Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

I will never know why I decided to break into Kramer’s flat. It was a strange and very stupid thing to do, but then again, strange and very stupid behaviour had become something of a habit with me. I knew that I wanted to invade his territory, although I didn’t quite know why I wanted that, and once I was inside I thought I would create a certain amount of wreckage, break a few precious things, smash a few major appliances. But perhaps I was also looking for something; clues maybe, a masochistic search for evidence about Catherine, proof of her closeness to him and her distance from me; stained sheets, love letters, something to reinforce my own pain and loss, to reinforce the sense of separation.

I went there in the evening, parked my car and waited until I saw Kramer leave his building at about nine o’clock. Then I went into action. I was deliberately reckless in smashing open his front door. There was nothing furtive or covert about it. I had armed myself with a large hammer and chisel, and I chopped away at the locks, used brute force on the hinges, and the door gave way. I found myself in a low, narrow passageway that ended in a flight of stairs. I turned on all the lights I could find. I wasn’t going to skulk around in semi-darkness. I wanted to see what I had broken into. I went up the stairs, up another flight and another, to the top floor where there was a second locked door that needed opening, but now I felt like an old hand, and I cracked it open effortlessly.

I switched on more lights to see that I was in a sort of reception area, an outer office, with chairs, and a secretary’s desk. There were notice-boards with invoices and business cards and Polaroids pinned to them, and a few composites from models and some contact sheets. There were framed photographs on the walls. It appeared that our man was in business as a photographer and that this place was a studio as well as a home. I saw my opportunities for havoc and damage expanding rapidly.

Beyond the reception area was a bathroom, a living room, a bedroom. I looked into these briefly but the studio was my real destination, the place where he took his photographs, where the expensive equipment was. I found it easily; a high wide space. The roof and one of the walls were glass but there were drapes and blinds everywhere, some black, some white, absorbing or reflecting light, lining and subdividing the space.

Reflectors and spot lamps and flash units were clamped to a framework of stands and gantries, and a big plate camera stood centre stage, focused on a bare paper roll of backdrop. I shoved the camera with both hands and it fell with a satisfyingly heavy thud, though there was no sound of breakage.

There were lots of storage units around the place, filing cabinets, box files, plan chests, boxes of negatives and contact sheets. I ripped open a few. They were dull stuff, portraits of smiling business executives, shots of hairdriers and shampoo bottles. As I lost interest in them I dropped them on to the floor.

And then I opened the plan chest. It contained finished prints, huge, shiny, hard-edged photographs, sixteen by twenty or bigger, giant enlargements. I flipped through some of them, looking at the magnified faces and products and rapidly cast them aside. They were of no interest either. I was about to close the chest when I saw another set of prints, carefully wrapped up in paper. I pulled some of them out, unwrapped them, and stopped stone dead.

I could barely believe it but they were blow ups of Catherine’s feet, many, many times larger than life, showing and highlighting every detail, every flawless feature, the sheen and grain of the skin, the curvature of the nails, the thin, precise lines of cuticle, the traces of musculature and blood vessels.

I pulled the rest of the photographs out of the drawer, twenty, maybe thirty, portraits of Catherine’s bare feet, sometimes stretching and pointing, sometimes on tiptoe, sometimes at rest, photographs taken from subtly different angles, with different gradations of illumination and shadow, different degrees of contrast. The quality of the prints, the professionalism of the photography was over-whelming. It made all the examples in my archive look tacky and inept. I was devastated. I felt utterly hopeless and defeated. Until then it had been possible to tell myself that nobody could care for Catherine in quite the way I did, that nobody else could appreciate and worship her feet as I could. Yet here was evidence that Kramer, this stranger, this unknown quantity, this man she had been able to find so quickly after separating from me, was every bit as obsessional and fetishistic as I was.

I stood and stared at the black and white photographs; but monochrome, eloquent though it was, only told half the story. I somehow knew there would be more. I knew there would be colour images as well. I threw open a few metal cupboards until I came across boxes of transparencies. Ham-fisted and over-eager, I yanked out handfuls of slides, shuffled them, tossed them aside until I found what I was looking for.

There were at least a hundred of them, large format slides of Catherine’s bare feet. I held them up to the light but that was too frustrating. They were too small, the illumination wasn’t good enough. I intended to take some away with me and I immediately stashed a few in my pockets, but that still wasn’t enough. I was raging with adrenalin, flapping with recklessness. I decided I wanted to see them here and now on the big screen. I decided to have myself a little slide show.

I found a projector and set it up where the plate camera had been, so that it would project on to the studio’s paper backdrop. I loaded the magazine and slipped it in, turned off the lights, took the remote control in my fist and settled down for showtime. Catherine’s feet appeared in front of me, ten, twelve feet high, seen against different backgrounds, strong saturated purples and reds, but also on swathes of fur, on slick, smooth rubber, on a studded black leather jacket. And whereas her nails had been unpainted in the black and white prints, here they were lacquered a smooth, thick cerise.

Of course, I did wonder how come Catherine’s feet were bare in all the shots, how come Kramer hadn’t photographed her in shoes, but I could only think that his tastes weren’t exactly the same as mine. He apparently went for nature unadorned.

I stood there in the darkness, dust following currents through the beam of light, my eyes fixed on the projected images, Catherine’s feet filling my entire field of vision. I was transported and I was stiff as a poker. My heart was drumming, my head was full of blood and interference, and that was when Kramer returned.

Maybe he’d forgotten something, or maybe I’d miscalculated and he’d only slipped out to buy cigarettes. I didn’t hear him enter the room behind me; the noise of the projector fan was loud enough to cover the sound and, let’s face it, my concentration was elsewhere. Suddenly a light was switched on and the image on the screen was bleached to a thin, pale version of itself. I dropped the remote control and turned round to see Kramer staring at me.

‘What the fuck?’ he said to himself.

He was angry but I could see he was also frightened. He’d caught an intruder in his home and these days nobody knows what a cornered intruder might do to you. I could see him looking around the room, at the small pockets of disorder I’d caused, but it was plain that I hadn’t just trashed the place, that I wasn’t simply a wrecker or burglar. He picked up a heavy tripod, as much to defend himself as to attack me, but then he gave me a good looking over, noticed the image being projected, and I could see something shifting behind his eyes, something falling into place.

‘I think I know who you are,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve heard all about you.’