Anansi Boys

Chapter Six

Daisy woke up to the alarm. She stretched in her bed like a kitten. She could hear the shower, which meant that her flatmate was already up. She put on a pink fuzzy dressing gown and went into the hall.

“You want porridge?” she called through the bathroom door.

“Not much. If you’re making it, I’ll eat it.”

“You certainly know how to make a girl feel wanted,” said Daisy, and she went into the kitchenette and put the porridge on to cook.

She went back into her bedroom, pulled on her work clothes, then looked at herself in the mirror. She made a face. She put her hair up into a tight bun at the back.

Her flatmate, Carol, a thin-faced white woman from Preston, stuck her head around the bedroom door. She was toweling her hair vigorously. “Bathroom’s all yours. What’s the word on the porridge?”

“Probably needs a stir.”

“So where were you the other night anyway? You said you were going off to Sybilla’s birthday drinks, and I know you never came back.”

“None of your beeswax, innit.” Daisy went into the kitchen and stirred the porridge. She added a pinch of salt and stirred it some more. She glopped the porridge into bowls and placed them on the counter.

“Carol? Porridge is getting cold.”

Carol came in, sat down, stared at the porridge. She was only half-dressed. “S’not a proper breakfast, is it? You ask me, a proper breakfast is fried eggs, sausages, black pudden, and grilled tomatoes.”

“You cook it,” said Daisy, “I’ll eat it.”

Carol sprinkled a dessert-spoonful of sugar on her porridge. She looked at it. Then she sprinkled another one on. “No, you bloody won’t. You say that you will. But you’ll start rabbiting on about cholesterol or what fried food is doing to your kidneys.” She tasted the porridge as if it might bite her back. Daisy passed her a cup of tea. “You and your kidneys. Actually, that might be nice for a change. You ever eaten kidneys, Daisy?”

“Once,” said Daisy. “If you ask me, you can get the same effect by grilling half a pound of liver, then weeing all over it.”

Carol sniffed. “That wasn’t called for,” she said.

“Eat your porridge.”

They finished their porridge and their tea. They put the bowls in the dishwasher and, because it was not yet full, did not turn it on. Then they drove in to work. Carol, who was now in uniform, did the driving.

Daisy went up to her desk, in a room filled with empty desks.

The phone rang as she sat down. “Daisy? You’re late.”

She looked at her watch. “No,” she said. “I’m not. Sir. Now is there anything else I can do for you this morning?”

“Too right. You can call a man named Coats. He’s a friend of the chief super. Fellow Crystal Palace supporter. He’s already texted me about it twice this morning. Who taught the chief super to text, that’s what I want to know?”

Daisy took down the details and called the number. She put on her most businesslike and efficient tone of voice and said, “Detective Constable Day. How can I help you?”

“Ah,” said a man’s voice. “Well, as I was telling the chief superintendent last night, a lovely man, old friend. Good man. He suggested I talk to someone in your office. I wish to report. Well, I’m not actually certain that a crime has been committed. Probably a perfectly sensible explanation. There have been certain irregularities, and, well, to be perfectly frank with you, I’ve given my bookkeeper a couple of weeks’ leave while I try to come to grips with the possibility that he may have been involved in certain, mm, financial irregularities.”

“Suppose we get the details,” said Daisy. “What’s your full name, sir? And the bookkeeper’s name?”

“My name is Grahame Coats,” said the man on the other end of the telephone. “Of the Grahame Coats Agency. My bookkeeper is a man named Nancy. Charles Nancy.”

She wrote both names down. They did not ring any bells.

Fat Charlie had planned to have an argument with spider as soon as Spider came home. He had rehearsed the argument in his head, over and over, and had won it, both fairly and decisively, every time.

Spider had not, however, come home last night, and Fat Charlie had eventually fallen asleep in front of the television, half-watching a raucous game show for horny insomniacs, which seemed to be called Show Us Your Bum!

He woke up on the sofa, when Spider pulled open the curtains. “Beautiful day,” said Spider.

“You!” said Fat Charlie. “You were kissing Rosie. Don’t try to deny it.”

“I had to,” said Spider.

“What do you mean, you had to? You didn’t have to.”

“She thought I was you.”

“Well, you knew you weren’t me. You shouldn’t have kissed her.”

“But if I had refused to kiss her, she would have thought it was you not kissing her.”

“But it wasn’t me.”

“She didn’t know that. I was just trying to be helpful.”

“Being helpful,” said Fat Charlie, from the sofa, “is something you do that, generally speaking, involves not kissing my fiancée. You could have said you had a toothache.”

“That,” said Spider, virtuously, “would have been lying.”

“But you were lying already! You were pretending to be me!”

“Well, it would have been compounding the lie, anyway,” explained Spider. “Something I only did because you were in no shape to go to work. No,” he said, “I couldn’t have lied further. I would have felt dreadful.”

“Well, I did feel dreadful. I had to watch you kissing her.”

“Ah,” said Spider. “But she thought she was kissing you.”

“Don’t keep saying that!”

“You should feel flattered.” Spider said, “Do you want lunch?”

“Of course I don’t want lunch. What time is it?”

“Lunchtime,” said Spider. “And you’re late for work again. It’s a good thing I didn’t cover for you again, if this is all the thanks I get.”

“S’okay,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ve been given two weeks off. And a bonus.”

Spider raised an eyebrow.

“Look,” said Fat Charlie, feeling like it was time to move to the second round of the argument, “it’s not like I’m trying to get rid of you or anything, but I was wondering when you were thinking of leaving?”

Spider said, “Well, when I came here, I’d only planned to visit for a day. Maybe two days. Long enough to meet my little brother, and then I’d be on my way. I’m a busy man.”

“So you’re leaving today.”

“That was my plan,” said Spider. “But then I met you. I cannot believe that we have let almost an entire lifetime go by without each other’s company, my brother.”

“I can.”

“The ties of blood,” said Spider, “are stronger than water.”

“Water’s not strong,” objected Fat Charlie.

“Stronger than vodka, then. Or volcanoes. Or, or ammonia. Look, my point is that meeting you—well, it’s a privilege. We’ve never been part of each other’s lives, but that was yesterday. Let’s start a new tomorrow, today. We’ll put yesterday behind us and forge new bonds—the bonds of brotherhood.”

“You’re totally after Rosie,” said Fat Charlie.

“Totally,” agreed Spider. “What do you plan to do about it?”

“Do about it? Well, she’s my fiancée.”

“Not to worry. She thinks I’m you.”

“Will you stop saying that?”

Spider spread his hands in a saintly gesture, then ruined the effect by licking his lips.

“So,” said Fat Charlie, “what are you planning to do next? Marry her, pretending to be me?”

“Marry?” Spider paused and thought for a moment. “What. A horrible. Idea.”

“Well, I was quite looking forward to it, actually.”

“Spider does not marry. I’m not the marrying kind.”

“So my Rosie’s not good enough for you, is that what you’re saying?”

Spider did not answer. He walked out of the room.

Fat Charlie felt like he’d scored, somehow, in the argument. He got up from the sofa, picked up the empty foil cartons that had, the previous evening, held a chicken chow mein and a crispy pork balls, and he dropped them into the bin. He went into his bedroom, where he took off the clothes he had slept in in order to put on clean clothes, discovered that, due to not doing the laundry, he had no clean clothes, so brushed yesterday’s clothes down vigorously—dislodging several stray strands of chow mein—and put them back on.

He went into the kitchen.

Spider was sitting at the kitchen table, enjoying a steak large enough for two people.

“Where did you get that from?” said Fat Charlie, although he was certain that he already knew.

“I asked you if you wanted lunch,” said Spider, mildly.

“Where did you get the steak?”

“It was in the fridge.”

“That,” declaimed Fat Charlie, wagging his finger like a prosecuting attorney going in for the kill, “that was the steak I bought for dinner tonight. For dinner tonight for me and Rosie. The dinner I was going to be cooking for her! And you’re just sitting there like a, a person eating a steak, and, and eating it, and—”

“It’s not a problem,” said Spider.

“What do you mean, not a problem?”

“Well,” said Spider, “I called Rosie this morning already, and I’m taking her out to dinner tonight. So you wouldn’t have needed the steak anyway.”

Fat Charlie opened his mouth. He closed it again. “I want you out,” he said.

“It’s a good thing for man’s desire to outstrip his something or other—grasp or reach or something—or what else is Heaven for?” said Spider, cheerfully, between mouthfuls of Fat Charlie’s steak.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means I’m not going anywhere. I like it here.” He hacked off another lump of steak, shoveled it down.

“Out,” said Fat Charlie, and then the hall telephone rang. Fat Charlie sighed, walked into the hall, and answered it. “What?”

“Ah. Charles. Good to hear your voice. I know you’re currently enjoying your well-earned, but do you think it might be within the bounds of possibility for you to swing by for, oh, half an hour or so, tomorrow morning? Say, around ten-ish?”

“Yeah. Course,” said Fat Charlie. “Not a problem.”

“Delighted to hear it. I’ll need your signature on some papers. Well, until then.”

“Who was that?” asked Spider. He had cleaned his plate and was blotting his mouth with a paper towel.

“Grahame Coats. He wants me to pop in tomorrow.”

Spider said, “He’s a bastard.”

“So? You’re a bastard.”

“Different kind of bastard. He’s not good news. You should find another job.”

“I love my job!” Fat Charlie meant it when he said it. He had managed entirely to forget how much he disliked his job, and the Grahame Coats Agency, and the ghastly, lurking-behind-every-door presence of Grahame Coats.

Spider stood up. “Nice piece of steak,” he said. “I’ve set my stuff up in your spare room.”

“You’ve what?”

Fat Charlie hurried down to the end of the hall, where there was a room that technically qualified his residence as a two-bedroom flat. The room contained several cartons of books, a box containing an elderly Scalextric Racing set, a tin box filled with Hot Wheels cars (most of them missing tires), and various other battered remnants of Fat Charlie’s childhood. It might have been a good-sized bedroom for a normal-sized garden gnome or an undersized dwarf, but for anyone else it was a closet with a window.

Or rather, it used to be, but it wasn’t. Not anymore.

Fat Charlie pulled the door open and stood in the hallway, blinking.

There was a room, yes; that much was still true, but it was an enormous room. A magnificent room. There were windows at the far end, huge picture windows, looking out over what appeared to be a waterfall. Beyond the waterfall, the tropical sun was low on the horizon, and it burnished everything in its golden light. There was a fireplace large enough to roast a pair of oxen, upon which three burning logs crackled and spat. There was a hammock in one corner, along with a perfectly white sofa and a four-poster bed. Near the fireplace was something that Fat Charlie, who had only ever seen them in magazines, suspected was probably some kind of Jacuzzi. There was a zebra-skin rug, and a bear pelt hanging on one wall, and there was the kind of advanced audio equipment that mostly consists of a black piece of polished plastic that you wave at. On one wall hung a flat television screen that was the width of the room that should have been there. And there was more—

“What have you done?” asked Fat Charlie. He did not go in.

“Well,” said Spider from behind him, “seeing as I’m going to be here for a few days, I thought I’d bring my stuff over.”

“Bring your stuff? Bringing your stuff is a couple of carrier bags filled with laundry, some PlayStation games and a spider plant. This is—this is—” He was out of words.

Spider patted Fat Charlie’s shoulder as he pushed past. “If you need me,” he said to his brother, “I’ll be in my room.” And he shut the door behind him.

Fat Charlie shook the doorknob. The door was now locked.

He went into the TV room, got the phone from the hall, and dialed Mrs. Higgler’s number.

“Who the hell is this at this time of the morning?” she said.

“It’s me. Fat Charlie. I’m sorry.”

“Well? What you callin’ about?”

“Well, I was calling to ask your advice. You see, my brother came out here.”

“Your brother.”

“Spider. You told me about him. You said to ask a spider if I wanted to see him, and I did, and he’s here.”

“Well,” she said, noncommittally, “that’s good.”

“It’s not.”

“Why not? He’s family, isn’t he?”

“Look, I can’t go into it now. I just want him to go away.”

“Have you tried asking him nicely?”

“We just got through with all that. He says he isn’t going. He’s set up something that looks like the pleasure dome of Kublai Khan in my box room and, I mean, round here you need the council’s permission just to put in double glazing. He’s got some kind of waterfall in there. Not in there, it’s on the other side of the window. And he’s after my fiancée.”

“How do you know?”

“He said so.”

Mrs. Higgler said, “I’m not at my best before I have my coffee.”

“I just need to know how to make him go away.”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Higgler. “I will talk to Mrs. Dunwiddy about it.” She hung up.

Fat Charlie went back down to the end of the corridor and knocked on the door.

“What is it now?”

“I want to talk.”

The door clicked and swung open. Fat Charlie went inside. Spider was reclining, naked, in the hot tub. He was drinking something more or less the color of electricity from a long, frosted glass. The huge picture windows were now wide open, and the roar of the waterfall contrasted with the low, liquid jazz that emanated from hidden speakers somewhere in the room.

“Look,” said Fat Charlie, “you have to understand, this is my house.”

Spider blinked. “This?” he asked. “This is your house?”

“Well, not exactly. But the principle’s the same. I mean, we’re in my spare room, and you’re a guest. Um.”

Spider sipped his drink and luxuriated deeper in the hot water. “They say,” he said, “that houseguests are like fish. They both stink after three days.”

“Good point,” said Fat Charlie.

“But it’s hard,” said Spider. “Hard when you’ve gone a lifetime not seeing your brother. Hard when he didn’t even know you existed. Harder still when you finally see him and learn that, as far as he’s concerned, you’re no better than a dead fish.”

“But,” said Fat Charlie.

Spider stretched in the tub. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I can’t stay here forever. Chill. I’ll be gone before you know it. And, for my part, I will never think of you as a dead fish. And I appreciate that we’re both under a lot of stress. So let’s say no more about it. Why don’t you go and get yourself some lunch—leave your front-door key behind—and then go and see a movie.”

Fat Charlie put on his jacket and went outside. He put his door key down beside the sink. The fresh air was wonderful, although the day was gray and the sky was spitting drizzle. He bought a newspaper to read. He stopped at the chippie and bought a large bag of chips and a battered saveloy for his lunch. The drizzle stopped, so he sat on a bench in a churchyard and read his newspaper and ate his saveloy and chips.

He very much wanted to see a film.

He wandered into the Odeon, bought a ticket for the first thing showing. It was an action-adventure, and it was already on when he went inside. Things blew up. It was great.

Halfway through the film it occurred to Fat Charlie that there was something that he was not remembering. It was in his head somewhere, like an itch an inch behind his eyes, and it kept distracting him.

The film ended.

Fat Charlie realized that, although he had enjoyed it, he had not actually managed to keep much of the film he had just seen in his head. So he bought a large bag of popcorn and sat through it again. It was even better the second time.

And the third.

After that, he thought that perhaps he ought to think about getting home, but there was a late-night double feature of Eraserhead and True Stories, and he had never actually seen either film, so he watched them both, although he was, by now, really quite hungry, which meant that by the end he was unsure of what Eraserhead had actually been about, or what the lady was doing in the radiator, and he wondered if they’d let him stay and watch it again, but they explained, very patiently, over and over, that they were going to close for the night, and inquired as to whether he didn’t have a home to go to, and wasn’t it time for him to be in bed?

And of course, he did, and it was, although the fact of it had slipped his mind for a while. So he walked back to Maxwell Gardens and was slightly surprised to see that the light was on in his bedroom.

The curtains were drawn as he reached the house. Still, there were silhouettes on the window, moving about. He thought he recognized both of the silhouettes.

They came together; they blended into one shadow.

Fat Charlie uttered one deep and terrible howl.

In Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house there were many plastic animals. The dust moved slowly through the air in that place, as if it were better used to the sunbeams of a more leisurely age, and could not be doing with all this fast modern light. There was a transparent plastic cover on the sofa, and chairs that crackled when you sat down on them.

In Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house there was pine-scented hard toilet paper—shiny, uncomfortable strips of greaseproof paper. Mrs. Dunwiddy believed in economy, and pine-scented hard toilet paper was at the bottom of her economy drive. You could still get hard toilet paper, if you looked long enough and were prepared to pay more for it.

Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house smelled of violet water. It was an old house. People forget that the children born to settlers in Florida were already old men and women when the dour Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock. The house didn’t go that far back; it had been built in the 1920’s, during a Florida land development scheme, to be the show house, to represent the hypothetical houses that all the other buyers would find themselves eventually unable to build on the plots of gatory swamp they were being sold. Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house had survived hurricanes without losing a roof tile.

When the doorbell rang, Mrs. Dunwiddy was stuffing a small turkey. She tutted, and washed her hands, then walked down the corridor to her front door, peering out at the world through her thick, thick glasses, her left hand trailing on the wallpaper.

She opened the door a crack and peered out.

“Louella? It’s me.” It was Callyanne Higgler.

“Come in.” Mrs. Higgler followed Mrs. Dunwiddy back to the kitchen. Mrs. Dunwiddy ran her hands under the tap, then recommenced taking handfuls of soggy cornbread stuffing and pushing them deep into the turkey.

“You expectin’ company?”

Mrs. Dunwiddy made a noncommittal noise. “It always a good idea to be prepared,” she said. “Now, suppose you tell me what’s going on?”

“Nancy’s boy. Fat Charlie.”

“What about him?”

“Well, I tell him about his brother, when he out here last week.”

Mrs. Dunwiddy pulled her hand out of the turkey. “That’s not the end of the world,” she said.

“I tell him how he can contact his brother.”

“Ahh,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. She could disapprove with just that one syllable. “And?”

“He’s turned up in Hingland. Boy’s at his wit’s end.”

Mrs. Dunwiddy took a large handful of wet cornbread and rammed it into the turkey with a force that would have made the turkey’s eyes water, if it still had any. “Can’t get him to go away?”

“Nope.”

Sharp eyes peered through thick lenses. Then Mrs. Dunwiddy said, “I done it once. Can’t do it again. Not that way.”

“I know. But we got to do something.”

Mrs. Dunwiddy sighed. “It’s true what they say. Live long enough, you see all your birds come home to roost.”

“Isn’t there another way?”

Mrs. Dunwiddy finished stuffing the turkey. She picked up a skewer, pinned the flap of skin closed. Then she covered the bird with silver foil.

“I reckon,” she said, “I put it on to cook late tomorrow morning. It be done in the afternoon, then I put it back into a hot oven early evening, to get it all ready for dinner.”

“Who you got comin’ to dinner?” asked Mrs. Higgler.

“You,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, “Zorah Bustamonte, Bella Noles. And Fat Charlie Nancy. By the time that boy gets here, he have a real appetite.”

Mrs. Higgler said, “He’s coming here?”

“Aren’t you listening, girl?” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. Only Mrs. Dunwiddy could have called Mrs. Higgler “girl” without sounding foolish. “Now, help me get this turkey into the fridge.”

It would be fair to say that Rosie had, that evening, just had the most wonderful night of her life: magical, perfect, utterly fine. She could not have stopped smiling, not even if she had wanted to. The food had been fabulous, and once they had eaten Fat Charlie had taken her dancing. It was a proper dance hall, with a small orchestra and people in pastel clothes who glided across the floor. She felt as if they had traveled in time together and were visiting a gentler age. Rosie had enjoyed dancing lessons from the age of five, but had no one to dance with.

“I didn’t know you could dance,” she told him.

“There are so many things about me you do not know,” he said.

And that made her happy. Soon enough, she and this man would be married. There were things about him she did not know? Excellent. She would have a lifetime in which to find them out. All sorts of things.

She noticed the way other women, and other men, looked at Fat Charlie as she walked beside him, and she was happy she was the woman on his arm.

They walked through Leicester Square, and Rosie could see the stars shining up above them, the starlight somehow crisply twinkling, despite the glare of the streetlights.

For a brief moment, she found herself wondering why it had never been like this with Fat Charlie before. Sometimes, somewhere deep inside herself, Rosie had suspected that perhaps she had only kept going out with Fat Charlie because her mother disliked him so much; that she had only said yes when he had asked her to marry him because her mother would have wanted her to say no—

Fat Charlie had taken her out to the West End once. They’d gone to the theater. It was a birthday surprise for her, but there had been a mix-up on the tickets, which, it turned out, had actually been issued for the day before; the management were both understanding and extremely helpful, and they had managed to find Fat Charlie a seat behind a pillar in the stalls, while Rosie took a seat in the upper circle behind a violently giggly hen party from Norwich. It had not been a success, not as these things were counted.

This evening, though, this evening had been magic. Rosie had not had many perfect moments in her life, but whatever the total was, it had just gone up by one.

She loved how she felt when she was with him.

And once the dancing was done, after they had stumbled out into the night, giddy on movement and champagne, then Fat Charlie—and, she thought, why did she think of him as Fat Charlie anyway? for he wasn’t the least bit fat—put his arm around her and said, “Now, you’re coming back to my place,” in a voice so deep and real it made her abdomen vibrate; and she said nothing about working the next day, nothing about there’d be time enough for that kind of thing when they were married, nothing at all, in fact, while all the time she thought about how much she didn’t want the evening to end, and how very very much she wished—no, she needed—to kiss this man on the lips, and to hold him.

And then, remembering she had to say something, she said yes.

In the cab back to his flat, her hands held his, and she leaned against him and stared at him as the light from passing cars and streetlamps illuminated his face.

“You have a pierced ear,” she said. “Why didn’t I ever notice before that you have a pierced ear?”

“Hey,” he said with a smile, his voice a deep bass thrum, “how do you think it makes me feel, when you’ve never even noticed something like that, even when we’ve been together for, what is it now?”

“Eighteen months,” said Rosie.

“For eighteen months,” said her fiancée.

She leaned against him, breathed him in. “I love the way you smell,” she told him. “Are you wearing some kind of cologne?”

“That’s just me,” he told her.

“Well, you should bottle it.”

She paid the taxi while he opened the front door. They went up the stairs together. When they got to the top of the stairs, he seemed to be heading along the corridor, toward the spare room at the back.

“You know,” she said, “the bedroom’s here, silly. Where are you going?”

“Nowhere. I knew that,” he said. They went into Fat Charlie’s bedroom. She closed the curtains. Then she just looked at him, and was happy.

“Well,” she said, after a while, “aren’t you going to try to kiss me?”

“I guess I am,” he said, and he did. Time melted and stretched and curved. She might have kissed him for a moment, or for an hour, or for a lifetime. And then—

“What was that?”

He said, “I didn’t hear anything.”

“It sounded like someone in pain.”

“Cats fighting, maybe?”

“It sounded like a person.”

“Could have been an urban fox. They can sound a lot like people.”

She stood there with her head tipped to one side, listening intently. “It’s stopped now,” she said. “Hmm. You want to know the strangest thing?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, his lips now nuzzling her neck. “Sure, tell me the strangest thing. But I’ve made it go away now. It won’t bother you again.”

“The strangest thing,” said Rosie, “is that it sounded like you.”

Fat Charlie walked the streets, trying to clear his head. The obvious course of action was to bang on his own front door until Spider came down and let him in, then to give Spider and Rosie a piece of his mind. That was obvious. Perfectly, utterly obvious.

He just needed to go back to his flat and explain the whole thing to Rosie, and shame Spider into leaving him alone. That was all he had to do. How hard could that be?

Harder than it ought to be, that was for certain. He was not quite sure why he had walked away from his flat. He was even less certain how to find his way back. Streets he knew, or thought he knew, seemed to have reconfigured themselves. He found himself walking down dead ends, exploring endless cul-de-sacs, stumbling through the tangles of late-night London residential streets.

Sometimes he saw the main road. There were traffic lights on it, and the lights of fast-food places. He knew that once he got onto the main road he would be able to find his way back to his house, but whenever he walked to the main road he would wind up somewhere else.

Fat Charlie’s feet were starting to hurt. His stomach rumbled, violently. He was angry, and as he walked he became angrier and angrier.

The anger cleared his head. The cobwebs surrounding his thoughts began to evaporate; the web of streets he was walking began to simplify. He turned a corner and found himself on the main road, next to the all-night “New Jersey Fried Chicken” outlet. He ordered a family pack of chicken, and sat and finished it off without any help from anyone else in his family. When that was done he stood on the pavement until the friendly orange light of a For Hire sign, attached to a large black cab, came into view, and he hailed the cab. It pulled up next to him, and the window rolled down.

“Where to?”

“Maxwell Gardens,” said Fat Charlie.

“You taking the mickey or something?” asked the cab driver. “That’s just around the corner.”

“Will you take me there? I’ll give you an extra fiver. Honest.”

The cabbie breathed in loudly through his clenched teeth: it was the noise a car mechanic makes before asking you whether you’re particularly attached to that engine for sentimental reasons. “It’s your funeral,” said the cabbie. “Hop in.”

Fat Charlie hopped. The cabbie pulled out, waited for the lights to change, went around the corner.

“Where did you say you wanted to go?” asked the cabbie.

“Maxwell Gardens,” said Fat Charlie. “Number 34. It’s just past the off-license.”

He was wearing yesterday’s clothes, and he wished he wasn’t. His mother had always told him to wear clean underwear, in case he was hit by a car, and to brush his teeth, in case they needed to identify him by his dental records.

“I know where it is,” said the cabbie. “It’s just before you get to Park Crescent.”

“That’s right,” said Fat Charlie. He was falling asleep in the backseat.

“I must have taken a wrong turning,” said the cabbie. He sounded irritated. “I’ll turn off the meter, all right? Call it a fiver.”

“Sure,” said Fat Charlie, and he snuggled down in the backseat of the taxi, and he slept. The taxi drove on through the night, trying to get just around the corner.

Detective Constable Day, currently on a twelve-month secondment to the Fraud Squad, arrived at the offices of the Grahame Coats Agency at 9:30 A.M. Grahame Coats was waiting for her in reception, and he walked her back into his office.

“Would you care for a coffee, tea?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.” She pulled out a notebook and sat looking at him expectantly.

“Now, I cannot stress enough that discretion must needs be the essence of your investigations. The Grahame Coats Agency has a reputation for probity and fair dealing. At the Grahame Coats Agency, a client’s money is a sacrosanct trust. I must tell you, that when I first began to entertain suspicions about Charles Nancy, I dismissed them as unworthy of a decent man and a hard worker. Had you asked me a week ago what I thought about Charles Nancy, I would have told you that he was the very salt of the earth.”

“I’m sure you would. So when did you become aware that money might have been diverted from clients’ accounts?”

“Well, I’m still not certain. I hesitate to cast aspersions. Or first stones, for that matter. Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

On television, thought Daisy, they say “just give me the facts.” She wished she could say it, but she didn’t.

She did not like this man.

“I’ve printed out all the anomalous transactions here,” he said. “As you’ll see, they were all made from Nancy’s computer. I must again stress that discretion is of the essence here: clients of the Grahame Coats Agency include a number of prominent public figures, and, as I said to your superior, I would count it as a personal favor if this matter could be dealt with as quietly as possible. Discretion must be your watchword. If, perchance, we can persuade our Master Nancy simply to return his ill-gotten gains, I would be perfectly satisfied to let the matter rest there. I have no desire to prosecute.”

“I can do my best, but at the end of the day, we gather information and turn it over to the Crown Prosecution Service.” She wondered how much pull he really had with the chief super. “So what attracted your suspicions?”

“Ah yes. Frankly and in all honesty, it was certain peculiarities of behavior. The dog that failed to bark in the nighttime. The depth the parsley had sunk into the butter. We detectives find significance in the smallest things, do we not, Detective Day?”

“Er, it’s Detective Constable Day, really. So, if you can give me the printouts,” she said, “along with any other documentation, bank records all that. We may actually need to pick up his computer, to look at the hard disk.”

“Absatively,” he said. His desk phone rang, and—“If you’ll excuse me?”—he answered it. “He is? Good Lord. Well, tell him to just wait for me in reception. I’ll come out and see him in a moment.” He put down the phone. “That,” he said to Daisy, “is what I believe you would call, in police circles, a right turn-up for the books.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“That is the aforementioned Charles Nancy himself, here to see me. Shall we show him in? If you need to, you may use my offices as an interview room. I’m sure I even have a tape recorder you might borrow.”

Daisy said, “That won’t be necessary. And the first thing I’ll need to do is go through all the paperwork.”

“Right-ho,” he said. “Silly of me. Um, would you—would you like to look at him?”

“I don’t see that that would accomplish anything,” said Daisy.

“Oh, I wouldn’t tell him you were investigating him,” Grahame Coats assured her. “Otherwise he’d be off to the costa-del-crime before we could say prima facie evidence. Frankly, I like to think of myself as being extremely sympathetic to the problems of contemporary policing.”

Daisy caught herself thinking that anyone who would steal money from this man could not be all bad, which was, she knew, no way for a police officer to think.

“I’ll lead you out,” he said to her.

In the waiting room a man was sitting. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes. He was unshaven, and he looked a little confused. Grahame Coats nudged Daisy and inclined his head toward the man. Aloud, he said, “Charles, good Lord, man, look at the state of you. You look terrible.”

Fat Charlie looked at him blearily. “Didn’t get home last night,” he said. “Bit of a mix-up with the taxi.”

“Charles,” said Grahame Coats, “this is Detective Constable Day, of the Metropolitan Police. She is just here on routine business.”

Fat Charlie realized there was someone else there. He focused, saw the sensible clothes that might as well have been a uniform. Then he saw the face. “Er,” he said.

“Morning,” said Daisy. That was what she said with her mouth. Inside her head she was going ohbollocks ohbollocks ohbollocks, over and over.

“Nice to meet you,” said Fat Charlie. Puzzled, he did something he had never done before: he imagined a plainclothes police officer with no clothes on, and found his imagination was providing him with a fairly accurate representation of the young lady beside whom he had woken up in bed, the morning after his father’s wake. The sensible clothes made her look slightly older, more severe, and much scarier, but it was her, all right.

Like all sentient beings, Fat Charlie had a weirdness quotient. For some days the needle had been over in the red, occasionally banging jerkily against the pin. Now the meter broke. From this moment on, he suspected, nothing would surprise him. He could no longer be outweirded. He was done.

He was wrong, of course.

Fat Charlie watched Daisy leave, and he followed Grahame Coats back into his office.

Grahame Coats closed the door firmly. Then he perched his bottom against his desk, and smiled like a weasel who has just realized that he’s been accidentally locked into the henhouse for the night.

“Let us be blunt,” he said. “Cards on the table. No beating about the bush. Let us,” he elaborated, “let us call a spade a spade.”

“All right,” said Fat Charlie, “Let’s. You said you had something for me to sign?”

“No longer an operative statement. Dismiss it from your mind. No, let us now discuss something you pointed out to me several days ago. You alerted me to certain unorthodox transactions occurring here.”

“I did?”

“Two, as they say, Charles, two can play at that game. Naturally, my first impulse was to investigate. Thus the visit this morning from Detective Constable Day. And what I found will, I suspect, not come as a shock to you.”

“It won’t?”

“No indeed. There are, as you pointed out, definite indicators of financial irregularities, Charles. But alas, there is only one place to which the fickle finger of suspicion unerringly points.”

“There is?”

“There is.”

Fat Charlie felt completely at sea. “Where?”

Grahame Coats attempted to look concerned, or at least to look as if he were trying to look concerned, managing an expression which, in babies, always indicates that they are need of a good burping. “You, Charles. The police suspect you.”

“Yes,” said Fat Charlie. “Of course they do. It’s been that sort of a day.”

And he went home.

Spider opened the front door. It had started raining, and Fat Charlie stood there looking rumpled and wet.

“So,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m now allowed home now, am I?”

“I wouldn’t do anything to stop you,” said Spider. “It’s your home, after all. Where were you all night?”

“You know perfectly well where I was. I was failing to come home. I don’t know what kind of magic ‘fluence you were using on me.”

“It wasn’t magic,” said Spider, offended. “It was a miracle.”

Fat Charlie pushed past him and stomped up the stairs. He walked into the bathroom, put in the plug, and turned on the taps. He leaned out into the hall. “I don’t care what it’s called. You’re doing it in my house, and you stopped me coming home last night.”

He took off the day-before-yesterday’s clothes. Then he put his head back around the door. “And the police are investigating me at work. Did you tell Grahame Coats that there were financial irregularities going on?”

“Of course I did,” said Spider.

“Hah! Well, he only suspects me, that’s what.”

“Oh, I don’t think he does,” said Spider.

“Shows all you know,” said Fat Charlie. “I talked to him. The police are involved. And then there’s Rosie. And you and I are going to have a very long conversation about Rosie when I get out of the bath. But first of all, I’m going to get into the bath. I spent yesterday night wandering around. I got the only sleep of the night in the backseat of a taxi. By the time I woke up it was five in the morning and my taxi driver was turning into Travis Bickle. He was conducting a monologue. I told him he might as well give up looking for Maxwell Gardens, and that it obviously wasn’t a Maxwell Gardens kind of night, and eventually he agreed so we went and had breakfast in one of those places taxi drivers have breakfast. Eggs and beans and sausages and toast, and tea you could stand a spoon up in. When he told the other taxi drivers he’d been driving all around last night looking for Maxwell Gardens, well, I thought blood was going to be spilled. It wasn’t. But it looked a pretty close thing for a minute there.”

Fat Charlie stopped to take a breath. Spider looked guilty.

“After,” said Fat Charlie. “After my bath.” He shut the bathroom door.

He climbed into the bath.

He made a whimpering noise.

He climbed out of the bath.

He turned off the taps.

He wrapped a towel around his midriff and opened the bathroom door. “No hot water,” he said much, much too calmly. “Do you have any idea why we have no hot water?”

Spider was still standing in the hallway. He hadn’t moved. “My hot tub,” he said. “Sorry.”

Fat Charlie said, “Well, at least Rosie doesn’t. I mean, she wouldn’t have—” And then he caught the expression on Spider’s face.

Fat Charlie said, “I want you out of here. Out of my life. Out of Rosie’s life. Gone.”

“I like it here,” said Spider.

“You’re ruining my bloody life.”

“Tough.” Spider walked down the hallway and opened the door to Fat Charlie’s spare room. Golden tropical sunlight flooded the hallway momentarily, then the door was closed.

Fat Charlie washed his hair in cold water. He brushed his teeth. He rummaged through his laundry hamper until he found a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that were, by virtue of being at the bottom, practically clean once more. He put them on, along with a purple sweater with a teddy bear on it his mother had once given him that he had never worn but had never got around to giving away.

He went down to the end of the corridor.

The boom-chagga-boom of a bass and drums penetrated the door.

Fat Charlie rattled the door handle. It didn’t budge. “If you don’t open this door,” he said, “I’m going to break it down.”

The door opened without warning, and Fat Charlie lurched inward, into the empty box room at the end of the hall. The view through the window was the back of the house behind, what little you could see of it through the rain that was now lashing the windowpane.

Still, from somewhere only a wall’s thinness away, a stereo was playing too loudly: everything in the box room vibrated to a distant boom-chagga-boom.

“Right,” said Fat Charlie conversationally. “You realize, of course, that this means war.” It was the traditional war cry of the rabbit when pushed too far. There are places in which people believe that Anansi was a trickster rabbit. They are wrong, of course; he was a spider. You might think the two creatures would be easy to keep separate, but they still get confused more often than you would expect.

Fat Charlie went into his bedroom. He retrieved his passport from the drawer by his bed. He found his wallet where he had left it in the bathroom.

He walked down to the main road, in the rain, and hailed a taxi.

“Where to?”

“Heathrow,” said Fat Charlie.

“Right you are,” said the cabbie. “Which terminal?”

“No idea,” said Fat Charlie, who knew that, really, he ought to know. It had only been a few days, after all. “Where do they leave for Florida?”

Grahame Coats had begun planning his exit from the Grahame Coats Agency back when John Major was prime minister. Nothing good lasts forever, after all. Sooner or later, as Grahame Coats himself would have delighted in assuring you, even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked. While his planning had been good—one never knew when one might need to leave at a moment’s notice—and he was not unaware that events were massing, like gray clouds on the horizon, he wished to put off the moment of leaving until it could be delayed no longer.

What was important, he had long ago decided, was not leaving, but vanishing, evaporating, disappearing without trace.

In the concealed safe in his office—a walk-in room he was extremely proud of—on a shelf he had put up himself and had recently needed to put up again when it fell down, was a leather vanity case containing two passports, one in the name of Basil Finnegan, the other in the name of Roger Bronstein. Each of the men had been born about fifty years ago, just as Grahame Coats had, but had died in their first year of life. Both of the passport photographs in the passports were of Grahame Coats. The case also contained two wallets, each with its own set of credit cards and photographic identification in the name of one of the names of the passport holders. Each name was a signatory to the funnel accounts in the Caymans, which themselves funneled to other accounts in the British Virgin Islands, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein.

Grahame Coats had been planning to leave for good on his fiftieth birthday, a little more than a year from now, and he was brooding on the matter of Fat Charlie.

He did not actually expect Fat Charlie to be arrested or imprisoned, although he would not have greatly objected to either scenario had it occurred. He wanted him scared, discredited, and gone.

Grahame Coats truly enjoyed milking the clients of the Grahame Coats Agency, and he was good at it. He had been pleasantly surprised to discover that, as long as he picked his clientele with care, the celebrities and performers he represented had very little sense of money and were relieved to find someone who would represent them and manage their financial affairs and make sure that they didn’t have to worry. And if sometimes statements or checks were late in coming, or if they weren’t always what the clients were expecting, or if there were unidentified direct debits from client accounts, well, Grahame Coats had a high staff turnover, particularly in the bookkeeping department, and there was nothing that couldn’t easily be blamed on the incompetence of a previous employee or, rarely, made right with a case of champagne and a large and apologetic check.

It wasn’t that people liked Grahame Coats, or that they trusted him. Even the people he represented thought he was a weasel. But they believed that he was their weasel, and in that they were wrong.

Grahame Coats was his own weasel.

The telephone on his desk rang, and he picked it up. “Yes?”

“Mister Coats? It’s Maeve Livingstone on the phone. I know you said to put her through to Fat Charlie, but he’s off this week, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Shall I tell her you’re out?”

Grahame Coats pondered. Before a sudden heart attack had carried him off, Morris Livingstone, once the best-loved short Yorkshire comedian in the country had been the star of such television series as Short Back and Sides and his own Saturday-night variety-game show Morris Livingstone, I Presume. He had even had a top-ten single back in the eighties, with the novelty song, “It’s Nice Out (But Put It Away).” Amiable, easygoing, he had not only left all his financial affairs in the control of the Grahame Coats Agency, but he had also appointed, at Grahame Coats’s suggestion, Grahame Coats himself as trustee of his estate.

It would have been criminal not to give in to temptation like that.

And then there was Maeve Livingstone. It would be fair to say that Maeve Livingstone had, without knowing it, featured for many years in starring and costarring roles in a number of Grahame Coats’s most treasured and private fantasies.

Grahame Coats said, “Please. Put her through,” and then, solicitously, “Maeve, how lovely to hear from you. How are you?”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

Maeve Livingstone had been a dancer when she met Morris, and had always towered over the little man. They had adored each other.

“Well, why don’t you tell me about it?”

“I spoke to Charles a couple of days ago. I was wondering. Well, the bank manager was wondering. The money from Morris’s estate. We were told we would be seeing something by now.”

“Maeve,” said Grahame Coats, in what he thought of as his dark velvet voice, the one he believed that women responded to, “the problem is not that the money is not there—it’s merely a matter of liquidity. As I’ve told you, Morris made a number of unwise investments toward the end of his life, and although, following my advice, he made some sound ones as well, we do need to allow the good ones to mature: we cannot pull out now without losing almost everything. But worry ye not, worry ye not. Anything for a good client. I shall write you a check from my own bank account in order to keep you solvent and comfortable. How much does the bank manager require?”

“He says that he’s going to have to start bouncing checks,” she said. “And the BBC tell me that they’ve been sending money from the DVD releases of the old shows. That’s not invested, is it?”

“That’s what the BBC said? Actually, we’ve been chasing them for money. But I wouldn’t want to put all the blame on BBC Worldwide. Our bookkeeper’s pregnant, and things have been all at sixes and sevens. And Charles Nancy, who you spoke to, has been rather distraught—his father died, and he has been out of the country a great deal—”

“Last time we spoke,” she pointed out, “you were putting in a new computer system.”

“Indeed we were, and please, do not get me started on the subject of bookkeeping programs. What is it they say—to err is human, but to really, er, mess things up, you need a computer. Something like that. I shall investigate this forcefully, by hand if necessary, the old-fashioned way, and your moneys shall be wending their way to you. It’s what Morris would have wanted.”

“My bank manager says I need ten thousand pounds in right now, just to stop them bouncing checks.”

“Ten thousand pounds shall be yours. I am writing a check for you even as we speak.” He drew a circle on his notepad, with a line going off the top of it. It looked a bit like an apple.

“I’m very grateful,” said Maeve, and Grahame Coats preened. “I hope I’m not becoming a bother.”

“You are never a bother,” said Grahame Coats. “No sort of bother at all.”

He put down the phone. The funny thing, Grahame Coats always thought, was that Morris’s comedic persona had always been that of a hardheaded Yorkshireman, proud of knowing the location of every penny.

It had been a fine game, thought Grahame Coats, and he added two eyes to the apple, and a couple of ears. It now looked, he decided, more or less like a cat. Soon enough it would be time to exchange a life of milking hard-to-please celebrities for a life of sunshine, swimming pools, fine meals, good wines, and, if possible, enormous quantities of oral sex. The best things in life, Grahame Coats was convinced, could all be bought and paid for.

He drew a mouth on the cat and filled it with sharp teeth, so it looked a little like a mountain lion, and as he drew he began to sing, in a reedy tenor voice,

Morris Livingstone had bought and paid for Grahame Coats’s penthouse flat on the Copacabana and for the installation of the swimming pool on the island of Saint Andrews, and you must not imagine that Grahame Coats was not grateful.

Spider felt odd.

There was something going on: a strange feeling, spreading like a mist through his life, and it was ruining his day. He could not identify it, and he did not like it.

And if there was one thing that he was definitely not feeling, it was guilty. It simply wasn’t the kind of thing he ever felt. He felt excellent. Spider felt cool. He did not feel guilty. He would not have felt guilty if he was caught red-handed holding up a bank.

And yet there was, all about him, a faint miasma of discomfort.

Until now Spider had believed that gods were different: they had no consciences, nor did they need them. A god’s relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes.

Spider kept himself amused. That was what he did. That was the important bit. He would not have recognized guilt if he had an illustrated guide to it with all the component parts clearly labeled. It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck. But something had changed—inside him or outside, he was not sure—and it bothered him. He poured himself another drink. He waved a hand and made the music louder. He changed it from Miles Davis to James Brown. It still didn’t help.

He lay on the hammock, in the tropical sunshine, listening to the music, basking in how extremely cool it was to be him—and for the first time even that, somehow, wasn’t enough.

He climbed out of the hammock and wandered over to the door. “Fat Charlie?”

There was no answer. The flat felt empty. Outside the windows of the flat, there was a gray day, and rain. Spider liked the rain. It seemed appropriate.

Shrill and sweet, the telephone rang. Spider picked it up.

Rosie said, “Is that you?”

“Hullo Rosie.”

“Last night,” she said. Then she didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Was it as wonderful for you as it was for me?”

“I don’t know,” said Spider. “It was pretty wonderful for me. So, I mean, that’s probably a yes.”

“Mmm,” she said.

They didn’t say anything.

“Charlie?” said Rosie.

“Uh-huh?”

“I even like not saying anything, just knowing you’re on the other end of the phone.”

“Me too,” said Spider.

They enjoyed the sensation of not saying anything for a while longer, savoring it, making it last.

“Do you want to come over to my place tonight?” asked Rosie. “My flatmates are in the Cairngorms.”

“That,” said Spider, “may be a candidate for the most beautiful phrase in the English language. My flatmates are in the Cairngorms. Perfect poetry.”

She giggled. “Twit. Um. Bring your toothbrush—?”

“Oh. Oh. Okay.”

And after several minutes of “you put down the phone” and “no you put the down the phone” that would have done credit to a pair of hormonally intoxicated fifteen-year-olds, the phone was eventually put down.

Spider smiled like a saint. The world, given that it had Rosie in it, was the best world that any world could possibly be. The fog had lifted, the world had ungloomed.

It did not even occur to Spider to wonder where Fat Charlie had gone. Why should he care about such trivia? Rosie’s flat-mates were in the Cairngorms, and tonight? Why, tonight he would be bringing his toothbrush.

Fat Charlie’s body was on a plane to Florida; it was crushed in a seat in the middle of a row of five people, and it was fast asleep. This was a good thing: the rear toilets had malfunctioned as soon as the plane was in the air, and although the cabin attendants had hung Out of Order signs on the doors, this did nothing to alleviate the smell, which spread slowly across the back of the plane like a low-level chemical fug. There were babies crying and adults grumbling and children whining. One faction of the passengers, en route to Walt Disney World, who felt that their holidays began the moment they got on the plane, had got settled into their seats then began a sing-song. They sang “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” and “The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers,” and “Under the Sea” and “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Off To Work We Go,” and even, under the impression that it was a Disney song as well, “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”

Once the plane was in the air it was discovered that, due to a catering confusion, no coach class lunch meals had been put on-board. Instead, only breakfasts had been packed, which meant there would be individual packs of cereal and a banana for all passengers, which they would have to eat with plastic knives and forks, because there were, unfortunately, no spoons, which may have been a good thing, because pretty soon there wasn’t any milk for the cereal, either.

It was a hell flight, and Fat Charlie was sleeping through it.

In Fat Charlie’s dream he was in a huge hall, and he was wearing a morning suit. Next to him was Rosie, wearing a white wedding dress, and on the other side of her on the dais was Rosie’s mother, who was, a little jarringly, also wearing a wedding dress, although this one was covered with dust and with cobwebs. Far away, at the horizon, which was the distant edge of the hall, there were people firing guns and waving white flags.

It’s just the people at Table H, said Rosie’s mother. Don’t pay them no attention.

Fat Charlie turned to Rosie. She smiled at him with her soft, sweet smile, then she licked her lips.

Cake, said Rosie, in his dream.

This was the signal for an orchestra to begin to play. It was a New Orleans jazz band, playing a funeral march.

The chef’s assistant was a police officer. She was holding a pair of handcuffs. The chef wheeled the cake up onto the dais.

Now, said Rosie to Fat Charlie, in his dream. Cut the cake.

The people at Table B—who were not people but cartoon mice and rats and barnyard animals, human-sized, and celebrating—began to sing songs from Disney cartoons. Fat Charlie knew that they wanted him to join in with them. Even asleep he could feel himself panicking at the simple idea of having to sing in public, his limbs becoming numb, his lips prickling.

I can’t sing with you, he told them, desperate for an excuse. I have to cut this cake.

At this, the hall fell into silence. And in the silence, a chef entered, wheeling a little trolley with something on it. The chef wore Grahame Coats’s face, and on the trolley was an extravagant white wedding cake, an ornate, many-tiered confection. A tiny bride and tiny groom perched precariously on the topmost tier of the cake, like two people trying to keep their balance on top of a sugar-frosted Chrysler Building.

Rosie’s mother reached under the table and produced a long, wooden-handled knife—almost a machete—with a rusty blade. She passed it to Rosie, who reached for Fat Charlie’s right hand and placed it over her own, and together they pressed the rusty knife into the thick white icing on the topmost tier of the cake, pushed it in between the groom and the bride. The cake resisted the blade at first, and Fat Charlie pressed harder, putting all his weight on the knife. He felt the cake beginning to give. He pushed harder.

The blade sliced through the topmost tier of the wedding cake. It slipped and sliced down the cake, through every layer and tier, and as it did so, the cake opened—

In his dream, Fat Charlie supposed that the cake was filled with black beads, with beads of black glass or of polished jet, and then, as they tumbled out of the cake, he realized that the beads had legs, each bead had eight clever legs, and they came out the inside of the cake like a black wave. The spiders surged forward and covered the white tablecloth; they covered Rosie’s mother and Rosie herself, turning their white dresses black as ebony; then, as if controlled by some vast and malignant intelligence, they flowed, in their hundreds, toward Fat Charlie. He turned to run, but his legs were trapped in some kind of rubbery tanglefoot, and he tumbled to the floor.

Now they were upon him, their tiny legs crawling over his bare skin; he tried to get up, but he was drowning in spiders.

Fat Charlie wanted to scream, but his mouth was filled with spiders. They covered his eyes, and his world went dark—

Fat Charlie opened his eyes and saw nothing but blackness, and he screamed and he screamed and he screamed. Then he realized the lights were off and the window shades drawn, because people were watching the film.

It was already a flight from hell. Fat Charlie had just made it a little worse for everyone else.

He stood up and tried to get out to the aisle, tripping over people as he went past, then, when he was almost at the gangway, straightening up and banging the overhead locker with his forehead, which knocked open the locker door and tumbled someone’s hand luggage down onto his head.

People nearby, the ones who were watching, laughed. It was an elegant piece of slapstick, and it cheered them all up no end.