The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension

by Rhys Hughes

  This feeling grew stronger as he approached his own street, passing the greengrocer, the ironmonger, the coffee house and those other shops that formed a row that belonged out of its time. My breath comes in short gasps now, he had thought abstractedly, as he speared crisp packets with his umbrella (the shower had moved on) and shook them free in the air. But he was calm enough when he finally reached his house and confronted the network of ramparts and sagging walls that had seemingly appeared from nowhere…

  A brief glance was enough to confirm that the bricks of these elaborate fortifications were actually books. Thousands upon thousands of them; books of every possible size and description and smell, cemented together by dribbling ink. He was barred from his abode by an insurmountable barrier of learning. The books sealed the house like the walls of a cell, lacking doorways or windows, impenetrable. With fingers spread wide, he allowed himself a circuit of the ramparts, seeking a mode of entry. There was none. He retreated, confused. Not only were the walls too high to breach; they were also too thick.

  Feeling like an insignificant element of chance in a monstrous game of mah jong, he had then decided to tackle the problem with a more savage logic. To scale the barrier unaided would be to lose nerve and possibly literal face. He pictured siege engines; onagers, trebuchets, ballistas, hurling mighty stones at the wordy defences. He considered the old reliable techniques of tunnels and fire, of battering rams and gunpowder plots. Finally, he called on a neighbour to borrow a ladder.

  Once inside the house, he retreated into a kind of despairing darkness. He avoided staring out of the windows at the ponderous mass of literature. He boiled his leather belt in a rusty pan as a less than sanguine soup and raided pockets of forgotten jackets for furry mints. It was more than a fortnight later that he emerged, exhausted and extremely hungry, forcing a way through the mountains of books from the centre with a sledgehammer, eventually breaking through into a day that should have been hardly different from any other.

  Two men from the Council were waiting, with an order demanding that the entire collection be removed within seven days. Otherwise the Council itself would take steps to remove it for him, charging him an extortionate sum for the privilege. Ian held this latest piece of paper and sat on the pavement and cried. The men from the Council patted him on the head and left.

  His first impulse, in an effort to shift the responsibility away, was to telephone the solicitor who had originally sent him the letter. It was all a ludicrous mistake. Surely the matter would be cleared up with minimal fuss once the error was acknowledged? But he was unable to make contact; the operator claimed that no solicitor by that name was listed in any directory and that the number he had quoted was that of an isolated call box somewhere in the middle of a Scottish moor.

  A hoax then? But surely even Miranda would not have gone to such lengths for a mere joke? He placed an advert in the local paper designed to set the pulses of bibliophiles racing; no one came. He set fire to the hateful objects; the average rain extinguished the blaze. He waited for thieves and opportunists to complete the task for him. But not a single book was snatched. Not so much as a pocket Chatterton or the slimmest Shelley. The rain soaked through rare quartos and rarer folios, the wind dried them all a-flap like laughing mouths; but no element or agency came to relieve the burden for him.

  Finally, as the Council deadline approached, Ian realised that he had little choice other than to move the whole collection into the house. He worked with a frantic energy, discarding furniture and other domestic trivia to make the necessary room. When the men from the Council returned, pork pie hats askew, gold teeth aching and glinting, they found the reverse of what they had anticipated. Books now stuffed the house (it visibly sagged with the weight) while chairs, sofas and objets d’art cluttered up the driveway, pavement and road.

  The Council men had nodded once to each other, no more, and walked on, hand in hand. Domestic rubbish was fine; stained beds and tables presented no problem in their officially bright eyes. Academic rubbish was another matter; a serious offence to morals, if not quite against the law. They knew that vehicles that attempted to use the road would soon come to grief among wardrobes, grandfather clocks and Welsh-dressers, full of coat hangers, springs and yellowing moths respectively. But they also guessed that the word would spread quickly; the tarmac of this thoroughfare would forsake its vulcanised lovers as easily as the flunk betrayed the cap and gown. Cheap despair and beer crates alone would slide the passage, incongruous as grown men dancing.

  Now Ian sought to regain himself. He kept a sixteen-hour vigil of purpose each day. As time passed, he became convinced that the mysterious Uncle Daedalus had owned at least a single copy of every book that had ever been printed. He also began to suspect that his task would defeat him. He could destroy no more than twelve volumes an hour; limitations of size of grate and durability of storm-tempered paper had imposed this figure on him. One hundred and ninety-two books per working day. Just over seventy thousand in a year. It would take him more than fourteen years to be free. The smoke would cover the world and fill the lungs of new, aspiring writers.

  “Miranda, where are you?” he howled, rising to his feet again and kicking his way over to the window. The flickering streetlamp petrified his features into those of an ancient waxwork, sallow skin bubbling in the half reflection of the blue glass. To peer outside, he had to place his forehead against the cool square and shield the corners of his vision with his hands. Not all was silence. With leaves, dust, a discarded glove, the wind played chess on the patio.

  (iii)

  So Miranda was aghast, but consoling herself to great effect with each passing street and second. Her hair, which had been tied back with a green ribbon, now flared loose in auburn ecstasy and her eyes, the paler green of very early morning, took in her surroundings in a secret, knowing way. Ian could be struck off the list then, she decided without resentment; there would always be others. The love of the new was, for her, an ache and not an affectation; a genuine delicious fear.

  The streets in this drear student quarter were all named after a different sexual position, where some city official, weary of poets, trees and battles, had resorted to the nearest attempt he could make at humour. More likely, Miranda thought, with all of her dear and disconcerting ingenuity, they represented an analogue of all their futile exhaustions, working their way into each and every night only to find aborted time waiting.

  Half a myopic mile ahead, a furtive student crept out of a house with a bouquet of monstrous roses. Miranda doubled her strides, in both length and velocity, until she could see that he wore neo-motley and torn trousers; such finesse had obviously been gleaned from long hours in no mirror. His hair had been badly combed with a plastic knife; he crouched now over a leaf-choked puddle to make a final adjustment to quiff with said implement. Miranda felt naked desire for this careful inelegance mixed with distrust and a purer love.

  She followed him closely until he became so nervous that he slinked off down an alleyway and started running. “Where are you going little man?” she called after him, as she gave chase. Her fingers and thumb seemed connected by an unborn pinch to his taut buttocks. She did not require an answer. A girlfriend was doubtless lingering somewhere, rehearsing a sequence of coy smiles, stomach a-knotted; she would receive this gift with a small clap and smaller jump. She might even perceive in this offering of flowers the thorns of future dissatisfaction as romance became relationship and finally stasis. But not if Miranda had her way. If Miranda had her way, she would not receive them at all.

  Fifteen minutes later, Miranda re-emerged from the alley, clutching her prize, with the red itch of a stubbled kiss firmly aglow on her chin. She shed petals as she walked, idly scuffing them among the leaves that tripped no less rosy at her feet. Now, distractions permitted, there was no obstacle to hamper a perfect reunion with Michael, her second lover.

  Michael too was an undergraduate, but with this difference: he was a poet who preferred prose to verse
, and an intellectual who rated listening more highly than talking. He lived in Flanquette St, but spent most of his time wandering the pubs and basement clubs that spread their webs of sound and smoke and puns directly over the hub of the student quarter, where Croupade Av and Missionary Rd, those twin (and some would say antithetical) promenades of leisure and duty collided in a brash of colour, smell and life.

  Her melancholy had not only worn off by now, but had been transformed into wide-eyed appreciation of the ironies that wailed their sardonic justice all around her. She trotted down Florentine Place, swinging the requisitioned bouquet like a cat, ready for a saucy lunge at any other man who let her come within slapping distance. Heady electronic music, microtonal and polyphonic, warbled from a shuttered house; amplified brass and woodwind threatened to slip over the edge of the sound spectrum and begin afresh from the bass rumble, reminding her fleetingly of the soprano squeak of a million bed springs and the thump of a million headboards on grimy walls.

  This, of course, was an ongoing Entropy Party, a craze that had caught on during the summer and showed few signs of abating. Such parties combined aesthetics and hedonism with a grim rite of passage for unlucky freshers. The format was simple enough: a group of young people would seal themselves, Prince Prospero fashion, into a suitable residence and then embark on a continuous exploration of revelry and debauch that would last until the demise of the first celebrant. It could take weeks or even months, though with the sheer amount and potency of some of the substances being pedalled around campus by acid-scarred chemistry lecturers was more often measured in hours. Miranda had attended a handful of Entropy Parties herself; the novelty had worn thin with the first overdose, and completely dissipated with the ninth hemorrhage. She was closed to such pleasures.

  An absurdity more in keeping with her mood could be found a little further along in the broad swathe of demolished Viennese Oyster Terrace. Here, or so urban myth would have it, a post-doctoral physics student had once succeeded in manufacturing and detonating, in his sink, a small thermonuclear device; so small that it had caused no damage whatsoever to anything at all. But the Council (again with a wit that was staggering) had decided that although there was no crater to mark the folly there at least ought to be one. Bulldozers had cleared the designated space; sweating labourers armed with picks and shovels had added the finishing touches. The legally contaminated students had been evacuated to Brighton, their clothes and possessions incinerated or donated to Eastern Europe.

  New workmen now occupied the space, their candystripe tents and corrugated shacks standing amid the rubble and twisted ends of fractured water pipes. They were re-building Viennese Oyster Terrace on overtime; Miranda saw their swarthy faces blinking in the unsteady light of flickering lamps, chipped mugs of chicory raised to chapped lips, warty fingers flicking whatever detritus could be mined from either nostril or ear hole. As always, there was at least one who caught her eye. She leered out of the shadows and wolf-whistled herself hoarse, thrusting her fist forward at an unmistakable, though not obtuse, angle.

  Afterwards, satiated and relatively happy, Miranda sought out the pubs of the hub, stepping from a sidestreet straight into the purgatory of Missionary Rd. Fumes slapped her in the face; dishevelled crazies launched themselves in front of speeding cars; prostitutes of both sexes beckoned from balconies or shady doorways; dogs yapped; peripatetic alcoholics buried their faces in their hands and sang softly; vomit flowed its ochres and purples down to a moonless gutter.

  Glass crunching under her feet in a wholly inappropriate yuletide rhythm, Miranda studied and rejected first one pub and then another. Their names vainly tried to awaken her sense of wonder: The Nonchalant Pygmy, The Failed Men, The Unsteady Aardvark, The Throwback & Pickle, The Greasy Tension. She had a nose for Michael’s presence, as if his tubular angst threw an electromagnetic field around his body that she could detect. He was in none of these tormented dives; but he was close. She licked her lips and frowned.

  At last, right in the very centre of all, she squinted at a tall redbrick affair that had been thrown up during her absence and lingered at the door. The hardwood sign was missing from the metal bracket above the entrance (a rangy dog swung in its place; a student jape) but the name was duplicated in neon on the slanting roof: The Indigo Casbah. This one seemed worth a visit, Michael or no, and so she gingerly pushed her way through the small crowd that jammed the short corridor that connected without to within.

  Once inside, she donned sunglasses in the murk and tried to appear both relaxed and tense. The mazy chaos of stairways, little rooms, passages, galleries and tunnels defied systematic search. After ascending spiral steps and veering off down a curved walkway that swayed over the main bar, she found herself in a broad chamber near the top of the building. A low stage dominated one end of the room, stacked with unplucked instruments and idle amplifiers. And there, sandwiched between his other literary friends around a squat table, Michael puffed sullenly on a hookah and tore a sodden beer mat into a dozen abstract sculptures.

  Miranda twisted through the packed bodies and reached the table, clambering over its drink-infested surface, scattering glasses and ashtrays, both empty and full, to the four corners of her vantage. She threw the battered and ravished bouquet down in front of Michael, a gesture with more of the duel challenge about it than the love offering, and lowered herself between him and his nearest colleague, a cheek on each chair and her centre of gravity above the gap between; a position that had much of the perilous and winsome in its keeping. Then, with a great deal of determination and a gritting of the teeth, she embraced her lover and contemplated a kiss.

  “How do?” In Michael’s reedy voice the question was neither greeting nor presumption. Miranda turned to regard the student her other leg was twitching against. He was a broad northerner engrossed in reconstructing some mythical battle with figurines of pewter. Rimless glasses flared over the uglies of the Goblin Kingdom. Miranda selected a single rose from the pile in front of Michael and presented it to her new whim, sweeping dragons and demons clear of the beery field of carnage. In response, he very nearly found the courage to glower; but his name was Neil. Miranda retrieved the flower for herself.

  “Seeing you again is a fate worse than bliss,” she said, turning once more to Michael. “I hope you’ve been behaving yourself badly. And I also trust that your depression has been keeping well?”

  “Watch this now.” Michael indicated the stage. A group of musicians were climbing up onto the platform, trailing wires and plugging in a selection of black unadorned boxes. “Anti-noise generators. I’ve been waiting weeks for this. See the cellist? It’s his first gig since he was kicked out of Music College for destroying the brain of one of his tutors. A composition entitled ‘Geiger Counter Revolutionary’ or so I gather. Novelty waxes.”

  Miranda sighed and borrowed the nearest drink at hand, promising to repay its lender with interest before the end of the decade. At one point she had been worried that reality was going to escape her manipulations. Now she did not care; and with apathy came the certainty that it would not.

  “You don’t understand who these people are,” continued Michael. “This really is something new. A phoenix forged from the offcuts of all predecessors. A band of tonal terrorists.” He reached inside his jacket and presented her with a folded poster, doubtless torn from some rotting hoarding. Miranda unfolded it and studied the sans serif lettering superimposed upon a polarised photograph of Istanbul’s Kapali Carsi, the largest covered bazaar in the world. The poster merely fêted the opening of The Indigo Casbah as a vital centre for live music. Tracing with her finger the dates and bands listed alongside them, all with conventional avant-garde names (The Undivided Amoebae, The Spectre Bridegroom, The Vindaloo Bottoms), Miranda eyed both present date and band without a murmur. The smoke of Michael’s hookah curled the question mark for her.

  “Admirable Restraint,” she read. “Neither jazz nor folk nor croon. Music for saintly sinners and radical react
ionaries as writ and performed by Messrs Horner, Tuppence, Jakob and de los Rios with the superlative skills of Mistresses Clancy and Tourmaline to yeast the brew.” She crumpled poster into a wrinkled sphere and used bottle to bat it high over diverse heads. “What does this signify then? A minimalist extravaganza?”

  “In one way only.” Michael indicated her full glass. “Can I buy you another drink?” He jangled the change in his pockets with such reluctance that she nodded vigorous assent. He threaded between friends and bearded acquaintances and headed towards the bar. Miranda took the opportunity for her first real appraisal of the décor. Blue tiles and bluer draperies, shifting towards the purple in the red glow of cigarettes and pipes. Glib and not a little salty, she finally decided.

  Michael returned with cider and crisps, resuming his seat with a groan. By this time, the musicians had fully plugged in and tuned up. Miranda used the brief hiatus to try to renew contact. “Have you seen Ian lately? I’m worried about him. He won’t answer his door. Perhaps you could call on him sometime, if you’re passing? I mean, don’t go out of your way.”

  Michael raised a finger to his lips for silence. The band members had assumed their positions on the stage and were composing themselves with moody expressions and jaunty hat angles. A slightly unusual format even by modern standards, Miranda noted; bass, cello, keyboards and drums augmented not by guitar and vocalist but saxophone and flute. She made a conscious decision to enjoy the music, whatever the result. Michael was craning forward, pulling at his ears with savage jerks as if to increase their efficiency. Miranda tried to catch the gaze of the drummer.

  Suddenly, with no warning, and as a single unit, the group unleashed a crack of sound. Taken completely by surprise, Miranda dropped her drink into the lap of Neil, the armchair warlord, who was too paralysed by a similar shock to notice. She had the ludicrous impression that everyone in the audience was being crushed in a fist of harmony; glasses and tiles frosted and splintered. The music, so loud that it seemed nonexistent, had clutched the root of her mind with a soapy hand and was massaging her spinal cord, or else using it as a bell rope to ring her brain, with firm yet tender strokes.