Extra Work
This evening regular customer-mistress Ms Mukta madam is giving me some extra work to do. She has kindly brought along a pair of her husband’s shoes for me to lickshine. She explains that her husband (master Simon sir to me) can’t be bothered to clean his own filthy loafers at home, nor can he even be bothered to come along in person in order to have his loafers cleaned as he is ‘relaxing at home with his feet up on the sofa watching a game of footie on the tele’. Ms Mukta explains that she will therefore leave her husband’s dirty shoes with me overnight and that she expects them to be ‘nice and clean’ by the morning. She wants ‘every inch of dirt’ removed from them and down my throat by the time she returns to pick them up first thing tomorrow, and she kindly warns me that if they aren’t ‘shined’ to her, or her husband’s, satisfaction, they will arrange for the authorities to have me temporarily removed from my wall and whipped!
I assure Ms Mukta madam that I will do my utmost to give master Simon sir’s shoes a good clean – and not just because of the threat of the whip (though I confirm to Ms Mukta madam that I very much fear the whip’s sting), but because it will be an honour for the likes of me, a down-in-the-dirt public footservant, to taste where a real man like master Simon sir has been walking, and perhaps even promenading in the company of his beautiful wife? Ms Mukta laughs at me and says that her husband was certainly wearing his loafers earlier today when they went to the cinema together, so he has indeed been walking arm in arm along the same dirty pavements as her, in those very same shoes.
I thank Ms Mukta madam for that kind information, and immediately set about lickshining the master’s loafer shoes. She laughs at me and asks me if I can smell her husband’s feet in his shoes, to which I humbly confirm that, mercifully, I can indeed smell the master’s residual footsweat, and that the aroma reminds me of his manliness and godliness.
She laughs at me out loud again as she turns to leave me – her husband’s timid and pathetic, discarded-shoe licker. No wonder Ms Mukta despises me! What woman wouldn’t?
