Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

My nights were getting tattered and sleepless, and to make matters worse Crawford took to ringing me in the early hours of the morning. The first time it happened I thought there must be some crisis, some dramatic development, but he simply asked me what kind of car I drove, and after I’d told him he put the phone down. The next time it was to ask whether I’d heard from Catherine; another time he simply said he’d been mulling over the case and wondered if I’d thought of anything new to tell him. It must have happened half a dozen times in all and there was never any point to it. It became obvious that he was doing it just to harass me. I thought he was trying to scare me, to wear me down, and he was succeeding.

And then a moment came when it seemed as if my waking life was taking on the same lurid, absurd texture as my dreams. I was hurrying to work in the rain, I was late, I’d been late a lot recently, and I noticed a chemist’s window display and thought I must finally have snapped. There, blown up to a size that filled the whole of the window, was a giant black and white photograph of Catherine’s naked feet. I stopped dead. I couldn’t believe it. I would have preferred it to be a dream or hallucination. It seemed as though I might have gone completely mad and started to project images from my sick mind on to the world at large. And yet this particular image looked perfectly real and substantial. What’s more, when I could think at all straight, I recognized that this was one of Kramer’s photographs from the series I’d discovered in his studio. The bastard was dead but his art was living on. And once I’d managed to convince myself that the photograph did indeed exist in the real world, I soon realized this was commercial art. The words ‘Adiol Footcare’ had been superimposed in red lettering in the bottom right hand corner of the photograph. What I was looking at was a piece of advertising. Catherine’s perfect, adored feet were being used to shift beauty products. Arranged in front of the giant blow up was an elaborate display of boxes, jars, tubes and sprays, all with the name Adiol on them.

I stood for a long time in front of that window. In other circumstances I might have been worshipping an erotic icon, but this time all I felt was bafflement and anger. At last I tore myself away and went into the shop. There I found an in-store display, a point-of-sale carousel, a pile of leaflets promoting the benefits of Adiol Footcare; and they all showed the same image of Catherine’s feet.

I picked up a leaflet and opened it. It was full of stuff about how abused and neglected most people’s feet are, and how they could become things of beauty if only you used Adiol footbaths, moisturizers, deodorants and so on. This sounded like complete guff to me. Catherine’s feet, as far as I knew, were a wonder of nature and, apart from her one visit to a pedicurist with me, owed nothing to Adiol or any other manufactured product.

After I’d been standing by the in-store display for a good few minutes a woman approached me. She wanted to sell me something. I could tell because she was wearing a yellow uniform with the Adiol logo printed on her left breast, and she asked me did I know that the average person takes eighteen thousand steps every day. I said I did, as a matter of fact, and that surprised her, so she simply asked me if I needed any help. I most certainly did, but not the kind she was likely to give me. All I said was, could she tell me where I might get hold of a copy of the poster. She was gently amused and said I was the third person to have asked her that and the display had only been up for an hour. She said the company didn’t have any to give away, but maybe I could approach the photographer direct.

I lurched out into the street, picking up a fistful of leaflets as I went. So Kramer was an even more slimy piece of work than I’d imagined. At least my obsession with feet was personal, heartfelt and unexploitative. Kramer, it seemed, had wanted to make money out of his. Catherine really knew how to pick them. How could she let herself be used like that? For the very first time I thought that maybe Harold had done the right thing by killing Kramer.

Over the next week or two Catherine’s feet appeared in shops and windows all over town. A walk down any street could become a journey of tantalizingly exquisite torture for me. Ads using the same image appeared in newspapers and magazines, even on bus stops. Catherine’s feet must have found their way into hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of homes and psyches. Any common or garden foot fetishist or partialist could possess an image of Catherine’s feet. He could cut out the picture, put it in his scrapbook, his files, his archive. He could gloat and salivate and masturbate all over it. The idea made me simultaneously very angry and very horny. I wasn’t pleased with myself for feeling like that. But what could I do? Catherine had always had a life of her own. Now the object of my private fascination was well and truly in the public domain.

I decided to return to Kramer’s studio. This time I didn’t intend to break in and I didn’t intend to steal or destroy anything, but I did hope to get something I needed. I’d seen the reception area and the secretary’s desk when I’d been there before. They suggested that Kramer’s business wasn’t entirely a one-man operation. I had reason to believe that it had enough momentum to keep going for a little while after his death, especially since examples of his work were currently on display everywhere. It was a long shot but I thought it was my only hope.

I went there in working hours, pressed the doorbell and hoped for the best. A woman’s voice spoke in the entryphone and I muttered a few deliberately incomprehensible words. She said something equally incomprehensible in reply and pressed the buzzer that let me in.

I went up the stairs to the top of the building, to the studio, where I found a young woman in jeans and a lumberjack shirt, hair held back in a ponytail. She had her feet up on the desk and was smoking a joint. The place was a mess. There were boxes and tea chests all around her and it appeared she’d been half-heartedly packing and sorting through them. My presence gave her a surprise, and not a particularly pleasant one.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought you were a messenger.’

‘I’m a potential customer,’ I said.

She looked confused.

‘I’d like to see Mr Kramer,’ I said brightly.

Then she appeared terribly sad. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, and she said, ‘He’s passed away. I mean, he’s dead. Robert’s dead.’

‘Dead?’ I said. ‘That’s terrible. That’s really terrible. I had no idea.’

‘I’m just here holding the fort,’ she said. ‘Tidying up some loose ends. Sending out invoices. Paying bills.’

‘But I keep seeing his work everywhere. The Adiol campaign.’

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘It was all set up before he died, there was no reason to stop it. It breaks my heart every time I see it.’

‘That must be awful for you.’

‘It’s not so great.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I really am. I’ll go away and leave you to your work.’

I made as though to leave, but she said, ‘Since you’re here, what is it you wanted? Can I help?’

‘It sounds trivial now,’ I said. ‘I wanted Mr Kramer to take some photographs for me, that’s all. You see, I’m a shoe designer. I was so impressed by the photographs in the Adiol campaign I thought I’d like something similar to show off my own work.’

She didn’t look at all perturbed. This was probably how things were done in her business; one job led to another, work generated work.

‘It’s a real shame,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’d have been very interested. What can I say?’