Anansi Boys (Page 17)

Fat Charlie was not by nature a violent man; still, he could dream. His daydreams tended to be small and comfortable things. He would like to have enough money to eat in good restaurants whenever he wished. He wanted a job in which nobody could tell him what to do. He wanted to be able to sing without embarrassment, somewhere there were never any people around to hear him.

This afternoon, however, his daydreams assumed a different shape: he could fly, for a start, and bullets bounced off his mighty chest as he zoomed down from the sky and rescued Rosie from a band of kidnapping scoundrels and dastards. She would hold him tightly as they flew off into the sunset, off to his Fortress of Cool, where she would be so overwhelmed with feelings of gratitude that she would enthusiastically decide not to bother with the whole waiting-until-they-were-married bit, and would start to see how high and how fast they could fill their jar-.

The daydream eased the stress of life in the Grahame Coats Agency, of telling people that their checks were in the post, of calling in money the agency was owed.

At 6:00 PM Fat Charlie turned off his computer, and walked down the five flights of stairs to the street. It had not rained. Overhead, the starlings were wheeling and cheeping: the dusk chorus of a city. Everyone on the pavement was hurrying somewhere. Most of them, like Fat Charlie, were walking up Kingsway to Holborn tube. They had their heads down and the look about them of people who wanted to get home for the night.

There was one person on the pavement who wasn’t going anywhere, though. He stood there, facing Fat Charlie and the remaining commuters, and his leather jacket flapped in the wind. He was not smiling.

Fat Charlie saw him from the end of the street. As he walked toward him everything became unreal. The day melted, and he realized what he had spent the day trying to remember.

"Hello, Spider," he said, when he got close.

Spider looked like a storm was raging inside him. He might have been about to cry. Fat Charlie didn’t know. There was too much emotion on his face, in the way he stood, so the people on the street looked away, ashamed.

"I went out there," he said. His voice was dull. "I saw Mrs. Higgler. She took me to the grave. My father died, and I didn’t know."

Fat Charlie said, "He was my father too, Spider." He wondered how he could have forgotten Spider, how he could have dismissed him so easily as a dream.

"True."

The dusk sky was crosshatched with starlings; they wheeled and crossed from rooftop to rooftop.

Spider jerked, and stood straight. He seemed to have come to a decision. "You are so right," he said. "We got to do this together."

"Exactly," said Fat Charlie. Then he said, "Do what?" but Spider had already hailed a cab.

"We are men with troubles," said Spider to the world. "Our father is no more. Our hearts are heavy in our chests. Sorrow settles upon us like pollen in hay fever season. Darkness is our lot, and misfortune our only companion."

"Right, gentlemen," said the cabbie, brightly. "Where am I taking you?"

"To where the three remedies for darkness of the soul may be found," said Spider.

"Maybe we could get a curry," suggested Fat Charlie.

"There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life," said Spider. "These things are wine, women and song."

"Curry’s nice too," pointed out Fat Charlie, but nobody was listening to him.

"In any particular order?" asked the cabbie.

"Wine first," Spider announced. "Rivers and lakes and vast oceans of wine."

"Right you are," said the cabbie, and he pulled out into the traffic.

"I have a particularly bad feeling about all this," said Fat Charlie, helpfully.

Spider nodded. "A bad feeling," he said. "Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island."

"Seek not to ask for whom the bell tolls," intoned the cabbie. "It tolls for thee."

"Whoa," said Spider. "Now that’s a pretty heavy koan you got there."

"Thank you," said the cabbie.

"That’s how it ends, all right. You are some kind of philosopher. I’m Spider. This is my brother, Fat Charlie."

"Charles," said Fat Charlie.

"Steve," said the cabbie. "Steve Burridge."

"Mister Burridge," said Spider, "how would you like to be our personal driver this evening?"

Steve Burridge explained that he was coming up to the end of his shift and would now be driving his cab home for the night, that dinner with Mrs. Burridge and all the little Burridges awaited him.

"You hear that?" said Spider. "A family man. Now, my brother and I are all the family that we have left. And this is the first time we’ve met."

"Sounds like quite a story," said the cabbie. "Was there a feud?"

"Not at all. He simply did not know that he had a brother," said Spider.

"Did you?" asked Fat Charlie. "Know about me?"

"I may have done," said Spider. "But things like that can slip a guy’s mind so easily."

The cab pulled over to the curb. "Where are we?" asked Fat Charlie. They hadn’t gone very far. He thought they were somewhere just off Fleet Street.

"What he asked for," said the cabbie. "Wine."

Spider got out of the cab and stared at the grubby oak and grimy glass exterior of the ancient wine bar. "Perfect," he said. "Pay the man, Brother."

Fat Charlie paid the cabbie. They went inside: down wooden steps to a cellar where rubicund barristers drank side by side with pallid money market fund managers. There was sawdust on the floor, and a wine list chalked illegibly on a blackboard behind the bar.

"What are you drinking?" asked Spider.

"Just a glass of house red, please," said Fat Charlie.

Spider looked at him gravely. "We are the final scions of Anansi’s line. We do not mourn our father’s passing with house red."

"Er. Right. Well, I’ll have what you’re having then."

Spider went up to the bar, easing his way through the crush of people as if it was not there. In several minutes he returned, carrying two wineglasses, a corkscrew, and an extremely dusty wine bottle. He opened the bottle with an ease that left Fat Charlie, who always wound up picking fragments of cork from his wine, deeply impressed. Spider poured from the bottle a wine so tawny it was almost black. He filled each glass, then put one in front of Fat Charlie.