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“What was he like?” asked Fat Charlie. “When he was young?” Mrs. Dunwiddy looked at him through her thick, thick spectacles, and her lips pursed, and she shook her head. “Before my time,” was all she said. “Eat your cow foot.”
“So much to do? Like what? Fish off bridges? Play dominoes on the porch? Await the inevitable invention of karaoke? He wasn’t busy. I don’t think he ever did a day’s work in all the time I knew him.” “You shouldn’t say that about your father!” “Well, it’s true. He was crap. A rotten husband and a rotten father.” “Of course he was!” said Mrs Higgler, fiercely, “But you can’t judge him like you would judge a man. You got to remember, Fat Charlie, that your father was a god.”
“No,” he lied. “I’m not. Honestly I’m not.” His words rang with honesty, sincerity and truth. He was thousands of miles from home, in his late father’s house, with a crazy old woman on the verge of an apoplectic seizure. He would have told her that the moon was just some kind of unusual tropical fruit if it would have calmed her down, and meant it, as best he could.
“Back when he was a god,” she told him. “Back then, they called him Anansi.”
What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man. No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.
Grahame Coats came with both names. Not Mister Coats. Never just Grahame.
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.”
“Did they really sell this wine here?” “They had a bottle they didn’t know they had. They just needed to be reminded.”
Blood calls to blood like sirens in the night.
this will be good,” said the vodka and orange. “Did someone say you were his brother?” “No,” muttered Fat Charlie, ungraciously. “I said that he was my brother.”
“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?”
“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?”
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.
Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat’s eyes, or an octopus’s) are only made to see one version of reality at a time. Fat Charlie saw one thing with his eyes, and he saw something else with his mind, and in the gulf between the two things, madness waited.
It was all a jumble in his mind, the technicolor Ozness of the other place dissolving back into the sepia tones of reality.
Spider pulled out a five-pound note. “Here,” he said. “For the coffee. I’ve got to go.” The proprietor nodded, gratefully. “Keep the napkin.”
Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it. They know.
“I don’t need any of this,” said Spider. He said it aloud; it’s easier to lie to yourself when you say things out loud. “I didn’t need any of you people a week ago and I don’t need you now. I don’t care. I’m done.”
“When you need to flush the lavvy,” said the policeman accompanying him down the corridor, “you press the button in your cell. One of us’ll be by, sooner or later, to pull the chain for you. Stops you trying to flush away the evidence.” “Evidence of what?” “Leave it out, Sunshine.” Fat Charlie sighed. He’d been flushing away his own bodily waste products since he’d been old enough to take a certain pride in the activity, and the loss of that, more than the loss of his liberty, told him that everything had changed.
“You do not need the police,” said the voice. “All crimes will be dealt with by the appropriate and inevitable authorities.” “You know,” said Maeve, “I think I may have dialed the wrong number.” “Likewise,” said the voice, “all numbers are, ultimately, correct. They are simply numbers and cannot thus be right or wrong.”
“Oh dear,” she said, and felt herself, not for the first time in her existence, wishing that she had listened to Morris, who after all, she admitted to herself, by now probably knew rather more about being dead than she did. Ah well, she thought. Being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick some of it up as you go along, and you just make up the rest.
“Don’t say ‘sorry’ like that neither, like a dog that get tell off for messin’ on the kitchen floor. Hold your head up. Look the world in the eye. You hear me?” “Yes. Sorry. I mean, just yes.”
“You must be the Englishman with the lime.”
STORIES ARE WEBS, INTERCONNECTED STRAND TO STRAND, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN WHICH PROVES TO BE UNLUCKY FOR SOME
Fat Charlie sighed. “Dad. I don’t wear hats. It’ll look stupid. I’ll look a complete tit. Why do you always try to embarrass me?” In the fading light, the old man looked at his son. “You think I’d lie to you? Son, all you need to wear a hat is attitude. And you got that. You think I’d tell you you looked good if you didn’t? You look real sharp. You don’t believe me?”
“Maeve?” “Morris?” She looked around her, but the room was empty. “I wouldn’t want to disturb you, if you were still busy, pet.” “That’s very sweet of you,” she said. “But I think I’m done now.” The walls of the library were beginning to fade. They were losing color and form. The world behind the walls was starting to show, and in its light she saw a small figure in a smart suit waiting for her. Her hand crept into his. She said, “Where are we going now, Morris?” He told her. “Oh. Well, that will be a pleasant change,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.” And, hand in hand, they went.
Charlie pushed his fedora back onto his head. Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you. This hat was one of those, and Charlie was up to it.
