There is the world and there is the individual. The world is vast, complex and complete, and we as individuals are none of the above. We live in our small corners, trying to catch a glimpse of the ground plan, the overall structure, but we never quite do. We only get to see architectural details: the finials, the gargoyles. It never quite makes sense, and artists’ impressions aren’t much use in this area.
There are people who profess to have some notion of the grand design, who claim to understand whole systems; the true believers, the conspiracy theorists. But I think they’re mistaken. Believing in the cross, or in the free market or in any other damn thing seems every bit as partial as ‘believing in’ women’s feet or shoes. These systems themselves are still only synecdoches, relics, fetishes.
But I happen to think this isn’t so terrible. We deal with what we can. We try to bite off no more than we can chew. We prefer to feel at home within the limits of our own space and our own understanding, rather than to be adrift and lost in the random world. We like the familiar.
You can’t transform the world so you redecorate your living room. You can’t love the whole world so you do your best with your spouses, your lovers, your children, your parents, your pets.
What do we see as we walk down the street? It’s not an egalitarian mass of light waves and ambient noise, it isn’t just atoms and vibrations, all sensory data of equivalent value. In order to see it at all we create separations, reductions, groupings. The window cleaner walks down the street and sees only windows that need cleaning. The Peeping Tom sees openings into new worlds. The boy with a slingshot sees only targets.
Sure we’re looking for wholeness, but where are you going to find it? We slice up the encyclopaedia into part works, manageable morsels, only what the reader can digest. Everybody selects, and the things we select might be called our interests, our obsessions, our fetishes. But they are more than that. These ‘selections’ are what constitute our lives.
One day Catherine came back. I was alone in my house. It was night. I was free, whatever that meant. Crawford was off my back and Harold was behind bars, although his trial was still a long way off. I was slumped in a chair drinking cheap lager and watching a hired video. I knew this looked pathetic, and it was not the way I would have wanted Catherine to find me, but then again I wasn’t expecting to be found. The doorbell rang and I came close to not answering it. There was nobody I wanted to see, no arrival that I thought I would have welcomed. But for some reason I did answer the door and there she was, Catherine, looking somehow very different and somehow very much the same. The hair was a shade lighter, the skin had a tan, and she was wearing unfamiliar clothes, a version of western gear: jeans and a denim jacket, an embroidered shirt, fancy cowboy boots.
‘I’m not interrupting am I?’ she asked as she slid past me into the house. ‘Have you missed me?’
There was no point playing it cool.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘You had the shoes,’ she replied. ‘Some photographs, the plaster casts. Wasn’t that enough?’
‘You know it wasn’t.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I missed you too.’ Coming from Catherine that was quite a confession. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry about various things. You don’t need me to specify, do you?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Poor old Harold,’ she said.
Sympathy was only the slightest of a whole bundle of feelings I currently had towards Harold, but to be charitable I said, ‘Yes, poor old Harold.’
She sat down, leaned back into a corner of the sofa and put her feet up on the opposite arm. She looked perfectly relaxed and at home.
‘Are you back?’ I asked uncertainly, not knowing exactly what I meant by ‘back’.
‘Well, I’m here,’ she said.
‘Are you staying?’
‘Sure.’
‘Do you want anything? A drink?’
‘You could help me off with my boots.’
I’ve always quite liked cowboy boots as objects; their shape, their style, the way in which their essence always remains much the same and yet they’re a canvas for all kinds of aesthetic transformations. But I had never found them erotic, and the ones Catherine was wearing — purple and black, very pointed and heavily stitched — were really no exception. However, what the boots contained was still a subject of utmost erotic fascination for me. That hadn’t changed or diminished. I did indeed want to help her off with her boots so I could get at her feet. Mindful that some of my bad dreams might have been prophetic, I was ready for the worst as I pulled off the boots. I needn’t have worried; there were no tattoos, no scars, no stigmata.
‘I’ve been looking after them,’ she said. ‘Though probably not as well as you would have.’
I held her feet in my hands. They were perfect, of course, as pale and pure and cold as vellum. I kissed them, let my lips move softly and drily over their insteps. They were exactly as I remembered them.
‘I’ve really missed that,’ said Catherine, but she was only saying what I might have said. ‘You’ve done a job on me,’ she continued. ‘You’ve turned me into a mirror-image of you. You want to worship feet. I want to have my feet worshipped. I guess we’ve turned into the perfect couple.’
So she moved in. And it was strange, very strange, but it was good. We had plenty of wild, intense, unorthodox, fetishistic sex, but we also had a surprising amount of wild, intense, orthodox, unfetishistic sex; sex in which feet and shoes hardly figured at all.
We didn’t go to sex clubs, and when we were in wine bars I generally didn’t take her shoes away and masturbate into them. And instead of bringing strange women round to participate in three-way sex we simply had people round for dinner. I got in touch with Mike and Natasha again, made no reference to the strange scenes I’d gone through with both of them. They were as keen to deny history as I was, and they were eager to meet Catherine. ‘My God,’ they said after they’d met her. ‘Where have you been hiding her? She’s just what you’ve always needed.’ I was glad they liked her, and they seemed genuinely pleased on my behalf, but I also knew they were relieved that I’d finally found someone. I think I was relieved too.
It was two o’clock on Sunday morning. Mike and Natasha had been round for dinner and had only just left. The room was a mess with dirty plates, empty glasses and wine bottles, and Catherine and I were both tired and comfortably drunk. In general we didn’t spend much time talking about Harold or Kramer or the murder, but we didn’t specifically avoid it either, didn’t want to turn it into a taboo subject. However, if we wanted to talk about it at all, it was easiest when the night was old and we were nicely drunk.
This time Catherine said, ‘You know Harold made shoes for me after I stopped seeing you?’
I did, of course.
‘Well, want to see ‘em?’
It would have been cowardly to say no, so, with a lot of trepidation and some of the old anticipation, I agreed. Catherine stepped out of the living room into the hallway and I could hear a rustling of boxes and tissue paper, then the sound of clothing being removed, and when Catherine returned she was naked except for a pair of shoes I’d never seen before.
They were surprisingly restrained for a pair of Harold’s. The heels were very high and the toes were very pointed, but there was none of the baroque, erotic splendour that characterized so many of his shoes, nor did they appear to be made from any exotic fabric. They were elegant, classic, if slightly exaggerated, court shoes in a plain, rich brown leather. I was slightly disappointed.