The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (20 page)

“An error, Raymond. I’ll take your cash, but you’ve placed a bet on our game. It’s against the rules.”

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.