Eighteen
I went to Mike and Natasha’s house. They didn’t know that I’d split up with Catherine because I hadn’t told them. And even if they had known, they wouldn’t have seen it as a very significant event. They would have regarded it as an all too regular and ordinary occurrence in my life. The three of us were supposed to be going out for a cheap Italian meal, but Mike opened the door and said there’d been a change of plan.
‘Natasha’s not feeling so good,’ he said.
‘Nothing serious?’
‘No, no, but she says we should go without her.’
He was wearing his jacket and was all ready to set off. I never even stepped inside the house, never saw Natasha. We went without her but we didn’t get as far as the Italian restaurant. Mike wanted to stop for a beer on the way, at some dingy crowded pub that I’d never been to before, and it was obvious that he had some serious drinking to do. The occasional need for oblivion was one that I’d always understood, the more so since Catherine’s departure, though I didn’t know what had stirred the need in Mike. It was a long time before he got round to telling me. We’d had several pints, and had abandoned all hope of getting anything to eat, before Mike admitted there was anything wrong at all.
Finally he said, ‘It’s me and Natasha. Or rather, it’s just me.’
Mike and Natasha seemed perfectly happy together but it didn’t surprise me there might be problems; after all they were human, weren’t they?
‘It’s a big one,’ Mike continued. ‘A big, serious, potentially terminal kind of thing.’
‘Really?’ I said. I thought he must be exaggerating. Whatever the problem, I couldn’t imagine the two of them splitting up, and I couldn’t imagine the problem was anything like as important or as intractable as that which had driven Catherine and me apart.
Mike said, ‘You know the way I sometimes say let’s buy some drugs and pick up a couple of harlots?’
‘It’s one of your more endearing traits,’ I said.
‘Well, I did it.’
‘You did?’
‘Well, there was no cocaine involved and it was only one harlot.’
I expect I looked at him in some disbelief, but he obviously wasn’t making it up.
‘It was in Birmingham,’ he explained. ‘I was there on business. I was sitting at the hotel bar and so was she. We got talking and I bought her a drink and one thing led to another.’
I nodded. It seemed commonplace enough, though obviously it was a complete novelty in Mike’s life; in mine too for that matter.
‘Does Natasha know?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t told her but she knows something’s wrong. Do you think I should tell her?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘What good would it do?’
‘Confession. Good for the soul.’
‘Very bad for a marriage,’ I said.
‘How would you know? How would you know anything about marriage?’
He was right. I had no more right to comment on marriage than I thought Harold had to comment on love and loss.
‘I’m just taking an educated guess,’ I said.
He gave the matter some thought, then nodded to himself as though he’d decided I might know what I was talking about after all.
‘She wouldn’t understand,’ he said.
‘I think she’d understand perfectly, but that’s not necessarily a good thing,’ I said. ‘Besides, what’s to understand? You got drunk and did something you regret.’
He shook his head. ‘No, you don’t understand. I don’t regret it at all,’ he said. ‘It was the best fun I’ve ever had in my whole life. It was great. We did all sorts of things I’d never done before, really dirty stuff that Natasha would never do.’
‘Do I really need this much detail?’ I asked.
‘There was no love, no affection, no respect for the other person. It was dirty and cheap and disgusting and degrading. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it.’
‘Oh shit,’ I said.
‘And I want to do it again. I want to do it right now, and keep on doing it, every night of the week for the rest of my life.’
‘And where does Natasha fit in?’
‘That’s what I don’t know.’
‘You’re still in love with her?’
‘Of course I’m still in love with her. I care for her. I cherish her. I respect her. And that’s why our sex life is so fucking dull.’
‘Oh shit,’ I said.
‘Oh shit, indeed.’
We sat quietly amidst the noise and smoke of the pub, in a little pod of gloom. Confession had not been good for Mike, it had made him profoundly miserable. But he pulled himself together enough to get up, go to the bar and order a couple more numbing drinks. I was feeling miserable too, and no longer just because of Catherine. I felt sorry for Mike, even more so for Natasha. It wasn’t simply that I wanted them to be happy and together, it was more that Mike’s confession had been so depressingly, destructively sordid.
‘It’s OK,’ Mike said when he returned. ‘I’m not asking you to solve anything for me.’
‘Just as well.’
Mike took a big drink from his glass, then said, ‘Right, now it’s your turn.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours.’
‘I’m not with you.’
‘You know what I mean. You’ve got some dark little secret, haven’t you? Natasha and I have always wondered about it. What is it you’re into? Pain? Little girls? Little boys?’
‘You don’t really think I’m into children?’
‘I don’t know what you’re into. So tell me.’
So I told him. I don’t know exactly why I did. I had no particular desire to be understood by Mike, and I didn’t feel that his confession had put any obligation on me. It had far more to do with what was going on in my own life. Maybe I was compensating. Maybe what I really wanted to do was pour my heart out over Catherine, and talking about my fetishism was just an easy way of avoiding the issue. Whatever the reason, I told him. Not in the kind of detail, nor with the kind of relish that I’d told Catherine on our first meeting, but I recounted my story as honestly as I knew how. I explained what I liked and what I did, though I said nothing at all about Catherine. Mike listened in a distracted way, staring into his beer, twisting the glass around in both hands. A look of puzzlement and mild amusement flickered across his face from time to time, and when I’d said all I was going to, he looked at me and said, ‘Bullshit.’
‘What?’
‘You don’t have to mess around with me,’ he said.
‘I’m not messing around.’
‘It’s a wind-up, isn’t it? You don’t really expect me to believe all that. You don’t expect me to take that crap seriously.’
‘Well, yes, I guess I do,’ I said feeling insulted and not at all defensive.
I think it wasn’t until then that he believed me at all. He really had found it inconceivable that anyone, least of all one of his friends, could feel the way I did about feet and shoes. It was a new idea, an undreamed of possibility. When he’d finally, reluctantly, taken it on board he said, ‘Well, that’s just pathetic.’
He started to laugh. It was sniggering, contemptuous, destructive laughter. I thought he was in danger of standing up and making an announcement to the whole pub about precisely how pathetic he thought I was.
‘You really are a pitiful specimen, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Hey, Mike, you don’t have to like it.’
‘No, I bloody don’t.’
I couldn’t understand why he was so angry and affronted. What would he have done if I really had been into pain or little girls? Probably he could have accepted that more easily. Perhaps he’d expected something more dramatic, more ‘dirty’ and more in keeping with his own newly developed tastes. Perhaps he’d hoped that I was a kindred spirit. He gave me a look of definitive contempt and got up from his seat.
‘I’m going to
find myself a good old-fashioned whore,’ he said. ‘That’s something you’d know nothing about.’
It was perfectly true at the time.
Nineteen
I tried to carry on as normal. I went to work, I went out sometimes, though it appeared I wasn’t going to be seeing much of Mike and Natasha from now on. That made me sad too, but I tried to get on with my life, and it certainly wasn’t easy. It even crossed my mind that I should take to the streets again with my clipboard and camera and try to find new pairs of feet and shoes that would excite me. But I didn’t. It would have felt sacrilegious. And again, even though my archive was now all the richer for the addition of Catherine’s shoes (or Harold’s shoes, I wasn’t quite sure of the correct terminology), I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. My thoughts were elsewhere. Let’s face it, my thoughts were all over the place.
There were times when I tried to imagine where Catherine was and what she was doing, but it was impossible. Her life was and always had been a mystery to me. I had no idea what she did or who she saw when she wasn’t with me. She described herself as an adventuress and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that she was off having adventures. Unlike Harold, I didn’t want to have this stuff made specific and personal. I didn’t want to know. And why should I have to? London was surely big enough for me not to run across Catherine by chance. I wasn’t sure precisely how I would react if I did happen to see her, but I suspected I wouldn’t emerge with much dignity. And I was right.
It was night and I was in my car. I’d stopped at traffic lights and a red car, something Japanese and low to the ground, pulled up behind me. I looked in my rear-view mirror and immediately saw that Catherine was the passenger in the car. I couldn’t believe it. I felt as though someone had poured a bucket of hot fat over me. Then I looked at the driver. He was a young, dark, smooth-skinned man with a lot of black curly hair. I stared into the mirror with growing panic as Catherine leaned over and kissed him.
That’s when I lost it. Some circuit burned out, some trip switch was thrown inside me. The traffic lights changed, and, without quite understanding what I was doing or why, I slowed down so that the red car was forced to overtake me. As it accelerated past I saw Catherine more clearly. She looked happy, alive, drunk, and she was far too engrossed in her new man to notice me or recognize my car. So I started to follow them. I suppose I wanted to see where they were going, to know what new life Catherine had pitched herself into, though I had no idea what I’d do once I had that knowledge.
The man drove erratically, sometimes too fast, sometimes dawdling. I guessed he was drunk too. At last he turned off the main road, went into a side street, stopped abruptly and parked his car a long way from the kerb. The engine and lights were switched off and the two of them got out. I drove slowly past and stopped a safe distance away.
The street was dark and empty. It was lined with big, old, grey buildings that had once been dignified and substantial, but now some were empty and others had been converted into less dignified enterprises; a wine warehouse, a printer’s, a plumber’s supply shop. It didn’t look like a place where anyone would live, but the man felt in his pocket for a key and made for a door next to the printer’s. Catherine took his arm, and kissed him with real, if deliberately exaggerated, passion. He responded and then pulled away laughing. He opened the door, they went in. I saw a series of lights go on up the flights of stairs, all the way to the top floor, which I supposed was a converted flat above the shop.
Once I was sure they were safely inside, I went over to the door and read the name on the doorbell. It was Kramer, an innocent enough name, I thought at the time. I waited all night in my car, and I didn’t sleep. I had the radio on, jammed between stations, picking up Cuban rhythms, Creole languages, flurries of static and Morse code. I kept my eyes trained on the windows of the flat. A light was on but there were no shadows on the curtain, no hint of movement, nothing to tell me what was going on in there. All that was left to my imagination. I had to invent new obscenities and pornographies for the two of them to commit on each other, and my powers of invention had never been greater.
It was a long, long night. When dawn seeped in between the buildings I was still expecting nothing. I thought a time would eventually come when someone would draw back the curtains of Kramer’s flat, and I would see a face, it could be his or hers, looking blurred and sated. But I imagined that still to be some hours away. Then, against all expectations, the front door started to open. I didn’t dare to hope it was Catherine, and yet even before she appeared I knew it had to be her. She was alone and she was badly ruffled. Her face, her hair, her whole body looked creased and worn. Her dress was too thin for the cold of the morning. She hugged her arms around herself and started to walk down the street, heading in my direction, slowly, cautiously, as though the ground was not to be trusted.
Her legs were bare, paler and leaner than I remembered. The knees looked rough and were reddened, as though she had been kneeling in front of him, or been dragged across a carpet, or been crawling on all fours. Then I looked at her feet. They were bare except for the coat of enamel on her toenails, and I watched them flatten themselves against the cold roughness of the pavement, watched them arch and spring as they took her along the dirty, unswept street.
She looked hungover, or perhaps still drunk. She seemed raw, exposed, sand-papered, and yet she was wholly self-contained. Nothing was going to get to her. It must have been then that she realized I was watching her. She must have known. She might have recognized the car, might even have seen me behind the wheel, my face blurred and streaked behind the windscreen. She didn’t appear to react, but what she did next, she must certainly have done for my benefit.
She continued to walk down the street towards me, gathering momentum and confidence. She walked purposefully until she was ten or twelve feet from my car and then she stopped dead. There was a big, soft, fresh curl of dog shit lying directly in her path. She teetered a little, and I assumed she had stopped to avoid it, but then she looked hard in my direction, made a movement of her body that had some hint of a curtsy about it, and then she placed her bare right foot down firmly into the dog shit.
It submitted to the pressure. It spread, extended its boundaries, curled around the sides of her feet, oozed up between her toes like swamp mud or chocolate spread. And she took her right foot out of the shit and did exactly the same thing with her left. She was smiling to herself, feeling the warm slime of the shit on her soles, enjoying the sweet filthiness of the experience.
She stopped looking in my direction and began to move on, staring down at her feet as she walked, turning back to look at the shitty brown footprints she was leaving behind her. She seemed pleased with the effect and walked straight past me without looking back.
My face felt as though it was being pressed into hot coals. There were pains in my chest, and my hands were trembling. I wanted to kill something, tear something apart with my bare hands, with my teeth. I wanted to consume blood, rotting meat, raw jellyfish. I wanted to swallow lumps of the world and vomit them up again. But there was a much simpler remedy. I slipped my cock out of my trousers and needed only a few savage pulls on my foreskin before I shot sperm all over the dashboard.
Twenty
I went home. The next few days were hell. I hated myself. I had no belief in the healing powers of time. I knew that I could not and did not want to forget Catherine. Yet although I didn’t want to get rid of her memory, I did want to quell the pain of remembering. So I found myself doing a number of things that I would previously have considered out of character. Visiting a prostitute was the first of these.
No doubt I wouldn’t have done it if Mike’s Birmingham exploits hadn’t been on my mind. I thought maybe I could be like him, detached from the person he loved, relishing emptiness and dirt. I found her card in a phone box. The card was sunshine yellow, there was a drawing of high heels on it, and the unpunctuated selling line, ‘Love me love my feet.’
I call
ed the number and spoke to a woman with a smoker’s cough and a Geordie accent.
‘I’m calling about the ad,’ I said.
‘And which ad would that be?’
‘Love me love my feet,’ I said.
‘Would you like to make an appointment to meet the young lady?’
‘I think so. Probably yes.’
‘The young lady is called Alicia. She’s a lovely girl, dark haired, large chest, could easily be mistaken for a model.’
‘How about her feet.’
‘Lovely feet, sir. Lovely.’
I wasn’t going to let her get away with anything so glib. Eroticism is about specifics.
‘I need more detail,’ I said and the woman started giving me some ball-park figures regarding Alicia’s hourly rates. These sounded both vague and extortionate, but I said, ‘That all sounds fine, really fine, but what I need is for you to describe her feet.’
‘Are you taking the piss?’ the voice rasped.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not. I saw the ad and I do love feet, but I’m particular. Not any foot will do. If I get there and find Alicia has the wrong kind of feet, then I’ll have wasted everybody’s time.’
‘We don’t like time-wasters, sir.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Once you were here we would insist on your paying the fee whether you liked the young lady or not.’
‘That’s why I need you to describe the feet now. Please.’
Somewhat grudgingly she said, ‘The young lady has wonderful white, smooth, creamy feet. Very lovely, very kissable.’
I still wasn’t very convinced. It sounded to me as though the woman I was talking to wasn’t all that familiar with Alicia’s feet. Maybe she was just the person who answered the phone and had never even seen them. Maybe she wasn’t good at describing things. But then I told myself that even if she had seen them, she still wouldn’t have seen them through my eyes. This was subjective stuff; you couldn’t take somebody else’s word for it. I also reassured myself by thinking that anyone who advertised her feet in a sexual context must at least have some experience of the job in hand, must at least know what the issues are. You wouldn’t say, ‘Love me love my feet’ if your feet were a mass of corns and scar tissue. When I said I was still very interested I was given an address in St John’s Wood, assured that anything I wanted to do was negotiable, and I said I’d be there within the hour.
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