offered her a dollar when she was twelve if she’d let him put his hand down her top. The guy at the garage who used to make obscene gestures when she bought her gas. The creeps on subways, the men who followed her back to her shared apartment, the subtler, more expensive hands on her ass when she worked at the gallery. She thinks about the ways in which she has been expected to conform to some ideal that takes endless, endless effort just to stay married: keep your figure, create a perfect home environment, be interesting, have great hair every day (but none anywhere else), wear shoes that make your feet hurt, lacy underwear that cuts your hoo-ha in two, make sure your bedroom antics are porn-star level (even if your husband seems to think the act of getting a hard-on should be enough for his side). She tries to imagine Carl getting his pubic hair lasered to make sure he was attractive enough for her, and it’s so unthinkable she laughs out loud. And now, because she is female and did all the things expected of her, she’s been discarded for a younger, supposedly sweeter model.

And then, of course, laugh off all this unfairness or be deemed a humorless witch.

These thoughts, which she has suppressed for years (what good would have come from acknowledging them anyway?), are popping up to the surface, like the bubbles in the bath, irrepressible, relentless.

She lies there hearing Grace’s insistent music through the closed doors until her fingers and toes wrinkle, the tiny mirror is obscured by steam and the water becomes uncomfortably chilly. She is just emerging from the bathroom when Jasmine returns. The door slams and she is walking up the narrow hallway, unwinding a scarf from her neck when she spies Nisha. She walks straight past her into the kitchen.

“Babe! So where’s this surprise? I’m so hungry my mouth was watering the whole way home.”

Nisha stops in her tracks. “Oh.” She pulls a face. “Yeah, the thing is I had a problem on the bus. Some stupid woman pretty much sat on my lap and—”

“But what is it? You told me not to eat.” Jasmine is opening the oven door, and lifting the lids on empty pots that sit on the hob.

Nisha’s heart sinks. “Sorry. It—The food thing didn’t happen.”

There is a brief silence.

“So—what . . . You made nothing?”

She stares at Nisha, then closes her eyes slowly, as if she is trying hard to quell some imminent eruption. “I turned down coconut chicken curry for this.”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay. Well, I guess I’ll just have beans on toast. I need to eat fast. My blood sugar is way down.”

Nisha feels a sudden stab of discomfort. “I—I think I ate the last of the bread.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And you . . . didn’t think to go out and buy some more?”

“I needed a soak in the tub. I had a really bad day. Look, let me get dressed and I’ll get some.”

Jasmine’s look could cut glass. “Well, what did Grace eat?”

“She said she ate at your mom’s.”

“Mum told me she ate nothing.”

Jasmine closes her eyes, and lets out a sigh. She opens them, moves past Nisha and opens the airing cupboard to wedge in a pile of freshly laundered sheets. She stops. “Hang on. Who put the immersion heater on?”

“Me?” says Nisha.

“How long has it been on?”

“I don’t know. A couple of hours? I forget.”

Jasmine slams the illuminated switch off. “Jesus. You know how much that thing costs? Girl, you can’t just forget that shit. Oh, my God.” She slams the door shut and turns on her heel. “No food, no hot water and a whacking great electric bill. You think this is a fricking hotel? You think you’re still in the Bentley? Nish, just because you never had to worry about money doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t! You’re just taking the piss now! Jesus!”