Someone Else's Shoes(97)

“Soon, baby. I just have to get these shoes to your father and then he’ll have to give me the money.”

“I hate him,” he had said vehemently, and when she tried, half-heartedly, to protest that he shouldn’t think that, he really shouldn’t, he had asked why? In what way did his dad even love him? In what way did Ray owe him anything? And she hadn’t been able to come up with a good answer.

They had both been quiet for a few long, anguishing moments and then he had said, in a quiet voice: “Mom? Remember that song you used to sing me? Would you sing it to me now?”

When she had sung, her voice had trembled.

    You are my sunshine, my only sunshine . . .

You make me happy, when skies are gray . . .



“Couldn’t sleep either, huh?” Jasmine says, handing her a coffee.

A police helicopter has circled overhead for hours, its vibrations sending shock waves into the night sky, filling the atmosphere with a sense of vague, unspecified threat. Nisha takes the cup and shakes her head.

Jasmine sits down in the little fold-up chair she keeps on the balcony, adjusting her dressing-gown over her knees. “Me either. I keep asking myself if we’re nuts, trying to do this.”

Nisha knows that what Jasmine actually means is that she could lose her job. Every bit of this is a sackable offense. When Jasmine had outlined the plan to the others, Nisha had seen both jaws physically drop, as if they were characters in a cartoon. Nisha has spent hours trying to work out how to protect Jasmine: it will be Nisha who takes the key card, Nisha who removes the shoes, Nisha who, in a worst-case scenario, will hold up her hands and claim it is all down to her, that she bullied Jasmine into collaborating, that she is guilty of all of it. But it still feels like a risk.

“You don’t have to do this,” Nisha says, for the fifth time. “You’ve done so much for me. I don’t want to put you at—”

“Nish. Do I look like someone who does things they don’t want to do? No. I’ve thought about this over and over. What we’re doing is righteous. We’re getting you what is rightfully yours. We’re going to help you. I’m your friend, and I’m going to help you.” She sneaks a sideways look at Nisha. “Besides, if I don’t get you out of my daughter’s bunk bed and back into your own place soon Gracie is going to kick my arse.”

They smile. Then Jasmine’s smile falls and she takes another sip of her coffee. “The thing I’m worried about is when you hand the shoes over. If your bloke is going to keep his side of the bargain.”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that too.”

Carl will do anything to win. If this is just a game to him—and it is entirely possible that it is—he will simply find some other obstacle to place in the way of her settlement. This is her greatest fear: that he will simply have her running in circles endlessly in this strange city, penniless and powerless, while her boy sits alone in that school of his, growing sadder and sadder, thousands of miles away from her. She had thought her position protected her. She had thought the law protected her. And what she had discovered was that everything could be stripped away, and all she had was her own resources, whatever it was that kept her standing.

They drink their coffee in silence, looking at the lights of the city as it slowly comes to life, the red tail-lights of the vehicles making their way into the lead-lined dark.

Nisha closes her eyes. The thread pulls ever tighter.

“Well, you know what they say? One step at a time.” Jasmine swigs the last of her coffee and pats the wrap on her head that holds her hair in place as she sleeps. “Come on, babe. We get to work. Then we get your shoes. We’ll worry about the rest of it later. And step one is I’m going to put some toast on.”

She disappears inside. Nisha sits and stares at the sky. And then she pulls out her phone and types a message.

    JULIANA? Is this still your number?



She hesitates, and then adds: It’s Anita.

She waits another moment then presses send, watching the little message wink its way into the ether.



* * *



? ? ?

Sam walks the dog in the dark, forgetting for once to be nervous of shadowy strangers on the sodium-lit street. She is thinking about the day ahead, the strange thing she has agreed to. She has never done anything like this in her life. Samantha Kemp: a middle-aged woman, a print manager, married, one kid, still living in the same postcode in which she was raised. She is about to do something completely ridiculous to return shoes to a woman who doesn’t even like her. These facts swirl around and around her head. But in truth everything in her life feels so unhinged, so unreal just now, that this day does not feel so far removed. Besides, the worst of everything has already happened: she has lost, or pretty much lost, everything that was important to her, aside from Andrea.

As Kevin sniffs interestedly at the base of every tree and lamppost, she thinks about Jasmine and Andrea, and how they took to each other immediately. Andrea can do that with people: she seems to have a kind of shorthand, a straightforward, open friendliness that cuts through awkwardness and leaves people basking in her glow. When they were younger she could never understand why Andrea was friends with someone like her. Sam had never possessed that charisma, the strange unidentifiable aura that meant people always wanted to be near her. Andrea was not coming today, though—“Too identifiable,” Jasmine had decreed, and Nisha had said, “Damn. Scarfy can turn it on when she has to.”