Footsucker

Twenty-five

I made a big decision. I hired a white van. I’d already amassed a small city of cardboard boxes, all marked with the names of washing powders and potato snacks, and these poor things were going to become the containers of a lifetime’s erotic obsession. I was loading up my archive, moving it out of my cellar.

I felt I was attempting to get rid of evidence, but evidence of what? Certainly nothing to do with murder, as far as I could see. I was simply trying to cover up a large chunk of my personality in case Crawford changed his mind and decided to search my house after all.

In the beginning I thought all that was needed was a gentle pruning of the archive, a shedding of the most ‘incriminating’ material. It was obviously going to be necessary to get rid of the slides of Catherine’s feet, the ones I’d stolen from Kramer’s studio. They, as far as I knew, were the only direct link between me and the dead man, so of course they had to go. But it also seemed sensible to get rid of any other pictures of Catherine’s feet, the ones I’d taken myself, because that looked like something I had in common with Kramer. For much the same reason, I thought I’d better be rid of all the other foot pictures I’d taken, the ones of my old girlfriends, and the ones I’d taken with my hidden camera.

Then it was only common sense to move out all the shoes I’d stolen over the years. If nothing else, they showed I was a criminal, albeit of a very specialized and comparatively harmless kind, or so it seemed to me, but I didn’t want to give Crawford anything he could possibly use against me. I kept recalling his absurd logic; that a man who committed murder would have committed some other trivial crimes first, that a minor aberration was a major pointer, a giant neon arrow, towards some bigger, more serious aberration. He might well think that if I’d stolen shoes and broken into Kramer’s flat I could be capable of anything.

Then, painful though it was, I knew I had to get rid of the shoes that Harold had made for Catherine. It broke my heart to do it, but they all contained the trade mark of footprint and lightning flash, and their existence in my basement proved that I’d lied to Crawford about not recognizing the symbol. That left the archive with a very impoverished set of women’s footwear. It was as though all the best specimens had been looted. I could have hung on to what remained, but in Crawford’s eyes their possession might still have been evidence of sexual variance, so I felt they had to go too.

I was trying desperately to see myself as someone else might, not as a normal, healthy man with an intense, but entirely sane sexual preference, but as some dodgy pervert, a thief and a liar, or in Crawford’s terms, a murderer in the making. In this process of externalization, I could see that wandering the streets asking women about their sex lives mightn’t be seen as simple harmless fun either, so I decided that all the questionnaires had better go too.

The cuttings and printed material might have stayed, I suppose, but there were more problems there. Many of the books, for instance, dealt with the psychopathology of fetishism, and I didn’t want anything around the place suggesting that I was a psychopath. And as for my scrapbooks, well, I could see that certain people might think they were pretty strange. A lot of the pictures in there didn’t show complete women. In many cases I’d, so to speak, cut them in pieces. I’d kept the feet and thrown away the rest. I could now see how this might be construed as a form of mutilation. So they went as well. In fact, in the end, gradually and reluctantly, but inevitably, I decided it all had to go, the whole archive, the whole shebang. Once the cream had gone what was the point trying to live with the thin, skimmed remains? But go where?

To have been absolutely safe I should probably have burned the lot, made a bonfire, a sacrifice, a funeral pyre, and to be fully correct I should probably have thrown myself on to it like a Hindu widow. But I didn’t have nearly enough balls or strength of character to do that. Instead, I rented a lock-up garage a mile or so from where I lived, and I loaded the archive into its cardboard boxes, hired the white van, and began the removal process.

The garage was dry though not clean. It was windowless and no air circulated. It smelt of engine oil and there were bundles of old rags on the floor. I swept and cleaned up as best I could, but I couldn’t rid the place, or myself, of an oppressive feeling of misery. The corrugated iron walls and roof were reminiscent of shanty towns, of pig pens and chicken coops. I didn’t want to put my precious archive there, but what choice did I have?

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.