first at the blonde, then at the brunette, and sighed, ‘Ah, ladies, I need to buy two tickets for the ball, naturally. I can get them here, yes?’
Immediately the women fell away from him, trying to disguise looks of crushed disappointment.
‘Oh?’ The receptionist’s striking face snapped back into an impassive mask. ‘Well, you must wait. I must see if there are any tickets left.’
‘Who is lucky lady?’ the blonde hissed, trying to appear uninterested when her eyes shrieked the opposite.
Adonis shrugged his massive shoulders, and treated the two to a smouldering look. ‘I have not decided yet …’
The receptionist whipped round. ‘Plenty of tickets! I have just remembered!’ Amy, by now fully blended into the background, was slightly annoyed at being ignored, although another part of her was quite enjoying the pantomime being played out before her.
Debs, hurry back – you’d love this.
‘Hmm. Excellent.’ He was still appraising the women, like a tiger who’d accidentally caught two gazelles at once. ‘I would not want to come between sisters, however. Catch you, as they say, later.’
And with that, he tore himself away, swaggering down the corridor towards the gym.
You could crack nuts with those, Amy thought, inwardly giggling at his pert departure.
The receptionist and her blonde sister were standing bickering in the same spot where Adonis had stood between them.
Amy spoke up. ‘Erm, excuse me?’ It was now or never.
The women turned to glare at her. Amy raised a hand in a self-conscious little wave.
‘Yes? Oh, it is you – you are still there.’
Taking a deep breath, Amy said, as confidently as she could, ‘Yes, I am still here. I’m sorry to bother you, I can see you’re very busy, but I believe you have a Marta Kowalski working here?’
The sisters exchanged looks. Then the receptionist, narrowing her eyes, replied, ‘And you are?’
‘My name is Amy Marsh, but Marta doesn’t know me. I need to speak to her about a mix-up over a pair of shoes she bought on eBay.’
There was a silence. Amy was certain she felt a crackle of recognition pass between the two, though their faces remained impassive.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes. I … I sold them by mistake, and I was wondering whether I could possibly get them back. Buy them back, I mean, obviously …’
‘We don’t know what you are meaning. Do we, Iwona?’
Iwona? This must mean that the receptionist is Marta.
The receptionist glowered at her sister, then hissed something to her in Polish. Iwona responded sharply, her sister snapped back, and soon, gesturing and glowering, they were on course for another quarrel.
Stumped, Amy let them get on with it for a few minutes, wondering what to do.
Come on, this is mad! Debbie would have joined in by now, Jesminder would have us all sitting round a table discussing things rationally and here I am, standing like a lemon in the middle. That is just, like, totally … pants!
She took a step forward and held up her hands. ‘Excuse me!’ How she longed for a bit more gravitas, some higher heels, a deeper voice, a pair of cymbals, anything! But somehow it worked – sort of. Gradually the row simmered down, and the dark-haired receptionist turned to face her.
‘OK. I am Marta.’
Hurrah! At last, she was getting somewhere, although could they have been any more difficult?
I may regret tempting fate with that thought – these two are dynamite …
Iwona, the blonde, cut in, ‘You want to know about shoes? eBay shoes?’ She stormed over to the side of the reception area where a row of lockers sat beneath an array of heavily laden coat hooks. Pulling a set of keys from her belt, she stabbed one of them into the lock as though trying to kill it, pulled open the door and yanked out a pair of shoes. ‘These shoes?’
Amy caught her breath.
There, being slapped onto the reception desk like a pair of wet fish, were her black patent Ferragamo court shoes, the ones with the three-inch pale wooden heels, tiny heart-shaped peep-toe and wide, grosgrain ribbon ankle tie; the ones she’d bartered as though her life depended on it from the man on the stall in Spitalfields two years ago: the ones that meant the world to her.
Just looking at them, Amy was assailed by a raft of nostalgic memories. Now she realised that her shoe quest wasn’t only worthwhile, it was essential. But seeing them was one thing, getting them back from this pair was going to be entirely another.
‘Thank you for nothing,’ Marta snapped, grabbing the shoes. Iwona growled something earthy in Polish, as her sister made a face.
‘Hey!’ Amy cried.
‘You been making friends here?’ To Amy’s relief, Debbie had finally returned from the ladies.
‘You tell her,’ Marta mumbled, jabbing the heel of one of the shoes at her sister and turning her back.
‘You know,’ Debbie growled in Amy’s ear fifteen minutes later, ‘there’s a version of Cinderella that has one of the Ugly Sisters chopping her big toe off so that she can fit into the glass slipper.’
‘You what?’ Amy was only half listening, transfixed in horrified fascination by the sisters who sat before them, trying, as though their lives depended on it, to fit into her precious shoes.
‘Straight up,’ Debbie went on. ‘She saws her big toe off, then crams the shoe onto what’s left of her foot, and then the quite frankly not-all-there Prince sweeps her away on the back of his horse. It’s only when he spots the blood flowing from the shoe as they gallop off into the sunset that he realises he’s been suckered.’
‘Cinderella never was like that!’ Amy cried, elbowing her in the ribs.
‘Was where I come from! We like our fairy tales hardcore up north.’
‘Sicko. Oh, careful!’ Amy made to lunge forward as one of her shoes flew to the ground, hurled by an increasingly desperate Iwona. Meanwhile Marta was sitting with her back to them, dusting her feet with talcum powder in readiness for another attempt to get the other one onto her wide, resistant foot.
‘It’s no use!’ she snarled. ‘It will not fit!’
‘Hacksaw, anyone?’ Debbie chirped.
Earlier, interspersed with gesticulations and corrections from Marta, Iwona had explained why the sisters were at war over the shoes. They had spotted them on eBay when they were surfing the Net together, couldn’t agree who would bid for them, so agreed to share if their upper price limit of thirty-five pounds was accepted.
But Marta had upped her bid to forty at the last moment, thus securing the shoes for herself. This infuriated Iwona who, on seeing the parcel containing the shoes arrive at the gym, stashed it in her locker before Marta could get her hands on it, and had been holding the shoes hostage since.
Now, as Amy and Debbie looked nervously on, they were trying the shoes on for the first time, peeling off their trainers to reveal feet as wide as planks.
‘Didn’t they check the size before bidding?’ Debbie hissed with a frown.
‘They’ll need a fairy godmother with a wand to stand a hope in hell of getting ’em on, surely?’
‘It is because