Sexing the Cherry (12 page)

The brothel was a place of great skilfulness. When we came to the door a wooden flap was lifted and a pair of ferret eyes took us in. Inside there were noises of pain and misery such as we will hear in Hell. This counterfeit of the damned seemed strange to me, the more so when I was allowed to peep into a chamber and saw a man, naked but for a mask he wore, being branded on the buttocks with a hot iron. The woman who plunged the livid stick into his flesh was no taller than a child and looked a child from behind, though I was told she was well over sixty. When she turned around I saw her face was wrinkled and patched and her lips were white.

Pig fat,' said my accomplice. 'She is entirely covered in pig fat but the lips are larded to whiten them.'

I asked why this was.

'The man is a farmer of pigs. He loves pigs, but his wife no longer allows him to creep into their hindparts with his member. He comes to us and we punish him for his temptations. Look.'

I put my eyes back to the flap and saw that the man had been branded with the sign of a rutting pig. He was groaning with pain, but when the dwarf woman turned him over with her still-hot prong his member was swollen and hard out in front of him with lust. I heard a snorting, and a pig was driven into the room, wild with fright. The man leaped at it and, holding it fast between his legs, continued his pleasure with deep thrusts while the dwarf heated up the iron again.

'Is this the usual manner of satisfaction?' I asked.

There is no usual manner/ she said. There is only the unusual. These men are of God's Elect, do you not know?

Surely God's Elect are entitled to pleasure?' Then she laughed hideously and told me the man was a great supporter of Cromwell and would be dead by morning.

'Do you trade only in Puritans then?'

'We trade in those who need us. Have you not seen their sheets with holes?'

I said I had not, but had heard of them from the wife of my parson, Preacher Scroggs.

'We have no shortage of preachers here,' she said. 'Look.'

She led to another door and opened the flap. On a low bed a woman was being entered in the usual position, but on top of the man was another man, clinging as a beetle to a raft and busy by the back passage.

'How heavy that must be for the woman,' I cried, and at the same moment the two men sat up and began embracing each other and wiping each other's faces with their emissions.

It was then that I recognized them.

'It is Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace.'

My friend clapped her hand over my mouth and drew me into a private room where cakes were set out for the two of us.

I explained my association with those unrepentant vermin and asked if I might have a favour in return for my pains with the bodies.

She said I might, and the next time Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace visited the Spitalfields brothel this is what happened...

It was a fine night, the moon fair in the clouds, the weather warm. I had spent the few days previous constructing a revolving panel set in the wall. I fastened myself to the offside and waited for my clients to arrive.

Scroggs came first, in a purple nightdress affair. Then Fire-brace in a toga of some kind. They were to play Caesar and Brutus before the quarrel. Unable to contain myself, I waited long enough to see Firebrace's monstrous member rise beneath his skirts, then I swung into the wall and shot the revolving panel into the room. Both men screeched and were much taken aback, but they could not tell it was me, only some giant in the uniform of an executioner. My platform was an executioner's dais and I had a block upon it carved by myself. I had whetted the axe only an hour before. It still sparkled in the candlelight.

'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,' I said, quoting from a playwright whose name I can't remember.

The pair laughed nervously and Firebrace said he hadn't paid for any extra entertainment.

'Then you can pay for it now,' said I, stepping down and swinging at him with my axe. I missed on purpose, but it gave them a chance to see how sharp the thing was, as it sliced the bed in half.

'Please continue with your pleasure.' I waved my hand in a gracious gesture.

Scroggs reached up to ring the bell, but I chopped the cord and one of his thumbs as he did so. I have never seen so much bobbing and screaming over a minor injury.

Firebrace, not in the least loyal, but most like to Brutus in his treachery, tried to escape through the window, but I soon had his leg off and left him hopping in circles and begging for mercy.

I pulled off my mask and let them see me.

'Preacher Scroggs, on to the block if you will.'

He would not, and I was forced to hold him there myself while I tied him to the rings I had thoughtfully provided in case of such cowardly manners.

Think of the King,' I said, 'who lay on the block as a lamb to slaughter and never uttered a word.'

Then, without more ado, because I am not a torturer, I took his head off in one clean blow and kicked him off the block.

By this time Firebrace was whimpering in a corner and had soiled his toga with excrement.

'What a sight,' I sneered. 'Are you weeping for your leg? I will bring it and reunite it with your body.'

I fetched his leg from by the window and offered it to him, but he only lamented more loudly and begged me to spare him.

'I may not spare you,' I said. 'For I would rather spare all those who would come into contact with you, were you to be left alive.'

Then I picked him up by the neck, the way a terrier does a rat, and dropped him senseless on the block. That he was unconscious was better for him, my axe having lost its edge so that I was obliged to use two strokes before I could fully sever the head.

My work finished I opened the door, and an eager crowd of good gentlemen poured in, anxious to disport themselves amongst these ruins.

I looked back and saw that one already had Scroggs on the remains of the bed. He was mounting him from behind, all the while furiously kissing the severed head.

I went to the pump where I had once washed myself and all my clothes in favour of love, and I took off what I was wearing and doused myself properly. I wanted no trace of that ungodly pair. When I was clean I walked home naked and burned my clothes in a quiet fire. No one saw me. Like the angels, I can be invisible when there is work to be done.

THE NATURE OF TIME

My experience of time is mostly like my experience with maps. Flat, moving in a more or less straight line from one point to another. Being in time, in a continuous present, is to look at a map and not see the hills, shapes and undulations, but only the flat form. There is no sense of dimension, only a feeling for the surface. Thinking about time is more dizzy and precipitous.

Thinking about time is like turning the globe round and round, recognizing that all journeys exist simultaneously, that to be in one place is not to deny the existence of another, even though that other place cannot be felt or seen, our usual criteria for belief.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular - an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

Outside of the rules of daily time, not to be is as exact as to be. We can't talk about all that the universe contains because to do so would be to render it finite and we know in some way, that we cannot prove, that it is infinite. So what the universe doesn't contain is as significant to us as what it does. There will be a moment (though of course it won't be a moment) when we will know (though knowing will no longer be separate from being) that we are a part of all we have met and that all we have met was already a part of us.

Until now religion has described it better than science, but now physics and metaphysics appear to be saying the same thing. The world is flat and round, is it not? We have dreams of moving back and forward in time, though to use the words back and forward is to make a nonsense of the dream, for it implies that time is linear, and if that were so there could be no movement, only a forward progression. But we do not move through time, time moves through us. I say this because our physical bodies have a natural decay span, they are one-use-only units that crumble around us. To everyone, this is a surprise. Although we see it in parents and our friends we are always amazed to see it in ourselves. The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I'. We feel it as absolutely part but not at all part of who we are. Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise. And so we cannot move back and forth in time, but we can experience it in a different way. If all time is eternally present, there is no reason why we should not step out of one present into another.

The inward life tells us that we are multiple not single, and that our one existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end. When we say, 'I have been here before,' perhaps we mean, 'I am here now,' but in another life, another time, doing something else. Our lives could be stacked together like plates on a waiter's hand. Only the top one is showing, but the rest are there and by mistake we discover them.

Our inward life of pure time is sluggish or fast-flowing depending on our rate of conductivity. Just as certain metals and alloys when suitably cooled conduct electricity without generating any heat, and therefore without losing any of the energy they are carrying, so certain people may be superconductors for time. As well as experiencing time as we normally understand it, they may experience time as a larger, all encompassing dimension and so be in touch with much more than the present. Artists and gurus are, in the language of science, superconductors.

Our rate of conductivity is probably determined by an ability, learned or innate, to make the foreground into the background, so that the distractions of the everyday no longer take up our energy. Monks and contemplatives have tried to achieve this by withdrawing from the world - utter concentration, trance-like concentration, is what is needed. Passion, delirium, meditation, even out-of-body, are words we use to describe the heightened condition of superconductivity. It is certainly true that a criterion for true art, as opposed to its cunning counterfeit, is its ability to take us where the artist has been, to this other different place where we are free from the problems of gravity. When we are drawn into the art we are drawn out of ourselves. We are no longer bound by matter, matter has become what it is: empty space and light.

Empty space and light. For us, empty space is space empty of people. The sea blue-black at night, stretched on a curve under the curve of the sky, blue-black and pinned with silver stars that never need polish. The Arctic, where the white snow is the white of nothing and defies the focus of the eye. Forests and rain forests and waterfalls that roar down the hollows of rocks. Deserts like a burning fire. Paintings show us how light affects us, for to live in light is to live in time and not be conscious of it, except in the most obvious ways. Paintings are light caught and held like a genie in a jar. The energy is trapped for ever, concentrated, unable to disperse.

Still life is dancing life. The dancing life of light.

PAINTINGS I: 'A Hunt in a Forest'. A forest at night. Men in coloured tunics are riding fierce horses. Dogs bark. Disappearing distance into distance into distance the riders get smaller and vanish. Uccello. The coming of perspective.

When I saw this painting I began by concentrating on the foreground figures, and only by degrees did I notice the others, some so faint as to be hardly noticeable.

My own life is like this, or, I should say, my own lives. For the most part I can see only the most obvious detail, the present, my present. But sometimes, by a trick of the light, I can see more than that. I can see countless lives existing together and receding slowly into the trees.

TIME 4: Did my childhood happen? I must believe it did, but I don't have any proof. My mother says it did, but she is a fantasist, a liar and a murderer, though none of that would stop me loving her. I remember things, but I too am a fantasist and a liar, though I have not killed anyone yet.

There are others whom I could ask, but I would not count their word in a court of law. Can I count it in a more serious matter? I will have to assume that I had a childhood, but I cannot assume to have had the one I remember.

Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it. I have heard people say we are shaped by our childhood. But which one?

I was walking around the island today when I found a deep pit full of worn-out ballet shoes. The satin was stained and the toes were scuffed through in holes. I followed the track which led from the pit up a short hill and along a ridge thick with blue stone. I soon came to a handsome house, quite out of keeping with the wild surroundings. I pulled on the doorbell but no one answered. Determined now to seek an end to my mystery, I climbed up the side of the house and managed to get in through a double window on the top floor. Inside, the rooms were wooden-floored and without furnishings, though each had a large fireplace and in each fireplace a cast of embers or a furious blaze warmed the room.