Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

I tried to make Natasha welcome but I was relieved when she said she couldn’t stay long. I offered her coffee and she said she could murder a drink, a real drink. So I gave her a gin and tonic. I had no way of knowing what Mike had said to her about his exploits in Birmingham and his desire to repeat them daily, so I wanted to wait for Natasha to bring up the subject. We talked breezily about nothing at all for fifteen minutes or so and then she said, ‘Mike’s told me all about you.’

That wasn’t what I was expecting at all. I was lost for a reply.

‘About your foot and shoe fetishism,’ she added.

I could hardly be surprised that Mike had told her, but I couldn’t see why she wanted to bring it up now.

‘I don’t think he approved,’ I said. ‘He thought it was rather pathetic of me.’

‘He’s a bit of a prude really, you know,’ Natasha said.

There was no doubt some truth in that. I could see that the desire to do ‘dirty’ things with prostitutes could well stem from a puritanical frame of mind. Yet I didn’t think that was really what Natasha meant. It seemed probable that Mike had told her all about me, but told her nothing at all about himself.

‘It’s no big deal,’ I said. ‘It’s just a personal preference. It’s just something I’m into, like some people are into mountaineering or motorcycle racing.’

This was idiotic nonsense but I hoped it would keep Natasha’s interest at bay. This was not a moment when I wanted to explain and justify myself again. It didn’t work.

‘I think it’s fascinating,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s pathetic at all.’

‘Well, neither do I,’ I said, then desperately changing the subject, ‘And how is Mike?’

‘How was he the last time you saw him?’ she countered.

‘A little the worse for wear,’ I said. ‘But it was a while ago.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, though it wasn’t at all clear what she was thinking about or what she was agreeing to.

Suddenly I found myself saying, ‘I gather you and Mike are having a bad patch.’

I didn’t know why I’d said it. It wasn’t that I was eager to play therapist, or even that I was particularly interested.

‘Something like that,’ Natasha answered. ‘I don’t really want to talk about it. OK?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Fine.’ But in that case, I wondered, what she did want to talk about, why she was paying me this visit. I soon found out. She kicked off her shoes, low-heeled, round-toed, black court shoes — nothing special — and revealed her bare feet. I’ve said before that Natasha’s feet were pleasant enough, though not especially attractive to a man like myself. Now, however, she’d painted her nails a startling, uncharacteristic red, and while that didn’t make the feet suddenly, overwhelmingly more appealing, it certainly caught the eye.

‘Is that the kind of thing you like?’ she asked.

I looked at her feet politely and said, ‘Yes, that kind of thing.’

‘What would you do with them?’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘This is embarrassing.’

‘Would you fondle them, stroke them, kiss them, slobber over them?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘Would you like to do that now? To my feet?’

I was going to say something about Mike, about loyalty and friendship but Natasha stopped me and said, ‘And if you remind me that I’m married to your best friend, I’ll scream.’

‘Don’t scream,’ I said.

She was sitting in a chair and I was sitting vulnerably on the sofa. She came to sit beside me. She positioned herself at the opposite end of the sofa so that her feet were resting in my lap. At first I did nothing, but the absurdity of sitting there inertly like that, like the reluctant, sexually timid hero of some kind of Carry On movie, got the better of me.

I started to stroke Natasha’s feet. It was more of a massage than any version of foreplay, but Natasha seemed to be enjoying it a lot. She smiled and closed her eyes and threw her head back on to the arm of the sofa. As she did so her skirt rode up. I saw a long stretch of tanned thigh and I could see she was naked underneath the skirt. A dark, unruly pubic bush was clearly visible.

Now, I suppose if I had been a fetishist as per the classic case histories, Natasha’s bare feet should have made me as horny as a polecat, while the pubic bush should have left me completely cold. But, in fact, given that I didn’t find Natasha’s feet all that erotic in the first place, the situation was reversed. While Natasha was becoming intensely aroused by having her feet stroked, I was becoming intensely aroused by the sight, presence and prospect of her bare cunt. And, after a while, after some deliberation and some amount of thinking about Mike, and after experiencing a certain, though highly equivocal, pang of guilt, I ran my hand all the way up Natasha’s thigh. And then she did scream.

It wasn’t one of those piercing, blood-curdling, ripper movie type screams that would bring neighbours running to lynch me, but it was an effective scream nevertheless. I immediately took my hands off her as though she was radioactive, I covered her legs with the flap of her skirt, and she leapt up off the sofa and ran across the room to get as far away from me as possible.

‘This was a big mistake,’ she said, more to herself than to me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said again, just as inscrutably.

‘I’ve not been myself lately,’ I said.

‘It’s not your fault. It’s my fault. And Mike’s fault. He says I’m frigid. I think he’s wrong.’

‘Yes?’ Now it was my turn to be inscrutable.

She stamped her feet into her shoes, thanked me for something or other, and she was gone.

I started to have dreams about Catherine; nightmares I suppose. They would always start out well enough. Catherine would have returned. There would be a chance meeting, a conversation, some hand-holding and kissing, and then a reconciliation. We would both say that we’d made mistakes and that we wanted to try again. Even in the dreams I was aware of the essential mawkish banality of this stuff but my subconscious was refusing to be serious and unsentimental. Then we would go to some anonymous dream room and Catherine would kick off her shoes and that’s when all the problems would start.

In the least distressing of the dreams, the feet that were revealed were simply not Catherine’s; they were not grotesque or deformed, not the genuine stuff of nightmares, but they just happened to be somebody else’s. It was as though my whole reason for loving Catherine had been obliterated. It was terrible but not horrible. However, in another version of the dream I would discover that, at Kramer’s suggestion, Catherine had had her feet tattooed with Harold’s trade mark of footprint and lightning flash. The tattooing was garish and incompetent, done by some drug-stoked, cack-handed Hell’s Angel. It was a form of sacrilege, of desecration, and even in the dream I was wondering whether laser technology and skin grafts could be used to return the feet to their natural state. It seemed to me that they couldn’t, that the feet had been permanently damaged. Catherine, meanwhile, could never see what all the fuss was about.

And then came the worst dreams of all, the real stuff of a sick id on the rampage. In these Catherine would quite calmly tell me that she had developed a couple of open sores, one on each foot. But when she showed them to me it was obvious that these ‘sores’ were man-made, that someone (obviously Kramer) had driven nails into them, as if she had been nailed to a cross. I would run around looking for bandages, sticking plasters, TCP, Savlon; but the first-aid kit was always empty, the shops were always closed, there was nothing to be done, at which point Catherine would beg me to ‘kiss them better’. I would try very hard, very desperately, but I could never quite force my lips to make contact with the pierced, bloody flesh.