Twenty-six
In the middle of all this madness Natasha arrived at my house. I hadn’t given much thought to Mike and his problems recently, and even less to the reciprocal problems those were likely to have caused Natasha. I thought it was forgivable of me, granted the number of other things I had to worry about.
I’m sure it wasn’t the first time I’d been alone with Natasha but I was used to functioning with her as part of a trio. She said she just happened to be in the area, which sounded very unconvincing, and I assumed she had come because I was a good friend and she wanted to talk about her and Mike. Again it seemed to confirm that I couldn’t be a complete weirdo, not if people wanted to seek out my advice on their relationships. Not that I felt in any condition to give anybody advice on anything.
I tried to make Natasha welcome but I was relieved when she said she couldn’t stay long. I offered her coffee and she said she could murder a drink, a real drink. So I gave her a gin and tonic. I had no way of knowing what Mike had said to her about his exploits in Birmingham and his desire to repeat them daily, so I wanted to wait for Natasha to bring up the subject. We talked breezily about nothing at all for fifteen minutes or so and then she said, ‘Mike’s told me all about you.’
That wasn’t what I was expecting at all. I was lost for a reply.
‘About your foot and shoe fetishism,’ she added.
I could hardly be surprised that Mike had told her, but I couldn’t see why she wanted to bring it up now.
‘I don’t think he approved,’ I said. ‘He thought it was rather pathetic of me.’
‘He’s a bit of a prude really, you know,’ Natasha said.
There was no doubt some truth in that. I could see that the desire to do ‘dirty’ things with prostitutes could well stem from a puritanical frame of mind. Yet I didn’t think that was really what Natasha meant. It seemed probable that Mike had told her all about me, but told her nothing at all about himself.
‘It’s no big deal,’ I said. ‘It’s just a personal preference. It’s just something I’m into, like some people are into mountaineering or motorcycle racing.’
This was idiotic nonsense but I hoped it would keep Natasha’s interest at bay. This was not a moment when I wanted to explain and justify myself again. It didn’t work.
‘I think it’s fascinating,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s pathetic at all.’
‘Well, neither do I,’ I said, then desperately changing the subject, ‘And how is Mike?’
‘How was he the last time you saw him?’ she countered.
‘A little the worse for wear,’ I said. ‘But it was a while ago.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, though it wasn’t at all clear what she was thinking about or what she was agreeing to.
Suddenly I found myself saying, ‘I gather you and Mike are having a bad patch.’
I didn’t know why I’d said it. It wasn’t that I was eager to play therapist, or even that I was particularly interested.
‘Something like that,’ Natasha answered. ‘I don’t really want to talk about it. OK?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Fine.’ But in that case, I wondered, what she did want to talk about, why she was paying me this visit. I soon found out. She kicked off her shoes, low-heeled, round-toed, black court shoes – nothing special – and revealed her bare feet. I’ve said before that Natasha’s feet were pleasant enough, though not especially attractive to a man like myself. Now, however, she’d painted her nails a startling, uncharacteristic red, and while that didn’t make the feet suddenly, overwhelmingly more appealing, it certainly caught the eye.
‘Is that the kind of thing you like?’ she asked.
I looked at her feet politely and said, ‘Yes, that kind of thing.’
‘What would you do with them?’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘This is embarrassing.’
‘Would you fondle them, stroke them, kiss them, slobber over them?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘Would you like to do that now? To my feet?’
I was going to say something about Mike, about loyalty and friendship but Natasha stopped me and said, ‘And if you remind me that I’m married to your best friend, I’ll scream.’
‘Don’t scream,’ I said.
She was sitting in a chair and I was sitting vulnerably on the sofa. She came to sit beside me. She positioned herself at the opposite end of the sofa so that her feet were resting in my lap. At first I did nothing, but the absurdity of sitting there inertly like that, like the reluctant, sexually timid hero of some kind of Carry On movie, got the better of me.
I started to stroke Natasha’s feet. It was more of a massage than any version of foreplay, but Natasha seemed to be enjoying it a lot. She smiled and closed her eyes and threw her head back on to the arm of the sofa. As she did so her skirt rode up. I saw a long stretch of tanned thigh and I could see she was naked underneath the skirt. A dark, unruly pubic bush was clearly visible.
Now, I suppose if I had been a fetishist as per the classic case histories, Natasha’s bare feet should have made me as horny as a polecat, while the pubic bush should have left me completely cold. But, in fact, given that I didn’t find Natasha’s feet all that erotic in the first place, the situation was reversed. While Natasha was becoming intensely aroused by having her feet stroked, I was becoming intensely aroused by the sight, presence and prospect of her bare cunt. And, after a while, after some deliberation and some amount of thinking about Mike, and after experiencing a certain, though highly equivocal, pang of guilt, I ran my hand all the way up Natasha’s thigh. And then she did scream.
It wasn’t one of those piercing, blood-curdling, ripper movie type screams that would bring neighbours running to lynch me, but it was an effective scream nevertheless. I immediately took my hands off her as though she was radioactive, I covered her legs with the flap of her skirt, and she leapt up off the sofa and ran across the room to get as far away from me as possible.
‘This was a big mistake,’ she said, more to herself than to me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said again, just as inscrutably.
‘I’ve not been myself lately,’ I said.
‘It’s not your fault. It’s my fault. And Mike’s fault. He says I’m frigid. I think he’s wrong.’
‘Yes?’ Now it was my turn to be inscrutable.
She stamped her feet into her shoes, thanked me for something or other, and she was gone.
Twenty-seven
I started to have dreams about Catherine; nightmares I suppose. They would always start out well enough. Catherine would have returned. There would be a chance meeting, a conversation, some hand-holding and kissing, and then a reconciliation. We would both say that we’d made mistakes and that we wanted to try again. Even in the dreams I was aware of the essential mawkish banality of this stuff but my subconscious was refusing to be serious and unsentimental. Then we would go to some anonymous dream room and Catherine would kick off her shoes and that’s when all the problems would start.
In the least distressing of the dreams, the feet that were revealed were simply not Catherine’s; they were not grotesque or deformed, not the genuine stuff of nightmares, but they just happened to be somebody else’s. It was as though my whole reason for loving Catherine had been obliterated. It was terrible but not horrible. However, in another version of the dream I would discover that, at Kramer’s suggestion, Catherine had had her feet tattooed with Harold’s trade mark of footprint and lightning flash. The tattooing was garish and incompetent, done by some drug-stoked, cack-handed Hell’s Angel. It was a form of sacrilege, of desecration, and even in the dream I was wondering whether laser technology and skin grafts could be used to return the feet to their natural state. It seemed to me that they couldn’t, that the feet had been permanently damaged. Catherine, meanwhile, could never see what all the fuss was about.
And then came the worst dreams of all, the real stuff of a sick id on the rampage
. In these Catherine would quite calmly tell me that she had developed a couple of open sores, one on each foot. But when she showed them to me it was obvious that these ‘sores’ were man-made, that someone (obviously Kramer) had driven nails into them, as if she had been nailed to a cross. I would run around looking for bandages, sticking plasters, TCP, Savlon; but the first-aid kit was always empty, the shops were always closed, there was nothing to be done, at which point Catherine would beg me to ‘kiss them better’. I would try very hard, very desperately, but I could never quite force my lips to make contact with the pierced, bloody flesh.
My nights were getting tattered and sleepless, and to make matters worse Crawford took to ringing me in the early hours of the morning. The first time it happened I thought there must be some crisis, some dramatic development, but he simply asked me what kind of car I drove, and after I’d told him he put the phone down. The next time it was to ask whether I’d heard from Catherine; another time he simply said he’d been mulling over the case and wondered if I’d thought of anything new to tell him. It must have happened half a dozen times in all and there was never any point to it. It became obvious that he was doing it just to harass me. I thought he was trying to scare me, to wear me down, and he was succeeding.
And then a moment came when it seemed as if my waking life was taking on the same lurid, absurd texture as my dreams. I was hurrying to work in the rain, I was late, I’d been late a lot recently, and I noticed a chemist’s window display and thought I must finally have snapped. There, blown up to a size that filled the whole of the window, was a giant black and white photograph of Catherine’s naked feet. I stopped dead. I couldn’t believe it. I would have preferred it to be a dream or hallucination. It seemed as though I might have gone completely mad and started to project images from my sick mind on to the world at large. And yet this particular image looked perfectly real and substantial. What’s more, when I could think at all straight, I recognized that this was one of Kramer’s photographs from the series I’d discovered in his studio. The bastard was dead but his art was living on. And once I’d managed to convince myself that the photograph did indeed exist in the real world, I soon realized this was commercial art. The words ‘Adiol Footcare’ had been superimposed in red lettering in the bottom right hand corner of the photograph. What I was looking at was a piece of advertising. Catherine’s perfect, adored feet were being used to shift beauty products. Arranged in front of the giant blow up was an elaborate display of boxes, jars, tubes and sprays, all with the name Adiol on them.
I stood for a long time in front of that window. In other circumstances I might have been worshipping an erotic icon, but this time all I felt was bafflement and anger. At last I tore myself away and went into the shop. There I found an in-store display, a point-of-sale carousel, a pile of leaflets promoting the benefits of Adiol Footcare; and they all showed the same image of Catherine’s feet.
I picked up a leaflet and opened it. It was full of stuff about how abused and neglected most people’s feet are, and how they could become things of beauty if only you used Adiol footbaths, moisturizers, deodorants and so on. This sounded like complete guff to me. Catherine’s feet, as far as I knew, were a wonder of nature and, apart from her one visit to a pedicurist with me, owed nothing to Adiol or any other manufactured product.
After I’d been standing by the in-store display for a good few minutes a woman approached me. She wanted to sell me something. I could tell because she was wearing a yellow uniform with the Adiol logo printed on her left breast, and she asked me did I know that the average person takes eighteen thousand steps every day. I said I did, as a matter of fact, and that surprised her, so she simply asked me if I needed any help. I most certainly did, but not the kind she was likely to give me. All I said was, could she tell me where I might get hold of a copy of the poster. She was gently amused and said I was the third person to have asked her that and the display had only been up for an hour. She said the company didn’t have any to give away, but maybe I could approach the photographer direct.
I lurched out into the street, picking up a fistful of leaflets as I went. So Kramer was an even more slimy piece of work than I’d imagined. At least my obsession with feet was personal, heartfelt and unexploitative. Kramer, it seemed, had wanted to make money out of his. Catherine really knew how to pick them. How could she let herself be used like that? For the very first time I thought that maybe Harold had done the right thing by killing Kramer.
Over the next week or two Catherine’s feet appeared in shops and windows all over town. A walk down any street could become a journey of tantalizingly exquisite torture for me. Ads using the same image appeared in newspapers and magazines, even on bus stops. Catherine’s feet must have found their way into hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of homes and psyches. Any common or garden foot fetishist or partialist could possess an image of Catherine’s feet. He could cut out the picture, put it in his scrapbook, his files, his archive. He could gloat and salivate and masturbate all over it. The idea made me simultaneously very angry and very horny. I wasn’t pleased with myself for feeling like that. But what could I do? Catherine had always had a life of her own. Now the object of my private fascination was well and truly in the public domain.
Twenty-eight
I decided to return to Kramer’s studio. This time I didn’t intend to break in and I didn’t intend to steal or destroy anything, but I did hope to get something I needed. I’d seen the reception area and the secretary’s desk when I’d been there before. They suggested that Kramer’s business wasn’t entirely a one-man operation. I had reason to believe that it had enough momentum to keep going for a little while after his death, especially since examples of his work were currently on display everywhere. It was a long shot but I thought it was my only hope.
I went there in working hours, pressed the doorbell and hoped for the best. A woman’s voice spoke in the entryphone and I muttered a few deliberately incomprehensible words. She said something equally incomprehensible in reply and pressed the buzzer that let me in.
I went up the stairs to the top of the building, to the studio, where I found a young woman in jeans and a lumberjack shirt, hair held back in a ponytail. She had her feet up on the desk and was smoking a joint. The place was a mess. There were boxes and tea chests all around her and it appeared she’d been half-heartedly packing and sorting through them. My presence gave her a surprise, and not a particularly pleasant one.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought you were a messenger.’
‘I’m a potential customer,’ I said.
She looked confused.
‘I’d like to see Mr Kramer,’ I said brightly.
Then she appeared terribly sad. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, and she said, ‘He’s passed away. I mean, he’s dead. Robert’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ I said. ‘That’s terrible. That’s really terrible. I had no idea.’
‘I’m just here holding the fort,’ she said. ‘Tidying up some loose ends. Sending out invoices. Paying bills.’
‘But I keep seeing his work everywhere. The Adiol campaign.’
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘It was all set up before he died, there was no reason to stop it. It breaks my heart every time I see it.’
‘That must be awful for you.’
‘It’s not so great.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I really am. I’ll go away and leave you to your work.’
I made as though to leave, but she said, ‘Since you’re here, what is it you wanted? Can I help?’
‘It sounds trivial now,’ I said. ‘I wanted Mr Kramer to take some photographs for me, that’s all. You see, I’m a shoe designer. I was so impressed by the photographs in the Adiol campaign I thought I’d like something similar to show off my own work.’
She didn’t look at all perturbed. This was probably how things were done in her business; one job led to another, work generated work.
‘It’s a real shame,’ she s
aid. ‘I’m sure he’d have been very interested. What can I say?’
‘I’d better go,’ I said.
‘Hold on,’ and she started looking through a fat address book. ‘I can give you the names of a couple of photographers who might be good for the job.’
‘That’s really kind of you,’ I said.
She jotted down the names and phone numbers for me and handed over a slip of paper. ‘They were both good friends of Robert’s. He’d have been happy for them to have the work.’
She was sad again. She stared down at the address book and seemed hypnotized by it.
‘It’s a while since he died,’ she said. ‘I feel I ought to be getting over it by now.’
‘It takes a lot of time,’ I said. ‘It takes as long as it takes.’
She nodded and looked at me as though I’d said something profound. I said goodbye and again started to leave.
‘Oh, just one more thing,’ I said. ‘The model. You don’t happen to know whose feet those are in the Adiol photographs?’
‘Sure. She’s not with an agency. But I can give you her name and phone number if you like.’
Casually, helpfully, undramatically, she wrote out Catherine’s new phone number for me.
Twenty-nine
The number was not an American one after all. Catherine was still in the country somewhere. I looked in the book of dialling codes and saw it was in Yorkshire. I had no idea what she would be doing there. I hurried home and called the number. She answered the phone and her voice sounded so familiar, so untroubled, so far away from all the panic and fear I was going through.
‘Hallo?’ she said.
‘Hallo, it’s me.’
The effect was immediate. Her voice turned cold and hostile. ‘How did you get this number?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘What are you doing in Yorkshire?’
‘Getting away from you. You shouldn’t have called me.’
Footsucker Page 16
