Come nightfall, Seymour Suelo would undress and ease into the circular inflatable paddling pool he used as a bed clutching a pair of women's shoes. Body bent at a right angle under the threadbare blanket, he would slip one shoe over his genitals and holding the other shoe by its high heel bury his nose inside it, savouring the bouquet of new leather, nostrils searching for the barely discernible odour of exertion impregnated in the insole until the sandman beguiled him into dreams of his one true love.

He began collecting Blanche Fury's shoes just after starting work as concierge at Cumulus Heights apartment building. The job came with accommodation where Seymour lived in spartan solitude, a sombre, humid basement lined with ducts, pipes and cables below a room housing the bin which caught garbage falling from the waste disposal chutes. An architectural compromise during the building's construction resulted in a quirk of physics whereby every time Blanche Fury threw something down the chute it deflected off the main conduit, sending it bouncing from the rim of the bin onto the basement floor.

Several times a week Seymour would find a pair of her shoes, brand spanking new, heels and soles barely scratched. Seymour knew nothing about fashion but did his homework, discovering that the one hundred and twenty seven pairs of Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Manolo Blahnik, Christian Dior, Yves St. Laurent and Chanel shoes that she had thrown away which where now lined up in his quarters cost an average of three hundred dollars a pair. Why she did this was a mystery, but he didn't care. For Seymour Suelo was hopelessly in love with Blanche Fury, even though he had never actually seen her face, or indeed, any more of her than her feet clad in the finery of foremost fashion designers.

******

When he was thirteen years old, Seymour had been hailed as a prodigy for his talent as a classical pianist, his prowess such that tutors predicted a stellar career for the youth. His parents wanted to buy him a Steinway, but a parsimonious tone-deaf bank manager only offered a loan equal to the price of a second-hand Yamaha.

On the day it was delivered, Seymour dashed downstairs to watch the piano unloaded from the truck before being hoisted by crane to their fifth floor apartment. As it reached the apartment windows, Seymour studied his fingers, a Chopin Nocturne echoing up from the depths of his soul.

It was at that moment that a bus travelling over the speed limit swerved to avoid a bibulous jaywalker and ploughed into the crane, causing its operator to release the hoist lever, which in turn sent the piano freefalling to crush the hapless Seymour beneath its lacquered black mass. The city's ambient sound was temporarily drowned by a resounding thud, splintering of wood and reverberating cacophony as metal strings vibrated against the innards of the instrument.

Following the ambulance to hospital, Mr. & Mrs. Suelo were killed when an eighteen wheeler jumped a red light and sent their Buick careering into the base of a freeway ramp. Their son was less fortunate. Backbone crushed, he was doomed to shuffle along for the rest of his life with his torso bent forward at a right angle from the waist, his vision of the world restricted to the ground, his contact with people beginning and ending at their feet.

An ambulance-chasing lawyer took on Seymour 's case, sued the drunk for jaywalking, the bus company for speeding, the crane manufacturer for inadequate safety devices, the city council for failing to inform the crane company to cordon off the area below the window, and the haulage company who owned the eighteen wheeler for knowingly employing a driver who was Daltonian. A Judge who also presided the city's Classical Music Appreciation Society was inclined towards largesse, awarding young Seymour 28 million dollars in damages.

The money was put in trust until the boy became of age where it remained untouched; Seymour decided that since his deformity denied him the sybaritic pleasures of first-class travel to exotic places, sliding into sexy sports cars, seducing beautiful women over candle lit suppers in three-star restaurants that there was no point in even touching the money. Instead, he drifted from job to job, condemned to the limited perspective of a ground level hell where Mozart, Chopin and Bach played in a heaven that he could no longer enter.

*****

'This couch gives me the eebie-jeebies.' Blanche Fury grumbled after exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke, 'Every time I lay on it, I feel I'm being contaminated by all the psychosis, phobias, and general craziness of all your other patients that's soaked into it. I came here to get my head straight. But every time I leave, I feel one step closer to a Dior straight jacket.'

Hugo Boolonz had been looking through the window at falling leaves.

'Would you prefer to sit somewhere else?' He asked, dragging his thoughts back to Blanche Fury's comments concerning the couch.

'Like on your face?'

'Would that be therapeutic?'

'You're not my type. And I don't have a pair of brand new shoes with me.'

Hugo Boolonz twirled the ends of his moustache. 'You began to tell me about shoes the last time. Before your hour was up.'

Blanche Fury growled. 'Look. Just tell me why I'm a nymphomaniac. One hundred and fifty dollars an hour for the past two and a half years with you and I'm none the wiser.'

Trying to imagine her naked on his couch, Boolonz sighed. 'Shoes. You only have sex with complete strangers and you must be wearing brand new shoes. Which you then throw away. A cleansing process. But there has to be a deeper meaning to your libidinal desires and the need to wear new shoes.'

'Stop looking for darker meanings to the shoe thing.'

Leaving silence to settle for a few moments, Boolonz looked at the intricate network of veins in a russet maple leaf that the wind had driven against the window pane. Rain beating against the window drove the leaf slowly down the glass until it disappeared.

'I'd like to get to the bottom of the shoe problem.' He said softly.

Blanche Fury lit another cigarette. 'It's a physical problem, not a problem in my head. My toes are...well, a hideous embarrassment.'

Hugo Boolonz listened to the rain, allowing his patient the possibility of exploring concealed labyrinths within her subconscious.

'Not one man,' Blanche Fury continued, 'has ever seen my toes.'

The psychoanalyst nodded. 'Frostbite? You're missing a toe? Or two? Bunions? Corns? Webfeet? You can tell me. I'm a doctor.'

Shaking her head, Blanche Fury glanced at the shoes she was wearing. Karl Lagerfeld, two hundred and eighty dollars of taupe canvas with grey patent leather toecaps featuring a tiny gold Louis XIV sunburst medallion on the heel. Looking up, she saw gravity drag the last grains of sand in the hourglass on the mantelpiece drain to the bottom.

'Time's up.' She sighed. 'I don't mind lifting the lid off my head, but my toes are my business.'

When she stood, Hugo Boolonz crossed his legs as he admired the svelte curves and mounds of her body.

'You know,' Blanche Fury said, 'I would sit on your face. But the thought of that bushy moustache against my labia is just, well, yukky.'

*****

It was war and the raining down of bombs that brought Seymour and Blanche to know peace and love. Seymour was in the lobby listening to old Mrs. Groloh from apartment 549 rattling on about the weather, her husband's ghost lacing her food with rat poison and her mother's incontinence, trying to compose a mental image of how she really looked compared to the monstrous fish-eye reflection he saw in the mirror-polished toecaps of his shoes.

The first missile tore through the steel and glass membrane of the skyscraper opposite before exploding in the multi-storey carpark behind it. A second missile blew the top floor off Cumulus Heights , showering glass, antennas, the building's water tank, flaming furniture, dismembered bodies, mutilated pets and a cascade of the minutiae that compose people's lives onto the avenue below.

When Mrs. Groloh screamed a litany of Yiddish profanities her dentures fell out and bounced across the marble floor. Shuffling onto the sidewalk, Seymour balanced precariously on one leg, extending the other as far upwards as his handicap would allow, squinting at the reflection in his toecap of lead coloured skies in which flame-tailed missiles flashed past.

Behind him he heard more screams as occupants of Cumulus Heights fled for their lives. Head colliding with their stomachs, Suelo fought against the tide of terror to regain his desk in the lobby and grabbed the internal phone.

'Miss Fury?' He rasped. 'It's Suelo. The concierge. We're under attack. Bombs. You must get to the ground floor. Use the stairs. I'll wait for you.'

She was wearing baby pink leather Kenzo stilettos with a small darker pink oval in the centre of the toecap. Seymour found them attractive, but bristled at the muddied work boots beside them. Another explosion nearby made the whole lobby quake.

'I'm outa here.' Said the uncouth voice belonging to the boots.

'I didn't get your name.' Blanche Fury purred. 'Or your number.'

After the boots had vanished, Suelo gazed into his own polished toecaps and saw the deformed reflection of Blanche Fury's face. Her hair was such a pale blonde it was almost white, her eyes a deep blue and her sensuous mouth a red cupid's bow.

'Fuck this.' She spat angrily, shattering his reveries. 'I'm not dying in this dumb building.'

Seymour grabbed her wrist, hoping that the passionate grip conveyed deep feelings of love he held for her.

'In case of aerial attack,' he blathered. 'the authorities advise seeking shelter below ground. We'd be safe in my room in the basement.'

He watched her head reflected in his toecaps turn left and right in hesitation.

'Basement?' She squawked, as if it were a dirty word.

'I've got food.' Suelo gushed. 'Candles. There's even wine a tenant left behind. French.'

Hunched over at ninety degrees, the concierge led the way. Descending the narrow staircase they were only three steps away from his quarters when a distant explosion caused the lights to flicker. Blanche Fury tripped, screamed and fell on top of him. In total darkness they tumbled head over heels, coming to a halt in a tangle of limbs half in his inflatable paddling pool.

'Are you hurt?' Seymour gasped, recoiling when his hand felt a desirable cashmere mound where her heart beat like a hammer.

'No.' She simpered. 'But this is my worst nightmare. My feet are naked.'

Lights flickered on, cruel neon illuminating their entwined bodies in the paddling pool.

'Don't look at my feet!' Blanche Fury shrieked. 'I'm a damned freak!'

Enchanted, Seymour Suelo ogled the source of her embarrassment. 'My.' He whispered admiringly. 'Pubic hairs on your toes. How very erotic.'

Pacified and flattered by his reaction, Blanche Fury hoisted her skirt and lowered her silk G-string. 'And none where there should be some.' She giggled.

Noise resembling flatulence the vinyl paddling pool made as they embraced was not exactly conducive to the amorous interlude which followed but it mattered not, for at that instant they knew that in the moments to come and lifetime they would spend together they were not freaks, but simply different.

Caressing the blonde down sprouting from her toes, Seymour Suelo breathed in deeply, a stirring in his nether regions prompting an admission.

'I, er, you should know that, well, I'm a...virgin.' He stammered. 'And with my back bent like this, I don't quite see...how...'

Blanche Fury bared her teeth in a feral grin. 'Give the dog a bone.' She whispered as she rolled over.

'Bow-wow.' Howled Seymour Suelo.