The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension

by Rhys Hughes

  As if handling dung, Uncle twisted the notes and corked the bottle, passing it over to me like a whisper. I guessed the symbolism was purely commercial: when I uncorked the medicine, the money was spent. I studied every niche, alert for the rustle of satin, slit skirt revealing a black pubic triangle, isosceles, combed.

  “Don’t I get to see a woman?”

  “There is a brothel secreted in this room. It is engaged. Your task is to leave and anticipate guilt.”

  I shook the bottle, a pallid bloom in the shadows. As if reading my mind, and yawning over its mundane contents, Uncle stretched his fingers and patiently explained that white wasn’t the tint of death for a mystic reason. Not a Taoist attempt to suggest new life beyond the old. It came from the shimmer of desiccated skeletons. I responded that my own bones, those in my thighs at any rate, had gone black, being held in place with titanium pins, which stains the calcium. Uncle rose and I allowed him to guide me to the door. I caught the lift down. On the edge of Mountstuart Square, I waited and watched. An hour later, another wheelchair emerged, occupant sick with joy and horror.

  It was pointless turning the issues over in my sleep, but I had to annul the conventions of morality. My wife, Clarisse, was on holiday again. It was impossible for me to satisfy her, but I didn’t want her to sacrifice her own vibrant sexuality to my impotency. So I was benevolent enough to ignore her manifold affairs. Or rather, my anger was a eunuch. I guessed she was amusing herself in Portugal with a selection of greasy males who based their erotic techniques on the squid that drowned in their soups. Never bitter, I wept sweet tears on my pillow. Having helped her arrange the fortnight, regrets were as worthless as Algarve souvenirs. But still I needed to wrestle my conscience.

  An equal distance between midnight and dawn, I hauled myself out of bed, strummed a guitar for as many bars as were buried in my legs, found a games encyclopaedia on a low shelf, browsed the chapter on China. Very disappointed to discover that the structure of mah jong was identical to that of gin rummy. A lot of the glamour was robbed. The differences were lyrical or pretentious, depending on your outlook. I memorised the value of pungs and quongs of minor and major tiles, of a player’s Wind, of the Wind of the Round. The worth of flowers, no chows in the hand, raiding a quong to go mah jong, a Sparrow’s head of Dragons — as if the mixing of metaphors was a spell for fortune.

  Then I sat back and brooded. My accident had made the world taller, lifting cookers, showers, aspirations above my reach. Clarisse no longer had to bury the whisky in flowerpots. Balancing it on wardrobes rendered it safe from my digestion. But I wasn’t thirsty for oblivion. Liquor and bikes were never a vital passion of mine. Only an unexpected inheritance left me in no doubt I should be reckless. I chose the Harley because our local vicar, Lionel Fanthorpe, rode one. An authority on the supernatural, his attempts to dominate the community of Claude Road were surprisingly secular. Not that I was religious: attending church was just a cheap way of acting the eccentric. The crash happened in Splott, where smoked chrome is a dietary staple.

  I remained awake past sunrise and sat under the letterflap when the postman warbled past. A card from Clarisse swooped at my visage. Because betrayal was assumed, the text shocked me. Composed in a steady hand, an avowal of fidelity accompanied the platitudes. She was having a fabulous vacation, having fixed her massive lips around the necks of wine bottles and tentacles, but not yet over items with a stiffness rated between the two. My courage to occupy an exotic whore had been bolstered by fleeting mental pictures of Clarisse getting one, or a dozen, over on me. Now she had snatched away my justification. I was so supremely furious I plotted to take vengeance on her lingerie.

  First I returned the empty bottle to Uncle.

  “Describe the effects on your libido,” he lisped.

  “None. It stopped me sleeping, maybe increased my heart rate. Waste of money really. I’ve heard about your tiger’s paws and snake blood. All a trick. I want a woman or a refund.”

  “We haven’t taken your money yet. But that’s what I wanted to know. The only way to make sure you came back was to offer you something that didn’t work for free. Had you paid for it, you’d think we were gangsters and be too dismayed to reappear. And if it had worked, you wouldn’t need to turn up here. Take this, Raymond.”

  “Some sort of remote control? Am I right?”

  Uncle chuckled. “Second half of the cure.”

  The room was the same as before. Only the vista through the windows was different. I gathered there had been a collision on the marina, four yachts holed and sinking, middle-class lungs filling with polluted water below decks: retired hands, with all their financial expertise, pounding against portholes, a single bubble escaping from a left nostril. Futile. I love it when disaster befalls other people, especially when it’s worse than my own mishap. Despite the excitement, the scream of police sirens, the mah jong proceeded smoothly. I recalled enough from my night’s study to judge these tiles as much smaller than standard. A portable set, with rough edges and black spots of decay.

  I examined the box given to me. It felt incredibly light. I rotated it and slid the back open. It was bare inside; no circuits or batteries. The single dial protruding from the surface was unconnected to anything. A loose knob. I couldn’t accept this was a pun in Chinese and scowled at the sage, who escaped into nostalgia.

  “Worked for Chairman Mao. He had a problem too.”

  “Come on. It’s as barren as my heart.”

  “The whole experience will be psychosomatic. I claimed it was safe, didn’t I? You drank the tincture of the Celestial Stag; the potion is in your immune system, molecules pegged on your spinal cord like washing on a line. But you need something to focus it. The box fools your mind into believing you can control the woman.”

  “In what way? Do I operate her arms and legs?”

  Uncle chewed his lip. He was repressing a laugh or a howl, possibly both. Normally so guarded, crouched over their tiles, the players leaned back, involuntarily revealing their hands. Jin-Ming, closest to me, held a chow of Wheels, as if demonstrating the evolution of road transport. I didn’t let on. Whatever joke I had told was familiar and a favourite. It was therefore worth repeating.

  “No, Raymond. Her limbs obey vocal commands. The box is to vary her age. Zero on the left, infinity on the right. Every male’s guilty dream, venturing as close to depravity as possible, but turning back to decency once a satisfactory release has been obtained. That is why I said it was safe. Nothing here beyond a charge of paying for sex with a fully mature woman. Whereas in your brain, vileness may take place all afternoon. Not that we wish to know details.”

  I felt no pang of self-disgust, but a loathing of existence that at last might be translated into action.

  “The brothel, Uncle! Hurry now.”

  He snapped his cracked fingers and his comrades jumped up as if the heels of their silk shoes were loaded with fireworks. The mah jong table was folded down into a cube no bigger than a fist, and sickly hands were busy elsewhere, pressing objects into other items, some wider than their receptacles, the nested results then compressed into geometrical shapes, pyramids, dodecahedra and cones, the velocity of the operation violating logic. As if I was the fulcrum of a magnetic anomaly, lacquerware trays, peachwood sculptures, polychrome paintings and terracotta creatures span round me, borne aloft by my four hosts, shrinking on each circuit before vanishing into fathomless pockets.

  Soon the chamber was empty, its entire contents now secreted in the vestments of the gamblers. I was the centre of a void, shivering as each conjuror moved toward a wall and rotated it on its own axis, allowing it to flick him outside, leaving me alone. Then came a stamping and curious rustling above and below, as if my hosts were undoing the external knots of the building. The floor turned and I felt myself quickly sliding from this dimension into another; a world existing under the skin of our own. Somehow, the room had been reversed. A young woman sat on a cushion. She was twenty summers old, but twenty-one
autumns. The scent of jasmine and rice wine was almost overpowering.

  Almond eyes shelled themselves on my groin. There were stirrings in that area and my ruined knees began to burn.

  “Do you have a name? Don’t be alarmed.”

  In the misguided attempt to express compassion, my voice emerged as a shrill cough. Before she could reply, I unleashed the pain and disgust that had been building inside since the skid. Slamming my right hand on a wheel rim, I made it numb enough to rummage in my trouser pockets with no risk of feeling the curve of my decaying legs. I unreeled a brassière and a pair of knickers, both black lace, rescued from Clarisse’s laundry basket, and cast them at the girl.

  “Bitch! Stand up and put these on!”

  She complied with the order, her thin body shaking. But there was a defiance below the fear; even contempt. It was an act and I was a tyrant only by her design. I had a slave’s core. Nonetheless, my snarl remained as she removed the belt of her gown, allowing it to part like the drapes in a chapel of rest. Her breasts were surprisingly large, firm as skulls and netted with similar sutures. Mature nipples: milk had flowed through these taps during the last month. Then I spilled my eyes down her smooth belly and checked them on the sacred wedge, leaning forward to determine the truth of adolescent rumour that Chinese vulvas were slanted at right angles to those of Western design.

  But only the perfume was different.

  Strangely, her performance was incomprehensible at first, as if the subtler nuances of her body language were untranslatable. So I commanded her to dance, beating conventional waltz time on my groin, ensuring that the inverted striptease was shorn of any cryptic elements. Now her satin gown fell in a puddle on the floor, one corner rippling over her cushion like a Dali clock, and she was naked, far less at my mercy than I wanted to believe, but indentured for the term of a crippled master’s pleasure. I used my traitorous wife’s name. Clarisse! Spin for me! Her white soles left sweat prints on the wooden boards as she jumped. I giggled. Faster! Degenerate life: cruel and absurd.

  She raised one leg to slot it into the knickers and I jabbed at the remote control. She tripped and sprawled below me. Reversing my chair, I bellowed for her to rise. The knob had turned a fraction to the left and her body had altered slightly, breasts less full and nipples paler. With the dimmest flush of resentment, she began a second attempt, and I timed this also to perfection, shaving another year from her skeleton, so that the modest changes in body mass and distribution overbalanced her again. How many other handicapped bullies had laughed at her bruises? No sex or love here, I realised; that wasn’t the point. A symbiotic humiliation. A lick of power for a lipless idiot.

  “You noxious harlot! Grow backward!”

  Still she struggled to dress herself in Clarisse’s soiled garments, the choreography of her planned dance constantly disrupted by my control of her age. I knocked another month from her, determined to outsmart her attempts at wriggling into the material. Under the ceaseless pounding of my other hand, my groin had started to share my excitement. Days whipped from her skin. It was most noticeable on her erogenous zones, especially the less familiar ones — the backs of her knees, when they were exposed on a vault or tumble, became less glossy as she slipped back through her teens. I found it impossible to believe this was a hoax, that she really still owned the torso of a mother.

  Abandoning the knickers, she stooped for the brassière. A blink and one strap was already over her right shoulder. Desperately, I turned the knob hard to the left. Her breasts, which were almost straining to enter the cups, suddenly receded. Shuddering, I knew I’d reverted her to below the legal age for coitus. Fourteen, if that; still desirable, highly so, but only with a schoolyard lust. Now I became fascinated. What if I took a couple more months off? How far could I go? Where was the precise line between natural desire, however criminal, and filthy deviance? Uncle had claimed this knowledge as the main secret of his brothel. I was about to join the elite ranks of initiates.

  Clearly this wisdom had been passed down for a hundred generations, from the court of Shihuangdi to the equally imperial retinue of Mao. The public pelt of the girl shrank in jerky spirals as I delicately adjusted the control. She had given up obeying my orders, risking my wrath, which I didn’t feel generous enough to bestow, and stood helplessly before me, legs apart, eyes spilling bought tears; a salt which preserved my guilt. Another tiny modification, a matter of some hours, and I had reduced her covering to a single hair. The very threshold of puberty. A fine tuning, one minute, and I might be satisfied. I carefully pulled the strand into its follicle: to a dot of stubble.

  Shrill, unformed, virginal, she began snarling.

  My nervous hands were incapable of the required accuracy and nudged her over the limits of the tolerable. They had decreased her to a child. I watched in despicable fascination as she picked up my wife’s underwear and pulled it on, knickers and brassière fluttering on her like the skin of a burst Siamese twin. Nauseated by the performance, I reached for the control, finally realising that the knob was calibrated. It indicated 10 years, 69 days, 13 hours. I twisted it viciously to the right, losing my grip on the device, and gibbering as it fell down the side of the chair, between armrest and thigh. Groping for it proved ineffectual. I shrugged in a woeful attempt at an apology.

  For a moment, she didn’t comprehend my meaning.

  Then she knew. She filled the slack underwear with startling speed, while I resumed my fumble for the control. Then she leapt forward with a shriek and straddled my legs, knocking the chair back, pinning me to the aluminium frame. Her breath was growing stale even as it bathed my chin, and it was somehow more disgusting emanating from a partly dressed whore than one fully nude. She was trying to retrieve the control, a matter of visceral importance to her, but her increasing weight had jammed my hand over the gadget. We tussled for access; she had returned to her original age and was now accelerating toward a pseudo-decrepitude. I thrashed but my struggles were mainly symbolic.

  “Uncle, help me! Breach of contract!”

  I was vaguely aware of a peephole sliding open in a wall. The woman had matured in my lap, crossing into her early thirties. Still alluring, only a dozen wrinkles corrugating the expanse between eyes and ears, she was much too tenacious to shiver loose. I’d mistaken Oriental slightness for weakness. As we wrestled, our pelvic regions rubbed savagely against each other, a diabolic frottage, prematurely senile pudenda scraping the final relics of lust from a defunct manroot. Shedding her last frivolous decade, she entered her forties, when death squats on one’s shadow as if it is a stool, resting slippered toebones on the penumbra. A grey streak in her hair; tall veins on wrists.

  At last she greeted the menopause and became wilder than ever. This was the period, or non-period, I most feared: when the drops of sympathy which lubricate a woman’s cruelty evaporate and leave an abrasive desert of awkwardness, grains of brusqueness stripping the patience of any male to an exasperated nub. She bruised both my sockets with her unreasonable tantrums, alternately weeping and smirking down my chest. Before I could recover, she had retired, at the standard age, sagging in my involuntary embrace like a hungry colostomy bag. Pensioner to geriatric: succubus to zombie. Our parts continued to grate morbidly, though she no longer knew why they were there, or who I was.

  “Uncle, for Monkey’s sake! Come and rescue me!”

  With a contemptible rattle, she expired in my arms, drooling senile slime down a chin unkissable even by hogs. A chilly fluid seeped into my insensitive legs. Too old for a feverish bowel discharge, her oedematous tissues dripped their ichor like a bedsit tap. I threw her off: she span through the air and cracked open on the floor. Then her skin peeled in a clockwise spiral from her bones, sinews snapping like violin strings, an ochre marrow bursting from arthritic femurs. Loose and flaking, her pale ribs collapsed; other bones tumbled outward from her spine like starched worms, magnified and electrocuted. I felt strangely calm, beyond horror, as I managed to grasp the control.

/>   The reading was unambiguous. 165 years, 333 days, 22 hours. Would I be in trouble with Uncle? Rocking forward, I propelled myself out of the chair, landing in the centre of the fractured skeleton: if possible, his girl had to be repaired. I assembled the bones as best I could, crawling among chipped vertebrae, powdered tibia adhering to my sweaty elbows, my own shins threatening to splinter under the pressure. Eventually she was back in some order and I rolled away, carefully twisting the knob to the correct age. Ligaments sprouted like shoots, knotted the bones together, served as a web on which to weave flesh. Opening reclaimed eyes, utterly devoid of trauma, she stood erect.

  I watched her hobble back to her cushion. Some essential parts were missing, and others had been incorrectly aligned. She was a freak. While I sobbed silently, one of the walls rotated and admitted Jin-Ming, teeth more vicious than the jagged edges of trampled Willow Pattern plate, who lifted a sardonic eyebrow in my direction and then kneeled directly over the spot where the whore had died. He produced a small brush and swept a few forgotten items into a phial. I knew what they were without looking. I had always guessed, from the instant Uncle Xia had presented his card. Why the women didn’t smile: they had nothing to use. I waited for him to leave and shut the wall after him.

  No sooner had this happened than the floor lurched over. Once again I was back in Cardiff docks. Uncle helped me into my chair. His comrades were assembling the mah jong table and the other furniture. Pressing his lips against my ear, Uncle hissed:

  “You don’t like women very much, Raymond. What were you before your accident? A councillor? A writer?”

  My voice was very faint. “Always a loser.”

  “Not necessarily. Beginner’s luck is a real energy in the universe. Shall we try you out in the game?”

  This was an obvious metaphor for payment, so I nodded and sighed as he wheeled me to a spare place at the table, now a pentagon. I kept calm as the tiles were shuffled like bites. Uncle cast the dice, breached the wall, dealt the hands; fourteen tiles for all. Needless to cross fingers for luck. Mine were predetermined.