The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (2 page)

For Raymond it had been one of those abstract evenings; formless desires, a quick splash of reckless paint on what had been a blank canvas, and then out into the city. He could hardly colour the town red; a blue-green fugue was clanking its counterpoint on his aching ribs. Too much tobacco, too little sleep, and Clarisse gone barely a week. So he hunched deeper into his overcoat while rain warmer than curdled milk lashed face and hands. A city, and a life, without straight lines.

He found the brothel down a cobbled backstreet, a low building with heavy curtains. At the entrance, he was greeted by a doorman who politely inquired whether he had made a reservation. Raymond shook his head. Was he supposed to feel inferior to those patrons who had previously arranged to displace a volume of the establishment’s air? He was unsure. Nothing in the doorman’s demeanour provided a clue. He allowed himself to be ushered into a waiting area, where he took a comfortable seat and accepted a drink. Filthy muzak whispered from concealed speakers.

“Sir?” Almost immediately, a waiter came to take his order. Raymond relaxed. They were not going to punish him for his minor transgression of etiquette. He adjusted his tie and smoothed back his damp hair.

“I’m a vegetarian,” he said. He pulled down his lower lip to expose gums as healthy as the release of tension. The waiter nodded and led him past rows of rooms, the air bristling with soft moans and the strains of sweet melodies, or else with harsh screams and atonal cacophony. His pulse began to race, his nostrils flared. He caught the mingled odour of myriad scents, exotic flavours on the tip of his tongue. A thousand combinations to sample, innumerable moods.

“Rhona is a root vegetable,” the waiter remarked casually, as he stopped in front of a narrow door. Raymond proffered a small tip, acknowledged the resulting wink with a curt nod and stepped into the room. His eyes adjusted slowly to the light, he blinked the sweat from tired lashes and regarded his new surroundings. She stood lovely and demure in an earthen pot in the centre of the room. Her tendrils beckoned to him, impossibly alluring in the steamy atmosphere.

But he lingered awhile near the threshold. “Why don’t you take your coat off?” she asked seductively and he obliged, hanging it up on a hook on the back of the door. “Now don’t be shy. Take your time. Real nice and slow. You look a little nervous. First time, eh? Well nothing to be worried about. Come a little closer. That’s it, darling, I don’t bite. Just talk to me, tell me what you like.”

“My name is Raymond.” Raymond felt an absurd shame at being here, bedraggled, unsure of himself or his real intentions. He dripped over the short-pile carpet and wrung his hands. “I’m a vegetarian,” he repeated. He managed a nervous grin.

“I hope so! One man’s meat…” Rhona winked and reached out to stroke his cheek. He winced but did not pull away. “Why don’t you choose some music? It may help you to relax.”

Raymond nodded and moved to one of the walls, his knuckles rapping quickly on the oak veneer. Instantly one of the panels slid back, exposing a beaming violinist who struck up a jaunty air. Raymond shook his head and the panel slid shut. He rapped at further points along the wall, exposing musicians of varying calibre. Eventually he settled for a combination of flute, guitar and cello.

“That’s better!” Rhona giggled coquettishly and reached out to touch him again. “Why don’t you loosen some of your clothing? You must be steaming under all those layers. Why don’t I help you?”

Conscious of the grins on the faces of the musicians, Raymond scowled. “I’m not some pink-cheeked virgin! I do have a wife, you know. She’s gone away for a while. That’s all. A man gets hungry, his tongue rolls around inside his mouth. I’m just not used to places like this!”

“Of course not.” Rhona’s eyes flashed with a secret mirth. “But I can be your wife tonight. I can be anything you want. I can love you heart and soil. I’ll be your slave, your mother, your mistress. A real turnip for the books!”

Raymond swallowed the bile that had been building up in his throat and pulled off his tie with savage jerks. As he undressed, he wondered about Clarisse, alone in a big city for the first time. How would she be filling her own formless evenings? Perhaps she was betraying him at this very moment, glutting her own maw with forbidden delights. He shuddered. She had always accused him of being uncouth; this despicable thought proved the truth of her words.

Raymond’s impulsiveness had meant that he had not checked the condition of his underwear before leaving the house. Acutely embarrassed, he huddled in his stained underpants while Rhona offered him an amused glance. He looked up at the musicians in despair, but although they were grinning broadly they were intent on their instruments. The music was now a gentle lullaby, an ironic murmur of sound that washed over him but could not clean his shame.

“I’ve seen worse, darling.” Rhona licked her lips and Raymond cursed her mocking nonchalance. “Well big boy, let’s have a look at your tool. You have got one, haven’t you?”

Raymond exploded. He leapt forward, brandishing the potato peeler. “Here!” he cried, throwing back his head. “Take it, bitch!” He thrust the point deep into her face and removed one of her eyes with a savage twist. Then he drew the blade down along her body, shedding the skin in a single flapping sheet. He was vaguely aware that the musicians had changed tempo, improvising a ragtime no less sardonic than their earlier number.

Rhona groaned with pleasure, but Raymond realised that this was merely an act for his sake. Senses dulled by numerous other such encounters, she could scarcely muster any genuine enthusiasm at all. Raymond felt his blood boil: he would be the lens of what little she could still feel, magnifying it beyond anything she could
have anticipated. “Taste this, you jaded hors d’oeuvre!” he screamed as he drew the blade back up, removing the flesh that lay under her skin. A single tear of surprise popped from her remaining eye.

Over and over again, he raised and lowered the blade, his vision a red mist, Rhona’s cries of pain and delight pounding in his ears. Never had he felt so lost to the world, so abandoned by reality, so originally and refreshingly alive. Specks of peel and warm flesh spattered his face. Pale juice trickled between his fingers, the odour of damp earth plugged his nostrils. He screamed aloud as he approached orgasm and gave himself wholly up to the nirvana of ultimate release.

Finally it was over. He dropped the blade and, trembling, reached for his clothes. They were lying in a pool of viscous ichor. The musicians had stopped playing. They stared sombrely at their feet. Raymond shook his head and the sliding panels shut away their gloomy countenances.

There was a knock on the door. Raymond opened it and regarded the bowing waiter who stood there. “Everything to your satisfaction sir?” In the waiter’s smile was a subtle contempt whose depths Raymond could not fathom. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the mess that lay behind.

“You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think!” he joked. The waiter merely returned the slightest of smiles. Raymond pulled on his coat, reached inside his pocket for his wallet and paid the fellow. As he did so, another waiter with a wheelbarrow entered the room and carted away Rhona’s remains to a door at the rear of the establishment. As the door swung open, Raymond caught a glimpse of a huge vat of bubbling oil.

The waiter noted his astonishment. “Crisp weather this time of year,” he said. He showed Raymond to the front of the building and the doorman waved him out into the night. “Very good, sir. Call again soon, sir.” But Raymond did not look back. He hid in the comforting darkness.

An ineffable bleakness enveloped his soul. He knew that he had made a fool of himself. No doubt the waiters were all laughing at him now, sharing the joke with each other as they sat around in that backroom, frying the remnants of his inadequacy. Clarisse was right; he was too much of a boor to visit such places. They were for people of breeding and taste, not for riff-raff such as himself.

Suddenly he felt a great hatred for Clarisse and with this hatred came an overwhelming urge to betray her, to teach her a lesson. He altered his direction and made his way down to the Docks, the red light district where he would find ample opportunity for revenge. As he walked, he kept an eye out for the police.

At last, he came across what he sought. They stood there in a line, wearing the seductive garments of their trade: the apron and tall white hat. As he peeped at them from the shadows, he felt a rumbling in his stomach. There were a dozen choices available. French, Italian, Indian and Turkish, they lounged on the corners, swinging their cleavers and ladles. A burly Swede with a bristling beard noticed him and gestured with his chin. “Smörgåsbord?” he hissed.

As Raymond moved closer, his attention was distracted by a suave Chinese spinning a wok on the end of a chopstick. Raymond paused. He had always fancied a bit of Oriental. He drew in a deep breath and summoned up all the last reserves of his courage. If he was going to pay for it he might as well ask for something really dirty. “You do stir-fry?” he whispered. The chef eyed him suspiciously for a moment and then nodded. Raymond followed him down an alley and into a dark doorway, where a small portable stove stood waiting. The chef cooked the meal with brisk efficiency and Raymond, startling himself with his own seediness, had it up against the wall.

Unloved and unemployed, Tennyson Jones walked along the drab street. His body burned with shame; his soul smoked. The sky was grey, a single immortal cloud that suited his mood. There was dust in his eyes or in the cracks of the city. Or both. It was always this way. Drops of rain like decaying olives struck his shoulders, began to slick and chill his hair, greased his cheeks and twisted mouth.

His inner pollution was vented through his expression. His grimaces and twitches helped to disperse the soot of his charred spirit. Once he had dreamed of cooking an angel for supper; behind the glass door of the oven it sang holy songs; then it crisped and fell silent. His soul felt like that angel now; his body was the oven, his face the door. His heart and its disgrace was the pulsing source of heat.

Because the cloud was so low, his head scraped the underside of the greyness, making him feel like an insignificant giant, an unpleasant paradox. An odd smog swirled around his ears where the fumes of his despair met wisps of the clogged sky that hung down like weeds or dying insect legs. Unbearable weather muffled every aspiration of this city. It was implausible that anyone might be successful here. He almost wished to fall very hard and shatter his pointless skull.

“Am I trapped here forever?” he muttered.

There were drunks on every corner, sipping cheap cider with bruised lips. Some hailed him and he resented this. Since losing his job, tramps and escaped lunatics had offered him winks and grins, fake compassion which merely drew attention to the fact he was no longer a part of real society but closer to the cosmos of these dispossessed outcasts. Yet he still refused to redefine himself as one of them.

He preferred to be utterly rejected by everybody.

He reached the Job Centre and entered it with a sigh. He waited in the queue, controlling his agitation and impatience. Both were useless here. The staff had been instructed to assume he had nothing better to do, no finer way of spending his time. He attempted to smile, failed and felt annoyed he had made the effort. Keeping his eyes on the floor, he shuffled forward slowly. When his turn came, the soles of his feet had turned numb. The girl who received him at her desk had skin the colour of mislaid documents.

She adjusted her spectacles and he interpreted this gesture as a question. There were probably other riddles secreted in the mannerisms of her colleagues and the positions of the objects on their desks. All were beyond his powers of answering. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves and enrich his desires. Pauses can be erotic or important, but his were only lonely or meaningless. His postures refuted the coolness of any silence he nurtured. Now he was just awkward.

He stammered, “I need a job.”

“Nothing today,” she replied instantly, but her hands passed him an application form. A single piece of paper; its texture old and heavy, not like the flimsy sheets he had filled in on a daily basis for the past year. He examined it. At the top was printed:

HEAVENLY SAFETY OFFICER

Frowning, he asked, “Is this a misprint?”

She shrugged. “No idea.”

“You think this job is suitable for me?”

The girl sneered, but there was no genuine malice in her voice as she replied, “Apply for it anyway.”

“Why should I do that?”

She leaned forward and rolled her eyes to indicate the totality of her surroundings, not just the building, but also the tormented city beyond the walls with its streets and rain.

“It involves travel. Far away from here.”

He recoiled and almost twisted an ankle in surprise. Others behind him, still in the queue, grumbled.

“Yes, but how many have applied already?”

She grimaced. “For what?”

“The job!” he cried, shaking the slip of paper under her nose. She regarded it with professional distaste.

“I’ve never seen this before. Who are you?”

Even before his exasperation could manifest itself in his features, let alone in the pitch of his sigh, she added cruelly, “Take it away. I pay taxes for workshy vermin like you. It’s not fair.”

“I’m sorry,” he caught himself saying.

He backed off and she roared, “Never show me stupid pieces of paper again. I’m too busy for games.”

“It’s not a game! You suggested it!”

She appealed for support from her colleagues with a nod. A few came up with preadjusted spectacles.

“What’s wrong? Shall we summon the police? Is he scum? We can block his exit or allow him to continue his retreat. Which do you favour? With trained kicks we can weaken his internal organs and reduce his lifespan by a precise number of months or years. Alternatively we can hire men to push him out of a helicopter over the sea at varying altitudes. Maulings by beasts are also feasible.”

This is what he heard, though he suspected they said something else entirely. He glanced at the girl again, saw a disdain in her eyes that was shockingly vast but also hugely impersonal and he realised his paranoid delusions were mostly in error. Nobody was out to destroy him; he was too minor to waste time with. His insignificance was profound, another awful paradox. But she was indecisive enough to rescue him from trouble. While she pouted over her options, he fled.

As he slipped around the side of the building, he passed beneath an open window directly behind her desk. He heard her joking with the other staff members. A comic interlude.

“The short, depressed, smelly one handed me a homemade application form for a nonexistent job! Why do grotty people keep doing things like that? Are they all on drugs?”

There was a chorus: “For sure.”

Pressing his hands to his ears, he ran in a ludicrous lope down High Street until he reached Castle Square, the concrete plaza where a grey pond was no longer fed by a fountain. Flakes of rust and grains of dust moved in ripples abound his aching feet. He collapsed on a bench and closed his eyes against the looming bulk of the crumbling castle. Traffic bounced past, booming idiotic music and rattling broken exhaust pipes on the uneven surface of the eroded road. He chanced more glances. Once an ugly, lovely city, Swansea; but now the flat echo of a sudden scream, simultaneously boring and alarming.

A city of vile impossibilities.

After a brief and uneasy rest, he filled in the application form with the stub of a pencil he found in one of his pockets. He had been groping for mints. He used his trembling knee as a desk. His hand shook and the two vibrations exactly cancelled each other out. The result was remarkably neat. Then he pondered how to deliver the form. There was no address on it at all. But the job was a religious one. He decided that he was expected to use his initiative. Then he knew what was best. He stood and lurched out of the cement garden, down other streets, toward the nearest church. Lost in the wasteland, the edifice seemed to sag. Tramps encircled it, like gargoyles with vertigo, fallen from eaves.

The carpet of litter that softened every footfall on the pavements and roads overlapped the graveyard and formed rotting pyramids against the unreadable headstones. Supermarket shopping bags with fading logos commercialised oblivion. In patches the grass was still visible, yellow from neglect and the spilled cider of vagrants. He approached the actual building at a brisker pace, stepping between prone homeless bodies. The stained glass windows were all smashed and the main doors had been set alight in the past. They still stood as ash replicas of the originals. Ignoring the faint meaningless calls of human derelicts, he pushed through the sooty barrier that crumbled just for him.

Now he smelled as if he had recently attended a barbecue in a green and civilised sector of suburbia. A cruel illusion. The church interior was fouler than the darkness revealed. Cobwebs brushed his face and only the magical glitter of discarded hypodermic needles allowed him to pick his way toward the toppled altar. There were other gleams too, from the twisted pipes of the organ. He noted that every one of the stained ivory keys was stuck down, mimicking a gigantic agonising chord that had probably never really been played.

Some upheaval, a cataclysm much worse than the violence of vandals, had struck this church. The decaying altar reclined across the width of the chancel. It seemed too big for this building. It formed a barricade beyond which outmoded beliefs might cluster for sanctuary. His mind was filled with abrupt images of religious wars, minor crusades and the dark doings of shrewd popery. Blood and fire and wafers. The armpits of nuns and their thighs. Orisons. Standing on blistered tiptoe, he cast his application form over the altar and listened to it fluttering down in the gloom. Then he turned and hurried home.

He was in the habit of going for long walks at night. It was a cheap form of escape. He always took the same route through Singleton Park, down to the sea. A coastal path ran parallel to the polluted beach all the way to Mumbles, a small resort that boasted a pier and lighthouse. The path was lonely in the early hours, but it was rarely dark, save for a short stretch under wilting trees. The skyglow of the city, an unholy halo composed of thousands of streetlamps, gave him enough confidence to stroll the entire distance. The faint shine of the possibly radioactive sea also helped. Only once had he been troubled. A mad dog had leapt out from some bushes, biting his ankles with loose teeth.

He generally felt safe. But this time there was a different taste in the air of the park, a flavour of grotesque expectancy. He took a shortcut through the grounds of the University. Vague shapes hugged too many corners. He was being followed. He crouched behind a low wall and waited. The shadows were full of outlines darker than themselves. Tall figures were reflected in blank windows. He stood and ran towards the library. There was a bicycle rack in front of the entrance, but only one machine stood chained to the iron bars. As he struggled to pull it free, he sensed that the figures were very close.

He shouted, “I have a crossbow.”

This was true. It was slung over his shoulder on a leather strap; but he had no ammunition, no quiver of bolts. He had made the weapon himself for a specific purpose. Part of the coastal path was bordered by a small golf course. In more innocent times, when he took his walks in the day, players often deliberately hit balls in his direction, hoping to strike him on the head. With his crude but powerful weapon he was able to fire them back, usually with greater accuracy. Although there were few golfers at night, the habit remained with him; but he didn’t brandish the crossbow now. He continued to grapple with the bicycle.

The chain holding it was corroded. It snapped and the machine came free at last, bouncing on its overinflated tyres like the skeleton of an electrified pig. He steadied it with his large hands and mounted it at a trot. Then he permitted himself a chuckle as he left the campus, crossed the main road to the coastal path and pedalled under the sick trees. He felt lucky. Only when the squeak of rival wheels began to hurt his ears did he risk a glance over his shoulder. His pursuers had nearly caught up with him. The machines they employed were superior to his own. Where had they obtained them at such short notice? His one advantage was that they were encumbered by their disguises.

They were clearly members of the secret police. He counted exactly twelve. All were burly men and they wore flamboyant uniforms to trick observers. Now they started to close around him, trapping him in a net of spinning wheels and multiple gears. They were forcing him off the path, herding him onto the verge where brambles concealed stones. It was inevitable he would lose his balance. His bicycle flipped and broke apart on the pebbles of the beach. Cogs raced each other into lifeless pools. He tried to stand, failed and kneeled with gasping sobs racking his frame. Then they were on him. Huge hats nodded at his fear, as if they agreed with it and wanted more.

He rolled in the filthy sand and they raised their hands and pretended to strike him. It was a joke on their part, because they kept pulling their punches and making the sign of the cross instead. But he almost felt the wounds in his soul. Then he heard questions. They were interrogating him with hysterical precision. It was at this point he decided to offer no more resistance and stopped moving.

“What is your name? Answer immediately!”

“Tennyson Jones,” he gasped.

“What are your inherent qualities?”

“I’m a survivor. I’m unloved and unemployed, but I’m still here. That says a lot about my character.”

“Too indolent to kill yourself, is that it?”

“No, I’m addicted to hope.”

“Good answer. You’re doing extremely well. We congratulate you, partly against our will. Here is the last question. It’s easily the most difficult one. Do you believe?”