The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension

by Rhys Hughes

  But now she had revealed that dwelling with him in full health was the worst punishment! His efforts to strike at her had all been wasted. His time, money and hopes were flecks of foam on waves already gone. Instead of weakening his survival instinct, this negation of everything he had lived for gave him a perverse strength.

  “In that case, my dear, shall we strive to save ourselves? If you truly were so miserable, your preservation will give me great delight. I want to prolong your suffering indefinitely.”

  “It’s too far to swim back to the island.”

  “I agree. But we only need to stay afloat until help comes. Nobody knows our position, true enough, nor that we are even out here, and I had no time to send a distress signal by radio, and this is hardly a busy shipping lane, but all the same a vessel might pass and spot us. Stranger things happen at sea. I’ll name some of them, if you like.”

  “You really are an idiot,” she hissed.

  “Hardly a positive response!”

  “But how can we avoid sinking and drowning when we are too fatigued to tread water? I’m already aching.”

  He answered at once, “I’ll build a raft.”

  Shaking her head, she looked at the empty sea. The yacht had been filled with objects but all of them had sunk with it. Jason had lashed down every loose item on deck, so they had only the clothes they wore. Shorts for him and a satin dress for her. She was obsessed with this garment and had been posing with it in front of a mirror when the boat snapped in two. The fabric was inappropriate for the climate, not to mention the situation. Yet it seemed a fine sort of shroud, elegant, sleek, rippled with deep colour, like the ocean that would soon open as a tomb to receive it and her. This blue dress might serve for a sail, but not for a hull. For that, there was nothing. Not even a spoon bobbing loose from the galley.

  All had gone down, falling in graceful oscillations to the abyssal plain, where ophiuroids and scotoplanes played dark unruly chess with themselves as pieces. Littering that limbo.

  Better not to think about the creatures at the bottom of the sea! Better to remain optimistic, undefeated.

  “My dear, a raft is our only chance.”

  “You really are the limit, Jason. Do you hope to grow your fingernails at an accelerated rate, bite them off and use them as planks? Is that how you’re planning to manufacture a vessel?”

  “With a suggestion like that, you have the audacity to accuse me of being an idiot! But there’s something else I want to talk to you about. Can’t you see that shadow moving below…”

  She looked and nodded. The shadow grew larger, refracted to an irregular shape. Jason assumed it was a shark and decided to scream, but before the note formed on his tongue the shape broke the surface and revealed itself to be a wardrobe. It must have worked itself loose from the cabin where it had stood. Only half watertight, it was leaking and soon would sink a second time and never come back up.

  The door was shut but the key was still in its lock. Jason swam to it with bold strokes while Henrietta blushed. Her embarrassment was puzzling, for here was something tangible that might provide temporary support until its buoyancy was compromised.

  He hugged it by extending his stiff arms to their fullest extent. Then he recoiled. A knocking came from within. Henrietta shrugged unconvincingly at this, but Jason clambered onto the object and turned the key. The door opened and a man leapt out. The water gushed in to take his place and the wardrobe plunged under again.

  “Who are you?” Jason spluttered.

  The newcomer blinked, grinned, floated confidently. His exposed teeth were perfectly white, like unwritten books without covers. His hair was a mass of oily curls. He was handsome and arrogant and unexpected. “You are a stowaway!” accused Jason.

  “He’s my lover,” corrected Henrietta.

  “You smuggled him on board without me knowing?” Jason wailed, his fists beating water into foam.

  “Clearly I did,” agreed Henrietta.

  “And kept him a secret all this time?” he growled.

  “That was the easy part. You spent so much time with your compasses, charts and other navigational aids, forever recalculating your position, that you had no opportunity to observe my positions. And I tried plenty of them. Carlos took me at every angle known to geometry. The creak of the boards you kept complaining about was really the groaning of our hammock as he serviced me under your feet.”

  Jason looked at Carlos, but the blink and grin combination appeared to be that fellow’s only reaction to anything, his sole comment on the cosmos and all its properties. Henrietta now began to drift closer to her illicit lover as if caught in his emotional riptide.

  Jason stopped punching the sea and whimpered, “But how long has this sordid romance been going on?”

  Henrietta’s cheeks were no longer crimson. She was defiant. “You should be more specific than that,” she said, clutching her lover, entwining her lithe arms and legs about him. “Which part of our affair are you alluding to? Love isn’t homogenous. The best parts have been going on for years, right under your dripping twitching nose.”

  “I must confess to some astonishment.”

  And that was no lie.

  “A dose of surprise will do you good,” Henrietta remarked, “even though it has arrived somewhat late.”

  But Jason was shaking his head at something else. “My nose may twitch, but it never drips and never will. It was dried up forever by an island curse long before I met you. I was with a local girl then, Amelia her name was, the daughter of a plantation owner.”

  “What do I care about any of that?” Henrietta barked, her dress billowing around her and her lover like the hood of a jellyfish. She kicked her legs and so altered course. South now.

  A memory burst deep inside Jason’s brain, poured its juice along the arid channels of his mind, flooded his dry cerebral corners. São Tomé more than three decades ago, still in the grip of a paranoid regime that had banned the smoking of cigarettes on the shore in case the smoker was a spy signalling to a submarine with the glowing tip. Amelia’s generous form enveloping him in the scented dusk, fireflies drifting through the open windows of the shack, a guitar playing softly somewhere, the pounding of the surf on the rocks and a ripple of laughter from a porch.

  Suddenly the door was flung open and her father stood like an outline cut from a lunar eclipse, reddish and bruised, a face daubed with bloody circles that might be craters, a neck hung with a dozen seashell necklaces. Pointing directly at Jason’s nose with the index finger of his left hand he began a song that would have been foolish in a film or book but had an awful resonance in this balmy reality. Then he danced a few ungainly steps, forward, backward, bowed politely, closed the door.

  “What did he do?” Jason had whispered.

  “He cursed your nose,” answered Amelia, collecting her clothes, turning away from him, her firm dark body as remote to him now as the mainland, that continent hulking unseen over the eastern horizon, the less benign face of the equatorial dream. She would leave and he would never see her again. It was an unspoken certainty.

  “That story happens to be true,” sighed Jason.

  “Just your nose?” asked Henrietta.

  “He didn’t dare curse the rest. The government wanted to discourage the old beliefs, to penalise sorcerers and put them in jail if all else failed. It was a strange time, very oppressive.”

  “I remember those days,” mumbled Carlos.

  Jason shivered and hugged himself. He did those actions both in the past and in the present, so the memory was a mirror image across time of the man who remembered. Then he grew ashamed, angry with himself for sharing his experience with his wife and her paramour, but they hadn’t understood much from his actions and he was safer than he realised. He noticed how they were drifting further away every minute.

  Another object abruptly erupted from the depths.

  Not a wardrobe this time, but a barrel. The empty one that Jason had kept in the storeroom behind the galle
y. It bobbed on the surface like a section of butchered whale, sparkling with brine, blowing mist through the bunghole in its side, moaning sickly. With powerful strokes Jason reached it, wrenched off the lid, caught a figure that tumbled out, fixed his mouth to hers in a kiss imparting both life and passion.

  “So it didn’t contain rum,” sneered Henrietta.

  “I lied about that,” confessed Jason, after he had finished resuscitating the new arrival, who recovered rapidly and now floated next to her rescuer with a wide smile, holding his hand.

  “Your secret lover, I take it?” snapped Henrietta.

  “That’s correct,” said Jason.

  “You miserable little hypocrite!”

  Jason chuckled. “Clearly you’re not the only one who knows how to play the game of deceit. I told you I like to take risks but that hint was too obtuse for you. Allow me to introduce you to Isabel. All the time you assumed I was busy with my navigational aids, I was actually enjoying fleshy delights with this young beautiful damsel.”

  Isabel seemed on the verge of apologising.

  But Carlos forestalled her. “Good afternoon,” he said politely. He even bowed, his head dipping under.

  Isabel acknowledged his courtesy. Then she said frantically, “You won’t believe what I saw down there…”

  “A ghost ship?” prompted Jason.

  “No, a ruined city on the seabed far below!”

  Henrietta narrowed her eyes. “How could you possibly discern anything at such a depth, especially from the inside of a sealed barrel? I think you are trying to engineer a distraction.”

  “She sometimes tells white lies,” admitted Jason.

  “Perhaps she hallucinated from lack of oxygen. That’s a more plausible explanation, I think,” said Carlos.

  “How gallant,” mocked Jason.

  “Don’t forget whose secret lover you are!” warned Henrietta.

  “Are you talking to me or him?”

  “That’s your choice, you fickle beast…”

  Jason was at a loss for words.

  But Isabel announced, “I like your dress!”

  “Thank you,” replied Henrietta warily. The opposing couples floated now like two knots in a rope made of words, a rope that would never haul them to the safety of any shore. So they drifted hopelessly, almost as far apart as the bow and stern of the original vessel.

  To communicate they didn’t need to shout. The afternoon air was still too serene. Not a single cloud existed anywhere, no stormy seas were promised. They were destined to drown gently.

  “I love satin too,” declared Carlos.

  Jason nodded. “She bought it while I was negotiating for my yacht. If we go shopping together we argue, so I always let her wander off while I focus on my own business. The São Tomé markets sell anything now, a far cry from the days under the Da Costa government. The boat was a bargain, but I don’t know how much the dress cost.”

  “I didn’t buy it there,” retorted Henrietta.

  Jason was about to question her on this discrepancy when Isabel shrieked. A large suitcase had bobbed to the surface near her and it was emitting faint cries for help. Carlos disengaged himself from Henrietta, reached the item of luggage and deftly opened it. A slim dark girl leapt safely into the sea while the suitcase sank back down.

  “Like an elevator service,” muttered Jason.

  The dark girl smiled sweetly.

  “Who on earth are you?” blurted Henrietta.

  “This is Luana, my mistress. I smuggled her aboard because I can’t live without her,” replied Carlos bravely.

  “But you love my wife, don’t you?” asked Jason.

  Carlos nodded. “Of course. But as she was so unfaithful to you, I worried whether I could trust her. I didn’t want to get hurt and I decided to betray her before she could betray me.”

  Faced with this twisted logic, Henrietta trembled.

  And Jason roared with laughter.

  But his triumph was short lived. A new object was rising rapidly beneath him, an outline too elongated to be anything other than a mythic sea serpent or severed elephant’s trunk. But in fact it was the rolled-up carpet that he had found under the bed in his cabin. During the short voyage he assumed it had belonged to the vessel’s previous owner. Now he knew differently, because Isabel splashed over to it anxiously.

  She rapidly unrolled it. The man inside fell out.

  Isabel caught and caressed him.

  Jason glared in his direction. “It’s difficult to judge height when we’re all treading water,” he observed sourly.

  “True,” said Isabel, “but he’s considerably taller than you.”

  “Your secret lover, I presume?”

  “Naturally. If you are allowed to have one, so am I.”

  “That’s symmetry,” said Luana.

  “It is,” agreed Isabel, “and his name is Pedro.”

  “Hello Pedro,” said Henrietta.

  “Pleased to meet you,” replied the newcomer.

  Jason shuddered, then spoke with admirable restraint. “This is ridiculous. I’ve never heard of anything like it before! But we’ve more important things to worry about. We’re drifting south and that’s the wrong direction. The next southern landmass is Antarctica.”

  “Very cold all the way down there,” said Carlos.

  “And it’s many thousands of miles away. I’m not dressed for those kinds of conditions,” complained Pedro.

  “None of us are, not even myself,” added Henrietta.

  “But it is a nice dress!” said Isabel.

  These trite comments were interrupted by another surfacing object. It was a sack this time, supposedly filled with coffee beans but actually containing a man by the name of Fábio who was quickly retrieved by Luana. As if the situation couldn’t get any worse, it soon emerged that the lovers of the lovers were also allowed illicit lovers. Luana had anticipated the cynical attitude of Carlos and neatly pre-empted him. She kissed Fábio tenderly and stroked him intimately while her first lover fumed and slowly opened and closed his mouth like a sunfish in moonlight.

  “Now you know how it feels,” smirked Henrietta.

  “I do,” conceded Carlos sadly.

  “Fábio is more trustworthy,” explained Luana.

  “Actually I’m not,” said Fábio.

  “Who is?” grumbled Jason.

  Then he lowered his gaze and barely recoiled at the no longer unexpected surfacing of yet another piece of submerged flotsam, a wicker basket stuffed with a green eyed woman called Elena who seemed to rouse the chivalrous instinct in Pedro. She was his secret lover, it turned out, but she was only the centre of attention for half a minute or so, before that special honour went to the occupant of the next rising capsule, an old tea chest that contained a man by the name of Sergio, who was followed by Giovana, who was followed by Joaquim, who was followed by…

  Thrust up from the uterus of the deep ocean, birthed out into the golden glow of the waning day, new lovers kept arriving like the breaking bubbles of a drowning mother goddess, her divine breath seeding the sultry world above with fully grown children.

  Luiza came up next, followed by Roberto, Flora, Filipe, Eunice, Rynaldo and the aptly named Marina. Then there was Caetano and Jussara, Nilo and Alda, Bruno and Cristina. They arrived in a variety of mundane wombs that returned to the unknown deeps the instant the passengers were disgorged, in much the same way that highly polished and enduring ideas are delivered by offhand remarks that fade back into silence. But in fact the idea that entered Jason’s mind now wasn’t propagated by any words. It came unbidden, out of nowhere, that favourite destination of nobody, and it began fermenting until he was drunk on its odd promise.

  He regarded the growing collection of floating bodies that were forming a rough circle around him and realised that the current had rotated him until he was no longer facing west but south. They were all facing south in fact. Yet he waited in silence, nervously.

  They all waited, but the surface of the sea
remained unbroken. Clearly the final lover had been disgorged…

  Jason continued to say nothing. He hadn’t finished thinking, drinking the brew of his idea. The others grew less restrained, babbling nonsense, trying fretfully to distract themselves.

  “What were you discussing before my arrival?” asked Elena.

  “About drifting south,” said Pedro.

  “To an entirely frozen continent,” explained Carlos.

  “I’ve never seen ice,” lamented Luana.

  “I did once,” insisted Isabel.

  Henrietta sniggered. “But you’re a liar. Even Jason admits that. How can a ghost ship be found under the sea? Phantoms vessels don’t sink! They float on the surface like normal ships.”

  “Global warming,” said Fábio. “Rising sea levels.”

  “How does that help?” asked Giovana.

  It was Sergio who answered. “Maybe in the past the ghost ship sailed on the surface but over time the water has gone higher while the ship stayed on its original level, so it only seems to be travelling beneath the waves. That’s the most watertight explanation.”

  “Have sea levels risen so much?”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”

  “How dare you disparage me?”

  “But I never even said that I saw a ghost ship! I said that I saw a sunken lost continent on the seabed.”

  “Like Atlantis, you mean?”

  “Not like Atlantis. I believe that it was Atlantis!”

  “From the inside of a barrel!”

  “You’re just jealous…”

  It was time for him to reveal his idea, Jason decided, before the moment was buried alive under the weight of petty recriminations. So he clapped his hands, his peeling palms attracting more attention with the resultant spray than with the pitifully thin sound.

  “Listen to me! We need to change our direction fast, but as the current is against us, we should huddle close and paddle all together. If we drift too far apart we’ll drown one at a time.”