Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

‘You know it wasn’t.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I missed you too.’ Coming from Catherine that was quite a confession. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry about various things. You don’t need me to specify, do you?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Poor old Harold,’ she said.

Sympathy was only the slightest of a whole bundle of feelings I currently had towards Harold, but to be charitable I said, ‘Yes, poor old Harold.’

She sat down, leaned back into a corner of the sofa and put her feet up on the opposite arm. She looked perfectly relaxed and at home.

‘Are you back?’ I asked uncertainly, not knowing exactly what I meant by ‘back’.

‘Well, I’m here,’ she said.

‘Are you staying?’

‘Sure.’

‘Do you want anything? A drink?’

‘You could help me off with my boots.’

I’ve always quite liked cowboy boots as objects; their shape, their style, the way in which their essence always remains much the same and yet they’re a canvas for all kinds of aesthetic transformations. But I had never found them erotic, and the ones Catherine was wearing — purple and black, very pointed and heavily stitched — were really no exception. However, what the boots contained was still a subject of utmost erotic fascination for me. That hadn’t changed or diminished. I did indeed want to help her off with her boots so I could get at her feet. Mindful that some of my bad dreams might have been prophetic, I was ready for the worst as I pulled off the boots. I needn’t have worried; there were no tattoos, no scars, no stigmata.

‘I’ve been looking after them,’ she said. ‘Though probably not as well as you would have.’

I held her feet in my hands. They were perfect, of course, as pale and pure and cold as vellum. I kissed them, let my lips move softly and drily over their insteps. They were exactly as I remembered them.

‘I’ve really missed that,’ said Catherine, but she was only saying what I might have said. ‘You’ve done a job on me,’ she continued. ‘You’ve turned me into a mirror-image of you. You want to worship feet. I want to have my feet worshipped. I guess we’ve turned into the perfect couple.’

So she moved in. And it was strange, very strange, but it was good. We had plenty of wild, intense, unorthodox, fetishistic sex, but we also had a surprising amount of wild, intense, orthodox, unfetishistic sex; sex in which feet and shoes hardly figured at all.

We didn’t go to sex clubs, and when we were in wine bars I generally didn’t take her shoes away and masturbate into them. And instead of bringing strange women round to participate in three-way sex we simply had people round for dinner. I got in touch with Mike and Natasha again, made no reference to the strange scenes I’d gone through with both of them. They were as keen to deny history as I was, and they were eager to meet Catherine. ‘My God,’ they said after they’d met her. ‘Where have you been hiding her? She’s just what you’ve always needed.’ I was glad they liked her, and they seemed genuinely pleased on my behalf, but I also knew they were relieved that I’d finally found someone. I think I was relieved too.

It was two o’clock on Sunday morning. Mike and Natasha had been round for dinner and had only just left. The room was a mess with dirty plates, empty glasses and wine bottles, and Catherine and I were both tired and comfortably drunk. In general we didn’t spend much time talking about Harold or Kramer or the murder, but we didn’t specifically avoid it either, didn’t want to turn it into a taboo subject. However, if we wanted to talk about it at all, it was easiest when the night was old and we were nicely drunk.

This time Catherine said, ‘You know Harold made shoes for me after I stopped seeing you?’

I did, of course.

‘Well, want to see ‘em?’

It would have been cowardly to say no, so, with a lot of trepidation and some of the old anticipation, I agreed. Catherine stepped out of the living room into the hallway and I could hear a rustling of boxes and tissue paper, then the sound of clothing being removed, and when Catherine returned she was naked except for a pair of shoes I’d never seen before.

They were surprisingly restrained for a pair of Harold’s. The heels were very high and the toes were very pointed, but there was none of the baroque, erotic splendour that characterized so many of his shoes, nor did they appear to be made from any exotic fabric. They were elegant, classic, if slightly exaggerated, court shoes in a plain, rich brown leather. I was slightly disappointed.

Catherine pulled up a dining chair and sat in front of me, opened her legs, raised them and placed one foot on each of my shoulders. I turned and kissed the tops of her feet and my eyes came very close to the shoes. The grain of the leather was strangely smooth and unmarked. It was less commonplace than I’d thought. It had a fine, waxy texture to it, and it was clearly not calf, not pigskin, not kid, in fact, not anything I’d ever seen before, at least not in this form.

And then I remembered what Crawford had said about Kramer’s mutilation. He’d said that Harold’s trade mark had been carved into the dead man’s chest, but he’d added ‘among other things’. I sniffed at the shoes, ran my fingers over them.

I said to Catherine, ‘They could be made out of human skin, couldn’t they?’

‘Couldn’t they just,’ she said.