The other night I went out for a drink with Steve - he's an old friend of mine and I went round to his house to pick him up. His wife Cath answered the door and invited me in. I could hear Steve upstairs, swearing and banging drawers. Looking for his wallet, she said, rolling her eyes.

I like Cath, she's a friendly, pretty and outgoing sort but the funny thing is, ever since I've known her, I've never quite been able to look her in the eye. I'm not sure what she thinks of me as a result - that I'm shifty and untrustworthy or that I've secretly got a bit of a thing for her - but the truth is altogether different, and a bit embarrassing, as I am about to relate:

Once long ago, when I was a lad about town and she was the equivalent in girlhood, I had just staggered out of a nightclub at chucking out time and furtively nipped into the underground car park next door for a nifty jimmy. On hearing a bit of a commotion a short distance away I peered, or was it leered, drunkenly round my chosen pillar - and that's when I first saw her. There upon the bonnet of a BMW, getting a good seeing to, was Cath, wearing nothing but a pair of little pixie boots. Not in the car, you note, but on it, bold as you please, which has a certain cavalier style you have to admit. I was unseen of course and chose not to linger, realising even in my drunken state that being discovered there, especially in an unzipped condition, might seriously jeopardise my chances of ever becoming a scoutmaster.

I didn't know who she was then but I often spotted her around town after that, in the pubs and clubs, more often than not wearing those dinky little boots and whenever I saw her I could not rid myself of that image - those little pixie boots reaching for the sky. It was shortly after that incident that Steve started going out with her. I've never told Steve about what I'd seen, obviously, and its not exactly something I could casually drop into a conversation with Cath either. In all honesty its not a difficult subject to steer clear of as long as you avoid potentially embarrassing conversations about the strengths of BMW engineering and the most effective methods of buffing up one's paintwork should you happen to purchase one. But that doesn't mean it hasn't preyed on my mind. In fact, a few years ago, when a new baby clothes shop opened in town called Bonnets and Bootees, I even peered in the shop window on my way past just to see if by some admirable quirk of fate she might be the proprietor, calmly sitting there with an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile on her face. But I've always been afraid the matter might one day just accidentally pop out, like an inadvertent and unavoidable expulsion of wind.

"We were just looking through some old photos," Cath told me, as I took off my coat "looking at what we used to get up to. They must from about twenty years ago. You must have a look."

But as I followed her into the lounge the impending horror hit me. Oh no please no. No boots, not the boots! I'm going to blurt something out I just know it. We sat side by side on the sofa flicking through the their old photo albums: lots of shiny faced lads and lasses, holidays, nights out, Christmas parties, people dancing to bleeding Agadoo in clubs. Suddenly there they were: those proud little white pixie boots. She was posing drunkenly with a friend in the doorway of a pub.

"Oh just look at that outfit: RaRa skirts." she laughed, "And those boots look!, I used to love those boots, never took them off."

"mmm" I squeaked.

"They were so comfortable I wore them for years, even after they went out of fashion, they just never seemed to wear out."

"You don't say."

"I still have them somewhere, Steve won't let me throw them away - its... well... sentimental reasons, embarrassing really." She looked at me coyly and reddened. "I was wearing them the night we first met." Then the realisation suddenly hit me, a penny dropped,

"Oh," I exclaimed, "was that Steve then?"

"What do you mean?" she asked, looking puzzled.

"Er...I mean is that him... there" I jabbed at a photo, "just look at that haircut." I tutted, rescuing myself I think.

You see I never knew that, I never even looked at the bloke in the car park, I clocked a naked girl, a fancy car, that was it. But it all fits - Steve had been with us that nght - but one minute he was dancing to Aga-bleeding-doo the next he was gone. For some reason, I'd always assumed it was some smoothie who'd pulled her that night, casually dropping his BMW into the conversation whilst Roger Moorely stroking an eyebrow and adjusting his cravat. Even though BMW drivers probably don't wear cravats. And come to think of it, he wouldn't have been much of a smoothie either, he could at least have got in the bloody thing. Steve never had no BMW. In fact I think he still had an Austin Allegro then - not a car worth keeping your boots on for.

I still can't say a word of course but at least it fills up a little gap in my grubby past. The secret will go with me to me grave. Or at least until I get really pissed.