Anansi Boys

E-Book Extra One

Think of this as being one of those odd scenes that normally turn up as extras on DVDs—the scenes that everyone liked, but that made the film work better without them. It’s one of them.

I really enjoyed writing it, and my editor at Headline, the redoubtable Jane Morpeth, was sad when I told her it was going, because she liked it. And for that matter, I liked it too, only it messed up the pacing of the chapter it was in, and once I was prepared to grit my teeth and cut it, everything worked rather better.

I firmly believe that cut scenes are best left cut.

Even so, it had Spider in it, doing what Spider does best. And it had birds in. And in my head, it was the bit of the novel that was almost a Warner Brothers’ cartoon.

So when Jane asked if I would be willing to let it appear—just this once—in the back of the UK edition of Anansi Boys, I found myself, slightly to my surprise, saying yes, and now here it is in the electronic version.

I’ve let it run into an earlier version of the scene that’s still in the novel, at the end of Chapter Eleven. (This scene would have been in Chapter Eleven, split into two or three segments, and occurred between Fat Charlie arriving at the hotel, and the end of the chapter.)

Neil

Spider was imagining himself elsewhere. He was flicking, in his mind, through places he knew, or remembered, or imagined, willing himself there. Nothing happened. He remained precisely where he was, held by the chain of bones in his feathered cell.

He tried doing it the other way, thinking of a person, and trying to make himself be with them. This tended to be a fairly unreliable method of travel for Spider at the best of times: Spider had trouble with other people. He had trouble remembering their faces or their names, or sometimes even that they really existed at all.

He thought about Fat Charlie; he thought of old girlfriends, but they seemed peculiarly unconvincing, reconfiguring in his head into an assembly of breasts and lips and skin and smiles, and they evaporated in his mind; last of all, he thought of Rosie. He thought of her eyes, her warmth, the curve of her nostrils, the smell of her hair.

(And on a cruise ship, dozing by the pool, Rosie shifted uncomfortably.)

Well, thought Spider, if he could not get out one way, he would get out another. There was more than one way to skin a cat, after all1.

He tried changing shape, with no result. He tried shouting. He tried shouting some more.

There was a flapping noise. Two sandhill cranes stood in front of him. They looked at him curiously.

It’s not impossible to be Spider, or something like him. All you need is a complete and utter certainty that everything will work out; a cocky assurance that’s just a hair’s breadth away from psychosis; the conviction that you’re a monstrously clever fellow, and that the universe always looks after its own.

“You know,” said Spider to the birds, “I don’t want to cause a problem but these chains are a bit loose. One solid tug and I could fall down.”

The birds might have looked concerned. Spider couldn’t be sure. It’s hard to tell with birds.

“It’s a shocking job,” said Spider. “Whoever made these chains should be properly ashamed of themselves. Frankly, I could get out of them in a couple of minutes, and think of the trouble you’d all be with herself if I simply fell out of them and wandered off. Quite appalling workmanship.”

The cranes looked at each other. One of them strutted back towards the wall. Spider watched it—a jog to the left, then it reached out its beak to the wall, and it touched a feather there, a feather paler than the others. And then it was gone.

“You know,” said Spider to the remaining crane. “Let’s just pretend I didn’t say anything. I’d hate to put you all to any bother.”

A fluttering, and now the space was filled with huge crows who landed on the bone chains, then strutted about like builders examining the work of quite a different firm of builders, one that had left town with the work left incomplete. They cawed and tokked in what Spider was certain was the corvine equivalent of “So what sort of cowboy put this together than?”

A word from their foreman and the chains were covered in crows, pecking and clawing at the bones, tapping and prodding with black beaks against the bones. A loud caw and the chains fell apart—the bones tumbled to the floor, and Spider tumbled with them. The floor was littered with twigs and tiny feathers, splashed and speckled with birdshit.

Spider got to his feet, and noticed, for the first time, the geese. There were five of them, and they surrounded him, pecking at him, honking and hissing, to ensure that he stayed in the centre of them. A goose with its dander up and its neck down can cow a Doberman with a hiss, and these were the geese of nightmares.

Spider smiled at them.

Beneath the clever beaks of the crows the bone chains were expertly reassembled. The geese began to lower their necks once more, honking and hissing, pushing Spider back to where the chains were waiting.

“Hey,” he said to the geese.”Just give me room to breathe. I’m going back.Yeah?”

He turned where the chains hung, waiting for him, he counted to three, and then he turned and swung himself back toward the wall, where the sandhill crane had vanished. In the dim light he lunged for one feather paler than the others, and he hoped.

The wall became thin, almost translucent, and he pushed through it triumphantly, with angry geese pecking at his heels, and realised, as he did so, that he might have made a slight mistake.

Somehow, he had assumed that the cell was deep in the earth—that’s where people build cells, after all. But on the whole, birds don’t burrow. The tree was enormous, higher than a giant redwood, and it was filled with a rookery of nests, including, just above him, the nest from which he had escaped. Below him approaching with the speed of an out-of-control sports car, was the ground.

“Not a problem,” Spider told himself.

Again he tried to shift his location, with no more luck or success than before. Again he tried to change his shape—a little brown spider would simply have flown away on the air currents. Nothing happened, only the ground was rather closer.

Still, he thought, if he couldn’t move and he couldn’t change, the odds were that whatever kind of a place he was in, it wasn’t a real place. It was made of mind, not world. As long as he was able to bear in mind that this was Maya, was illusion, he thought, he would be fine. The cold air rushed past him. He spread his arms and his legs.The cold air rushed past him.

And then he hit the ground. “It’s not real,” he thought, as the air was knocked out of him, and, for a moment, everything went dark.

Spider picked himself up. He hurt, all over, but nothing seemed to be broken.

He wondered if he had his own pocket universe somewhere, hung with webs and scuttling, industrious, storytelling spiders. He did not know. He was not sure where to look for it, if he did have one. His father would have known, of course—

The sky was the colour of beaten copper, and the earth was sandy and grey, and everything smelled of cinnamon and nutmeg.There had to be a way out.That was obvious.Ways in, ways out. He picked a direction, and did not run. Instead, he strolled, but he covered a lot of ground like that. Spider strolled like some people zoomed.

There was a large bird on a bush looking at him. The bird said, “Spider.You know you’re never going to escape from here.”

Spider said, “I’ll bet you all I own that I shall. And that you’ll show me how to get away.”

Birds can’t smirk, they don’t have the equipment, but this one almost managed it. “All you own?”

“Everything, if you don’t show me the way out. So please, show me the way out of here.”

“Never,” said the bird.

“Close your eyes,” said Spider, “And count to ten. I promise that by the time you’ve finished counting you’ll have pointed me to the way out of here.”

The bird closed its eyes. “One,” it said. “Two. Three. Four.”

With one twist, Spider broke its neck, and it stopped counting. “Still, I wouldn’t want you to think me a liar,” said Spider to the bird. He plucked it, and set the feathers to one side, then he made a small fire in the earth, roasted and ate the meat, cleaned off the bones, and, last of all, he cast the bones onto the sand.

They fell higgledy-piggledy, every which way. Spider scooped them up again. “Remember,” he said, “You can’t lie when you’re dead. “This time when he cast the bones they pointed unequivocally in one direction.

“That’s what I like,” said Spider. “Someone who honours his bets.”

He put the bird’s feathers on, and walked to the top of a hill. Ahead of him was a tear in the sky, a small rip in the coppery fabric of everything, and darkness spilled through it, and behind the darkness stars were twinkling. Spider no longer cared that it was uncool to run. Now he ran.

As he reached the bottom of the hill, birds descended around him.

“Stop!” they called.

He stopped. “I’m a bird,” he told them. “Just like you.” Even in the Bird Woman’s universe, he was certain that he had enough conviction to make the things he said true for those that heard them.

“What manner of bird are you?” asked a heron, puzzled. “An emu? An ostrich? A moa?”

“Yeah. Sure. Something like that,” said Spider. “Hey, have any of you seen Spider anywhere? I heard that he had escaped, and I was told to guard the way out of here.”

“We’re looking for him too,” said an eagle. “Haven’t seen him, though. Actually, we thought you might be him, when we saw you coming towards us.”

“No, you didn’t,” said Spider. “You thought I was just another bird.”

“Oh. Right. That was what we thought,” agreed the heron.

“So. You lot all wait here, and guard the way out,” said Spider. “And I’ll just put my head through there and make sure that he hasn’t got here ahead of us.”

Spider walked forward. He walked through the rip in the sky.

Ahead of him he could see an island. He could see a small mountain in the centre of the island. He could see a pure blue sky, and swaying palm trees, a white gull high in the sky. But even as he saw it the world seemed to be receding. It was as if he was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. It shrank and slipped from him, and the more he ran towards it the further away it seemed to get.

The island was a reflection in a puddle of water, and then it was nothing at all.

He was in a cave.The edges of things were crisp—crisper and sharper than anywhere that Spider had ever been before. This was a different kind of place.The feather she had worn fell to the rocky floor. He turned to the daylight.

She was standing in the mouth of the cave, between him and the open air. She had stared into his face in a Greek Restaurant in South London, and birds had come from her mouth.

“You know,” said Spider, “I was just in your world. And I have to say, you’ve got the strangest ideas about hospitality. You come to my world, I’d make you dinner, open a bottle of wine, put on some soft music, give you an evening you would never forget.”

Her face was impassive; carved from black rock it was. The wind tugged at the edges of her old brown coat. She spoke then, her voice high and distant as the wrenching call of a distant gull.

“I took you,” she said. “Now, you will call him.”

“Call him? Call who?”

“You will bleat,” she said.” You will whimper. Your fear will excite him.”

“Spider does not bleat,” he said. He was not certain it was true.

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

“If you kill me,” said Spider, “my curse will be upon you.” He wondered if he actually had a curse. He probably did.

“It will not be I that kills you,” she said. She raised her hand, and it was not a hand but a raptor’s talon. She raked her talon down his face, down his chest, her cruel claws sinking into his flesh, ripping his skin.

It did not hurt, although Spider knew that it would hurt soon enough.

Beads of blood crimsoned his chest and dripped down his face. His eyes stung. His blood touched his lips. He could taste it and smell the iron scent of it.

“Now,” she said in the cries of distant birds. “Now your death begins.”

Spider said, “We’re both reasonable entities. Let me present you with a perhaps rather more feasible alternative scenario that might conceivably have benefits for both of us.” He said it with an easy smile. He said it convincingly.

“You talk too much,” she said. Then she reached into his mouth with her sharp talons, and with one wrenching movement she tore out his tongue.

“There,” she said. And then she said, “Sleep.”