Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t know me.’

‘I think I do,’ he insisted, and he immediately came at me. Suddenly he regarded me as no threat whatsoever, and he hit me in the stomach with the end of the tripod. It was a good shot. I was winded, in pain, and my legs felt as though the bones in them had turned to mercury. I swayed, teetered, fell on my side. Kramer stood over me. He could have hit or kicked me anywhere he wanted to, a free hit. He could have crippled me probably, but instead he pushed me over on to my back and put his foot on my neck and pressed. He was wearing heavy, thick-soled work boots, and the pattern of tread was cold against my windpipe. Experimentally, he increased and decreased the pressure of his foot, as though he was revving an accelerator. I didn’t struggle or cry out. I just watched him and tried to breathe through my nose.

‘You’re a real comedy act, aren’t you?’ he said, and he took his foot off me. Automatically my hand went up to rub my throat but he kicked it away. I lay still after that. I could see he was trying to come up with another way of hurting me. At last he looked satisfied; he’d thought of something. He brought the sole of his right boot down on to my face, flattening my nose, its threatening pressure spread evenly between my forehead and my mouth. But he didn’t put all his weight on it, that wasn’t his game, not yet.

‘Now lick it,’ he said. ‘Lick it clean.’

I still had some pride. ‘Fuck you,’ I said, and then he raised his foot to about knee height and stamped on my face. Something light, brittle and very well supplied with pain receptors and blood seemed to snap behind my nose and it became difficult to breathe.

‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Get up. You want to see slides, I’ll show you some slides.’

He dragged me up by the hair and threw me down on to a couch. He went to a storage cabinet, pulled out a box of transparencies and loaded them into the projector.

‘See how you like these,’ he said.

A new set of images filled the makeshift screen. They were of Catherine but they were no longer just of her feet. They were of her whole body, naked and not alone. Kramer was in the photographs too, equally naked. I was being shown images of the two of them having sex. They were explicit shots, pornographic, I suppose. They made no attempt to be art, and neither were they posed exactly. I could see in the pictures that Kramer was holding a cable release and he was obviously pressing it and firing the shutter as and when he moved into a position that appealed to him, that seemed photogenic.

I didn’t want to watch, but it was hard to look away. The transparencies changed rapidly as Catherine and Kramer changed position, changed places: and, precisely as if I was looking at a pornographic magazine, I found it strangely easy to blot out the images of limbs and bodies, faces and genitals, and focus simply on Catherine’s feet. They were as magnificent as ever. I felt terrible about it but I soon found myself getting aroused again. I couldn’t face it. I stood up and confronted Kramer. ‘This is stupid,’ I said. ‘You’ve got Catherine. You’ve humiliated me. Isn’t that enough for you?’

I think more than anything else that must have surprised and confused him. He moved as though to threaten me again, but he was half-hearted about it now. I’d had enough and I felt that he had too. I walked away, turning my back on him. I knew there was a possibility he might hit me from behind, but I calculated that he wouldn’t. I left the studio, left the building, convinced myself that he wasn’t following me, and went back to my car.

I felt my face, tried to look at it in the rear-view mirror. It was wet with blood and dirt but nothing felt as if it was broken. I knew I was lucky. I could have been beaten to a pulp or I could have been handed over to the police as a burglar. I had good reason to feel relieved, but in fact I felt ashamed, disgusted, and I also felt truly sorry for myself. I needed a bit of sympathy so I headed for the only place where I thought I had any conceivable hopes of receiving a welcome: Harold Wilmer’s shop.

Harold’s shop was locked up, and there were no lights on inside. The window looked strangely empty as though he had given up trying to attract custom. However, there were lights on in his flat upstairs. I pressed the doorbell but at first there was no answer; perhaps Harold was used to passing drunks ringing it in the middle of the night. But I persisted, made it plain that I wasn’t going away, and eventually a curtain was pulled back and Harold’s face appeared. He looked down at me, neither surprised nor pleased to see me, having no sense of urgency nor of my need. It took him a long time to shamble down the stairs and open the door.

‘Yes?’ he said, as though he was confronting a man peddling religious tracts, but then he saw the blood on my face and my wounded looks and he let me in.

‘I’m sorry to arrive like this,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have anywhere else to go.’

I had never been inside Harold’s flat before and I imagined it would be some dark labyrinth of a place. In the event it was just a small, old man’s flat, full of big heavy furniture that he had to squeeze past or climb over in order to move around the room. There was a carpet that might not have been vacuumed in years, and dust was spread thickly and evenly over every horizontal surface. But there was nothing particularly odd or eccentric about any of it, and there was no display of his handiwork, no covert stash of exotic shoes.

However, two things caught my eye. First, I noticed a framed photograph that sat on the mantelpiece above the hissing gas fire. It was a snapshot of a plump-cheeked, open-faced young woman. Harold saw me looking and said, ‘Yes, that’s Ruth.’

I was surprised. She was not as I’d imagined her and she did not look like anybody’s idea of a prostitute. It was hard to believe that the wholesome-looking woman in the photograph had strutted through alien bedrooms, touching strangers, being paid for sex, wearing shoes Harold had made for her. Her face looked neither sexual nor knowing, but perhaps there were other faces that she kept for professional purposes.

The other thing that leapt out at me was a cast of Catherine’s right foot that rested on the sideboard in the yellow glow of a table lamp. It was marked with grubby fingerprints, and I wondered what use Harold had for it and what had happened to the other one.

I sat down in a furrowed armchair and continued to feel sorry for myself while Harold poured me a small brandy and fetched a damp cloth to wipe the mess off my face.

‘What happened to you?’ Harold asked as he too sat down, but he didn’t sound very interested.

‘It’s a long story,’ I said, and with some guilt I described my bad times with Alicia, with my ugly-footed women, with the man from the ICA. Most shameful of all, I admitted that I had smashed the plaster casts of Catherine’s feet. Harold listened and I confessed. I wanted him to be shocked and disapproving. I wanted him to tell me how stupid and wrong I’d been, but he wouldn’t give me that satisfaction. He just nodded from time to time, as though everything I was confessing to was par for the course. But so far I’d said nothing about my encounter with Kramer.

‘I feel such a fraud compared to you, Harold,’ I said. ‘I feel that my behaviour isn’t justified. I shouldn’t be going off the rails like this. I mean, all that’s happened is I’ve been dumped by my girlfriend, whereas you …’

I couldn’t finish my sentence. Harold looked as though his features had been set in cement. I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.

‘None of this explains the blood on your face,’ he said.