The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension

by Rhys Hughes

  Moona stopped undressing in front of me, but one evening when she was leaning over the balcony I noted that she had acquired a small tattoo at the base of her spine. Her organisation had invented a symbolism for itself. They were flirting more boldly with danger but it was clear they had struck a few successful blows against the regime. Nothing was reported but there was a tangible expectancy in the air. The government responded with increasingly extreme measures. Now people were not permitted to congregate in groups of more than two. The city became a place of fake romanticism, the streets and parks dotted with couples seeking solitude.

  “Isolation is the problem,” Moona said to me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The root cause of paranoia. You can only be suspicious of others if you perceive them to be outside yourself, separate units rather than part of the same system. This is the key to our rebellion. My movement seeks to instill in people the feeling we are all connected, all part of one organism. In fact our most fundamental principle is that the planet can be regarded holistically as a living being, not merely an inanimate rock on which individuals struggle against each other. We are cells in a vast body. Once this mode of thinking becomes truly established, paranoia must wither away. It cannot flourish in an environment where there is no isolation, no more loneliness.”

  I now understood why her tattoo was that of a blue world surrounded by a sunburst. Colonel Bones was looking inward and forcing society to lose its sanity: the secret opposition had chosen to look outward as a balance and a cure. I realised that Moona was inviting me to join her cause but I still could not find the courage or perhaps the belief. She was dismayed but my contribution would have been superfluous. The government was doomed anyway. In the following month the police seemed to lose the will to enforce the rules. Armoured cars lay abandoned in the roads. How Moona had helped to accomplish this was beyond my conjecture and I could not motivate myself to ask her.

  The radio had been silent for many weeks but we kept it turned on and tuned to the official news channel. This had been shut down on some bizarre whim of the regime, which apparently could no longer even trust its own propaganda. The foreign music stations we avoided because the unthinking joviality of freedom excited too much envy in us. However, in the early hours of one morning, the set crackled into life. Moona had just returned from a meeting, alert despite her fatigue, and we listened together. For a few minutes we were connected again, but we had moved too far apart to reclaim our previous infatuation and mutual respect.

  The voice that came over the airwaves belonged to Colonel Bones. Desperation had driven him out of his reclusion. His voice was very strained and old as he talked about enemies and traitors and admitted the government was close to collapse. In the background the murmurings of other old men were punctuated by the slamming of doors. He rambled on, choking back tears, articulating his words as if suffering from toothache, and finally announced that as a last measure he was outlawing all gatherings in public consisting of more than one individual. I shook my head at this and turned to Moona with a remark that the oppression had reached its absolute limit. It was almost a relief.

  Moona said nothing and returned to the bedroom. I did not follow her but slept in a chair. She must have left before dawn because when I roused myself at first light and went to check on her the bed was empty and cold. She did not return later in the day or in the night. I imagined she had been arrested. My apprehension was a combination of selfishness and confusion: I feared she would name me as an accomplice. I lived for a week wincing at every sound in the apartment, the gurgling of the pipes and creak of floorboards, expecting the notorious knock on the door, the rap of gloved knuckles.

  Only the hiss of the radio soothed me and I smoked the last of my cigarettes in front of the set. Slowly I began to hate Moona. I sank to new depths and understood that I had to reclaim my humanity before it was too late. I decided to search for her. This was my first step back into an authentic life, my only honourable act since Colonel Bones took power and infected society with his diseased values. I went out without my coat and called her name on every street corner. The sound of the rain was like radio static. I approached pedestrians to make enquiries, holding up her photograph and pleading for help in finding her, but they fled before I could reach them, scared of forming a crowd.

  And yet the police were nowhere to be seen. The whirling of truncheons and shouts of “Break it up!” were absent. But the fear and mistrust still lingered.

  I went home and retreated into myself. The supply of food in the house was running low but I adopted an extremely frugal lifestyle, refusing to venture out to any of the state run shops. I even locked the doors leading onto the balcony and drew the curtains. I wept and I hope my tears were for Moona as well as myself. Alternating between self congratulation and self loathing I lost track of time and spent most of my days and nights in uneasy slumber on the crumpled bed, listening to the muffled sounds which reached me through the walls. It was impossible to work out what was happening outside. It was easier to allow my dreams to handle that task and to dismiss the more unpleasant possibilities as simply the products of subconscious fantasy. I was hiding from everything.

  One morning the radio exploded into activity and I jumped from the bed with such force that all my muscles burned with real pain. I had forgotten the set was still on. I wondered if the humidity of the sealed apartment had altered its circuits in some manner, adjusting the capacitors until the tuning slipped to the frequency of a foreign station. But this was not the case. The official news channel was playing music. I crouched before the set and touched it, more bewildered than delighted.

  Outside the voices of a multitude rose on the late summer air. I peeped through a gap in the curtains and beheld a procession of citizens singing and waving banners. Each banner depicted a single symbol: a blue world surrounded by a sunburst. Moona and her colleagues had staged a successful coup. For an instant I felt an urge to join them but for some reason I pulled back. I remained a recluse in my apartment, too damaged on some level to welcome this new age, trembling at the sound of fireworks and carnival drums, envious and resentful of the universal joy and freedom.

  Despite my seclusion I could not avoid understanding the nature of the changes in society. The cult of separation and individuality had been replaced by one of sharing and mingling. All people were now brothers and sisters. Closer than that in fact: the whole world was a living entity and we were the cells that gave it life, working together, discarding the demands of the ego for the greater good. I despised myself for not contributing, for acting as if nothing had altered since the days of Colonel Bones. I still awaited a knock on the door but this time I was dismayed when it did not come. I felt left out and forgotten and my jealousy was only amplified by the fact that I was entirely responsible for this situation.

  At last contact was established with the outer world. An envelope was pushed under my door. I snatched it up and read the message inside. Moona wanted to see me. I washed and shaved and wore my cleanest clothes and made my way to the address she had given. Festivals were in progress everywhere. I was smothered with kisses and adorned with flowers. My route took me to the edge of town, the old industrial zone. The warehouse where the resistance had conducted its plotting had been converted into a palace. An immense sunburst flag flapped lazily above the ramshackle roof.

  Guards marched me to a room at the rear of the building. Moona sat behind a desk littered with charts. Among the flowers that filled the room I noted a telescope on a tripod angled at a high open skylight. She had been an astronomy student at the university and I assumed she planned to recommence her studies. The truth was less innocent and I had a vague feeling something was wrong even before she glanced at me.

  “You are our new leader,” I said simply.

  “Don’t congratulate me,” she replied harshly, rising from her chair and clutching one of the charts. “We are living in dark times, darker than any that have gone before.
We have been so ignorant.”

  “Why did you send for me?” I asked.

  “I need your advice. As you should be aware, the entire world is a single organism, but it is not the only planet in the solar system. There are others. Take a look at this.”

  She offered the chart to me and I approached and studied it. “It doesn’t seem very significant.”

  She snorted. “How can you say that? These are the current positions of all the planets in our solar system. As you can see, our world is alone on one side of the sun, the others are grouped on the far side.”

  “I still don’t follow you,” I admitted.

  “What are they doing there? All together, huddled like conspirators. Gossiping about our own world, plotting and scheming against it, leaving us out.”

  “This is a joke,” I responded.

  She slammed her fist down on the table. “How dare you doubt my word? Our civilisation is in danger from vast forces. They are whispering behind the sun.”

  I glanced away from the chart and shook my head. “Earth might be a living organism but all those other planets are dead worlds. And planets don’t conspire against each other, the concept is ridiculous. Power has deformed your mind. Come home with me Moona.”

  She sneered. “Measures must be taken to protect ourselves. The first step is to declare Martial Law.”

  I felt at last I might achieve something worthwhile. “Don’t do it!”

  Her sneer was replaced by a smile. “Thank you. That’s all I needed you for. I always knew you were weak and I intended to do the opposite of whatever you advised. Tonight the laws are going to be changed, but the danger we face is greater than anything Colonel Bones had to deal with, so we must be even stricter. We will start by outlawing public gatherings of one or more.”

  I blinked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  She moved away and approached the telescope, standing immobile and staring up at the skylight, resting one hand on the apparatus, her muscles tense as if she was preparing to make a sudden leap through the roof into the sky. I waited for her to move or speak but her position and attitude did not change. I turned on my heel and walked briskly out of the palace. I had no more desire to see her again. As evening drew on, the first stars appeared above me and I hurried home to avoid catching any of the abominable twinkle in my eyes.

  I thought about Moona as I lay on my bed. Her attempts at dissolving individuality into the greater mass of the entire world had backfired: it had simply redefined our planet as an individual, solitary, alone in space, and this cosmic loneliness was vaster by far than the loneliness of a single man or woman in society. If ordinary paranoia is the result of isolation then the principles of her movement, the ideals of the revolution that had overthrown Colonel Bones, had accidentally generated a far greater paranoia, a paranoia never possible before the belief that the world was a single organism. The consequences would be terrible.

  My food had run out but I waited eight days before leaving my apartment in search of supplies. The shattered innards of my radio had not been swept off the street: I had hurled the device out of the window in contempt after hearing the declaration of Martial Law a week earlier. The city was almost silent. On the first lamppost I noticed something curious hanging from a length of twine. I hurried past. In the park there were similar objects: propped against trees or arranged on benches, many had even been planted in the flowerbeds. They existed apart, separate, removed from their owners by some brutal surgery.

  Everywhere I went I encountered more limbs, jawbones, parts of torsos, ears and eyeballs, teeth. I realised they were not on display, they did not serve as warnings of punishment. They were not examples. They were simply the individual units of crowds that had been dispersed, crowds of one. Then I turned a corner and found myself facing a policeman. In his hand he held something much sharper than a truncheon. He cast an eye over my whole body, pointed his weapon and cried:

  “Break it up! Break it up immediately!”

  I fled. He was in no position to follow. More than two thirds of him was missing, moved on elsewhere, isolated in its own space away from the other parts it had always associated with. Paranoia was heading toward a new extreme, a position where even groupings of cells would be defined as a conspiracy. I kept running and took refuge in a doorway. The door was unlocked and I entered.

  It was the bicycle shop. The gears, wheels and chains had been replaced with sinews, bones and organs, the shelves stacked with limbs. My first reaction was horror but then I understood that the new government had already defeated itself. By separating a single person into many parts and giving each one of those parts the status of an individual, the regime had dramatically increased the population of the city and decreased the amount of space in which those parts might exist alone. Gatherings had become more likely, not less. In a crowded world, crowds are always more possible.

  I rubbed my hands in glee for I had finally found a worthy role to play. Whether all these body parts had been deliberately stored here by the authorities or whether they had accumulated through an oversight was irrelevant. They formed an illegal gathering, the first blow against the tyrant Moona. I would lead the coming revolution. I addressed my new comrades and urged them to prepare themselves for yet another utopia. The hearts at least took heart, or so I believe. The stink of reality had finally returned. Clearly I was a born leader, for although there must have been a hundred tongues in the shop with me, mine was the only one that did any talking.

  Southbound Satin

  The boat broke open like a nut. That is a lazy image, but Jason didn’t yawn. He splashed in the water, comparing the blue of the sky with the blue of the ocean. The differences were considerable, but unimportant. Then he realised he was standing on his wife.

  He moved his leg and she floated to the surface, gasping, her tanned face gleaming, and for an instant he saw a frantic mermaid made of bronze but hollow and filled with air. Her mouth was close to his ear but he heard only bubbles exploding, bubbles without written words in them for him to read, though the accident certainly resembled a cartoon tragedy. Ships don’t come apart quite like this, neatly, cleanly. There had been no sharp rocks or raging storms. Everything was still calm. The salty taste in his mouth was his own blood. He spat and shrugged.

  Henrietta was the only complex object between him and the horizon, but he was facing west and knew the tropical sun must set eventually, with stars to follow, so other interesting items would appear in due course. He wasn’t completely stuck with her. There might even appear sleekly strange flying fish to glide over their heads.

  He turned to look at her. She desperately clutched her pearl necklace and the quivering muscles in her hands caught his attention. He gazed at the loop of pale globes and it suddenly resembled a string of miniature bathyspheres returning from a series of hazardous missions in the depths of her cleavage. He gulped. Then his tension seemed to erode itself, lapped to nothing by the wavelets that tickled his armpits.

  “That was rather unexpected,” she remarked.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Your cheap yacht was a waste of money,” she said.

  “I’m not taking the blame!”

  “You ought to. Always pinching pennies. If you want good quality, you have to pay for it, that’s the rule.”

  He gritted his teeth. “But did they spend all their savings on sophisticated hulls? Or did they prefer to take the risk of sudden annihilation in pursuit of a dream of fame and adventure?”

  “To whom are you referring?” she demanded.

  “The ancient mariners, of course!”

  “You are modern,” she pointed out, “and a banker.”

  He sighed. “True enough. I admit there’s a difference. All the same, I like to gamble with my fate. I do many daring things. Sometimes in the office I neglect to answer the telephone or twist paperclips into animal shapes. I’m a maverick. You married me for that reason. On this occasion I decided it was prudent to buy a yacht
from a dubious looking fellow whom neither of us had met before. That’s how I live.”

  “So you say. And now we’re going to drown.”

  He digested this. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t fret too much, Jason. You’ve done me a favour. My existence with you was exceptionally dismal.”

  He studied her face and understood that she was serious. This insult was a massive puncture wound in his honour, and his dignity deflated like a dinghy ruptured on a swordfish nose. The odour of rubber was probably imaginary but the sense of sag was real enough. Henrietta had dismissed the decade of their marriage without a blink.

  He envied her ability to edit intricate experiences into a score of simple words surrounded by clear spit. There were never crumbs in her saliva, an enigma of drool that also deserved admiration. However mad she may have turned, he decided, no speck of stale food would ever dry on the bib of her straitjacket. It was time for a thin ironic smile: his original plan to commit her to a lunatic asylum had been abandoned when he had first reluctantly accepted she was incurably sane.

  That was many years ago. Other schemes to rid his life of her had also failed, unless a sequence of minor annoyances can be grouped together as separate parts of a single long slow destruction. But they can’t. He had only stopped short of hiring a professional assassin because he didn’t know how to contact one. He suspected she had also tried to dispose of him and failed in almost the same way. That would explain the little pains that had bothered his entire span as a husband.