Footsucker

by Geoff Nicholson

  By the same author

  Fiction

  STREET SLEEPER

  STILL LIFE WITH VOLKSWAGENS

  THE KNOT GARDEN

  WHAT WE DID ON OUR HOLIDAYS

  HUNTERS AND GATHERERS

  THE FOOD CHAIN

  THE ERROL FLYNN NOVEL

  EVERYTHING AND MORE

  Non-fiction

  BIG NOISES

  DAY TRIPS TO THE DESERT

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 1996 by

  The Overlook Press

  Lewis Hollow Road

  Woodstock, New York 12498

  Copyright © 1995 Geoff Nicholson

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-59020-946-2

  Contents

  By the same author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  I love feet. They talk to me. As I take them in my hands I feel their strengths, their weaknesses, their vitality or their failings. A good foot, its muscles firm, its arch strong, is a delight to touch, a masterpiece of divine workmanship. A bad foot – crooked toes, ugly joints, loose ligaments moving under the skin – is an agony. As I take these feet in my hands I am consumed with anger and compassion: anger that I cannot shoe all the feet in the world, compassion for all those who walk in agony.

  Salvatore Ferragamo, Shoemaker of Dreams

  Just as the fetish enables the fetishist to simultaneously recognize and deny woman’s castration, irony allows the ironist to both reject and reappropriate the discourse of reference.

  Naomi Schor, ‘Fetishism and Its Ironies’

  in Nineteenth Century French Studies, Fall 1988

  One

  I held her feet in my hands. They were perfect, of course; as pale and pure and cold as vellum. I kissed them, let my lips move softly and drily over their insteps, then placed them gently on the floor by the bed. I took a final long, lingering look. I wanted always to remember them this way.

  Then I took a claw hammer, previously unused, all shiny burnished steel, with a rubber sheath around the handle to give grip and absorb shock. I raised it high above my head, let it balance at the peak of its apex, and then I brought it down as hard and as precisely as I could, down on to the cold, pale, white, left foot. I did it again for the right. Then several times more, again and again, until the feet were no longer perfect, indeed no longer recognizable as feet, until they were smashed, disordered, pulverized, scattered to all points of the room.

  White dust hung low in the air. White fragments littered the floor, and I gathered them together, crumbling them between my fingers. Of course there was no blood, no flesh, no splinters of bone, no smashed tissue. All I had done was destroy two plaster casts of Catherine’s feet. The real ones were still intact, still perfect, although they were no longer accessible to me.

  I had hoped that destroying the casts might act as a kind of therapy, as a kind of voodoo. I had hoped that destroying the replicas might also destroy the hold that Catherine’s feet had over me. As I sat on the floor, surrounded by plaster rubble, I knew that the magic hadn’t worked. I was as deeply in thrall as ever.

  Two

  This is what used to happen. This is what I used to do. This is how it usually went. I stood on street corners looking presentable. I wore a good suit with a plain tie. I looked smart and clean and boyish. I had a pen in one hand and a clipboard in the other, and I tried my very hardest to look unthreatening. I tried to be charming and I tried to make my smile sincere. Then I would stop women in the street and ask if they’d be prepared to answer a few simple questions. I often stood close to a shoe shop and approached women as they came out, because I could see they’d either bought shoes or at the very least had been looking at them and trying them on. Shoes and feet were already on these women’s minds and that helped a lot.

  I would tell them that I was attached to a fashion PR company, doing research on behalf of shoe manufacturers, and would they be prepared to talk to me about the kind of shoes they bought and wore.

  Naturally, I didn’t stop just anybody. I only stopped women who looked right, who were wearing the right type of shoes. Of course, a certain percentage of women just said no. They were busy, or they were in a hurry, or they weren’t interested in shoes, or they didn’t like being stopped by a strange man in the street however presentable he looked, or they thought I was trying to sell them something. I always did my best to reassure them that I wasn’t a salesman, but some of them just wouldn’t be reassured. Nevertheless, a large, perhaps a surprisingly large, number of women were prepared to take the time to answer my questions.

  I tried not to be intrusive. I didn’t ask for names or ages, occupations or details of income or socio-economic group, nothing like that. The first thing I wanted to know was simply how many pairs of shoes the woman owned, and what kind they were, what they were made of, how many in leather, how many in suede, how high the heels were, whether they were slingbacks or court shoes or strappy sandals, what colours they were, whether any of them came from the great and famous shoe manufacturers.

  Assuming all this went well, I would move on to questions about the feet themselves, whether the woman had any problems with her feet, whether she had corns or calluses, bunions or scars or fallen arches or hammer toes. In some cases, depending on the type of shoes the woman was wearing, I could see much of this quite plainly, but it was still good to ask. Then I would enquire whether she’d ever had a foot massage or a professional pedicure, and whether she painted her toenails and if so in what colours.

  At this point, rather disingenuously, I would act as though the interview was over. The woman would be surprised. She had thought it would take longer than that. She might even say, ‘Is that all?’ But then, almost as an afterthought, as though it was a matter of no consequence whatsoever, I would ask was it all right if I took her photograph in the interests of research. The woman would always say no, would turn her head, put up a hand to cover her face, say she hated having her picture taken. I would apologize for any embarrassment and say sorry, no, no, I wouldn’t ever presume to take a photograph of her face. I just wanted to photograph her feet and shoes. She would be relieved at this and usually said OK. Well, to be honest, not all of them used to say OK. For some this was going too far, was just the wrong side of strange, and they said no, in which case I let them go on their way with no argument. But again, a surprising number of
women would let a strange man photograph their feet in the middle of a busy London street. Or perhaps they felt safer precisely because the street was busy and the act so public.

  I would put down my clipboard and produce a serious, professional-looking camera. I would kneel at the woman’s feet, peer through the lens, focus, get a good angle, while all the time making it clear that I wasn’t trying to look up her skirt, and then I took as many photographs as I decently could. When I sensed the woman was getting bored or restless, I stood up again, put away the camera and said that the interview had gone very well indeed and that since she had been such a helpful respondent would she be prepared to answer a few supplementary questions, that is if she wanted to, if she didn’t mind, if I wasn’t delaying her too much.

  Assuming she agreed, I would ask whether, in her opinion, women dress for themselves, for other women or for men. Regardless of the answer I then asked whether the man, or men, in the woman’s life appreciated the shoes she wore. Did they ever, for example, ask her to wear very high heels? If we had got this far, the answer was invariably yes. I asked her to describe the feeling of wearing high heels. She would say that she felt good, strong, high and mighty, attractive, sexy.

  Then I would ask whether she ever kept her shoes on during sex. And if I was given the chance I then asked if her sexual partner ever kissed or licked her toes. Did he like her to massage his cock with her bare feet? Did he ever ask her to run her high heels over his balls and buttocks? Did he ever ejaculate into the cleavage of her toes? And so on.

  It was during this phase that the interview would invariably come to an abrupt halt. Some women would simply look at me with contempt and anger and walk away. Some would call me a pathetic wanker, some threatened me with violence, either their own or their husband’s or boyfriend’s. One woman said she’d like to kick me in the balls but I was probably the kind of pervert who’d enjoy it. (She was quite wrong, incidentally.) And one or two had been known to say they were going to call the police.

  Almost all these threats were just that. Retribution never came. I was never hit. The police were never summoned, and if they had been, I would have been long gone by the time they arrived. And even if they had arrived in time, what would they have done? Surely the police in central London have better things to do than arrest presentable young men who are doing nothing more sinister than interviewing women about their feet and footwear. And, equally, surely women have far greater things to fear than somebody like me. I was always, and still am, completely harmless.

  So that was it. That’s what I used to do. That’s all. It was no big deal. On the scale of human depravity and perversity it barely registered. There was no violence, no violation, no pain, no victim. Later I would take the questionnaire, which was a genuine document designed and devised by me, and file it away, along with any photographs I’d taken, which I would have had developed and printed and, in certain cases, blown up. This material became part of my archive. More about the archive (much, much more) later.

  Subsequently I would lay out these photographs, pore over them, savour the intricacies of foot and shoe, and if I happened to become aroused by this, and if I used the pictures as an aid to masturbation, well, what harm was there in that?

  So that’s what I usually did. That’s what usually happened. But this was a long time ago, and it’s not at all what happened when I met Catherine. With Catherine it went very differently.

  It was a hot summer’s afternoon, a Friday. I was taking an extended lunch break. My suit was too hot but I didn’t want to loosen my tie, and I had positioned myself in South Molton Street in readiness to quiz women as they came out of the expensive clothes and shoe shops there.

  You couldn’t help noticing Catherine. She looked great. She was very tall, statuesque even, not thin, not girlish. She had a bundle of rough, shaggy, black hair, large, strong features, dark eyes and a broad, crimson, pleasingly asymmetrical mouth. She was, I’m sure, in every sense, conventionally attractive, but what attracted me was her footwear, a pair of spike-heeled, zebra-skin shoes. They were something very special indeed. Her walk was sinuous and not quite steady. That may have been the shoes or she could have been slightly drunk. Drunkenness would explain some of what happened next, but not all of it.

  I approached her. She stopped willingly enough and when I asked how many pairs of shoes she had, she said about two hundred and fifty. No doubt my eyes lit up, and I hoped I wasn’t drooling. I asked what the shoes were like. She said, and I took it down word for word, ‘High heels, peep-toes, ankle straps, a lot of red and black leather, some very soft suede, one or two in silk, some fur mules, some ankle boots, some thigh boots, lots of weird animal skins; you know, your basic set of slut’s shoes.’

  I felt like all my Christmases had come at once. When I asked if I could photograph her from the ankles down she was delighted. I squatted on the pavement and started shooting the zebra-skin shoes. She moved her feet for me, arching them, turning her ankles this way and that, displaying them for me to admire. She really seemed to be getting into it.

  I noticed she had an American accent and I wondered if she was a tourist. People away from home, unsure of the local ground rules, are always more likely to give themselves over to the unexpected. Or perhaps, I thought, Americans are more outgoing, more sexually sophisticated, or maybe they’re just more naive. But there was nothing naive about Catherine.

  Even though the shoes weren’t particularly revealing, I could tell she had really nice feet. They were long and lean and lightly suntanned. All the same, I was unprepared for what I saw when, without my bidding, she kicked off her shoes. Perfection is a difficult concept and it is not a thing you can prove rationally or convince someone else of, nevertheless, as far as I was concerned, the feet that Catherine so casually, so wantonly revealed were absolute perfection. When I saw them bare, their curves and contours, their long elegant toes, their nails lacquered in deep scarlet, when I witnessed the intricate movement of bones and muscles, of veins and skin, I knew they were the feet I had been looking for all my life.

  I used up a whole roll of film. They subsequently proved to be excellent photographs. They showed Catherine’s beautiful bare feet standing naked on the hot, dusty pavement of South Molton Street, her wonderful zebra-skin shoes lying beside them, expensive, exquisite and so guilelessly discarded.

  She said she had never had a proper foot massage nor a professional pedicure although a couple of her boyfriends had painted her toenails for her. She said she wore high heels for herself and for her men. She said, and I quote again, that they made her feel, ‘Potent, dominant and, oh yes, wet.

  Then she said as though it had only just occurred to her, ‘What are you going to do with those pictures?’

  I said they would find a place in my archive.

  She laughed. ‘So it’s not like you’re going to take them home and jerk off all over them.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I lied.

  We were now at the point in the interview where, in normal circumstances, I would have asked a few offensively intimate questions about her sex life, but I didn’t get the chance.

  ‘You’re a foot fetishist, right?’ she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Come on, don’t get coy. Feet and shoes turn you on. Yes?’

  ‘All right, yes,’ I admitted, and I waited for her to insult me and walk away, but she didn’t.

  ‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘I’ve never met one of those. I mean what do you do? Do you like women to wear shoes while you’re fucking them? Do you like to suck their toes? Do you like to be walked on? Come on. Tell me all about it.’

  ‘How long have you got?’ I asked.

  ‘All the time in the world.’

  So we went to a bar and I told her about it. Not everything, that would have taken forever, and, even as it was, it took the rest of the afternoon and some of the evening. But by the end things had changed. By then we had moved on from theory to practice, and again that is not
at all what usually happened.

  And none of the rest should have happened either. When you approach an unknown woman in the street with the intention of asking her a few mildly obscene questions you might, in your wildest, most optimistic dreams, hope for some kind of sexual liaison; and this we duly, and to my complete astonishment, did have. But you could never, ever hope that such an encounter would present you with the perfect pair of feet. You could not expect to fall in love, and you would certainly never dream of the terrible, violent, appalling consequences that came from that simple, silly, sexually retarded act.

  Three

  My Gray’s Anatomy would tell you that the foot is the terminal part of the inferior extremity, what you and I would call the leg. It would say the foot serves as a support structure and also an instrument of locomotion. It would say that the foot is divided into three sections, the tarsus, the metatarsus and the phalanges, that there are seven tarsal bones, five metatarsal bones, fourteen phalangeal bones; a total of twenty-six.

  It would say that the foot is intricately and richly supplied with muscles, blood vessels and nerves. Only some of these are responsible for making the foot an object of fascination to a man such as myself.

  For instance, on the dorsal surface of the foot you will find the extensor digitorum brevis, a thin broad muscle that subdivides to form four tendons that spread out across the foot. On any foot that I found truly beautiful these tendons would have to be clearly, tautly visible.

  Also on that same surface you find the dorsalis pedis artery, a blood vessel which splits and forms branches; namely the tarsea and metatarsea which run parallel across the top of the foot, and the interosseæ and dorsalis hallucis which run along the foot in the direction of the toes. These too stand out in low relief on a beautiful foot.

  There are then the cutaneous nerves, the anterior tibial and the saphenous, which criss-cross the foot, again branching and subdividing, interweaving with bone and muscle. These are not obviously visible, yet they are responsible for making the foot so uniquely sensitive.