Of course I checked out the shoes that the women around me were wearing, and you couldn’t deny that people were making an effort. There was fiercely fetishistic footwear on all sides; the usual stuff, spike highs, viciously pointed toes, platforms, straps, laces, thongs, buckles. There were boots of all lengths, from ankle to upper, upper thigh. I enjoyed it but, if anything, the effect was too strident. Compared to the devastating eroticism of the shoes Catherine was wearing, all these others seemed a little crass and obvious. Not that crassness and obviousness was necessarily out of place at Stains; take the cabaret act that started halfway through the evening.
A man of about fifty with a scrawny but tanned body, that he was showing most of, was dragged on to a small stage by two women in dominatrix gear. They wheeled out a wooden apparatus, somewhat like stocks, somewhat like a rack, strapped the poor guy into it, and started to give him a mild but theatrical going over.
An audience gathered quickly around the stage and there was a lot of cheering and encouragement, but it was the sort of crowd that gawps at a freak show, not a crowd that comes together in celebration. The most spectacular ‘torture’ inflicted on the victim involved one of the women shoving the spiked heel of her shoe into the man’s open mouth. This caused a lot of audience response, but it seemed to me to have more to do with sword swallowing than with shoe fetishism. It seemed to have nothing at all to do with sex.
The evening passed and it wasn’t unenjoyable. Watching people is always entertaining, and much more so when they’re so keen to be watched. And, of course, people scrutinized Catherine and me too. I’m sure nobody found me an object of any great fascination, but Catherine was much stared at and leched over. However, it was a general all-purpose kind of lechery. If someone had come up to her and offered to lick or suck her feet I would have been delighted and not surprised. But nobody did. At one point a slim, slightly camp young man with studded belts crisscrossing his chest came up and said he’d like, and I quote, ‘To give both your arseholes a tongue bath,’ and while this wasn’t either the time or the place to be offended I did think he was missing the point. We declined.
Later I was invited into a dark area of the club where a dozen or so men were lining up to spank a blindfolded woman who was bent over a leather chair. Reluctantly, and only at Catherine’s insistence, I went along and joined in, but my heart was never in it. I didn’t enjoy spanking the woman and my performance was so perfunctory that I’m sure she didn’t enjoy it very much either.
We left when another cabaret act started. Two women with shaven heads, in depressingly authentic-looking Nazi regalia, got up on stage and started licking each other’s breasts. The breast licking I enjoyed, and the shaven heads were fine, but I found the Nazi regalia too hard to take.
I emerged from the club feeling strangely illiberal. It wasn’t that I thought the membership of Stains should be prevented from enjoying, or persecuted because of, their unusual sexual preferences, but I thought they should just keep them to themselves.
When we got home Catherine and I made love, and even though Catherine kept the shoes on, and even though she ran them all over my face and body, it seemed an act of purest vanilla after what we’d seen in the club.
Then Catherine said, ‘A strange thing happened on my way to the bathroom. A man came up to me, older man, not bad looking, normal looking, and he was carrying a woman’s shoe. He handed it to me, asked would I take it into the Ladies, piss into it, fill it up and then return it to him.’
‘Are you serious?’ I asked. I hadn’t seen any man wandering around with a woman’s shoe, and it was the kind of thing I’d have noticed.
‘He was very serious,’ said Catherine.
‘What did you do?’
‘What would you have wanted me to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know.’
‘Maybe you’ll be disappointed in me. I told him he was disgusting. I said he should get a life.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He seemed to like being bad-mouthed. So I said I already had one pervert in my life and that was enough. And he said you were a very lucky man.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know I’m lucky.’
But luck can change.
Fourteen
I arrived at Catherine’s flat in the usual way. I gave a firm, sustained ring on the front doorbell, a ring that meant business. She was expecting me and she let me in immediately. I knew she would be waiting, wearing a pair of Harold’s shoes, ready for me as usual, ready to do the things that we always did. But this time there was going to be a difference. This time I wasn’t alone. This time I had a female companion: Rosemary.
Rosemary and I went back a long way. Rosemary was no beauty, not even from the ankles down. She was heavily built, brassy, and she was in no conceivable sense my sort of woman. But she was supremely willing to try just about anything sexual, and there had been a number of times over the years when we, she and I, had had need of each other. This was just such an occasion. Today she was wearing a black raincoat and her rather plump feet were gamely crammed into a pair of purple velvet high heels. She had considered all other clothing unnecessary.
We stepped into the building, walked briskly up the stairs to Catherine’s floor, then to her front door, which she had left open. We went inside, into the hall where Catherine was waiting. She did a double-take when she saw Rosemary, looked at her curiously, suspiciously, but she didn’t speak. I imagine I was looking both furtive and pleased with myself, while Rosemary looked around the flat and its furnishings as though she might be a prospective purchaser or perhaps a burglar.
Catherine stared hard into Rosemary’s round, painted face. For a moment she looked as though she was about to ask who this stranger was and what she was doing there, but explaining would have spoiled everything and, in any case, she was in no real doubt what was going on, or about to. I put a finger to her lips to hush her. I nodded to Rosemary and, as arranged, she shrugged the raincoat from her shoulders. She stood there naked apart from the purple velvet shoes; very white, unembarrassed, very lewd. Her breasts looked enormous, and Catherine and I could see that the colour of her pubic hair did not even remotely match that on her head.
The three of us went into the bedroom and there proceeded to do everything we wanted to and could possibly think of. I suppose a certain amount of it might be considered predictable. The combination of mouths, organs, fluids, feet and shoes are, inevitably, limited. However much one strives to be inventive there are only so many options, so many possibilities. Nevertheless we achieved a number of combinations and conjunctions that I, at least, had never managed before.
It was a long session, hot and exhausting. When it was all over, when Rosemary had put her raincoat on again and gone, she left her shoes behind as a sort of souvenir, and suffice it to say that they were thoroughly sodden with both male and female juices.
Catherine and I lay together feeling emptied, carved out. It seemed to me there was nothing to be said about what we’d done, no room and no reason for discussion. But Catherine said, ‘I think that may have been too much.’