The Appeal of Christ to Sad Little Men
A Christmas Tale
A friend of mine, who until recently worked as a podiatrist at a prestigious London clinic for the stars, decided that on his very last day and session he would twist the patient’s foot incredibly hard until he screamed.
This had not been a spontaneous desire, but one that he had been harbouring for several years, and he had calculated with minute precision the potential consequences of such an action. The necessity of obtaining a reference from his current clinic was virtually nil. He was to make himself independent; he would relocate to Sweden after Christmas and establish his own private practice where he would take on the administrative end of podiatry, becoming richer and leaving the business of actually having to touch feet to a band of juniors. Feet repulsed him — continue to repulse him — and he had entered the profession out of familial and economic reasons rather than a love for the vocation. It is not only their basic unpleasantness which anyone but the fetishists can understand, nor the horrifying ailments that people who visit podiatrists tend to carry, but rather their bland uniformity which he found disgusting: As rich or as influential as the patients who came into his clinic might have been, their feet shared the same bunions, corns, calluses and blisters as those of the relatively ordinary people whom he had treated as a junior podiatrist, and of those of the dissected corpses of his university days. Feet are anonymous, ugly appendages when looked at closely. One might have some special affection for a lover’s arms, breasts, legs, hands or even their wrists, but only the sick hold feet in any esteem.
There was little risk of his medical reputation being damaged by word of mouth either. His final patient at the clinic, he had made sure, would be a relative nobody, a mincing middle-aged Kentish man who had fallen into fame and fortune by pure casualty several years ago through reality television as an inept but flamboyant hotel manager. His fame had dripped away so gradually that he had been so unconscious of its decline — or too unwilling to see it — and he had seen fit to publish yet another novelty book for Christmas with dismal projected sales. Briefly a national figure of fun, he now barely raised enough interest to appear in anything but the middle pages of the red top press. Too sexually suspect, too, for anyone to give much credence to anything that he might say: as the offers to appear on television dried up, he had begun publishing vlogs in which only his spastic, desperate gesticulations had anything to say: “Make me famous again”.
The videos had garnered a pitiful number of views, something which my friend noted with pleasure. In a bid to grow his viewership he had offered one of his viewers to accompany him on a week-long trip in Nice, France, where the succeeding exploits would be filmed from a selfie-stick for the entertainment of his audience, a novelty which did not cease to amuse him. Perhaps it amused some of his viewers, too. The competition was won by a Pakistani youth of some seventeen years, and in the resulting videos the host appeared to make passes at his young companion, smothering him with double entendres, humiliating him with diminutive, feminising names, taking advantage of a particularly small bumper car seat at a playground to squeeze up to him while moaning “ooh!” exaggeratedly. Things of that nature. The footage left his few remaining viewers tepid. It was precisely what had won him fame on the television, but without the gleam of television production, with its prudent cuts and choice music, the whole thing felt illicit, and the viewer was left with the impression of an old, sick thing dragging a flowering youth into premature degeneracy.
He was a fit subject to have his foot twisted, I agreed, and was to be a nice end to a dull year. As the day approached, hunched over an office computer screen, increasingly detached from the repetitive tasks which I performed, I found satisfaction in imagining the act taking place, in the grimace which would spread across this man’s face, this face which I had seen all too frequently on the television and in the papers. All faces which we see on the television and in the papers are seen too often, and to imagine them torsioned in pain is a welcome rupture. Soon the fantasy winged out to include my work colleagues which surrounded me having their feet twisted. They had done nothing to hurt me but lead depressing lives, but that was sufficient for me to hate them. The pandemic had changed their lives very little. They were still allowed to work for eleven hours and then return home to watch Young Sheldon on the television. International trade does not permit the intrusion of pandemics, or death, or anything which might suggest that the whole thing cannot go on indefinitely. Catholics, at the very least, have known how to throw themselves into absolute terror, to relish violence and suffering whether they are on the receiving or giving end of it. As soon as news broke out that countries as nominally Catholic as Spain and Italy were taking the brunt of the virus, there were calls to shut down the economy and lock everyone up until it was safe to go out again, while the humanistic Scandinavians decided to put the economy first. Whatever one believes about the severity of the virus, you would have to be daft not to perform whatever mental somersaults are necessary to plunge yourself into the pure, gripping fear which it can inspire.
My podiatrist friend called me earlier than expected to tell me that he’d chickened out in the moment, excusing himself by saying that the hygienic measures which he had been forced to adapt in response to the pandemic had made his work process so mechanical and so ingrained, closer to that of an assembly line than the treatment of a human being, that he had been unable to find in its steely structure any chink through which his mischief might find vent. In the end he had sprayed the old nonce’s foot with antiseptic, wiped it with a haircloth and sent him on his way. “It’s not worth the risk at the moment,” he told me. “Not with everything that’s going on. Maybe I’ll do it in the new year. Merry Christmas.”
He won’t do it next year, I am sure of it. If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that even in the most extreme circumstances we are unable to imagine anything but our current lot. Keep calm and carry on; we’ll soon be back to normal. And when we are, we’ll realise that we are still miserable, were always miserable, and always will be miserable. Then the death toll will really start to rise.
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