What Do You Do If

you’re just going about your business — though truth to tell you don’t have a lot of business: you’re on your way back from yet another audition, and there you are walking through the corridor of something or nothing which the space between the buildings becomes after an audition, that slice of time when, depending on how you suited, your life might go one way or a completely different other — your heels clacking, you wore heels this time, and those pink glass earrings you picked up from a market, because you wanted to lend a touch of the character to your appearance, to let them see you as her — because that’s what they need to be helped to do, some of these TV directors: they don’t understand the actor’s chameleon art. (Well, not many people understand it, you can lose a lover because he can’t understand it: How do I know you’re not acting now? he’ll say, and at first you can laugh it off, sometimes even make it a game, above all take it as a compliment, but then there’s the time, you’ve been making love, and he says it again, tracing his finger over the curve of your naked waist and hips, your real true self, and he isn’t laughing, he’s looking troubled.) Well, there you are now, clipping between the glassy walls of the city, still trailing something of the character you’ve just read for, and just as you come to a phone box the door bursts open and a girl almost throws herself into your arms?
‘Please!’ she says, in a foreign accent, holding out a phone card towards you.
Your instant instinct of course is to help. That’s the point that too many people, including a lover, can fail to understand: that far from being a threat, a kind of deceit, your chameleon skill is based on empathy, the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes.
Right away you understand the situation. You take the young woman in: cheap clothes — anorak, tracksuit bottoms and trainers — scraped-back hair, flat pale face with an anxious expression; a young girl far from home, a foreign worker no doubt, newly arrived from some Eastern European village. And you put yourself in her shoes, her scuffed white trainers, and know how she’ll feel: the unfamiliarity of it all, the slightly giddying sense of dislocation. You smile. You are reassuring. You take the phone card and say you’ll show her how.
You see her visibly relax, her shoulders drop, yet there’s still a tension about her as you hold the door and she goes before you into the phone box. You smile again your reassuring smile.
You look at the card. In fact, you’ve not used one yourself before. You peer at the instructions which clearly she’s been unable to interpret. There’s a code to be revealed by scratching, and she’s done this already, but there’s a number she has to ring first. You point to it, explanatory.
She nods, almost in irritation: she understands this, she is indicating. She says something in her Eastern European language and points from you to the buttons: she wants you to do it.
You get it now: it’s the voice at the other end of the phone she can’t follow.
You pick up the receiver and punch in the number. The computerised voice instructs you to key in the code. You press the buttons as she watches, crowding you now with the washing-powder smell of her clothes and something else not so pleasant, musty, sweaty, you’re thinking, when the voice tells you the card has no credit remaining.
‘No credit,’ you tell her, putting down the receiver and shaking your head to try and make her understand. ‘It’s all used up.’
She shakes her own head in incomprehension.
‘Finished!’ you say. ‘Finit! Empty!’ She looks blank. You mime to explain. You point to the card then throw up your hands.
But still she doesn’t understand, she shakes her head again, this time fiercely, and gestures for you to try again.
For a moment you feel almost bullied.
But you can make allowance, of course you can, for a young girl’s anxiety in a big strange city, so you mime some more, you raise your arms in exaggerated illustration of uselessness, you point again to the card and trace a nought with your finger in the air, you say, ‘Kaput!’
At last she understands.
She swoops and grabs it off you, shockingly ferocious, and stares at it in disbelief.
She groans, her shoulders slump; she falls back against the glass, which strikes you as an oddly exaggerated gesture. She jags her hands in her pockets and pulls out the lining, dramatic, to show they are empty. And then she holds out her hand to you. Begging for cash.
This is the moment it comes to you that the whole thing has been a scam.
What do you do then? When it hits you that you got her wrong, that you weren’t so good after all at getting inside her shoes. She was better at getting inside yours: at sizing up your sentimental mind of a middle-class Westerner afloat on the illusion that she can imagine herself in any situation, and thus ripe for being tricked by an illusion? She’s the better actress, this girl in the anorak, slumped against the glass in apparent despair. And you, you’ve lost your grip on things now, your sense of your own insights, things are slipping. There’s a smell in your mouth of confusion and corruption, the under-smell of this young woman which has sharpened, the smell, you think, of deceit.
And to stop the slipping, you stand firm against the coercion.
You shake your head once more, but this time firmly in refusal. You make to push the door to usher her out, but it’s awkward: somehow, without your noticing, she got herself between you and the door. And as you try to reach past her, she looks behind her, out through the glass — there’s no doubt about this — she is looking for someone out there in the crowd. She must have an accomplice. And she’s got you trapped there, standing between you and the door.
You’re afraid now, but you’re also angry. You hold tight to your bag and you push forward roughly, push into her sweet-and-sour smell and past her, and get the door open.
She doesn’t follow. You should go, stride off smartly into the crowd and away from this, which is not just a dodgy situation but a kind of abyss, a rent in your sense of things, but you’re too curious not to look back.
She is slumped against the glass once more. She doesn’t know you are watching. And as you watch, her knees bend, give way, she slips down the glass to the piss-darkened floor, and you cannot doubt it: she is in despair.
Contrite, mortified even, you yank open the door, scrabble for your purse and grab a handful of change.
She has closed her eyes now. You bend and touch her on the shoulder and she opens them, slowly. Their look as she focuses on you is dead. You nudge your hand with the money towards her, and she turns her gaze slowly towards it.
She shakes her head.
‘No, go on,’ you say, ‘take it!’
She ignores it. She gives a sigh which is almost a groan, and then heaves herself up and stands. She is looking out into the crowd now. There is no doubting it: she is expecting to see someone there.
‘Take it!’ you say, desperate now.
She shakes her head, she gives a deep shrug and pushes on the door and goes out.
What do you do then, as you watch her walk away between the jostling bodies, not running but slowly, her feet dragging, her whole body set in resignation, and the images tumble through your chameleon brain: the cramped journey at night across borders to the better life that had been promised, the house down the side street you were brought to, its grubby walls, the cheap partitions and the washing machine in the basement, the outside door with the intercom grille and the bell that goes all night long, the lock which was only once left undone, and the sudden understanding that there’s no getting away after all, even kindly-looking women will stand in your way while the heavies scour the streets for a girl in scuffed white trainers, a fugitive’s shoes?