Page 81 of Someone Else's Shoes
‘Joel, I – I –’ she stutters. She turns and runs back towards the office, wrestling the gloves off and hurling them behind her as she goes.
Sam walks briskly through the cubicles until she reaches her own, her colour high, her sights fixed in front of her, sure that everyone in there must know what just happened. Her body feels as if it has been ignited, as if she is radiating heat, and her thoughts are churning and jumbled.
She sits down in her chair a little shakily, staring unseeing at the screen.She has just kissed Joel. She has just kissed Joel. She wanted to do a lot more than just kiss Joel. She can still feel his mouth on hers, his tough, sinewy body against hers. She thinks of Ted’s appalled expression, then abruptly lets out a half-laugh, a strange high-pitched squeal, and puts both hands to her face, immediately mortified. What on earth has she done? Who has she become? She glances guiltily behind her, but nobody seems to have noticed. Heads are bowed. Marina is walking past with a mug of coffee. The photocopier by the fire-exit door appears to be on the blink again. She jumps slightly as her phone buzzes. Joel.
Are you okay?
She stares at it.
I think so, she types, with trembling fingers.Did Ted say anything?
Just that it was none of his business. He went straight out again.
You think I should go after him?
No. No. I don’t know. Maybe I should. I don’t know what just happened.
She glances up, checking to see if anyone has noticed, if anyone can sense that this is her, Sam Kemp, sneaking around locking lips with a work colleague. Was this almost having an affair? Was this where her life was heading? Did Ted think she was a terrible person?Help me, she thinks, not sure who she is actually asking. And then she jumps out of her skin because a dark-haired woman is standing in the doorway to her cubicle glaring at her and saying, in a loud, American voice: ‘WHERE ARE MY SHOES, BITCH?’
25
Nisha had walked unchallenged into the offices of Uberprint. The men gathered by the vans glanced at her but nobody seemed to think it unusual that she was walking straight through the back entrance. After a cursory glance at her legs they turned back to their discussion. The offices are drab, the kind of place that might sell pet insurance or drain solutions, and she wrinkled her nose at the smell of stale carpet and machine coffee as she headed down a corridor that looked like it led to the main office. A young woman lifted her head from her phone at the reception desk, but didn’t stop her, and Nisha pushed through a set of double doors, finding herself in a large space divided into grey cubicles.
In the corner of the room she saw a big, glass-windowed office containing a gathering of young men in cheap suits, while around her a vague hum of half-hearted industry emanated from the individual desks, people clicking on keyboards, murmuring into phones or sipping tea while chatting at the photocopier. She scanned the room, her bag clamped to her side. Then she spied a woman, hunched in one of the far cubicles as she took her seat, her badly tinted hair visible above the composite partitions. Nisha had stopped and stared.
Nisha had not known what she would do when she finally confronted the woman who had caused so much trouble, a thief who also happens to hold the key to her future. But there was something about the shabbiness of her, the depressed slope of her shoulders that instantly infuriated her.I have been bested bythis? she thought, as she strode across the office. Her heartbeat started a loud, insistent thumping in her ears. And suddenly she is in the cubicle, and the woman is spinning in her seat to face her, phone in a limp hand, her features rigid with shock.
‘Wh-what?’ the woman is stammering. ‘What are you talking about?’
She looks, Nisha notes, with some distant sense of gratification, genuinely terrified.
‘You stole my shoes! At the gym. You stole my shoes and you’ve been wearing them. I’ve got you on CCTV and – and – oh, my God – is that myChanel jacket?’
The woman flushes to the roots of her hair, glances guiltily at the cream bouclé jacket draped on the back of her office chair.
‘What the actual –’ Nisha wrenches the jacket from the chair and checks the label. ‘Where are my shoes? Where is my bag? What have you done with my things? I’m going to call the cops.’
‘I didn’t steal anything! It was an accident!’
‘Oh, an accident! And instead of handing my stuff in you decided to wear my shoes to a bar? And bring my Chanel jacket to work? Sure! That’s definitely an accident.’
A small crowd has gathered around the cubicle. The woman is staring at her, her hands waving, palms up, in front of her. ‘Look – I can explain – the gym was –’
‘You have no idea the trouble you’ve caused. Bet you thought I’d never find you, right? Well, you have no idea who you’re dealing with.’
A man appears at the entrance of the cubicle: gelled hair, cheap suit, bringing with him a slightly self-conscious air of authority.
‘What’s going on here?’
‘What’s going on? Ask her, the shoe thief.’
‘I told you! I didn’t know whose they were! I must have picked up the wrong bag and when I went back to return them they were –’
‘I want my shoes.’
The man turns to Sam. ‘Sam? What’s going on?’
The woman turns to him. ‘Simon – I can explain this. When I went to the gym – the day you saw me in the flip-flops – there was a mix-up with the bags and –’
