I’d never been to a prostitute before. The thought had crossed my mind from time to time, in the way that it crosses your mind to try parachute jumping or to take saxophone lessons, but I had never been sure that I’d enjoy the experience. Now I was lost enough, reckless enough not to care.
I went to the address, a block of nineteen-fifties flats, one of those low-rise brick and stucco arrangements with lots of balconies and curved bay windows, and a jam of cars parked on the forecourt. Some men, Mike for instance, would no doubt have wanted sleaze and danger with their prostitution, but I was reassured that the block looked so smart and well cared for.
I rang one of a row of polished brass bells and a muffled, fuzzed female voice told me to come up to flat thirty-five on the third floor. I knew that I still had time to turn round and abort this little escapade. Meeting an unknown woman in a strange flat did not fill me with erotic expectation. Instead I could imagine myself being robbed, beaten up, humiliated. But so what? In Catherine’s absence I felt robbed, beaten up, humiliated anyway. I would only be getting more of what I deserved. I carried on.
I reached the third floor, found flat thirty-five and knocked a little too hard on the door. It was immediately opened by a smart, dark-haired woman in a blue and pink track suit. She didn’t look like my idea of a prostitute, more like an aerobics instructor or an assistant in a sports shop.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Alicia.’
I could tell at once from the voice that this was the woman I’d spoken to on the phone. It appeared she was her own ‘young lady’. As advertised, she had dark hair and large breasts, but personally I would not have mistaken her for a model. I looked down at her feet and saw that she was wearing a pair of high-heeled, gold court shoes, not the most perfect examples of fuck-me shoes you were ever going to come across but a reasonable attempt to show willing.
I could understand why she might wish to give the impression she was not simply a one-woman operation, and why she had talked about herself in the third person, but her reluctance and inability to describe Alicia’s feet now appeared totally inexplicable. I must have looked confused and hesitant.
‘Come in, love,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about what you have in mind, get the business side out of the way and then you can enjoy yourself.’
I was shown into the living room and she gave me a weak whisky and soda, and I sat down uneasily in a corduroy armchair. The flat was as empty and anonymous as a hotel room. There was no clutter, no personality, no suggestion that anybody lived here full-time.
There were other rooms in the flat, including, I supposed, the bedroom in which the physical side of our transaction would take place, but even though I heard and saw nothing, I got an uneasy feeling there was someone else in the flat somewhere; a pimp, or a minder, or maybe another prostitute.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Brass tacks. I don’t do S and M of any kind, neither giving nor receiving. I’ll walk on you if you like, but that’s all. You can touch my feet if you want, kiss them, suck them, same with my toes and my shoes. You can massage them, rub them with creams, powders, oils and so on. Or I can massage you with them, either bare or in stockings or in white ankle socks. If you’d like a souvenir of the event I can provide a camera and film, though I would insist that my face doesn’t appear in any of the photographs. Failing that I do have sets of prints available for purchase. I have a selection of boots, shoes and specialist footwear that I can wear at your discretion. Intercourse costs extra, oral costs a lot extra, and anal is out of the question. Right. What would you like?’
‘I’d like to look at your feet,’ I said.
She smiled affably enough and kicked off her gold shoes. I was prepared for something dramatic, feet that were either supremely beautiful or supremely disappointing, but in fact they were neither. There was certainly nothing bad or repellent about them. I would not have kicked them out of bed. They were feet I could quite happily fondle and kiss, but they were not feet that a man could lose his heart to. A man could not worship and adore them, could not become crazily obsessed with them. Essentially they were not Catherine’s feet. And I suppose the bottom line was they were not feet that I wanted to waste a lot of money on.
From Alicia’s menu I selected a small snack; a simple foot job. We negotiated that I would unzip my trousers and she would manipulate my cock with her bare feet. We agreed that a trip to the bedroom would not be necessary and she decided there was no need to remove her clothes.
Slightly to my surprise Alicia turned out to be highly skilled at her work. Her toes were strong and adept, her rhythm was vigorous and encouraging, and yet I didn’t feel she was rushing me through the session. I was just starting to enjoy it when she suddenly stopped, reached into the pocket of her track suit, and in one continuous motion tore open a foil packet and unrolled a condom over my penis. I was too surprised and baffled to object, and I’m sure my objections wouldn’t have cut much ice, in any case. Besides, what would I have said? That a condom seemed a little excessive here, a little superfluous, a little insanely overcautious, that it appeared to be making a fetish out of ‘safety’. I knew my opinions would not have been well received.
Alicia rapidly finished the job. She stood up and put her shoes back on. It was a touching gesture in a way. I mean, she could have slipped into something more comfortable, something tartan and fluffy perhaps. But I didn’t get much time to admire the shoes. A couple of minutes later I was out of the flat, on the street, looking for the nearest pub. As I ordered myself a pint of lager I wondered if I should have bought some of the photographs she had for sale. They would have been a small but significant addition to the archive. A kind of first. Ah well, if I decided later that I really needed them I could go back for a return visit, but something told me my need was never going to be quite that great.
My session with Alicia was depressing enough but there were worse nights. It didn’t look as though paying was going to work. Such transactions were bound to be brief and formal, and would leave far too much time to think about Catherine. So I went to bars and clubs and tried to pick up women. These women were not intended in any sense to replace Catherine but I hoped they might fill the dead time without her. It was surprisingly easy. I found plenty of women who were prepared to talk and drink and sleep with me. The fact that nothing relied on succeeding or failing with these women was somehow liberating. I wasn’t too discriminating. I didn’t much care who they were or what they looked like. I didn’t even care what their feet looked like. I just took the women home, had sex with them, didn’t bother to kiss their feet, didn’t bother to photograph their shoes, didn’t invite them down to see the archive. Christ, I was almost behaving like a normal person.
That was no good, so I decided to push my luck. I would get drunk and indifferent and reckless. I’d go up to a woman at the bar and start talking. ‘Oh, hi there. Can I buy you a drink? Really nice shoes you’re wearing. Really nice feet you have. Well, actually, it’s the interaction of foot and shoe, of flesh and leather, nature and culture, art and artifice, the sweep of the foot, the curved architecture of the shoe, the pattern of veins and tendons below the surface of the skin, complex and intermeshed like tributary routes on a road map. I’d like to touch them, hold them, feel them on my face, on my tongue. I’d very much like to cover them in my sweat, my saliva, my semen …’
That use of the word semen always did it. That was the one word I found I couldn’t say to a woman in a London bar. It always brought proceedings to a halt, like when I did my clipboard act and mentioned sex. In the confines of a nightspot, in a place where alcohol was sold, where sex was already on the agenda, it took a stronger word, a stronger image. But it also provoked a stronger reaction. I was sworn at, slapped, had drinks thrown at me. I didn’t give a shit, but I learned my lesson. I stopped mentioning semen.
One night I found myself in the back of my car making inept attempts to have some sort of sex with a drunk, fleshy blonde. Her legs were splayed and bare. She’d ki
cked off her shoes and her feet were up on my shoulders. I turned my head and saw that these were not the feet of my dreams. They were plump and flat-footed and the silver pearl nail varnish was chipped and peeling. I was revolted, so revolted that I immediately took her fat little toes in my mouth and sucked each one in turn, disgusted, almost gagging, revelling in the self-abasement of it all. The woman didn’t mind at all. She immediately appeared to be having a long and very satisfying orgasm.
Twenty-one
I’ve often wondered what it would have been like to have lived in China somewhere between the eleventh and the nineteenth centuries. This was a time when a whole population, a whole society, appears to have fallen victim to one very specific fetish: that of the bound foot. It wasn’t a simple case of a few men and women getting together here and there and playing footsy. It was rather that for hundreds of years, millions of people decided that the female foot was the be all and end all of human sexuality. But not any old foot: only feet that were moulded and remodelled into a nightmarishly specific and rigid ideal – the lotus foot.
That was the name they gave to the anatomical curiosity that was created by foot binding. The big toe was left free, then the other toes and the body of the foot were strapped tight back, curving the foot and reducing its length, and also creating a sort of cleft on the underside between the end of the heel and the start of the sole. The flesh in this cleft became incredibly soft and sensitive. It was a brand new erogenous zone for the woman, and one into which the Chinese male loved to insert his penis.
There’s some evidence that foot binding started with the Empress Taki. She was born in the eleventh century with tiny deformed feet, and as a mark of honour other women started binding their feet in imitation of her deformity. Now medieval Imperial China was no doubt a wacky place, but this simply doesn’t sound like a credible example of human behaviour. In fact it sounds like deranged lunacy to me, but there’s no doubt that it happened. Millions of women had their feet bound, and a great many of those who didn’t probably wanted to.
I understand there was a considerable class element involved in foot binding. If you were a very rich woman you’d have your feet completely bound and therefore be completely crippled. If you were very poor you’d need to stand up in a field working all day in which case you couldn’t afford to be bound at all. But in between there were lots of women who were only moderately rich, who might need to do a little work now and again, and so they were only moderately bound, only moderately crippled.
Of course, like any other good Westerner I find foot binding a complete horror. Crippling women isn’t my idea of fun. And not least of the problems for a man like me is that the lotus foot doesn’t look very appealing in a shoe. The foot itself is so distorted that it can never fit into an ordinary shoe at all. Such shoes as ever existed for women with bound feet were just loose slippers, shapeless in themselves.
But the main problem for me with the lotus foot is how it looks. I realize that beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, is indeed culturally specific, but the lotus foot seems to me to be quite objectively ugly. It looks like the foot of some strange, mutated animal, or some half-developed foetus. Call me an old square, but I can’t see why someone would create, much less worship and have sex with, a thing that looked like that.
What exactly was going on here? Now, you might say that the people of China were attempting to redesign and customize the human body. And you might say that’s what all clothes, all shoes, all fashion attempts to do. I’d know what you meant, and I could sort of agree with you, but my gut feeling is that something very different is at stake. What I think was really going on in China for all those centuries was that these people had fallen in love with deformity for its own sake. They’d found a way to revel in ugliness. It can happen. I know.
In an ever more futile attempt to blot out Catherine, I went to a one-day conference at the ICA. Its title was ‘Defeating the Object: the body as a medium of subversion.’ There were lectures and workshops on tattooing and body piercing, on the feminist aesthetics of lesbian SM, and a good deal about ‘the frenzy of the visible’.
Late in the afternoon I found myself in a seminar on fetishism. There were about twelve of us in the small white seminar room, more women than men, and a number of the women were wearing some serious FMs.
The first half-hour or so was spent discussing ‘the female gaze’ and how it differed from the male gaze. Then we debated whether or not women could be fetishists, and it came as no surprise, given the tenor of the group, when it was agreed that they could. They could be food fetishists, for instance, which sounded like no fun at all to me, and this led to a long and depressing discussion about eating disorders. It was said that shopping could be a form of fetishism, shoplifting too. Finally there was a debate about whether femininity itself wasn’t perhaps a form of fetishism, and a couple of people suggested that femininity was a thing that could be put on and taken off in much the same way as a leather cat suit or a pair of thigh boots.
I wasn’t really surprised that the discussion was on these terms. I’d hardly expected that we would regale each other with tales of our sexual escapades, much less have any fun. Nevertheless, I soon felt as though I was in a rapidly descending submarine and that all the oxygen around me was being used up. I didn’t make any contribution to the seminar, and I wondered if I’d survive to the end of the session without screaming out in agony, but somehow I did.
It was late afternoon when we at last trooped out of the seminar room. The conference was over. Certain friendships and alliances had been established in the course of the day, and people were standing around in small groups continuing to talk and debate. I decided to head for the bar. I did not feel part of any group, nor had I struck up any friendships; nevertheless, when a young man walked up to me as though to start a conversation, I wasn’t particularly surprised. He had been in the fetishism seminar, but he had contributed as little as I had.
He was in his early twenties, pale, wiry, nervous but studious looking. He was dressed all in black, with a black leather jacket, and he wore curious, high-tech spectacles. His hands and his Adam’s apple looked too large for his body. His appearance seemed to hold the world at bay, but he was friendly enough when he talked to me.
‘I don’t think you enjoyed that seminar any more than I did,’ he said.
‘That depends how much you enjoyed it,’ I said.
‘It sucked.’
I didn’t disagree.
‘I’m not wholly against theory,’ he continued. ‘What I am against is people who need to hide behind theory. I mean, if people want to writhe around and suck each other’s feet, why not just do it? Why do they feel they need to justify it intellectually?’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said.
So we went to the bar and had a couple of bottles of beer and we talked about (what else?) foot and shoe fetishism. He did far more talking than I did, but what he said made a lot of sense to me. I wondered what Mike would have made of it all. He’d have wanted both of us locked up, probably. I had no desire to describe my own practices and preferences to this stranger, no desire to tell him about Catherine, but he was happy enough to do most of the talking, and he continued ever more enthusiastically. He was now in a confessional mood, talking of the feet he had sucked, the shoes he had masturbated over, and so on. I was faintly embarrassed. He was assuming an intimacy that I neither desired nor intended to reciprocate, but I didn’t try to stop him talking. I doubt whether I could have.
Before long I said I had to leave. He looked disappointed, as though he had much, much more to confess, but he said that he was going too. We left the bar, left the ICA and stood on the wide grass verge outside the entrance. Traffic swept up and down the road and I intended to say a swift, final goodbye to this stranger and hail a taxi. But he said, ‘I don’t live very far from here. I have a great deal of material you might be interested in.’
‘What kind of material?’ I asked.
&n
bsp; ‘Photographs, drawings, books, samples. Some of it’s very, very unusual. It’s a kind of archive.’
That was enough for me. I took a chance. I agreed to go with him to his flat to view his material.
Although he called it a flat, it was little more than a bedsit, an attic room, up in the eaves of a peeling Victorian house. The walls of the room were painted black and it was furnished with junk-shop kitsch; an Elvis mirror, a lamp in the shape of a flying saucer, a piece of green fun fur thrown over the bed. It was far too small to contain anything that might truly be considered an archive, but there were a couple of filing cabinets and some metal lockers that he said contained his material.
He began by showing me his books. Some of them coincided with volumes in my own collection but there were all sorts of oddities here that I’d never seen before, and in many cases never wanted to see again. He had manuals of foot surgery and dissection, atlases of foot disease. He showed me pictures of hideously ugly feet, feet with burned skin, feet with frostbite, with toes missing, lepers’ feet, and inevitably, endless pictures of feet that had been mutilated by foot binding. These obviously really hit the spot for him. He spent a long time leering over them and he obviously expected me to share his enthusiasm. I told him they revolted me, and he looked very disappointed, though it was clear he had plenty of other things that he thought would impress me.
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