The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension

by Rhys Hughes

  The lucky pair who get an hour on the surface have to go in disguise and never reveal their identities to living people. They also have to take up crates of snacks with them.

  Another handcart comes for us and we climb into it. The fit is very tight because of all the nuts and tortillas that take up most of the room. Suddenly a spiral bannister appears from nowhere and the handcart attaches itself over it somehow and we begin accelerating upwards. Just like riding a monorail, not that I ever have.

  We might end up anywhere, in any land or on any planet where music is a phenomenon, maybe Calcutta, Helsinki, Los Angeles, Uranus, Ursa Major, Andromeda or even other universes, Blubberhack, Greasewrinkle. Who knows? At the exact moment we reach the ceiling and I think we are about to have our dead brains dashed out on solid rock, a hole opens and closes like a mouth and we are above again.

  By an improbable coincidence we are in Swansea.

  I conceal my ecstasy and set about unloading the nuts and tortillas. We are in a back room of a venue called The Chattery and I can’t wait to get out front and see if anyone I know is there. I’m hoping against hope that Stuart, Lee, John or Steve will be present so I can whisper my words of warning and save their souls!

  When the nuts and tortillas have been dealt with, we cautiously make our way into the main room. The small stage has been set up with a small keyboard and a microphone. Something simple is obviously the order of the night. We sit and wait near the back. Within five minutes, to my delight, the survivors of Satori really do come in. I let them settle down before I lean over to break the news.

  Disaster strikes! Jan Hammer loses control!

  Something has compelled him to leave his seat and position himself in front of the keyboard. I see what he is about to do but it’s too late to stop him. So I prioritise the passing of my message to my old colleagues. I whip off my disguise and gleam baldly.

  Prog rock will condemn you to Hell, I shriek!

  They exchange amused glances. Then they tell me that within an hour of my death they had stopped playing prog and started playing other kinds of music, individually and collectively. I was the only reason they played prog rock in the first place. They don’t need my warning, their souls are already safe. I am devastated by this revelation. It fills me with mixed emotions in the same way that a bag of pistachios, cashews, almonds and pecans is full of fighting flavours.

  The only satisfaction I get is the news that the only prog rocker in Swansea is Huw Rees. At some point he has changed allegiance. I find that incredibly ironic and I laugh.

  But this means he will someday join me in Hell.

  So I stop laughing quickly!

  A sudden blast of noise diverts all our attentions to the stage. Jan Hammer is helping himself to the gig. The young singer songwriter due to come on and croon her numbers has been usurped by a grizzled virtuoso! She stands uncertainly at the bar.

  Jan Hammer has launched into a dazzling sequence of arpeggios, grace notes and wibbly wobbly tweakings.

  He makes a face like he’s being eaten.

  That’s what the Devil will surely do to him later, when he finds out. Or if not the Devil then Julie Burchill. I don’t envy Jan Hammer. He is committing the ultimate anti-sin.

  All offences against the Devil are anti-sins.

  A terrible thought has struck me. I am still suffused with complex emotions, the simultaneous feeling that I’ve been betrayed by my friends and relief that they are safe.

  Characters in stories don’t have such complex emotions. A slim hope I’ve always entertained that I might not be the real Anthony Lewis but a caricature in a satirical tale by an author I know has now been denied. I must be the real Anthony Lewis!

  I have nothing to look forward to in this case. Just an eternity of cracking nuts and maybe being paired up with someone even worse than Jan Hammer such as Geddy Lee or the yodeller from Focus, Thijs van Leer. Every time I sigh there is the smell of worms. Not because I’m dead but because I’m waiting with baited breath. To see what the Devil might do. He hasn’t done anything yet. I check the time.

  Twenty five minutes before we have to return to Hell. Jan Hammer has just finished an enormous solo. He looks like he’s about to launch into another ambitious tune. A spark of rebellion jumps up inside me and bursts into flame. I jump up too and grab the microphone on stage. Now there’s only twenty four minutes left.

  Just enough time for a song about the history of the entire universe!

  The Docking of Spaceship Earth

  (i)

  The revelation that he was captain of the world came to Neil as he tried to escape the pub. Pressing between the bodies of foaming drinkers, beer lashing his head in waves, he mounted one of the wrought iron staircases and emerged on a rope bridge over the lounge. Even this swaying strip of frayed novelty was bordered with students and jobseekers, the indigenous species of the upper levels. Most were a good quiff taller than himself. They made him feel like the survivor of a shipwreck who must pick a path under spitting rocks towards an illusory shore. He shivered as briny ale crashed down, threatening to sweep him over the edge. Even if he crossed safely, he might still succumb to exposure before finding an exit. Bones of previous customers littered the carpets below, pushed under stools or propped against vending machines.

  The city had many labyrinthine taverns, but The Indigo Casbah was a hypermaze that employed four dimensions to trap patrons: length, width, depth and intoxication. Neil had developed a method for aligning himself in its paisley bowels, but it had cost him his humanity. Over a shoulder he carried a bag that held little pewter figures. Each goblin and troll formed part of a matrix that enabled him to navigate around the devious twists with reasonable confidence. The movement of ridiculous characters across an imaginary landscape corresponded to his passage through massed revellers. He kept the technique to himself; his friends regarded him as a lonely fantasist, obsessed with ritualising his repressed sexuality in a mythic context. They refused to consider other reasons for an interest in games of psychogenic strategy.

  Behind him, muffled by innumerable caftans and virgin beards, music receded like a dying uncle. Neil had come to watch the band in the heart of the complex, but had been forced to leave by a girl with red hair who knocked over whole armies as she stole his chair. Supposedly Michael was her lover, but there was something in her bearing that made Neil decide she was evolving beyond human relationships. Her existence disturbed him and he left before the musicians plugged in their amplifiers. Now chords of ineffable beauty chased him further out, spirals of fractal melodies, woodwind, strings and keyboards licking the margins of his appreciation. It was too sophisticated for his senses anyway; he consoled himself with thoughts of his achievements in other areas. Even Michael had to confess he was a superb leader of gnomes.

  In the centre of the rope bridge, he paused to look up. There was a skylight directly over his head, a warped trapezium set in the roof at a peculiar angle. The night was riddled with chimneys, like an acupuncture patient. Beyond the grimy glass and yeasty smoke (the pub brewed its own beer; inspectors who entered to investigate never emerged) a flame shone steadily. Only a planet could penetrate this smog. The drunkard standing next to Neil drained his pint and studied the star through the bottom of his convex tankard. Dregs swirled.

  “Saturn,” he eventually announced. “I can see the rings. I consider them to be rather pretentious. Those of Uranus are more subtle. Will you furnish me with a second opinion?”

  Neil misunderstood this request for another drink, took the offered glass and raised it to his eye. Thick liquid trickled down, blurring his vision into bands of pale opacity.

  “I never guessed they were so extensive. I see giant bubbles of gas moving about in them. They must be millions of miles across. They almost cover the whole sky. Spectacular!”

  The drunkard retrieved the tankard. “Don’t be absurd. You must have focussed on our rings by mistake.”

  “I didn’t know we had any.” Neil blinked.r />
  “All the junk we hurled into orbit over the decades has accumulated into a spectrum of wasted dreams. That’s our system. When the loop joins up round the back of the globe we’ll be marooned here forever. Spaceship Earth in quarantine, its passengers confined to quarters. Can’t fly into a carousel of solid metal can we?”

  “I suppose not.” Neil was in tears; the insight had arrived. He was captain of the world and must therefore have issued an order to seal off the planet from outside contact. The fact he remembered nothing was only proof that he took precautions to conceal his actions even from himself. The celebrant regarded his emotion with disgust, attempting to turn away on the crowded bridge. Neil reached out to steady himself, hand gripping the drunkard’s shoulder. This was the point when the fellow would reveal his true status. A curious synthesis had taken place recently, making it tricky to distinguish students from jobseekers. If his touch was thought to be sexual, a member of the former class would surely be many knuckles more tolerant than an adherent of the latter. Slowly, the tippler turned to face the mighty shandy warlord.

  Before he could define his position in the city strata, there was a sudden lurch and two of the rope bridge’s rotting slats broke free. Down went the celebrant and his improvised telescope. As he dropped smoothly, Neil leaned forward to catch his final words. They were also descending, pitch lengthened to unintelligibility. The student-jobseeker vanished in a maelstrom of dancers far beneath. Neil’s fractured brain abandoned the enigma; better to reach safe ground before the entire edifice collapsed. He forced a path to the end of the catenary curve, rolling the encounter gently in his one efficient lobe.

  Spaceship Earth? The phrase had been a familiar one in college, not just among those ecologists who attempted to spike motorways with chains of starched hedgehogs but also in the vocabulary of apolitical students. It was an elegant description of humanity’s home, combining purpose with reason. It was simultaneously naïve and knowing, mystical and prosaic, a catch-all expression guaranteed to appeal to acolytes of any discipline, whether alloyed or woolly. It was unremarkable the drunkard had employed it so readily. Everybody in suburbia had on various occasions. Neil even used it himself. But for the first time it occurred to him that if Earth really was a spaceship there must be somebody in charge. That person was most likely to be the one who first grasped this fact. As far as he knew he alone fitted this description.

  The perception that power is ultimately corrupting suggested that a responsible leader would ensure his own ineptness. Neil was ignorant; of life, love and maturity. He also lacked the means to control his friends and enemies. What more impotent persona could be envisaged? Only one who had deliberately sacrificed his competence for a higher purpose could be quite as pathetic as he. It was obvious he had erased his own memory and adopted the role of a social and academic failure to perform his unknown duties. It was no longer necessary to conceal his role from himself; his mission must be coming to an end.

  Cheered by this insight into his importance, Neil continued to poke his misshapen body through marooned imbibers, most wandering randomly in the hope of chancing on a door that opened outwards. The furnishings of The Indigo Casbah further confused the eye, though the hues soothed. The walls were patterned with scalene tiles or hung with shrunken squares of carpet; silk and wool schematics exported from the Turkish city of Konya by a certain Mehmet. The casbah theme was not an extensive one; haggling with staff over the price of crisps and nuts was a convention that many taverns were adopting. Neil wondered if the markings of the décor were a clue to the building’s layout, but other patrons had taken that route to insanity. They were still at large somewhere in the tangle, he had heard occasional footsteps on the roof.

  Like a city-state, the pub generated its own economy. A hardcore of undergraduates, resigned to incarceration, had taken to conducting their affairs in the myriad bars and lounges. Impromptu lectures were given on sundry topics around the massive tables; dissertations were completed on peeled beer-mats; cheats prepared for mock-exams by hiding crib notes in mugs of scrumpy. Neil entered a low chamber and discovered the editor of the college magazine reading for the accommodation page, where landlords advertised property to let. Pushed towards her by the mob, Neil acted on impulse. He selected a griffin from his bag, pressed it flat between his ungainly hands and etched a message with a thumbnail. Then he distracted the editor with a low growl and surreptitiously dropped his notice among the scraps of parsimonious paper.

  (ii)

  Outside the building, at long last, he inhaled the bitter perfume of the raw city and limped off down Missionary Road. At the corner of Gamahuche Lane he turned into a furred artery of ramshackle terraces. Windows were clothed with faded flags or bamboo blinds, litter and traffic cones made the pavement resemble the terrain of an alien planet. He picked over the festering rubbish and dipped into the Feuille de Rose tunnel. He was big and dark enough to deter potential attackers lingering in the conduit. A sack of pewter monsters, he reasoned, made a weapon just as effective as a broadsword. Accompanying this wisdom with a whistle, he fooled himself under the railway tracks into Postillionage Avenue, his own habitat, the filthiest of the student ghettos.

  His lodgings were squeezed between two tall houses falling together like unread books. He rented three rooms, each narrower than the blowing out of a candle. And his breath was not strong: he smoked cigarettes out of the window, a low-tar brand which irritated the throat less, allowing him to inhale more deeply and nurture a cancer at the base of his lungs. His kitchen contained a leaking refrigerator and an electric slow cooker that had been boiling a brochan for several years. Every other week, he cautiously lifted the lid for a lick. Still not done. His bedroom was an analogue of the potential meal: damp, tepid and chaotic. Lacking castors his furniture was supported by towers of slipstream novels that Michael had forced on him. There was also the broom cupboard, home to an ancient gramophone and bottled chemicals.

  Folding his coat over a chair, Neil pondered his next move. College would interfere with his real job, the captaincy of the world. Therefore he ought to drop out. Why study History when he should be steering it? A flutter of doubt in his stomach was soon digested. Sooner or later every student had to be relegated to the rank of a jobseeker. What was the use in delay? He would talk to Michael tomorrow. Now it was time to rest and conserve his energy. He picked a jar of spirits from the broom-cupboard, removing the cloth stopper. Before he was able to fully relax in bed, it was necessary to guard his home against vampires. These were not the old bloodsuckers of folklore, but modern parasites. So far he had been lucky enough to evade their attentions.

  While he was washing the walls in alcohol, a crash of sound erupted from each side of his dwelling. His neighbours were holding simultaneous Entropy Parties. There would be little peace until the first fatalities, the customary signal for a cessation of festivities. The odd thing about this set of raves was that they had all chosen to spin the same track at the same time. The record, which Neil recognised as the latest effort of The Cussmothers, a flock of trainee accountants, reverberated from above and below, East and West. The pounding beat of this group had been known to smash whole terraces into a powder that was then sold in clubs as an ultimate downer. Neil had snorted some: it made him feel like a builder, unhealthy and cloven. A raging thirst for sweet tea had withered over an estimated period of twelve weeks.

  The music was too familiar. The Cussmothers usually sampled records from the turn of the century, editing together brief passages at random. This groove was totally coherent: it seemed they had lifted samples from earlier products of sampling. This had resulted in the reconstruction of an original song, long forgotten, fused from its own cannibalised parts. Despite being identical to the archetype, this new version was superior. To create a real historical work, rather than a pastiche, in the present is more difficult than in the past, where it belongs. Neil was accepting of this logic. He listened with a frown, but his worries were unfounded. His residenc
e would not be triturated tonight: the four outpourings held the house in a stable field of forces, cancelling each other out. Nobody would be plastered on his rubble.

  Gradually, with the inevitability of local geology, the rhythms and harmony shifted out of phase. The loudspeakers were running slow; a much more intense musical experience was generated by this fluke. Neil paused in his work as the meshing of skewed songs strung a net of savage beauty between the walls of his apartment. Only a regular knocking which lay at the nadir of all four versions spoiled the effect. Why did this beat not slide out of phase as well? As the separate parts revolved back into one unit, he understood that the hammering came from his front door. With an excited cry, he rushed down the steps. Who could it be? He had never had a visitor before; Michael and the others used the excuse that the abodes of heroic fantasy devotees were unhygienic. It could be a lost partygoer confused by competing addresses.

  Opening the door, Neil found himself confronted by a female, a tall example of that mystical phylum.

  “You’ll be wanting next door, either way,” he said, “or up or down. I’m too busy to join in the fun. Will you ask them to drop the volume? I have vital dreams to implement.”

  She stepped over the threshold and glanced about at the damp stairs and ceiling. She nodded solemnly. “I have come about the room to rent. I would like to view it first.” Her accent was beyond Neil’s repertoire, a vaguely antipodean lilt. “Are you the landlord? If not then fetch him on the instant: he is called Neil.”

  “Room?” He remembered his pewter advert, that violent lunge against loneliness. He never expected it to be answered, even by ugly men with a Paleolithic mentality. But here was a girl, apparently sane, though one could never be sure, and her mouth was free of irony. “No, I mean yes, I can show you round, but I’m not a landlord. I’m looking for a sub-tenant who is willing to keep silent about the arrangement. That’s why the rent is so low. In fact, you can stay here for nothing. I know how to clean a dish and iron a tie. I’ll brew you tea in the mornings; just make a list of chores and I’ll try my best.”