Footsucker

by Geoff Nicholson

  The most important scene in this whole drama took place in my absence. I wasn’t there. I didn’t see what happened or how or why, and the two people who were there have very good reasons for refusing to tell me the precise details.

  First, what I do know. It appears that Harold Wilmer’s disappearance was not as complete as I had imagined. Although he abandoned his shop and made himself unavailable both to me and to the police, he never lost touch with Catherine. In fact I discovered that even before then, Catherine and Harold had been in regular contact. I know now that they continued to see each other after Catherine and I split up. I know now that he continued to make shoes for her. I also know that she never told him she was seeing Kramer, and when he found out, when I told him, that’s when he decided to become a murderer. And once Kramer was dead he broke the news to Catherine, only he told her I was the one who’d done it.

  After I tracked down Catherine and spoke to her on the phone, when I put the idea in her mind that perhaps I wasn’t the murderer after all, that Harold was, she knew exactly how to find him and she did so. Catherine is no fool. She put two and two together and realized that I was likely to be telling the truth, that Harold might indeed have killed Kramer, and subsequently she managed to convince Harold to turn himself in and make a full confession. She took him along to the police where he told them everything, much more than I could have. They believed him, and shortly thereafter someone made a phone call to Crawford, and that was the only reason he decided that I hadn’t committed the murder.

  Those are the bare bones of the story, and I have probably spent too much time trying to put flesh on them. I realized it was unreasonable of me but I was angry and upset to learn that Catherine and Harold had seen each other in my absence. I felt betrayed. I thought they had no connection except through me, and I wanted it to remain that way. I picture them in Harold’s workshop, or later in some secret unknown place, Catherine arriving, Harold proffering the latest pair of shoes. I can see his leathery old hands slipping some flimsy, exotic creation on to Catherine’s perfect foot. I see her walking across the room, turning, posing, wheeling on tiptoe. I know that all this must have really happened.

  Of course, I see a powerful erotic element here, and sometimes my vision of the scene takes on a pornographic, fantastical aspect. Then I visualize Catherine being naked, except for the shoes, displaying herself, showing herself to Harold. Sometimes his involvement is simply voyeuristic, he simply watches and is appreciative. But other times he touches, strokes, kisses, penetrates. And she reciprocates, runs her hands, lips, feet, over Harold’s old, small, sagging body.

  I don’t know if that really happened or not. Catherine won’t tell me and perhaps I should be grateful not to know, but there are times when it seems all too likely. For Catherine it would have been just another adventure, and if Harold really was sexually involved with her that would give him much more reason for killing Kramer.

  And I wonder sometimes how Catherine got him to con fess to the murder. I have asked her, and she tells me she appealed to his better nature, but I know that’s just an evasive joke. I can easily envisage a number of perverse scenarios; the two of them together, naked, in bed, or on the floor, or in a hotel, or out of doors, Catherine in tortuously high heels egging him on, apparently for some sort of weird sexual gratification. ‘Did you ever kill a man, Harold? Did you strip him naked? Did you mutilate the body? Did you carve your trade mark in his chest?’ And Harold says yes, he did, he did all that and more, and he did it for her because he was in love with her. And perhaps Catherine is filled with horror and immediately disentangles herself from his embrace, but it seems equally likely that she’d wait until he’d finished, until the old bones and the old flesh had concluded their business. And then she tells him the game is up, that she knows everything, that she’ll blow the whistle if he doesn’t turn himself in.

  Or perhaps none of that happened at all, perhaps he was simply so besotted with Catherine, so in thrall to her, that all she needed to do was tell him to confess and he would immediately obey.

  But even as these thoughts first occurred to me, I knew that in one sense none of it really mattered. I didn’t enjoy thinking of Catherine with Harold, but I knew that for her it was just another sexual adventure, quite a colourful one, managing to sleep with the fetishist and the creator of the fetish objects, with the murderer and the victim, but it was no more than an adventure. It was not love.

  Besides, how could I feel resentful towards her? She saved me in more ways than one. I owed her everything. I knew I was still in love with her, and the weird thing was, I was no longer only in love with her feet.

  Thirty-two

  It is 1966 in California and a group of young male student volunteers are sitting in a darkened lecture theatre on a distant part of the campus waiting for the slide show to begin. They have all stated that they are heterosexuals and that they are not foot or shoe fetishists. They have signed the appropriate forms, received a small cash payment, and they sit in their seats, their genitals wired up to electrical devices that measure the degree of their sexual arousal.

  The projector kicks into life and the first slide appears; a picture of a woman’s high-heeled shoe. Then a slide of a slingback, then of a patent leather thigh boot. This goes on for some time. The guys giggle and get restless. Is this really what they’ve been brought here for? Then things get better. A new set of slides appears; a naked woman, Playboy-style, big breasted, air-brushed, not the girl next door. More giggles now, but of a different sort; they start to enjoy themselves and the display of naked female flesh continues till the end of the session when the projector dies, and the lights are switched on again. No word of explanation is forthcoming from the research staff as they unhook the electrical devices and tell the boys to come back next week for more of the same.

  Once they’ve gone, the psychologists running the experiment, Rachman and Hodgson as they are known in the literature, scrutinize each subject’s arousal chart. They are as predicted: nothing when the shoes appear on the screen, but the moment the naked women appear there’s lots of vigorous, boyish arousal. Well, thinks Rachman, that could be changed.

  Time passes. The students attend the weekly sessions, and on each occasion it’s the same procedure; sitting there wired up, looking at footwear followed by cheesecake. A few of the guys have started to find this whole thing totally ridiculous. There are strange things happening on every campus in America but this feels stranger than most. Still, the process isn’t arduous, it seems perfectly harmless and the money is worth having. Besides, the number of sessions is finite. The last session soon arrives. The students go into the lecture theatre and are appropriately blasé as they get wired up and take their seats for a final session of the same old thing. But this time there’s a surprise.

  The room dims, the projector starts, and the slides of women’s shoes duly appear. But that’s all there is. This time the naked babes don’t put in an appearance. The students watch a slide show that consists entirely of women’s shoes. A couple of the guys make loud complaints but Rachman and Hodgson check the arousal meters and they see that five of the guys are every bit as aroused as they would be by watching slides of naked women. Five brand-new fetishists have been created. In some quarters this would be called a success.

  I don’t find this piece of research particularly reassuring. It seems to suggest that there’s nothing very profound or deep-rooted about fetishism. Fetishists, it appears, can be created from scratch in no time at all. Fetishism, the experiment seems to imply, is just a form of conditioning, no more complex or crucial than being swayed by a TV commercial.

  You see an ad on TV. It tells you that you need some new product. You never knew you needed it, but that’s because you’d never been told that you did. Now that you’ve been told, you know that you want it. It has become an object of desire, separate from all the rest of the world of objects. It has become a fetish. You have become a fetishist. If it works with soap powders a
nd cars and tampons, then why shouldn’t it work with shoes and feet or any other damn thing? As I have said, I think we are all fetishists, but when I said it before I was only talking about sex and these days I think sex isn’t even the half of it.

  There is the world and there is the individual. The world is vast, complex and complete, and we as individuals are none of the above. We live in our small corners, trying to catch a glimpse of the ground plan, the overall structure, but we never quite do. We only get to see architectural details: the finials, the gargoyles. It never quite makes sense, and artists’ impressions aren’t much use in this area.

  There are people who profess to have some notion of the grand design, who claim to understand whole systems; the true believers, the conspiracy theorists. But I think they’re mistaken. Believing in the cross, or in the free market or in any other damn thing seems every bit as partial as ‘believing in’ women’s feet or shoes. These systems themselves are still only synecdoches, relics, fetishes.

  But I happen to think this isn’t so terrible. We deal with what we can. We try to bite off no more than we can chew. We prefer to feel at home within the limits of our own space and our own understanding, rather than to be adrift and lost in the random world. We like the familiar.

  You can’t transform the world so you redecorate your living room. You can’t love the whole world so you do your best with your spouses, your lovers, your children, your parents, your pets.

  What do we see as we walk down the street? It’s not an egalitarian mass of light waves and ambient noise, it isn’t just atoms and vibrations, all sensory data of equivalent value. In order to see it at all we create separations, reductions, groupings. The window cleaner walks down the street and sees only windows that need cleaning. The Peeping Tom sees openings into new worlds. The boy with a slingshot sees only targets.

  Sure we’re looking for wholeness, but where are you going to find it? We slice up the encyclopaedia into part works, manageable morsels, only what the reader can digest. Everybody selects, and the things we select might be called our interests, our obsessions, our fetishes. But they are more than that. These ‘selections’ are what constitute our lives.

  One day Catherine came back. I was alone in my house. It was night. I was free, whatever that meant. Crawford was off my back and Harold was behind bars, although his trial was still a long way off. I was slumped in a chair drinking cheap lager and watching a hired video. I knew this looked pathetic, and it was not the way I would have wanted Catherine to find me, but then again I wasn’t expecting to be found. The doorbell rang and I came close to not answering it. There was nobody I wanted to see, no arrival that I thought I would have welcomed. But for some reason I did answer the door and there she was, Catherine, looking somehow very different and somehow very much the same. The hair was a shade lighter, the skin had a tan, and she was wearing unfamiliar clothes, a version of western gear: jeans and a denim jacket, an embroidered shirt, fancy cowboy boots.

  ‘I’m not interrupting am I?’ she asked as she slid past me into the house. ‘Have you missed me?’

  There was no point playing it cool.

  ‘What do you think?’ I said.

  ‘You had the shoes,’ she replied. ‘Some photographs, the plaster casts. Wasn’t that enough?’

  ‘You know it wasn’t.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I missed you too.’ Coming from Catherine that was quite a confession. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry about various things. You don’t need me to specify, do you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Poor old Harold,’ she said.

  Sympathy was only the slightest of a whole bundle of feelings I currently had towards Harold, but to be charitable I said, ‘Yes, poor old Harold.’

  She sat down, leaned back into a corner of the sofa and put her feet up on the opposite arm. She looked perfectly relaxed and at home.

  ‘Are you back?’ I asked uncertainly, not knowing exactly what I meant by ‘back’.

  ‘Well, I’m here,’ she said.

  ‘Are you staying?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you want anything? A drink?’

  ‘You could help me off with my boots.’

  I’ve always quite liked cowboy boots as objects; their shape, their style, the way in which their essence always remains much the same and yet they’re a canvas for all kinds of aesthetic transformations. But I had never found them erotic, and the ones Catherine was wearing – purple and black, very pointed and heavily stitched – were really no exception. However, what the boots contained was still a subject of utmost erotic fascination for me. That hadn’t changed or diminished. I did indeed want to help her off with her boots so I could get at her feet. Mindful that some of my bad dreams might have been prophetic, I was ready for the worst as I pulled off the boots. I needn’t have worried; there were no tattoos, no scars, no stigmata.

  ‘I’ve been looking after them,’ she said. ‘Though probably not as well as you would have.’

  I held her feet in my hands. They were perfect, of course, as pale and pure and cold as vellum. I kissed them, let my lips move softly and drily over their insteps. They were exactly as I remembered them.

  ‘I’ve really missed that,’ said Catherine, but she was only saying what I might have said. ‘You’ve done a job on me,’ she continued. ‘You’ve turned me into a mirror-image of you. You want to worship feet. I want to have my feet worshipped. I guess we’ve turned into the perfect couple.’

  So she moved in. And it was strange, very strange, but it was good. We had plenty of wild, intense, unorthodox, fetishistic sex, but we also had a surprising amount of wild, intense, orthodox, unfetishistic sex; sex in which feet and shoes hardly figured at all.

  We didn’t go to sex clubs, and when we were in wine bars I generally didn’t take her shoes away and masturbate into them. And instead of bringing strange women round to participate in three-way sex we simply had people round for dinner. I got in touch with Mike and Natasha again, made no reference to the strange scenes I’d gone through with both of them. They were as keen to deny history as I was, and they were eager to meet Catherine. ‘My God,’ they said after they’d met her. ‘Where have you been hiding her? She’s just what you’ve always needed.’ I was glad they liked her, and they seemed genuinely pleased on my behalf, but I also knew they were relieved that I’d finally found someone. I think I was relieved too.

  It was two o’clock on Sunday morning. Mike and Natasha had been round for dinner and had only just left. The room was a mess with dirty plates, empty glasses and wine bottles, and Catherine and I were both tired and comfortably drunk. In general we didn’t spend much time talking about Harold or Kramer or the murder, but we didn’t specifically avoid it either, didn’t want to turn it into a taboo subject. However, if we wanted to talk about it at all, it was easiest when the night was old and we were nicely drunk.

  This time Catherine said, ‘You know Harold made shoes for me after I stopped seeing you?’

  I did, of course.

  ‘Well, want to see ‘em?’

  It would have been cowardly to say no, so, with a lot of trepidation and some of the old anticipation, I agreed. Catherine stepped out of the living room into the hallway and I could hear a rustling of boxes and tissue paper, then the sound of clothing being removed, and when Catherine returned she was naked except for a pair of shoes I’d never seen before.

  They were surprisingly restrained for a pair of Harold’s. The heels were very high and the toes were very pointed, but there was none of the baroque, erotic splendour that characterized so many of his shoes, nor did they appear to be made from any exotic fabric. They were elegant, classic, if slightly exaggerated, court shoes in a plain, rich brown leather. I was slightly disappointed.

  Catherine pulled up a dining chair and sat in front of me, opened her legs, raised them and placed one foot on each of my shoulders. I turned and kissed the tops of her feet and my eyes came very close to the shoes. Th
e grain of the leather was strangely smooth and unmarked. It was less commonplace than I’d thought. It had a fine, waxy texture to it, and it was clearly not calf, not pigskin, not kid, in fact, not anything I’d ever seen before, at least not in this form.

  And then I remembered what Crawford had said about Kramer’s mutilation. He’d said that Harold’s trade mark had been carved into the dead man’s chest, but he’d added ‘among other things’. I sniffed at the shoes, ran my fingers over them.

  I said to Catherine, ‘They could be made out of human skin, couldn’t they?’

  ‘Couldn’t they just,’ she said.