Tails of Wonder and Imagination

CANDIA Graham Joyce

Candia. It was surely in Candia, with its crumbling Venetian waterfront and its abandoned minarets, and its harbor sliding into the rose-coloured sea further by an inch every day. Just like Ben Wheeler when I first spotted him, with his bottle of raki at his permanent station outside the Black Orchid Café, a misted tumbler forever fixed at some point on the arc between tabletop and bottom lip.

I had just climbed down from the rusting, antiquated bus, the sole passenger to disembark in that dusty square, when I saw him, at a time when I never expected to see again anyone I’d ever known.

His glass of raki arrested itself on its mechanical ascent, and he peered across the rim of his tumbler directly into my eyes. He was sitting at a table on the concrete edge of the neglected wharf. Over his shoulder the sun was punctured on a derelict minaret, spilling lavender and molten gold across the motionless waters of the harbor. He took a sip from his glass, and turned away.

“Wheeler,” I called. “Hey, Wheeler!”

On hearing his name he spun round and looked at me again, this time with an expression of incredulity and horror. Then he looked around wildly, as if for egress. For a moment I thought he was actually going to make a break for it and run away from me. I crossed the square to the café and dragged a seat from under the table; but as he showed no sign that he would allow me to join him, I was made to hover.

“Don’t you remember me?” I asked.

Before I got an answer a singer struck up in the square. He had a cardboard shoe-box for donations and was singing in that curious, deep-throated and unaccompanied resitica of the dispossessed people from the mountains. The sound was of almost unendurable melancholy and sweetness, and the guttural voice resonated along the baked brickwork.

Wheeler put down his glass and hooked his thumbs in his waistband, regarding me with an unblinking gaze. I wasn’t fooled. He was clearly nervous. It was as if he had somewhere important to go, but in his astonishment at seeing me there, he couldn’t tear himself away.

“So what are you doing here?” I asked.

He eyed me steadily. “I might ask you the same question.”

He looked back at the square and stroked the white stubble of his beard. Again I got the impression I was detaining him from something important.

“I’ve come here to drink myself to death,” I joked. At least, it was a truth hidden inside a joke, but he nodded seriously, as if this was perfectly reasonable.

The arrival of a waiter brought a moment’s relief. Slow to spot him, Wheeler turned suddenly and fixed the waiter with his extraordinary gaze. The boy shuffled uncomfortably, tapping the steel disc of his tray against his thigh.

“Let me stand you a drink,” I suggested.

Wheeler put his hand to his mouth, removing something very small from the tip of his tongue. “Sure.” He let his eyes drop. “Sit down. I’ll have a beer. Yes, I’ll have a beer.”

I sat, but I was already beginning to regret this. Ben Wheeler looked terrible. I could see a ring of filth on the collar of his short-sleeved shirt. The hems of his oil-spotted chinos were rolled and his bare feet were thrust inside a pair of rotting, rope-soled espadrilles. When the beer arrived, he slurped it greedily. We sat in a stiff silence for a while, the swelling vocalizations of the resitica man the only other sound in the square in the parched heat of the afternoon.

Our paths had crossed briefly in the eighties, when we were both working for Aid-Direct, the notorious London-based charity, three or four years before public scandal closed the outfit down. Wheeler, Director of Fundraising at the time, was a flamboyant character in a double-breasted suit and sixties haircut that looked like it was woven out of brown twill. For some of the serious-minded charity workers he was too fond of champagne, parties and pretty girls, but he could bring in money the way a poacher can tickle trout from a stream. The eighties. New money wanted to log onto charitable causes, not out of any sense of philanthropy, but to clamber aboard the Queen’s Honours List. Wheeler obliged by organizing fatcat charity parties, in which city stockbrokers and dealers would be photographed sipping champers from a Page Three girl’s shoe, all before writing a cheque.

After one of these all-night jamborees at the Savoy or the Dorchester, a sack of rice or two would end up on a truck bound for Ethiopia or Somalia. At the time I didn’t care where the money came from, or how little of it found a way through so long as it assisted me in my plans to change the world. Or rather, I wasn’t so naïve as to believe one could change the world, but I did believe it was possible to change one person’s world, and that was good enough for me.

I’d only been working for Aid-Direct about six months before accountants were called in. No one was ever told why, but Wheeler was suddenly given an impressive golden handshake. After the farewell party, I got caught in the lift with him. He was smashed.

“Hey,” he said that day, “Something I wanna do, ’fore I leave here.”

“What,” I said, my finger hovering over the lift button.

He swayed dangerously. “Young tart who works in your office. Wassname. Cat-like. Yum yum. Feline.” I offered no help, and he supplied the name himself “Sarah.”

“What about her?” The lift started its descent.

“Afore I go. Ten minutes wiv Sarah the feline. In the store cupboard. Hey. Ten minutes.”

“Good luck.”

“No no,” he said, brushing imaginary lint from the front of my jacket. “I want you to ask her for me.”

“Get out of here!” The lift door opened.

His huge, manicured hand restrained me as I made to step out of the lift. Fumbling in his pocket, he produced a couple of banknotes and stuffed them in my breast pocket. “Ask her.”

“Piss off.”

More banknotes, stuffed in with the others. “Ask her for me.”

Still more. Big denomination. “Just ask her for me.” He patted my cheek with his be-ringed paw.

We got out of the lift and I went back to my office, where Sarah was audio-typing. With her lithe figure and her long, raven hair scraped back from her face and tied at the back, Sarah cut a figure like a ballerina. Who wouldn’t want ten minutes with Sarah? I did. I’d taken her out a few times. Despite some lavish wining and dining, she’d resisted all my best efforts. Any man who has tried and failed to seduce a particular woman nurses a tiny malice, and I confess to giving way to a disgraceful and sadistic instinct to collude with Wheeler’s drunken lust.

I gently lifted one of her earphones. “We need some more envelopes. Can you go get ’em?”

“Now?”

“Please.”

“What’s the rush?”

She looked at me quizzically as I turned my back. I heard her replacing her headset on the table. The door closed as she went out. Half an hour later she was back, flushed and looking like she’d learned some new wrestling holds.

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.

Wheeler surprised me by storming behind the bar and confidently mixing Vodka Martinis. “I’m known here,” he assured me. Knowing he was broke, I took out my wallet but he waved it away. “Don’t worry, it’s free.”

Overhearing, one of the girls snorted. “Free. He says it’s free. Nothing is free.”

The second of the two, the one who’d said nothing, was smiling at me, holding her cocktail glass to her mouth. The bar was lit by soft blue and ruby lights, and she struck me as extraordinarily pretty as she waited for me to come back at her friend’s remark. Perhaps because Wheeler had reminded me of the incident, I was struck by how much she resembled Sarah from our days at Aid-Direct.

“You’re a philosopher,” I said.

Taking this as a rebuff, the outspoken one looked away, exhibiting the attributes of extreme boredom; but the other continued to gaze in my direction.

“You’ve made a hit,” said Wheeler, coming from behind the bar.

“She’s nice,” I whispered.

Wheeler nearly dropped his glass. “You like her? You mean you really like her?”

I couldn’t understand why he was so amazed. I checked her out again. Wheeler’s response suggested he regarded her as some kind of reptile. “Doesn’t she remind you of…” Wheeler was looking at me searchingly. I decided to let it go.

“She’s beautiful.”

And she was, at least so she seemed in shadow: long, auburn hair and a china-doll complexion, just a hint of the oriental about her. Wheeler made some sort of gesture to her, because she got off her stool and came over. I got the chance to look at her in proper light.

She was even more striking than my first impression had suggested. It was not until she came over that I realized the two women were wearing some kind of fancy-dress outfits: leotards and sheer black nylon tights. Her eyes were heavily lined with mascara. Wheeler, in a state of some excitement, introduced us, and she slid onto the stool next to me.

“This is Lilly,” Wheeler said, and almost from behind his hand he added, “and I think I’ve found my way out of this town.”

I didn’t know what he meant, and I didn’t much like the way he said it. It reminded me of how little I trusted the man. I thought again of Aid-Direct, and how after he’d gone the depth of his corruption had been made plain. The organization, heavily in debt, collapsed like a house of cards. The executives, those caring-sharing liberal bleeding-heart charity workers began stripping the place before the liquidators came in. Office equipment was driven away by the van-load, the car-pool drained itself overnight, and fabulously inflated expenses were cash-processed before the banks had wind of what was happening. My immediate superior stopped a consignment of rice before it left the docks and sold it on to a wholefood collective, pocketing the proceeds. I have to say that, demoralized, I joined in this feverish stampede.

But I was too busy getting along fine with Lilly to give much thought to Wheeler’s odd remark. Lilly and I sensed immediate rapport. I can’t remember anything I said to her, or she to me, but we had anchored and the next fifteen minutes melted in a miraculous and sympathetic exchange of thoughts. It was only when I offered to buy her a drink that I noticed Wheeler deep in conversation with the other woman. They eyed me intently. I sensed that they were striking some kind of deal, and that it involved me.

The jukebox went dead. Lilly jumped up to feed it with a coin, and it was only then that I noticed the tail protruding from the butt of her leotard, part of her fancy-dress. The other woman too, had a tail, sitting erect on the stool behind her. As Lilly bent over the juke box to make her selection, the tail swished slightly in the air.

“How d’you make it do that?” I asked, coming up behind her. I was feeling slightly drunk from the cocktail and all the raki I’d consumed earlier. The tail was actually flesh coloured, with a furry collar halfway along its length, and another at the tip, as if the regions between the furred collars had been shaved. I grasped the brown, furry tail-end, which was still swishing gently as Lilly fingered Bakelite buttons on the jukebox, and I squeezed the tip hard.

It was the wrong thing to do. Lilly spun round, slamming into the jukebox. “Don’t DO that!” she hissed at me. “Don’t EVER do that!”

She was coiled like a spring, her eyes leaking venom. Astonished by this transformation I mumbled an apology.

“I hate it when men do that!”

“Sorry.” I looked round for Wheeler and the other woman, but they were gone. So too had the shadowy figure clearing up the tables behind us. Lilly and I were left alone in the bar.

“Where did—”

There was a few seconds of vinyl hiss before honeyed saxophone music started oozing from the jukebox. Lilly’s mood was restored, and she sidled up close, enfolding her arms around me. “Come here. Let’s dance. I’m sorry I reacted like that. I’m sensitive. Here, dance a little closer.”

The bar dissolved around us. I abandoned myself to Lilly’s embrace. Her perfume, or maybe it was her natural cassolette, had me inflamed.

An hour later she was undressed in my apartment and I was carefully examining her tail. Her anatomy was normal in every other way. She had the physique of a centerfold, but she also had a tail. This time she let me touch it, but tenderly. She let me stroke it. She let me run my fingers gently along its sinuous curved length.

Three collars of brown tailfur had been left unshaved. These were at the tip, the location of my early offense, in the sensitive middle; and at the coccyx, where the tail joined the body at the base of her spine. The exposed, shaved skin was considerably lighter than the rest of her sallow flesh tone.

“Why do you shave it?” I asked as she stood over me, naked. I marveled at the way she could make it swish lightly from side to side.

She shrugged. “Fashion.”

“Sure,” I said. “Doesn’t everyone shave their tails these days?”

She grew bored with my fascination for her tail, aggressively straddling me and pinning me back on the bed. For the next hour she rolled over me like a heatwave. Her tongue was rough, like a cat’s tongue, and the odour of her body was an intoxicant, like the smell of a waterfront spice warehouse in the old trading days of Candia. I abandoned myself to her, and she to me, though all the time I couldn’t help wondering how her tail was behaving behind her, or beneath her, or beside her. At the moment of her orgasm I instinctively reached around and grasped it above her coccyx. She gasped, sinking her nails deep into my back and tearing lightly at my skin with her sharp teeth.

When I woke in the morning I somehow expected her not to be there. But she was already awake, her head resting on the pillow. She blinked at me sadly.

“What is it?” I said, wiping away a tear with my thumb.

She wouldn’t answer me. She slipped out of bed, dressed hurriedly and then kissed me deeply and passionately.

“I’ve got to go.”

“When can I see you again?” I didn’t want to lose her. “Will you be at the Shades Club?”

“Sure,” she said rather cynically. “When it next opens.”

And she left. I made to shout after her, but there was something stuck to my tongue. I plucked it from my mouth. It was a dark hair. In distaste I flicked it away, but in that time Lilly had gone. My skin tingled in the places she’d bitten me. I had a high temperature.

In the evening I returned to the Shades Club, only to find it closed. The malfunctioning neon sign had been switched off. I couldn’t find anyone around the place to ask when it was going to open again. I scoured the town for signs of Lilly, or of Wheeler, or even for the other girl in the bar. Exhausted I returned to my room, where I fell into a hot, feverish sleep lasting some days.

I don’t know if this happened to me a year ago, or just the night before last. Time has a way of becoming a concertina, of expanding and diminishing moments in this town. I spend the hours drifting in the streets, returning to the Shades Club of an evening, never to find it open. I ask the waiters at the other bars if they know anything about it. Someone was working there that night I met Lilly, but no one seems able to tell me anything. They regard me sadly, pour me a drink, sometimes they give me a meal.

I’ve made efforts to get out of this town, but every time I resolve to leave, then I’m distracted, by another hair on my tongue, or an involuntary twitch of my tail muscle. I don’t know when the tail first appeared. I woke up one morning and it was there, as if it had always been there. I keep it self-consciously coiled inside my trousers as I go about the town, hoping its movements won’t betray me.

But the discomfort of the tail is nothing compared to the hollow ache, the hunger, the yearning to make one moment snap together with another to form a chain of some consequence, some meaning. For I catch myself, washed up on this street or in that club, with no sense of why I came there, or what it is I’m looking for.

I am haunted by the desire to know what I am doing in this place.

I haven’t seen Ben Wheeler since that night. I know he struck some kind of a deal involving me, which helped him get out of town. Meanwhile I wait. I wait for the Shades Club to open its door again. I wait for an old acquaintance to turn up at one of the waterfront bars, so that maybe this time I can strike the deal. And every now and then, something appears on the tip of my tongue, a hair, a strand of fur, like something half remembered, or like the first words in a strange, impossible story I’m about to tell. A story about the town of Candia, with its sleepy waterfront, and its lost bars and missing streets, and its ruined temples dedicated to gods glimpsed only once in a lifetime. A story about Candia, the town that couldn’t decide its allegiance between the Greeks and the Turks, and so invited its own downfall.

But then a kind of waking sleep washes over me. And I find myself back again in one of the bars on the waterfront, nursing a glass of raki while the resitica man decants from his bursting heart in this town of forgotten miracles.