I went home. The next few days were hell. I hated myself. I had no belief in the healing powers of time. I knew that I could not and did not want to forget Catherine. Yet although I didn’t want to get rid of her memory, I did want to quell the pain of remembering. So I found myself doing a number of things that I would previously have considered out of character. Visiting a prostitute was the first of these.
No doubt I wouldn’t have done it if Mike’s Birmingham exploits hadn’t been on my mind. I thought maybe I could be like him, detached from the person he loved, relishing emptiness and dirt. I found her card in a phone box. The card was sunshine yellow, there was a drawing of high heels on it, and the unpunctuated selling line, ‘Love me love my feet.’
I called the number and spoke to a woman with a smoker’s cough and a Geordie accent.
‘I’m calling about the ad,’ I said.
‘And which ad would that be?’
‘Love me love my feet,’ I said.
‘Would you like to make an appointment to meet the young lady?’
‘I think so. Probably yes.’
‘The young lady is called Alicia. She’s a lovely girl, dark haired, large chest, could easily be mistaken for a model.’
‘How about her feet.’
I wasn’t going to let her get away with anything so glib. Eroticism is about specifics.
‘I need more detail,’ I said and the woman started giving me some ball-park figures regarding Alicia’s hourly rates. These sounded both vague and extortionate, but I said, ‘That all sounds fine, really fine, but what I need is for you to describe her feet.’
‘Are you taking the piss?’ the voice rasped.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not. I saw the ad and I do love feet, but I’m particular. Not any foot will do. If I get there and find Alicia has the wrong kind of feet, then I’ll have wasted everybody’s time.’
‘We don’t like time-wasters, sir.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Once you were here we would insist on your paying the fee whether you liked the young lady or not.’
‘That’s why I need you to describe the feet now. Please.’
Somewhat grudgingly she said, ‘The young lady has wonderful white, smooth, creamy feet. Very lovely, very kissable.’
I still wasn’t very convinced. It sounded to me as though the woman I was talking to wasn’t all that familiar with Alicia’s feet. Maybe she was just the person who answered the phone and had never even seen them. Maybe she wasn’t good at describing things. But then I told myself that even if she had seen them, she still wouldn’t have seen them through my eyes. This was subjective stuff; you couldn’t take somebody else’s word for it. I also reassured myself by thinking that anyone who advertised her feet in a sexual context must at least have some experience of the job in hand, must at least know what the issues are. You wouldn’t say, ‘Love me love my feet’ if your feet were a mass of corns and scar tissue. When I said I was still very interested I was given an address in St John’s Wood, assured that anything I wanted to do was negotiable, and I said I’d be there within the hour.
I’d never been to a prostitute before. The thought had crossed my mind from time to time, in the way that it crosses your mind to try parachute jumping or to take saxophone lessons, but I had never been sure that I’d enjoy the experience. Now I was lost enough, reckless enough not to care.
I went to the address, a block of nineteen-fifties flats, one of those low-rise brick and stucco arrangements with lots of balconies and curved bay windows, and a jam of cars parked on the forecourt. Some men, Mike for instance, would no doubt have wanted sleaze and danger with their prostitution, but I was reassured that the block looked so smart and well cared for.
I rang one of a row of polished brass bells and a muffled, fuzzed female voice told me to come up to flat thirty-five on the third floor. I knew that I still had time to turn round and abort this little escapade. Meeting an unknown woman in a strange flat did not fill me with erotic expectation. Instead I could imagine myself being robbed, beaten up, humiliated. But so what? In Catherine’s absence I felt robbed, beaten up, humiliated anyway. I would only be getting more of what I deserved. I carried on.
I reached the third floor, found flat thirty-five and knocked a little too hard on the door. It was immediately opened by a smart, dark-haired woman in a blue and pink track suit. She didn’t look like my idea of a prostitute, more like an aerobics instructor or an assistant in a sports shop.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Alicia.’
I could tell at once from the voice that this was the woman I’d spoken to on the phone. It appeared she was her own ‘young lady’. As advertised, she had dark hair and large breasts, but personally I would not have mistaken her for a model. I looked down at her feet and saw that she was wearing a pair of high-heeled, gold court shoes, not the most perfect examples of fuck-me shoes you were ever going to come across but a reasonable attempt to show willing.
I could understand why she might wish to give the impression she was not simply a one-woman operation, and why she had talked about herself in the third person, but her reluctance and inability to describe Alicia’s feet now appeared totally inexplicable. I must have looked confused and hesitant.
‘Come in, love,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about what you have in mind, get the business side out of the way and then you can enjoy yourself.’
I was shown into the living room and she gave me a weak whisky and soda, and I sat down uneasily in a corduroy armchair. The flat was as empty and anonymous as a hotel room. There was no clutter, no personality, no suggestion that anybody lived here full-time.
There were other rooms in the flat, including, I supposed, the bedroom in which the physical side of our transaction would take place, but even though I heard and saw nothing, I got an uneasy feeling there was someone else in the flat somewhere; a pimp, or a minder, or maybe another prostitute.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Brass tacks. I don’t do S and M of any kind, neither giving nor receiving. I’ll walk on you if you like, but that’s all. You can touch my feet if you want, kiss them, suck them, same with my toes and my shoes. You can massage them, rub them with creams, powders, oils and so on. Or I can massage you with them, either bare or in stockings or in white ankle socks. If you’d like a souvenir of the event I can provide a camera and film, though I would insist that my face doesn’t appear in any of the photographs. Failing that I do have sets of prints available for purchase. I have a selection of boots, shoes and specialist footwear that I can wear at your discretion. Intercourse costs extra, oral costs a lot extra, and anal is out of the question. Right. What would you like?’
‘I’d like to look at your feet,’ I said.
She smiled affably enough and kicked off her gold shoes. I was prepared for something dramatic, feet that were either supremely beautiful or supremely disappointing, but in fact they were neither. There was certainly nothing bad or repellent about them. I would not have kicked them out of bed. They were feet I could quite happily fondle and kiss, but they were not feet that a man could lose his heart to. A man could not worship and adore them, could not become crazily obsessed with them. Essentially they were not Catherine’s feet. And I suppose the bottom line was they were not feet that I wanted to waste a lot of money on.
From Alicia’s menu I selected a small snack; a simple foot job. We negotiated that I would unzip my trousers and she would manipulate my cock with her bare feet. We agreed that a trip to the bedroom would not be necessary and she decided there was no need to remove her clothes.
Slightly to my surprise Alicia turned out to be highly skilled at her work. Her toes were strong and adept, her rhythm was vigorous and encouraging, and yet I didn’t feel she was rushing me through the session. I was just starting to enjoy it when she suddenly stopped, reached into the pocket of her track suit, and in one continuous motion tore open a foil packet and unrolled a condom over my penis. I was too surprised and baffled to object, and I’m sure my objections wouldn’t have cut much ice, in any case. Besides, what would I have said? That a condom seemed a little excessive here, a little superfluous, a little insanely overcautious, that it appeared to be making a fetish out of ‘safety’. I knew my opinions would not have been well received.
Alicia rapidly finished the job. She stood up and put her shoes back on. It was a touching gesture in a way. I mean, she could have slipped into something more comfortable, something tartan and fluffy perhaps. But I didn’t get much time to admire the shoes. A couple of minutes later I was out of the flat, on the street, looking for the nearest pub. As I ordered myself a pint of lager I wondered if I should have bought some of the photographs she had for sale. They would have been a small but significant addition to the archive. A kind of first. Ah well, if I decided later that I really needed them I could go back for a return visit, but something told me my need was never going to be quite that great.
My session with Alicia was depressing enough but there were worse nights. It didn’t look as though paying was going to work. Such transactions were bound to be brief and formal, and would leave far too much time to think about Catherine. So I went to bars and clubs and tried to pick up women. These women were not intended in any sense to replace Catherine but I hoped they might fill the dead time without her. It was surprisingly easy. I found plenty of women who were prepared to talk and drink and sleep with me. The fact that nothing relied on succeeding or failing with these women was somehow liberating. I wasn’t too discriminating. I didn’t much care who they were or what they looked like. I didn’t even care what their feet looked like. I just took the women home, had sex with them, didn’t bother to kiss their feet, didn’t bother to photograph their shoes, didn’t invite them down to see the archive. Christ, I was almost behaving like a normal person.
That was no good, so I decided to push my luck. I would get drunk and indifferent and reckless. I’d go up to a woman at the bar and start talking. ‘Oh, hi there. Can I buy you a drink? Really nice shoes you’re wearing. Really nice feet you have. Well, actually, it’s the interaction of foot and shoe, of flesh and leather, nature and culture, art and artifice, the sweep of the foot, the curved architecture of the shoe, the pattern of veins and tendons below the surface of the skin, complex and intermeshed like tributary routes on a road map. I’d like to touch them, hold them, feel them on my face, on my tongue. I’d very much like to cover them in my sweat, my saliva, my semen …’
That use of the word semen always did it. That was the one word I found I couldn’t say to a woman in a London bar. It always brought proceedings to a halt, like when I did my clipboard act and mentioned sex. In the confines of a nightspot, in a place where alcohol was sold, where sex was already on the agenda, it took a stronger word, a stronger image. But it also provoked a stronger reaction. I was sworn at, slapped, had drinks thrown at me. I didn’t give a shit, but I learned my lesson. I stopped mentioning semen.
One night I found myself in the back of my car making inept attempts to have some sort of sex with a drunk, fleshy blonde. Her legs were splayed and bare. She’d kicked off her shoes and her feet were up on my shoulders. I turned my head and saw that these were not the feet of my dreams. They were plump and flat-footed and the silver pearl nail varnish was chipped and peeling. I was revolted, so revolted that I immediately took her fat little toes in my mouth and sucked each one in turn, disgusted, almost gagging, revelling in the self-abasement of it all. The woman didn’t mind at all. She immediately appeared to be having a long and very satisfying orgasm.