Footsucker

Four

The above was part, but only a small part, of what I told Catherine that evening in the bar on the day we met. She was genuinely fascinated. She found it strange, and perhaps slightly shocking, but she certainly wasn’t repelled. As she said, she had never encountered a real foot and shoe fetishist before, and she found me interesting, a curiosity, a case study. She was attracted by the fact that I was different, and perhaps she was attracted by other things too. I am a reasonably good-looking man. I have a certain charm and openness. She was interested to meet a fetishist but I don’t think she would have gone drinking with me had I been physically repellent, if I had been older or uglier or if I had more closely resembled the popular image of a sexual pervert. The fact that I do not resemble this image is not the least of my advantages. She was also an American, and, strange as it seems to me, some Americans still have a taste for things British. She said she was ‘attached to the university’, whatever that meant, and perhaps I was an area of research for her.

At some point in our long session in the bar it became inevitable that we would go home together, the only doubt being whose home. For my part I wanted very much to go to hers. There was the promise of two hundred and fifty pairs of fuck-me shoes, and for her there was the security of being on her own territory. She needed a little persuading, but in the end she shrugged and agreed.

We arrived by taxi, thickly drunk by now. Her flat was rented and looked curiously unlived-in, very unhomely. She said she hadn’t been there long, wasn’t sure if she was staying. As an American in London it fitted. I supposed she was just passing through. That should have made me suspicious. We soon found our way into her bedroom. My imagination had been working too hard, accelerating away. I had pictured all two hundred and fifty pairs of shoes artfully displayed on shelves, shown to their best advantage, spotlit like exotic birds. She saw me looking around, saw my confusion and disappointment.

‘I lied,’ she said quietly.

My disappointment increased, no doubt tinged with drunken frustration and anger. It had never occurred to me that she was a liar, much less a tease.

‘I was drunk,’ she continued. ‘I just thought of a number and tripled it.’

I made a move towards the door, towards leaving.

‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was just a joke. I don’t have two hundred and fifty pairs. But I do have one or two good pairs of shoes if you want to see them. If you want me to dress up in them.’

She could see that I didn’t believe her. She had committed an act of betrayal. I felt used and deceived, and I wasn’t going to make myself vulnerable again so quickly.

In a corner of the room there was a large oak wardrobe that had a deep drawer along the full width of its base. She pulled it open, trying to be conciliatory, trying to please. Inside there were some shoe boxes, though scarcely more than half a dozen. I knew that quality and quantity were not the same thing, nevertheless I wasn’t expecting much, but she opened the boxes one by one, and in the end I was partly consoled. She did own some very elegant and pleasing pairs of shoes; a pair of Manolo Blahnik evening mules in red satin, a pair of Maud Frizon high heels in black suede with open backs, a pair of towering black patent stilettos from Frederick’s of Hollywood, a pair of trashy Terry de Havilland platforms in what looked like gold snakeskin, some very curious Kurt Geiger open sandals with a tripod heel, three slender metal supports converging in an inverted cone like a piece of miniature scaffolding. The feeling of being let down had hardly passed, but these shoes weren’t at all bad. I was quietly impressed and I was prepared to be forgiving. At least now we could have sex.

The question of what foot and shoe fetishists do in bed isn’t a particularly complex one. Nor is it difficult to answer. They do everything that everybody else does, but they do one or two other things as well. They (we) use all the techniques and actions and positions that everyone else does, but usually the woman is wearing high heels.

The fetishist will fondle his partner’s feet, of course. He will kiss them, perhaps lick and suck the toes. The woman will run her feet, whether shod or bare, over her partner’s body. Of course she will concentrate on his erogenous zones, of course she will use her feet to massage his genitals, she may well press her feet into his face.

The practice of taking your partner’s toes in your mouth is known to some people as ‘shrimping’, and in one sense this seems like rather a good term. The toes do resemble shrimps by virtue of being pink, curled and soft, and of about the right size. But the word shrimping sounds like a frivolous and silly activity, and when I have a woman’s toes in my mouth, the feeling is anything but frivolous. For me it is a moment of breathtaking, stomach-churning intensity.

In answer to a question Catherine asked right at the beginning, I was able to assure her that I had no desire to be walked on, trodden on, or kicked. There’s a certain undeniable element of self-abasement involved in scrabbling around at a woman’s feet, but humiliation and subjugation are no part of my own sexual profile, although I’m sure there are other foot and shoe fetishists for whom they’re essential.

So that is what Catherine and I did together — all the usual things. We were drunk and we were unfamiliar with each other’s tastes and preferences, the very conditions that make a first time so exciting yet so unsatisfactory.

Despite having a few, though extremely limited number of, pairs of shoes to choose from, and despite her willingness to explore this new sexual area, when it came right down to it I asked her to keep on the zebra-skin numbers she’d been wearing in the street. After all, they were the ones that had brought us together. In fact they weren’t a famous make. There was no signature or manufacturer’s name inside, just a small trade mark, the outline of a bare footprint with a tiny lightning flash across it. It wasn’t a mark I recognized, so I made a note to look it up when I got back to my archive. I asked her where she’d bought them and she said in a second-hand clothes shop in Islington, but they had been unworn.

I stayed the night, and the next morning, early, a little hungover, a little shamefaced, having received no offer of breakfast, I said goodbye. We exchanged telephone numbers, but I couldn’t tell if Catherine was being anything other than polite.

At some point in the night I had asked her whether this was the sort of thing she did very often, allowing herself to be picked up in the street by strange men. It was a crass question, I know.

‘What do you want me to say?’ she demanded. ‘That I’ve never done anything remotely like this before, not once, not ever. That you’re so special, so attractive, so charismatic, that I was driven to do something dangerous and out of character that I’d never normally do.’

Now, I am sufficiently versed in the arts and science of courtship to realize that it’s no good simply telling a woman that she has perfect feet, the feet you’ve been looking for all your life, feet that you could happily spend the rest of your life contemplating, adoring, worshipping. You just can’t do that, certainly not on a first date. It just scares them away, and I was determined that Catherine should not be scared.

Given the strange, unlikely way we had got together, neither of us had any right to expect anything from the other. The situation, the transaction, had all the features of a brief and singular encounter, a one-night stand, but I knew from the very beginning that I wanted it to be much more than that. It is not every day you encounter the perfect feet of your dreams, and when you do, you aren’t inclined to let them skip away so easily.

I stood on the threshold of her flat, about to let myself out. She stood at the other end of the hall, across an expanse of marble tiles, and it was quite clear that she was not about to kiss me goodbye. She had a chaste blue robe wrapped around her, but she was barefoot. I saw nothing chaste in that. I half-slid, half-pounced the length of the hall, and threw myself at her feet. I gave them a final ravish before I left. Above me I heard her give a small, dry laugh, and at the time I chose to believe her laughter was not unkind.