The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (18 page)

Fanny lay awake at night listening to the traffic of the big city. If she tried hard enough, using the power of her adolescent imagination, the incessant hiss of cars outside her window sounded like the surge of gentle waves on a faraway beach. This soothing effect was regularly spoiled by thieves in stolen vehicles who squealed their tyres on the bends as they endeavoured to evade pursuit, knocking down elderly women returning late from bingo and gin like blue-rinsed skittles; and leaving them, bleeding but still alive, to be crushed by the siren-wailing cops.

It was a terrible environment for a romantically pure young girl to find herself in. Still only seventeen years old, poor Fanny was desperate to get out of the misery, to escape forever the crumbling tenements, the violence and drunkenness, the filth, squalor and terminally imbecilic populace that perpetually wandered like shell-shocked shell-suited zombies from bleak benefit office to inane daytime television sets and back again in mindless hopeless loops. She was a sweet fairy; they were scum. She simply
had
to flee. But what could she do about it really?

She lacked funds, influence and luck; and her only friends were poems and cats. Why couldn’t she visit a genuine tropical beach instead of being forced to pretend that cars were surf? Even to be marooned on an island would be welcome to her; and unlike that Crusoe chap she wouldn’t ever strive to return to so-called civilisation. Any island would do, provided it was a warm place remote from Burberry baseball caps, gangsta rap, gang rape, crack, crystal meth, soccer violence, housing benefit fraud, spitting, swearing. Anywhere other than Swansea!

Stray cats often came to visit Fanny. Many were injured and mutilated and still had airgun pellets or heroin syringes stuck in their flesh. The vile yobs that occupied Housing Association properties through the city honed their torture skills on innocent beasts as well as on kidnapped infants and asylum seekers. Fanny cared for the furry creatures; and as she did so, she recalled an old fable that was turned into a pantomime in her girlhood. It was about a cunning cat that helped its master. What was that cat’s name? Now she remembered! Puss in Boots…

Yes, that was it.
He
would be certain to help her to achieve her heart’s desire, that wise booted feline! Unfortunately, he didn’t actually exist. Or did he? There was one way of finding out. Every time a cat came to visit her, she whispered a message in its ear before it went off again, a plea to that magical Puss. Most of these cats were slaughtered by chavs and other worthless vermin, but a few animals might get through to their legendary leader. Her message was simple and direct. Please help me escape! Please shipwreck me on an island! Any island!

One night, Fanny discovered that her message had indeed got through and that her petition had been answered positively. As she lay on her bed, it began rocking back and forth and the carpet swirled like ocean currents. Her bed had become a ship and the carpet a sea! Now a mighty storm was brewing and the bed lurched awfully. Fanny clung to the duvet, but it was no use. One more convulsion and she was flung off. She landed on a hard surface and looked up anxiously. She was no longer in her bedroom and a strange woman was standing above her.

This woman was an elegant redhead, completely nude save for a pair of thigh length boots fitted with bizarre attachments, miniature whips and manacles, nipple clamps, gags and ropes with pre-tied shibari knots, all on retractable robotic arms. She stood with one hand on her hip, shaved pudenda thrust aggressively, alluringly forward; moist, hungry. Then she licked her mouth lips. Fanny blinked.

“You are Puss in Boots?”

“Oh, I see. There has been a minor clerical error.”

“Who exactly are you then?”

“Diana the Rig. No, not Diana Rigg, the iconic actress who starred in
The Avengers
, even though I look exactly like her. No, I’m an oil rig and I live in the North Sea, but I can adopt human form. I can grant wishes too. So I brought you to this island.”

“This isn’t an island but a high street shop!”

“It’s a high street shop
on
an island,” corrected Diana the Rig. “Really, you should be more grateful, Fanny.”

“No, I’m disappointed. It’s Boots the Chemist. And you must be
Pussy
in Boots. My request was misheard!”

Diana the Rig shook her head, her auburn hair swinging like a metallic clitoral hood under the stimulus of powerful electromagnets, whatever the hell that signifies, and said, “No, it’s not Boots the Chemist. The shop you allude to was founded in 1849 by John Boot but sold to the Yanks by his descendant Jesse in 1920. Look out of the window, Fanny. See the olive trees? This shop is Boötes the Chemist. In Greek mythology, Boötes was the herdsman who drove the oxen in the constellation Ursa Major. Those oxen are tied to the polar axis and keep the sky rotating. He was also the fellow who invented the plough…”

“So I am marooned on one of the Greek islands?”

“This one’s called Lesbos, my pretty.”

“You mean to say that…”

Diana the Rig nodded and Fanny began running, but she didn’t get far before the tip of a miniature whip curled around her ankle and tripped her up. More whiplashes reduced her clothes to tatters. Now the whip tasted bare buttock flesh and Fanny wriggled, half in pain, half in shame, with a murmuring undercurrent of forbidden pleasure. She felt moisture trickle down her inner thigh and only some of it was blood. Under the whipping Fanny felt locked into the moment for the first time in her life. Diana the Rig was gasping with lust and power.

“Poor Fanny! You can’t escape the Kinky Boots!”

And over the next month, Fanny learned to both fear and love lesbian kinks, especially tribadism. Look that word up in a dictionary if you don’t know what it means. It’s worth it.

“I’ve got some bad news, Fanny,” I said, as I entered the page where my unlucky heroine was sleeping between stories. “I’m bored with you and I intend to kill you for good.”

She opened her sleepy eyes and blinked. “Well, I’m used to that. You finish me off in nearly every tale. Then you always get another idea for a sequel and you resurrect me.”

“Not this time, Fanny. I really am fed up with you.”

She sighed and threw back the sheets. She was dressed in pyjamas but the synthetic satin fabric couldn’t conceal her attractive curves. I saw that she was planning to get out of bed and I was overcome with pure physical desire for her young body.

I stepped forward and tore her clothes off. She did her best to resist but I was too strong for her. My mouth sought her freckled breasts and her russet nipples hardened and vibrated under the pressure of my tongue. Then I worked my way down and tasted her yoni juice. Diana the Rig had taught her how to please a woman but not how to please a man. That was my task, I decided.

She moaned as I entered her, but only because I put the moan into her mouth. An author is a minor god to his characters. Then I pushed my way rhythmically as deep as I could go.

Finally I flooded her with my seed. But immediately the deed was done I pulled out. What was I thinking? I have a girlfriend waiting for me back in the real world. I hope she never reads this story and finds out how I betrayed her trust. But she doesn’t actually read my fiction. I’m safe. Yet I still felt bad.

“I’m sorry, Fanny,” I said, deeply ashamed. “I’ve never raped one of my own characters before.”

She twisted her mouth in a sneer. “Are you genuinely remorseful or just worried that your critics will use this scene to justify their opinion of you as a bad person?”

“There’s truth in that,” I admitted, “but I also feel bad for your sake. I won’t stress the issue, as this is still a story and so I don’t have to take any responsibility. Nonetheless I feel…”

“If I told you I enjoyed it, would it make you feel better?”

“Yes, yes it would! Thanks, Fanny!”

“Well, I didn’t!” she snapped.

I chewed my lower lip. I had foolishly allowed a mere character to get the better of me. I had been humiliated in public! I always had the option not to publish this story, of course, to conceal my loss of face from my readers; but I was too arrogant for that. When I write something, I want it in print, because it must be brilliant. That’s how inflated my ego is! So my pride would end up making me look like a fool. Fanny saw that I was anxious. She took advantage of it.

“You’re twenty-six years older than me. You’re disgusting!”

“Don’t be stupid, Fanny. You’re no longer seventeen. Sure, that’s how old you were when I fucked you, but now, to lessen my guilt, I’ve decided to age you by a decade. Authors can do things like that. They don’t have to live in good faith. They can cheat.”

Fanny was devastated. “You slimeball! You stole ten years of my life. You took away the prime of my youth. I’ll…”

“What will you do, Fanny?”

“I’ll ignore you,” she said, “if that’s the one thing left within my power. Yes, I’ll simply look through you.”

She strode to the corner of the room where a large oak trunk stood. I hadn’t noticed this item of furniture in her room before. It was clearly an antique. Where had it come from? How the hell had an object not of my devising entered one of my stories? The sight of it shook me to the core of my being. Was I losing my grip over my own material? This called for drastic action. I would have to provide my own reason for the presence of the trunk. By describing its origins in the next paragraph I would gain control over it retroactively.

“I notice the trunk left to you by your eccentric aunt, the one who was a flapper in the 1920s,” I said.

“Yes, and it’s full of her clothes. I’m going to a fancy dress party and these will suit me just fine,” replied Fanny, forgetting her vow to ignore me. I watched her sullenly and slyly. She began dressing as a flapper. I was on the point of offering to cut her hair into a bob, then I came to my senses. I was supposed to be destroying her, not helping her look the part! She finished and closed the trunk, then she moved to examine herself in a full-length mirror.

While she was engrossed by her own reflection, I quickly substituted a trunk of my own for her aunt’s.

“Fanny,” I said sadly, “you’ve forgotten the feather boa. You can’t possibly go to a fancy dress party as a flapper without that. Go back to the trunk and rummage in it properly.”

And that’s what she did. And I stepped out of the story…

Inside the story I’m only slightly bigger than Fanny, as tall as an average man compared with an average girl. But outside the story I’m much bigger, I’m a giant. Fanny, after all, is only a word as long as the joint of my index finger.

Which is the finger I used to flick her into the trunk before slamming the lid and locking it tight.

“Poor Fanny!” I chortled sadistically. “That’s no longer a trunk of clothes but Pandora’s box! Do you know what that means? Pandora was cursed with curiosity and when she opened the forbidden box she let loose all the troubles and toils that make the world the terrible place it is! But they have climbed back in especially for me and so now you are entombed with them forever!”

Her voice was muffled but audible. She said, “Although you have forced an awful fate upon me, I recall that at the bottom of Pandora’s box dwells the concept ‘Hope’. I will push my way through the demons until I reach that blessed creature.”

I didn’t reply to this. I merely ended the story with an evil flourish; for I am wise, and the wise know that
hope
is the worst of all the evils that plague the universe.

Because it is false.

Mrs Hamilton died yesterday in her last trolley crash. During my time as assistant manager of the supermarket she had rehearsed her death on many occasions, but this was her only true accident. I was talking to one of the checkout girls when I heard a loud screech coming from Frozen Foods. Mrs Hamilton had skidded on a wet patch left by a negligent cleaner and gyrated out of control toward one of the freezers. The lid had been left open by another customer and the impact hurled her body into the gaping compartment. By the time I reached the scene, ice crystals were already forming in the wrinkles of her face.

Laura, the checkout girl, accompanied me and nervously fingered her blonde highlights as she peered over the side. The internal lamps of the refrigerator cast a sterile glow over her features, as if their photons had turned brittle and were splintering against the inflamed sebaceous follicles of her cheeks. Her voice betrayed numb concern. “Shouldn’t we help her? I think she’s still alive!”

This compassion was inappropriate. The chilly security of the freon sarcophagus was too perfect to violate. I shook my handsome head. “No, it’s unhygienic. Leave her in peace with the
petits poit
and oven chips. She would have wanted it this way.”

Gently, I closed the lid and escorted Laura back to the till where an agitated crowd had gathered, armed with credit cards and money-off coupons. Later, when I returned to Frozen Foods, the body had stopped twitching. The compartment would have to be defrosted and chlorinated after closing time. Until then, it was necessary to block the aisle to discourage voyeurs. I ordered plastic cones to be placed at either end and positioned a security guard near the thermostat. It was a far cry from Mrs Hamilton’s planned demise, in Condiments, on the jagged corners of a hundred ketchup bottles. She had mapped the tiles of the floor, calculating the number of rivulets her lifeblood would form as it fled her veins. Had she seen in the hemorrhagic hues of the tomato sauce the symbolic spectrum of her martyrdom?

Until accepting my post at Safebury’s, my experience of supermarket death was confined to isolated acts of aisle-rage in a cut-price chain in the centre of town. These hyperstores on the periphery of the city, rising from a landscape of concrete car parks and weed verges, were far more lethal. Many of the staff considered the building to be a theatre of spilled organs, as if the whole process of shopping was a throwback to the ancient circuses. The trolleys themselves, mesh frames recalling the nets of a
retiarius
gladiator, had been designed by a committee as anonymous as the one that originated tridents and short swords. This vaudeville of violence and sex was epitomised by the rush for reduced items in the Bakery department, where customers would compete for stale Bakewell tarts, arranged to resemble the breasts of anaemic girls, like libertines fighting over harlots.

I was introduced to Mrs Hamilton by Becker, my immediate superior. He pointed her out while we were touring Biscuits. A diminutive figure, she seemed to steer her trolley like a charioteer cracking her tongue at illusory steeds. As I watched, she struck a small child playing near the custard creams and I was treated to a momentary shower of splayed limbs and artificially sweetened crumbs. Oblivious of our presence, she parked next to the fig rolls and furiously began to stock up. Even then I noted that her motions corresponded to a personal algebra whose variables and constants were polyunsaturated.

“It’s the inertia,” Becker informed me. “The more weight in her trolley, the more damage it will do in a crash. She’s one of our best customers; always goes for bulk.”

Shortly after this event, I commenced an affair with Laura, timing our relationship by the speed at which her highlights grew out. When the roots had reclaimed her head she promised we would consummate our desire among the soft cheeses of the Delicatessen. With care this might even be accomplished during opening hours. Laura drove me to distraction with her pale thighs, visible as her gingham uniform rode over her knees when she sat on the swivel chair at the checkout. I suspect that sliding the Visa cards through the groove in the till was an erotic act for her, but one devoid of warmth and sensitivity. I wondered what her feelings were as she dealt with each customer’s produce, fondling the goods to line up the bar-codes with the sensors and then discarding them with a casual flick toward a mound of plastic bags layered as carefully as bedsheets in a hospice for the terminally ill. An urge to present myself to her in a trolley, to be similarly handled, came over me, but I managed to repress it for the sake of my job.

Laura was the physical opposite of Mrs Hamilton, yet they seemed to complement each other. Whenever the two met at the checkout, I envisaged a sperm struggling through a cervical fissure toward a reluctant ovary. Mrs Hamilton’s jars of instant coffee and tins of sweetcorn, her veggie burgers and packets of tortillas, her boxes of cornflakes and bottles of balsamic vinegar, appeared to impregnate Laura’s till, swelling its womb with a loss leader foetus. Like a neon triangle born from a warping of rectilinear geometries, I expected this entity, the ultimate product of consumer-oriented evolution, to emerge from the receipt outlet in a roll of new improved flesh and non-biological bone.

At the terminus of my inaugural month at Safebury’s, I witnessed my first spectacular trolley crash. A customer who had entered the building from the adjacent Housebase store with a mop protruding from his vehicle collided with a hydrophobe who had arranged an umbrella in an analogous position. Like jousting accountants they straightened their ties in the last seconds before impact. The handle of the mop caught the thyroid of the hydrophobe, while the tip of his umbrella penetrated the eye of his adversary. Cartilage and iris burst simultaneously, sounding like a kiss between an armadillo and a toad, and then both customers collapsed onto the mosaic floor. I was cognizant of Mrs Hamilton leering across from another aisle, tunnelling through a pyramid of baked beans for a better view. Other shoppers arrived to gawp and I realised Laura had deserted her till and was rubbing herself against a tower of ideal milk. There was liquid on her thighs, though whether from orgasm, ruptured tin or spraying eye was impossible to determine.

I cleared the area rapidly, wary of looters and necrophiles. Mrs Hamilton had reached the site of the accident and was lightly touching the wheels and chassis of each twisted trolley before moving her fingers to her sagging breasts, as if directly absorbing a wonky sensuality. I gripped her by the elbow and she responded by clutching my genitals. I was startled by way her fingers guided my penis within my trousers, as if she intended to steer my scrotum toward the checkout while leaving the rest of my body behind. I slapped her wrist and called for Security. Laura came to my rescue, placing her pricing gun against the hag’s face and pressing the trigger until her skull became a bargain. Mrs Hamilton, blinded by the sticky labels, disengaged with a crisp, overpackaged wail and scuttled away toward Toiletries.

Becker and I raided the damaged trolleys for the pound coins. This was a distasteful but profitable business. I saved my share over several weeks to take Laura to the cinema. Bathed in the flickering shadows of a horror film, dipping into a bucket of popcorn like a spider fishing for sperm, I was able to consider the parameters of consumerism at leisure. The extreme metaphors of mashed potato, tetrahedral tea bags and caster sugar were far more disturbing than the images of blood and violation that faced me on the screen. Laura appeared to share my thoughts; she panted with disappointment at the panoply of celluloid violence that pulsed high above. The natural environment of real horror, we realised, was among the shredded wheat and pâté of Safebury’s most unlucky aisles, where the greedy desires and tender fantasies of shoppers were fused in a sudden alchemy of trolley and driver. Broken arms, thighs cubed by the wire-mesh, tongues caught in axles: these were the dehydrated archetypes of contemporary fear and loathing.

The imprint of Mrs Hamilton’s fingers remained on my penis like Tabasco stains on a gherkin. I tried unsuccessfully to wash them away in the shower, exciting myself in the process and extrapolating a fantasy that involved Laura and a whole basement of baby-food. At the moment of climax, her face was replaced by Mrs Hamilton’s and I recoiled in shock, slipping on a bar of soap and striking my head on a faucet. Blood flowed down the plughole like herbaceous pasta sauce. I bandaged the wound and staggered to bed, where my dreams were full of runaway trolleys speeding through an Escher-like mall, collecting bodies instead of groceries from the infinite rows of palladium shelves.

My obsession with our best customer intensified after an especially gory incident in Fresh Vegetables. A single mother had committed suicide by slashing her wrists on the edge of a ripe starfruit and her abandoned baby, perched on the collapsible trolley seat like an economy-sized sack of mischief, was howling and struggling to free its legs from the holes in the side of the contraption. I was reminded of a prisoner trapped in the stocks as Becker came up and ordered me to wheel the orphan out of the store to await suitable foster parents at the bottle bank. While I was swerving around an edifice of bananas, a myopic hippy with a basket full of organic mushrooms suddenly lurched in my path. I braked sharply and the deceleration caused the collapsible seat to slam shut. Milk teeth and bile erupted over the hippy, smudging his little round glasses and matting his technophobic beard.

With the aid of half a cucumber, I levered the seat open to inspect the damage. The child resembled a barbecued tin of Chicken Korma. As his cloven legs dropped to the floor, followed by the contents of his nappy, I saw that his undeveloped penis was also marked with crimson sores. Was Mrs Hamilton somehow responsible for the arbitrary chaos that defined the character of Safebury’s? Had she condemned me to a similar fate with her touch, like an irradiated Midas?

From that moment I checked the inside of every victim’s underwear before allowing the bodies to be removed. Both male and female corpses betrayed signs of prior meetings with Mrs Hamilton. I confided in Becker but he was dismissive, claiming she had once grabbed his lingam without ill effects. As far as he was concerned, such conspiracy theories were examples of boil-in-the-bag paranoia.

“I’ve been driving trolleys for a decade,” he said, “and I’ve had a couple of near misses, but nothing serious. It comes down to experience, knowing how to anticipate the actions of other consumers. I don’t accept your ridiculous destiny hypothesis.”

Three days later, Becker was killed when his trolley suffered a blowout in Wines & Spirits. The shattered wheel span through the air, lodging in the head of a teetotaller, while my immediate superior tried to jump from his stricken vehicle. His tie caught in the mesh and he was dragged into an island display of imported beer. He was marooned there for nearly a whole afternoon, unable to cross the busy aisles to safety. The official cause of death was alcohol poisoning, but I believe it was a shandy of despair and embarrassment.

I decided to do some research on Mrs Hamilton. Something in the way she knotted her faded scarf convinced me she had once attended the local university. I spent an hour in the college library, checking the titles and authors of graduate dissertations. At last I found what I wanted: a doctoral thesis that Mrs Hamilton had submitted fifty years earlier. It had been rejected by the examiners as far-fetched, but as I read through it, I realised it provided formulae for a new sexuality. I photocopied relevant passages and took them to Laura.

“That old harpy trained to be a psychologist,” I mused, handing her the pages. “The thrust of her argument concerned traditional similes for regenerative organs. If a car really is an extension of the penis, then a car crash must be a symbol of male orgasm. Mrs Hamilton tried to show by analogy that the shopping trolley is an extension of the vagina and that the trolley crash is a symbol of female orgasm, which is much more intense than the male version.”

My promotion delighted Laura and her highlights started to grow out more rapidly. But I was too intent on watching the movements of Mrs Hamilton to anticipate the textures of soft cheese. She seemed to be observing me in turn: more than once I caught her seizing the genitals of other customers. Invariably these were killed in trolley crashes and I began to perceive a pattern in her shopping habits. Often she lingered in Condiments, running her callused thumbs over the bottles of ketchup, obviously planning some monumental act of carnage, but waiting for a missing factor to prompt her into action.

Last week, Laura came sobbing to me, throwing herself into my arms and staining my shirts with tears harder than olive stones. She had been attacked at the checkout by Mrs Hamilton. Hunkering down in the shadows of Soft Drinks, she showed me the marks on her vulva, like a desiccated steak spotted with cheap wine. It was plain we both formed part of some ready-washed matrix, an amalgam of ecstasy and additives. Laura, whose brain is bijou but piquant, like a sample tub of wholegrain mustard, was incoherent for the remainder of her shift and I decided to confront her assailant, throwing her out of the supermarket if necessary, despite the reduction in profits this would entail. I borrowed a knife from Kitchen Accessories and eventually tracked Mrs Hamilton down at the junction between Pet Foods and Detergents.