That was enough for me. I took a chance. I agreed to go with him to his flat to view his material.
Although he called it a flat, it was little more than a bedsit, an attic room, up in the eaves of a peeling Victorian house. The walls of the room were painted black and it was furnished with junk-shop kitsch; an Elvis mirror, a lamp in the shape of a flying saucer, a piece of green fun fur thrown over the bed. It was far too small to contain anything that might truly be considered an archive, but there were a couple of filing cabinets and some metal lockers that he said contained his material.
He began by showing me his books. Some of them coincided with volumes in my own collection but there were all sorts of oddities here that I’d never seen before, and in many cases never wanted to see again. He had manuals of foot surgery and dissection, atlases of foot disease. He showed me pictures of hideously ugly feet, feet with burned skin, feet with frostbite, with toes missing, lepers’ feet, and inevitably, endless pictures of feet that had been mutilated by foot binding. These obviously really hit the spot for him. He spent a long time leering over them and he obviously expected me to share his enthusiasm. I told him they revolted me, and he looked very disappointed, though it was clear he had plenty of other things that he thought would impress me.
He started to show me his shoe collection. He opened the metal lockers and pulled out samples. I was completely baffled. These were not FMs as I knew them. In fact they constituted the most dismal assembly of women’s footwear I had ever seen. There were beige slingbacks, tasselled loafers, clogs, flip-flops, sneakers, plastic sandals. There were even Earth Shoes and Dr Scholls. In normal circumstances they would just have been ugly and aesthetically unpleasing, erotically neutral, but what made them actively disgusting was their condition. He had obviously gone to great lengths to find the most distressed, scuffed, worn-out examples of each type. Fabric was torn, soles and heels were loose or flapping, and the owners’ feet had left them looking decayed, distorted, sweat laden.
I was horrified. The man disgusted me as much as his shoes did. I wanted to go.
‘Now wait,’ he said. ‘Look at these. They’re beauties, aren’t they?’
By now I knew him well enough not to expect to share his sense of what constituted beauty and I was not at all surprised to find that he was waving a pair of unexciting, open-toed, black patent high heels. They were horribly grubby and cracked and extremely large. I looked at them indifferently and said nothing. And then, to my dismay and horror, I saw that he’d taken off his own shoes and socks and he slipped his bare feet into the black high-heeled shoes. He stood up and strutted across the room. His gait was a little wobbly, yet he looked as though he was well practised in wearing women’s shoes. His feet looked totally, profoundly, disgustingly ugly, as ugly as anything I’d seen in his collection of pictures of bound and deformed feet.
I should probably have done nothing. I could have laughed at him or simply walked away, out of the building. But something in me couldn’t leave it just like that, I was disgusted and outraged and angry. I admit that I was also a little surprised by the power of my own reaction. I wanted to preserve my dignity, to say something pithy and dismissive and final, but words wouldn’t come to me. Instead he was the one who spoke.
‘I don’t know what you’re looking so mealy-mouthed about,’ he said. ‘I know you’re into it every bit as much as I am.’
I didn’t hit him exactly. I just headed for the door and as I went I pushed him out of the way. The flat of my hand made contact with his shoulder, nothing more violent than that, just a nudge really, and yet it resulted in him falling over. No doubt he wouldn’t have fallen so easily had he not been wearing the high heels, nor would he have fallen quite so far. But he made no attempt to break his fall, didn’t put out a hand or arm to stop himself, and his head hit the floor with a sharp, dry, full sound. He wasn’t knocked out but his eyelids flickered and he looked about him as though he didn’t recognize his surroundings or what had happened to him. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then slowly turned his head.
He had fallen in such a way that his head was next to the corner of the bed. I knelt down to make sure he was all right and I saw, hidden under the bed, a pair of spectacular silver and black FMs. I recognized the style immediately. I picked them up. Inside was Harold’s familiar trade mark, the footprint and the lightning flash. I was doubly disgusted. This pathetic specimen on the floor had no right to own a pair of Harold’s shoes. He didn’t deserve them. He wasn’t good enough. I grabbed the shoes and tried to stand up. The man protested groggily, and put out a hand to stop me. I was having none of that. I kicked him a few times in the ribs and then ran desperately out of his flat, taking Harold’s shoes with me.
That was the night I went home and smashed the plaster casts of Catherine’s feet. I didn’t know why I was doing it. Perhaps it was indeed a symbolic act to try to free myself, but it really made no sense at all. I treasured those casts. They were all I had left of Catherine. In destroying them I was only hurting myself. And I realized then there was a part of me that might have been perfectly happy to destroy Catherine’s actual feet as well as the casts. If they weren’t going to be mine, then nobody else was going to have them, not even Catherine. And, as I sat there amidst the plaster debris, with the pair of silver and black shoes I’d stolen from the ICA man, I feared that I might be going insane.
Twenty-two
Given that pornography is a problem for just about everybody these days, it provides a special set of problems for the foot and shoe fetishist. There are, or at least there used to be, men who said they looked at Playboy simply for the articles. I suppose nobody needs to tell lies like that any more. But if I ever look at Playboy it’s simply for the feet.
Now, I’m not made of stone. I’m not completely unmoved by the come-to-bed eyes and eagerly opened mouths of the women in girly magazines. I look at the long, smooth legs and the heavy, glossy breasts, and the silky buttocks and the hint or streak or flourish of inner pink, and, yes, sometimes I find that sexy. I’m not impervious to the erotic possibilities of stockings and suspenders, to strategically placed strands of leather or PVC or lace. But the only thing that really grabs me, the only thing I really care about is whether the model in the spread has a great pair of feet and a great pair of shoes.
You see surprisingly few bare feet in these pages. I suspect they aren’t considered glamorous enough. The women therefore tend to wear high heels, and this ought to be a very good thing, yet there’s often something tokenistic about it. The photographer or stylist thinks, Oh yeah, right, glamour shot, that means loads of make up, big hair, pair of high heels, without considering what constitutes good make up or good hair or good high heels. All too often the shoes are the wrong shape, the wrong colour, the wrong material. I’m not saying they always get it wrong, but they get it wrong more often than you might think possible.
However, even a casual browse through such magazines will reveal something very curious. It’s extraordinary how often the photographs of the women are cropped in a way that leaves the feet out of the picture. Sometimes they will even be cropped so that some of the foot will be shown, but the toes will be outside the frame. More frustrating still, the woman will be on a four-poster bed or a chaise-longue, and some skein of exotic material will be wrapped around her, draped so as to show off her body, but her feet will be tangled up and concealed in the material.