He started to show me his shoe collection. He opened the metal lockers and pulled out samples. I was completely baffled. These were not FMs as I knew them. In fact they constituted the most dismal assembly of women’s footwear I had ever seen. There were beige slingbacks, tasselled loafers, clogs, flip-flops, sneakers, plastic sandals. There were even Earth Shoes and Dr Scholls. In normal circumstances they would just have been ugly and aesthetically unpleasing, erotically neutral, but what made them actively disgusting was their condition. He had obviously gone to great lengths to find the most distressed, scuffed, worn-out examples of each type. Fabric was torn, soles and heels were loose or flapping, and the owners’ feet had left them looking decayed, distorted, sweat laden.
I was horrified. The man disgusted me as much as his shoes did. I wanted to go.
‘Now wait,’ he said. ‘Look at these. They’re beauties, aren’t they?’
By now I knew him well enough not to expect to share his sense of what constituted beauty and I was not at all surprised to find that he was waving a pair of unexciting, open-toed, black patent high heels. They were horribly grubby and cracked and extremely large. I looked at them indifferently and said nothing. And then, to my dismay and horror, I saw that he’d taken off his own shoes and socks and he slipped his bare feet into the black high-heeled shoes. He stood up and strutted across the room. His gait was a little wobbly, yet he looked as though he was well practised in wearing women’s shoes. His feet looked totally, profoundly, disgustingly ugly, as ugly as anything I’d seen in his collection of pictures of bound and deformed feet.
I should probably have done nothing. I could have laughed at him or simply walked away, out of the building. But something in me couldn’t leave it just like that, I was disgusted and outraged and angry. I admit that I was also a little surprised by the power of my own reaction. I wanted to preserve my dignity, to say something pithy and dismissive and final, but words wouldn’t come to me. Instead he was the one who spoke.
‘I don’t know what you’re looking so mealy-mouthed about,’ he said. ‘I know you’re into it every bit as much as I am.’
I didn’t hit him exactly. I just headed for the door and as I went I pushed him out of the way. The flat of my hand made contact with his shoulder, nothing more violent than that, just a nudge really, and yet it resulted in him falling over. No doubt he wouldn’t have fallen so easily had he not been wearing the high heels, nor would he have fallen quite so far. But he made no attempt to break his fall, didn’t put out a hand or arm to stop himself, and his head hit the floor with a sharp, dry, full sound. He wasn’t knocked out but his eyelids flickered and he looked about him as though he didn’t recognize his surroundings or what had happened to him. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then slowly turned his head.
He had fallen in such a way that his head was next to the corner of the bed. I knelt down to make sure he was all right and I saw, hidden under the bed, a pair of spectacular silver and black FMs. I recognized the style immediately. I picked them up. Inside was Harold’s familiar trade mark, the footprint and the lightning flash. I was doubly disgusted. This pathetic specimen on the floor had no right to own a pair of Harold’s shoes. He didn’t deserve them. He wasn’t good enough. I grabbed the shoes and tried to stand up. The man protested groggily, and put out a hand to stop me. I was having none of that. I kicked him a few times in the ribs and then ran desperately out of his flat, taking Harold’s shoes with me.
That was the night I went home and smashed the plaster casts of Catherine’s feet. I didn’t know why I was doing it. Perhaps it was indeed a symbolic act to try to free myself, but it really made no sense at all. I treasured those casts. They were all I had left of Catherine. In destroying them I was only hurting myself. And I realized then there was a part of me that might have been perfectly happy to destroy Catherine’s actual feet as well as the casts. If they weren’t going to be mine, then nobody else was going to have them, not even Catherine. And, as I sat there amidst the plaster debris, with the pair of silver and black shoes I’d stolen from the ICA man, I feared that I might be going insane.
Twenty-two
Given that pornography is a problem for just about everybody these days, it provides a special set of problems for the foot and shoe fetishist. There are, or at least there used to be, men who said they looked at Playboy simply for the articles. I suppose nobody needs to tell lies like that any more. But if I ever look at Playboy it’s simply for the feet.
Now, I’m not made of stone. I’m not completely unmoved by the come-to-bed eyes and eagerly opened mouths of the women in girly magazines. I look at the long, smooth legs and the heavy, glossy breasts, and the silky buttocks and the hint or streak or flourish of inner pink, and, yes, sometimes I find that sexy. I’m not impervious to the erotic possibilities of stockings and suspenders, to strategically placed strands of leather or PVC or lace. But the only thing that really grabs me, the only thing I really care about is whether the model in the spread has a great pair of feet and a great pair of shoes.
You see surprisingly few bare feet in these pages. I suspect they aren’t considered glamorous enough. The women therefore tend to wear high heels, and this ought to be a very good thing, yet there’s often something tokenistic about it. The photographer or stylist thinks, Oh yeah, right, glamour shot, that means loads of make up, big hair, pair of high heels, without considering what constitutes good make up or good hair or good high heels. All too often the shoes are the wrong shape, the wrong colour, the wrong material. I’m not saying they always get it wrong, but they get it wrong more often than you might think possible.
However, even a casual browse through such magazines will reveal something very curious. It’s extraordinary how often the photographs of the women are cropped in a way that leaves the feet out of the picture. Sometimes they will even be cropped so that some of the foot will be shown, but the toes will be outside the frame. More frustrating still, the woman will be on a four-poster bed or a chaise-longue, and some skein of exotic material will be wrapped around her, draped so as to show off her body, but her feet will be tangled up and concealed in the material.
I can think of two possible explanations for this. The first is that the photographers, or at least the layout artists, are so insensitive to the finer points of eroticism that they’re not even aware that anyone could be interested in seeing women’s feet. You might think it’s unlikely. You might think anyone who makes a living in that world ought to be alive to these things but, let’s face it, there are plenty of people in all sorts of jobs whose heart isn’t in their work.
The other explanation is that there’s something terribly wrong with the women’s feet. Despite the beautifully made up face, the flatteringly lit skin, the improbably perfect body, the model’s feet, I suppose, may be calloused, deformed, twisted, ugly as sin. By leaving them out of the shot, the photographer could be doing us a favour, and yet it’s a favour I don’t really need. I’d rather be allowed to make up my own mind about whether a given pair of feet are attractive or not.
Of course there are many rooms within the ruined mansion of pornography, but even when the imagery moves well outside the soft, ‘girly’ category, into the hard-core wing, my erotic concerns remain much the same. I see a porno mag or video, and in it the women may be servicing four or five people of their own or different sexes, they may be doing thrillingly obscene things with dildos, fists and bodily fluids, but I find I’m still looking to see what’s going on below ankle level.
There are some specialist magazines for foot and shoe fetishists. I haven’t seen that many of them, and I certainly haven’t studied them, but the ones I’ve seen have been a considerable disappointment. They show feet being licked, toes being sucked, toes gripping cocks and probing vaginas, and these are all activities that in theory I find very appealing, but somehow, when you see a whole magazine devoted to them, it’s too formulaic, too forced.
For all these reasons, pornography, whether hard
or soft, often proves not to be an especially rich source of erotic imagery for the fetishist. Vogue is likely to offer classier, sexier, more elegant shoes than Playboy ever is. The models will probably be more beautiful, certainly they’ll be more striking and better photographed. And quality of photography was something I was going to find out all about.
I will never know why I decided to break into Kramer’s flat. It was a strange and very stupid thing to do, but then again, strange and very stupid behaviour had become something of a habit with me. I knew that I wanted to invade his territory, although I didn’t quite know why I wanted that, and once I was inside I thought I would create a certain amount of wreckage, break a few precious things, smash a few major appliances. But perhaps I was also looking for something; clues maybe, a masochistic search for evidence about Catherine, proof of her closeness to him and her distance from me; stained sheets, love letters, something to reinforce my own pain and loss, to reinforce the sense of separation.
I went there in the evening, parked my car and waited until I saw Kramer leave his building at about nine o’clock. Then I went into action. I was deliberately reckless in smashing open his front door. There was nothing furtive or covert about it. I had armed myself with a large hammer and chisel, and I chopped away at the locks, used brute force on the hinges, and the door gave way. I found myself in a low, narrow passageway that ended in a flight of stairs. I turned on all the lights I could find. I wasn’t going to skulk around in semi-darkness. I wanted to see what I had broken into. I went up the stairs, up another flight and another, to the top floor where there was a second locked door that needed opening, but now I felt like an old hand, and I cracked it open effortlessly.
I switched on more lights to see that I was in a sort of reception area, an outer office, with chairs, and a secretary’s desk. There were notice-boards with invoices and business cards and Polaroids pinned to them, and a few composites from models and some contact sheets. There were framed photographs on the walls. It appeared that our man was in business as a photographer and that this place was a studio as well as a home. I saw my opportunities for havoc and damage expanding rapidly.
Beyond the reception area was a bathroom, a living room, a bedroom. I looked into these briefly but the studio was my real destination, the place where he took his photographs, where the expensive equipment was. I found it easily; a high wide space. The roof and one of the walls were glass but there were drapes and blinds everywhere, some black, some white, absorbing or reflecting light, lining and subdividing the space.
Reflectors and spot lamps and flash units were clamped to a framework of stands and gantries, and a big plate camera stood centre stage, focused on a bare paper roll of backdrop. I shoved the camera with both hands and it fell with a satisfyingly heavy thud, though there was no sound of breakage.
There were lots of storage units around the place, filing cabinets, box files, plan chests, boxes of negatives and contact sheets. I ripped open a few. They were dull stuff, portraits of smiling business executives, shots of hairdriers and shampoo bottles. As I lost interest in them I dropped them on to the floor.
And then I opened the plan chest. It contained finished prints, huge, shiny, hard-edged photographs, sixteen by twenty or bigger, giant enlargements. I flipped through some of them, looking at the magnified faces and products and rapidly cast them aside. They were of no interest either. I was about to close the chest when I saw another set of prints, carefully wrapped up in paper. I pulled some of them out, unwrapped them, and stopped stone dead.
I could barely believe it but they were blow ups of Catherine’s feet, many, many times larger than life, showing and highlighting every detail, every flawless feature, the sheen and grain of the skin, the curvature of the nails, the thin, precise lines of cuticle, the traces of musculature and blood vessels.
I pulled the rest of the photographs out of the drawer, twenty, maybe thirty, portraits of Catherine’s bare feet, sometimes stretching and pointing, sometimes on tiptoe, sometimes at rest, photographs taken from subtly different angles, with different gradations of illumination and shadow, different degrees of contrast. The quality of the prints, the professionalism of the photography was over-whelming. It made all the examples in my archive look tacky and inept. I was devastated. I felt utterly hopeless and defeated. Until then it had been possible to tell myself that nobody could care for Catherine in quite the way I did, that nobody else could appreciate and worship her feet as I could. Yet here was evidence that Kramer, this stranger, this unknown quantity, this man she had been able to find so quickly after separating from me, was every bit as obsessional and fetishistic as I was.
I stood and stared at the black and white photographs; but monochrome, eloquent though it was, only told half the story. I somehow knew there would be more. I knew there would be colour images as well. I threw open a few metal cupboards until I came across boxes of transparencies. Ham-fisted and over-eager, I yanked out handfuls of slides, shuffled them, tossed them aside until I found what I was looking for.
There were at least a hundred of them, large format slides of Catherine’s bare feet. I held them up to the light but that was too frustrating. They were too small, the illumination wasn’t good enough. I intended to take some away with me and I immediately stashed a few in my pockets, but that still wasn’t enough. I was raging with adrenalin, flapping with recklessness. I decided I wanted to see them here and now on the big screen. I decided to have myself a little slide show.
I found a projector and set it up where the plate camera had been, so that it would project on to the studio’s paper backdrop. I loaded the magazine and slipped it in, turned off the lights, took the remote control in my fist and settled down for showtime. Catherine’s feet appeared in front of me, ten, twelve feet high, seen against different backgrounds, strong saturated purples and reds, but also on swathes of fur, on slick, smooth rubber, on a studded black leather jacket. And whereas her nails had been unpainted in the black and white prints, here they were lacquered a smooth, thick cerise.
Of course, I did wonder how come Catherine’s feet were bare in all the shots, how come Kramer hadn’t photographed her in shoes, but I could only think that his tastes weren’t exactly the same as mine. He apparently went for nature unadorned.
I stood there in the darkness, dust following currents through the beam of light, my eyes fixed on the projected images, Catherine’s feet filling my entire field of vision. I was transported and I was stiff as a poker. My heart was drumming, my head was full of blood and interference, and that was when Kramer returned.
Maybe he’d forgotten something, or maybe I’d miscalculated and he’d only slipped out to buy cigarettes. I didn’t hear him enter the room behind me; the noise of the projector fan was loud enough to cover the sound and, let’s face it, my concentration was elsewhere. Suddenly a light was switched on and the image on the screen was bleached to a thin, pale version of itself. I dropped the remote control and turned round to see Kramer staring at me.
‘What the fuck?’ he said to himself.
He was angry but I could see he was also frightened. He’d caught an intruder in his home and these days nobody knows what a cornered intruder might do to you. I could see him looking around the room, at the small pockets of disorder I’d caused, but it was plain that I hadn’t just trashed the place, that I wasn’t simply a wrecker or burglar. He picked up a heavy tripod, as much to defend himself as to attack me, but then he gave me a good looking over, noticed the image being projected, and I could see something shifting behind his eyes, something falling into place.
‘I think I know who you are,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve heard all about you.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t know me.’
‘I think I do,’ he insisted, and he immediately came at me. Suddenly he regarded me as no threat whatsoever, and he hit me in the stomach with the end of the tripod. It was a good shot. I was winded, in pain, and my legs felt as though the bones in them had turned
to mercury. I swayed, teetered, fell on my side. Kramer stood over me. He could have hit or kicked me anywhere he wanted to, a free hit. He could have crippled me probably, but instead he pushed me over on to my back and put his foot on my neck and pressed. He was wearing heavy, thick-soled work boots, and the pattern of tread was cold against my windpipe. Experimentally, he increased and decreased the pressure of his foot, as though he was revving an accelerator. I didn’t struggle or cry out. I just watched him and tried to breathe through my nose.
‘You’re a real comedy act, aren’t you?’ he said, and he took his foot off me. Automatically my hand went up to rub my throat but he kicked it away. I lay still after that. I could see he was trying to come up with another way of hurting me. At last he looked satisfied; he’d thought of something. He brought the sole of his right boot down on to my face, flattening my nose, its threatening pressure spread evenly between my forehead and my mouth. But he didn’t put all his weight on it, that wasn’t his game, not yet.
‘Now lick it,’ he said. ‘Lick it clean.’
I still had some pride. ‘Fuck you,’ I said, and then he raised his foot to about knee height and stamped on my face. Something light, brittle and very well supplied with pain receptors and blood seemed to snap behind my nose and it became difficult to breathe.
‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Get up. You want to see slides, I’ll show you some slides.’
He dragged me up by the hair and threw me down on to a couch. He went to a storage cabinet, pulled out a box of transparencies and loaded them into the projector.
‘See how you like these,’ he said.
A new set of images filled the makeshift screen. They were of Catherine but they were no longer just of her feet. They were of her whole body, naked and not alone. Kramer was in the photographs too, equally naked. I was being shown images of the two of them having sex. They were explicit shots, pornographic, I suppose. They made no attempt to be art, and neither were they posed exactly. I could see in the pictures that Kramer was holding a cable release and he was obviously pressing it and firing the shutter as and when he moved into a position that appealed to him, that seemed photogenic.
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