Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

I caught her eye, but I was the one to look away first. The expression of guilt, shame and humiliation on Sarah’s face filled me with self-loathing and regret. She put her headset back on and resumed work, punching so hard on her keyboard I thought it might shatter. It disgusted me that Wheeler had found it so easy to make a whore out of a perfectly respectable young woman, and a pimp out of me. As for the money he stuffed into my breast pocket, I can’t even bring myself to repeat how little it was. I only hope Sarah got a lot more.

I waited until Sarah left the office. I heard her heels clacking angrily on the linoleum of the corridor.

That was the last time I’d seen Wheeler. Ten or more years had gone by. Now here he was, washed up in Candia, his face crumbling like a waterfront warehouse and with eyes like the oil-slicked, scummy backwash of the sea. Did he remember that episode in the lift on his last day at Aid-Direct? I doubted it. But then people choose not to remember things. Or they pretend to forget. He put his fingers to his mouth again, plucking from his tongue what I thought was a loose strand of tobacco. Finessing it clear of his fingers, he drained his glass.

“Have another,” I offered. My companionable behavior was more to do with my own intolerable loneliness than with any attraction in Wheeler’s company. Besides, I was curious.

He shook his head, didn’t move. I signaled to the waiter, who brought another beer, and a raki for me. “You heard about the company, after you left?”

A light went on. “You worked at A-D? That must be where I know you from.” Recall the episode with Sarah? He barely remembered me.

I reintroduced myself. “William Blythe. I was in the Training department.”

“Yes, yes, yes. I remember.” Again his hand went to his mouth.

“What did you do after that? After Aid-Direct, I mean.”

“Went here. Went there. Here. There.”

It was dark by now. The resitica singer had gone, carrying away his shoe-box without a single donation. A breeze picked up off the swelling black tide and Wheeler shivered. The water sucked and slopped around the concrete breakers. Laughter carried across the bay from one of the bars, making him look over his shoulder. I guessed he was hungry. “I’m just going to eat,” I said.

We went to a small restaurant converted from a spice warehouse in the narrow streets behind the waterfront. I ordered an array of small dishes and Wheeler fell on them like a man who hadn’t eaten in days. After a few glasses of resinated wine, he began to drop his guard.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

“Some years. Four maybe. Not sure anymore.”

“How do you survive?”

He drained his glass and looked at me quite sincerely. “I don’t know. I don’t do anything. One day runs into another. I’m always hungry, but I survive. And I don’t know how.” He became distracted, gazing at something across my shoulder.

Then his fingers went to his mouth again, unconsciously plucking something from the tip of his tongue before flicking it to the floor. He looked up at me with a sudden intensity. “Have you ever tried to leave this town?”

The question was absurd. I’d only just arrived. “It’s not hard. Tourist buses come in and out every day in the summer months.”

He laughed cynically. “Sure. But I’m no tourist. And neither are you. Tell me: where were you before you came here?”

I tried to think, but my mind went blank. He found this amusing. He laughed again and seemed to relax. He returned to his food, and then he did something I haven’t seen anyone do in a long time. He picked up an almost empty plate and he licked the sauce clean with his tongue. “Terrific food here!” he said. “What was in that sauce?”

“Knowing this place,” I joked, “it was probably a dead cat.”

That was the wrong thing to say. Wheeler carefully set down his plate and pushed it away from him, staring at the dish as if it was on fire.

I broke his trance by asking him where he stayed.

He looked confused. “Anywhere. Anywhere they let me stay. Now I have to go.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Have another drink. Look, it’s my birthday.” It was true, and though Wheeler wasn’t first choice for company, I was feeling sorry for myself The popping of a celebration cork is a lonely sound when you’re on your own.

Wheeler looked astonished. “You’re lying!”

“Why should I lie? September 21st. It’s my birthday.”

Wheeler stood up. “But that means it’s the Autumnal Equinox today!” I shrugged. “And you arrived here today? You don’t understand. This could be an opportunity.”

“Opportunity?”

“If it really is your birthday, the Shades Club might be open!”

“Shades? Where’s that?”

“You haven’t been? I could take you there.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to the Shades Club, wherever it was, whatever it was. But Wheeler insisted. He became more interested in me than at any other point in the evening. But what else had I to do? I had no one to go home to and nothing to detain me. I was ready to be picked up by any foul wind blowing in from the ocean. It was around midnight when I settled the bill at the restaurant.

As we walked across the waterfront, sounds from one of the cafés drifted across the bay, another explosion of men’s laughter and the eerie skirling music of the bow of a lira drawn across strings as taut as a man’s nerves on Judgement Day.

Wheeler led me behind the crumbling waterfront and into the derelict streets of what were once spice warehouses in the grand trading days of Candia. Damp odours of ancient plaster, brine, spice and exhausted trade breathed along the ratruns of those streets.

Then Wheeler was clambering over a pile of broken bricks. He spotted my hesitation and beckoned me to follow. “It was on my own birthday that I first discovered the Shades Club,” he explained. He ducked under a fractured arch and I could see he was heading for the ruined mosque. The moon, obscured by clouds, barely offered enough light to illuminate the needle of the minaret.

In the glory of its trading days, Candia had prospered under four hundred years of Ottoman rule, but the infidel had returned, and the dome of the mosque lay sundered, like a cracked egg laid by some giant, mythical reptile. The minaret sailed defiantly above the mooncast ruins, but the exotic call of the adhan was no more than a ghost. A clump of jasmine growing amongst the rubble breathed a tiger perfume into the night.

I followed Wheeler through a fissure in the tumbled wall, and we emerged in a darkened street. A flight of stone steps descended behind the shadows of the mosque. The anapaest beat of music thudded from below. At the bottom of the steps a malfunctioning red neon light fizzed, spitting the words SHADES CLUB. The letter S flickered intermittently.

The place was almost empty. Two women sat at the shadowy end of the bar, both stirring tall cocktail glasses with a straw, both displaying a lot of leg.

“It’s a clip-joint,” I said to Wheeler, annoyed. The bar looked like any other place I’d been in where you pay for girls to sip coloured water, and at prices that would frighten a steeplejack.

“No. It’s not like that. Sit down, it’ll be all right.”

I took a stool at the bar. An old-style juke box was grinding out early rock music. Someone behind me was cleaning tables with a dirty rag. I saw the girls give us the once-over, but the sight of Wheeler made them lose interest.