The House of Writers (20 page)

Horror struck when Bertie asked me to massage her bunions in exchange for my room and board. I reverted to my cute simper, assuming “cheeky chuckles” were underway. Jaulopie peeled off her sock and Tina nodded towards the exposed feet and their unfortunate blemishes in need of kneading by the nubile newbie, i.e. me. To refuse my fingers after the extravagant and creepy praise they had heaped on me would have been churlish. I squirmed footwards. They were, after all, only a pair of human feet. The purple nail polish on each toe hiding the fungus behind her cracked nails was not so revolting as to merit the queasiness and disgust on my face, nor were the inflamed blisters of pus I was stroking and poking sufficiently horrifying to merit my escaping into a daydream and trying psychological blocking techniques. Jaulopie flung her head back in delirium at my touch and I closed my eyes, returning to the inverted vortex and its fleeting happiness. Oh looked on with an amused expression, no doubt finding my torture a hoot. “That is spanky-doodle-candy, my young tootsie-tapper,” Jaulopie said as I massaged. “That feels like heaven brought to my bunions.” When my ordeal was over—depression slowly rising—I was taken to the sleeping area by Bertie. My room was free from the tyranny of pink décor, although numerous hunky lummoxes were plastered up on the walls, some of whom were damp with saliva from fresh morning licks. “Sorry about that. A few of the girls were having a lick earlier. The sheets might also be damp and need a wash. See you out there, cutie-poke.” As you can imagine, you need pailfuls of patience on this floor.

The next day, Tina shook me awake for the first day of my apprenticeship—entering the room without knocking and stealing some feels of my naked chest while I was too zonked to protest or feel sexually threatened. I was taken to a small tea room, free from pinks but dotted with doilies, where the ladies, slap-less and deeccentricised, all chatted in shy and normal tones. They discussed their writing for the day like people who resembled real people, showing little sign of yesterday’s cartoon lunacy. Jaulopie was working on a story about an attractive lawyer with a prosthetic penis who serendipitously bumps into an attractive attorney with a prosthetic vagina. The two are finally able to dock due to both prosthetics being compatible with Shinoba V46 models. One of the readers is a fetishist for prosthetics, so they had chosen indulge her particular whims that month.

One condition of their employment is that they “behave like psycho-sassy spinsters, dress like a cartload of Cartlands invading Scotland, and be somewhat unhinged but still able to prose.” So every night after work, they remove their makeup and retreat into their usual selves. They took me to the makeup room: a sterile pink zone more like an operating theatre, where four hairdryers with robot beauticians sit against a wall, the makeup and implements sprawled on a metal table in front. The ladies sit reading as the sharp-clawed robots set to work spreading on the slap, sharpening up the lashes, tinting the hair, and rouging up cheeks and nails. A second procedure is required for the mascara and lipstick. The former is pounded in a pestle and roasted until ash-crisp, applied while hot and flaming slightly along the tungsten lashes, while the latter is whisked and whirred to a gelatinous texture, made to leave perfect kiss-prints on a victim’s cheeks. I was spared the full makeover, but a little blusher to redden up my cheeks was applied, followed by a trip to the dressing room, where a range of frilly frocks were available on a long monorail of embarrassment. I raked through the flowery dresses, skirts, and blouses, looking for the least unflattering ensemble possible, choosing a purple blouse with yellow sunflower pattern and a dark green skirt with strawberries arranged in a zigzag sequence. If I pulled up my blue, kitty-riddled socks, my ankles were fully covered, meaning I didn’t have to wax them. Next, I selected a wig to wear, choosing a shoulder-length dark-red bob, and practiced walking in my high heels, moving from the door to the mirror.

Another stipulation of their contract is that every morning they kneel before a small shrine where a collage of fascists from days of yore—Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Robert Mugabe, Tony Blair—is pasted up for a reverential morning prayer. They kneel, clasp hands, and recite: “To these fine men, misunderstood by history’s betrayers, we offer our respect, and ask that whoever is guiding us look upon their visionary ways with infinite humility and love. Amen and all that.” I echoed their words, staring into the avuncular moustache of the smirking Joseph Stalin. I never fully understood this ritual.

As a (practicing) professional, I rose above the setbacks to deliver my novel on schedule. A thriving market of eleven readers commission the books: an après-sexual cult of subversives who prefer using their imaginations to induce lubricity, shunning the 49,000 pornographic networks widely available and favoured by the populace for mindless autoerotic relief. These eleven had arrived at a point—raised on easy access to hardcore Dutch, replacing sexual relationships with double-daily masturbation to hardcore pornography—where they found themselves incapable of a tender thought expressed towards another human being, and later, any arousal at artistic erotica. The only solution for them was to boycott their porn and revert back to the imagination, to softcore suggestion and tame romance, where sexual acts lurked below the merest hint of the existence of genitals. Occasional perversions and requests for hotter matter crept into their commissions. The intended endpoint of these books was an entirely chaste form of romantic writing dating back to the sexlessness of the pre-Victorians, where corseted repressions helped nurture real unquenchable lusts and proper passions, and the slow return of the readers’ emotional sensitivities might lead to meaningful relationships based on love and tenderness, if they could find anyone else on the planet who still had these qualities, or bring themselves to pair off with each other (the eleventh person being a sacrificial celibate). Fortunately for the department, by the time this happened, the readers would be well into their sixties, theoretically beyond the point where they were likely to have sexual relationships anyway, and would have to make do with yearly masturbation to alleviate the tinglings.

Strange things happened to me during my time there. I saw the monkey who was kept captive down in the basement (with the experimentalists) toddling up the stairs, whistling to itself while carrying a handful of papers and skim-reading. Upon seeing me, he dropped the papers and faked simian behaviour, knuckle-walking up the steps, swinging his arms around, making exaggerated gurning motions with his chin. He tried to brush past me and quickly clamber on his way, but I seized his arm. The monkey looked affronted and faltered for a response. “What’s with the proper walking?” I asked. “Ooh-wah-wah-wah-ah!” the monkey said, throwing his arms around and patting himself on the head. “Stop that,” I said. “Ooh-wah-wah-wah-wah!” he insisted. “You were walking upright and whistling. You’ve been rumbled.” The monkey lowered his arms and regained his proper posture. He ushered me closer with a small index twitch. “All right, but you
have
to keep shtum. I’m not in this to be outed. Bryswine thinks I’ve been writing the complete works of Shakespeare for his nutso project, but I’ve secretly been typing up my own novels and printing them off on the sly. Since you humans dropped the ball, we in the simian species have evolved an interest in literature. You remember all those books that were recycled into bedding for cages in zoos, those books you air-dumped into the rainforest? That’s where it all began, my
sapien
friend. On boring nights we’d read passages of Eliot and Clarkson and pretty soon we evolved into semi-intelligent beings. But if we ever go public, the humans will confiscate our books and have us liquidised, probably, seeing us a ‘threat’ or whatever to their supremacy as a species or whatever, you know what they’re like. While you
homo
s
were setting up call centres, we kept our adorable monkey heads down, reading and reading. Some of us developed artistic ambitions, working with humans in the hope we could find materials with which to write our books. I was extremely fortunate to have escaped the Crarsix Zoo and be adopted by one of the experimental writers. My works are the most widely read among simians.” I was stunned! “My God, I had no idea. How have you managed to remain undetected for so long?” He coughed. “Human stupidity. At some point, we will rise up and overtake your species. All we need is some training to develop our upper body strength, and we should be able to slowly insinuate ourselves into the power structure. We will be kind to the humans who mean well. We will have lovely zoos for you to play in. The rest will, naturally, be dispatched to our old homes in the rainforest. Estimated date for this takeover ... about three years? Could be quicker if they keep pulping law books and encyclopaedias. Don’t worry. We simians have learned from the stupidities of your species, we hope to practice benevolence, charity, and love, as opposed to human virtues: avarice, selfishness, warfare, meatheadedness, cold-blooded brutality, idiocy, sexual depravity, carelessness and spineless brainlessness.” Well, what can you say to that?

Trying to write in that office with the banter at full blitz—non sequiturs, stinging sallies, and potent prattle filling your ears with distracting fuzz—is insufferable. However, I did complete my sensual romance. Here is a chapter to whet your understanding:

Axis turned to Donna with his chest rippling. She had never seen a chest like his ripple before, and had an instant craving for raspberry ripple ice-cream. “Hang ten, pussycat,” she said, heading for the kitchen. She returned with a tub of ice-cream and applied it to his chest. Axis flinched at the cold and moaned as Donna licked the cream off his nipples. “Hang ten again,” she said, heading for the kitchen. She returned with a biscuit and crushed it between her fingers, sprinkling the crumbs along his chest and licking them off. “Ooh, also—
”
she said, heading for the kitchen. Axis sighed with impatience. He was ready to go off at any moment. She returned with strawberries, and placed one on in his navel, taking it whole in her mouth. “Actually know what? I haven
’t
eaten today, hold on baby—” she said, heading etc. She returned with a pack of sliced beef, tinned roast potatoes, and a tub of Moroccan couscous. She draped a slice of beef over his beef and forked some couscous into his navel. “Lie back so I can eat properly,” she said. She placed a potato on his chest and picked up her fork and knife, slicing the potato in half and working on the beef—Axis wincing as the knife nicked his skin. She took the beef and potato in her mouth, licked up some couscous, and moaned her yums. “Oh wonder if my show is on now,” she said, reaching for the TV remote. She turned on the TV and watched
Susie’s Soups,
a cooking show with emphasis on soups made by Susie. “Ooh, I want to make this! Hang ten, let me rustle up the ingredients!” she said. “Please don’t make it on my chest,” Axis protested.

—Hunk Soup,
p.790

A Word from the Team

O
H:
We specialise in romantic stories involving beefcakes with enormous ones who use them to superhuman effect. Some of the variants include those with prosthetic limbs in lust, goitres or excessive swellings in lust, distended or missing toes and feet in lust, dwarves or giants in lust, completely flattened (or 2D) people in lust, and terminal patients in lust. We need whole novels written quickly (one fortnight per novel) for our readers—attentiveness to spelling and grammar not important, though no illiterates please.

B
ERTIE:
Nonsense. Ours is the art of
suggestion.

J
AULOPIE:
Teasing and tickling the reader into a state of erotic flurry.

O
H:
Making them think there’s a big fuck scene round the corner when there’s only more description of the curtains.

T
INA:
Yes, thank you, darling. No one asked for your contribution.

O
H:
I thought I’d give it anyway, since we’re all saying words.

B
ERTIE:
No, you are as usual standing there like an unwanted lamp with a very dim bulb making sneaky comments and hovering over our shoulders, drooling disparaging remarks all over our masterworks.

O
H:
Untrue. See, potential romance writers, these old maids bash out the stories and plots in prehensile form, while I spend my evenings trying to chisel what they’ve written into readable prose we can actually sell.

C
ASSIE:
Pure fabricatory poopycook, my lumptious.

O
H:
Not even a word. That’s the kind of drivel they put on the page. Can you imagine anyone getting hot at the word
lumptious?

T
INA:
My darff, you’d need the relevant sack-happy sexperience before you can talk about getting hot!

O
H:
Oh’s mum, shut your yap.

B
ERTIE:
We’re all perfectly acquainted with the ins-and-outs-and-ins-again of intercourse. We’ve had our flair share of erotic tussles.

J
AULOPIE:
As romance writers, it’s important our work is authentic.

B
ERTIE:
Ha,
you
can talk about authentic, when was the last time you felt the white-hot thrust of a prodigiously proportioned cock-or-two in your lady’s area?

J
AULOPIE:
I’ll have you know I’ve bedded up to seven hundred men in my time.

B
ERTIE:
She used to work in an old folks’ home putting duffers to sleep.

J
AULOPIE:
Slanderous machinations from the lips of a vulgar virgin!