Read Online The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension by Rhys Hughes - Free Book Online

he heard only bubbles exploding, bubbles without written words in them for him to read, though the accident certainly resembled a cartoon tragedy. Ships don’t come apart quite like this, neatly, cleanly. There had been no sharp rocks or raging storms. Everything was still calm. The salty taste in his mouth was his own blood. He spat and shrugged.
    Henrietta was the only complex object between him and the horizon, but he was facing west and knew the tropical sun must set eventually, with stars to follow, so other interesting items would appear in due course. He wasn’t completely stuck with her. There might even appear sleekly strange flying fish to glide over their heads.
    He turned to look at her. She desperately clutched her pearl necklace and the quivering muscles in her hands caught his attention. He gazed at the loop of pale globes and it suddenly resembled a string of miniature bathyspheres returning from a series of hazardous missions in the depths of her cleavage. He gulped. Then his tension seemed to erode itself, lapped to nothing by the wavelets that tickled his armpits.
    “That was rather unexpected,” she remarked.
    “What happened?” he asked.
    “Your cheap yacht was a waste of money,” she said.
    “I’m not taking the blame!”
    “You ought to. Always pinching pennies. If you want good quality, you have to pay for it, that’s the rule.”
    He gritted his teeth. “But did they spend all their savings on sophisticated hulls? Or did they prefer to take the risk of sudden annihilation in pursuit of a dream of fame and adventure?”
    “To whom are you referring?” she demanded.
    “The ancient mariners, of course!”
    “You are modern,” she pointed out, “and a banker.”
    He sighed. “True enough. I admit there’s a difference. All the same, I like to gamble with my fate. I do many daring things. Sometimes in the office I neglect to answer the telephone or twist paperclips into animal shapes. I’m a maverick. You married me for that reason. On this occasion I decided it was prudent to buy a yacht from a dubious looking fellow whom neither of us had met before. That’s how I live.”
    “So you say. And now we’re going to drown.”
    He digested this. “I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t fret too much, Jason. You’ve done me a favour. My existence with you was exceptionally dismal.”
    He studied her face and understood that she was serious. This insult was a massive puncture wound in his honour, and his dignity deflated like a dinghy ruptured on a swordfish nose. The odour of rubber was probably imaginary but the sense of sag was real enough. Henrietta had dismissed the decade of their marriage without a blink.
    He envied her ability to edit intricate experiences into a score of simple words surrounded by clear spit. There were never crumbs in her saliva, an enigma of drool that also deserved admiration. However mad she may have turned, he decided, no speck of stale food would ever dry on the bib of her straitjacket. It was time for a thin ironic smile: his original plan to commit her to a lunatic asylum had been abandoned when he had first reluctantly accepted she was incurably sane.
    That was many years ago. Other schemes to rid his life of her had also failed, unless a sequence of minor annoyances can be grouped together as separate parts of a single long slow destruction. But they can’t. He had only stopped short of hiring a professional assassin because he didn’t know how to contact one. He suspected she had also tried to dispose of him and failed in almost the same way. That would explain the little pains that had bothered his entire span as a husband.
    But now she had revealed that dwelling with him in full health was the worst punishment! His efforts to strike at her had all been wasted. His time, money and hopes were flecks of foam on waves already gone. Instead of weakening his survival instinct, this negation of everything he had lived for gave him a perverse strength.
    “In that