The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (32 page)

He dipped into the water with his hands. Then he blinked. There were reddish lights in the distance. Houses? They grew brighter but remained clustered in a small group. Were vehicles moving along the causeway toward the abbey? That must be the answer, for now he heard a low rumbling. A convoy was approaching. He stopped paddling and waited.

The vibrations made little waves in the lake. Masonry flaked from the tower. Whatever was coming was heavy. A line of trucks? But the lights were not strong enough to be headlamps. They were vivid but they flickered. They did not pour forth in beams. And some of them were too high. They were more like illuminated windows. Raymond frowned. A train? But there were no rails on the causeway.

Now a dark shape began to loom and with a profound shock he understood that his first guess was the right one. It was a house. But it was moving and was followed by others. A migrating street. But these buildings did not seem like natural neighbours. His raft had come nearly to a stop and for this small mercy he was grateful.

The houses slid along with difficulty, for they had no wheels, but they maintained a constant speed. Waves of heat rose from the friction of contact, oscillating the air and turning each building into a fake mirage. A mirage of a mirage. Raymond grinned at the paradox, but he felt miserable inside. The warmth slicked his face with sweat and evaporated the sweat of fear already there.

These were very ornate houses. Tall and imposing and wealthy. Balconies in the rococo style, with rich curtains tied back with golden cords. And beyond the windows, sumptuous rooms with large beds and antique furniture, lanterns glowing on tables with curved legs. He saw everything. They were not typical homes. There was an air of decadence about them, of commerce and jaded desires. The first one reached the end of the causeway and entered the abbey through its shattered side.

Now the others followed, one at a time, vanishing from Raymond’s sight. He was still facing the tower and the intact walls. Soon all the houses had entered. There was silence. As he drifted very slowly closer, he thought he heard a low mumbling. Father Crouch had spoken to him in the same deep tones. Then he fully grasped what he had just witnessed.

“Brothels on their way to confession!”

The instant he uttered this absurdity, he knew it was true. The houses, each one a den of iniquity, had travelled to the abbey to unload their sins, those acts committed on their premises by anonymous men on bored girls. These confessions would take a long time. There were many secrets to reveal, some mundane and ridiculous, a few very dark. He waited but they did not emerge. And the mumbling continued without a pause.

It was time to make a decision. If he landed on the causeway he might hurry along it until he was out of the marsh completely. But what if more brothels were on their way? Then he realised something dreadful. He knew he had not escaped after all. His oppressors would come for him, all of them, without needing to give chase.

He remembered Genovefa and the extra services she had provided. It had taken many months to persuade her to trade her favours for money. Clarissa unwittingly paid the bill. As his appetite for this illicit contact had grown, so Genovefa increased her price. Only after the miracle did he cancel this special arrangement. Health had perversely destroyed his lust. But all the same he had succeeded in turning his nurse into a whore.

Now he peered into the darkness. Was the hospital coming down the causeway to meet him? Had it skirted the marsh to intercept him at the abbey? As a brothel it must also be in need of confession. And if he lingered, he would hear his shame mumbled aloud. It did not matter whether he turned and paddled back the way he had come or simply waited for the hospital to collect him here. The result was the same.

He found Marcel in his usual place in the lounge. Marcel lifted his hand and Raymond waved back, but the blind man was pointing at the ceiling. There was no need to argue this time. The stairs creaked as he ascended them. The room that occupied the tallest tower was bare. Raymond stepped to the window and opened it.

False dawn was on the horizon. Only the brightest stars still twinkled, but without much magic. Strange how buildings must feel guilt too. Raymond sighed. From here he saw that the marsh was endless. The causeway went on forever. And escape was impossible in every other direction too. The hospital was perfectly sealed.

He heard a distant roar and looked up. An angel was carrying his wife south again. He blew her a hypocritical kiss. Then he climbed out and jumped without any fuss. Big miracles leave a permanent mark, but small ones can be reversed. The wheelchair was taken out of the attic and the easy life returned.

Daniela loved her own jealousy. She hated this love, but it excited her. She was sexually aroused by the idea of betrayal. Her fantasies involved losing an imaginary husband to other girls, especially to her friends, her sister, even a future daughter. She dreamed that her marriage was unhappy and her days ventilated with the scars of lies, in the same way the markings on a clock are sliced by its moving hands. Unbearable but essential. Her heart worked like this. It needed reliable pain to function.

Her masochism left no visible marks, no bruises or welts on her skin. It was internal, emotional. She kept her feelings secret for many years, but one morning her friend Ivan called round. He had been out of town for several months, visiting a dead relative in Belo Horizonte, a relative that everybody had forgotten about, an old uncle who died alone in a chair and completely decayed while sitting there. Ivan had a key to his apartment and discovered the perfect skeleton coated with dust.

Ivan had said nothing to the bones because he found it socially awkward. He pretended nothing was wrong, lived in the apartment briefly and returned home as usual with only trivial news.

Daniela enquired after the uncle’s health. Ivan had come to shave her. He licked his lips and said, “He was very quiet.”

“Taciturn?” asked Daniela.

“Not exactly. Relaxed is a better description.”

“That’s a word I don’t like.”

“Why not? But I find it distasteful too.”

Daniela sighed and closed her eyes. She concentrated on the blade of the razor moving over her skin.

“I prefer to be agitated. Is that strange?”

Ivan had no real idea what she meant, so he shrugged and hoped this gesture would satisfy her, though she was unable to see it. But the sound of his shoulders moving had always been louder than expected, a physical disadvantage he had come to respect.

“I have a perversion,” she added.

“Well, I know that already. But who doesn’t?”

And he hid his slight embarrassment with the shiny blade, which reflected her brighter blush. This was the tenth year of their friendship and few secrets remained between them. Only truly important ones were left, certain mysteries of eroticism and death. Ivan guessed that Daniela was capable of fusing both enigmas and he waited with mounting anxiety for the coming revelation to be born through her lips, keeping his eyes on her lower lips to avoid meeting her viridian gaze and discouraging her.

He had intended to shave her pubic hair into a heart, but now he saw his design more closely resembled a deformed skull. So he skilfully altered it to a smaller shape, a bright sunburst. Daniela rarely asked for anything specific. Later she might show it off from her balcony, a traditional display for the cooling evening, while palm trees waved gently below and the sound of traffic became surf on a concrete beach.

“It’s not really active,” she added.

Ivan raised an eyebrow. “So the rumours are false?”

“What do they say about me?”

“That you make love to jaguars in the forest.”

Daniela laughed. “Not true, sorry!”

Ivan seemed mildly disappointed. “I wondered about it. Rita was the one who told me. I wanted to visit you in the morning to smell your skin, but I couldn’t think of a good enough excuse.”

“You don’t need one,” Daniela replied.

“There’s no point now. I knew deep down that jaguars weren’t your type. You are too complex. But the others can’t understand why you go walking before dawn alone in the jungle.”

“For privacy and dew, I suppose.”

He nodded, wiped her dry with a cloth and nodded at her open legs. With his delicate fingers he replaced the glistening razor in his little bag and stood up. His knees were creased and red from kneeling. She also stood and watched him as he made for the door. He had dozens of clients to visit before noon. He was one of the hardest-working men Daniela had met. His chosen profession had given him expertise in a truly delicate area. He was a scholar of female anatomy, not only its physical wonders and variations, but also its symbolism and aspirations.

She realised he was the best authority to approach for practical advice about her perversion, the only man with suggestions worth hearing. Waiting for her hair to grow again before unburdening herself was impossible. It had to be done now. She said abruptly, “Wait! I’ll tell you everything. Jealousy turns me on. I wish my husband was cheating on me.”

He glanced over his shoulder and grinned. “That’s original, but I don’t think it’s too strange. You desire what most other women have to put up with but don’t like. The main problem is your case is that you aren’t married. You don’t even have a boyfriend.”

“I’m much too impatient for that.”

Ivan lowered his voice. “I’m not sure how a single woman can be a victim of adultery. Those sorts of paradoxes belong to the philosophers. By luck there’s one who lives in the next street. He’s an inventor actually but he experiments with concepts as well as machines. I used to visit his wife on a professional basis. His name is Doctor Morales. I believe he worked for the space program before it was discontinued.”

Daniela frowned. “How might he help me?”

Ivan shrugged. “I don’t know but he’s always eager for a challenge. Maybe he could build an artificial husband for you? Why not ask? He’s retired now and I think he’s bored with life. He’ll probably welcome your dilemma. Go round and see him. At the very least it’ll be something different for us to talk about next time.”

Feeling slightly absurd, Daniela nodded. Ivan wrote the address on a piece of paper. Unable to help himself, he sketched a full moon below the words. As if in response, Daniela’s sunburst began to itch. It was as if some metaphysical conjunction of these two celestial bodies was swelling the tides within her pelvis. Tides of blood and lust. She resisted the urge to scratch until Ivan had gone. This delay in such a simple and innocent consummation was excruciatingly sweet.

Doctor Veloso Morales was a man of indeterminate antiquity with golden hair and watery eyes. The smell of warm dust and desiccated fruit filled the room behind him and made his looming shape on the threshold of the house seem like a sentinel at the entrance of a mysterious factory, but he smiled and regarded Daniela with a certain tenderness that had the signs of a transposed nostalgia. Perhaps he was remembering a lost girlfriend or sister from his youth. He stood back and beckoned for her to enter and she passed into a museum of eccentric machines. They covered nearly every surface and the gentle hum of spinning wheels made her wonder if bees or monks were trapped inside his cabinets. A solitary chair was free of technical clutter and she accepted his unspoken invitation to sit there.

He moved slowly around her but with considerable dignity. Unable to pause or lean anywhere without feeling the jab of a spring, wire or toothed wheel in his back or side, he kept walking. Daniela felt guilty for depriving this old man of rest until she realised he was taking pleasure from making minor adjustments to the positions of objects. Every finished machine was surrounded by the scattered components of those not yet ready. Morales was clearly an inventor who worked on many projects at the same time. As her natural curiosity overcame her formal shyness she developed an unlikely need to know the function of each appliance. Opposite her stood a rack of crystal tubes. The late sunbeams that slanted from a window in a far wall partly illuminated this array and generated a pattern from the irregular alternation of dark and bright tubes in rows and columns, almost a coherent picture, but what it depicted was unfathomable to Daniela. Yet it was not quite abstract. An unfocussed image.

Now her host passed behind her. She swivelled her head but he was already bending over her other shoulder.

“You walked here in your slippers.”

“It isn’t far. Just one block. Anyway, they aren’t mine, I borrowed them. If you were more observant, you might see they don’t quite fit. It seems to me that you don’t know everything.”

“Indeed. I’m not an oracle.”

She wondered why she had employed such a bantering tone, but he had taken no offence and was pacing again, so she nodded at the translucent tubes. “What are those for?”

“It’s a device for making levers for other machines. Most engineers don’t realise that different inventions need specific kinds of lever. Shape and weight and how they are connected underneath are less important than their secret characters. Levers have internal qualities, no matter how solid they are, just like plants. Let me show you.”

Approaching the array, he extracted one of the tubes. It sighed as it came out. Then he tipped the contents into his hand and passed the object to her. It was very smooth and still warm.

“Wood. I was expecting metal,” she remarked.

“Cheaper and easier to grow them. Now roll it between your palms, caress it gently. It’s shy. Probably won’t function too well in a public environment. Not suitable for a vending machine or elevator control. It will be used in some private capacity, to operate a hidden trapdoor in a cellar, perhaps, or maybe even a guillotine.”

“I wish it the best of luck,” she said.

“There are a few mature levers on your right side. These have all been weaned and tested but they belong to contraptions that have become redundant or inappropriate. There’s a slim chance they might come out of retirement one day. That’s why I keep them.”

“You’re a sentimentalist.”

“An optimist too. And dreamer. All the ludicrous things that everybody is or should be. That’s my curse.”

“I heard you were involved with outer space?”

“Yes. A lunar project but it was aborted on the eve of the big day. The worst disappointment of my career! All that work for nothing. It wasn’t purely an academic exercise but something of potential benefit to the human race. Cheap energy. Naturally we kept it quiet. That was easy because it was going to be a surprise anyway. I don’t mind talking about it to anyone who asks, but nobody does and nobody has, until now. It was cancelled because of a single unavoidable factor.”

“Lack of funds?” asked Daniela.

He bared his teeth in a grimace. “Women.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Don’t worry. The female of the species really was responsible for our failure but I don’t resent your kind for what happened. There was no help for it. We overlooked an element that was dependent on gender difference. This element doomed the enterprise.”

She wanted to laugh in his face, but he had turned his back and was lurching into the cluttered depths of his abode, so she examined the finished levers by her side. A console rested on legs next to her chair and the levers were arranged in a single line. The smallest resembled a little finger, complete with knuckle. The thickest was like the hilt of a heavy sword. Idly she pulled the nearest and the position and shape of the shadows in the room altered. The sparkles that burned on glassy and alloyed surfaces died and re-ignited elsewhere. Then she understood that the solitary window was sliding across the walls and with a delighted gasp she guided it with the lever, moving it over the ceiling to expose the rooms above, also filled to bursting with machines. In the sweet murk where her host had ventured, there was a cry. He had knocked his hip against the edge of a table.

She pushed the lever to its former position but the changes she had made did not correct themselves.

“I’m sorry,” she cried out.

His shrug was so laboured it was almost audible. “No matter. I need an injection of randomness into my life. It took me at least a month to situate that window precisely where I wanted it. I desired the light to penetrate my residence in a particular way, but you have rescued me from the tyranny of perfectionism. For that I thank you.”

She regarded this as an invitation to try the other levers. There were seven in total. The second caused the house to be filled with music that was unbearably strange, every object throbbing and resonating like an instrument, including her bones and flesh. She was being orchestrated in all her cells. She reversed the lever and moved to the next, the echo in her ears fading slowly. This third lever was stiff and required both hands to shift. Its sole function seemed to be the destruction of the levers adjacent to it, the second and fourth, which vaporised into gas and dispersed slowly in the static air. She moved to the fifth. This appeared to engage hidden gears far below, deep in the ground, but there were no other discernible results. Not yet, at any rate. The sixth lever also had no blatant purpose. The level of light in the room increased by a tiny fraction. That was all.