Footsucker

Twenty-three

Harold’s shop was locked up, and there were no lights on inside. The window looked strangely empty as though he had given up trying to attract custom. However, there were lights on in his flat upstairs. I pressed the doorbell but at first there was no answer; perhaps Harold was used to passing drunks ringing it in the middle of the night. But I persisted, made it plain that I wasn’t going away, and eventually a curtain was pulled back and Harold’s face appeared. He looked down at me, neither surprised nor pleased to see me, having no sense of urgency nor of my need. It took him a long time to shamble down the stairs and open the door.

‘Yes?’ he said, as though he was confronting a man peddling religious tracts, but then he saw the blood on my face and my wounded looks and he let me in.

‘I’m sorry to arrive like this,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have anywhere else to go.’

I had never been inside Harold’s flat before and I imagined it would be some dark labyrinth of a place. In the event it was just a small, old man’s flat, full of big heavy furniture that he had to squeeze past or climb over in order to move around the room. There was a carpet that might not have been vacuumed in years, and dust was spread thickly and evenly over every horizontal surface. But there was nothing particularly odd or eccentric about any of it, and there was no display of his handiwork, no covert stash of exotic shoes.

However, two things caught my eye. First, I noticed a framed photograph that sat on the mantelpiece above the hissing gas fire. It was a snapshot of a plump-cheeked, open-faced young woman. Harold saw me looking and said, ‘Yes, that’s Ruth.’

I was surprised. She was not as I’d imagined her and she did not look like anybody’s idea of a prostitute. It was hard to believe that the wholesome-looking woman in the photograph had strutted through alien bedrooms, touching strangers, being paid for sex, wearing shoes Harold had made for her. Her face looked neither sexual nor knowing, but perhaps there were other faces that she kept for professional purposes.

The other thing that leapt out at me was a cast of Catherine’s right foot that rested on the sideboard in the yellow glow of a table lamp. It was marked with grubby fingerprints, and I wondered what use Harold had for it and what had happened to the other one.

I sat down in a furrowed armchair and continued to feel sorry for myself while Harold poured me a small brandy and fetched a damp cloth to wipe the mess off my face.

‘What happened to you?’ Harold asked as he too sat down, but he didn’t sound very interested.

‘It’s a long story,’ I said, and with some guilt I described my bad times with Alicia, with my ugly-footed women, with the man from the ICA. Most shameful of all, I admitted that I had smashed the plaster casts of Catherine’s feet. Harold listened and I confessed. I wanted him to be shocked and disapproving. I wanted him to tell me how stupid and wrong I’d been, but he wouldn’t give me that satisfaction. He just nodded from time to time, as though everything I was confessing to was par for the course. But so far I’d said nothing about my encounter with Kramer.

‘I feel such a fraud compared to you, Harold,’ I said. ‘I feel that my behaviour isn’t justified. I shouldn’t be going off the rails like this. I mean, all that’s happened is I’ve been dumped by my girlfriend, whereas you …’

I couldn’t finish my sentence. Harold looked as though his features had been set in cement. I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.

‘None of this explains the blood on your face,’ he said.

So I told him all about Kramer, about my break-in, about the pictures of Catherine’s feet and, for the first time, he seemed to get interested.

‘That’s a strange one, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘That he’s as obsessed with Catherine’s feet as you are. I wonder why. I wonder if she sought him out deliberately. Maybe you’ve given her a taste for it.’

‘Am I supposed to feel good about that?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

I took the few transparencies I’d slipped into my pockets and showed them to Harold. He held them up to the light, peered closely, but didn’t seem very impressed.

‘Do you think he’s called the police?’ Harold asked.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘But he knows who you are.’

‘Apparently.’

‘He’ll tell Catherine, no doubt.’

‘I guess so.’

‘This is no way to get her back, is it?’ said Harold sadly.

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘Sit here for a while. Go home. Get drunk. Get some sleep.’

‘I mean, what are you going to do about Kramer?’

‘What can I do? It’s over with. I probably got what I deserved.’

Harold gave a strange little laugh, somewhat like a hiccup, somewhat like a whoop of delight. ‘How about getting some revenge?’ he said.

‘Like what?’

He reached over and picked up the photograph of Ruth and stared at it, as though he was looking right through it, peering into another world.

He said, ‘You know, above all else, beyond all the other feelings I have, I’m chiefly very angry about Ruth’s death. Still. Perhaps more now than ever. And for a long time I tried to focus that anger. I wanted her death to be somebody’s fault. And it might have been possible to blame the doctors, or our polluted environment, or even to blame God, but in reality Ruth died of what we have to call natural causes, and being angry with nature is as absurd as it is futile.

‘I used to wish that a drunken driver had killed her, or a sex murderer, maybe one of her clients, because then there would have been someone to blame, someone to be angry with, someone to take revenge on. And I’m absolutely sure I’d have taken that revenge. I’d very happily have killed Ruth’s killer.’

He was as cold and as serious as I had ever seen him. He undoubtedly believed what he was saying but I wasn’t at all sure that I did. I’ve no doubt that most of us are capable of murder in certain specific circumstances, but it was still impossible to think of mild little Harold Wilmer as any sort of killer.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said apologetically. ‘I know my loss can’t possibly be in the same league as yours.’

‘Not true,’ he replied. ‘For you things are actually much harder. You’re angry because Catherine’s gone. You want her back but you’re angry with her. She’s both the cause and the object of your anger. You’re so angry with her you could kill her, but if you killed her you wouldn’t have her at all and could never have her again. I can see it’s a difficult situation.’

‘Hey, steady on, Harold. I haven’t the slightest urge to kill Catherine.’

‘No? But you do need a focus for all that anger, don’t you? I always said you did. And Kramer fits the bill nicely.’

It made some sort of sense.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You could be right. Maybe that’s why I broke into his place, because I was angry and wanted to destroy something.’

‘But you found the photographs of Catherine’s feet and that made you angrier still, I’d guess.’

I wasn’t sure that they’d made me angry exactly, and sitting there in Harold’s armchair, I didn’t feel angry at all. I felt lost, pathetic, trivial. I didn’t say that to Harold. It would have been letting him down. If he wanted to play at being an amateur psychologist, if he wanted to think I was trying to come to terms with my anger, I had no urge to argue.

‘But,’ said Harold, ‘then Kramer caught you and humiliated you. At this very moment, you probably feel as though you want to kill Kramer.’

‘No,’ I protested again. ‘I don’t have the slightest urge to kill Kramer, either.’

Harold was starting to worry me. I’d never seen him like this. These casual, literal references to killing weren’t in character with the man I thought I knew. He looked at the photograph of Ruth again, then at me. I felt he was trying to see what I was made of whether I was quality merchandise, whether I was good enough for whatever he had in mind. I knew I wasn’t.

‘No, perhaps you couldn’t kill Kramer,’ he conceded. ‘But I could.’

Later that night he did.