Footsucker

by Geoff Nicholson

  ‘Now there’s nothing in here to worry about,’ she said. ‘Just water, Epsom salts, plus a few drops of essential oils: lavender, rosemary and geranium. And I want you to give your feet a really good soak.’

  Catherine did as she was told, and our pedicurist then disappeared. I’m sure there’s nothing inherently pleasurable about sitting in a salon soaking your feet in lukewarm water. In fact, if Catherine was anything to go by, it’s a procedure that’s likely to bring on a fit of the giggles. I didn’t giggle but I would have agreed that the pedicure had started on a moderately absurd note. After fifteen minutes we were thinking we might have been forgotten, but Sophie returned, bouncy as a puppy, carrying a big absorbent towel with which she dried Catherine’s feet.

  ‘Now I’m going to put on some avocado foot cream,’ she said. ‘That will soothe your soles nicely and improve circulation.’

  We nodded and watched as she worked some greenish goo into Catherine’s feet.

  ‘You know,’ said Sophie, ‘a lot of people think that walking around barefoot is good for you, but I disagree. You’re all too likely to cut your feet or pick up a fungus or bacteria. And, of course, you must always wear plastic or rubber sandals at the health club or in poolside showers.’

  We both assured her that we would.

  ‘Next, I usually have to remove any old or chipped nail varnish. Not a pleasant job, and obviously not necessary in this case, and then I cut and shape the nails. Now you’d think that’s a simple enough procedure, but you’d be amazed how easy it is to get wrong, and badly cut toe-nails can be really dangerous.’

  ‘Really?’ said Catherine, all exaggerated awe.

  ‘Really. Because badly cut toe-nails affect the way you walk, they cause discomfort and that can cause you to transfer too much weight to the heels. There’s really only one option here. I’m going to cut them straight across, anything else can give you ingrown toenails. And length is all important too, short enough so that they don’t touch the edges of your shoes or cut into adjacent toes, but long enough so that they provide some protection to the tips of your toes. Is that clear?’

  She looked at both of us, willing us to understand, as though she had explained, albeit in layman’s terms, some state-of-the-art piece of microsurgery. We confirmed that we understood.

  She began to work with her clippers, purposefully but delicately. It seemed to me she was performing an intensely, unbearably intimate task. Much as I loved Catherine’s feet, I wasn’t sure that I’d have been able to clip her toenails in that way. Something about it would have felt too intrusive. Sophie had no such qualms. Soon she put down the clippers and worked on the nails using a smoothing disc and a buffer.

  Next she pushed back what little cuticle there was round the edges of the nails, and she looked at Catherine’s feet in admiration, though I wasn’t sure whether it was in admiration of the feet themselves or of her own work. She felt Catherine’s heels and the balls of her feet.

  ‘Normally I’d now have a go with a skin slougher or pumice to remove any dead skin or calluses, but there’s no need for that here,’ she said. ‘You’ve got really good feet. Really.’

  Then it was time to varnish the nails. You know it was Cecil Beaton who said of Coco Chanel, ‘She wore no red on her fingernails but reddened the tips of her toes on the theory that feet were a dreary business and required every aid.’ Ever since I read that I’ve felt very differently about Coco Chanel. Dreary business indeed. Not that Sophie appeared to find the business at all dreary.

  ‘The most popular colour is still the good old fire-engine red,’ she said. ‘That’s because it looks good with almost any kind of skin. Nude colours or corals can be used to enhance a dark or tanned skin tone, and these days we can have a lot of fun with metallics.’

  ‘No,’ I said as gently as I could, not wanting to disappoint her. ‘I don’t think we want to have fun with metallics.’

  ‘Are you sure? I can recommend Revlon’s Sahara Gold, from their Exotica collection, which personally I’d describe as giving a shimmering, crystalline, golden-brown effect.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Or Silver Sparkle by Creative Nail Design.’

  ‘No,’ said Catherine, helping me out. ‘We’ll go for the good old fire-engine red.’

  ‘I think you’ve made a very good choice,’ said Sophie.

  She inserted foam rubber separators between Catherine’s toes and applied a base coat to the nails, and when it was dry she started to put on the red varnish. She had the steadiest, most precise hand I think I’ve ever seen. Each nail was painted in three sure, clean strokes, one down the centre of the nail, then one down each side. There were no blots, no runs, no hint of hesitation. The job was done rapidly, though not hurriedly, and then she allowed five more minutes to pass before applying a clear top coat.

  ‘Now, I want you to sit there and not move a muscle for the next fifteen minutes.’

  Catherine did as she was told and Sophie went away again. Catherine’s toes were still splayed apart by the separators and they gave her feet a curiously deformed look. But I knew it was going to be worth it. Our pedicurist hadn’t really done much that Catherine couldn’t have done for herself, yet there was something oddly pleasing about the presence of an outsider, of a professional touch. Whether there was any erotic element to it I wasn’t sure.

  When the fifteen minutes was up Sophie returned to tell us that the procedure was over.

  ‘Before you go,’ she said, ‘can I recommend a product called Adiol?’

  I’d never heard of it and assumed it was some fancy cosmetic product that she was selling on commission, but no.

  ‘It comes originally from the horse-racing fraternity,’ she said. ‘Grooms used to apply Adiol to horses’ hoofs to strengthen them, but then the grooms themselves noticed their own nails becoming much healthier and stronger.

  ‘You know, nails are structurally very similar to horses’ hoofs. So the scientists at Adiol refined their product and Adiol Nail-Strengthening Cream was born. It’s rich in vitamin E and collagen but it contains no formaldehyde or toluene, and I can personally vouch for it.’

  We were sold, and we bought a bottle. It was time to go home. With some reluctance Catherine slipped on her shoes. It seemed a shame to cover up all that hard pedicuring.

  As I was paying Sophie her fee I said, ‘Yours is a strange calling, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A strange job, handling people’s feet all day.’

  She looked mildly offended. I knew I’d said the wrong thing and tried to laugh it off.

  ‘Well, I guess it’s not strange at all,’ I said. ‘There are probably people who’d pay good money to handle other people’s feet all day.’

  That was wrong too. She looked at me with what seemed to be practised contempt, as though she had seen right through me and spotted me as just another sicko loser of the sort that she had to deal with all too often.

  ‘It’s just a job, all right?’

  I said all right, gave her a bigger tip than I might have otherwise, and I hustled Catherine out of the salon.

  Catherine and I didn’t spend that night together, and alone in my bed, somewhere between waking and sleeping, I had a little sexual fantasy about what might have happened in the salon with Sophie and Catherine. It involved troilism and footsucking and was, I suppose, not really very original. But what was interesting was the way the fantasy had come unbidden. It wasn’t as if my sex life with Catherine needed any spicing up. Rather I felt it was an indication that with Catherine anything, any sexual antic or adventure, seemed possible, in fact seemed very likely.

  Catherine and I continued to see each other, not too often, perhaps not as often as I would have liked, but continue we did. I wanted her to come to my place, to see the archive if nothing else, but she said she wasn’t ready for that yet. So we met in bars, where she would reiterate that she didn’t know what she was doing with me, and then we would go back to her place, where
what she was doing with me became perfectly clear. Other times we went shopping for shoes.

  We were in the shoe department of a big London department store; very smart, moderately exclusive, very expensive. Some of the shoes were arranged on racks, with the more exotic specimens on pedestals or wall-mounted on glass shelves. The department was busy and assistants hard to find, not that we needed any assistance. It was easy enough to take shoes from the displays and try them on, and Catherine did so, to my obvious pleasure, but we were not there to do anything as wholesome and uncomplicated as shopping.

  We browsed through the whole department, looking for something very special, the right shoe for the right occasion, and at last we found the one that satisfied our needs. I handed Catherine a single, high-heeled, lizard-skin court shoe. The skin was soft and had a matt finish. It was elegant, narrow and had a long, pointed toe. She took it from me and admired it, then looked around to make sure nobody else was watching. She was wearing a calf-length, wraparound skirt, with a slit up the side that showed a length of leg as she walked. She was wearing nothing underneath, and she slid the shoe inside the folds of the skirt.

  This might have been interpreted as the act of a shoplifter, but that was not what we had in mind at all. Catherine carefully pressed the shoe against her cunt. She exerted a slow, steady, twisting pressure, so that the toe of the shoe parted her and bluntly entered. I watched intently, my gaze partly on what Catherine was doing beneath the skirt, partly on her face, which she was desperately trying to keep impassive.

  She had soon done as much as she could with the shoe. She bought it out from beneath the skirt, and handed it back to me. I looked at it and smiled appreciatively when I saw that the toe of the shoe was smeared with her juices. For a second I considered licking them off, but that was not part of the plan. I steadied myself and returned the shoe to its place on the display stand. We moved away, pretended we were still looking round the department, but our attention remained firmly on the lizard skin shoe. We did not have long to wait before someone else tried it on.

  She was young, very dark, her body and face very angular. She was sullen but sensual, and she was with her bored, much older husband who watched impatiently as she sat down, shucked off her own footwear and slipped her foot into the lizard-skin shoe. It went on easily and appeared to be a good fit. She extended her leg, held out the foot, turned her ankle so she could see the effect from different angles. She seemed satisfied, though she remained sullen, and she asked an assistant for the other half of the pair. While she was waiting for the assistant to return, something about the shoe caught her attention. She peered at it, and saw there was a mark on the toe, but she didn’t know what it was, how could she? She must have thought it was a scuff or a line of dust. She touched the shoe, as though to polish it, and her long, white index finger found itself skimming through the traces from Catherine’s vagina and removing them. She looked at the shoe again, seemed pleased. She still didn’t know what she had touched.

  The assistant returned, the woman tried on the other shoe, declared herself content and her husband paid for them. While she was waiting for the transaction to be completed she absent-mindedly stroked the corner of her mouth with the same finger that had touched the shoe and Catherine’s juices.

  Later, in Catherine’s flat, as we had sex, Catherine’s legs up, her feet pressed to my face, I knew we were both thinking about the dark, angular woman in the store. We wondered what she and her husband were doing tonight, whether they were enjoying the reality of the shoes they’d bought as much as we were enjoying the mere thought of them.

  Nine

  The story of Cinderella is a primary myth for all foot and shoe fetishists, but there are a lot of problems that go with it. At its simplest level, and even to the most unideological observer, it must seem to be peddling some unpleasant nonsense about class and romantic love. The idea that a woman might change her life utterly and for the better simply by dressing up in finery and attending a ball so that she can become a prince’s object of desire, is one that we find as suspect as we do improbable. But, of course, it’s the glass slipper that really interests me.

  How does the slipper come to be so crucial in the story? The prince, let’s remember, has spent a certain amount of time with Cinderella. He’s talked to her, heard her voice, seen her face, has surely had time enough to gain some sense of her personality. Yet when he begins his search for her, such attributes as personality, face and voice are wholly ignored. He is simply searching for the owner of a certain foot, a foot that will fit the glass slipper she left behind.

  It is well known that in Perrault’s original French fairytale the slipper is made of fur not glass. Now, there’s no shortage of sexual overtones in a fur slipper. Pubic hair is invoked, the interaction of human and animal skin is suggested, and the penetration of a fur opening by a woman’s foot is certainly ripe with perverse symbolism. But the plot of Cinderella revolves around the slipper fitting only one woman, and the fact is that fur is soft, yielding and could be stretched to fit any number of differently sized feet. A glass slipper, being rigid, has a far more specific fit, and is far less accommodating than fur.

  However, if we accept that the slipper is being used as some kind of vaginal symbol, a fur one is surely more serviceable than a glass one. Glass is brittle. It breaks. It is potentially dangerous. One could so easily smash the vessel and cut oneself.

  The role of the slipper is made even more complex and perverse, because it’s the prince who’s the possessor of this symbolic vagina. It belonged to Cinderella but she has run from it, left it behind. When the prince begins his search it’s the women of the kingdom who must perform an act of penetration, who must insert their foot into this fragile glass opening that he carries with him.

  This is a highly unusual and unlikely way of talking about heterosexual intercourse. The prince is active in his search for the foot, but entirely passive at the moment of insertion. We might easily convince ourselves that the prince is, in some sense, searching for a phallus, but, if so, it’s interesting that he’s in search of a small, delicate one.

  The behaviour of the ugly sisters contains all manner of weirdness too. They know that their feet are too big and ugly for the glass slipper, and, in a later version of the story, they actually have parts of their feet amputated so that they’ll be small enough to fit into it. In one case it’s the heel, in the other, more alarmingly, it’s the big toe. Taken simply as an act of self-mutilation this is shocking enough, but if we allow the foot to be considered as a phallic substitute, the idea becomes one of hysterical violence. Not that the prince is fooled. Cosmetic surgery is no good. The foot must conform to specific criteria but it has to be that way naturally.

  But does the whole business of the glass slipper work anyway? It is possible that there is something going on here that we could call poetic licence, but we might just as easily call it a clumsy plot device. And given that glass is an improvement on fur, surely it’s not credible that a shoe, even when made of glass, however carefully fashioned, however specific to the wearer, would really only fit one woman in the whole kingdom.

  Yes, everyone’s feet are unique, and if the prince, for example, had taken a Polaroid of Cinderella’s feet and gone round the kingdom in search of feet that matched the photograph, then he might well have tracked down Cinderella. But he was just relying on size and shape. How many shoe sizes are there? How many width fittings? How many defining features? Not many. It’s hard to imagine a foot so singular that a shoe could be fashioned that would fit this foot and no other.

  And here it seems to me the glass slipper functions in yet another way. Glass is transparent. When the glass slipper is on. Cinderella’s foot, the foot, by definition, remains entirely visible. The foot is contained, restrained, reshaped by the slipper, possibly a little squashed and pushed around, yet every feature can still be seen.

  But let’s think about Cinderella’s feet. She is forced to be a drudge. In English pantomime
she is usually to be found barefoot in the kitchen, by the fireplace. And her main job, of course, is to sweep up cinders. However delicate and small and special those feet of hers may be, they will not be clean. They would have been made dirty by treading in ash and coal dust. During the fairy godmother’s transformation it is possible to suppose they were made clean by the power of magic, but by the time the prince arrives they would certainly be dirty again.

  The prince holds out the delicate glass slipper and Cinderella places her perfect but soiled foot inside it. The long sought fit is achieved. The prince sees the object of his desire encased in glass like a museum specimen. The sullied sexual object is made safe, put behind glass. The prince can see its every detail, but he doesn’t need to touch it, indeed he doesn’t want to. It is as though the foot is varnished, set in colourless amber. However much he loves it, he won’t get his hands or anything else dirty. The man is obviously a fool.

  All this Cinderella business was brought into idiosyncratic focus the day I first met Harold Wilmer and had my life changed. Harold was a small, trim, compact man. He must have been sixty years old and yet he was as slight and as lean as a teenager. His face was thin, though hardly wrinkled, and he looked as though he would scarcely ever need to shave. He had the air of a man who might once have been seriously ill. The illness was cured but it had left him brittle. You would not have mistaken him for a happy man, but it seemed to me that he was touched with melancholy, not misery.

  His hair was threadbare and his eyes were tired, but he was dapper and alert, and he sat at his workbench wearing a tie and tweed waistcoat under his stained apron. He might have been mistaken for a jeweller or a taxidermist, and I suppose his work had something in common with both those trades, but in fact he was a bespoke shoemaker.

  I know a little about shoemaking; not enough to be able to make a shoe, probably not even enough to give instructions to a shoemaker, but I like to think I have enough knowledge of the techniques of shoemaking to be able to appreciate other people’s mastery of those techniques. I know that shoemaking is not what it was, that it’s become a dying art. Automation and synthetic fabrics have made a lot of the old skills superfluous. Good shoemakers are a rare breed and in danger of extinction.