Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

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.

I went home. The next few days were hell. I hated myself. I had no belief in the healing powers of time. I knew that I could not and did not want to forget Catherine. Yet although I didn’t want to get rid of her memory, I did want to quell the pain of remembering. So I found myself doing a number of things that I would previously have considered out of character. Visiting a prostitute was the first of these.

No doubt I wouldn’t have done it if Mike’s Birmingham exploits hadn’t been on my mind. I thought maybe I could be like him, detached from the person he loved, relishing emptiness and dirt. I found her card in a phone box. The card was sunshine yellow, there was a drawing of high heels on it, and the unpunctuated selling line, ‘Love me love my feet.’

I called the number and spoke to a woman with a smoker’s cough and a Geordie accent.

‘I’m calling about the ad,’ I said.

‘And which ad would that be?’

‘Love me love my feet,’ I said.

‘Would you like to make an appointment to meet the young lady?’

‘I think so. Probably yes.’

‘The young lady is called Alicia. She’s a lovely girl, dark haired, large chest, could easily be mistaken for a model.’

‘How about her feet.’

‘Lovely feet, sir. Lovely.’

I wasn’t going to let her get away with anything so glib. Eroticism is about specifics.

‘I need more detail,’ I said and the woman started giving me some ball-park figures regarding Alicia’s hourly rates. These sounded both vague and extortionate, but I said, ‘That all sounds fine, really fine, but what I need is for you to describe her feet.’

‘Are you taking the piss?’ the voice rasped.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not. I saw the ad and I do love feet, but I’m particular. Not any foot will do. If I get there and find Alicia has the wrong kind of feet, then I’ll have wasted everybody’s time.’

‘We don’t like time-wasters, sir.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Once you were here we would insist on your paying the fee whether you liked the young lady or not.’

‘That’s why I need you to describe the feet now. Please.’

Somewhat grudgingly she said, ‘The young lady has wonderful white, smooth, creamy feet. Very lovely, very kissable.’

I still wasn’t very convinced. It sounded to me as though the woman I was talking to wasn’t all that familiar with Alicia’s feet. Maybe she was just the person who answered the phone and had never even seen them. Maybe she wasn’t good at describing things. But then I told myself that even if she had seen them, she still wouldn’t have seen them through my eyes. This was subjective stuff; you couldn’t take somebody else’s word for it. I also reassured myself by thinking that anyone who advertised her feet in a sexual context must at least have some experience of the job in hand, must at least know what the issues are. You wouldn’t say, ‘Love me love my feet’ if your feet were a mass of corns and scar tissue. When I said I was still very interested I was given an address in St John’s Wood, assured that anything I wanted to do was negotiable, and I said I’d be there within the hour.

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.