Fetish VignetteKneeling on the floor, looking up at your mother, over her nyloned knees, from under her pushed up and pointed breasts, you see triumph in her face. She has exerted a privilege arising from her sister’s demeaning occupation at the textile mill and has acquired a gratuity. Beside you is vast pile of wool skeins. Dressed for the afternoon in style, nylons, heels and tailored suit, a cigarette lodged between crimson lips, huffing with every breath she frenzedly winds the wool off your aching arms and adds to the number of balls on the smokers stand at her elbow. Her fingers jab at the wool centimetres from your eyes and you anxiously focus on the sharp laquered nails. The winged, cut velvet armchair is a throne, you are a very young boy, an only child, say six years of age, whose instinct is to please, and you are at the exclusive service of some kind of goddess. While your arms ache, you are conscious of the idea of enduring discomfort, even pain to achieve an end. Restraint, stoicism and endurance at the service of indulgence, excess and utterly irrational program.
Later you will be rewarded with a pullover, never completely free of the tobacco odour embedded into every strand, the colour too garish for regular commerce, and a pattern so overwrought that others will look elsewhere in relief. Every stitch will be tighter than that from a knitting machine and seemingly knitted as fast, with a furious clatter of needles.
In this home, in these rooms, the air is always grey, and your health oscillates around periodic asthma attacks. Asthma telegraphs ahead with a wheeze, then you know that there will be three to four days when you will struggle to breathe, with interminable coughing, broken only by lapsing into exhausted, disturbed sleep. As the dread anticipation mounts, you become, hyper-active, agitated and destructive. Naughty boys must be disciplined and the goddess is annoyed, (maybe she has simply run out of cigarettes and you are too indisposed to run the errand). Retribution is swift. The beating is delivered in frenzy. The goddess preens at her mirror, many hours in the day, and she may present in her underwear. Then you see the construction of that overripe, overblown form, girdled, hooked, laced and ribboned in black satin and nylon, sometimes unsteady in impossible heels. The pain is real, the illness is real, the scene bizarre and the adrenalin rush unforgettable.
In the polite speak of the late fifties, to the kindergarten teacher, you are a “solemn” child, intelligent, even gifted, but isolated and unsocial. You father is rarely home, he works away often, and later you realise he preferred it that way, prepared to support the performance, unaware of its intensity, and trusting his instinct to disengage with this wife who expresses no warmth, exalting in her cold glamour and delusion of dominance.
You mother’s real man had never come home from the Pacific War. - He died a distinguished hero’s death. The biography, which in these times, reads like the tale of a pathetic innocent adrift in deadly theatre, outlines an inevitable, swift path to death for the young captain. (It also notes that he was a heavy smoker - even by WW2 standards!) He had been among the district’s finest, a substantial landholder and a most advantageous marriage prospect. You and your father could not compete with the perfection of a ghost.
You are now forty something. Your parents have died smokers’ deaths. Smoking is bound into your sexuality as tightly now as it was at puberty. - Thanks to the net you know that you are not alone, you no longer deny the fetish and the confusion has been dissipated. On the negative side, you have no current partner or confidants of any kind. You are burdened by a history of serious achievement, outweighed by two failed marriages to non - smokers, academic and career debacles. Your children are at constant risk of alienation - “You are so strange Dad” - Your daughter, in her late teens, with a child’s face and a willlowy body, favours skintight leather, extreme heels, obvious makeup and is an addicted cigarette smoker. That may look like fetish to you, to her it is fashion, free drinks and entre to the best nightclubs.
There is real regret that you have stubbornly resisted relationships with women who were prepared to work the fetish - - (that goes back to the seventies - three particular women were barely out of their teens and without prompting, generally delivered the cigarette theatrics that were essential to your sexual performance)
If you visit your small home town where your fetish is folklore, there are overtures. There are women, bored in marriages to men with the emotional complexity of white sliced bread. Their men were once undoubtably “so cool” in comparison to your own fevered youth, but they were not as driven, as successful as yourself. In your company, the women, who have never quit, once more light up with attitude. Another forty-something comments that she could “take up smoking again, anytime”. It is time to go home - “Are you going to bash me, mum?”
