Footsucker

Eight

In one sense, what I wanted from Catherine was entirely simple and straightforward. I simply wanted her to make her feet available to me and I would do the rest. I would be the active partner, the one in need and yet the giver. I would treat her feet well, pamper them, adore them, dress them up in beautiful shoes, just the way any lover would treat any object of desire. And, even though Catherine’s feet would be the primary sexual focus, I wouldn’t be totally selfish. I wouldn’t neglect the rest of her. I’d do my damndest to satisfy her in all the more usual ways as well. The standard components of a good conventional relationship would not be entirely absent. I had every intention of being thoughtful, considerate and generous. I would try not to be too demanding, nor too jealous.

But inevitably it would not be a strictly conventional relationship. Mine was not the kind of love that led to domesticity, joint home-ownership, marriage, babies and all that stuff. It didn’t lead to sharing a social life, to meeting friends and relatives. In fact I found it hard to imagine what it did lead to. I couldn’t quite envisage how our future lives might shape themselves around each other. Nevertheless, fragile and provisional though our relationship was, I envisaged that we would in some sense continue.

I suppose I imagined that we would go on leading our quotidian lives as we always had, though I had no idea what that involved for Catherine, and occasionally we would come together, at her place or mine (although so far she had refused to come to my home), or perhaps in some hotel or some risky semi-public place where we would drink, talk briefly, then have intense, fetishistic sex. The meeting in the wine bar when I masturbated into her shoe was only the first of several such encounters.

Faithfulness certainly didn’t seem to be important. I felt it wouldn’t have bothered me if Catherine had been involved with, or committed to, any number of other people, just so long as she continued to see me, continued to let me love her feet. I eventually realized I was quite wrong to think that, but this discovery was some way off.

As for what Catherine wanted, that was a mystery. She had not sought out a fetishist. I had simply turned up and presented myself to her. I had always imagined there might be a woman out there who was my sexual mirror-image, someone with perfect feet who was looking for a man who would adore them for her. Even though Catherine enjoyed being the object of my obsession she was not precisely that mirror-image. There was always a certain ambivalence, a certain hesitation. She obviously found my fetishism strange and unsettling, but she was ultimately not repelled by it. And her reluctance was not insuperable. Although she hesitated, although she would say she didn’t know what she was doing with me, a moment always came when she would give herself over to the perversity of the situation and, as she had shown in the wine bar, as she showed elsewhere, she would respond intensely.

On one of our first ‘dates’ we went along to a beauty salon and Catherine had a professional pedicure. I was there as an interested (not to say fascinated, not to say fixated) observer. The salon had some aspirations to style and modernity, though it was something of a period piece; lots of mirrors, black sinks, spotlights and networks of chrome railings that had no obvious function.

We met ‘our’ pedicurist, a young, cheerful, freckled, sturdy-looking girl not more than eighteen years old. Her badge said she was called Sophie. I saw that she was wearing some flat, open-toed sandals which weren’t at all appealing, yet the feet within them looked nice enough. The toes were good and straight, and the nails though unpainted were shapely and glossy. I was encouraged.

There were only a couple of women in the salon having their hair done, having facials and manicures, so it wasn’t crowded. Nevertheless it seemed like an all too public space. I wanted Catherine’s pedicure to be done in private and I was pleased when we were escorted away from the main area of the salon into a special pedicure section. Catherine sat down in a raised hydraulic chair, not unlike a dentist’s, although it was upholstered in white leatherette. There was a footstool and a low table from which Sophie was going to operate.

‘When did you last have a pedicure?’ she asked.

‘It’s my first time,’ said Catherine.

Sophie nodded knowingly, and said, ‘Basically we recommend a pedicure and paraffin treatment every three weeks.’

‘Paraffin?’ Catherine asked.

‘Oh yes,’ Sophie confirmed, though without explaining anything.

She began laying out her instruments, the tools of her trade: toenail clippers, toe separators, pumice stone, different grades of emery board, cotton-wool swabs, and then a variety of bottles, one or two that were labelled as nail-varnish removers or cuticle softeners, but mostly blank and inscrutable. Then she produced an enamel bowl full of water and set it at Catherine’s feet.

‘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.