As I was paying Sophie her fee I said, ‘Yours is a strange calling, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘A strange job, handling people’s feet all day.’
She looked mildly offended. I knew I’d said the wrong thing and tried to laugh it off.
‘Well, I guess it’s not strange at all,’ I said. ‘There are probably people who’d pay good money to handle other people’s feet all day.’
That was wrong too. She looked at me with what seemed to be practised contempt, as though she had seen right through me and spotted me as just another sicko loser of the sort that she had to deal with all too often.
‘It’s just a job, all right?’
I said all right, gave her a bigger tip than I might have otherwise, and I hustled Catherine out of the salon.
Catherine and I didn’t spend that night together, and alone in my bed, somewhere between waking and sleeping, I had a little sexual fantasy about what might have happened in the salon with Sophie and Catherine. It involved troilism and footsucking and was, I suppose, not really very original. But what was interesting was the way the fantasy had come unbidden. It wasn’t as if my sex life with Catherine needed any spicing up. Rather I felt it was an indication that with Catherine anything, any sexual antic or adventure, seemed possible, in fact seemed very likely.
Catherine and I continued to see each other, not too often, perhaps not as often as I would have liked, but continue we did. I wanted her to come to my place, to see the archive if nothing else, but she said she wasn’t ready for that yet. So we met in bars, where she would reiterate that she didn’t know what she was doing with me, and then we would go back to her place, where what she was doing with me became perfectly clear. Other times we went shopping for shoes.
We were in the shoe department of a big London department store; very smart, moderately exclusive, very expensive. Some of the shoes were arranged on racks, with the more exotic specimens on pedestals or wall-mounted on glass shelves. The department was busy and assistants hard to find, not that we needed any assistance. It was easy enough to take shoes from the displays and try them on, and Catherine did so, to my obvious pleasure, but we were not there to do anything as wholesome and uncomplicated as shopping.
We browsed through the whole department, looking for something very special, the right shoe for the right occasion, and at last we found the one that satisfied our needs. I handed Catherine a single, high-heeled, lizard-skin court shoe. The skin was soft and had a matt finish. It was elegant, narrow and had a long, pointed toe. She took it from me and admired it, then looked around to make sure nobody else was watching. She was wearing a calf-length, wraparound skirt, with a slit up the side that showed a length of leg as she walked. She was wearing nothing underneath, and she slid the shoe inside the folds of the skirt.
This might have been interpreted as the act of a shoplifter, but that was not what we had in mind at all. Catherine carefully pressed the shoe against her cunt. She exerted a slow, steady, twisting pressure, so that the toe of the shoe parted her and bluntly entered. I watched intently, my gaze partly on what Catherine was doing beneath the skirt, partly on her face, which she was desperately trying to keep impassive.
She had soon done as much as she could with the shoe. She bought it out from beneath the skirt, and handed it back to me. I looked at it and smiled appreciatively when I saw that the toe of the shoe was smeared with her juices. For a second I considered licking them off, but that was not part of the plan. I steadied myself and returned the shoe to its place on the display stand. We moved away, pretended we were still looking round the department, but our attention remained firmly on the lizard skin shoe. We did not have long to wait before someone else tried it on.
She was young, very dark, her body and face very angular. She was sullen but sensual, and she was with her bored, much older husband who watched impatiently as she sat down, shucked off her own footwear and slipped her foot into the lizard-skin shoe. It went on easily and appeared to be a good fit. She extended her leg, held out the foot, turned her ankle so she could see the effect from different angles. She seemed satisfied, though she remained sullen, and she asked an assistant for the other half of the pair. While she was waiting for the assistant to return, something about the shoe caught her attention. She peered at it, and saw there was a mark on the toe, but she didn’t know what it was, how could she? She must have thought it was a scuff or a line of dust. She touched the shoe, as though to polish it, and her long, white index finger found itself skimming through the traces from Catherine’s vagina and removing them. She looked at the shoe again, seemed pleased. She still didn’t know what she had touched.
The assistant returned, the woman tried on the other shoe, declared herself content and her husband paid for them. While she was waiting for the transaction to be completed she absent-mindedly stroked the corner of her mouth with the same finger that had touched the shoe and Catherine’s juices.
Later, in Catherine’s flat, as we had sex, Catherine’s legs up, her feet pressed to my face, I knew we were both thinking about the dark, angular woman in the store. We wondered what she and her husband were doing tonight, whether they were enjoying the reality of the shoes they’d bought as much as we were enjoying the mere thought of them.
Nine
The story of Cinderella is a primary myth for all foot and shoe fetishists, but there are a lot of problems that go with it. At its simplest level, and even to the most unideological observer, it must seem to be peddling some unpleasant nonsense about class and romantic love. The idea that a woman might change her life utterly and for the better simply by dressing up in finery and attending a ball so that she can become a prince’s object of desire, is one that we find as suspect as we do improbable. But, of course, it’s the glass slipper that really interests me.
How does the slipper come to be so crucial in the story? The prince, let’s remember, has spent a certain amount of time with Cinderella. He’s talked to her, heard her voice, seen her face, has surely had time enough to gain some sense of her personality. Yet when he begins his search for her, such attributes as personality, face and voice are wholly ignored. He is simply searching for the owner of a certain foot, a foot that will fit the glass slipper she left behind.
It is well known that in Perrault’s original French fairytale the slipper is made of fur not glass. Now, there’s no shortage of sexual overtones in a fur slipper. Pubic hair is invoked, the interaction of human and animal skin is suggested, and the penetration of a fur opening by a woman’s foot is certainly ripe with perverse symbolism. But the plot of Cinderella revolves around the slipper fitting only one woman, and the fact is that fur is soft, yielding and could be stretched to fit any number of differently sized feet. A glass slipper, being rigid, has a far more specific fit, and is far less accommodating than fur.
However, if we accept that the slipper is being used as some kind of vaginal symbol, a fur one is surely more serviceable than a glass one. Glass is brittle. It breaks. It is potentially dangerous. One could so easily smash the vessel and cut oneself.
The role of the slipper is made even more complex and perverse, because it’s the prince who’s the possessor of this symbolic vagina. It belonged to Cinderella but she has run from it, left it behind. When the prince begins his search it’s the women of the kingdom who must perform an act of penetration, who must insert their foot into this fragile glass opening that he carries with him.