Geoff Nicholson - Footsucker

I’d meet them, talk to them, be friendly, and the evening would go well enough, but since I was being encouraged to think of these women as potential partners and mates, I had to check their feet. And their feet were never the feet of my dreams. I can’t remember the exact chapter and verse, their foot and shoe failings were not so hideous as to be permanently imprinted in my memory, but I know they were never any good.

‘Would you like Sarah’s phone number?’ Natasha asked.

‘No thanks.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want to phone her.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want to talk to her.’

‘What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with all my friends?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s probably something wrong with me.’

Mike put on his German psychiatrist accent. ‘Now ziss is very interesting.’

But while I didn’t want to satisfy their curiosity, I don’t deny that I was flattered by their interest in me. I liked being a source of fascination and speculation and concern. Mike always pretended to disapprove of Natasha’s prying but I knew he was as nosy as she was.

It wouldn’t have been impossible to tell them that I was a foot and shoe fetishist. I felt sure they wouldn’t have been horrified, and I wouldn’t have been particularly embarrassed, but I never wanted to. It was simply more enjoyable if it was a part of my life that I kept to myself.

So they stopped trying to find suitable girls for me, and I stopped introducing my succession of transitory girlfriends. It suited us all fine. Mike and Natasha knew plenty of other couples but I never felt very at home with them, so when we met up it tended to be just the three of us. We were capable of doing quite blokish things together, like going to the pub to play pool or going to watch Sunday League cricket. Other times we’d be cultured and go to see new films or plays or concerts. I always felt very at ease in their company and I’d never, never felt like a gooseberry.

Occasionally Mike would turn to me and say something like, ‘How about we ditch the wife, score some cocaine, pick up a couple of harlots and shag our brains out in a sordid hovel in King’s Cross?’

But, hey, I knew he didn’t mean it. Given that Mike and Natasha had been together for about ten years, and given that they were perfectly normal people, and despite the fact that they obviously adored each other, I did wonder if they had stayed wholly faithful to each other all that time. It was only human nature to stray once in a while, whether out of curiosity or drunkenness or misplaced lust. Besides, I always felt that their marriage was tough enough to withstand a little philandering.

After I’d met Catherine, I told them I had a new girlfriend, and said I had hopes for the relationship, though I didn’t go as far as telling them her name. Mike did ask what this one had that the others didn’t and, of course, I couldn’t say that she had a perfect pair of feet. I simply said she was American, and that seemed enough of an explanation for them. Natasha said I should bring her over but we all knew that I wouldn’t.

Natasha was, no doubt, a very attractive woman. She was big hipped and big breasted, though her figure was more earth mother than hour glass. I don’t imagine she had to fight men off, but I’m sure she must have had her opportunities. For the record, her feet were nicely arched, but much too plump and short-toed for my tastes. Consequently I entertained no feelings of lust for her whatsoever. I didn’t want anything like that from her. At the time I thought that was just as well, and subsequent events would prove that I was absolutely right to think that.

In one sense, what I wanted from Catherine was entirely simple and straightforward. I simply wanted her to make her feet available to me and I would do the rest. I would be the active partner, the one in need and yet the giver. I would treat her feet well, pamper them, adore them, dress them up in beautiful shoes, just the way any lover would treat any object of desire. And, even though Catherine’s feet would be the primary sexual focus, I wouldn’t be totally selfish. I wouldn’t neglect the rest of her. I’d do my damndest to satisfy her in all the more usual ways as well. The standard components of a good conventional relationship would not be entirely absent. I had every intention of being thoughtful, considerate and generous. I would try not to be too demanding, nor too jealous.

But inevitably it would not be a strictly conventional relationship. Mine was not the kind of love that led to domesticity, joint home-ownership, marriage, babies and all that stuff. It didn’t lead to sharing a social life, to meeting friends and relatives. In fact I found it hard to imagine what it did lead to. I couldn’t quite envisage how our future lives might shape themselves around each other. Nevertheless, fragile and provisional though our relationship was, I envisaged that we would in some sense continue.

I suppose I imagined that we would go on leading our quotidian lives as we always had, though I had no idea what that involved for Catherine, and occasionally we would come together, at her place or mine (although so far she had refused to come to my home), or perhaps in some hotel or some risky semi-public place where we would drink, talk briefly, then have intense, fetishistic sex. The meeting in the wine bar when I masturbated into her shoe was only the first of several such encounters.

Faithfulness certainly didn’t seem to be important. I felt it wouldn’t have bothered me if Catherine had been involved with, or committed to, any number of other people, just so long as she continued to see me, continued to let me love her feet. I eventually realized I was quite wrong to think that, but this discovery was some way off.

As for what Catherine wanted, that was a mystery. She had not sought out a fetishist. I had simply turned up and presented myself to her. I had always imagined there might be a woman out there who was my sexual mirror-image, someone with perfect feet who was looking for a man who would adore them for her. Even though Catherine enjoyed being the object of my obsession she was not precisely that mirror-image. There was always a certain ambivalence, a certain hesitation. She obviously found my fetishism strange and unsettling, but she was ultimately not repelled by it. And her reluctance was not insuperable. Although she hesitated, although she would say she didn’t know what she was doing with me, a moment always came when she would give herself over to the perversity of the situation and, as she had shown in the wine bar, as she showed elsewhere, she would respond intensely.

On one of our first ‘dates’ we went along to a beauty salon and Catherine had a professional pedicure. I was there as an interested (not to say fascinated, not to say fixated) observer. The salon had some aspirations to style and modernity, though it was something of a period piece; lots of mirrors, black sinks, spotlights and networks of chrome railings that had no obvious function.

We met ‘our’ pedicurist, a young, cheerful, freckled, sturdy-looking girl not more than eighteen years old. Her badge said she was called Sophie. I saw that she was wearing some flat, open-toed sandals which weren’t at all appealing, yet the feet within them looked nice enough. The toes were good and straight, and the nails though unpainted were shapely and glossy. I was encouraged.

There were only a couple of women in the salon having their hair done, having facials and manicures, so it wasn’t crowded. Nevertheless it seemed like an all too public space. I wanted Catherine’s pedicure to be done in private and I was pleased when we were escorted away from the main area of the salon into a special pedicure section. Catherine sat down in a raised hydraulic chair, not unlike a dentist’s, although it was upholstered in white leatherette. There was a footstool and a low table from which Sophie was going to operate.