Anansi Boys

Chapter Fourteen

Charlie woke to a banging on a door. Disoriented, he looked around: he was in a hotel room; various unlikely events clustered inside his head like moths around a naked bulb, and while he tried to make sense of them he let his feet get up and walk him to the hotel room door. He blinked at the diagram on the back of the door which told him where to go in case of fire, trying to remember the events of the previous night. Then he unlocked the door and pulled it open.

Daisy looked up at him. She said, “Were you asleep in that hat?”

Charlie put his hand up and felt his head. There was definitely a hat on it. “Yes,” he said. “I think I must have been.”

“Bless,” she said. “Well, at least you took your shoes off. You know you missed all the excitement, last night?”

“I did?”

“Brush your teeth,” she said helpfully. “And change your shirt. Yes, you did. While you were—” and then she hesitated. It seemed quite improbable, on reflection, that he really had vanished in the middle of a séance. These things did not happen. Not in the real world. “While you weren’t there. I got the police chief to go up to Grahame Coats’s house. He had those tourists.”

“Tourists—?”

“It was what he said at dinner, something about us sending the two people in, the two at the house. It was your fiancée and her mother. He’d locked them up in his basement.”

“Are they okay?”

“They’re both in the hospital.”

“Oh.”

“Her mum’s in rough shape. I think your fiancée will be okay.”

“Will you stop calling her that? She’s not my fiancée. She ended the engagement.”

“Yes. But you didn’t, did you?”

“She’s not in love with me,” said Charlie. “Now, I’m going to brush my teeth and change my shirt, and I need a certain amount of privacy.”

“You should shower too,” she said. “And that hat smells like a cigar.”

“It’s a family heirloom,” he told her, and he went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

The hospital was a ten-minute-walk from the hotel, and Spider was sitting in the waiting room, holding a dog-eared copy of Entertainment Weekly magazine as if he were actually reading it.

Charlie tapped him on the shoulder, and Spider jumped. He looked up warily and then, seeing his brother, he relaxed, but not much. “They said I had to wait out here,” Spider said. “Because I’m not a relation or anything.”

Charlie boggled. “Well, why didn’t you just tell them you were a relative? Or a doctor?”

Spider looked uncomfortable. “Well, it’s easy to do that stuff if you don’t care. If it doesn’t matter if I go in or I don’t, it’s easy to go in. But now it matters, and I’d hate to get in the way or do something wrong, and I mean, what if I tried and they said no, and then—what are you grinning about?”

“Nothing really,” said Charlie. “It just all sounds a bit familiar. Come on. Let’s go and find Rosie. You know,” he said to Daisy, as they set off down a random corridor, “there are two ways to walk through a hospital. Either you look like you belong there—here you go Spider. White coat on back of door, just your size. Put it on—or you should look so out of place that no one will complain that you’re there. They’ll just leave it for someone else to sort out.” He began to hum.

“What’s that song?” asked Daisy.

“It’s called ‘Yellow Bird,’ ” said Spider.

Charlie pushed his hat back on his head, and they walked into Rosie’s hospital room.

Rosie was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine, and looking worried. When she saw the three of them come in, she looked more worried. She looked from Spider to Charlie and back again.

“You’re both a long way from home,” was all she said.

“We all are,” said Charlie. “Now, you’ve met Spider. This is Daisy. She’s in the police.”

“I’m not sure that I am anymore,” said Daisy. “I’m probably in all kinds of hot water.”

“You’re the one who was there last night? The one who got the island police to come up to the house?” Rosie stopped. She said, “Any word on Grahame Coats?”

“He’s in intensive care, just like your mum.”

“Well, if she comes to before he does,” said Rosie, “I expect she’ll kill him.” Then she said, “They won’t talk to me about my mum’s condition. They just say that it’s very serious, and they’ll tell me as soon as there’s anything to tell.” She looked at Charlie with clear eyes. “She’s not as bad as you think she is, really. Not when you get time to know her. We had a lot of time to talk, locked up in the dark. She’s all right.”

She blew her nose. Then she said, “They don’t think she’s going to make it. They haven’t directly said that to me, but they sort of said it in a not-saying-it sort of way. It’s funny. I thought she’d live through anything.”

Charlie said, “Me too. I figured even if there was a nuclear war, it would still leave radioactive cockroaches and your mum.”

Daisy stepped on his foot. She said, “Do they know anything more about what hurt her?”

“I told them,” said Rosie. “There was some kind of animal in the house. Maybe it was just Grahame Coats. I mean it sort of was him, but it was sort of someone else. She distracted it from me, and it went for her—” She had explained it all as best she could to the island police that morning. She had decided not to talk about the blonde ghost-woman. Sometimes minds snap under pressure, and she thought it best if people did not know that hers had.

Rosie broke off. She was staring at Spider as if she had only just remembered who he was. She said, “I still hate you, you know.” Spider said nothing, but a miserable expression crept across his face, and he no longer looked like a doctor: now he looked like a man who had borrowed a white coat from behind a door and was worried that someone would notice. A dreamlike tone came into her voice. “Only,” she said, “only when I was in the dark, I thought that you were helping me. That you were keeping the animal away. What happened to your face? It’s all scratched.”

“It was an animal,” said Spider.

“You know,” she said, “Now I see you both at once, you don’t look anything alike at all.”

“I’m the good-looking one,” said Charlie, and Daisy’s foot pressed down on his toes for the second time.

“Bless,” said Daisy, quietly. And then, slightly louder, “Charlie? There’s something we need to talk about outside. Now.”

They went out into the hospital corridor, leaving Spider inside.

“What?” said Charlie.

“What what?” said Daisy.

“What have we got to talk about?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are we out here? You heard her. She hates him. We shouldn’t have left them alone together. She’s probably killed him by now.”

Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad: there was pity in that expression, along with almost infinite compassion.

She touched a finger to her lips and pulled him back toward the door. He looked back into the hospital room: Rosie did not appear to be killing Spider. Quite the opposite, if anything. “Oh,” said Charlie.

They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You’d miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.

Charlie turned his attention back to the corridor to find Daisy in conversation with several doctors and the police officer they had encountered the previous evening.

“Well, we always had him figured as a bad man,” the police officer was saying to Daisy. “I mean, frankly, you only get this kind of behavior from foreigners. The local people, they simply wouldn’t do that kind of thing.”

“Obviously not,” said Daisy.

“Very. Very grateful,” said the police chief, patting her shoulder in a way that set Daisy’s teeth on edge. “This little lady saved that woman’s life,” he told Charlie, giving his shoulder a patronizing pat for good measure, before setting off with the doctors down the corridor.

“So what’s happening?” asked Charlie.

“Well, Grahame Coats is dead,” she said. “More or less. And they don’t hold out any hope for Rosie’s mum, either.”

“I see,” said Charlie. He thought about this. Then he finished thinking and came to a decision. Said, “Would you mind if I just chatted to my brother for a bit? I think he and I need to talk.”

“I’m going back to the hotel anyway. I’m going to check my e-mail. Probably going to have to say sorry on the phone a lot. Find out if I still have a career.”

“But you’re a hero, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think that’s what anyone was paying me for,” she said, a little wanly. “Come and find me at the hotel when you’re done.”

Spider and Charlie walked down the Williamstown high street in the morning sun.

“You know, that really is a good hat,” said Spider.

“You really think so?”

“Yeah. Can I try it on?”

Charlie gave Spider the green fedora. Spider put it on, looked at his reflection in a shop window. He made a face and gave Charlie the hat back. “Well,” he said, disappointed, “it looks good on you, anyway.”

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. He said, “Rosie’s mum is dying.”

“Yeah.”

“I really, really never liked her.”

“I didn’t know her as well as you did. But given time, I’m sure I would have really, really disliked her too.”

Charlie said, “We have to try and save her life, don’t we?” He said it without enthusiasm, like someone pointing out it was time to visit the dentist.

“I don’t think we can do things like that.”

“Dad did something like it for mum. He got her better, for a while.”

“But that was him. I don’t know how we’d do that.”

Charlie said, “The place at the end of the world. With the caves.”

“Beginning of the world, not the end. What about it?”

“Can we just get there? Without all that candles-and-herbs malarkey?”

Spider was quiet. Then he nodded, “I think so.”

They turned together, turned in a direction that wasn’t usually there, and they walked away from the Williamstown high street.

Now the sun was rising, and Charlie and Spider walked across a beach littered with skulls. They were not proper human skulls, and they covered the beach like yellow pebbles. Charlie avoided them where he could, while Spider crunched his way through them. At the end of the beach they took a left turn that was left to absolutely everything, and the mountains at the beginning of the world towered above them and the cliffs fell away below.

Charlie remembered the last time he was here, and it seemed like a thousand years ago. “Where is everyone?” he said aloud, and his voice echoed against the rocks and came back to him. He said, loudly, “Hello?”

And then they were there, watching him. All of them. They seemed grander, now, less human, more animal, wilder. He realized that he had seen them as people last time because he had expected to meet people. But they were not people. Arrayed on the rocks above them were Lion and Elephant, Crocodile and Python, Rabbit and Scorpion, and the rest of them, hundreds of them, and they stared at him with eyes unsmiling: animals he recognized; animals that no one living would be able to identify. All the animals that have ever been in stories. All the animals that people have dreamed of, worshipped, or placated.

Charlie saw all of them.

It’s one thing, he thought, singing for your life, in a room filled with diners, on the spur of the moment, with a gun barrel in the ribs of the girl you—

That you—

Oh.

Well, thought Charlie, I can worry about that later.

Right now he badly wanted either to breathe into a brown paper bag or to vanish.

“There must be hundreds of them,” said Spider, and there was awe in his voice.

There was a flurry in the air, on a nearby rock, which resolved itself into the Bird Woman. She folded her arms and stared at them.

“Whatever it is you’re going to do,” Spider said, “you better do it soon. They aren’t going to wait around forever.”

Charlie’s mouth was dry. “Right.”

Spider said, “So. Um. What exactly do we do now?”

“We sing to them,” said Charlie, simply.

“What?”

“It’s how we fix things. I figured it out. We just sing it all, you and I.”

“I don’t understand. Sing what?”

Charlie said, “The song. You sing the song, you fix things.” Now he sounded desperate. “The song.”

Spider’s eyes were like puddles after the rain, and Charlie saw things in them he had not seen before: affection, perhaps, and confusion and, mostly, apology. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lion watched them from the side of a boulder. Monkey looked at them from the top of a tree. And Tiger—

Charlie saw Tiger. It was walking gingerly on four feet. Its face was swollen and bruised, but there was a glint in its eyes, and it looked as if it would be more than happy to even the score.

Charlie opened his mouth. A small croaking noise came out, as if Charlie had recently swallowed a particularly nervous frog. “It’s no use,” he whispered to Spider. “This was a stupid idea, wasn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“Do you think we can just go away again?” Charlie’s nervous glance swept the mountainside and the caves, took in each of the hundreds of totem creatures from before the dawn of time. There was one he had not seen the last time he had looked: a small man, with lemon yellow gloves and a pencil-thin moustache and no fedora hat to cover his thinning hair.

The old man winked when he caught Charlie’s gaze.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

Charlie filled his lungs, and he began to sing. “I am Charlie,” he sang. “I am Anansi’s son. Listen as I sing my song. Listen to my life.”

He sang them the song of a boy who was half a god, and who was broken into two by an old woman with a grudge. He sang of his father, and he sang of his mother.

He sang of names and words, of the building blocks beneath the real, the worlds that make worlds, the truths beneath the way things are; he sang of appropriate ends and just conclusions for those who would have hurt him and his.

He sang the world.

It was a good song, and it was his song. Sometimes it had words, and sometimes it didn’t have any words at all.

As he sang, all the creatures listening began to clap and to stamp and to hum along; Charlie felt like he was the conduit for a great song that took in all of them. He sang of birds, of the magic of looking up and seeing them in flight, of the sheen of the sun on a wing feather in the morning.

The totem creatures were dancing now, the dances of their kind. The Bird Woman danced the wheeling dance of birds, fanning her tail feathers, tossing back her beak.

There was only one creature on the mountainside who did not dance.

Tiger lashed his tail. He was not clapping or singing or dancing. His face was bruised purple, and his body was covered in welts and in bite marks. He had padded down the rocks, a step at a time, until he was close to Charlie. “The songs aren’t yours,” he growled.

Charlie looked at him, and sang about Tiger, and about Grahame Coats, and those who would prey upon the innocent. He turned: Spider was looking up at him with admiration. Tiger roared in anger, and Charlie took the roar and wound his song around it. Then he did the roar himself, just like Tiger had done it. Well, the roar began just as Tiger’s roar had, but then Charlie changed it, so it became a really goofy sort of roar, and all the creatures watching from the rocks started to laugh. They couldn’t help it. Charlie did the goofy roar again. Like any impersonation, like any perfect caricature, it had the effect of making what it made fun of intrinsically ridiculous. No one would ever hear Tiger roar again without hearing Charlie’s roar underneath it. “Goofy sort of a roar,” they’d say.

Tiger turned his back on Charlie. He loped through the crowd, roaring as he ran, which only made the crowd laugh the harder. Tiger angrily retreated back into his cave.

Spider gestured with his hands, a curt movement.

There was a rumble, and the mouth of Tiger’s cave collapsed in a small rock slide. Spider looked satisfied. Charlie kept singing.

He sang the song of Rosie Noah and the song of Rosie’s mother: he sang a long life for Mrs. Noah and all the happiness that she deserved.

He sang of his life, all of their lives, and in his song he saw the pattern of their lives as a web that a fly had blundered into, and with his song he wrapped the fly, made certain it would not escape, and he repaired the web with new strands.

And now the song was coming to its natural end.

Charlie realized, with no little surprise, that he enjoyed singing to other people, and he knew, at that moment, that this was what he would spend the rest of his life doing. He would sing: not big, magical songs that made worlds or recreated existence. Just small songs that would make people happy for a breath, make them move, make them for a little while, forget their problems. And he knew that there would always be the fear before performing, the stage fright, that would never go away, but he also understood that it would be like jumping into a swimming pool—only uncomfortably chill for a few seconds—and then the discomfort would pass and it would be good—

Never this good. Never this good again. But good enough.

And then he was done. Charlie hung his head. The creatures on the cliff top let the last notes die away, stopped stamping, stopped clapping, stopped dancing. Charlie took off his father’s green fedora and fanned his face with it.

Under his breath, Spider said, “That was amazing.”

“You could have done it too,” said Charlie.

“I don’t think so. What was happening at the end? I felt you doing something, but I couldn’t really tell what it was.”

“I fixed things,” said Charlie. “For us. I think. I’m not really sure—” And he wasn’t. Now the song was over, the content of the song was unraveling like a dream in the morning.

He pointed to the cave mouth that was blocked by rocks. “Did you do that?”

“Yeah,” said Spider. “Seemed the least I could do. Tiger will dig his way out eventually, though. I wish I’d done something worse than just shut the door on him, to be honest.”

“Not to worry,” said Charlie. “I did. Something much worse.”

He watched the animals disperse. His father was nowhere to be seen, which did not surprise him. “Come on,” he said. “We ought to be getting back.”

Spider went back to see Rosie at visiting time. He was carrying a large box of chocolates, the largest that the hospital gift shop sold.

“For you,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“They told me,” she said, “that they think my mum’s going to pull through. Apparently she opened her eyes and asked for porridge. The doctor said it’s a miracle.”

“Yup. Your mother asking for food. Certainly sounds like a miracle to me.”

She swatted his arm with her hand, then left her hand resting on his arm.

“You know,” she said, after a while, “You’re going to think this is silly of me. But when I was in the dark, with Mum, I thought that you were helping me. I felt like you were keeping the beast at bay. That if you hadn’t’ve done what you were doing, he would have killed us.”

“Um. I probably helped.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I was in trouble as well, and I thought about you.”

“Were you in very big trouble?”

“Enormous. Yes.”

“Will you pour me a glass of water, please?”

He did. She said, “Spider, what do you do?”

“Do?”

“For a job.”

“Whatever I feel like doing.”

“I think,” she said, “I may stay here, for a bit. The nurses have been telling me how much they need teachers here. I’d like to see that I was making a difference.”

“That might be fun.”

“And what would you do, if I did?”

“Oh. Well, if you were here, I’m sure I could find something to keep me busy.”

Their fingers twined, tight as a ship’s knot.

“Do you think we can make this work?” she asked.

“I think so,” said Spider, soberly. “And if I get bored with you, I’ll just go away and do something else. So not to worry.”

“Oh,” said Rosie, “I’m not worried.” And she wasn’t. There was steel in her voice beneath the softness. You could tell where her mother got it from.

Charlie found Daisy on a deck chair out on the beach. He thought she was asleep in the sun. When his shadow touched her, she said, “Hello Charlie.” She didn’t open her eyes.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Your hat smells like a cigar. Are you going to be getting rid of it soon?”

“No,” said Charlie. “I told you. Family heirloom. I plan to wear it till I die, then leave it to my children. So. Do you still have a job with the police force?”

“Sort of,” she said. “My boss said that it’s been decided that what I was suffering from was nervous exhaustion brought on by overwork, and I’m on sick leave until I feel well enough to come back.”

“Ah. And when will that be?”

“Not sure,” she said. “Can you pass the suntan oil?”

He had a box in his pocket. He took it out and put it on the arm of the deck chair. “In a minute. Er.” He paused. “You know,” he said, “we’ve already done the big embarrassing one of these at gunpoint.” He opened the box. “But this is for you, from me. Well, Rosie returned it to me. And we can swap it for one you like. Pick out a different one. Probably it won’t even fit. But it’s yours. If you want it. And um. Me.”

She reached into the box and took out the engagement ring.

“Hmph. All right,” she said. “As long as you’re not just doing it to get the lime back.”

Tiger prowled. His tail lashed irritably from side to side as he paced back and forth across the mouth of his cave. His eyes burned like emerald torches in the shadows.

“Whole world and everything used to be mine,” said Tiger. “Moon and stars and sun and stories. I owned them all.”

“I feel it incumbent on me to point out,” said a small voice from the back of the cave, “that you said that already.”

Tiger paused in his pacing; he turned then and insinuated himself into the back of his cave, rippling as he walked, like a fur rug over hydraulic springs. He padded back until he came to the carcass of an ox, and he said, in a quiet voice, “I beg your pardon.”

There was a scrabbling from inside the carcass. The tip of a nose protruded from the rib cage. “Actually,” it said, “I was, so to speak, agreeing with you. That was what I was doing.”

Little white hands pulled a thin strip of dried meat from between two ribs, revealing a small animal the color of dirty snow. It might have been an albino mongoose, or perhaps some particularly shifty kind of weasel in its winter coat. It had a scavenger’s eyes.

“Whole world and everything used to be mine. Moon and stars and sun and stories. I owned them all.” Then he said, “Would have been mine again.”

Tiger stared down at the little beast. Then, without warning, one huge paw descended, smashing the rib cage, breaking the carcass into foul-smelling fragments, pinning the little animal to the floor; it wriggled and writhed, but it could not escape.

“You are here,” said Tiger, his huge head nose to nose with the pale animal’s tiny head, “you are here under my sufferance. Do you understand that? Because the next time you say something irritating, I shall bite your head off.”

“Mmmph,” said the weasely thing.

“You wouldn’t like it if I bit off your head, would you?”

“Nngk,” said the smaller animal. Its eyes were a pale blue, two chips of ice, and they glinted as it twisted uncomfortably beneath the weight of the huge paw.

“So will you promise me that you will behave, and you will be quiet?” rumbled Tiger. He lifted his paw a little to allow the beast to speak.

“Indeedy,” said the small white thing, extremely politely. Then, with one weasely movement, it twisted and sank its sharp little teeth into Tiger’s paw. Tiger bellowed in pain, whipped the paw back, sending the little animal flying through the air. It struck the rock ceiling, bounced over to a ledge, and from there it darted, like a dirty white streak, to the very back of the cave, where the ceiling got low and close to the floor, and where there were many hiding places for a small animal, places a larger animal could not go.

Tiger padded as far back into the cave as it could easily walk. “You think I can’t wait?” he asked. “You have to come out sooner or later. I’m not going anywhere.” Tiger lay down. He closed his eyes and soon began to make fairly convincing snoring noises.

After about half an hour of snoring from Tiger, the pale animal crept out from the rocks and slipped from shadow to shadow, making for a large bone that still had plenty of good meat on it, if you didn’t mind a certain rankness, and it didn’t. Still, to get to the bone, it would have to pass the great beast. It lurked in the shadows, then it ventured out on little silent feet.

As it passed the sleeping Tiger, a forepaw shot out, and a claw slammed down on the creature’s tail, pinning it down. Another paw held the little creature behind the neck. The great cat opened its eyes. “Frankly,” it said, “we appear to be stuck with each other. So all I’m asking is that you make an effort. We can both make an effort. I rather doubt that we’ll ever be friends, but perhaps we could learn to tolerate each other.”

“I take your point,” said the small ferretty thing. “Needs must, as they say, when the Devil drives.”

“That’s an example of what I’m saying,” said Tiger. “You just have to learn when to keep your mouth shut.”

“It’s an ill wind,” said the little animal, “that blows nobody any good.”

“Now you’re irritating me again,” said Tiger. “I’m trying to tell you. Don’t irritate me, and I won’t bite off your head.”

“You keep using the phrase ‘bite my head off.’ Now when you say ‘bite my head off,’ I take it I can assume that this is actually some kind of metaphorical statement, implying that you’ll shout at me, perhaps rather angrily?”

“Bite your head off. Then crunch it. Then chew it. Then swallow it,” said Tiger. “Neither of us can leave until Anansi’s child forgets we’re here. The way that bastard seems to have arranged things, even if I kill you in the morning you’ll be reincarnated back in this blasted cave by the end of the afternoon. So don’t irritate me.”

The small white animal said, “Ah well. Another day—“

“If you say ‘another dollar,’ ” said Tiger, “I will be irritated, and there will be serious consequences. Don’t. Say anything. Irritating. Do you understand?”

There was a brief silence in the cave at the end of the world. It was broken by a small, weasely voice saying, “Absatively.”

It started to say, “Oww!” but the noise was suddenly and effectively silenced.

And then there was nothing in that place but the sound of crunching.

The thing they don’t tell you about coffins in the literature, because frankly it’s not much of a selling point to the people who are buying them, is just how comfortable they are.

Mr. Nancy was extremely satisfied with his coffin. Now that all the excitement was over, he’d gone back to his coffin and was comfortably dozing. Every once in a while he would wake and remember where he was, then he’d roll over and go back to sleep.

The grave, as has been pointed out, is a fine place, not to mention a private one, and is thus an excellent place to get a little downtime. Six feet down, best kind there is. Another twenty years or so, he thought, and he would have to think about getting up.

He opened one eye when the funeral started.

He could hear them up above him: Callyanne Higgler and the Bustamonte woman and the other one, the thin one, not to mention a small horde of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren, all of them sighing and wailing and crying their eyes out for the late Mrs. Dunwiddy.

Mr. Nancy thought about pushing one hand up through the turf and grabbing Callyanne Higgler’s ankle. It was something he’d wanted to do ever since he saw Carrie at a drive-in, thirty years earlier, but now that the opportunity presented itself, he found himself able to resist the temptation. Honestly, he couldn’t be bothered. She’d only scream and have a heart attack and die, and then the damn Garden of Rest would get even more crowded than it already was.

Too much like hard work, anyway. There were good dreams to be dreamed in the world beneath the soil. Twenty years, he thought. Maybe twenty-five. By that time, he might even have grandchildren. It’s always interesting to see how the grandchildren turn out.

He could hear Callyanne Higgler wailing and carrying on up above him. Then she stopped her sobbing long enough to announce, “Still. It’s not as if she don’t have a good life and a long one. That woman’s a hundred and three years old when she passes from us.”

“Hunnert and four!” said an irritated voice from under the ground beside him.

Mr. Nancy reached one insubstantial arm out and tapped the new coffin sharply on the side. “Keep it down, there, woman,” he barked. “Some of us is tryin’ to sleep.”

Rosie had made it clear to Spider that she expected him to get a steady job, the kind that involved getting up in the morning and going somewhere.

So one morning, the day before Rosie was to be discharged from the hospital, Spider got up early and went down to the town library. He logged on to the library computer, sauntered onto the Internet and, very carefully, cleared out all Grahame Coats’s remaining bank accounts, the ones that the police forces of several continents had so far failed to find. He arranged for the stud farm in Argentina to be sold. He bought a small, off-the-peg company, endowed it with the money, and applied for charitable status. He sent off an e-mail, in the name of Roger Bronstein, hiring a lawyer to administer the foundation’s business, and suggested that the lawyer might wish to seek out Miss Rosie Noah, late of London, currently of Saint Andrews, and hire her to Do Good.

Rosie was hired. Her first task was to find office space.

Following this, Spider spent four full days walking (and, at nights, sleeping on) the beach that circled most of the island, tasting the food in each of the dining establishments he encountered along the way until he came to Dawson’s Fish Shack. He tried the fried flying fish, the boiled green figs, the grilled chicken, and the coconut pie, then he went back into the kitchen and found the chef, who was also the owner, and offered him money enough for partnership and cooking lessons.

Dawson’s Fish Shack is now a restaurant, and Mr. Dawson has retired. Sometimes Spider’s out front and sometimes he’s back in the kitchen: you go down there and look for him, you’ll see him. The food is the best on the island. He’s fatter than he used to be, though not as fat as he’ll wind up if he keeps tasting everything he cooks.

Not that Rosie minds.

She does some teaching, and some helping out, and a lot of Doing Good, and if she ever misses London she never lets it show. Rosie’s mother, on the other hand, misses London continually and vocally, but takes any suggestion that she might want to return there as an attempt to part her from her as-yet-unborn (and, for that matter, unconceived) grandchildren.

Nothing would give this author greater pleasure than to be able to assure you that, following her return from the valley of the shadow of death, Rosie’s mother became a new person, a jolly woman with a kind word for everyone, that her newfound appetite for food was only matched by her appetite for life and all if had to offer. Alas, respect for the truth compels perfect honesty and the truth is that when she came out of hospital Rosie’s mother was still herself, just as suspicious and uncharitable as ever, although significantly more frail and now given to sleeping with the light on.

She announced that she would be selling her flat in London and would move to wherever in the world Spider and Rosie were, to be near her grandchildren; and, as time went on, she would drop pointed comments about the lack of grandchildren, the quantity and motility of Spider’s spermatozoa, the frequency and positions of Spider and Rosie’s sexual relations, and the relative cheapness and ease of in vitro fertilization, to the point where Spider seriously began to think about not going to bed with Rosie anymore, just to spite Rosie’s mother. He thought about this for about eleven seconds one afternoon, while Rosie’s mother was handing them photocopies of an article from a magazine that she had found which suggested that Rosie should stand on her head for half an hour after sex; and he mentioned these thoughts to Rosie that night, and she laughed and told him that her mother wasn’t allowed in their bedroom anyway, and that she wasn’t going to be standing on her head after making love for anybody.

Mrs. Noah has a flat in Williamstown, near Spider and Rosie’s house, and twice a week one of Callyanne Higgler’s many nieces looks in on her, does the vacuuming, dusts the glass fruit (the wax fruit melted in the island heat), and makes a little food and leaves it in the fridge, and sometimes Rosie’s mum eats it and sometimes she doesn’t.

Charlie’s a singer these days. He’s lost a lot of the softness. He’s a lean man now, with a trademark fedora hat. He has lots of different fedoras, in different colors; his favorite one is green.

Charlie has a son. His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

Nobody ever calls Charlie “Fat Charlie” anymore, and honestly, sometimes he misses it.

It was early in the morning in the summer, and it was already light. There was already noise coming from the room next door. Charlie let Daisy sleep. He climbed out of bed quietly, grabbed a T-shirt and shorts, and went through the door to see his son naked on the floor playing with a small wooden train set. Together they pulled on their T-shirts and shorts and flip-flops, and Charlie put on a hat, and they walked down to the beach.

“Daddy?” said the boy. His jaw was set, and he seemed to be pondering something.

“Yes, Marcus?”

“Who was the shortest president?”

“You mean in height?”

“No. In, in days. Who was the shortest.”

“Harrison. He caught pneumonia during his inauguration and died. He was president for forty-something days, and he spent most of his time in office dying.”

“Oh. Well, who was the longest then?”

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He served three full terms. Died in office during his fourth. We’ll take off our shoes here.”

They placed their shoes on a rock and carried on walking down toward the waves, their toes digging into the damp sand.

“How do you know so much about presidents?”

“Because my father thought it would do me good to find out about them, when I was a kid.”

“Oh.”

They waded out into the water, making for a boulder, one that could only be seen at low tide. After a while, Charlie picked the boy up and let him ride on his shoulders.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Marcus.”

“P’choona says you’re famous.”

“And who’s Petunia?”

“At playgroup. She says her mom has all your CDs. She says she loves your singing.”

“Ah.”

“Are you famous?”

“Not really. A little bit.” He put Marcus down on the top of the boulder, then he clambered up it himself. “Okay. Ready to sing?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want to sing?”

“My favorite song.”

“I don’t know if she’ll like that one.”

“She will.” Marcus had the certainty of walls, of mountains.

“Okay. One, two, three—”

They sang “Yellow Bird” together, which was Marcus’s favorite song that week, and then they sang “Zombie Jamboree,” which was his second favorite, and “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” which was his third favorite. Marcus, whose eyes were better than Charlie’s, spotted her as they were finishing “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” and he began to wave.

“There she is, Daddy.”

“Are you sure?”

The morning haze blurred the sea and sky together into a pale whiteness, and Charlie squinted at the horizon. “I don’t see anything.”

“She’s gone under the water. She’ll be here soon.”

There was a splash, and she surfaced immediately below them; with a reach and a flip and a wiggle she was sitting on the rock beside them, her silvery tail dangling down into the Atlantic, flicking beads of water up onto her scales. She had long, orange-red hair.

They all sang together now, the man and the boy and the mermaid. They sang “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Yellow Submarine” and then Marcus taught the mermaid the words to the Flintstones theme song.

“He reminds me of you,” she said to Charlie, “when you were a little boy.”

“You knew me then?”

She smiled. “You and your father used to walk down the beach, back then. Your father,” she said. “He was quite some gentleman.” She sighed. Mermaids sigh better than anyone. Then she said, “You should go back now. The tide’s coming in.” She pushed her long hair back and jackknifed into the ocean. She raised her head above the waves, touched her fingertips to her lips, and blew Marcus a kiss before vanishing under the water.

Charlie put his son onto his shoulders, and he waded through the sea, back to the beach, where his son slipped down from his shoulders onto the sand. He took off his old fedora hat and placed it on his son’s head. It was much too big for the boy, but it still made him smile.

“Hey,” said Charlie, “You want to see something?”

“Okay. But I want breakfast. I want pancakes. No, I want oatmeal. No, I want pancakes.”

“Watch this.” Charlie began to do a sand-dance in his bare feet, soft-shoe shuffling through the sand.

“I can do that,” said Marcus.

“Really?”

“Watch me, Daddy.”

He could, too.

Together the man and the boy danced their way back up the sand to the house, singing a wordless song that they made up as they went along, which lingered in the air even after they had gone in for breakfast.