Anansi Boys

Chapter Five

Fat Charlie was thirsty.

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt.

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead.

Fat Charlie opened his eyes, which was a mistake, in that it let daylight in, which hurt. It also told him where he was (in his own bed, in his bedroom), and because he was staring at the clock on his bedside table, it told him that the time was 11:30.

That, he thought, one word at a time, was about as bad as things could get: he had the kind of hangover that an Old Testament God might have smitten the Midianites with, and the next time he saw Grahame Coats he would undoubtedly learn that he had been fired.

He wondered if he could sound convincingly sick over the phone, then realized that the challenge would be convincingly sounding anything else.

He could not remember getting home last night.

He would phone the office, the moment he was able to remember the telephone number. He would apologize—crippling twenty-four-hour flu, flat on his back, nothing that could be done—

“You know,” said someone in the bed next to him, “I think there’s a bottle of water on your side. Could you pass it over here?”

Fat Charlie wanted to explain that there was no water on his side of the bed, and that there was, in fact, no water closer than the bathroom sink, if he disinfected the toothbrush mug first, but he realized he was staring at one of several bottles of water, sitting on the bedside table. He reached his hand out, and closed fingers that felt like they belonged to someone else around one of them, then, with the sort of effort people usually reserve for hauling themselves up the final few feet of a sheer rock face, he rolled over in bed.

It was the vodka and orange.

Also, she was naked. At least, the bits of her he could see were.

She took the water, and pulled the sheet up to cover her chest. “Ta. He said to tell you,” she said, “when you woke, not to worry about calling work and telling them you were ill. He said to tell you he’s already taken care of it.”

Fat Charlie’s mind was not put at rest. His fears and worries were not allayed. Then again, in the condition he was in, he only had room in his head for a single thing to worry about at once, and right now he was worrying about whether or not he would make it to the bathroom in time.

“You’ll need more liquids,” said the girl. “You’ll need to replenish your electrolytes.”

Fat Charlie made it to the bathroom in time. Afterward, seeing he was there already, he stood under the shower until the room stopped undulating, and then he brushed his teeth without throwing up.

When he returned to the bedroom, the vodka and orange was no longer there, which was a relief to Fat Charlie, who had started to hope that she might have been an alcohol-induced delusion, like pink elephants or the nightmarish idea that he had taken to the stage to sing on the previous evening.

He could not find his dressing gown, so he pulled on a tracksuit, in order to feel dressed enough to visit the kitchen, at the far end of the hall.

His phone chimed, and he rummaged through his jacket, which was on the floor beside the bed, until he found it, and flipped it open. He grunted into it, as anonymously as he could, just in case it was someone from the Grahame Coats Agency trying to discern his whereabouts.

“It’s me,” said Spider’s voice. “Everything’s okay.”

“You told them I was dead?”

“Better than that. I told them I was you.”

“But.” Fat Charlie tried to think clearly. “But you’re not me.”

“Hey. I know that. I told them I was.”

“You don’t even look like me.”

“Brother of mine, you are harshing a potential mellow here. It’s all taken care of. Oops. Gotta go. The big boss needs to talk to me.”

“Grahame Coats? Look, Spider—”

But Spider had put down the phone, and the screen blanked.

Fat Charlie’s dressing gown came through the door. There was a girl inside it. It looked significantly better on her than it ever had on him. She was carrying a tray, on which was a water glass with a fizzing Alka-Seltzer in it, along with something in a mug.

“Drink both of these,” she told him. “The mug first. Just knock it back.”

“What’s in the mug?”

“Egg yolk, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, salt, dash of vodka, things like that,” she said. “Kill or cure. Now,” she told him, in tones that brooked no argument. “Drink.”

Fat Charlie drank.

“Oh my god,” he said.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “But you’re still alive.”

He wasn’t sure about that. He drank the Alka-Seltzer anyway. Something occurred to him.

“Um,” said Fat Charlie. “Um. Look. Last night. Did we. Um.”

She looked blank.

“Did we what?”

“Did we. You know. Do it?”

“You mean you don’t remember?” Her face fell. “You said it was the best you’d ever had. That it was as if you’d never made love to a woman before. You were part god, part animal, and part unstoppable sex machine—”

Fat Charlie didn’t know where to look. She giggled.

“I’m just winding you up,” she said. “I’d helped your brother get you home, we cleaned you up, and, after that, you know.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“Well,” she said, “you were completely out cold, and it’s a big bed. I’m not sure where your brother slept. He must have the constitution of an ox. He was up at the crack of dawn, all bright and smiling.”

“He went into work,” said Fat Charlie. “He told them he was me.”

“Wouldn’t they be able to tell the difference? I mean, you’re not exactly twins.”

“Apparently not.” He shook his head. Then he looked at her. She stuck out a small, extremely pink tongue at him.

“What’s your name?”

“You mean you’ve forgotten? I remember your name. You’re Fat Charlie.”

“Charles,” he said. “Just Charles is fine.”

“I’m Daisy,” she said, and stuck out her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

They shook hands solemnly.

“I feel a bit better,” said Fat Charlie.

“Like I said,” she said. “Kill or cure.”

Spider was having a great day at the office. He almost never worked in offices. He almost never worked. Everything was new, everything was marvelous and strange, from the tiny lift that lurched him up to the fifth floor, to the warren-like offices of the Grahame Coats Agency. He stared, fascinated, at the glass case in the lobby filled with dusty awards. He wandered through the offices, and when anyone asked him who he was, he would say “I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” and he’d say it in his god-voice, which would make whatever he said practically true.

He found the tea-room, and made himself several cups of tea. Then he carried them back to Fat Charlie’s desk, and arranged them around it in an artistic fashion. He started to play with the computer network. It asked him for a password. “I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” he told the computer, but there were still places it didn’t want him to go, so he said “I’m Grahame Coats,” and it opened to him like a flower.

He looked at things on the computer until he got bored.

He dealt with the contents of Fat Charlie’s in basket. He dealt with Fat Charlie’s pending basket.

It occurred to him that Fat Charlie would be waking up around now, so he called him at home, in order to reassure him; he just felt that he was making a little headway when Grahame Coats put his head around the door, ran his fingers across his stoatlike lips, and beckoned.

“Gotta go,” Spider said to his brother. “The big boss needs to talk to me.” He put down the phone.

“Making private phone calls on company time, Nancy,” stated Grahame Coats.

“Abso-friggin’-lutely,” agreed Spider.

“And was that myself you were referring to as ‘the big boss’?” asked Grahame Coats. They walked to the end of the hallway and into his office.

“You’re the biggest,” said Spider. “And the bossest.”

Grahame Coats looked puzzled; he suspected he was being made fun of, but he was not certain, and this disturbed him.

“Well, sit ye down, sit ye down,” he said.

Spider sat him down.

It was Grahame Coats’s custom to keep the turnover of staff at the Grahame Coats Agency fairly constant. Some people came and went. Others came and remained until just before their jobs would begin to carry some kind of employment protection. Fat Charlie had been there longer than anyone: one year and eleven months. One month to go before redundancy payments or industrial tribunals could become a part of his life.

There was a speech that Grahame Coats gave, before he fired someone. He was very proud of his speech.

“Into each life,” he began, “a little rain must fall. There’s no cloud without a silver lining.”

“It’s an ill wind,” offered Spider, “that blows no one good.”

“Ah. Yes. Yes indeed. Well. As we pass through this vale of tears, we must pause to reflect that—”

“The first cut,” said Spider, “is the deepest.”

“What? Oh.” Grahame Coats scrabbled to remember what came next. “Happiness,” he pronounced, “is like a butterfly.”

“Or a bluebird,” agreed Spider.

“Quite. If I may finish?”

“Of course. Be my guest,” said Spider, cheerfully.

“And the happiness of every soul at the Grahame Coats Agency is as important to me as my own.”

“I cannot tell you,” said Spider, “how happy that makes me.”

“Yes,” said Grahame Coats.

“Well, I better get back to work,” said Spider. “It’s been a blast, though. Next time you want to share some more, just call me. You know where I am.”

“Happiness,” said Grahame Coats. His voice was taking on a faintly strangulated quality. “And what I wonder, Nancy, Charles, is this—are you happy here? And do you not agree that you might be rather happier elsewhere?”

“That’s not what I wonder,” said Spider. “You want to know what I wonder?”

Grahame Coats said nothing. It had never gone like this before. Normally, at this point, their faces fell, and they went into shock. Sometimes they cried. Grahame Coats had never minded when they cried.

“What I wonder,” said Spider, “is what the accounts in the Cayman Islands are for. You know, because it almost sort of looks like money that should go to our client accounts sometimes just goes into the Cayman Island accounts instead. And it seems a funny sort of way to organize the finances, for the money coming in to rest in those accounts. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I was hoping you could explain it to me.”

Grahame Coats had gone off-white—one of those colors that turn up in paint catalogs with names like “parchment” or “magnolia.” He said, “How did you get access to those accounts?”

“Computers,” said Spider. “Do they drive you as nuts as they drive me? What can you do?”

Grahame Coats thought for several long moments. He had always liked to imagine that his financial affairs were so deeply tangled that, even if the Fraud Squad were ever able to conclude that financial crimes had been committed, they would find it extremely difficult to explain to a jury exactly what kind of crimes they were.

“There’s nothing illegal about having offshore accounts,” he said, as carelessly as possible.

“Illegal?” said Spider. “I should hope not. I mean, if I saw anything illegal, I should have to report it to the appropriate authorities.”

Grahame Coats picked up a pen from his desk, then he put it down again. “Ah,” he said. “Well, delightful though it is to chat, converse, spend time, and otherwise hobnob with you, Charles, I suspect that both of us have work we should be getting on with. Time and tide, after all, wait for no man. Procrastination is the thief of time.”

“Life is a rock,” suggested Spider, “but the radio rolled me.”

“Whatever.”

Fat Charlie was starting to feel human again. He was no longer in pain; slow, intimate waves of nausea were no longer sweeping over him. While he was not yet convinced that the world was a fine and joyous place, he was no longer in the ninth circle of hangover hell, and this was a good thing.

Daisy had taken over the bathroom. He had listened to the taps running, and then to some contented splashes.

He knocked on the bathroom door.

“I’m in here,” said Daisy. “I’m in the bath.”

“I know,” said Fat Charlie. “I mean, I didn’t know, but I thought you probably were.”

“Yes?” said Daisy.

“I just wondered,” he said, through the door. “I wondered why you came back here. Last night.”

“Well,” she said. “You were a bit the worse for wear. And your brother looked like he needed a hand. I’m not working this morning, so. Voilà.”

“Voilà,” said Fat Charlie. On the one hand, she felt sorry for him. And on the other, she really liked Spider. Yes. He’d only had a brother for a little over a day, and already he felt there would be no surprises left in this new family relationship. Spider was the cool one; he was the other one.

She said, “You have a lovely voice.”

“What?”

“You were singing in the taxi, when we were going home. Unforgettable. It was lovely.”

He had somehow put the karaoke incident out of his mind, placed it in the dark places one disposes of inconvenient things. Now it came back, and he wished it hadn’t.

“You were great,” she said. “Will you sing to me later?”

Fat Charlie thought desperately, and then was saved from thinking desperately by the doorbell.

“Someone at the door,” he said.

He went downstairs and opened the door and things got worse. Rosie’s mother gave him a look that would have curdled milk. She said nothing. She was holding a large white envelope.

“Hello,” said Fat Charlie. “Mrs. Noah. Nice to see you. Um.”

She sniffed and held the envelope in front of her. “Oh,” she said. “You’re here. So. You going to invite me in?”

That’s right, thought Fat Charlie. Your kind always have to be invited. Just say no, and she’ll have to go away. “Of course, Mrs. Noah. Please, come in.” So that’s how vampires do it. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Don’t think you can get around me like that,” she said. “Because you can’t.”

“Er. Right.”

Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie’s mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing, as it did, edible foodstuffs. “Coffee? Water?” Don’t say wax fruit. “Wax fruit?” Damn.

“I understand from Rosie that your father recently passed away,” she said.

“Yes. He did.”

“When Rosie’s father passed, they did a four-page obituary in Cooks and Cookery. They said he was solely responsible for the arrival of Caribbean fusion cuisine in this country.”

“Oh,” he said.

“It’s not like he left me badly off, neither. He had life insurance, and he owned a share of two successful restaurants. I’m a very well-off woman. When I die, it will all go to Rosie.”

“When we’re married,” said Fat Charlie, “I’ll be looking after her. Don’t you worry.”

“I’m not saying you’re only after Rosie for my money,” said Rosie’s mother, in a tone of voice that made it clear that that was exactly what she did believe.

Fat Charlie’s headache started coming back. “Mrs. Noah, is there anything I can help you with?”

“I’ve been talking to Rosie, and we’ve decided that I should start helping with your wedding plans,” she said, primly. “I need a list of your people. The ones you were hoping to invite. Names, addresses, e-mail, and phone numbers. I’ve made a form for you to fill out. I thought I’d save on postage and drop it off myself, since I was going to be passing by Maxwell Gardens anyway. I was not expecting to find you home.” She handed him the large white envelope. “There will be a total of ninety people at the wedding. You will be permitted a total of eight family members and six personal friends. The personal friends and four members will comprise Table H. The rest of your group will be at Table C. Your father would have been seated with us at the head table, but seeing that he has passed over, we have allocated his seat to Rosie’s Aunt Winifred. Have you decided on your best man yet?”

Fat Charlie shook his head.

“Well, when you do, make certain he knows that there won’t be any crude stuff in his speech. I don’t want to hear anything from your best man I wouldn’t hear in a church. You understand me?”

Fat Charlie wondered what Rosie’s mother would usually hear in a church. Probably just cries of “Back! Foul beast of Hell!” followed by gasps of “Is it alive?” and a nervous inquiry as to whether anybody had remembered to bring the stakes and hammers.

“I think,” said Fat Charlie, “I have more than ten relations. I mean, there are cousins and great-aunts and things.”

“What you obviously fail to grasp,” said Rosie’s mother, “is that weddings cost money. I’ve allocated £175 a person to tables A to D—Table A is the head table—which takes care of Rosie’s closest relations and my women’s club, and £125 to tables E to G, which are, you know, more distant acquaintances, the children and so on and so forth.”

“You said my friends would be at Table H,” said Fat Charlie.

“That’s the next tier down. They won’t be getting the avocado shrimp starters or the sherry trifle.”

“When Rosie and I talked about it last, we thought we’d go for a sort of a general West Indian theme to the food.”

Rosie’s mother sniffed. “She sometimes doesn’t know her own mind, that girl. But she and I are now in full agreement.”

“Look,” said Fat Charlie, “I think maybe I ought to talk to Rosie about all this and get back to you.”

“Just fill out the forms,” said Rosie’s mother. Then she said suspiciously, “Why aren’t you at work?”

“I’m. Um. I’m not in. That is to say, I’m off this morning. Not going in today. I’m. Not.”

“I hope you told Rosie that. She was planning to see you for lunch, she told me. That was why she could not have lunch with me.”

Fat Charlie took this information in. “Right,” he said. “Well, thanks for popping over, Mrs. Noah. I’ll talk to Rosie, and—”

Daisy came into the kitchen. She wore a towel wrapped around her head, and Fat Charlie’s dressing gown, which clung to her damp body. She said “There’s orange juice, isn’t there? I know I saw some, when I was poking around before. How’s your head? Any better?” She opened the fridge door, and poured herself a tall glass of orange juice.

Rosie’s mother cleared her throat. It did not sound like a throat being cleared. It sounded like pebbles rattling down a beach.

“Hullo,” said Daisy. “I’m Daisy.”

The temperature in the kitchen began to drop. “Indeed?” said Rosie’s mother. Icicles hung from the final D.

“I wonder what they would have called oranges,” said Fat Charlie into the silence, “if they weren’t orange. I mean, if they were some previously unknown blue fruit, would they have been called blues? Would we be drinking blue juice?”

“What?” asked Rosie’s mother.

“Bless. You should hear the things that come out of your mouth,” said Daisy, cheerfully. “Right. I’m going to see if I can find my clothes. Lovely meeting you.”

She went out. Fat Charlie did not resume breathing.

“Who,” said Rosie’s mother, perfectly calmly. “Was. That.”

“My sis—cousin. My cousin,” said Fat Charlie. “I just think of her as my sister. We were very close, growing up. She just decided to crash here last night. She’s a bit of a wild child. Well. Yes. You’ll see her at the wedding.”

“I’ll put her down for Table H,” said Rosie’s mother. “She’ll be more comfortable there.” She said it in the same way most people would say things like, “Do you wish to die quickly, or shall I let Mongo have his fun first?”

“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Well,” he said. “Lovely to see you. Well,” he said, “you must have lots of things to be getting on with. And,” he said, “I need to be getting to work.”

“I thought you had the day off.”

“Morning. I’ve got the morning off. And it’s nearly over. And I should be getting off to work now so good-bye.”

She clutched her handbag to her, and she stood up. Fat Charlie followed her out into the hall.

“Lovely seeing you,” he said.

She blinked, as a nictitating python might blink before striking. “Good-bye Daisy,” she called. “I’ll see you at the wedding.”

Daisy, now wearing panties and a bra, and in the process of pulling on a T-shirt, leaned out into the hall. “Take care,” she said, and went back into Fat Charlie’s bedroom.

Rosie’s mother said nothing else as Fat Charlie led her down the stairs. He opened the door for her, and as she went past him, he saw on her face something terrible, something that made his stomach knot more than it was knotting already: the thing that Rosie’s mother was doing with her mouth. It was pulled up at the corners in a ghastly rictus. Like a skull with lips, Rosie’s mother was smiling.

He closed the door behind her and he stood and shivered in the downstairs hall. Then, like a man going to the electric chair, he went back up the hall steps.

“Who was that?” asked Daisy, who was now almost dressed.

“My fiancée’s mother.”

“She’s a real bundle of joy, isn’t she?” She dressed in the same clothes she had worn the previous night.

“You going to work like that?”

“Oh, bless. No, I’ll go home and change. This isn’t how I look at work, anyway. Can you ring a taxi?”

“Where are you headed?”

“Hendon.”

He called a local taxi service. Then he sat on the floor in the hallway and contemplated various future scenarios, all of them uncontemplatable.

Someone was standing next to him. “I’ve got some B vitamins in my bag,” she said. “Or you could try sucking on a spoonful of honey. It’s never done anything for me, but my flatmate swears by it for hangovers.”

“It’s not that,” said Fat Charlie. “I told her you were my cousin. So she wouldn’t think you were my, that we, you know, a strange girl in the apartment, all that.”

“Cousin, is it? Well, not to worry. She’ll probably forget all about me, and if she doesn’t, tell her I left the country mysteriously. You’ll never see me again.”

“Really? Promise?”

“You don’t have to sound so pleased about it.”

A car horn sounded in the street outside. “That’ll be my taxi. Stand up and say good-bye.”

He stood up.

“Not to worry,” she said. She hugged him.

“I think my life is over,” he said.

“No. It’s not.”

“I’m doomed.”

“Thanks,” she said. And she leaned up, and she kissed him on the lips, longer and harder than could possibly fit within the bounds of recent introduction. Then she smiled, and walked jauntily down the stairs and let herself out.

“This,” said Fat Charlie out loud when the door closed, “probably isn’t really happening.”

He could still taste her on his lips, all orange juice and raspberries. That was a kiss. That was a serious kiss. There was an oomph behind the kiss that he had never in his whole life had before, not even from—

“Rosie,” he said.

He flipped open his phone, and speed-dialed her.

“This is Rosie’s phone,” said Rosie’s voice. “I’m busy, or I’ve lost the phone again. And you’re in voice mail. Try me at home or leave me a message.”

Fat Charlie closed the phone. Then he put on his coat over his tracksuit and, wincing just a little at the terrible unblinking daylight, he went out into the street.

Rosie Noah was worried, which in itself worried her. It was, as so many things in Rosie’s world were, whether she would admit it to herself or not, Rosie’s mother’s fault.

Rosie had become quite used to a world in which her mother hated the idea of her marrying Fat Charlie Nancy. She took her mother’s opposition to the marriage as a sign from the heavens that she was probably doing something right, even when she was not entirely sure in her own mind that this was actually the case.

And she loved him, of course. He was solid, reassuring, sane—

Her mother’s about-turn on the matter of Fat Charlie had Rosie worried, and her mother’s sudden enthusiasm for wedding organization troubled her deeply.

She had phoned Fat Charlie the previous night to discuss the matter, but he was not answering his phones. Rosie thought perhaps he had had an early night.

It was why she was giving up her lunchtime to talk to him.

The Grahame Coats Agency occupied the top floor of a gray Victorian building in the Aldwych, and was at the top of five flights of stairs. There was a lift, though, an antique elevator which had been installed a hundred years before by theatrical agent Rupert “Binky” Butterworth. It was an extremely small, slow, juddery lift whose design and function peculiarities only became comprehensible when you discovered that Binky Butterworth had possessed the size, shape, and ability to squeeze into small spaces of a portly young hippopotamus, and had designed the lift to fit, at a squeeze, Binky Butterworth and one other, much slimmer, person: a chorus girl, for example, or a chorus boy—Binky was not picky. All it took to make Binky happy was someone seeking theatrical representation squeezed into the lift with him, and a very slow and juddery journey up all six stories to the top. It was often the case that by the time he reached the top floor, Binky would be so overcome by the pressures of the journey that he would need to go and have a little lie-down, leaving the chorus girl or chorus boy to cool his or her heels in the waiting room, concerned that the red-faced panting and uncontrolled gasping for breath that Binky had been suffering from as they reached the final floors meant that he had been having some kind of early Edwardian embolism.

People would go into the lift with Binky Butterworth once, but after that they used the stairs.

Grahame Coats, who had purchased the remains of the Butterworth Agency from Binky’s granddaughter more than twenty years before, maintained the lift was part of history.

Rosie slammed the inner accordion door, closed the outer door, and went into reception, where she told the receptionist she wanted to see Charles Nancy. She sat down beneath the photographs of Grahame Coats with people he had represented—she recognized Morris Livingstone, the comedian, some once famous boy-bands, and a clutch of sports stars who had, in their later years, become “personalities”—the kind who got as much fun out of life as they could until a new liver became available.

A man came into reception. He did not look much like Fat Charlie. He was darker, and he was smiling as if he were amused by everything—deeply, dangerously amused.

“I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” said the man.

Rosie walked over to Fat Charlie and gave him a peck on the cheek. He said, “Do I know you?” which was an odd thing to say, and then he said, “Of course I do. You’re Rosie. And you get more beautiful every day,” and he kissed her back, touching his lips to hers. Their lips only brushed, but Rosie’s heart began to beat like Binky Butterworth’s after a particularly juddery lift journey pressed up against a chorine.

“Lunch,” squeaked Rosie. “Passing. Thought maybe we could. Talk.”

“Yeah,” said the man who Rosie now thought of as Fat Charlie. “Lunch.”

He put a comfortable arm around Rosie. “Anywhere you want to go for lunch?”

“Oh,” she said. “Just. Wherever you want.” It was the way he smelled, she thought. Why had she never before noticed how much she liked the way he smelled?

“We’ll find somewhere,” he said. “Shall we take the stairs?”

“If it’s all the same to you,” she said, “I think I’d rather take the lift.”

She banged home the accordion door, and they rode down to street level slowly and shakily, pressed up against each other.

Rosie couldn’t remember the last time she had been so happy.

When they got out onto the street Rosie’s phone beeped to let her know she had missed a call. She ignored it.

They went into the first restaurant they came to. Until the previous month it had been a high-tech sushi restaurant, with a conveyor belt that ran around the room carrying small raw fishy nibbles priced according to plate color. The Japanese restaurant had gone out of business and had been instantly replaced, in the way of London restaurants, by a Hungarian restaurant, which had kept the conveyor belt as a high-tech addition to the world of Hungarian cuisine, which meant that rapidly cooling bowls of goulash, paprika dumplings, and pots of sour cream made their way in stately fashion around the room.

Rosie didn’t think it was going to catch on.

“Where were you last night?” she asked.

“I went out,” he said. “With my brother.”

“You’re an only child,” she said.

“I’m not. It turns out I’m half of a matched set.”

“Really? Is this more of your dad’s legacy?”

“Honey,” said the man she thought of as Fat Charlie, “you don’t know the half of it.”

“Well,” she said. “I hope he’ll be coming to the wedding.”

“I don’t believe he would miss it for the world.” He closed his hand around hers, and she nearly dropped her goulash spoon. “What are you doing for the rest of the afternoon?”

“Not much. Things are practically dead back at the office right now. Couple of fund-raising phone calls to make, but they can wait. Is there. Um. Were you. Um. Why?”

“It’s such a beautiful day. Do you want to go for a walk?”

“That,” said Rosie, “would be quite lovely.”

They wandered down to the Embankment and began to walk along the northern back of the Thames, a slow, hand-in-hand amble, talking about nothing much in particular.

“What about your work?” asked Rosie, when they stopped to buy an ice cream.

“Oh,” he said. “They won’t mind. They probably won’t even notice that I’m not there.”

Fat Charlie ran up the stairs to the Grahame Coats Agency. He always took the stairs. It was healthier, for a start, and it meant he would never again have to worry about finding himself wedged into the lift with someone else, too close to pretend they weren’t there.

He walked into reception, panting slightly. “Has Rosie been in, Annie?”

“Did you lose her?” said the receptionist.

He walked back to his office. His desk was peculiarly tidy. The clutter of undealt-with correspondence was gone. There was a yellow Post-it note on his computer screen, with “See me. GC” on it.

He knocked on Grahame Coats’s office door. This time a voice said, “Yes?”

“It’s me,” he said.

“Yes,” said Grahame Coats. “Come ye in, Master Nancy. Pull up a pew. I’ve been giving our conversation of this morning a great deal of thought. And it seems to me that I have misjudged you. You have been working here, for, how long—?”

“Nearly two years.”

“You have been working long and hard. And now your father’s sad passing—.”

“I didn’t really know him.”

“Ah. Brave soul, Nancy. Given that it is currently the fallow season, how would you react to an offer of a couple of weeks off? With, I hardly need to add, full pay?”

“Full pay?” said Fat Charlie.

“Full pay, but, yes, I see your point. Spending money. I’m sure you could do with a little spending money, couldn’t you?”

Fat Charlie tried to work out what universe he was in. “Am I being fired?”

Grahame Coats laughed then, like a weasel with a sharp bone stuck in its throat. “Absatively not. Quite the reverse. In fact I believe,” he said, “that we now understand each other perfectly. Your job is safe and sound. Safe as houses. As long as you remain the model of circumspection and discretion you have been so far.”

“How safe are houses?” asked Fat Charlie.

“Extremely safe.”

“It’s just that I read somewhere that most accidents occur in the home.”

“Then,” said Grahame Coats, “I think it vitally important that you are encouraged to return to your own house with all celerity.” He handed Fat Charlie a piece of rectangular paper. “Here,” he said. “A small thank-you for two years of devoted service to the Grahame Coats Agency.” Then, because it was what he always said when he gave people money, “Don’t spend it all at once.”

Fat Charlie looked at the piece of paper. It was a check. “Two thousand pounds. Gosh. I mean, I won’t.”

Grahame Coats smiled at Fat Charlie. If there was triumph in that smile, Fat Charlie was too puzzled, too shaken, too bemused to see it.

“Go well,” said Grahame Coats.

Fat Charlie went back to his office.

Grahame Coats leaned around the door, casually, like a mongoose leaning idly against a snake-den. “An idle question. If, while you are off enjoying yourself and relaxing—a course of action I cannot press upon you strongly enough—if, during this time, I should need to access your files, could you let me know your password?”

“I think your password should get you anywhere in the system,” said Fat Charlie.

“Without doubt it will,” agreed Grahame Coats, blithely. “But just in case. You know computers, after all.”

“It’s mermaid,” said Fat Charlie. “M-E-R-M-A-I-D.”

“Excellent,” said Grahame Coats. “Excellent.” He didn’t rub his hands together, but he might as well have done.

Fat Charlie walked down the stairs with a check for two thousand pounds in his pocket, wondering how he could have so misjudged Grahame Coats for the last two years.

He walked around the corner to his bank, and deposited the check into his account.

Then he walked down to the Embankment, to breathe, and to think.

He was two thousand pounds richer. His headache of this morning had completely gone. He was feeling solid and prosperous. He wondered if he could talk Rosie into coming on a short holiday with him. It was short notice, but still—

And then he saw Spider and Rosie, walking hand in hand on the other side of the road. Rosie was finishing an ice cream. Then she stopped and dropped the remainder of the ice cream into a bin and pulled Spider toward her and, with an ice-creamy mouth, began to kiss him with enthusiasm and gusto.

Fat Charlie could feel his headache coming back. He felt paralyzed.

He watched them kissing. He was of the opinion that sooner or later they would have to come up for air, but they didn’t, so he walked in the other direction, feeling miserable, until he reached the tube.

And he went home.

By the time he got home, Fat Charlie felt pretty wretched, so he got onto a bed that still smelled faintly of Daisy, and he closed his eyes.

Time passed, and now Fat Charlie was walking along a sandy beach with his father. They were barefoot. He was a kid again, and his father was ageless.

So, his father was saying, how are you and Spider getting on?

This is a dream, pointed out Fat Charlie, and I don’t want to talk about it.

You boys, said his father, shaking his head. Listen. I’m going to tell you something important.

What?

But his father did not answer. Something on the edge of the waves had caught his eye, and he reached down and picked it up. Five pointed legs flexed languidly.

Starfish, said his father, musing. When you cut one in half, they just grow into two new starfish.

I thought you said you were going to tell me something important.

His father clutched his chest, and he collapsed onto the sand and stopped moving. Worms came out of the sand and devoured him in moments, leaving nothing but bones.

Dad?

Fat Charlie woke up in his bedroom with his cheeks wet with tears. Then he stopped crying. He had nothing to be upset about. His father had not died; it had simply been a bad dream.

He decided that he would invite Rosie over tomorrow night. They would have steak. He would cook. All would be well.

He got up and got dressed.

He was in the kitchen, twenty minutes later, spooning down a Pot Noodle, when it occurred to him that, although what had happened on the beach had been a dream, his father was still dead.

Rosie stopped in at her mother’s flat in Wimpole street, late that afternoon.

“I saw your boyfriend today,” said Mrs. Noah. Her given name had been Eutheria, but in the previous three decades nobody had used it to her face but her late husband, and following his death it had atrophied and was unlikely to be used again in her lifetime.

“So did I,” said Rosie. “My god I love that man.”

“Well, of course. You’re marrying him, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes. I mean, I always knew I loved him, but today I really saw how much I loved him. Everything about him.”

“Did you find out where he was last night?”

“Yes. He explained it all. He was out with his brother.”

“I didn’t know he had a brother.”

“He hadn’t mentioned him before. They aren’t very close.”

Rosie’s mother clicked her tongue. “Must be quite a family reunion going on. Did he mention his cousin, too?”

“Cousin?”

“Or maybe his sister. He didn’t seem entirely sure. Pretty thing, in a trashy sort of way. Looked a bit Chinese. No better than she should be, if you ask me. But that’s that whole family for you.”

“Mum. You haven’t met his family.”

“I met her. She was in his kitchen this morning, walking about that place damn near naked. Shameless. If she was his cousin.”

“Fat Charlie wouldn’t lie.”

“He’s a man isn’t he?”

“Mum!”

“And why wasn’t he at work today, anyway?”

“He was. He was at work today. We had lunch together.”

Rosie’s mother examined her lipstick in a pocket mirror, then, with her forefinger, rubbed the scarlet smudges off her teeth.

“What else did you say to him?” asked Rosie.

“We just talked about the wedding, how I didn’t want his best man making one of them near-the-knuckle speeches. He looked to me like he’d been drinking. You know how I warned you about marrying a drinking man.”

“Well, he looked perfectly fine when I saw him,” said Rosie primly. Then, “Oh Mum, I had the most wonderful day. We walked and we talked and—oh, have I told you how wonderful he smells? And he has the softest hands.”

“You ask me,” said her mother, “he smells fishy. Tell you what, next time you see him, you ask him about this cousin of his. I’m not saying she is his cousin, and I’m not saying she’s not. I’m just saying that if she is, then he has hookers and strippers and good-time girls in his family and is not the kind of person you should be seeing romantically.”

Rosie felt more comfortable, now her mother was once more coming down against Fat Charlie. “Mum. I won’t hear another word.”

“All right. I’ll hold my tongue. It’s not me that’s marrying him, after all. Not me that’s throwing my life away. Not me that’ll be weeping into my pillow while he’s out all night drinking with his fancy women. It’s not me that’ll be waiting, day after day, night after empty night, for him to get out of prison.”

“Mum!” Rosie tried to be indignant, but the thought of Fat Charlie in prison was too funny, too silly, and she found herself stifling a giggle.

Rosie’s phone trilled. She answered it, and said “Yes,” and “I’d love to. That would be wonderful.” She put her phone away.

“That was him,” she said to her mother. “I’m going over there tomorrow night. He’s cooking for me. How sweet is that?” And then she said, “Prison indeed.”

“I’m a mother,” said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, “and I know what I know.”

Grahame Coats sat in his office, while the day faded into dusk, staring at a computer screen. He brought up document after document, spreadsheet after spreadsheet. Some of them he changed. Most of them he deleted.

He was meant to be traveling to Birmingham that evening, where a former footballer, a client of his, was to open a nightclub. Instead he called and apologized: some things were unavoidable.

Soon the light outside the window was gone entirely. Grahame Coats sat in the cold glow of the computer screen, and he changed, and he overwrote, and he deleted.

Here’s another story they tell about Anansi.

Once, long, long ago, Anansi’s wife planted a field of peas. They were the finest, the fattest, the greenest peas you ever did see. It would have made your mouth water just to look at them.

From the moment Anansi saw the pea field, he wanted them. And he didn’t just want some of them, for Anansi was a man of enormous appetites. He did not want to share them. He wanted them all.

So Anansi lay down on his bed and he sighed, long long and loud, and his wife and his sons all came a-running. “I’m a-dying,” said Anansi, in this little weeny- weedy- weaky voice, “and my life is all over and done.”

At this his wife and his sons began to cry hot tears.

In his weensy-weak voice, Anansi says, “On my deathbed, you have to promise me two things.”

“Anything, anything,” says his wife and his sons.

“First, you got to promise me you will bury me down under the big breadfruit tree.”

“The big breadfruit tree down by the pea patch, you mean?” asks his wife.

“Of course that’s the one I mean,” says Anansi. Then, in his weensy-weak voice, he says, “And you got to promise something else. Promise me that, as a memorial to me, you going to make a little fire at the foot of my grave. And, to show you ain’t forgotten me, you going to keep the little fire burning, and not ever let it go out.”

“We will! We will!” said Anansi’s wife and children, wailing and sobbing.

“And on that fire, as mark of your respect and your love, I want to see a lickle pot, filled with saltwater, to remind you all of the hot salt tears you shed over me as I lay dying.”

“We shall! We shall!” they wept, and Anansi, he closed his eyes, and he breathed no more.

Well, they carried Anansi down to the big breadfruit tree that grew beside the pea patch, and they buried him six feet down, and at the foot of the grave they built a little fire, and they put a pot beside it, filled with saltwater.

Anansi, he waits down there all the day but when night falls he climbs out of the grave, and he goes into the pea patch, where he picks him the fattest, sweetest, ripest peas. He gathers them up, and he boils them up in his pot, and he stuffs himself with them till his tummy swells and tightens like a drum.

Then, before dawn, he goes back under the ground, and he goes back to sleep. He sleeps as his wife and his sons find the peas gone; he sleeps through them seeing the pot empty of water and refilling it; he sleeps through their sorrow.

Each night Anansi comes out of his grave, dancing and delighting at the cleverness of him, and each night he fills the pot with peas, and he fills his tummy with peas, and he eats until he cannot eat another thing.

Days go by, and Anansi’s family gets thinner and thinner, for nothing ever ripens that isn’t picked in the night by Anansi, and they got nothing to eat.

Anansi’s wife, she looks down at the empty plates, and she says to her sons, “What would your father do?”

Her sons, they think and they think, and they remember every tale that Anansi ever told them. Then they go down to the tar pits, and they buy them sixpennyworth of tar, enough to fill four big buckets, and they take that tar back to the pea patch. And down in the middle of the pea patch, they make them a man out of tar: tar face, tar eyes, tar arms, tar fingers, and tar chest. It was a fine man, as black and as proud as Anansi himself.

That night, old Anansi, fat as he has ever been in his whole life, he scuttles up out of the ground, and, plump and happy, stomach swollen like a drum, he strolls over to the pea patch.

“Who you?” he says to the tar man.

The tar man, he don’t say one word.

“This is my place,” said Anansi to the tar man. “It’s my pea patch. You better get going, if you know what’s good for you.”

The tar man, he don’t say one word, he don’t move a muscle.

“I’m the strongest, mightiest, most powerful fellow there is or was or ever will be,” says Anansi to the tar man. “I’m fiercer than Lion, faster than Cheetah, stronger than Elephant, more terrible than Tiger.” He swelled up with pride at his power and strength and fierceness, and he forgot he was just a little spider. “Tremble,” says Anansi. “Tremble and run.”

The tar man, he didn’t tremble and he didn’t run. Tell the truth, he just stood there.

So Anansi hits him.

Anansi’s fist, it sticks solid.

“Let go of my hand,” he tells the tar man. “Let go my hand, or I’m going to hit you in the face.”

The tar man, he says not a word, and he doesn’t move the tiniest muscle, and Anansi hits him, bash, right in the face.

“Okay,” says Anansi, “a joke’s a joke. You can keep hold of my hands if you like, but I got four more hands, and two good legs, and you can’t hold them all, so you let me go and I’ll take it easy on you.”

The tar man, he doesn’t let go of Anansi’s hands, and he doesn’t say a word, so Anansi hits him with all his hands and then kicks him with his feet, one after another.

“Right,” says Anansi. “You let me go, or I bite you.” The tar fills his mouth, and covers his nose and his face.

So that’s how they find Anansi the next morning, when his wife and his sons come down to the pea patch by the old breadfruit tree: all stuck to the tar man, and dead as history.

They weren’t surprised to see him like that.

Those days, you used to find Anansi like that all the time.