Page 44 of Someone Else's Shoes
‘I thought I had a lot of clothes,’ Nisha says.
‘Oh, they aren’t mine.’ Jasmine motions her to sit down at the table. ‘Those are ironing and alterations.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what I do when I’m not at the hotel. Ironing and alterations.’
Nisha stares at her. When Nisha finishes her shifts at the Bentley she is so exhausted it’s all she can do to walk back and climb into a shower. The idea of starting work again is unthinkable.
Jasmine brings the lamb stew to the table and dishes up. The food, rich and delicious-smelling, steams gently on the plates beside fluffy white rice and greens. It is the first home-cooked meal Nisha has eaten in two weeks. Once she might have picked at it, inwardly calculating protein versus fibre and pushing aside the white rice. But now she mixes them together greedily with her fork, soaking the rice in the delicious gravy, eating in huge, hungry mouthfuls. She eats fast and barely stops to speak. She has finished her plate before the other two are even halfway through theirs.
‘Aleks not in today, huh?’ Jasmine says, until Nisha looks up and pauses. ‘Go on, help yourself.’
She hadn’t realized how much she had come to rely on hisdaily meals, or that Jasmine had noticed this. Nisha waits just a moment, then spoons more onto her plate. Jasmine chats to her daughter about her homework and what she has to do for school tomorrow and then, when she is sure Nisha has had enough (she has: her stomach is actually hurting), waits while her daughter clears the plates and takes them through to the kitchen. Then she turns to Nisha.
‘So where are you living?’
‘In a hotel. But …’ She doesn’t want to admit it.
‘But what?’
Nisha sighs. Stretches her arms above her head. ‘They want the room back. And I can’t afford to stay there anyway. I was going to ask you … about that little back room at the Bentley. Where you went when you had stomach-ache that time.’
‘Oh, no.’ Jasmine shakes her head. ‘Forget that. They use it for the night-shift workers. There’s people in and out of there all night. Two hours is the limit.’
‘Well … do you think I could use a guest room? Just, you know, sneak in? Like if we checked whether it had occupants that day and – I mean I’d lie on top of the covers. There’s nothing I couldn’t fix up in five minutes.’
Jasmine’s look tells her what she thinks of that idea. ‘Seriously,’ she says, ‘what are you going to do?’
‘I have no idea.’
Jasmine pushes herself up from the table. ‘Well,’ she says eventually, ‘I guess you’ll have to stay here.’ She says it like it’s already decided.
‘What?’
‘Well, where else are you going?’
‘But you don’t seem to … have a lot of room.’
‘I don’t. But you have none. So there we are. I’m not offering you room service and a five-star massage, Nisha. Just a bed. Till you can get yourself sorted. You can help mindGrace for me when you’re not on shift. Cook some meals. Pay me back that way. Hah! Unless you’re going to tell me you had a private chef and you don’t know how to cook.’
There is a brief silence. They gaze at each other.
‘Oh, no. Oh, no.’
Nisha shakes her head slowly.
Jasmine’s eyebrows shoot upwards. And suddenly the mood shifts and Jasmine erupts into fits of laughter. Nisha feels something quite alien. She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know what to feel. She is in a tiny apartment with a woman she barely knows and she is beyond grateful for a bed she wouldn’t have been caught dead in a couple of weeks ago. And this woman is laughing at her.
‘Oh, my days. You’re unreal, Nisha.’ Jasmine is wiping her eyes. ‘Seriously. You areunreal.’
‘I’m going to fix this,’ Nisha says seriously. ‘I am. I’m going to make a plan and I’m going to make that man pay. For all of it.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt it.’ Jasmine leans back in her chair. She is still laughing, as if this is the best thing she has ever heard. ‘And I am here with the popcorn for when that happens. Front-row seat. Family-sized carton. Ohhh, yes.’
The spare bed sits a full two and a half feet above Grace’s. Nisha will be sleeping on the top berth of a chipped blue bunk bed covered with stickers from some previous occupant and under a My Little Pony duvet cover. Nisha stares at the little room, which is dominated by the beds, beside which a wardrobe and a small desk jostle for space under a wall covered with posters of singers she doesn’t recognize. Grace turns from her desk to look at her.
‘You need to get your stuff off the top bunk, baby,’ says Jasmine, pointing.
