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.