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

them. Carlos took me at every angle known to geometry. The creak of the boards you kept complaining about was really the groaning of our hammock as he serviced me under your feet.”
    Jason looked at Carlos, but the blink and grin combination appeared to be that fellow’s only reaction to anything, his sole comment on the cosmos and all its properties. Henrietta now began to drift closer to her illicit lover as if caught in his emotional riptide.
    Jason stopped punching the sea and whimpered, “But how long has this sordid romance been going on?”
    Henrietta’s cheeks were no longer crimson. She was defiant. “You should be more specific than that,” she said, clutching her lover, entwining her lithe arms and legs about him. “Which part of our affair are you alluding to? Love isn’t homogenous. The best parts have been going on for years, right under your dripping twitching nose.”
    “I must confess to some astonishment.”
    And that was no lie.
    “A dose of surprise will do you good,” Henrietta remarked, “even though it has arrived somewhat late.”
    But Jason was shaking his head at something else. “My nose may twitch, but it never drips and never will. It was dried up forever by an island curse long before I met you. I was with a local girl then, Amelia her name was, the daughter of a plantation owner.”
    “What do I care about any of that?” Henrietta barked, her dress billowing around her and her lover like the hood of a jellyfish. She kicked her legs and so altered course. South now.
    A memory burst deep inside Jason’s brain, poured its juice along the arid channels of his mind, flooded his dry cerebral corners. São Tomé more than three decades ago, still in the grip of a paranoid regime that had banned the smoking of cigarettes on the shore in case the smoker was a spy signalling to a submarine with the glowing tip. Amelia’s generous form enveloping him in the scented dusk, fireflies drifting through the open windows of the shack, a guitar playing softly somewhere, the pounding of the surf on the rocks and a ripple of laughter from a porch.
    Suddenly the door was flung open and her father stood like an outline cut from a lunar eclipse, reddish and bruised, a face daubed with bloody circles that might be craters, a neck hung with a dozen seashell necklaces. Pointing directly at Jason’s nose with the index finger of his left hand he began a song that would have been foolish in a film or book but had an awful resonance in this balmy reality. Then he danced a few ungainly steps, forward, backward, bowed politely, closed the door.
    “What did he do?” Jason had whispered.
    “He cursed your nose,” answered Amelia, collecting her clothes, turning away from him, her firm dark body as remote to him now as the mainland, that continent hulking unseen over the eastern horizon, the less benign face of the equatorial dream. She would leave and he would never see her again. It was an unspoken certainty.
    “That story happens to be true,” sighed Jason.
    “Just your nose?” asked Henrietta.
    “He didn’t dare curse the rest. The government wanted to discourage the old beliefs, to penalise sorcerers and put them in jail if all else failed. It was a strange time, very oppressive.”
    “I remember those days,” mumbled Carlos.
    Jason shivered and hugged himself. He did those actions both in the past and in the present, so the memory was a mirror image across time of the man who remembered. Then he grew ashamed, angry with himself for sharing his experience with his wife and her paramour, but they hadn’t understood much from his actions and he was safer than he realised. He noticed how they were drifting further away every minute.
    Another object abruptly erupted from the depths.
    Not a wardrobe this time, but a barrel. The empty one that Jason had kept in the storeroom behind the galley. It bobbed on the surface like a section of butchered whale, sparkling with brine, blowing mist through the