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.