The threat was effective. The passage fell silent.
Mrs Gardner and the others seemed to have gone. All that could be heard was the sound of a lone pair of boots, as of Guard-Mistress Savannah walking steadily up and down its length on her patrol.
In darkness, Roy lay on his back where he’d been thrown. His head felt as if it had been cracked open; it ached unbearably, and seemed to be running wet with cold sweat. His body felt weak and nauseous, as if to lift a limb might be enough to make him vomit. What was going to happen next? They couldn’t mean to leave him here like this, could they?
The boots were coming up the passage again. As they reached his cell, he called out: “Help! Please...!”
It was meant to be a shout, but came out a groan. But Guard-Mistress Savannah heard. There was a scrape and a clunk, and the darkness was broken by a little rectangle of light five feet overhead. Guard-Mistress Savannah’s eyes looked down at Roy through an observation trap in the door.
“Get Mrs Gardner, please. Tell her I’m gonna be sick. Please, I’m begging you...”
Without answering, the guard-mistress went down the passage. The sound of her boots died away. But she’d left the little trap open, giving Roy a light in his darkness. Flashes of colour were dancing in front of his eyes, but he began to make out the appearance of his cell.
In size it was tiny, no more than eight feet by ten. As well as having shutters fastened on the outside, the window was barred. There was no bed, nor any other furniture. But the walls were clean, and they were not bare: far from it.
Still Roy lay, but he let his head fall to the right and he saw to the right of him an enormous picture, a life-size portrait photograph framed and fastened to the wall. It showed Mrs Gardner in military uniform jacket and short skirt, flexing a stout lash gripped in both hands. Her legs were held akimbo, and booted to the knees. Her feet rested upon spiky heels, and were the largest part of her from Roy’s perspective. With a painful effort, he turned his head the other way, to the left. But what he saw on the left-hand wall made him sit up with an involuntary cry.
He saw the logo, the circle of chain enclosing the D, which in its turn enclosed the intertwined M and S. With great care it had been painted upon the wall, six feet high, in gold paint which shone brightly. And it was accompanied by text, written in bold, stern capitals. Above it:
NEVER FORGET!
And below:
DAVINIA,
MADAME SUPREME!
Blue and red lightning flashed in Roy’s head, accompanied by stabs of pain. His stomach churned, as if on the very verge of hurling its contents back up his throat. All in a moment, he’d thrown himself over and down again, on to his face and buried his head in his hands.
***
“The first I heard of this was when Mrs Gardner phoned me up the next morning,” Mr Keane concluded. “I was very angry when I heard what Roy had done, as you may imagine.”
Victoria nodded; all through the later scenes of the tale, her head had been nodding in repeated approval.
“I said I’d sack him, but she wanted to detain him at the Lodge until she could teach him better. She had his head seen to - there was a doctor being kept prisoner there at the time, as it happened. And he’s back with me now, and has given excellent service. Guard a lady’s boots with his life, he will. He’s getting married soon. Mrs Gardner’s given her permission.”
“To Angie?”
“Oh, no. I don’t think Angie ever forgave Roy for trying to run out and leave her behind.”
“What about Angie, then? Whatever became of her?”
“She’s still at the Lodge, miss - but not as a prisoner,” Mr Keane said. “Mrs Gardner’s methods are meant for men, not young ladies. And Angie was a terribly strong-willed girl. In fact...”
He stepped across the showroom. In a corner stood a row of cardboard boxes, of varying heights; he laid a hand on one of the taller ones. “I’ve got a few special orders here, waiting to go. This is for the Lodge - for Under-Mistress Angela. In the end, Mrs Gardner stopped trying to break her and offered her a job instead.”
“So she’s got a pair of boots all her own from you?” Victoria exclaimed. “Let me see them!”
The parcel was opened and the contents unwrapped. They were full-length knee-boots, made to contain the complete lower half of the wearer’s legs, cut high at the front and low at the back, thus allowing the knees to bend comfortably. They had sharply pointed toes, and ‘cha-cha’ heels, high but solid, narrower at the tops than the bottoms. But the real splendour of these boots lay in their colour, and sheen: they were a dazzling dayglo pink, and their surface captured the light as if cut from polished metal. Stamped into it, on the outside leg of each boot, was the ‘D.M.S.’ logo. “Careful how you handle them, miss,” Mr Keane murmured; of course Victoria had taken them out of their box. “I don’t think Miss Angela would take kindly to finding fingerprints on her special order. That’s a beautiful sort of leather, but it’s almost impossible to handle without leaving marks. You’ll see that they’ve got hidden straps inside the legs, to pull them on by.”
“So they have. I could do with straps like that in these,” Victoria said. She looked down at her own new boots; for the first time, with a touch of dissatisfaction. “Why didn’t you put them in when you made mine?” she said, and her voice had become a snap.
She looked querulously at Mr Keane.
“I - I didn’t think, miss - “
“Why not? Isn’t it your fucking business to think about things like that?”
“I’m very sorry, miss - I tell you what. I can supply you with a special rubber-boot polish that’ll always make them come up so you can see your face in them - “ Mr Keane broke off and hurried into the alcove. He produced an aerosol can and a little round brush. “If you like to come and sit down, miss...”
“No,” Victoria said. She folded her arms and shifted her weight on to one leg, bending the other at the knee. “You come here. Get down on the floor, and polish my boots while I stand.”
She lifted her chin and looked into mid-air, with a lofty disregard for the service about to be rendered her. Far below, the aerosol gave a hiss and she felt the brush begin to rub against the exterior of her right boot. Mr Keane rubbed hard, but took time and care in the polishing, moving slowly from the toe to the arch and instep, only gradually beginning to climb the leg.
“Amuse me,” Victoria said, without deigning to look down. “Tell me another story.”
Four
‘Another story, miss?’ Mr Keane said without pausing in his task. ‘Oh, I don’t know...’
‘You’d better think of something.’
‘Well,’ Mr Keane said, ‘there was a young lady who came in for the first time the other week. I cleaned a pair of boots for her, which she’d brought in. Cowboy boots from America, they were. High on the calf, brown leather, very fancy, perfect fit, so well-made they’d last twenty years if you took care of them. But I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d put them in the dustbin, considering what had been done with them.’
‘Why? What had been?’
Mr Keane shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t like to say, not to a lady, miss. I really wouldn’t.’
A spasm of impatience caused Victoria to dispense with words this time. She kicked Mr Keane as he knelt in front of her; not viciously, but with enough force to knock him off his balance. From high above, Victoria watched him fall backwards and roll on the carpet.
Their eyes met as he lay. She made no apology. He made no protest. He found his brush and polish and resumed his boot-work. ‘Well, the young lady’s name is Miss Cheryl McKenzie. She’s a few years younger than you, miss. This day she was changing her clothes: she’d changed her jeans for a short denim skirt, and was just pulling on her favourite pair of boots, when...’
***
&n
bsp; Cheryl only made the discovery that there was something revolting at the bottom of her right cowboy boot by putting her foot inside it. The boot was such a good fit that several moments hard pulling were needed before she could find out what the ‘something’ was. Sitting on her bed, she lifted her foot, now bare but for a short black sock. Its sole was wet through, soiled by a thick sticky liquid. A white droplet fell away under her eyes, and a smell - a smell that was closely related to sweat, the smell of someone else’s bodily product - rose to meet her.
She looked down at her boots, her beautiful American cowboy boots, her most comfortable and best-looking pair of boots ever; she picked the right boot up again, and put her hand inside. Her fingers met what remained of a puddle of semen. Much of it had been mopped up by her foot, but there was still a slimy coating left. The person who had done this - who had masturbated in such a position as to squirt his ejaculation down the leg of her boot - had evidently enjoyed a generous orgasm. It could have been done at any time in the previous seven days, for Cheryl had only just got home from a week on an ‘outward bound’ course organised by her school. Not that there was any mystery in her mind as to whose toss it was.
She’d been to the bathroom and washed and dried her foot and was just putting on fresh socks and trainers, when she heard the sound of a car outside. She looked down through her bedroom window, which was at the front of the house and gave a view of the street. Two people had got out of the car: Cheryl’s mother, whose name was Helen, and her live-in boyfriend, whose name was Andrew. Eight or nine bags loaded with shopping had to be unpacked from the rear seats and the boot; it was Saturday and tonight Mrs McKenzie was holding one of her regular parties.
His arms full, Andrew turned the key in the lock and then pushed the front door open with a shove of his elbow. ‘Hello, here’s Chezz!’
She was coming down the stairs. Like Andrew she was holding a bag in her arms, an old carrier bag stuffed almost to overflowing with various clothes. She smiled down at him from above it. No one would ever have guessed how much she detested being called ‘Chezz’. ‘I got an early train. I’ve been home a while.’
Mrs McKenzie came in and dumped down two bags. She was a small, energetic woman, nearly forty but a good deal younger-looking and strikingly attractive and carefully-dressed. Even now, when she would have said she was ‘slopping around’, her jeans fitted her slender legs and pert bottom without a crease. Her high-heeled black suede shoes were brushed to perfection, ropes of gold glittered around her wrists and neck, and every strand of her hairstyle rested in its proper place. ‘Hello, dear,’ she said without looking up. ‘Did you have a nice time?’
‘It was okay.’
‘Did you meet anybody?’
Andrew laughed. ‘Helen! She didn’t go there to cop off!’ he said. ‘She went to - well, I’ve never really known why anyone does go on that sort of thing. But it ain’t no disco! Our Chezz has spent the last week walking up hill and down dale, climbing mountains, shooting the rapids in a canoe - all that kind of thing. Haven’t you, Chezz?’
Cheryl nodded. ‘That’s right. I’ve got a lot of the things I did videoed for you to watch.’
‘Well, I don’t know when I’ll be able to look at it,’ Mrs McKenzie said.
‘You can show it to me, Chezz,’ Andrew said.
‘Oh, no,’ Mrs McKenzie said with an emphatic shake of her head. ‘You’re not dodging helping me with the party that easily. I’ll want you, too,’ she said to Cheryl.
‘Actually, mum, I’m just on my way out. I’m going into town. But I’ll be back early.’
‘You’re taking that stuff with you?’ Andrew asked.
He asked the question in a casual tone of voice but throughout the conversation, his eyes had rested on the bag in Cheryl’s arms. Several inches clear of its other contents stood the tops of her cowboy boots.
‘They’re just some things I’m tired of wearing. I thought I’d take them to Oxfam.’
‘But you’ve got your boots there,’ Andrew said in mild surprise. ‘I thought you loved those...’
‘For God’s sake, Andrew, if she wants to stop wearing them don’t talk her out of it,’ Mrs McKenzie exclaimed. ‘She hasn’t the legs for high boots. I’ve told her that over and over, and she’s never listened to me.’
‘I was thinking I might get some new ones while I’m in town,’ Cheryl said. ‘Have you ever heard of a place called the House of Footwear?’
Mrs McKenzie grunted loudly. ‘I’d never wear anything higher than ankle length,’ she said, as if that should have settled the question of boot height once and for all. ‘Still, if you want to advertise the fact that you’ve got a pair of legs like two gigantic pork sausages, it’s your funeral. Come on, Andrew. I’ve got a party to organise.’
***
That evening, Helen McKenzie’s friends held little whispered conversations out of general earshot, or under the camouflage of the party music. ‘I suppose you’ve got to feel sorry for the girl...’
‘I feel sorrier for Helen.’
‘Well, actually, I’m sorrier for the rest of us!’
And they laughed. It was an adult gathering, with no-one present under thirty-five; no one, that is, except for Helen’s daughter Cheryl. The presence of a single teenage girl might have been a problem, a magnet for the attention of the men and a source of unease and envy for the women. Fortunately, Cheryl wasn’t that kind of a teenager; in fact, her main contribution to any of Helen’s parties was as a talking point, because of the extreme and awful contrast between mother and daughter. Where Helen was petite in stature and birdlike in her movements, Cheryl was big and bovine. Where Helen dressed with a sure sense of how to enhance her appearance, Cheryl’s dress sense was absolutely hopeless. Where Helen had a long list of friends old and new, Cheryl didn’t have a single friend of her own age. She wasn’t a bad girl, and was apparently very intelligent to judge by her school reports; but at a party, she was a sad and embarrassing figure. So, of course, everyone laughed at her behind her back.
Often her manner was quiet and subdued, and she took the role of a kind of cloakroom attendant-cum-waitress, mumbling ‘here, let me,’ and ‘would you like some of these?’ with lowered eyes. Tonight, however, she was joining in the fun and really, it was worse. First of all she’d been wandering around with a camcorder, pushing it into everybody’s face in turn and shouting ‘Smile, please!’ until Helen had physically pulled it out of her hands. Now she was dancing, stomping about in the middle of the room with (as someone had put it in a murmur) all the grace of an elephant afflicted with severe haemorrhoids.
And the way she was dressed! On her head she wore a hat, a shapeless curly-brimmed thing, from out of which her long, straight hair descended to her broad, powerful shoulders. They in turn were draped in a jacket of bright lime-green, cut in an abbreviated style which left several inches of space between its lower hem and the waistline of a black leather mini-skirt. On a slim girl, the effect could have been exciting; on Cheryl, it drew your attention to just how thick and solid her midriff was, even as the leather of her skirt seemed only just able to confine her big, hefty buttocks.
Below the skirt, her legs were sheathed up to the knees and just over in glossy black leather boots, a very new-looking pair: low-heeled, tight on the calves, fastening on the outer sides with long rows of outsized press studs, each an inch in diameter and made of shiny brass, running from the ball of the foot all the way up. Cheryl was tall enough to wear them, certainly, but her legs were about as shapely as two tree trunks. On a sexy, leggy-model type of girl, those boots would have drawn plenty of admiring glances; on Cheryl they pounded the carpet like black leather piledrivers. And if her neighbouring dancers paid attention to her feet it was to avoid the danger of being trodden on.
For a dancing partner, she seemed to have captured Andrew. He stayed with her for record after reco
rd and when the music stopped, and Cheryl kept on dancing for a few seconds, then stumbled and almost fell headlong to the floor, he caught her, laughing. ‘Hold on, Chezz, we don’t want to cause any earthquakes.’
Cheryl joined in his laughter, but she seemed unable to regain her footing, or keep it unaided. Suddenly she stopped laughing. ‘Ooh, Andrew, I don’t feel well... Don’t let me go, will you...? I - I...’
Her voice trailed incoherently away. His arm gripped around her waist, Andrew supported her with some difficulty: she was very nearly as tall as he was, and rather heavier. He cast a grin around the room. ‘Looks like I’m holding the baby.’
There was an awkward moment’s silence before someone had the sense to put another record on. As the music started up again, Helen pushed her way through to the spot. ‘Don’t just stand there with her, for god’s sake,’ she said in a fierce whisper. ‘Get rid of her!’
Nodding, Andrew began to haul Cheryl towards the door. He got her into the hall, and began to get her up the stairs to her bedroom, lifting her one step at a time. She seemed to have more or less passed out by now. Her eyes closed, opened, then closed again and she spoke in a faint, indecipherable mumble, apparently to herself. ‘Makes you glad they’re not allowed in the pub, doesn’t it?’ came a quite audible voice from below.
In Cheryl’s bedroom the light was off and without putting it on, Andrew hauled her to the bed and let her go. She hit the mattress, rolled over on to her back and lay still. Her eyes were closed. Her hat had fallen on to the floor and her legs hung over the side of the bed.
Andrew picked up the hat and put it on a peg. Then he bent down again and took hold of her feet. Getting a good grip by the ankles, he lifted them up and swung them around. Now she was lying properly on the bed, in her green jacket (which she wore unfastened, with a short black T-shirt beneath), her leather mini-skirt, bare thighs, and her new boots: her new long boots of gleaming leather, with those unusual brass press studs running up the legs.
Strange Desires Page 12