Almost all these threats were just that. Retribution never came. I was never hit. The police were never summoned, and if they had been, I would have been long gone by the time they arrived. And even if they had arrived in time, what would they have done? Surely the police in central London have better things to do than arrest presentable young men who are doing nothing more sinister than interviewing women about their feet and footwear. And, equally, surely women have far greater things to fear than somebody like me. I was always, and still am, completely harmless.
So that was it. That’s what I used to do. That’s all. It was no big deal. On the scale of human depravity and perversity it barely registered. There was no violence, no violation, no pain, no victim. Later I would take the questionnaire, which was a genuine document designed and devised by me, and file it away, along with any photographs I’d taken, which I would have had developed and printed and, in certain cases, blown up. This material became part of my archive. More about the archive (much, much more) later.
Subsequently I would lay out these photographs, pore over them, savour the intricacies of foot and shoe, and if I happened to become aroused by this, and if I used the pictures as an aid to masturbation, well, what harm was there in that?
So that’s what I usually did. That’s what usually happened. But this was a long time ago, and it’s not at all what happened when I met Catherine. With Catherine it went very differently.
It was a hot summer’s afternoon, a Friday. I was taking an extended lunch break. My suit was too hot but I didn’t want to loosen my tie, and I had positioned myself in South Molton Street in readiness to quiz women as they came out of the expensive clothes and shoe shops there.
You couldn’t help noticing Catherine. She looked great. She was very tall, statuesque even, not thin, not girlish. She had a bundle of rough, shaggy, black hair, large, strong features, dark eyes and a broad, crimson, pleasingly asymmetrical mouth. She was, I’m sure, in every sense, conventionally attractive, but what attracted me was her footwear, a pair of spike-heeled, zebra-skin shoes. They were something very special indeed. Her walk was sinuous and not quite steady. That may have been the shoes or she could have been slightly drunk. Drunkenness would explain some of what happened next, but not all of it.
I approached her. She stopped willingly enough and when I asked how many pairs of shoes she had, she said about two hundred and fifty. No doubt my eyes lit up, and I hoped I wasn’t drooling. I asked what the shoes were like. She said, and I took it down word for word, ‘High heels, peep-toes, ankle straps, a lot of red and black leather, some very soft suede, one or two in silk, some fur mules, some ankle boots, some thigh boots, lots of weird animal skins; you know, your basic set of slut’s shoes.’
I felt like all my Christmases had come at once. When I asked if I could photograph her from the ankles down she was delighted. I squatted on the pavement and started shooting the zebra-skin shoes. She moved her feet for me, arching them, turning her ankles this way and that, displaying them for me to admire. She really seemed to be getting into it.
I noticed she had an American accent and I wondered if she was a tourist. People away from home, unsure of the local ground rules, are always more likely to give themselves over to the unexpected. Or perhaps, I thought, Americans are more outgoing, more sexually sophisticated, or maybe they’re just more naive. But there was nothing naive about Catherine.
Even though the shoes weren’t particularly revealing, I could tell she had really nice feet. They were long and lean and lightly suntanned. All the same, I was unprepared for what I saw when, without my bidding, she kicked off her shoes. Perfection is a difficult concept and it is not a thing you can prove rationally or convince someone else of, nevertheless, as far as I was concerned, the feet that Catherine so casually, so wantonly revealed were absolute perfection. When I saw them bare, their curves and contours, their long elegant toes, their nails lacquered in deep scarlet, when I witnessed the intricate movement of bones and muscles, of veins and skin, I knew they were the feet I had been looking for all my life.
I used up a whole roll of film. They subsequently proved to be excellent photographs. They showed Catherine’s beautiful bare feet standing naked on the hot, dusty pavement of South Molton Street, her wonderful zebra-skin shoes lying beside them, expensive, exquisite and so guilelessly discarded.
She said she had never had a proper foot massage nor a professional pedicure although a couple of her boyfriends had painted her toenails for her. She said she wore high heels for herself and for her men. She said, and I quote again, that they made her feel, ‘Potent, dominant and, oh yes, wet.
Then she said as though it had only just occurred to her, ‘What are you going to do with those pictures?’
I said they would find a place in my archive.
She laughed. ‘So it’s not like you’re going to take them home and jerk off all over them.’
‘Certainly not,’ I lied.
We were now at the point in the interview where, in normal circumstances, I would have asked a few offensively intimate questions about her sex life, but I didn’t get the chance.
‘You’re a foot fetishist, right?’ she said.
I didn’t answer.
‘Come on, don’t get coy. Feet and shoes turn you on. Yes?’
‘All right, yes,’ I admitted, and I waited for her to insult me and walk away, but she didn’t.
‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘I’ve never met one of those. I mean what do you do? Do you like women to wear shoes while you’re fucking them? Do you like to suck their toes? Do you like to be walked on? Come on. Tell me all about it.’
‘How long have you got?’ I asked.
‘All the time in the world.’
So we went to a bar and I told her about it. Not everything, that would have taken forever, and, even as it was, it took the rest of the afternoon and some of the evening. But by the end things had changed. By then we had moved on from theory to practice, and again that is not at all what usually happened.
And none of the rest should have happened either. When you approach an unknown woman in the street with the intention of asking her a few mildly obscene questions you might, in your wildest, most optimistic dreams, hope for some kind of sexual liaison; and this we duly, and to my complete astonishment, did have. But you could never, ever hope that such an encounter would present you with the perfect pair of feet. You could not expect to fall in love, and you would certainly never dream of the terrible, violent, appalling consequences that came from that simple, silly, sexually retarded act.
Three
My Gray’s Anatomy would tell you that the foot is the terminal part of the inferior extremity, what you and I would call the leg. It would say the foot serves as a support structure and also an instrument of locomotion. It would say that the foot is divided into three sections, the tarsus, the metatarsus and the phalanges, that there are seven tarsal bones, five metatarsal bones, fourteen phalangeal bones; a total of twenty-six.
It would say that the foot is intricately and richly supplied with muscles, blood vessels and nerves. Only some of these are responsible for making the foot an object of fascination to a man such as myself.
For instance, on the dorsal surface of the foot you will find the extensor digitorum brevis, a thin broad muscle that subdivides to form four tendons that spread out across the foot. On any foot that I found truly beautiful these tendons would have to be clearly, tautly visible.