It was hard work doing the job alone, but there was no possibility of getting help. The boxes of shoes were light enough, but the files and cuttings were heavy, and it was all imbued with a psychological as well as a physical weight. I was packing up a part of my own personality. In denying the archive I was also denying myself, and it occurred to me that these fetish objects which previously might have been thought to be emblematic, indeed synecdochal, standing in as a substitute for a real woman or real sex, now seemed to be standing in as a substitute for me.
I made a half-hearted attempt to label the boxes but it was clearly pointless. Once they were in the garage, stacked on top of one another, few would be accessible, and in any case, I couldn’t see myself needing access at the moment. Things had got too serious, too threatening, for me to want to toy with women’s shoes, to want to pore over images of feet every evening.
Eventually my cellar was empty and the garage was full. I hooked a huge padlock on to the garage door and snapped it shut. The place looked reasonably secure but I could have wished for more. I needed a vault, a secret room, a cave guarded by mythical hounds. But this was going to have to do. Assuming there were no more developments and no revelations, no more visits from Crawford or his colleagues, then maybe a couple of months would be long enough to make me feel secure again. After that I could reclaim my archive, make it part of me again, return myself to myself. I looked forward hopefully to that day, but it never arrived.
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.