Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

I was horrified. The man disgusted me as much as his shoes did. I wanted to go.

‘Now wait,’ he said. ‘Look at these. They’re beauties, aren’t they?’

By now I knew him well enough not to expect to share his sense of what constituted beauty and I was not at all surprised to find that he was waving a pair of unexciting, open-toed, black patent high heels. They were horribly grubby and cracked and extremely large. I looked at them indifferently and said nothing. And then, to my dismay and horror, I saw that he’d taken off his own shoes and socks and he slipped his bare feet into the black high-heeled shoes. He stood up and strutted across the room. His gait was a little wobbly, yet he looked as though he was well practised in wearing women’s shoes. His feet looked totally, profoundly, disgustingly ugly, as ugly as anything I’d seen in his collection of pictures of bound and deformed feet.

I should probably have done nothing. I could have laughed at him or simply walked away, out of the building. But something in me couldn’t leave it just like that, I was disgusted and outraged and angry. I admit that I was also a little surprised by the power of my own reaction. I wanted to preserve my dignity, to say something pithy and dismissive and final, but words wouldn’t come to me. Instead he was the one who spoke.

‘I don’t know what you’re looking so mealy-mouthed about,’ he said. ‘I know you’re into it every bit as much as I am.’

I didn’t hit him exactly. I just headed for the door and as I went I pushed him out of the way. The flat of my hand made contact with his shoulder, nothing more violent than that, just a nudge really, and yet it resulted in him falling over. No doubt he wouldn’t have fallen so easily had he not been wearing the high heels, nor would he have fallen quite so far. But he made no attempt to break his fall, didn’t put out a hand or arm to stop himself, and his head hit the floor with a sharp, dry, full sound. He wasn’t knocked out but his eyelids flickered and he looked about him as though he didn’t recognize his surroundings or what had happened to him. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then slowly turned his head.

He had fallen in such a way that his head was next to the corner of the bed. I knelt down to make sure he was all right and I saw, hidden under the bed, a pair of spectacular silver and black FMs. I recognized the style immediately. I picked them up. Inside was Harold’s familiar trade mark, the footprint and the lightning flash. I was doubly disgusted. This pathetic specimen on the floor had no right to own a pair of Harold’s shoes. He didn’t deserve them. He wasn’t good enough. I grabbed the shoes and tried to stand up. The man protested groggily, and put out a hand to stop me. I was having none of that. I kicked him a few times in the ribs and then ran desperately out of his flat, taking Harold’s shoes with me.

That was the night I went home and smashed the plaster casts of Catherine’s feet. I didn’t know why I was doing it. Perhaps it was indeed a symbolic act to try to free myself, but it really made no sense at all. I treasured those casts. They were all I had left of Catherine. In destroying them I was only hurting myself. And I realized then there was a part of me that might have been perfectly happy to destroy Catherine’s actual feet as well as the casts. If they weren’t going to be mine, then nobody else was going to have them, not even Catherine. And, as I sat there amidst the plaster debris, with the pair of silver and black shoes I’d stolen from the ICA man, I feared that I might be going insane.

Given that pornography is a problem for just about everybody these days, it provides a special set of problems for the foot and shoe fetishist. There are, or at least there used to be, men who said they looked at Playboy simply for the articles. I suppose nobody needs to tell lies like that any more. But if I ever look at Playboy it’s simply for the feet.

Now, I’m not made of stone. I’m not completely unmoved by the come-to-bed eyes and eagerly opened mouths of the women in girly magazines. I look at the long, smooth legs and the heavy, glossy breasts, and the silky buttocks and the hint or streak or flourish of inner pink, and, yes, sometimes I find that sexy. I’m not impervious to the erotic possibilities of stockings and suspenders, to strategically placed strands of leather or PVC or lace. But the only thing that really grabs me, the only thing I really care about is whether the model in the spread has a great pair of feet and a great pair of shoes.

You see surprisingly few bare feet in these pages. I suspect they aren’t considered glamorous enough. The women therefore tend to wear high heels, and this ought to be a very good thing, yet there’s often something tokenistic about it. The photographer or stylist thinks, Oh yeah, right, glamour shot, that means loads of make up, big hair, pair of high heels, without considering what constitutes good make up or good hair or good high heels. All too often the shoes are the wrong shape, the wrong colour, the wrong material. I’m not saying they always get it wrong, but they get it wrong more often than you might think possible.

However, even a casual browse through such magazines will reveal something very curious. It’s extraordinary how often the photographs of the women are cropped in a way that leaves the feet out of the picture. Sometimes they will even be cropped so that some of the foot will be shown, but the toes will be outside the frame. More frustrating still, the woman will be on a four-poster bed or a chaise-longue , and some skein of exotic material will be wrapped around her, draped so as to show off her body, but her feet will be tangled up and concealed in the material.

I can think of two possible explanations for this. The first is that the photographers, or at least the layout artists, are so insensitive to the finer points of eroticism that they’re not even aware that anyone could be interested in seeing women’s feet. You might think it’s unlikely. You might think anyone who makes a living in that world ought to be alive to these things but, let’s face it, there are plenty of people in all sorts of jobs whose heart isn’t in their work.

The other explanation is that there’s something terribly wrong with the women’s feet. Despite the beautifully made up face, the flatteringly lit skin, the improbably perfect body, the model’s feet, I suppose, may be calloused, deformed, twisted, ugly as sin. By leaving them out of the shot, the photographer could be doing us a favour, and yet it’s a favour I don’t really need. I’d rather be allowed to make up my own mind about whether a given pair of feet are attractive or not.

Of course there are many rooms within the ruined mansion of pornography, but even when the imagery moves well outside the soft, ‘girly’ category, into the hard-core wing, my erotic concerns remain much the same. I see a porno mag or video, and in it the women may be servicing four or five people of their own or different sexes, they may be doing thrillingly obscene things with dildos, fists and bodily fluids, but I find I’m still looking to see what’s going on below ankle level.

There are some specialist magazines for foot and shoe fetishists. I haven’t seen that many of them, and I certainly haven’t studied them, but the ones I’ve seen have been a considerable disappointment. They show feet being licked, toes being sucked, toes gripping cocks and probing vaginas, and these are all activities that in theory I find very appealing, but somehow, when you see a whole magazine devoted to them, it’s too formulaic, too forced.

For all these reasons, pornography, whether hard or soft, often proves not to be an especially rich source of erotic imagery for the fetishist. Vogue is likely to offer classier, sexier, more elegant shoes than Playboy ever is. The models will probably be more beautiful, certainly they’ll be more striking and better photographed. And quality of photography was something I was going to find out all about.