Someone Else's Shoes(70)
When Jasmine arrives she folds her into her arms and murmurs: Oh, baby. Oh, my poor baby. And Nisha doesn’t even mind.
* * *
? ? ?
She calls Carl that evening from Jasmine’s. She has been a ball of barely suppressed rage all day.
“Carl. I—”
“You got them?”
“Got what?” she says.
“The shoes!” he says impatiently.
“The shoes.” Jasmine had sniffed earlier. “You know the shoes are just a way for him to give you the run-around, right? He probably knows they’re the one thing you can’t trade so he’s making it look like you’re the one not meeting your side of the bargain. What man is so attached to a pair of women’s shoes?” Nisha had thought about this and it made sense. There is probably some bizarre legal stipulation that insists both sides should comply with requests or something. She would be able to find out, except she can’t get a damn lawyer with no goddamn money.
“Stop playing games, Carl,” she says. “Just give me my clothes and the alimony I’m owed, you absolute stinking piece of crap.”
“Ah. The language of the gutter. I wondered how long it would take for you to revert to type.”
She is briefly silenced. She can see Jasmine watching her from across the room as she irons, her face watchful and concerned. She had told Nisha not to call him, to wait it out, make him sweat a little, but Nisha has spent the evening building a froth of fury and cannot hold back.
“You’re the one in the gutter, Carl,” she yells. “I know you’re playing games with this stupid shoe thing to avoid paying me what I’m owed. But this is not going to work. No damn judge in the world is going to let you treat me like this.”
“Have fun finding him, darling,” he says coolly, and laughs. He actually laughs.
“Just give me my fair share! Carl, you cannot do this! I’m your wife!”
“Give me the shoes and we’ll talk.”
“You know the shoes were stolen! My God, you probably stole them yourself just to leave me with nothing! What stupid, childish game is this?”
“You’re boring me now,” he says coldly. “No shoes, no money.”
And he puts the phone down on her. She holds hers in her hand, her mouth open.
Jasmine appears in front of her and silently hands her a cushion.
Nisha looks at it. “What?” she says. “What’s that for?”
“Scream into it, babes. If you make too much noise I’ll have the council complaining again.”
* * *
? ? ?
Sometimes she thinks about the person who took her shoes, just like she thinks about the duck Aleks gave her, maybe even now traveling in an endless loop around Battersea and Peckham, still swaddled in its muslin wrappings underneath a seat. Her shoes are probably out there, stuffed into the closet of some over-made-up nightclubber, or perhaps packed in tissue by some resale agency, ready to go to an influencer in Dubai. He will probably love it if she cannot get them back. She hates him so much sometimes that it actually hurts.
“I was kind of joking about you missing your clothes more than your old man,” Jasmine says, as she removes the last of Nisha’s hair extensions in front of the television. They had started to fall out, matting into lumps where they were attached to her scalp, and Nisha’s head feels oddly light and insubstantial without them. “But you really do? Don’t you? I’m serious. You’re not crying and weeping and hating this other woman for stealing your man but, boy, are you mad about those clothes.”
It had startled her at first. She looks at Jasmine, considering this for a moment, and takes a tortilla chip from the bowl, waiting for the time it takes her to chew and swallow it. “I guess they represent something to me. They’re the version of me I fought for.”
“A version of you?”
“You don’t know what I came from,” she says.
“What did you come from?”
Nisha stares at the television for a while. Then finally she speaks. “A little town in the Midwest where we used to get our clothes from the DollarSave. And we were lucky if they were new.”
“The what?”
“It’s like a discount store. Like your Primark, or whatever it is. But not as classy.”
Jasmine lets out a bark of laughter. “You’re messing with me.”
Nisha shakes her head. She has never told anyone this story. Not since she got on the Greyhound at the age of nineteen and left Anita behind. “My mom left when I was two. I grew up with my dad and my grandma and they thought that clothes were vanity and that vanity was the Devil’s work. At least, they said that. Now I think it was because they’d rather spend any money we managed to get on cheap bourbon. So I had to beg for anything I needed and anything I got came from the DollarSave where everything smelled cheap, and they always bought me everything two sizes too big so that I would grow into it. The two of them were mean and they were tight. If they didn’t have it there they bought me second-, third-hand clothes from Goodwill.”
Jasmine is listening intently.
“The ones near us were so nasty even dirt-poor neighbors were too proud to use them. And everyone at school knew you were in Goodwill clothes. They could spot them a mile away and they’d beat you for it. I hated looking like that. I hated everything I ever wore. I would wear my dad’s work shirts when I got tall enough because those upset me less than those shitty cheap girls’ clothes. They were at least made to last. Heavy-duty. And if you looked like a boy where I lived bad things were less likely to happen to you.” Nisha lights a cigarette, and even though Jasmine doesn’t usually allow her to smoke inside the flat, she sees Nisha’s trembling hand and doesn’t stop her.