The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension

by Rhys Hughes

  Uncle tuned his lips. “Bets, gentlemen!”

  Notes fluttered. I carefully stacked my treasure across that of the professionals. Regrets for its imminent confiscation were few. How might money benefit me now? Simply by letting me out onto the street, gambling rituals satisfied, ready for home.

  Without looking, I flipped my tiles over, a gesture of resignation. Uncle kept up the charade to the end. Peering forward, as if to help, he sighed wistfully. “Nothing much there, Raymond. A pung of plaque, a pair of cavities. You needed a quong of fillings, one of nicotine stains, and one of crowns, with a Sparrow’s Head of abscesses to beat what I’ve got. Not much luckier in love, are we?”

  I gripped Uncle by the elbow. “It’s a startling illusion, I know. I haven’t really damaged her. It’s the drug. How long before it wears off? Maybe you’ll let me see her then?”

  The four gamblers exchanged glances. They were genuinely bewildered by my suggestion. Uncle finally roused himself to state the obvious. His embarrassment carried his words like a struck gong sweeps a blown flute, club and pin for a listener’s ear.

  “Wears off? Not from a Celestial Stag.”

  I simmered in a sheen of sweat. Turning away from the table, waving aside Jin-Ming, who rose to push me, I rolled through the chamber to the door. Beyond waited lobby and lift. First I looked back over my shoulder with the panache of an ugly flirt.

  “Do you employ assassins as well as whores?”

  “Very expensive, Raymond. You’ll have to save more prudently if you want a successful chopping. But I’m amazed to learn you have enemies. We offer a discount for bulk orders.”

  “It is just one person I have in mind.”

  He shook his head. The lift carried me down. Outside, I immediately started hoarding pennies for the chance to meet him again. This entailed ignoring the taxi rank and wheeling myself all the way up Bute Street, a considerable soulless distance. Then through town and along Newport Road to sleep away shame, and dream: of bald heads and motorbike wheels being severed by blunt kitchen cleavers.

  Clarisse has returned from Portugal with corked nipples. I can’t bear to watch her dress, not with a clock in the room. She still pretends not to notice that her underwear collection has been depleted. She assumes I’ve destroyed items in a bizarre experiment, and in essence this is correct, but she’ll never guess the foul details. I confess nothing. I resist the temptation to replace what is missing, while passing the shops of Albany Road with pockets full of Disability Allowance. I must save every pound. Keeping one eye open for Uncle Xia, the other for a girl with a shocking limp; these activities occupy my spare time. And now all women appear to be deformed in some secretive way.

  Uncle was right. I’ve always owned a misogynist streak. He has very fine judgement. Before my ruination I was a councillor and writer. There are few more egoistic combinations. Check out the council tax department of your city hall, the horror section of your bookstore. The ambience is remarkably similar. Sometimes I brave the voyage to the docks, desperate to avoid the expense of a puncture. Once I even tried to enter the grand building on Mountstuart Square, but the door with the ramp had gone, and the other led to the office of a promotional agency. Somehow the brothel and mah jong table were still there, stored in the geometry of the room, woven into its actual perspective.

  Most evenings I amuse myself by sitting at the window spying on the residents of Claude Road, waiting for Lionel Fanthorpe to rumble past on his new Harley. I still blame his influence for my condition. His recent success in television angers me. He has been commissioned to investigate ungodly phenomena for a series of documentaries, and he intends to visit Chinatown to interview a prostitute with a right-angled vagina. He won’t find her on the game. She is the game. Meanwhile I paint my teeth with a traditional brush, images of seasons, climates, dragons, avoiding white. No more tolerance for cumulus clouds, electric sockets, squeezed pimples and urgent knuckles on wheel rims.

  The Flesh Stocking

  We were already black and blistered before we reached the location. A busy night, sure enough. Fires dancing on both sides of the river, homes mostly, a few offices, a school; but now a factory had been bombed and the anxiety in our stomachs was tighter than before.

  You never know what you might have to face with an industrial blaze. Explosions, acid leaks, machinery doing unexpected things because of the heat. Always gives me a sinking feeling, racing off to deal with one of those, with the eerie searchlights moving across the sky and the drone of enemy aircraft just beyond the clouds.

  Every time we tried to cheer ourselves by talking all at once until we accidentally settled on a single subject.

  There aren’t too many conversations that tired and frightened men can hold in a moving fire engine during a blackout with everyone feeling guilty for quietly blessing the flames on the skyline because they help to illuminate the craters and blocks of masonry in our path.

  Hitting an obstruction at this speed was usually fatal. Five of us were killed like that a few days before, in Lewisham. A toppled chimney was responsible, though someone said it was a fool in a gas mask and a homemade suit of armour hammered and soldered from saucepans; he was exhausted with the weight while crossing the road and lay down in the middle for a nap.

  These unbelievable rumours were more often true than not. Certainly pedestrians were a hazard, but we never awarded ourselves points for hitting them, with vicars worth the most, as some teams did.

  We generally began by sharing and repeating the popular stories of that week, the bizarre gossip that only war can generate. One of the big recent stories was about an experiment with secret weapons that had gone wrong in a park near Bethnal Green. Some sort of rocket apparently, and the detonation started a false alarm about an air raid. Lots of local people pressed to death in the crush on the steps that go down to the underground station that was used as a bomb shelter.

  To be honest, none of us cared too much. We already sensed the war was coming to an end and that we were the victors. Maybe we were just numb. Lofty wanted to talk about the sorts of things we might do to relax when our shift was over. He mentioned something about prostitutes.

  “I hate paying for it,” said Bumble.

  “Same here; and I’m broke,” sniffed Verno. We all knew he preferred gambling to women and always blew his wages in an illicit poker club run by an artist whose name I can never remember correctly. But Lofty wasn’t going to be deterred quite so easily. He licked his lips and leered.

  “If we all share one girl, we can reduce the cost.”

  “That’s disgusting,” said Smyth.

  “Not at all,” coolly retorted Lofty. “It takes all kinds to make the world a dirtier place. Right, Hammy?”

  I laughed and told a story I had heard the previous week from Newton, my journalist pal who works for a small newspaper down in Brighton. It seems a drowned German sailor was washed up on the beach, and though he was wearing the regular jacket and cap, and even had a medal on his chest, his lower half was dressed in lingerie: stockings, suspenders, black knickers; just like a tart on the postcards Verno’s dad used to keep under the counter when he was a newsagent.

  “The filthy bugger,” said Smyth.

  “Maybe he was an actor in a show,” suggested Bumble. “Probably fell overboard during a performance.”

  “Right. I bet the other side need to be entertained just like us; I’m sure they like a bit of slapstick just the same,” opined Clark, who was driving and so wasn’t supposed to join in.

  “Just watch the road in front,” warned Verno.

  “Sure, sure,” grumbled Clark.

  Lofty nudged me in the ribs, winked and asked, “Are they all soft in the head, Hammy? That hun was clearly a big cream puff. Actor indeed! Nancy boy, more like. Love a bit of sausage, Hitler’s lads do; that’s an established fact, make no mistake.”

  I went on to explain that the story of the sailor was given the front page of the newspaper because the real main story had t
o be censored. One of our own planes had released its bombs prematurely and destroyed a row of houses. Some sort of mechanical failure. Two families wiped out in their beds, young children’s arms found in the rubble afterwards but nothing else, no other scrap of flesh.

  “Who the hell are we supposed to be fighting against? Our own side’s out to get us now!” spat Bumble.

  Smyth nodded enthusiastically. “But it’s not who, it’s what? What are we fighting against? What, I say!”

  “Come on, lads, mistakes happen!” sighed Verno.

  But there was no real concern in any of their voices; the exchange was automatic, almost a reflex. “We’re not actually fighting against anything at all,” I pointed out unkindly. “We’re stuck in the rear, short sighted, flat footed, hard of hearing, but good at putting out fires. We don’t face the enemy at any hour of any day.”

  “In the rear!” chortled Lofty, and he made gestures that left little to the imagination. Then Mouthy spoke.

  Mouthy was the quiet one. I wouldn’t say he was shy, I wouldn’t even say he was especially thoughtful, but there was a restrained strength about him, an odd dignity. He said simply:

  “I don’t believe that story about the sailor.”

  “What do you mean?” cried Lofty. “Are you doubting Hammy’s word? Are you doubting the word of his journalist friend? Are you doubting the word of the Brighton authorities?”

  Mouthy looked at Lofty, and even though the fire engine bounced over a pothole that made us all levitate from our seats for a moment and crash back down on them, his eyes never unlocked from that direct gaze. Then he smiled slowly and explained:

  “Stockings during wartime? The girls over here can’t get hold of them and resort to drawing the seams on with pencil. That’s a common enough ploy. I don’t think the Germans are more likely to have such luxuries. It’s a matter of shortages all round.”

  “He has a point there,” babbled Clark.

  “Concentrate on driving!” reprimanded Bumble. Then he said, “That’s what my wife does. Draws them on. Mastered the art of making perfect straight lines down each leg, she has.”

  “That’s cheap,” mumbled Smyth.

  “Cheap?” blinked Verno. “Not at all. It’s versatile. Shows imagination. I reckon Mouthy’s right about the sailor. He might have been a poof but the stockings are a bit farfetched.” He nodded to himself and evidently decided the conversation was over.

  But Lofty didn’t like one of the implications of his speech. “What are you saying? The stockings and the rest aren’t true but he was still a poof? So he was a poof just because he was a sailor, is that it? My brother’s in the Navy and has been for the past three years. You’re suggesting there’s something wrong with him now?”

  “Calm down, lads. Take it easy,” said Bumble.

  I thought it unlikely that a fight might take place there and then, but it clearly wasn’t a good thing to be heading towards a job, especially one as nasty as an industrial blaze, with the mood souring between two members of our team. As I wondered how to defuse the tension, Mouthy spoke up again. He was loquacious tonight.

  “Not every man who wears the clothes of women necessarily feels an attraction to other men. That’s just an assumption; you have no evidence for it. Surely it’s more likely that such a man likes women more than the average man? He likes them so much that he wants to be like them. That’s an alternative theory, a better one.”

  Verno exchanged glances with Lofty; Bumble with Smyth; and Clark risked a brief glance back over his shoulder to meet my own eyes. The sheer eccentricity of Mouthy’s opinion was bewildering to us. I thought he must have been joking; the others decided he was drunk. Or genuinely mad. After all, that did happen. Men lost their minds as well as their lives in the nightly dance of the infernos.

  “Twisted thinking,” said Smyth.

  Lofty leaned forward, frowning with a great effort. “I’ve just realised something. That sort of man must be extinct now in Britain. The sort of man who wears lingerie. With the unavailability of stockings, he simply can’t get up to those games. It’s impossible. Whether he’s a poof or not, there’s no opportunity left for him.”

  “No silk, no satin,” said Verno.

  “Nothing in the shops for him to linger around, pretending to examine hats while staring out of the corner of his eye. The temptation has been removed for him,” added Bumble.

  “Good. That’s settled,” I remarked firmly.

  The argument had been nipped, but the tension didn’t disperse, as it should have done. Silence filled the cramped space; we fidgeted, rubbed our sooty faces, became more acutely aware of the pressure of our bony knees pushing against other knees.

  I was almost grateful to get my first look at our destination through the grimy window. A factory behind a warehouse. The tall windows were already shattering with the heat. Tongues of orange flame rose up and broke off and had an independent life for whole seconds; at the same time they were reflected in the inky waters of the dock to one side, sliding like overcharged electric eels on the surface, then diving out of sight; a lovely optical illusion that was also disturbing.

  Clark no longer needed to strain to make out the quality of the terrain we passed over. The road was sufficiently bright. He rumbled us down to a spot neither too near nor far; we jumped out and unwound the hose. It was too late to put this one out; we couldn’t save the building from being demolished even if the fire was extinguished rapidly. Bricks popped and tumbled in clouds of scorching dust.

  The structural integrity of the factory had been fatally damaged. Down it would come, one way or another.

  But we had a job to do. We never stand back and watch, not our team. It’s a code of honour or some such; maybe we’re just more idiotic than we ought to be, or feel guiltier for not fighting properly. I don’t know the true answer to that, but we connected the hose, got the pressure up, and four of us held onto the hissing rubber snake as it tried to buck us off. The arc of water was a solid tube with enough force to prop the sagging front wall up as it pounded against the bricks.

  “Step closer! Forward!” barked Verno.

  We did so. The accelerated gurgling through the hose tucked in my armpit always made me giggle; I imagine this is how an elephant’s trunk must feel like if you hold it while the beast is sucking up water from a pond. The thought was whimsical, escapist. Mouthy was staring at the façade of the factory. He frowned.

  And now occurred one of those situations that means our job is always a prime source of future anecdotes. This one would be retold in the pub for years. A barrage balloon broke free of its mooring cable and started drifting slowly towards the inferno.

  I heard the hiss and slap of the cable at it struck the ground half a mile away. There’s a system called Double Parachute/Ripping or DP/R which entails a parachute opening and letting the heavy mooring line float down without killing anyone; but this parachute didn’t properly deploy and the line lashed the ground like a monstrous whip. Would have sliced off heads if any were available. At the same time, a vent should have opened in the balloon so it deflated harmlessly.

  But that’s not what happened. The balloon canopy remained fully inflated and when it was directly over the heart of the blaze it began to change colour. The heat should have expanded the helium inside the rubber-coated cotton and sent the thing soaring upwards, but maybe some freak current of air pushed it down.

  They do say that if a fire is hot enough it sucks in the air around it, but I don’t think that was the case here. Whatever the reason for the sudden loss of altitude, the balloon visibly crisped and then it exploded with an almighty detonation, just like a party balloon that floats into a birthday candle flame but magnified again and again and again, a million times. The reverberation echoed off the hot brick walls and re-echoed off the wooden warehouse and stunned us.

  I felt blinded for a few moments as well as deafened. Shreds of rubber drifted down around us, tatters of shredded barrage balloon like military confet
ti, perhaps celebrating the marriage of reason and nightmare; or so I fancifully thought. When we had recovered our senses we blinked at each other and Verno displayed his teeth.

  “Where’s Mouthy? Where the hell is he?”

  “Did the balloon kill him?” wondered Bumble. “Who the hell are we fighting against?” he added. It was his favourite catchphrase and not just because he knew it annoyed us.

  “Not who, but what!” insisted Smyth. He had a theory it was easier to know what you were fighting for than what you were fighting against. Or the other way around, I can’t remember.

  “Shut up, for Gawd’s sake!” bellowed Verno.

  I spotted a dark silhouette beyond the gaping main door of the factory. I couldn’t imagine why our quiet colleague had decided to become a hero over such a stupid thing as a factory. Did he think there were people still trapped inside? Had he heard voices?

  “Mouthy! You idiot! Come back out here!”

  I said, “Can you hold the hose without me? I’ll go and get him!” Then I began running, sliding over rubble, the arc of water above me like a monochrome rainbow vanishing through the eye of an upper window. I jumped through the main door. Flames. Blackened machinery and rows of crates. The crates were blazing and the things they contained were also blazing and Mouthy was crouching.

  I saw what he was doing. He was dipping his gloved hands into fire and scooping up smoking pencils. Dozens of them. This was a pencil factory! He was trying to stuff them into the pockets of his trousers and his face was bright, brighter than the reflected glare should have made it. I called out but he didn’t heed me.

  I couldn’t comprehend the value of those writing implements to him but his greed and excitement were intense. So many different kinds of pencil! The entire trove of the Penguin Pencil Company’s Fine Arts Lead Pencils (slogan: thirteen degrees of hardness) was open to him alone. From the crumbly soft 6B to the spike-like 6H; and he wanted them all. And he was oblivious to everything else.