Anansi Boys

Chapter Eight

If anything was making Spider go away, Spider didn’t know about it. On the contrary, Spider was having an excellent time being Fat Charlie. He was having such a good time being Fat Charlie he began to wonder why he hadn’t been Fat Charlie before. It was more fun than a barrelful of monkeys. [1]

The bit of being Fat Charlie that Spider liked best was Rosie.

Until now Spider had regarded women as more or less interchangeable. You didn’t give them a real name, or an address that would work for longer than a week, of course, or anything more than a disposable cell-phone number. Women were fun, and decorative, and terrific accessories, but there would always be more of them; like bowls of goulash coming along a conveyor belt, when you were done with one, you simply picked up the next, and spooned in your sour cream.

But Rosie—

Rosie was different.

He couldn’t have told you how she was different. He had tried and failed. Partly it was how he felt when he was with her: as if, seeing himself in her eyes, he became a wholly better person. That was part of it.

Spider liked knowing that Rosie knew where to find him. It made him feel comfortable. He delighted in the pillowy curves of her, the way she meant nothing but good to the world, the way she smiled. There was really nothing at all wrong with Rosie, apart from having to spend time away from her, and, of course, he was beginning to discover, the little matter of Rosie’s mother. On this particular evening, while Fat Charlie was in an airport four thousand miles away in the process of being bumped up to first class, Spider was in Rosie’s mother’s flat in Wimpole Street, and he was learning about her the hard way.

Spider was used to being able to push reality around a little, just a little but that was always enough. You just had to show reality who was boss, that was all. Having said that, he had never met anyone who inhabited her own reality quite so firmly as Rosie’s mother.

“Who’s this?” she asked, suspiciously, as they walked in.

“I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” said Spider.

“Why is he saying that?” asked Rosie’s mother. “Who is he?”

“I’m Fat Charlie Nancy, your future son-in-law, and you really like me,” said Spider, with utter conviction.

Rosie’s mother swayed and blinked and stared at him. “You may be Fat Charlie,” she said, uncertainly, “but I don’t like you.”

“Well,” said Spider, “you should. I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all-around wonderfulness. I don’t have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.”

Rosie’s mother sniffed. She did not know what was going on, but whatever it was, she did not like it. Until now, she felt that she had got the measure of Fat Charlie. She might, she admitted to herself, have mishandled things a little in the beginning: it was quite possible that Rosie would not have attached herself to Fat Charlie with such enthusiasm if, following the first meeting of her mother and Fat Charlie, her mother had not expressed her opinion quite so vociferously. He was a loser, Rosie’s mother had said, for she could smell fear like a shark scenting blood across the bay. But she had failed to persuade Rosie to dump him, and now her main strategy involved assuming control of the wedding plans, making Fat Charlie as miserable as possible, and contemplating the national divorce statistics with a certain grim satisfaction.

Something different was now happening, and she did not like it. Fat Charlie was no longer a large vulnerable person. This new, sharp creature confused her.

Spider, for his part, was having to work.

Most people do not notice other people. Rosie’s mother did. She noticed everything. Now she sipped her hot water from a bone china cup. She knew that she had just lost a skirmish, even if she could not have told you how or what the battle was about. So she moved her next assault to higher ground.

“Charles, dear,” she said, “tell me about your cousin Daisy. I worry that your family is underrepresented. Would you like her to be given a larger role in the wedding party?”

“Who?”

“Daisy,” said Rosie’s mother, sweetly. “The young lady I met at your house the other morning, wandering around in her scanties. If she was your cousin, of course.”

“Mother! If Charlie says she was his cousin—”

“Let him talk for himself, Rosie,” said her mother, and she took another sip of hot water.

“Right,” said Spider. “Daisy,” said Spider.

He cast his mind back to the night of wine, women and song: he had brought the prettiest and funniest of the women back to the flat with them, after telling her that it was her idea, and then had needed her help in getting the semiconscious bulk of Fat Charlie up the stairs. Having already enjoyed the attentions of several of the other women during the course of the evening, he had brought the little funny one back with him rather as one might set aside an after-dinner mint, but he had found, on getting home and putting a cleaned-up Fat Charlie to bed, that he was no longer hungry. That one.

“Sweet little cousin Daisy,” he continued, without a pause. “I am certain that she would love to be involved in the wedding, should she be in the country. Alas, she’s a courier. Always traveling. One day she’s here, the next, she’s dropping off a confidential document in Murmansk.”

“You don’t have her address? Or her phone number?”

“We can look for her together, you and I,” agreed Spider. “Zooming around the world. She comes, she goes.”

“Then,” said Rosie’s mother, much as Alexander the Great might have ordered the sacking and pillaging of a little Persian village, “the next time she is in the country, you must invite her over. I thought she was such a pretty little thing, and I am sure that Rosie would just love to meet her.”

“Yes,” said Spider. “I must. I really must.”

Each person whoever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.

Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which had been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life, had a reassuring, marching sort of beat, and words that were about protecting the weak, and it had a chorus that began “Evildoers beware!” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits.

And that is, more or less, everything you need to know about Daisy. The rest is details.

Daisy’s father was born in Hong Kong. Her mother came from Ethiopia, of a family of wealthy carpet exporters: they owned a house in Addis Ababa, and another house and lands outside Nazret. Daisy’s parents met at Cambridge—he was studying computing before that was something that was seen as being a sensible career path, and she was devouring molecular chemistry and international law. They were two young people who were equally studious, naturally shy, and generally ill-at-ease. They were both homesick, but for very different things; however, they both played chess, and they met on a Wednesday afternoon, at the chess club. They were, as novices, encouraged to play together, and during their first game Daisy’s mother beat Daisy’s father with ease.

Daisy’s father was nettled by this, enough that he shyly asked for a rematch on the following Wednesday, and on every successive Wednesday after that (excluding vacations and public holidays) for the next two years.

Their social interaction increased as their social skills and her spoken English improved. Together, they held hands as part of a human chain and protested the arrival of large trucks loaded with missiles. Together, although as part of a much larger party, they traveled to Barcelona in order to protest the unstoppable flood of international capitalism and to register stern protests at corporate hegemonies. This was also the time they got to experience officially squirted tear gas, and Mr. Day’s wrist was sprained as he was being pushed out of the way by the Spanish police.

And then, one Wednesday at the beginning of their third year at Cambridge, Daisy’s father beat Daisy’s mother at chess. He was made so happy by this, so elated and triumphant that, buoyed and emboldened by his conquest, he proposed marriage; and Daisy’s mother, who had been, deep down, afraid that as soon as he won a game he would lose interest in her, said yes, of course.

They stayed in England and remained in academia, and they had one daughter, whom they called Daisy because at the time they owned (and, to Daisy’s later amusement, actually rode) a tandem—a bicycle built for two. They moved from university to university across Britain: he taught computer sciences while his wife wrote books that nobody wanted to read about international corporate hegemonies, and books that people did want to read about chess, its strategies and its history, and thus in a good year she would make more money than he did, which was never very much. Their involvement in politics waned as they grew older, and as they approached middle age they had become a happy couple with no interests beyond each other, chess, Daisy, and the reconstruction and debugging of forgotten operating systems.

Neither of them understood Daisy, not even a little.

They blamed themselves for not having nipped her fascination with the police force in the bud when it first began to manifest, more or less at the same time that she began talking. Daisy would point out police cars in the same excited way that other little girls might point out ponies. Her seventh birthday party was held in fancy dress to allow her to wear her junior policewoman’s costume, and there are still photographs in a box in her parents’ attic of her face suffused with a seven-year-old’s perfect joy at the sight of her birthday cake: seven candles ringing a flashing blue light.

Daisy was a diligent, cheerful, intelligent teenager who made both her parents happy when she went to the University of London to study law and computing. Her father had dreams of her becoming a lecturer in law; her mother nurtured dreams of her daughter taking silk, perhaps even becoming a judge and then using the law to crush corporate hegemonies whenever they appeared. And then Daisy went and ruined everything by taking the entry exams and joining the police force. The police welcomed her with open arms: on the one hand, there were directives on the need to improve the diversity of the force, while on the other, computer crime and computer-related fraud was on the increase. They needed Daisy. Frankly, they needed a whole string of Daisies.

At this point, four years on, it would be fair to say that a career in the police force had failed to live up to Daisy’s expectations. It was not, as her parents had warned her repeatedly, that the police force was an institutionally racist and sexist monolith that would crush her individuality into something soul-destroying and uniform, that would make her as much a part of the canteen culture as instant coffee. No, the frustrating part of it was getting other coppers to understand that she was a copper, too. She had come to the conclusion that, for most coppers, police work was something you did to protect Middle England from scary people of the wrong social background, who were probably out to steal their cell phones. From where Daisy stood it was about something else. Daisy knew that a kid in his den in Germany could send out a virus that would shut down a hospital, causing more damage than a bomb. Daisy was of the opinion that the real bad guys these days understood FTP sites and high-level encryption and disposable prepaid cell phones. She was not sure that the good guys did.

She took a sip of coffee from a plastic cup and made a face; while she had been paging through screen after screen, her coffee had gone cold.

She had gone through all the information that Grahame Coats had given her. There was certainly a prima facie case for thinking that something was wrong—if nothing else there was a check for two thousand pounds that Charles Nancy had apparently written to himself the previous week.

Except. Except something did not feel right.

She walked down the corridor and knocked on the superintendent’s door.

“Come!”

Camberwell had smoked a pipe at his desk for thirty years, until the building had instituted a no-smoking policy. Now he made do with a lump of Plasticine, which he balled and squashed and kneaded and prodded. As a man with a pipe in his mouth, he had been placid, good-natured, and, as far as those beneath him were concerned, the salt of the earth. As a man with a lump of Plasticine in his hand, he was uniformly irritable and short-tempered. On a good day he made it as far as tetchy.

“Yes?”

“The Grahame Coats Agency case.”

“Mm?”

“I’m not sure about it.”

“Not sure about it? What on earth is there not to be sure about?”

“Well, I think maybe I should take myself off the case.”

He did not look impressed. He stared at her. Down on the desk, unwatched, his fingers were kneading the blue Plasticine into the shape of a meerschaum. “Because?”

“I’ve met the suspect socially.”

“And? You’ve been on holiday with him? You’re godmother to his kids? What?”

“No. I met him once. I stayed overnight at his house.”

“So are you saying you and he did the nasty?” A deep sigh, in which world-weariness, irritation, and a craving for half an ounce of Condor ready-rubbed mingled in equal parts.

“No sir. Nothing like that. I just slept there.”

“And that’s your total involvement with him?”

“Yes sir.”

He crushed the Plasticine pipe back into a shapeless blob. “You realize you’re wasting my time?”

“Yes sir. Sorry sir.”

“Do whatever you have to do. Don’t bother me.”

Maeve Livingstone rode the lift up to the fifth floor alone, the slow jerky journey giving her plenty of time to rehearse in her head what she would say to Grahame Coats when she got there.

She was carrying a slim brown briefcase, which had belonged to Morris: a peculiarly masculine object. She wore a white blouse and a blue denim skirt and over it, a gray coat. She had very long legs and extremely pale skin and hair which remained, with only minimal chemical assistance, quite as blonde as it had been when Morris Livingstone had married her twenty years earlier.

Maeve had loved Morris very much. When he died, she did not delete him from her cell phone, not even after she had canceled his service and returned his phone. Her nephew had taken the photo of Morris that was on her phone, and she did not want to lose that. She wished she could phone Morris now, ask his advice.

She had told the speakerphone who she was, to be buzzed in downstairs, and when she walked into reception Grahame Coats was already waiting for her.

“How de do, how de do, good lady,” he said.

“We need to talk privately, Grahame,” said Maeve. “Now.”

Grahame Coats smirked; oddly enough, many of his private fantasies began with Maeve saying something fairly similar, before she went on to utter such statements as “I need you, Grahame, right now,” and “Oh Grahame, I’ve been such a bad bad bad bad girl who needs to be taught some discipline,” and, on rare occasions, “Grahame, you are too much for one woman, so let me introduce you to my identical naked twin sister, Maeve II.”

They went into his office.

Maeve, slightly disappointingly as far as Grahame Coats was concerned, said nothing about needing it right here, right now. She did not take off her coat. Instead she opened her briefcase and took out a sheaf of papers, which she placed upon the desk.

“Grahame, at my bank manager’s suggestion, I had your figures and statements for the last decade independently audited. From back when Morris was still alive. You can look at them if you like. The numbers don’t work. None of them. I thought I’d talk to you about it before I called in the police. In Morris’s memory, I felt I owed you that.”

“You do indeed,” agreed Grahame Coats, smooth as a snake in a butter churn. “Indeed you do.”

“Well?” Maeve Livingstone raised one perfect eyebrow. Her expression was not reassuring. Grahame Coats liked her better in his imagination.

“I’m afraid we’ve had a rogue employee at the Grahame Coats Agency for quite a while, Maeve. I actually called in the police myself, last week, when I realized that something was amiss. The long arm of the law is already investigating. Due to the illustrious nature of several of the clients of the Grahame Coats Agency—yourself among them—the police are keeping this as quiet as possible, and who can blame them?” She did not seem as mollified as he had hoped. He tried another tack. “They have high hopes of recovering much, if not all, of the money.”

Maeve nodded. Grahame Coats relaxed, but only a little.

“Can I ask which employee?”

“Charles Nancy. I have to say I trusted him implicitly. It came as quite a shock.”

“Oh. He’s sweet.”

“Appearances,” pointed out Grahame Coats, “can be deceptive.”

She smiled then, and a very sweet smile it was. “It won’t wash, Grahame. This has been going on for yonks. Since long before Charles Nancy started here. Probably since before my time. Morris absolutely trusted you, and you stole from him. And now you’re trying to tell me that you’re hoping to frame one of your employees—or blame one of your confederates—well, it won’t wash.”

“No,” said Grahame Coats, contritely. “Sorry.”

She picked up the sheaf of papers. “Out of interest,” she said, “how much do you think you got from Morris and me over the years? I make it about three million quid.”

“Ah.” He was not smiling at all, now. It was certainly more than that, but still. “That sounds about right.”

They looked at each other, and Grahame Coats calculated, furiously. He needed to buy time. That was what he needed. “What if,” he said, “what if I were to repay it, in full, in cash, now. With interest. Let’s say, fifty percent of the amount in question.”

“You’re offering me four and a half million pounds? In cash?”

Grahame Coats smiled at her in exactly the same way that striking cobras tend not to. “Absa-tively. If you go to the police, then I will deny everything, and hire excellent lawyers. In a worst-case scenario, after an extremely lengthy trial, during which I shall be forced to blacken Morris’s good name in every way I possibly can, I will be sentenced at most to ten to twelve years in prison. I might actually serve five years, with good behavior—and I should be a model prisoner. Given the general overcrowding of the prison services, I’d serve most of my sentence in an open prison, or even on day release. I don’t see this as being too problematic. On the flip side, I can guarantee that if you go to the police, you will never get a penny of Morris’s money. The alternative is to keep your mouth shut, get all the money you need and more, while I buy myself a little time to—to do the decent thing. If you see what I mean.”

Maeve thought about it. “I would like to see you rot in prison,” she said. And then she sighed, and nodded. “All right,” she said. “I take the money. I never have to see or deal with you again. All future royalty checks come directly to me.”

“Absatively. The safe is over here,” he told her.

There was a bookcase on the far wall, on which were uniform leatherbound editions of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and Austen, all unread. He fumbled with a book, and the bookcase slipped to one side, revealing a door behind it, painted to match the wall.

Maeve wondered if it would have a combination, but no, there was just a small keyhole, which Grahame Coats unlocked with a large brass key. The door swung open.

He reached in and turned on the light. It was a narrow room, lined with rather amateurishly fixed shelves. At the far end was a small, fireproof filing cabinet.

“You can take it in cash, or in jewelry, or in a combination of the two,” he said, bluntly. “I’d advise the latter. Lots of nice antique gold back there. Very portable.”

He unlocked several strongboxes and displayed the contents. Rings and chains and lockets glittered and gleamed and shone.

Maeve’s mouth opened. “Take a look,” he told her, and she squeezed past him. It was a treasure cave.

She pulled out a golden locket on a chain, held it up, stared at it in wonder. “This is gorgeous,” she said. “It must be worth—” and she broke off. In the polished gold of the locket she saw something moving behind her, and she turned, which meant that the hammer did not hit her squarely on the back of the head, as Grahame Coats had intended, but instead glanced off the side of her cheek.

“You little shit!” she said, and she kicked him. Maeve had good legs and a powerful kick, but she and her attacker were at close quarters.

Maeve’s foot connected with his shin, and she reached for the hammer he was holding. Grahame Coats smashed out with it; this time it connected, and Maeve stumbled to one side. Her eyes seemed to unfocus. He hit her again, squarely on the top of the head, and again, and again, and she went down.

Grahame Coats wished that he had a gun. A nice, sensible handgun. With a silencer, like in the films. Honestly, if it had ever occurred to him that he would need to kill someone in his office he would have been much better prepared for it. He might even have laid in a supply of poison. That would have been wise. No need for any of this nonsense.

There was blood and blonde hair adhering to the end of the hammer. He put it down with distaste and, stepping around the woman on the floor, grabbed the safe-deposit boxes containing the jewelry. He tipped them out onto his desk and returned them to the safe, where he removed an attaché case containing bundles of hundred-dollar bills and of five-hundred euro notes, and a small black velvet bag half full of unset diamonds. He removed some files from the filing cabinet. And, last but—as he would have pointed out—by no means least, he took out from the secret room the small leather vanity case containing two wallets and two passports.

Then he pushed the heavy door closed, and locked it, and swung the bookcase back into position.

He stood there, panting somewhat, and caught his breath.

All in all, he decided, he was rather proud of himself. Good job, Grahame. Good man. Good show. He had improvised with the materials at hand and come out ahead: bluffed and been bold and creative—ready, as the poet said, to risk it all on a turn of pitch-and-toss. He had risked, and he had won. He was the pitcher. He was the tosser. One day, on his tropical paradise, he would write his memoirs, and people would learn how he had bested a dangerous woman. Although, he thought, it might be better if she had actually been holding a gun.

Probably, he realized on reflection, she had pulled a gun on him. He was fairly sure he had seen her reach for it. He had been extremely fortunate that the hammer had been there, that he had a tool kit in the room for moments of necessary DIY, or he would not have been able to act in self-defense with it so swiftly or so effectively.

Only now did it occur to him to lock the main door to his office.

There was, he noticed, blood on his shirt and on his hand, and on the sole of one shoe. He took off his shirt, and wiped down his shoe with it. Then he dropped the shirt into the bin beneath his desk. He surprised himself by putting his hand to his mouth and licking the gobbet of blood off it, like a cat, with his red tongue.

And then he yawned. He took Maeve’s papers from the desk, ran them through the shredder. She had a second set of documents in her briefcase, and he shredded them as well. He reshredded the shreddings.

He had a closet in the corner of his office, with a suit hanging in it, and spare shirts, socks, underpants, and so on. You never knew when you would need to head to a first night from the office, after all. Be prepared.

He dressed with care.

There was a small suitcase with wheels in it in the closet, too, of the kind that is meant to be placed in overhead lockers, and he put things into it, moving them around to make room.

He called reception. “Annie,” he said. “Would you pop out and get me a sandwich? Not from Prêt, no. I thought the new place in Brewer Street? I’m just wrapping up with Mrs Livingstone. I may actually wind up taking her out for a spot of real lunch, but best to be prepared.”

He spent several minutes on the computer, running the kind of disk-cleaning program that takes your data, overwrites it with random ones and zeroes, then grinds it up extremely small before finally depositing it at the bottom of the Thames wearing concrete overshoes. Then he walked down the hall, pulling his wheeled suitcase behind him.

He put his head around one office door. “Popping out for a bit,” he said. “I’ll be back in about three, if anyone asks.”

Annie was gone from reception, which, he thought, was a good thing. People would assume that Maeve Livingstone had already left the agency, just as they would expect Grahame Coats to return at any time. By the time they started looking for him, he would be a long way away.

He descended in the lift. This was all happening early, he thought. He would not turn fifty for more than a year. But the exit mechanisms were already in place. He needed simply to think of it as a golden handshake, or perhaps a golden parachute.

And then, pulling the wheelie suitcase behind him, he walked out of the front door into the sunny Aldwych morning, and out of the Grahame Coats Agency forever.

Spider had slept peacefully in his own enormous bed, in his place in Fat Charlie’s spare room. He had begun to wonder, in a vague sort of way, whether Fat Charlie had gone for good, and had resolved to investigate the matter the next time that he could in any way he bothered to do so, unless something more interesting distracted him or he forgot.

He had slept late, and was now on his way to meet Rosie for lunch. He would pick her up at her flat, and they would go somewhere good. It was a beautiful day in early autumn, and Spider’s happiness was infectious. This was because Spider was, give or take a little, a god. When you’re a god, your emotions are contagious—other people can catch them. When people stood near Spider on a day that he was this happy, their worlds would seem a little brighter. If he hummed a song, other people around him would start humming, in key, like something from a musical. Of course, if he yawned, a hundred people nearby would yawn, and when he was miserable it spread like a damp river-mist, making the world even gloomier for everyone caught up in it. It wasn’t anything he did; it was something that he was.

Right now, the only thing casting a damper on his happiness was that he had resolved to tell Rosie the truth.

Spider was not terribly good at telling the truth. He regarded truth as fundamentally malleable, more or less a matter of opinion, and Spider was able to muster some pretty impressive opinions when he had to.

Being an imposter was not the problem. He liked being an imposter. He was good at it. It fitted in with his plans, which were fairly simple and could until now have been summarized more or less as: (a) go somewhere; (b) enjoy yourself; and (c) leave before you get bored. And it was now, he knew deep down, definitely time to leave. The world was his lobster, his bib was round his neck, and he had a pot of melted butter and an array of grotesque but effective lobster-eating implements and devices at the ready.

Only—

Only he didn’t want to go.

He was having second thoughts about all this, something Spider found fairly disconcerting. Normally he didn’t even have first thoughts about things. Life without thinking had been perfectly pleasant—instinct, impulse, and an obscene amount of luck had served him quite well up to now. But even miracles can only take you so far. Spider walked down the street, and people smiled at him.

He had agreed with Rosie that he would meet her at her flat, so he was pleasantly surprised to see her standing at the end of the road, waiting for him. He felt a pang of something that was still not entirely guilt, and waved.

“Rosie? Hey!”

She came toward him along the pavement, and he began to grin. They would sort things out. Everything would work out for the best. Everything would be fine. “You look like a million dollars,” he told her. “Maybe two million. What are you hungry for?”

Rosie smiled and shrugged.

They were passing a Greek restaurant. “Is Greek okay?” She nodded. They walked down some steps and went inside. It was dark and empty, having only just opened, and the proprietor pointed them toward a nook, or possibly a cranny, toward the rear.

They sat opposite each other, at a table just big enough for two. Spider said, “There’s something that I wanted to talk to you about.” She said nothing. “It’s not bad,” he went on. “Well, it’s not good. But. Well. It’s something you ought to know.”

The proprietor asked them if they were ready to order anything. “Coffee,” said Spider, and Rosie nodded her agreement. “Two coffees,” said Spider. “And if you can give us, um, five minutes? I need a little privacy here.”

The proprietor withdrew.

Rosie looked at Spider inquiringly.

He took a deep breath. “Right. Okay. Let me just say this, because it isn’t easy, and I don’t know that I can—right. Okay. Look, I’m not Fat Charlie. I know you think I am, but I’m not. I’m his brother, Spider. You think I’m him because we sort of look alike.”

She did not say anything.

“Well, I don’t really look like him. But. Y’know, none of this really comes easy to me. Ookay. Uh. I can’t stop thinking about you. So I mean, I know you’re engaged to my brother, but I’m sort of asking if you, well, if you’d think about maybe dumping him and possibly going out with me.”

A pot of coffee arrived on a small silver tray, with two cups.

“Greek coffee,” said the proprietor, who had brought it.

“Yes. Thanks. I did ask for a couple of minutes—”

“Is very hot,” said the proprietor. “Very hot coffee. Strong. Greek. Not Turkish.”

“That’s great. Listen, if you don’t mind—five minutes. Please?”

The proprietor shrugged and walked away.

“You probably hate me,” said Spider. “If I was you I’d probably hate me, too. But I mean this. More than I’ve ever meant anything in my life.” She was just looking at him, without expression, and he said, “Please. Just say something. Anything.”

Her lips moved, as if she were trying to find the right words to say.

Spider waited.

Her mouth opened.

His first thought was that she was eating something, because the thing he saw between her teeth was brown, and was certainly not a tongue. Then it moved its head and its eyes, little black-bead eyes, stared at him. Rosie opened her mouth impossibly wide and the birds came out.

Spider said “Rosie?” and then the air was filled with beaks and feathers and claws, one after the other. Birds poured out from her throat, each accompanied by a tiny coughing-choking noise, in a stream directed at him.

He threw up an arm to protect his eyes, and something hurt his wrist. He flailed out, and something flew at his face, heading for his eyes. He jerked his head backward, and the beak punctured his cheek.

A moment of nightmare clarity: there was still a woman sitting opposite him. What he could no longer understand was how he could ever have mistaken her for Rosie. She was older than Rosie, for a start, her blue-black hair streaked here and there with silver. Her skin was not the warm brown of Rosie’s skin but black as flint. She was wearing a ragged ochre raincoat. And she grinned and opened her mouth wide once more, and now inside her mouth he could see the cruel beaks and crazy eyes of seagulls—

Spider did not stop to think. He acted. He grabbed the handle of the coffeepot, swept it up in one hand, while with the other he pulled off the lid; then he jerked the pot toward the woman in the seat opposite him. The contents of the pot, scalding hot black coffee, went all over her.

She hissed in pain.

Birds crashed and flapped through the air of the cellar restaurant, but now there was nobody sitting opposite him, and the birds flew without direction, flapping into walls wildly.

The proprietor said, “Sir? Are you hurt? I am sorry. They must have come in from the street.”

“I’m fine,” said Spider.

“Your face is bleeding,” said the man. He handed Spider a napkin, and Spider pressed it against his cheek. The cut stung.

Spider offered to help the man get the birds out. He opened the door to the street, but now the place was as empty of birds as it had been before his arrival.

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.”

Spider stopped and thought. “When I came in,” he asked, “was there a woman with me?”

The proprietor looked puzzled—possibly even scared, Spider could not be sure. “I do not remember,” he said, as if dazed. “If you had been alone, I would not have seated you back there. But I do not know.”

Spider went back out into the street. The day was still bright, but the sunlight no longer seemed reassuring. He looked around. He saw a pigeon, shuffling and pecking at an abandoned ice cream cone; a sparrow on a window ledge; and, high above, a flash of white in the sunlight, its wings extended, a seagull circled.