by Jay Rayner
She was easy to find. Her parents still lived in the same house, and when I telephoned, they told me she was now a podiatrist at a small practice in the same corner of North London. I flexed my feet within the hard casing of my shoes and felt once again the sharp insult where the smallest and most pathetic of my toes, salt-crusted with corns and calluses, made contact with the leather. I made an appointment with her secretary.
Wendy Coleman saw me the next day in her small white-tiled office, which smelled sourly of disinfectant just as our house had done when Dad was ill. There was only one meager slash of color, provided by a huge photograph of a dissected foot that hung on the wall, flaps of beige, graying skin pulled back to reveal the bloodless tramlines of tendon and muscle that had long ago been separated from their owner by a practical incision above the ankle. Wendy did not look up from her notes when I came in. She waved at the large articulated doctor’s chair in the middle of the room and said:
“Take a seat, please. Shoes and socks off. Don’t touch anything.”
I did as I was told. I am always compliant in podiatrists’ offices. My feet, the final joke upon which the whole ludicrous charade of my body is based, demand nothing less.
She snapped on a pair of thin white latex gloves and turned to look at me. She was exactly as I remembered her, save for a little harder-boned definition to the softness of her face. She wore a blindingly white coat, so that against the blank tiling, she seemed almost to be a part of the room itself. She had remained a woman at ease with the space she filled.
“Hello, Wendy. It’s Marc …”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve already seen your name in the book.” This coolly, as if I were merely proving the accepted fact of my stupidity. I felt horribly exposed (which is to say, even more exposed than I usually feel in a podiatrist’s chair, with my shoes and my socks off and my trousers rolled up and my feet on full display). It felt good. It felt right. An apology demands humility, and you cannot be anything other than humble before a woman who is willing to repair your feet.
With one hand she examined the toes on my left foot, pulling the smallest digit up and away from the protective custody of its larger brothers. With the other hand, and without looking, she picked up a sliver of steel scalpel.
“Your tendons are tight, and a regressive locking of the joints, particularly in the small toes, is causing you to walk increasingly on the balls of your feet, leading to a buildup of callused skin underneath and a roll inward, thereby depressing the bridge.” She sniffed. “You should consider having the toes broken and reset.”
“Do you do that sort of thing?” I said. “Break bones?”
“No,” she said. “I deal only with soft tissue.” I looked for a smirk, an acknowledgment of double entendre, for any recognition of the past, but there was nothing. She was a woman at work. Methodically, head bowed, she now began to cut away at my little toe; slicing, whittling away at the rough sleeve of hardened flesh. Each stroke of the blade raised the possibility of pain, suggested it, without delivering on the promise, like the suggestion of chili heat at the end of a tobacco chocolate. Fragments of my skin sugar-dusted the floor about her.
I said, “Do you like feet?” A podiatrist once told me that of all the fetishisms—latex, rubber, dwarves, amputees—the one that most appalled him was foot fetishism. That, he said, was truly aberrant behavior.
“Feet are straightforward,” she said. “The other end of the body from the mouth, so there’s no emotional rubbish …” She paused for a second as she started to dig into the crumpled eye of the corn on my little toe. “And with feet there’s always a solution.”
“What solution?”
“If worse comes to worst, you cut off the foot.”
There was silence in the room, save for the buzz of the overhead track lights and the self-sufficient murmur of a small clinical fridge.
“I didn’t just come here because of my feet,” I said eventually, as she lifted my left foot up a little and began to work on the callused motherlode beneath.
She said, “Hmm?” But she did not look up. I sensed she was enjoying herself, in a quiet sort of way.
“I came because I wanted to say sorry.” For a second she hesitated, the blade poised over the ball of the fourth toe, as if she were trying to recall a face or a name or a smell. She went back to work.
“I wanted to apologize for the way we—I mean I—treated you when we were kids.” Up to this point I had been sitting up a little in the chair, tensing my neck, so I could look down at her as she worked, but now that I had revealed my reason for being there I felt I could relax. I lay back and stared at the ceiling. The chair was my confessional; Wendy Coleman, my priest. She moved on to the other foot.
“We were just adolescent boys, dosed up on hormones, and well, I think that made us a little crazy. That’s not an excuse. More of an explanation, really. There are no excuses, of course not, but we were cruel to you and …”
I was on a roll now, comfortably negotiating the emotional landscape of apology. We had talked ill of her, I said, seen her less as a person than a challenge, and that was wrong. I hoped she didn’t mind me explaining all of this, I said, but I wanted to deal with the past. I finished up with, “So anyway, I don’t expect you to accept my apology or like me for it, but I did just want to say it.” She was dabbing at my feet now with a little astringent disinfectant, which did not so much sting as remind me that all the time there had been living skin buried down there. Now she lay down her cotton balls, job done. She got up and pulled off her gloves as she walked back to her notes.
“You can put your shoes and socks back on now,” she said as she wrote. “Do not leave it so long next time before you are seen, and if you think for a moment that I have spent even a minute of the last twenty years considering you and your little friends, then you are tragically mistaken.” This without even a pause for breath or a change in intonation, so that it took me a second or two to notice that she was acknowledging a word I had said.
She turned to look at me. “You were a sad bunch of tossers who could never get it up and I only feel sorry for the poor women you have all doubtless convinced to be your partners. That will be forty-five pounds. Pay at the front desk.”
And that was it. I paid at the front desk and left. The buzz was subtler than those produced by the Hestridge and Brennan apologies. I would even call it mellow, but it was sweet for all that. The Wendy Coleman account had been closed and I liked the feeling very much. Back home, in the corner of the living room above my desk, I assembled the Wall of Shame, a patchwork of photographs of those who deserved to hear from me. Over the next few days I began visiting them.
For Marcia Harris I prepared a soup of white beans and vine-ripened tomatoes, thick with chopped chervil. Marcia was a butcher’s daughter from Merseyside who at university had undergone a conversion to vegetarianism of such ferocity and vigor that she had broken off all links with her family. She took to wearing only rubber shoes that squeaked wherever she went, so you could hear her coming. Despite her refusal to have anything to do with them, her bemused parents continued to send her checks. She called them “blood money” and set fire to each and every one, with which guttering flame she lit her rank hand-rolled cigarettes. Short of cash, she turned to her friends for the occasional meal, “just to see me through,” but would nevertheless patrol our kitchens like a customs officer angling for promotion, sniffing out animal products. This infuriated me.
One night I made her a minestrone soup using a rich veal stock as the base. I waited until she had eaten two bowlsful before telling her. She screamed and ran out the front door. I chanted “baby-cow juice, baby-cow juice” at her as she threw up into some tired rosebushes. Then I took from the oven the spare ribs I had prepared in anticipation of her departure and ate the lot.
I took her the white bean and tomato soup in a cobalt blue pottery tureen that I had purchased especially for the occasion. She stood at the front door of her mansion block in deep
est South London, where she now practiced as an aromatherapist, with her arms crossed, and said, “Why should I trust another bowl of soup from you?”
“Because it would be bizarre for me to repeat the stunt again after nearly fifteen years.”
“And this isn’t bizarre?”
I shrugged and bowed my head. “You don’t have to accept my apology. I just wanted to make it. I’m really sorry. I was not respectful of your views.” I placed the tureen on her step. We both stared at it.
I said, “Are you still a vegetarian?”
“Yes, but I eat fish now.”
I nodded. “I like fish.” She smiled thinly, picked up the soup, went inside, and closed the door. It was, to be honest, only a division two apology. My genuine sorrow at what I had done and relief at having atoned for it were undermined by my deep-felt hatred of vegetarians. I noticed that she was still wearing rubber shoes, although I didn’t hear them squeak. Still, I stuck a gold star on Marcia Harris’s photograph to indicate that she had been dealt with.
For Miss Barrington I prepared a more complex dish. Ellen Barrington was our home economics teacher at Northills Secondary and I was her star pupil. She was the kind of round middle-aged woman who had always looked middle aged. She smelled just slightly of coconut—the aroma of a hair product, I think—and called every dish an “amiable attempt,” apart from mine, which were always “the genuine article.” She was unmarried and filled much of her time leading out-of-school activities, the most beloved of which was the Northills Brigade, a team of wannabe chefs who entered interschool competitions. I was, naturally, its captain. In my third year, when I was fourteen, we made it to the English finals, to be held in Birmingham, but the cook-off was scheduled to take place on the same day as a party which I was desperate not to miss because I had been told a girl who was going to be there might, quite remarkably, be willing to kiss me.
I was so certain of my kitchen skills, and so contemptuous of them, that the final seemed a pointless reason for missing the party. The morning of the contest I went into the back garden and, when I was sure I was out of view, smashed my arm against the corner of the garden wall five or six times, until a massive, bleeding bruise marked its length. I went inside and told my mother that I had fallen over. She took me to the hospital where they said it wasn’t broken, but put it in a sling anyway. By then the school minibus had left. Without me there to cook the star turn, an almond soufflé (in which most of the sugar was replaced by marzipan whipped into cream), the team didn’t even make it into the top three. Miss Barrington was, I heard later, distraught, but she didn’t show it to me. The following Monday in school she was genuinely concerned. And I never did get a kiss.
Miss Barrington had retired. I went to her little house in the privet-hedged, mock-Tudored suburbs, where she greeted me with a big hug. She still smelled of coconut. I had brought with me all the ingredients, and there, in her neat and scoured kitchen, with its pristine spice rack and its one-cup French press, I prepared the soufflé I had failed to make so many years before, while explaining myself. She watched me in silence.
When it was finished, the pillow of beige soufflé tumescent above the ramekin’s rim, I placed it on the kitchen table and sat down opposite her. She took one mouthful, pursed her lips, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. “One of the very special things about a life in teaching,” she said, gulping down air, “is seeing those you have shepherded through the confusions of childhood turn into such nice adults.” She reached over and gripped my hand. “You’re a good man, Marc Basset. A very good man.” I’m not embarrassed to say it. I wept too.
At a meeting in a local pub I apologized to Marcus Hedley, whom Stefan and I had taunted when we were just ten or eleven because he once wet himself while listening to the 1812 Overture during music lessons because, he said, it was so exciting. When I had explained myself, Marcus and I got raucously drunk and sang along to “No More Heroes” by the Stranglers on the pub jukebox.
I apologized to Karen and Richard Brewster, two former colleagues of Lynne’s at the British Council, because I once got so drunk at one of their parties that I quietly threw up into their laundry basket and then didn’t confess. I also bought them a new laundry basket to make up for it.
On the spur of the moment, I even apologized to our garbagemen for having put grass cuttings in the wheelie bin, which contravenes local council bylaws prohibiting the leaving of garden waste for collection. It wasn’t much of an apology, but it did help me to start the day on a little high. It was an espresso of apology. I cut out a picture of a wheelie bin from the local newspaper (which for some reason always contains photographs of wheelie bins) and I added it to the Wall of Shame. Then I stuck a gold star on it, to indicate that the matter had been dealt with.
Lynne tried to be understanding but I could tell she was confused. In the mornings, before going to work, she would stand in the doorway to the living room, silently watching me as I made adjustments to the Wall, sticking up gold stars or adding a new image.
One morning she said, “Are you nearly done, then?”
I laughed. “Done? I don’t think so.”
“Oh.” And then: “Who’s left?”
I was cutting out the photograph of a chef. I had once described him as “the David Koresh of the restaurant world” for the messianic devotion he inspired in his fans despite the generally demented nature of his dishes. (Seared herring fillets in a raspberry vinaigrette, anyone?) “There’s loads of people, actually. This guy, for example.” I held up the cutting. “He might be a truly awful cook, but that didn’t mean I had to humiliate him. The customers would have told him in the end, and if they didn’t, what business was it of mine?”
Lynne said, “Now you’re beginning to scare me.”
“I’m just saying perhaps there are limits to criticism.”
“Are you planning to apologize to every chef you’ve ever given a bad review to?”
“I’m not sure yet. Maybe.”
“And then? Will you stop?”
“Listen, Lynne, I haven’t apologized to my brother yet.”
I heard her mutter “sweet Jesus” under her breath as she retreated from the room. The front door slammed shut behind her.
Eight
One dull Sunday afternoon, when I was eleven, I spent two hours torturing my brother. I cannot now remember why I decided to do it, save that Luke was two years younger than me and that younger brothers, sodden with optimism, deserved to be tortured. Psychologists would say my behavior was born of a festering and deep-seated hostility toward the family member who, by mere fact of birth, had unseated me from my position of primacy within the household. I would have told you that he was an annoying little shit who always managed to make me look like I was in the wrong.
The method of torture was simple and devious but, ultimately, grossly effective. I made a sound at him once every three minutes or so for two hours. It was a kind of high-pitched braying noise, a sharp hee-haw on helium. Mum was out somewhere, but our father was in, working at his desk on another of his suburban chalet designs. We had been told not to disturb him on pain of death, and I knew that Luke could not call upon him to intervene just because I was braying at him like a prepubescent donkey. And so, all that afternoon, I followed him about the house, hee-hawing.
Hee-haw. Hee-haw.
At first, when we were watching TV together—it was an episode of Hart to Hart or The Pink Panther Show, something like that—he didn’t appear to be all that bothered. He merely looked over at me irritably from his corner of the settee and sighed at my obvious stupidity. After a while he became more intrigued. He’d say:
“What d’you do that for?”
And I’d say:
“Do what for?”
I’d turn back to the television.
Next he tried ignoring me. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the screen and barely flinched at each new squeak. But soon his patience gave out, as I knew it would.
“Hee-haw.”
“Shut up, Marc.”
“Hee-haw.”
“Marc!”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
“Hee-haw.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
And onward through that long, gray winter’s afternoon, until the daylight failed and the sound was driving him nuts; until he was trying to punch me and I, being bigger and stronger, was refusing to allow him the feeble pleasure. He pursued me around the house making a sharp keening noise, like a strangled goat, lashing out at me, fists and feet flying. Eventually Dad came roaring out of his office. He stood at the bottom of the stairs staring up at us on the landing, his huge, shoeless feet planted flat and splayed on the parquet.
“What is the bloody rocket going on out here?”
“It’s Marc. He’s …” He looked at me, trying to work out exactly what it was I was doing. “… teasing me.” He knew how feeble it sounded. I did my “I’m just as confused as you, Dad” face.
Our father shook his head. “You,” he said, pointing at Luke. “Grow up.”
“And you, leave your brother alone.” He stomped back to his office and shoved the door shut.
The moment I heard the door close I, naturally, made The Sound. Luke burst into tears and curled up in a tight ball on the upstairs landing carpet. Which was when I stopped. His will was broken. He was mine now. I left him sobbing on the floor.
A few hours later the family Basset gathered in the kitchen for supper. Dad had slow-roasted a shoulder of lamb in red wine flavored with rosemary and garlic and our plates had just been filled when, without looking up at Luke across the table, I made The Sound again; gently, quietly, as if it were no more than a sigh of pleasure.