The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (9 page)

With a slight inclination of her head, Thisbe gave me permission to drop Desmond and Poppy down the shafts. There was a long minute in which nothing was audible save the hiss of falling offspring. I held my musty breath. Then the inconceivable happened. The details of the explosion cannot really be imagined. But again I shall be content with offering a key word:
blagharghtakm!

My knowledge of physics was never very good. We were squashed flat, pyramid and occupants. Being immortal, it did not matter. At least we were rushing through the atmosphere, into space. The cosmos is one big coffin. So we began to feel at home.

We like it up here, cold and mute. We slide like shadows across the inner surface of our compressed vessel. My dreams about steering to the stars have also been squashed. We have gone into orbit around the moon. And yet, strangely enough, the washing machine survived the blast. I am tempted to enter it myself and change my own polarity. Too long have I been a mummy. Now I want to be an anti.

Hunky Pal watched his wife put on lipstick and said, “Are you going out tonight?” Then he sipped his beer.

Greta made that special face in the mirror that is supposed to be a test to see if a reddened mouth is right and said, “Darlene’s having a party just for all the girls. I promised to go.”

“It’s Friday night,” said Hunky.

“That’s right, it is. You don’t mind?”

“We play cribbage on a Friday, that’s all.” Hunky finished his beer and wiped dry his chin with his sleeve.

“Guess we’ll have to skip it for once.”

“So what’ll I do on my own?”

“Play solitaire instead. There’s a nice wooden board that Uncle Conker carved for us with his bare hands.”

“Suppose I could do that. Then sit on the roof with my telescope, if the clouds will let me. Gaze at stars.”

“There you go. Don’t wait up.”

Hunky shifted in his seat. “OK, take care, then.”

“Of course I will. Always do.”

She walked out of the house and closed the front door behind her with a click as soft and precise as an insect’s jaws. Hunky opened another beer but didn’t bother pouring it in a glass. He drank straight from the can like a jackal would, lapping the foam.

The television wasn’t on, it was never on.

He finished this second beer, went to look for the solitaire board. Then he realised he had never known where it was kept, that he hadn’t heard of Uncle Conker before. But it was worth a search. He rummaged behind the sofa, under the bed, up in the attic.

He backed down the ladder an hour later.

There was nothing for it but to dial Darlene’s house and ask to speak to his wife so Greta could tell him exactly where it was. Surely she wouldn’t object to such a simple request. Or would she? Women. He yanked up the telephone and pushed the sequence…

“Good evening, Darlene. This is Hunky here. Hunky. Sorry to disturb. May I speak to Greta for a minute? Greta. My wife. Oh, I get it, she’s not there. Did she leave the party?”

“What party, Mr Pal? There’s no party here.”

“No party there, Darlene?”

“Just a quiet night in, me and Rolf.”

“I understand. Thanks Darlene. Have a good night now.”

He replaced the telephone.

And frowned to himself. No party?

In that case, where was she? Where was his wife? Could it be possible he would never see Greta again?

He sobbed to himself, then went and resumed the search, still sobbing, still wondering who Uncle Conker might be. At last he found the solitaire board at the bottom of the laundry basket. The little cloth bag of wooden balls was missing, so he played with peanuts, unsalted, and kept failing to win against himself. He resigned.

He went to bed and lay under the quilt and the same thoughts bounced from one side of his mind to the other, as if two mirrors had been lodged there face to face, reflecting each other to infinity, batting spherical ideas back and forth in a game of insanity tennis. Greta had left him, gone back to her mother, fallen in a river, been eaten by moths or goats, combusted spontaneously or after arrangements.

She came back after midnight and slipped in beside him. He pretended to snore. Much later, when the time was right, he reached out and hugged her close. Then he snored for real.

The car outside honked its horn and Hunky kissed Greta goodbye and left for work. Crumbs of breakfast toast twitched on the corners of the grin he used to greet Zanger, his colleague.

Every morning Zanger gave him a lift to the factory. They drove down the road and Zanger said, “Do you think that rights should be proportional to the number of senses of a species?”

“That’s a strange question. I don’t know,” said Hunky.

“Well, how many do we have?”

“Most people say five, some say six.”

“Senses, right? But precisely how many rights in total? I’m asking you this because I want to know. Truly.”

Hunky wasn’t sure if he should really make an effort to count. Zanger had high expectations at times. He shrugged. “Hundreds, thousands, more than that maybe, after revolutions.”

Zanger nodded. “Yeah. That’s where the problem is, friend. There’s no fixed scale of rights for any individual being. But with my system, errors of dignity and miscarriages of justice are prevented at the nascent stage. I mean, we’re aware that a moose has the same number of senses as a boss, so it must have all the same rights.”

“But it doesn’t, generally,” pointed out Hunky.

“That’s what’s wrong in our society. Vegetables have less senses, so if we eat them that’s better than eating a moose. Five senses, five rights. Six senses, six rights. Seven senses…”

“What about a pebble? No rights at all?”

“Minerals are
out
of the equation, brother. Those igneous rascals don’t deserve
any
respect, not a crumb.”

Zanger slowed as his car passed a newsstand.

“You want me to jump out and fetch you a paper?” asked Hunky, as he did every morning. Zanger nodded.

Hunky opened the door, hit the kerb running, did the business, jumped back into the moving car, sat down.

“Hold it up at an angle,” insisted Zanger.

He always read the newspaper while driving and Hunky abetted him in this schema of negligence, but not entirely willingly. It seemed an absurd talent to possess, the art of steering and reading. They turned a corner and Hunky turned a page. Zanger sniffed.

“More obtuse, if you please, my good fellow.”

Hunky surmised he wasn’t alluding to the quality of the journalism but to the angle at which the print reached his eyes. He preferred surmising to guessing, Hunky did. Even better was deducing, but that didn’t occur very often in his life. Lack of opportunity.

“Well, that’s remarkable. I’m amazed,” said Zanger.

“What is it?” squeaked Hunky.

“The statue of a woman has been found on Mars.”

“May I see?” Hunky dribbled.

Zanger nodded his assent and Hunky scanned the relevant report. The monochrome pictures were unmistakable. A space probe had parachuted into the Martian atmosphere and had taken the photographs while falling toward the alien surface. There she was. His wife, Greta. A statue on such a monumental scale couldn’t have been built in less time than a thousand decades with tools familiar to the Ancient Egyptians, the story said. Mars was none of their business anyway, it went on. How dare they? The stone woman was a cool reclining nude.

“It landed last night. The probe, I mean. Last night was Friday. Before midnight, Earth time,” said Hunky.

“That’s correct. We’re here now, brother.”

They reached the gates of the factory, were waved through by a guard into the car park. Then it was time to begin another day in the workshops grinding mirrors, mirrors for solar heating projects, not for telescopes that could help to resolve this enigma.

Greta on Mars. But what excuse was that?

He couldn’t ask her directly, of course, for that would turn her sarcastic. It had to be done subtly, but Hunky doubted he was capable of such subtlety or any subtlety at all, even one wavelet of it, if that’s how it comes, and he suspected subtlety had something against him. He enjoyed suspecting less than guessing, or so he supposed.

Hunky waited for next Friday to come round, wondered what makes a Friday do that every time. Earth spinning on its axis, swinging around the sun, other planets doing the same. He shifted on the sofa, sipped his beer, watched her as she sat next to him.

“Aren’t you going to Darlene’s tonight?”

Greta squinted. “What for?”

“A party just for the girls, feasibly,” he said.

“That was last week, Hunky.”

“Did you enjoy it, last week, Greta?”

“I did. Yes I did. Mostly.”

“Wasn’t the
atmosphere
a little thin, though?”

“No it wasn’t. Not at all.”

“Did you require root
canal
work, Greta?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“What exactly is your knowledge? To how many decimal places can you compute pi? Any pyramid experience, Greta? What about a sphinx? Ever used theodolite or plumbline?”

She laughed but her eyes were uneasy. “Why don’t we have a game of cribbage now? Get the cards.”

“I don’t feel like it. Let’s watch TV instead.”

“Hunky, we never do that.”

He refused to be dissuaded from this particular course of action. With the remote control he switched the set on. It warmed up slowly, like soup made by dinosaurs, and sparks crackled around it. The hairs on the backs of his hands stood up. Then a red glow appeared on the screen, dusty and uncomforting, and bathed his face.

It was a documentary about Mars, about the probe.

“New discoveries,” he breathed.

“Aw Hunky,” protested Greta. “It’s boring.”

“Is it? For whom? Look at those pictures. The surface from above. An alien world, that is. Very alien.”

She climbed along the sofa and mounted him, blocking his view of the screen. Facing him she began to make saucy motions with her hips. “This is more fun. Let’s do it right here.”

“You’re trying to distract me, Greta. I know it.”

She unbuttoned her blouse…

He held her large breasts in his hands and she didn’t stop pulsating and soon he found himself matching her rhythm. Then he half stood, twisting her to the side, and climbed on top, reversing their positions and grabbing handfuls of her remaining clothing.

In the process, the heel of her foot touched the remote control, turning the TV off. An accident, obviously.

She was naked now. Him too. He hovered above her, in the sky of her presence, lowered himself gently.

Always it was this way. A direct descent from above. Face to face. He was a falling probe and she was both an alien surface and the implausible statue of herself on that surface. Later he dressed himself, opened another beer and asked, “So did it move?”

She smoothed her hair. “Did what move, Hunky?”

“The Earth. Our home world.”

“Don’t be deliberately corny,” she said.

Foam speckled the tip of his nose. “I’ll take that as a no. So what other planet
did
move, if not Earth?”

“What are you playing at?” she sighed.

“Greta,” said Hunky slowly, “who is Uncle Conker?”

“You know. You remember.”

“I don’t, Greta. No. Who is he? Is he green, Greta? Is that his hue? Can you prove he even has a face?”

“I have a photograph somewhere. I’ll get it.”

“Yes, you go get it, Greta.”

He smirked to himself as she left the sofa, still nude, and went upstairs to the spare bedroom. She returned with a battered metal box, used a bent key to open it, exposed a deck of faded postcards and photos. She flicked through them, selected just one.

“That’s Uncle Conker. He lived in a log cabin on an island in a lake. It was a lake in a crater. Thunderstorm sent down a lightning bolt that broke the lip of the crater. The lake poured out, left him stranded on the apex of an unscalable vertical column.”

Hunky shook his head. “Oh dear, this won’t do, won’t do at all. Try to tell me he’s human, would you?”

“Nowhere is he green,” pointed out Greta.

“I agree. He’s worse than that. He’s sepia. Sepia! I don’t blame you for lying, Greta. I’m going to bed now. I need to escape the consequences of what I’ve learned. The truth. Come later, when I’m asleep. Not now. I am excessively frightened. Sepia.”