“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 1920s, 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 co
me 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 fiancé.
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 c
abbie 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.”