Footsucker

Ten

And so our relationship with Harold began in earnest. A few days later we returned to the shop and he began the process of fitting. He measured Catherine’s feet, made drawings and diagrams, jotted pages of notes to himself. That much was as expected, but then he said, ‘Now I need to make a cast.’

‘A cast?’

‘Yes, a sort of life mask of the young lady’s feet.’

‘You mean like a plaster cast?’ Catherine asked.

‘Yes. It’s not absolutely essential to the shoemaking process, but a cast reveals all sorts of details about the foot that are invisible to the naked eye. It enables me to create a more perfect fit.’

There’s a famous photograph of Ferragamo surrounded by his lasts. They represent the feet of his famous clients and are marked with their names: Claudette Colbert, Greta Garbo, Sophia Loren. The lasts are made of wood and although they obviously depict the size and the shape of the foot very accurately, they don’t show any detail, no bone structure or veins, not even the toes. I could see that a ‘life mask’ would be a much more faithful replica, even though I wasn’t sure how necessary that detail would be when it came to making shoes.

Harold continued, ‘I’ll need to make a mould using the sort of bandage they use to set broken limbs. Once I’ve got the mould I can use it to make perfect models of the feet. I tend to use plaster but you could use lots of different things. I could just as easily make models in wax or plasticine, even jelly.’

The prospect of having Catherine’s feet cast in jelly was a bizarre one. What flavour would I choose? Strawberry? Lime? Calves-foot? Incidentally, there are a couple of Aboriginal tribes in south-eastern Australia who used to eat the feet of their slain enemies; but I’m rambling.

Harold began to make the cast. I thought it would be a difficult and painstaking process, but Harold went about it in a perfectly matter of fact way. He began by coating Catherine’s feet in Vaseline, which he described as ‘the releasing agent’. I watched his hands smearing the stuff all over Catherine’s bare feet, his short, dark fingers swirling over every part of them, smoothing them down, burrowing in between the toes. Harold retained an entirely formal air while completing his task, but for me there was something utterly profane about it.

Then he asked Catherine to arch her feet as though she was on tiptoe or, I suppose, as though she was wearing high heels. He then wrapped the feet in the medical bandages he’d spoken of and slapped white liquid plaster over them. We had to wait for them to set, and Catherine was commanded not to move, but the whole business was brief and painless. Harold was soon cutting the set bandage and releasing Catherine’s feet. It took less time and was far less intimidating than the pedicure had been.

Harold said he didn’t need us any more. He said that now he had the moulds he could make the actual casts in our absence. In fact, as Catherine pointed out after we’d left the shop, he could make any number of them, in a wide variety of media, and who knows to what uses he might put them. She giggled. The thought didn’t displease her.

Before long a pair of plaster casts duly arrived for me in the post. They were meticulously packed and I undid the parcel with a kind of awe. Harold had been perfectly correct. I thought I knew every nook and crevice of Catherine’s feet, and yet seeing them this way, inert and perfectly white, revealed new features, small indentations and elevations that I had not noticed so clearly before. I was looking at a new map, a new geography. The effect was strangely hyper-real, as though the replicas contained more information, more detail than the feet themselves.

I handled them for a long time, held them up to the light, placed them in various locations in my living room and bedroom to discover where they could be seen to their best advantage. They weren’t, of course, as appealing as the real thing, as Catherine’s real flesh, but as fetish objects they were more exciting than the majority of feet I had ever encountered.

Harold wasn’t very explicit about what he would do with the casts. The shoes weren’t going to be constructed around the plaster, he was making wooden lasts for that. Rather it seemed as though he wanted to have these models of Catherine’s feet in front of him as he designed and made a new pair of shoes, as a reminder of Catherine and as an inspiration.

Catherine and I still had no idea what kind of shoes Harold was going to come up with. We had both asked what he had in mind but he told us we would have to wait and see. He said it as though we were over-inquisitive children, and I think he took some pleasure in teasing us, in denying us gratification, and yet there was nothing frivolous in his approach to his craft.

I asked if he had any other shoes he could show us, some earlier examples of his work, but he said that all his shoes were now with their rightful owners. Didn’t he at least keep a few photographs or working drawings, I asked. Surely they’d have been good for drumming up business if nothing else. But Harold said he kept nothing. Once the shoes had been made he was finished with them. They had a life of their own, they went out into the world. He might occasionally see them in action, being worn by their owners, but at that point he was just a spectator, they were no longer his, he had no claim on them. As a confirmed archivist I found this detachment very peculiar, but I didn’t doubt that Harold was telling the truth.

Making this new pair of shoes for Catherine was a slow and painstaking business, and Harold was not going to be rushed. I knew better than to pester him but the anticipation was killing. I tried to imagine what he might be making but I didn’t want to fantasize too much in case my imaginings and expectations became so extreme that reality could never live up to them.

But the day finally arrived when Harold was ready to reveal his creation. We were summoned for eight in the evening and I took along a bottle of champagne, as though it might be a party or the launch of a ship. Harold accepted half a glass and then put it down absent-mindedly. His thoughts were elsewhere. For him there seemed to be a lot riding on this pair of shoes, more than I would have thought reasonable. After much prevarication, and what I took to be false modesty, Harold at last showed us the shoes, and they were truly glorious.

The back, sides, heels, all the basic form were styled like a traditional, if extraordinarily high-heeled, court shoe. They were elegant, classic and made of superbly malleable black kid. But there was nothing traditional about the toes of the shoes. They were made of black and white snakeskin, or, to be more accurate, each shoe had at its apex the head of a real snake, the eyes glassily black, the mouths wide open, fangs visible. But the snake heads weren’t mere adornment, they were part of the shoe’s structure, and the open jaws formed peep-toes, and when Catherine put the shoes on her lacquered nails were visible in the snake’s throat, the red varnish in rich contrast to the black and white diamonds of the snakeskin.

Catherine and I were speechless with admiration. She walked round the workshop in the shoes and it seemed as though she had grown in stature and voluptuousness. Her walk and her figure, her whole body were sensual and provocative, utterly carnal. I wanted to fuck her there and then, and there’s no greater compliment to a pair of shoes than that. More to the point, and as I could plainly see, they made Catherine want to be fucked there and then too. We both thanked and congratulated Harold. I toasted him and said he was a master, that these were the most exotic and wonderful shoes I’d ever seen.

‘I think we have a major success on our hands, Harold,’ Catherine agreed.

But Harold didn’t seem to share our enthusiasm. He looked profoundly melancholy. He hadn’t touched his champagne.

‘They’re good shoes,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with them. A lot of people would be delighted to have made them, but I know they’re only a partial success. I have to go back to the drawing board.’

Although I would have preferred Harold to be happy, I didn’t read too much into his dissatisfaction. He obviously cared deeply about his work, his standards were sky high, and I thought his sense of failure was only that of the true perfectionist. However sublime a creation might be, and these new shoes seemed utterly sublime to me, their creator might always have a sense that they were flawed and imperfect. That, I supposed, was what kept all artists and craftsmen going, the urge to try again, the desire to perfect the imperfectible. And, let’s face it, I was very happy for Harold to keep trying and failing if all his failures were going to be as magnificent as these. I was very happy indeed that he was going to be designing and making more shoes for Catherine.

The snake shoes were great for sex. Catherine and I went home, and on this occasion there was no time for contemplation. I put my tongue inside the snake’s mouth to lick Catherine’s toes. She would walk round her flat, naked but for the shoes, an act that rapidly led to more bouts of sex. I assumed Harold would be delighted by all this, not that we told him precisely what use we made of his shoes, there seemed no need to, obviously he already knew. What else were his kind of shoes for?

I was aware that this was not the usual relationship that existed between shoe wearer and shoemaker. Given that even the best shoes are often machine made, the wearer seldom has any sense of the maker’s identity. In this case we obviously had a precise sense of Harold’s personality, and in a strange way Harold Wilmer became a real if distant presence in the sex that Catherine and I had together.

For that reason, among others, over the next few weeks I found myself thinking often about Harold and his work. I knew he was making another pair of shoes for Catherine and although I wondered exactly what he was up to, I no longer had any anxiety about what he would produce. I knew they would be extraordinary and magnificent. It was like looking forward to a surprise party.

When a couple of weeks had passed and I hadn’t heard from him I decided to call in at the shop, not because I wanted to harass him, but because I couldn’t contain my curiosity any longer.

The shop was open so I entered. Harold was sitting immobile at his workbench, one hand up to his brow as though he might be shading his eyes from the light, but I could tell that in reality he was weeping. I was embarrassed. I felt I was intruding.

‘Is this a bad time?’ I asked. ‘Shall I come back later?’

He raised his head, looked at me and said, ‘It’ll be exactly the same later. Now that Ruth’s dead I just don’t …’

‘Ruth?’ I asked.

‘Ruth, the woman I used to make shoes for, the red and black ones that first brought you in here.’

‘The one you said was a special customer?’

‘Yes. But she was a lot more than that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Now she’s gone, I just don’t care about anything very much any more.’

I hoped that wasn’t literally true. I hoped he wasn’t trying to tell me that he’d stopped caring about his craft, that he wasn’t going to make any more shoes. I wasn’t selfish enough to ask him that directly, but there seemed no point in trying to be discreet. So I said, ‘Tell me about Ruth. Who was she exactly?’

‘She was a whore,’ Harold replied. ‘And I’m not speaking metaphorically. She got paid very well for having sex with strange men. She was very good, I understand, well worth the extra. And I made her shoes for her. She always said she could charge even more when she was wearing shoes I’d made.’

He smiled wryly and I wasn’t sure whether or not I ought to smile back.

‘We weren’t attached,’ he said. ‘We weren’t lovers. I never made love to her. That would have spoiled everything, although everything’s spoiled anyway.

‘I know it’s absurd to fall in love with a prostitute. It’s a thankless task. It’s madness. There’s no possible joy in it. The woman you love sells herself to other men. She will tell you that she’s only selling her body, but you know it’s more complex than that. It really isn’t possible for anyone to constantly have sex with unknown men, day after day, night after night, in hotel rooms, in rented flats, in the backs of cars, without losing something vital. I don’t know what you’d call that something, but sooner or later it just disappears. It trickles away.

‘I got angry with her sometimes but I never tried to change her, never tried to make her stop. There were times when I’d want to hurt someone, her or her clients. But I never did. I just kept on making shoes for her to be fucked in, and the only one who got hurt was me.’

‘How did Ruth die?’ I asked. I feared the worst: suicide or drugs or Aids, something lurid and dramatic.

‘Cancer,’ he said. ‘Banal, yes?’

‘No, not banal,’ I said.

‘She was the only person in the world I ever needed, the only person who ever needed me.’

‘Hey, Harold,’ I said. ‘Catherine and I need you. We need you to carry on making shoes.’

It was supposed to be something of a joke, an attempt to make him feel needed without sounding too sentimental, and maybe it worked.

‘Just before you arrived that first day,’ he said, ‘I was seriously contemplating suicide. I still think about it. It feels like a real option. But you came into the shop, asked about the shoes, and I thought possibly, just possibly, there might be some point carrying on. And possibly, just possibly there is. So long as I can carry on making shoes, practising my art, having someone like Catherine to wear them, then maybe …’

I tried to make light of what he was saying. I’d never wanted to be beholden to Harold Wilmer in the first place; now it looked as though he was trying to make me responsible for whether he lived or died.

Nevertheless, I found myself saying, ‘Hey, Harold, you can’t commit suicide until you’ve made Catherine at least another hundred pairs of shoes.’

Harold gave a wispy, resilient little smile and told me to come back in a week with Catherine when he’d have a brand new pair of shoes to show us.