Footsucker

Nineteen

I tried to carry on as normal. I went to work, I went out sometimes, though it appeared I wasn’t going to be seeing much of Mike and Natasha from now on. That made me sad too, but I tried to get on with my life, and it certainly wasn’t easy. It even crossed my mind that I should take to the streets again with my clipboard and camera and try to find new pairs of feet and shoes that would excite me. But I didn’t. It would have felt sacrilegious. And again, even though my archive was now all the richer for the addition of Catherine’s shoes (or Harold’s shoes, I wasn’t quite sure of the correct terminology), I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. My thoughts were elsewhere. Let’s face it, my thoughts were all over the place.

There were times when I tried to imagine where Catherine was and what she was doing, but it was impossible. Her life was and always had been a mystery to me. I had no idea what she did or who she saw when she wasn’t with me. She described herself as an adventuress and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that she was off having adventures. Unlike Harold, I didn’t want to have this stuff made specific and personal. I didn’t want to know. And why should I have to? London was surely big enough for me not to run across Catherine by chance. I wasn’t sure precisely how I would react if I did happen to see her, but I suspected I wouldn’t emerge with much dignity. And I was right.

It was night and I was in my car. I’d stopped at traffic lights and a red car, something Japanese and low to the ground, pulled up behind me. I looked in my rear-view mirror and immediately saw that Catherine was the passenger in the car. I couldn’t believe it. I felt as though someone had poured a bucket of hot fat over me. Then I looked at the driver. He was a young, dark, smooth-skinned man with a lot of black curly hair. I stared into the mirror with growing panic as Catherine leaned over and kissed him.

That’s when I lost it. Some circuit burned out, some trip switch was thrown inside me. The traffic lights changed, and, without quite understanding what I was doing or why, I slowed down so that the red car was forced to overtake me. As it accelerated past I saw Catherine more clearly. She looked happy, alive, drunk, and she was far too engrossed in her new man to notice me or recognize my car. So I started to follow them. I suppose I wanted to see where they were going, to know what new life Catherine had pitched herself into, though I had no idea what I’d do once I had that knowledge.

The man drove erratically, sometimes too fast, sometimes dawdling. I guessed he was drunk too. At last he turned off the main road, went into a side street, stopped abruptly and parked his car a long way from the kerb. The engine and lights were switched off and the two of them got out. I drove slowly past and stopped a safe distance away.

The street was dark and empty. It was lined with big, old, grey buildings that had once been dignified and substantial, but now some were empty and others had been converted into less dignified enterprises; a wine warehouse, a printer’s, a plumber’s supply shop. It didn’t look like a place where anyone would live, but the man felt in his pocket for a key and made for a door next to the printer’s. Catherine took his arm, and kissed him with real, if deliberately exaggerated, passion. He responded and then pulled away laughing. He opened the door, they went in. I saw a series of lights go on up the flights of stairs, all the way to the top floor, which I supposed was a converted flat above the shop.

Once I was sure they were safely inside, I went over to the door and read the name on the doorbell. It was Kramer, an innocent enough name, I thought at the time. I waited all night in my car, and I didn’t sleep. I had the radio on, jammed between stations, picking up Cuban rhythms, Creole languages, flurries of static and Morse code. I kept my eyes trained on the windows of the flat. A light was on but there were no shadows on the curtain, no hint of movement, nothing to tell me what was going on in there. All that was left to my imagination. I had to invent new obscenities and pornographies for the two of them to commit on each other, and my powers of invention had never been greater.

It was a long, long night. When dawn seeped in between the buildings I was still expecting nothing. I thought a time would eventually come when someone would draw back the curtains of Kramer’s flat, and I would see a face, it could be his or hers, looking blurred and sated. But I imagined that still to be some hours away. Then, against all expectations, the front door started to open. I didn’t dare to hope it was Catherine, and yet even before she appeared I knew it had to be her. She was alone and she was badly ruffled. Her face, her hair, her whole body looked creased and worn. Her dress was too thin for the cold of the morning. She hugged her arms around herself and started to walk down the street, heading in my direction, slowly, cautiously, as though the ground was not to be trusted.

Her legs were bare, paler and leaner than I remembered. The knees looked rough and were reddened, as though she had been kneeling in front of him, or been dragged across a carpet, or been crawling on all fours. Then I looked at her feet. They were bare except for the coat of enamel on her toenails, and I watched them flatten themselves against the cold roughness of the pavement, watched them arch and spring as they took her along the dirty, unswept street.

She looked hungover, or perhaps still drunk. She seemed raw, exposed, sand-papered, and yet she was wholly self-contained. Nothing was going to get to her. It must have been then that she realized I was watching her. She must have known. She might have recognized the car, might even have seen me behind the wheel, my face blurred and streaked behind the windscreen. She didn’t appear to react, but what she did next, she must certainly have done for my benefit.

She continued to walk down the street towards me, gathering momentum and confidence. She walked purposefully until she was ten or twelve feet from my car and then she stopped dead. There was a big, soft, fresh curl of dog shit lying directly in her path. She teetered a little, and I assumed she had stopped to avoid it, but then she looked hard in my direction, made a movement of her body that had some hint of a curtsy about it, and then she placed her bare right foot down firmly into the dog shit.

It submitted to the pressure. It spread, extended its boundaries, curled around the sides of her feet, oozed up between her toes like swamp mud or chocolate spread. And she took her right foot out of the shit and did exactly the same thing with her left. She was smiling to herself, feeling the warm slime of the shit on her soles, enjoying the sweet filthiness of the experience.

She stopped looking in my direction and began to move on, staring down at her feet as she walked, turning back to look at the shitty brown footprints she was leaving behind her. She seemed pleased with the effect and walked straight past me without looking back.

My face felt as though it was being pressed into hot coals. There were pains in my chest, and my hands were trembling. I wanted to kill something, tear something apart with my bare hands, with my teeth. I wanted to consume blood, rotting meat, raw jellyfish. I wanted to swallow lumps of the world and vomit them up again. But there was a much simpler remedy. I slipped my cock out of my trousers and needed only a few savage pulls on my foreskin before I shot sperm all over the dashboard.