The answer, or at least the source of his troubles, stared at him from a distance of no more than 5’ 7”: his feet – or, more precisely, his fear of other people’s feet.
As far as Billy could remember, his fear of feet had started when he was about seven or eight – certainly he could never recall being discomfited by them before that age. Seemingly overnight, in much the same way as the palsy had descended on Uncle Frank, Billy had woken up one morning with a nagging urge to cover his feet. He couldn’t explain why, but their appearance suddenly troubled him. From that day onwards he dressed his feet first, pulling on his socks and shoes even before his underpants, and at night bared them only for the briefest of moments before hiding them under the bedcovers.
He was soon unwilling to even touch his feet or allow others to touch them. He started to wear gloves when he cut his toenails and use a flannel when he washed his feet. Visits to shoe shops, once enjoyable, turned into nightmares. He sat in chairs and squeezed his mother’s hand, closed his eyes and tried to ignore the sickly feeling that welled in his stomach when assistants placed his foot in a measuring block or eased shoes on to his feet. Often, he would accept the first shoe brought to him, irrespective of whether he liked the style or if the shoe fitted comfortably. (When old enough to buy shoes for himself, Billy would simply point to a shoe, tell the salesperson his size and then buy the pair without first trying them on.)
While his own feet disquieted him, he never grew to hate them. Once covered, the anxiety they caused soon faded, and he was also cognisant of the fact that without them he wouldn’t be able to walk very far. Other people’s feet, however, terrified him.
Feet walking around in everyday life and minding their own business didn’t unduly bother him, but feet that came close or touched his scared the living daylights out of him. Unfortunately, such situations were hard to avoid at school, where feet were plentiful, constantly within range and, in changing rooms and swimming baths, invariably bare. The fear, if not the actuality of a foot touching him during periods of physical activity, filled Billy with feelings of indescribable dread. His heart would start to race and his breathing grow laboured; he’d break into a cold sweat and feel light-headed and, on occasion, suffer panic attacks.
When some of his classmates realised that Billy’s discomfort was caused by their touch, they touched him all the more and made a sport of grabbing his feet. It was good old-fashioned schoolboy fun at the expense of a weaker party, the kind that had propelled the Nazis to power in a bygone age and made Britain’s Got Talent a ratings success. Had they known that the happiest day of Billy’s young life was the day he left school and escaped their good humour, they would have been surprised but unrepentant. How the hell could anyone in their right mind be scared of feet?
And Billy wondered the same thing. He was embarrassed by his phobia and admitted it to no one. Rather than confide in his parents and teachers or talk it through with a doctor, he suffered in silence. They’d have told him he was being ridiculous and that his fear was irrational – and they’d have been right. He knew this as well as anyone.
There was a difference as deep as the Mariana Trench, however, between him knowing something and being able to do anything about it. In the thrall of the phobia he was powerless. Rather than confront the condition head-on, he resigned himself to a life of managing the disorder and avoiding potentially stressful situations, and for a time this strategy worked. What the stratagem hadn’t provided for, however, was that Billy would fall in love with the daughter of a podiatrist.
Jean had never mentioned that her father was a chiropodist, only that he was a successful businessman and magistrate, and consequently the bomb fell from a clear blue sky on the evening Billy first went to Spinney Cottage for dinner.
Although he’d shared a table with Jean’s parents at a charity event, Billy had never been formally introduced to them and, effectively, this was their first meeting. All had gone well until they’d sat down for dinner and Henry Halliwell had started to describe how he’d removed a nail from a client’s toe the previous day. Billy had been smoothing pâté on a small finger of toast at the time and the unnecessarily gruesome account disquieted him. It also left him wondering if such torture practices were common in big business.
Betty noticed the look of consternation on Billy’s face. ‘Henry’s a chiropodist,’ she explained. ‘If you ever want him to take a look at your feet, just say the word.’
At this point the blood drained from Billy’s face and a cold shiver ran through his body. The familiar feeling of dread returned and, despite his best efforts to ignore the portent, he started to hyperventilate.
‘Quick, Jean. Get a brown paper bag!’ Henry commanded.
Billy came round lying on the couch with his head propped on a cushion. He mumbled embarrassed apologies, and sought to explain the event by wondering out loud if a small piece of toast had gone down his throat the wrong way.
‘I doubt it, lad,’ Henry said. ‘My guess is that you’re squeamish.’
‘I think I might be, Mr Halliwell,’ Billy admitted.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t talk about your work at the table, Henry,’ Betty suggested.
‘It’s my work that puts food on the damned table, Betty! There’s no more suitable place to talk about it,’ Henry replied.
And until his death – and even though it had been decided that Billy was squeamish – Henry Halliwell continued to regale his family with tales of podiatry: stories of corns and in-growing toenails, verrucae and bunions, chilblains and athlete’s foot. Billy tried to block these stories by placing small wads of cotton wool in both ears and droning quietly to himself while Henry spoke, and if these tactics failed – which they often did – he would excuse himself from the room and make unnecessary visits to the downstairs toilet, passing the time there by combing his hair or brushing dandruff from his shoulders.
‘That boy’s got one hell of a weak bladder,’ Henry once commented.
There was one story, however, that intrigued Billy as much as it disgusted Jean and Betty. It concerned a patient whose toes were so twisted and jammed from wearing winkle pickers that Henry had been forced to refer him to the hospital for two toe amputations, one from each foot. This, to Billy, was an affirming story of feet disappearing – albeit bit by bit – and he started to envisage a world without feet, a utopia he’d never before dared to imagine. And then, out of the blue, an image of a woman with no feet popped into his head and his body stiffened.
‘What’s wrong, Billy?’ Jean asked.
‘Nothing’s the matter, love. I was just day dreaming.’
The unfaithful thought troubled him and he took Jean’s hand and squeezed it. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.
The image of the woman with no feet, however, lingered and refused to go away.
Billy had no intentions of betraying his wife at this stage of their relationship. He loved Jean and she loved him, and her feet never overly troubled him. He viewed them almost, though not quite, as he viewed his own feet, and though he made a point of minimising contact with them, he appreciated that some contact was unavoidable, especially if they were to have sex.
The exhilaration of the act was, at first, distraction enough for Billy not to notice when Jean’s feet touched his, but as time wore on the touch of her feet started to niggle him. He sought to remedy matters by researching sex manuals for positions where feet never came into contact, and with this end in mind, made a visit to a distant branch of Waterstones. He read the books he found there furtively, carefully memorised the postures that didn’t require professional gymnasts to perform them, and then returned to his car and sketched diagrams. (His suggestion to Jean that she wear boots when they have sex – other than the ones she wore for hiking – came to him after an even more secretive visit to an adult bookstore.)
Jean took his suggestions in her stride, pleased that the man she’d married w
as so experimental in the bedroom. When she suggested he try sucking her toes, however, Billy turned her down flat and became quite agitated.
‘I don’t know why not,’ Jean had said sulkily. ‘The Duchess of York has her toes sucked.’
‘And look what’s happened to her,’ Billy snapped. ‘The only time you see her these days is when she’s on The Oprah Winfrey Show confessing another of her problems. I don’t want you ending up on that woman’s couch, Jean!’
Issues in the bedroom were further resolved after Billy started wearing thick socks to bed. He explained to Jean that his circulation had worsened and he was now suffering from cold feet. It wasn’t his idea, he added, just something the doctor had suggested. (Billy was aware that in his attempts to hide his phobia from Jean, he hadn’t painted the most flattering portrait of himself over the years: squeamish, weak-bladdered and now cold-footed.)
Jean accepted the socks, but drew a line in the sand when Billy attempted to climb into bed wearing his slippers one night.
Things in the bedroom ran smoothly after that, and eventually Jean became pregnant with Katy. During the last three months of her pregnancy, however, Jean started to have problems in her lower legs, especially when she lay in bed. She experienced a kind of itching sensation, as if ants were crawling inside her legs, and without warning her lower limbs would spasm and jerk in Billy’s direction. The condition was diagnosed as Restless Leg Syndrome, a harmless disorder the doctors said, but with no known causes and no known cure.
While the doctors described the syndrome as innocuous, Billy had very different ideas. When he went to bed at night now, he felt threatened and in constant danger of being attacked by feet no longer in his wife’s control. He wanted to barricade himself, build a wall of blankets between himself and Jean or tie her fidgety legs to the bed rail. The dread that had always lurked once again returned and for long periods he would lie awake at night, his heart palpitating and his stomach churning. When he did fall asleep, he would dream of the callused and deformed feet Henry Halliwell had described in such detail, and would wake in the morning exhausted and drenched in sweat.
Once more, the image of the woman with no feet crept silently into his head, and this time Billy felt no guilt.
The crisis in sleeping arrangements was resolved after Jean suggested they move into the twin-bedded room. Conscious of the fact that she was now sleeping as well as eating for two, Jean was ever more aware that she was having difficulty enough sleeping for one. His anxiety, she complained to Billy, was not only palpable but contagious. How was she supposed to sleep at night when he tossed and turned the whole time and made strange noises in his sleep? The doctor, she continued, had told her that stressful situations only exacerbated her rhythmic leg movements, and there was nothing more stressful in her life at this time than sleeping next to Billy. She’d concluded, therefore – reluctantly, and with sorrow in her heart – that she and Billy needed to avoid each other at night.
The arrangement, which was only intended to be a temporary measure, suited Billy down to the ground. If circumstances demanded, he was now free to wear even his shoes to bed!
The arrangement, however, became permanent. Although the Restless Leg Syndrome went on extended vacations, it always returned unexpectedly and made a long-term commitment to a double bed impossible. The two foot gap separating their beds became symbolic of the growing gap in their relationship, which had morphed from romance to domesticity. They continued to have sex, but only occasionally and always hurriedly, and set aside their true passions for discussions of utility bills, Katy’s schooling and the whereabouts of Betty.
And then, shortly after Katy’s sixth birthday, the domesticity of Billy’s life was blown apart when he met the woman who’d been stalking him for the past seventeen years – the woman with no feet.
Polly
The offices of the company Billy worked for were located in a small sleepy town on the south coast of England, sited there for the simple reason that the man charged with establishing a European base for the American conglomerate was a keen sailor and a smooth talker, who legitimised his choice by pointing to the savings the company would make by not having to pay London salaries.
In the past, Billy had travelled there only for biannual sales meetings but, after being unexpectedly promoted to the no-man’s land of sub-middle management, had been encouraged, seemingly for political rather than practical reasons, to spend more of his time in the office and attend meetings on subject matters he barely understood.
He didn’t enjoy these trips which, depending on the traffic conditions of the day, could take anything from seven to twelve hours. They also took him away from Jean and Katy for three-day periods and necessitated him staying in soulless hotels and eating evening meals alone. But more than this, it was the language spoken in the office that troubled him: it was simply indecipherable!
Several years previously he’d attended a conference of textbook publishers and academic booksellers where speaker after speaker had climbed to the platform and incorporated the phrase 24/7 into their addresses. He’d had absolutely no idea what the expression meant but, for fear of appearing stupid, had been too reticent to ask the person sitting next to him for an explanation. By the time he’d learned its significance the idiom was already passé and had, in the meetings he now attended, been replaced by even more inscrutable expressions. People talked of blue ocean opportunities and green field thinking, boiling frogs and putting socks on octopuses, reverse infallibility and zombie projects; and variously described people as either negatrons, goldbrickers or duck shufflers.
Billy said little in these meetings and instead chose to nod his head knowingly. (He’d mastered this disingenuous knack of feigning comprehension while visiting lecturers of quantum physics and pure maths, subject matters he found equally impenetrable.)
Between meetings, he would sit at a hot desk in the open-planned area of the office and do work he could have done at home. The only person he knew there was his immediate boss, but most of the time he was either missing or in meetings too important for Billy to attend. He knew the faces of some of the marketing people in the department, but none seemed interested in conversation and he was never invited to join them for after-work drinks.
Billy wondered sometimes if people thought he was dull, something that had already crossed his mind at sales meetings. He’d noticed then that while his colleagues in the department walked to the designated restaurant in twos and threes, he usually walked there alone. It seemed that people rarely sought out his company. It also struck him as odd that he still had only four friends after so many years.
He was pondering this curious state of affairs when his boss came over to his desk waving an expenses sheet. Unbeknownst to Billy, the form he’d used had been superseded by a newer document and his claims had been placed in now out-of-date boxes. He was advised to go down to the accounts department ‘tout de suite’ and get an explanation of the new form from someone called Polly.
Billy put his laptop in sleep mode and headed down the stairs to the accounts department, wondering if he was going to be told off. He’d always worried about small things, and still remembered the time in primary school when a class teacher had thrown a fit after consecutive pupils had brought work to him not ruled off at the bottom of the page. The teacher, whose name was Mr Hodgson, warned the class that the next pupil to bring him work not ruled off would be in trouble – serious trouble!
Billy’s essay had come to a natural end on the very last line of the page and he was unsure what to do. Flustered, and not wanting to get into trouble, he’d taken another piece of paper and ruled a line across its top and then taken both sheets to the teacher. He could still recall Mr Hodgson’s words: ‘Well, if this doesn’t take the biscuit, Billy!’ The teacher had then held up both pieces of paper to the class and made Billy stand in the corner and face the wall for thirty minutes.
On a
sking for Polly, Billy was directed to one of three offices lining the far wall. He knocked softly and walked in, and found Polly sitting behind a large desk with two large computer screens open and an in-tray piled high with different coloured files.
‘Hi, Polly. I’m Billy Bowman from Academic Sales. I’ve been told I’ve been filling in the wrong expenses form.’
‘Don’t worry about it, you’re not the only one,’ Polly said. ‘It would have helped if someone had actually sent out an email telling people we’d changed the form. Most people here don’t bother themselves with details, but for me they’re what life’s all about. It’s probably why I became an accountant.’
‘I tried accountancy once,’ Billy said, sitting down in the chair opposite her. ‘I couldn’t understand it. That’s probably why I became a sales rep.’
Polly had an easy manner and a ready smile. She was slightly on the plump side of life – as jolly people, in Billy’s experience, tended to be – and had the prettiest of faces.
‘You’re in the field most of the time, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘It must be strange spending time in the office.’
Billy admitted that it was. He felt unusually at ease in her company and confessed that he didn’t have a clue what people were talking about most of the time.
‘Join the club, Billy,’ she laughed. ‘People here talk bollocks, and the more bollocks they talk the higher up the ladder they climb. Someone should coin a phrase for it. Bollocksurfing or something like that. You know my favourite? Deferred success. That’s failure to you and me. Ha!’
Billy laughed. ‘That’s a good one, Polly. I might have that engraved on my headstone,’ he said, wondering when he’d last been so amusing.
She handed a copy of the new form to him and went through the columns and boxes one at a time, indicating the expected location of each future expense claim. Surprisingly, Billy understood every word and returned to his desk feeling strangely good about life. He was certain in his own mind that he’d just made a new friend!
The Last of the Bowmans Page 15
