You know those old movies where they’re in a nightclub and the men are wearing evening dress and they have tiny spiv-like moustaches, and they’re with some good-time girls, and then one of the guys pulls a shoe off one of the girl’s feet and drinks champagne out of it? Well, come on, what’s that all about? Is it meant to imply that the woman is so attractive that even the sweat from her feet is desirable? It could be a simple bit of self-degradation, but on the scale of human degradation it seems to be so low it’s barely registering.
I’m far more persuaded that it’s a symbolic act. The cad is drinking champagne from the woman’s shoe, but really he wants to be drinking it from her cunt. Or maybe it’s not really about drinking at all. You’ll notice it’s only ever champagne that gets drunk. Why isn’t it a nice claret or a mature, tawny port? Well, I don’t think there’s much doubt it has something to do with ejaculation; white frothy stuff, not dark, resinous, full-bodied liquor. I suspect that it’s pouring in the champagne that’s the real symbolic act, not drinking it out.
The fact is, it’s not all that easy to drink out of a woman’s shoe, and I have of course tried. But for me the problem is more with the champagne than with the shoe. I’d much rather pour good, dark red wine over a woman’s bare foot and then lick it off. That was something I frequently did with Catherine. It was another little foot-related eccentricity of mine, and she never complained. Besides, even good champagne can ruin a shoe, and we weren’t going to take any risks, certainly not with Harold’s handiwork.
Time passed. We kept visiting Harold and he kept coming up with the goods, producing pair after pair of wild and exquisite shoes. Catherine and I were delighted with everything he made, but it was never a simple or straightforward delight. There was always a dark edge to his work. One pair of black stiletto court shoes was studded with false eyes of the most intense powder blue. Another pair, made of vibrant red satin, had shards of smashed mirror set in the toe. Others featured strange and alarming fabrics: chain mail, semi-transparent rubber, antelope skin. Or there would be weird features and decoration; an ankle strap made out of sinister medical tubing, wooden heels carved into the shape of putti. Sometimes there would be asymmetrical rips and slashes in the fabric, designed to give tantalizing glimpses of the bare foot inside as Catherine walked.
We made a lot of visits to Harold’s shop. Occasionally we’d arrive at the same time as one of his more orthodox customers, someone collecting a pair of handmade brogues or buckskin cricket boots. In that case we had to wait until he’d finished with them, then he’d shut the shop so that our business was entirely private. The world of fetishism had to be kept separate from his usual trade.
I sensed we were something special in Harold’s life, but he seemed determined that we shouldn’t become too friendly, and even though he lived in the flat above the shop, we were never invited there. Our transactions always took place in the neutral territory of the shop or workroom.
Owning truly great pairs of fetishistic shoes provokes at least two important questions. One: where and on what occasions do you wear them? Two: what do you wear them with? The obvious answers might appear to be that you wear them every night in bed with nothing else at all, but Catherine and I wanted a less obvious answer.
Great feet and great shoes need to be shown off. A woman can wear killer FMs in her normal daily life, in the supermarket, at the pub, in the office. In these situations heads will definitely turn, the shoes may even be appreciated, but they only have that effect because they’re actually out of place there. In fact, it was hard to think of anywhere, apart from a fetish club, where Harold’s shoes wouldn’t look out of place. So we decided to go to a fetish club.
It was called Stains, and its claim was that it ‘celebrated sexual difference’. Of course, in one sense, a fetishist like myself actually wants to celebrate sexual similarity: the more closely feet and shoes resemble my own personal ideals the better I like them. But I knew what they meant. As far as I was aware, and naturally I’d done a little research on the subject, there was no club in London that catered just for foot and shoe fetishists, but we knew that dressing up in sexy gear, lethal high heels included, was one of the ‘differences’ that Stains celebrated, so it would have to do.
Harold’s latest creation was a pair of peep-toed ankle boots made of what he assured us was monkeyskin. The ox-blood varnish on Catherine’s toenails made a wicked contrast against the shaggy black fur of the shoe. Thus arose the problem of what else Catherine should wear. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she’d been to one or two of these clubs before and she had a few well-chosen items in her wardrobe that would do the job; some wisps of leather and fishnet, a bit of exotic corsetry and uplift. It was powerful stuff, but for my tastes none of it was as wild or as eloquent as the shoes. As for me, I put on some leather trousers and a T-shirt with an illustration of a pair of FMs. It couldn’t compete with Catherine’s outfit, but it wasn’t meant to.
These things are largely a matter of context. As we drove to the club in a taxi I felt that our get-up was ridiculously excessive, but the moment we entered the loud, low-ceilinged gloom of the club we seemed to stand out like a couple of arch conservatives. We were surrounded by wearers of ornate rubber, leather and PVC costumes that spoke only about sex. Bodies were encased and reshaped under the restraining influence of uniforms and wild fancy dress. The occasional set of bare breasts was visible, popping out of basques and through holes in rubber or leather bodysuits, and there were plenty of bare buttocks, both male and female. But little of the flesh on display was either natural or unmediated. Much of it was tattooed, and some of it was pierced. Rings and chains linked noses, nipples, ears and cheeks, and no doubt there were labia and penises that had come in for similar treatment, but they were covered — at least for the time being. All the props and paraphernalia of fetishistic sex were present and on display: whips and dildos, body harnesses, dog collars, mackintoshes; but the concentration and the diversity had a curiously diluting effect, as though one fetish cancelled out another.
Of course, one jumped to conclusions about the other people in the club. You read the costumes they had adorned themselves with and you made assumptions about whether they were gay or straight, submissive or dominant, voyeurs or exhibitionists. There was a smattering of male and female transvestism, and we saw someone in a nappy. This was undoubtedly the ‘difference’ we had been promised, but I wasn’t sure how sexual, let alone erotic, it was. I made my Pavlovian responses to the various provocations around me, but men dressed as Shirley Bassey, gay boys in rubber shorts, women being led around on dog leads; these didn’t hit the spot at all.
There was assertive, metallic music clanging through the place, but nobody was dancing. People preferred to strut and pose. Occasionally someone would stroke someone else’s arm or cheek, or even bare bottom, yet the atmosphere was oddly without erotic charge, and it wasn’t a pick-up joint as far as I could see. A few people came up and talked to us. They were friendly, and of course they were heavily dressed up, but there were no offers of sexual difference. We were simply asked whether this was the first time we’d been to Stains, and whether we were enjoying ourselves. It was simply an attempt to make new members feel welcome.
It seemed to me there were two distinct types of clientele. The first was young and glamorous, and for them this kind of dressing up was just another way of being fashionable. They were dressed more outrageously, and showed more of their exceptionally good bodies than they would have in a more ordinary nightclub, but it was still just a form of clubbing. It may have been sexy but it wasn’t sex itself. The second type, generally the older ones, the middle-aged men with their pot bellies and leather masks, carrying their enema kits, and their women, with cellulite visible between their stocking-tops and leather panties, well, you knew they were serious about things. You knew they really meant it. The two groups had nothing in common and yet there was no antagonism between them. Even if old and young, attractive and ugly, bent and straight weren’t exactly coming together, they were at least tolerating each other’s existence. They were tolerating Catherine and me too, and I didn’t think we fitted into either category.