This was Una’s belief:
– that nature, in the beginning, had crudely divided the human race into two genders, male and female. Men had cocks, women had cunts; that was that. Go forth and multiply, was all nature had to say on the subject.
– but that the cock/cunt divide was now obsolete. Sexual desire and procreation had separated themselves out. ‘Men’ could no longer be defined by cock, ‘women’ by cunt: there was a menu of permutations in between. Being hung with a penis, being split by a vagina, was arbitrary anyway. Personality was laid down at the moment of conception, said Una, according to the happenstance of combining intertwining, inherited genes. Gender comes later, she claimed: a matter of chromosomes; a flood of oestrogen, a flood of testosterone working in that base, nothing to do with us. Society continues to collude with nature, which is crude and barbaric, and determined we shall continue to multiply while we are equally determined not to; people grow miserable as they try to do as expected and force their sexuality in the direction of their hung-edness or otherwise. Forget it, says Una.
– she, Una, will set things right if she can; so that anyone could be everything; everyone, anything.
Una’s intention was to turn Lodestar House into a brothel. She was never one to waste an opportunity, and if that brothel was to be for the dead as well as the living, as Maria assured her it could be, so much the better. If Una’s reward could only be in the afterlife, and an enigmatic one at that, for the dead had no means of handing money over, what did Una care? Money was the least of her problems. She had accumulated more than enough over the decades, from the pockets of the guilty and the grateful. Una’s salvation after death was more to the point: it would be useful to have friends and influence people in the hereafter as well as here on earth. Maria did not discount it.
Though Una herself saw nothing to apologise for in her profession – and could argue well enough that she provided a useful social service, offering relief to the frustrated, mercy for wives, the saving of young women from the attacks of sex-starved strangers, and so on, the formal censure of society worried her. She wanted to make amends. She wanted, like anyone else, to be thought well of.
The living sought their contentment, their happiness, their fulfilment, their freedom from anxiety and guilt, through the ecstasies of the flesh.
‘But, Maria,’ protested Una, ‘isn’t it altogether too late for the dead? They have no flesh but only bones, and bones rubbing together create only a squeak and some fine white powder, and no observable pleasure.’
But Maria swore it was never too late; she was in contact with the dead; they’d told her otherwise. Their pleasures were voyeuristic, but real enough. The dead were always present anyway, Maria swore, whenever the living fucked. That was their treat. The living should accordingly join in fleshly congress as much as possible; a notion that suited Una. The little death of orgasm acted as a kind of one-way presentation brothel mirror: on the one side the observers, the dead; on the other the observed, the living, at their most alive, their most powerful at the moment of orgasm, always a magnet for the dead. The air chattered with their presence at such times, but who ever noticed?
Lodestar House, Maria claimed, was alive with opportunistic ghosts. Oscar, Violet, Wendy, Congo; and Maria reported sighting a skinny man who looked like an executioner, and another who seemed to be a pirate, a Tinkerbell-lookalike – but probably vicious – little fairy; just outside the side door crouched a line of Bedouins. ‘You’re deranged,’ said Una. ‘You’re over the top,’ but Maria just shrugged, and said it made no difference to her whether anyone believed her or not, and it made no difference to the ghosts either.