Footsucker

Seven

But she was wrong. In those days, as I have said, I was not a crazy person at all. And if more proof were needed of my sanity, of my essential social adequacy, I would have presented my friends. I had plenty of them; friends from work, friends from university, even the odd remaining friend from school. I had male friends and female friends, friends in couples, single friends, married friends, friends in ménages, the occasional gay friend. And especially I had Mike and Natasha. Mike and Natasha were nice people and they liked me. If I had been a true degenerate they couldn’t possibly have wanted me as their friend.

I had been at university with both of them. They met in their first year and had been together ever since. They were my best friends, both of them equally. I was fond of them and they were fond of me. They led a secure, comfortable, affluent, couply sort of life, and that was just fine by me. There was nothing there for me to disapprove of. In fact, most of the time I was extremely envious. I had no problem with the way they lived their lives, but I sensed they had a problem with the way I lived mine.

To their credit, I’m sure this came out of compassion and concern. They seemed to think I must be unhappy, or perhaps that I ought to be unhappy, since I wasn’t leading a secure, comfortable, couply sort of life like them. They thought I had a little problem that needed solving. They weren’t unsympathetic, they just wished it would go away. I know they must have speculated from time to time about why I was still single, why I’d never even lived with anyone, why I’d never made it to the sort of life they’d got. Essentially, I think they just wished I was more ‘settled’.

In the beginning I used to introduce my girlfriends to Mike and Natasha, and they tried very hard to like them, even the ones I didn’t particularly like myself. They were always warm and welcoming, they were like that. We went out together in foursomes, did things, had meals together. But I think Mike and Natasha eventually found the emotional investment too much. They’d pin all their hopes on some new woman who’d entered my life, then a month later they’d have to start all over again. Using methods of greater or lesser subtlety, they sometimes tried to find out what was going wrong.

‘Are you not seeing Angela any more?’ Mike would ask.

‘That’s right.’

Mike would be prepared to leave it at that but Natasha would ask, ‘Why not?’

I’d shrug and say, ‘You know how it is.’

‘No,’ said Natasha. ‘Tell me.’

Trying to make a joke of it I’d reply, ‘She wasn’t Miss Right.’

Taking me more seriously than I wanted to take myself, Natasha would ask, ‘What does Miss Right look like?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t met her yet.’

‘Will you know her when you do?’

‘Sure.’

‘So what are the qualities she’ll have?’

Even then I could have talked about admiring a person’s qualities as being a form of fetishization, but mercifully I didn’t. At this point, sensing my discomfort, Mike would step in and say, ‘Hey, give the man a break.’

‘He doesn’t mind,’ Natasha would say. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No,’ I’d say, though I suppose I did mind.

‘See, he doesn’t mind.’

‘I think it’ll be an instinctive kind of thing,’ I’d say.

‘Instinctive?’

‘Yes, like goalkeeping.’

‘Goalkeeping. Right. Well, thanks for clearing that one up for us.’

They liked to think I was incorrigible. They even had a spell of trying to introduce me to suitable women. I didn’t mind that particularly. My life was never so full of women that I wasn’t glad to meet one or two more, especially since these women had been screened by Mike and Natasha and deemed suitable. There was always the possibility that one of them would have great feet. But they never did.

I’d meet them, talk to them, be friendly, and the evening would go well enough, but since I was being encouraged to think of these women as potential partners and mates, I had to check their feet. And their feet were never the feet of my dreams. I can’t remember the exact chapter and verse, their foot and shoe failings were not so hideous as to be permanently imprinted in my memory, but I know they were never any good.

‘Would you like Sarah’s phone number?’ Natasha asked.

‘No thanks.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want to phone her.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want to talk to her.’

‘What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with all my friends?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s probably something wrong with me.’

Mike put on his German psychiatrist accent. ‘Now ziss is very interesting.’

But while I didn’t want to satisfy their curiosity, I don’t deny that I was flattered by their interest in me. I liked being a source of fascination and speculation and concern. Mike always pretended to disapprove of Natasha’s prying but I knew he was as nosy as she was.

It wouldn’t have been impossible to tell them that I was a foot and shoe fetishist. I felt sure they wouldn’t have been horrified, and I wouldn’t have been particularly embarrassed, but I never wanted to. It was simply more enjoyable if it was a part of my life that I kept to myself.

So they stopped trying to find suitable girls for me, and I stopped introducing my succession of transitory girlfriends. It suited us all fine. Mike and Natasha knew plenty of other couples but I never felt very at home with them, so when we met up it tended to be just the three of us. We were capable of doing quite blokish things together, like going to the pub to play pool or going to watch Sunday League cricket. Other times we’d be cultured and go to see new films or plays or concerts. I always felt very at ease in their company and I’d never, never felt like a gooseberry.

Occasionally Mike would turn to me and say something like, ‘How about we ditch the wife, score some cocaine, pick up a couple of harlots and shag our brains out in a sordid hovel in King’s Cross?’

But, hey, I knew he didn’t mean it. Given that Mike and Natasha had been together for about ten years, and given that they were perfectly normal people, and despite the fact that they obviously adored each other, I did wonder if they had stayed wholly faithful to each other all that time. It was only human nature to stray once in a while, whether out of curiosity or drunkenness or misplaced lust. Besides, I always felt that their marriage was tough enough to withstand a little philandering.

After I’d met Catherine, I told them I had a new girlfriend, and said I had hopes for the relationship, though I didn’t go as far as telling them her name. Mike did ask what this one had that the others didn’t and, of course, I couldn’t say that she had a perfect pair of feet. I simply said she was American, and that seemed enough of an explanation for them. Natasha said I should bring her over but we all knew that I wouldn’t.

Natasha was, no doubt, a very attractive woman. She was big hipped and big breasted, though her figure was more earth mother than hour glass. I don’t imagine she had to fight men off, but I’m sure she must have had her opportunities. For the record, her feet were nicely arched, but much too plump and short-toed for my tastes. Consequently I entertained no feelings of lust for her whatsoever. I didn’t want anything like that from her. At the time I thought that was just as well, and subsequent events would prove that I was absolutely right to think that.