The Caretaker in The House of Lust

Play nicely

“Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”
― Haruki Murakami

Brass Eliza died. That was her name because she was a brass and her parents lumbered her with the name Elizabeth, after the queen. She had quite the gig brassing though. No real sex, just PVC, whips, humiliation, and a predictable portfolio of customers comprised of what you’d expect; lawyers, judges, politicians, company directors and the like. Money can’t buy you love but it can rent you some relief for that stomach churning, genital burning lust you’re too embarrassed and rightfully ashamed to share with that complete stranger you’ve shared a bed with every night for the past twenty years.

I’ve never really been into all that whipping malarkey. If I want humiliation, I’ll spend a few minutes with myself, recalling those things I’ve said and done that are so woven into the fabric of my consciousness you could probably see them etched on my brain with the right equipment. No, I want a woman to yield to my seduction. In the first place she’s already seduced me, just by the way she looks, speaks, behaves. And whether she knows she’s doing it or not, whether it’s intentional or the unconscious semiotic conversation of codes that have developed since the chemical swamp, I’m seduced. The lady draws first blood, and now I want to tease her into yielding, to lay back, to open her legs. And from there we just see where our entangled and damaged libidos take us. It’s simple really, the infinitely complicated way of sex.

Jessie, worked the door in a clip-joint in Soho, London. I’d walk past her every day when I went out for my morning tea at Bar Italia. Pure female sexuality, a monument to lust. It was her job to lure the half-pissed city boys, and full pissed tourists into the grotty little con-job downstairs; five plastic chairs, a plank of wood on a milkcrate for a table, and when a hot girl comes from out the back and sits next to you, unbeknownst to you, you’re now hiring an escort at one hundred pounds, basic rate. The drinks are ten quid a pop, whatever you have. Some don’t even have liquor licenses and you’re drinking no alcohol booze. What a party.

If you stayed there long enough a fifty-year old woman came onto the stage, the kind of woman you could tell was beautiful in her day, but her day had long passed, shed like a snake skin to reveal something grotesque and repellant, and the thought of her taking her clothes off would be like catching your nan scrubbing her snatch raw in the bath. So, it’s time to leave. The old dear doesn’t care though, that was her job, a legality, a mere formality because Jessie promised a stripper, so a stripper you got. That there’s a chance another layer of skin might come off with her sequin leotard matters not, the clip-joint had clipped, and the bill is served: Escort service times three, drinks, stripper, and at around three hundred pounds each, the staff wait for the inevitable and understandable argument to start, as it always does, so they slowly disappear behind curtains until two 6’ 5” ex-Soviet special forces animals appear from nowhere, shut you up, grab you by the neck and accompany you to the nearest ATM to get the money. What a night out.

A stunning, curvaceous woman, Jessie’s breasts wobbled and bounced, always on the cusp of just popping free of the tiny basque that must have had some kind of industrial fixings around the back as there was no way the standard brassiere fixings I’d fumbled free a thousand times before, drunk and in the dark of many a random girls bedroom, would hold those monsters back. The biggest cans I’ve ever seen.

One afternoon and she was looking particularly delightful, her hair was salon fresh and her make-up was caked-up like a sexy cartoon self-portrait of herself, on herself. “Hello” I said, which was as far as I’d got in the two-weeks I’d been living in my new flat on Rupert Street, the windows of which looked straight down Tisbury Court, the street of her clip-joint, meaning I could see her when she stepped out of her booth to have a cigarette. Sometimes she’d look up occasionally to see me standing there, like I’d been waiting for hours, because I had. “It’s my birthday” she said, half drunk, “Where’s my gift?”, “At the flat, I’ll bring it down later” I said as I carried on walking. Progress. I bought her a big bunch of flowers, and, still not knowing her name put on the card “Happy Birthday, come round one night” She loved the flowers but after reading the card, she said “I’m not that girl”, and I knew I’d be seeing her soon.

A couple of weeks later and she was standing at my door, a half empty bottle of vodka sticking out of her handbag and inch-long eye lashes sticking out of her face “I’m not that boy” I said, my penis disagreeing with urgency and gusto as it led me to her like a dowsing rod that hit the big time. She sat on the bed, and opened her legs, I went down there for a few minutes and then we fucked. As I lay on the bed still shaking, she got dressed, cleaned up in the bathroom briefly, and left without a whisper.

Brass Eliza’s life had been touched, nay scratched by death. Her first two husbands killed themselves and the third died in a car crash. In an attempt to offer support, care and compassion for our Eliza, her parents said all three were her fault, “To punish me for my sinful life” she said (they didn’t even know about the sex-work). Being ‘high ranking’ members of The Church of The Latter-Day Saints, it was probably Eliza’s ten a day cigarette habit that condemned her to a life of such parental hatred and spite. During the calm and loving conversation that followed, Brass Eliza defended herself asking how she could have been any way involved in a car crash she was nowhere near? “The Son of The Morning, who bears the name Lucifer, he drives the death car” which I’ve no doubt put things into perspective for everyone involved.

Brass Eliza got into sex-work by accident, when an old man in a black suit and bow-tie approached her in a bar in the city and asked her if she’d spank him for three hundred pounds. “I’d have done it for a tenner” she told me, before explaining in some detail the horrors of a fat, old man crying, with his head in the toilet bowl while she smacked his arse for five long minutes. “He didn’t even take his head out of the toilet when he said ‘The cash is under the left pillow, leave your number if you’d like to come back for more, occasionally.’”

She started putting adverts in free papers that get left in bars for lonely old men to read while they drink themselves stupid and daydream about watersports from the barmaid and the like. Business soon picked up and she was earning around a thousand pounds a month doing half a dozen jobs, similar stuff, whips, ropes, name-calling. Then one day her business phone rang and a man asked if she did ‘electronics’. “We do but Penelope is working abroad in Monaco for a while. Why don’t you call back in a few weeks?” He was persistent, he was desperate, he needed his electronics. “You must have another girl, I am willing to pay, and pay big” He said, like an electronic junkie, whatever that is. “I’ll see what I can do, call back in a few days” She said, and immediately set about finding out what the Hell ‘electronics’ were.

Jessie started coming around more, two or three times a week, after she’d finished her shift at the clip-joint. Always pissed, she started getting me to hit her, to slap her, all that hoo-ha. She lay there as we fucked, her only movement being the rocking up and down of my humping, her face turned to the right and called me ‘bastard’ and ‘evil’ while I slapped her about. She’d come, I’d come. She’d go. It was quite the scene. Once, before she left, I told her she wouldn’t be let in again unless she wore higher heels and fake eyelashes on the bottom lashes as well as the standard upper lashes. Why, I don’t know, maybe I just wanted to feel involved.

I saw her walking down the road from the clip-joint and heard the main door to my building slam shut. Moments later, ear to my door I heard her trying to stay quiet as she was no doubt putting on the lower lashes and changing into a pair of ankle-breakers. Her attempt at discretion failed terribly. Were someone to ask me what the noise was I’d say it was the curviest woman in the world trying to put on some eight-inch heels with her eyesight obscured by two sets of fake eye-lashes and at least one bottle of vodka. A few minutes later, she knocked on the door and barged her way in, and it was quite the wrecking ball, a big girl on what were pretty much stilts in danger of causing severe damage to herself, furniture, me, anything. So, I assisted her to the bed, safe from the new danger gravity was causing her.

From her bag she pulled a horse-whip and some rope, and asked me to tie her hands to the wooden slats of my mezzanine area. Within a few minutes it was done and I hitched up her skirt, freed her breasts and whipped her arse. She screamed in pleasure, her body bucking as much as it could in its restricted position while I looked at the wooden slat, suddenly concerned it might not be able to take the strain if she got too excited. The more I whipped the more she moaned, I sped up, her arse now covered in red and purple marks. This carried on for some time, her in ecstasy, and me, well, I just kept whipping, quite proud of my action, like a golfer might be his swing. And then she had one mighty orgasm, bucking and twitching and fighting the pleasure for a breath. She thanked me orally, which didn’t last long as I marveled at her swinging breasts, upon which she discharged me, and then true to form she cleaned herself up briefly and left, saying nothing, and not even giving me a look.

Eliza is banging on my door like a mad woman. As I open the door, she barges past me and empties a carrier bag onto the floor. A flesh-coloured box that had seen better days, a few cigarette burns, a crack sealed with last decade’s discoloured Sellotape, just a bit jank. She unhooks a clasp on each end of the lid, and lifts it open, her eyes widening at the contents, like it was the lost ark, a shabby, dirty, small, lost ark. Then she revolves the box one hundred and eighty degrees so I can see what’s inside, her face is alive with excitement, and I got the feeling I was meant to share it, she clearly thought I’d be impressed. I wasn’t. I was quite disgusted. A selection of wires, crocodile clips, dildos, cock-rings, and the like, things I know not what they are, and what looks like some kind of controller, a handset with buttons, dials and other things that were making me think of the dreams of lawyers, who wake up crying, cock in hand, watery jizz dripping from a flaccid member, complete with some kind of flakey skin condition. “Electronics!” she said “Or should I say, one thousand pounds an hour, for turning dials, and calling lonely old men, lonely old names!” Of course.

She’d found it in the classifieds in the back of the same type of free newspaper she advertised her services, and however happy she was, and a thousand pound an hour is not to sniff at, I couldn’t help but think of the history of that box, where it had been, what it had done. I struggled to share her enthusiasm, but I was happy for her, I think.

She was raking it in. She started doing two jobs a week and was earning eight grand a month, tax free, expenses being just a monthly travelcard and some wet-wipes. She didn’t even need to place adverts anymore as word had spread rapidly. After a few weeks of turning people down, simply because she couldn’t be bothered, she trained up a load of girls and had a little firm working for her. She’d work as the fixer and they’d go halves on the money, meaning Eliza was getting five hundred quid for answering the phone and arranging a meeting.

The next time she emptied a carrier bag into my front room, about six weeks later it had about eighty thousand pounds in it, in twenty and fifty-pound notes. She also had a far more advanced case of electronics, which she talked me through, laughing all the way at buzzing and cracking sounds. If you haven’t worked it out yet, ‘electronics’ is the practice of sending electric shocks through balls, cocks, and anal dildos, the old coffin dodger begging for more, begging for less. The sort of wholesome practices you wouldn’t necessarily want those who make life-changing decisions for the rest of us, to be engaging in.

We talked for a while and then she got a bag or rocks out, about half an ounce of crack. “Are you ready?” she asked. And as much as she knew she didn’t need to ask, I started getting the migraine aura.

I get a zig-zag pattern in the right-hand side of my vision and that’s my body telling me to turn the lights out, and lay down. “Sorry love, I’m having a migraine, but you crack on.” I felt like shit. I laid on the bed, eyes closed, patterns filling my non-vision. What terrible timing. There’s a great night or five worth of cash on the floor, half and ounce of crack and Eliza, who I’d already fucked a few times, and would have certainly done so again, after a couple of pipes. But no, there I was laid out in the timeless space of a migraine unable to do much more than breathe. I told Eliza to get my Zomig from the cupboard above the fridge, a migraine medication, which hardly worked but occasionally took the edge off. I necked a couple and laid there, listening to the sound of Eliza smoking crack, and that familiar and strangely organic smell filling the room. “Oooh, I wish you felt as good as I do”, Eliza said as she exhaled what sounded like an entire twenty-pound stone in one breath. Yeah, thanks.

The Zomig worked surprisingly well, but I still wasn’t up for crack, possibly the worst thing I could imagine on top of a migraine. But when Eliza suggested a massage, it seemed like a good idea. I took off my shirt and laid back down. I wasn’t quite sure why Eliza had stripped down to her bra and panties, but I wasn’t feeling strong enough for that debate and let her get on with it. She straddled my arse and after pouring some kind of lubricant over me, began massaging my back. It was lovely. She was a whisper of a girl, Eliza, thin as a rake. On top of her taste for crack I always thought there might be some eating disorder in the background, Bulimia or the like, but having a not unattractive girl in her underwear massaging you does wonders for a migraine so I just laid down and enjoyed it.

She stopped occasionally for another pipe, and although I couldn’t see, I was sure she was blowing the smoke over my head to try and tempt me into having some. After about fifteen minutes I became aware of her lightly grinding herself on the small of my back. The lightly grinding soon turned into heavy grinding and before long I was laying there, my hands on the headboard to stop my head smashing into it as Eliza brought herself to orgasm on my back. In some bizarre, secondary crack smoke, Zomig trip, I was shocked when this twig of a woman, about forty years old, managed to flip me over, and in no time at all got me hard. I glanced at the box of ‘electronics’ still open and too close to the bed for comfort, but thankfully she just climbed on, absorbed my cock inside her and carried on her adventure. And although there was no in/out, the motion required really for a man to finish, I shut my eyes and just let the grind happen. Orgasm after orgasm she had. A small pause in between where she clamped her legs tight around my thighs and made a variety of peculiar, but positive noises. One more orgasm and squeaky moan and I thought it was over, no tight clamping of my thighs, she just seemed to go all soft and finally relax. I just laid there enjoying the feeling of my cock in her soaking pussy, strangely out of breath myself, although I hadn’t done a thing, really. I opened my eyes just in time to see a white faced, purple lipped Eliza flop forward, face planting heavily into the pillow, her arms hanging loose by her side and making no attempt to cushion the fall. I even had to move my head to the side a fair amount to avoid copping a black eye, missing tooth, or similar. It didn’t take me too long, as much as I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening to realise Eliza wasn’t breathing. Did I have my penis in a dead girl? Was this a first? What about Eliza? Did the Son of The Morning, who bears the name Lucifer, just give me the death fuck? I pushed her torso up and she still wasn’t breathing and I realized I needed to do something. What, I do not know. I tried to feel for a pulse but my heart was pumping so fast through fear now, I couldn’t make out who’s was what. I pulled my rapidly retreating cock out of her and got off the bed. I grabbed her by the arms and dragged her off the bed, doing my best not to let her slam heavily on the floor which is exactly what she did, only a carrier bag of eighty-grand preventing her head from landing on the wooden floor. I considered mouth to mouth, but it had been about thirty-five years since I’d done it to that plastic head and torso when the Red Cross came to our school for a demonstration, and I’d made a mess of it then. I put Eliza in the shower cubicle, her frail body slumping into the corner and almost disappearing. Unfortunately, not. The dying or dead body of sweet Eliza was certainly still there. Bummer. I turned on the shower, cold, and started shouting at her to breathe, giving her face the occasional slap for reasons I don’t know. She was so pale. I remember thinking she might have been dead when she arrived and I’d just been sexually haunted. Thankfully, just before my imagination allowed me to go any further in that direction she inhaled deeply and opened her eyes. I turned the shower off and gave her a towel.

To anyone else, this would be a major event in their life, but Eliza had such an intense and extreme life, after about thirty minutes and a cup of tea, you’d have thought nothing had happened. She put her underwear in the microwave to dry it out a bit, got dressed and asked if she could stash the ‘electronics’ and money in my room for a few days. “No problem, just call to make sure I’m in when you come to collect”. I was chuffed she trusted me. We weren’t the best of friends, but we liked each other and it felt nice to be trusted with all that cash and a box of smelly items that had tortured the near fossilized junk of a stratum of society I’d never had much time for. She had another pipe, put five hundred quid on the bed, blew me a kiss and looking at the time on her phone rushed out the door.

It’s hard to say if it was the Zomig, the death/life combo, the fuck, or the combination of all three, but I felt pretty good after she’d left, and I was five hundred quid up. Although I couldn’t be sure if she was paying me for looking after the money and electronics, or the fuck. Had Eliza just whored me? I stashed her money and stuff in a cupboard under the sink, and had a little sleep. When I woke up I realized it was Saturday, and the chances were, Jessie would turn up around midnight, and a bit of what she liked would occur.

Like clockwork, Jessie knocked the door with the bottom of a bottle at quarter past twelve, and I opened it to see her considerably more drunk than usual, which was saying something. A bottle of Bacardi in one hand and a can of coke in the other. Mouth mixing; class. She put her drinks on the sideboard, threw the rope and whip at me, hitched up her skirt, let the balloons free, and assumed the position. “Get on with it” she said. So, I tied her wrists to the lowest slat of the mezzanine area, progressing to a handcuff knot with her wrists in the loops. I’d been practicing in the week to add a bit of style to things, and I do declare she looked pretty impressed when I tightened the loops around her wrists. I took out the horse whip and began. It wasn’t a proper horse whip, probably for the best. She was a big girl but didn’t have the arse of a horse, it was a sex-toy, a bit of plastic wrapped in gaffer tape with a little fake leather loop at the end.

So, I’m whipping, and she’s screaming, and it’s the same as it always was, and then she cries “Harder you bastard!” and so harder it was. I was wincing myself as her arse-cheeks were glowing red, and I’m sure I’d split the skin in a few places. She was coming, loud, and now barely able to say it but giving it a go anyway “Harder you fucking bastard”, the words broken by cries of ecstasy, agony, and more coming. It was really building up this time, she’d never asked me to do it harder, and she’d never come so hard and so much, and then the whip broke. “Why have you stopped?” she asked, the gasping expression on her face like someone who just found out their mother died. “It snapped!” I told her. Immediately her eyes darted around the room, looking for something, anything to continue her ascent to the orgasm of orgasms. “Use the umbrella! Quick!” she said, turning back around and poking her arse back out. “Quick!” Now, in fairness I wasn’t too into risking damaging my three hundred quid James Smith and Sons umbrella, but I was five hundred quid up already, so I could always buy a new one. And wouldn’t you know, the very first whack and it broke, the damn think opened too, making the situation – for me at least – farcical. But not Jessie, she was riding the tiger and didn’t want to get off, “Strangle me, quick, fucking strangle me!” I put my hands around her neck and started squeezing, her body bucked and spasmed, her knees knocked together and she twisted on the toes of her heels, her considerable weight now being held just by the rope, and my hands. I decided to give her one final squeeze, and that would be that. But that wasn’t that. Her head flopped forward, her tongue hanging out and to the side like a not too clever dog, and her heels dragging on the ground as she rocked gently back and forward. She was no longer breathing either; worth considering. For the second time in one day, I didn’t know what to do regarding the death of a woman in my company. It was then I noticed her hands were as red as blood, and maybe twice their normal size. All her weight was being supported by the rope, by her wrists. I climbed up the ladder to the mezzanine and tried to undo the rope. It turns out the handcuff knot is not so good for such things, goes on easy, doesn’t come off at all. So, I went back down, got a bread knife and with a few panicked but committed saws back and forth the rope snapped and her body flopped to the ground.

In fairness, although I was part of both incidents, neither of them were really anything to do with me. Sort of. And as Jessie lay there, her body all creased up like this morning’s pajamas at the end of my bed, I realized several very bad things at once. She’s not breathing, her arse is covered in bruises and blood, my hands had been around her neck where I had strangled her, I had tied her wrists and the icing on the cake was the carrier bag of money and that damn box of electronics under the sink. When you call an ambulance for this kind of thing the police come too, and this doesn’t look very for good for me at all.

Now there was no way I was going to drag Jessie to the shower, not a chance, I was quite surprised she didn’t go through the floor and through the downstairs ceiling when I cut her lose to be honest. I straightened out her body and lay her on her back. I tuned in to the Red Cross visit thirty years ago. I put my hand under her neck to straighten out her airway, pinched her nose closed, and filled her lungs with air. It all came back out, I watched her huge tits rise and then fall, which I thought was meant to happen. I considered it a good sign, and done it again. If that torso the Red Cross used to teach us had the huge breasts Jessie had spread over her chest, maybe we’d have all done a bit better. I went in for another one “What the fuck are you doing?” She said, sitting up looking around the room like she didn’t know where she was. She took a swig from her Bacardi and a mouthful of coke, tidied her clothes up and left. Had I become some kind of gigolo, had I just done a freebie? Maybe I’d become The Son of The Morning, who bears the name Chris, who drives the death penis?

Brass Eliza died well before time, a couple of years later. It was Bernie, the diminutive maître d of the Groucho club who told me, and also told the barman to give me whatever I wanted, which I took full advantage of and was carried home later that night. Eliza was found dead in her room, in her armchair. I didn’t ask for more information, Eliza was dead, that was enough. Bernie died a year or so later, Sadie Frost told me. She’s still alive.

Jessie is in a relationship now, it looks perfect on Facebook, but she told me once that none of her boy-friends ever hurt her properly, so who knows?

Sex without love occurs amidst the aura of death as much as sex with love embraces the celebration of life. Which is why for all its thrills and distractions, sex without love is two individuals putting as much space as possible between each other, while their hearts cry out for someone to love them.

The End

Chris Dangerfield

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