‘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.