The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (15 page)

I travel Heaven, looking for God, looking for Meredith. Because she never deceived me, I search for him in the basement flats of the largely empty cities I encounter. Paradise is not overcrowded after all — it was a deception. The few people I meet also believed they were privileged. The trick maintained a desperate balance, the equilibrium of an acrobat perched on a sword. A new mood has gripped Heaven: with God’s disappearance, people are forced to be free, to shoulder responsibility, to make choices. I am unprepared for such changes. My mentality is too rigid, I belong in a starched past which never really existed. I lust for death more than ever. My quest is the same as always: blood and blossoms.

In a dingy cellar in the last town I passed through, I chanced upon a group of my fellow countrymen. They were mostly ancestors, with a few later emperors and businessmen. After I had forced an entry and brushed the splinters of rotten door wood off my shoulders, they invited me to sit with them over a pot of green tea. Even here I was unconsoled: it took a great deal of restraint not to turn on Hirohito and blame all my troubles on him. By renouncing his divinity he subjected our culture to a fatal paradox. It set a precedent. A perfect being cannot claim mortal flaws. Once a god always a god. Aware of my hate, he said, “Students and deities always end up in basement flats.”

There is still hope in my aching brain. I like to imagine that somewhere there are creatures able to grant my wish. In the rhomboidal courtyards of deserted tenements, dying angels are pegged on washing lines; beyond the cities they are worked mercilessly in the fields; blinded in deep mines they hack at motherlodes with picks. The revolution is spreading. If angels are stronger than God, and we are mightier than angels, who can we look up to? There must be something. When I find God I shall ask him a single question. From Mishima, the very lips. Down there, in his foul basement, before I cut him into three pieces and skewer each one, a holy trinity, I will demand to know the address of his landlord.

Fanny was seventeen years old and her head was so full of romantic thoughts it’s a surprise it didn’t burst and splatter the walls of her bedroom with the crushed petals of rejected roses, the musical notes of wistful songs and those little glints that appear in winsome smiles with perfect teeth.

But maybe thoughts don’t exert much pressure, unlike the more volatile gases. Who knows? I’m not a neurologist and neither are you. Probably.

Fanny was unhappy in this world of ours.

She hated the cynicism and dirt of the city, she loathed the intolerance and brutality of the rural regions, she fretted constantly at the casual cruelties of her fellow human beings, the greyness of the utilitarian society into which she had been born, the cold drudgery of pointless work, the general lack of imagination exhibited all around her, and she had no friends who felt like she did.

It was a lonely existence for her, and although solitude had its bittersweet qualities, it wasn’t enough to feed her hungry soul.

She wanted to leave the planet and go elsewhere. But where?

To the Evening Star, of course! Every night it shone through her window, bright over the distant rooftops of a slum where mad people roamed the streets and shouted their despair, a twinkling point of hope beyond the sooty glass ceiling of her life, a beacon that seemed to sparkle just for her,
to
her, calling out.

She remembered an old poem by a writer named Poe and whispered a few lines to herself. “Twas noontide of summer and mid-time of night, and stars in their orbits shone pale through the light of the brighter cold moon... Proud Evening Star in thy glory afar, and dearer thy beam shall be...”

Perhaps on the Evening Star she would find peace, a magic world where everything was nice and gentle and easy. A romantic paradise!

Yes, she yearned to reach that place, at the speed of thought, but it could only be a futile dream, couldn’t it? Her carpet wasn’t magical, it couldn’t fly, she had tried enough times, and that old lamp on the sideboard didn’t have a genie in it, she’d rubbed and rubbed, like many young girls do, and nothing had come out at all.

So she was stuck, stuck in thoughtless ugliness!

One evening she decided to get drunk on a young wine, partly to forget about her dissatisfaction, partly to focus it more sentimentally, partly because a young wine is a romantic drink, partly because she couldn’t afford anything better. She drank and her head whirled and she fell off the bed.

Off the bed and onto the carpet!

She struggled to stand up, her brain spinning, and in the process she happened to rub the carpet a few times with her pale delicate hands. Suddenly the threads of the carpet unravelled and reared up, forming themselves into the figure of a huge man with a big turban, a giant who stood with folded arms.

“A genie!” she gasped.

“Yes,” he replied, “the fairytales got it wrong. Carpets are for rubbing and old lamps are for flying. A simple case of misinformation. But now you’ve summoned me I have to give you one wish. What will it be?”

“I want to go to the Evening Star!” she cried.

“Really? Are you sure? How fast do you want to travel there?”

“Faster than I’ve ever travelled before. At the speed of light... No, at the speed of
thought
! That’s how fast. Not one jot slower!”

“Sure you don’t want to reconsider that wish? Maybe you’d prefer immense wealth or irresistible beauty or a vast intellect?”

“I know exactly what I want. Give it to me now!”

And so he did. And while he was in the process of doing so, he spoke softly the following words, “I think your choice is a bad one, but who am I to pass judgment? For a start, the ‘Evening Star’ is a name actually applied to two separate planets, Mercury and Venus, both visible for a short time before sunrise or after sunset. Secondly, the ‘speed of thought’ isn’t as rapid as you probably imagine. I won’t go into the technical details about the frequencies of different brain wave patterns, because I’m not really a neurologist, and neither are you, but I’ll briefly state that ‘thought’ can only be as fast as the maximum firing rate of neurons. At this moment your brain is in Beta Mode and its pulse frequency is between 15 and 18 HZ.”

He paused for breath and then continued, “Let’s be generous and say that the speed of your thought is currently 20 metres per second. I’ll have to divide your body in two, send one half to Venus, at a minimum distance of 41,840,000 KM, and the other half to Mercury, at a minimum distance of 77,300,000 KM. The first half will arrive at its destination in at least 63 years, the second half in no less than 122 years. There’s nothing to eat on the way, so you’ll slowly starve to death. But in fact you’ll be dead long before then, because there’s no air in space. And in extra fact you’ll be dead long before you reach space, because of the fatal division of your body. I did ask you to reconsider... Now where did I put my saw?”

There were no rose petals, musical notes or the glints of smiles inside her head after all. His work finished for the day, the genie mounted the lamp on the sideboard with some difficulty and flew out of the window, cutting a few of his threads of the edges of the breaking glass. Then he went to the slum to enjoy a night of hard drinking in the bleak surroundings he liked best.

She wanted to dance at a ball, Fanny did, because it was the most romantic thing she could imagine. Often she daydreamed about this breathtaking event, but the details remained vague and it would have been impossible for her to describe the look of the ballroom or the kind of music she danced to. Not that anyone ever asked her to reveal the substance of her fantasies: she was a loner and had no real friends.

Seventeen years old she was and lightly freckled. Her features were dainty but in perfect proportion. Her small nose could sneeze without disturbing the mice that lived behind the walls of her room and her eyes sparkled like small coins. As for her curls, those tumbled like a cascade of stringy syrup, all golden on her shoulders. But not sticky.

One evening in autumn, that misty season when certain gardeners get ready to enter enormous vegetables in competitions, Fanny sighed wistfully and was about to lose herself in her favourite daydream when she was interrupted by a cough at the open window. Although it was an upstairs window, the highest in the house, a figure was climbing through without the aid of a ladder, a silver wand gripped in one hand.

“I may grant you any wish you like,” the new arrival said.

“Are you a werewolf?” blinked Fanny.

The figure scowled. “I’m a fairy godmother but I have a distressing genetic condition called hypertrichosis. And before you ask: there’s no cure. Let’s get back to the reason I’m here, shall we?”

“It’s
very
hairy, your face,” persisted Fanny.

“I explained why. There’s no need to talk more about it. Very self-conscious it makes me and I’ll be grateful if you don’t draw attention to it. We all have our defects. But I’m a supernatural benefactor and...”

“Laser treatment might work,” suggested Fanny.

“Enough! I’ve come here to do a job, to grant you a wish. I already know your deepest desire and I’m in a position to facilitate its attainment. Behold! You
shall
go to the ball!”

The wand was waved and multicoloured stars seemed to drift lazily from its tip. Fanny stood there in perplexity. Nothing much seemed to have happened. “Shall I?” she whispered.

“Yes! Go onto the street and proceed down the hill. Turn left at the bottom and then take the second right and keep going until you reach the park. Enter the park and walk around the lake towards the pavilion. That’s where the ball is. But remember this: make sure you’re back before midnight, for on the stroke of that hour everything will change!”

“Don’t I get a glass slipper?” asked Fanny.

“Too bloody dangerous. They’ve been banned.”

The magical godmother clearly wasn’t going to say or give anything more, so Fanny went out and hurried along the predetermined route. Gangs of drunken people shouted abuse as she went, slipping in their own vomit and falling onto broken bottles. She passed the spiked gate of the allotment gardens and reached a row of shops, all boarded up expect one selling exotic pets that was really a front for a drug pushing operation. Lizards basked in a glass tank while heroin dealers schemed in a back room.

She continued to the park and saw the lake gleaming in the dark, its waters sluggish with rubbish. When she finally skirted it and came to the pavilion her face fell in disappointment. Here was the ball. Ten metres in diameter it stood, some ancient sphere mysteriously transported from the depths of intergalactic space to this suburban patch of spoiled greenery, the heart of a lost comet or the frozen teardrop of a forgotten god.

Cold it was and streaming with unearthly mists…

A profound silence seemed to radiate from it, tumbling over her like waves of emptiness. There was
no
music at this ball.

Cracks covered its translucent surface and Fanny peered into its depths with a contempt that was now tempered by horror. Embedded inside, deeper than the rules of perspective should ever allow, were shapes. The profiles of strange beings, an empty suit of armour, an octopus...

She glanced at her watch. It was already five minutes to midnight. The fairy godmother hadn’t turned up until half past eleven. Maybe she was overworked at present? That would explain the confusion between two different meanings of the word
ball
. A clerical error due to haste.

Might as well wait for the stroke of twelve, Fanny decided. Maybe the ball itself would change. Maybe that’s what the godmother had meant. Somewhere the victim of a mugger screamed.

Twelve came. Nothing happened. Fanny shook her head and walked away with downcast eyes. In the morning the surface of the ball would be covered with obscene graffiti, she knew.

The return journey was more eventful than the original stroll. In the pet shop window a number of footmen had somehow got inside the lizard tank and were stuck there. The lizards were nowhere to be seen.

Further along, a furious gardener with an electric torch was roaring outside the gates to the allotment. He had gone to uproot his prize pumpkin ready for a competition tomorrow and found that it had been replaced by a carriage. “I’ll murder the swine who did this!” he bellowed.

Full of foreboding, Fanny continued home. Once she thought she saw a creature on all fours dart down an alley as she approached, a monster with a shredded face and huge canine teeth, hot tongue panting and drooling. But it didn’t menace her and she pressed on to her house. Her room was empty but the razors she used to shave her legs were all blunted and clumps of bloody fur lay scattered about beneath her mirror.

She went to bed but had difficulty sleeping because of the horses that kicked behind the walls all night.