“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.
MBO
Nicholas Royle
Nicholas Royle, born in Manchester in 1963, is the author of five novels—including Counterparts, The Director’s Cut, and Antwerp—and two novellas—The Appetite and The Enigma of Departure. He has published around 120 short stories, 20 of which are collected in Mortality. Widely published as a journalist, with regular appearances in Time Out and the Independent, he has also edited twelve original anthologies, including two Darklands volumes and The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams. The winner of three British Fantasy Awards, he teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has a black cat called Max.
“Mbo,” one of the more visceral and violent stories in this anthology, is a good example of Royle’s talent as crackerjack storyteller and brings together two legends.
He says: “Islands are interesting precisely because they are isolated. Evolution can follow a different path. The Javan tiger (extinct), the Tasmanian tiger (widely believed to be extinct and actually a marsupial rather than a cat), the Zanzibar leopard (probably extinct, but you never know). The Zanzibar leopard was smaller than its mainland counterpart and its spots were different, too. A search for evidence of the cat’s presence on the island in the 1990s uncovered no trace, but it’s hard, when you stand on the edge of the Jozani Forest gazing in, not to imagine the leopard lurking somewhere within.”
It was a question of arriving at the right time. You didn’t necessarily, for example, turn up at the same time each evening, but juggled various considerations, such as the heat, the number of clouds in the sky, even what type they were, whether they were cumulus or stratus or cirro-stratus—stuff like that. You wanted to turn up just at the right moment, just in time to get a seat and a good view and not a moment too soon. After all, the terrace of the Africa House Hotel was not a place you wanted to spend any more time than you absolutely had to. It simply wasn’t that nice.