packing tape that surrounded it; Spider reached into the box with his thin fingers, riffling through the photographs like playing cards, until he pulled out one of their mother and Mrs. Higgler, sitting on Mrs. Higgler’s porch, twenty- five years earlier.
“Is that porch still there?”
Fat Charlie tried to remember. “I think so,” he said.
Later, he was unable to remember whether the picture grew very big, or Spider grew very small. He could have sworn that neither of those things had actually happened; nevertheless, it was unarguable that Spider had walked into the photograph, and it had shimmered and rippled and swallowed him up.
Fat Charlie rubbed his eyes. He was alone in the kitchen at six in the morning. There was a box filled with photographs and papers on the kitchen table, along with an empty mug, which he placed in the sink. He walked along the hall to his bedroom, lay down on his bed and slept until the alarm went off at seven fifteen.
Chapter Four
Fat Charlie woke up.
Memories of dreams of a meeting with some film-star brother mingled with a dream in which President Taft had come to stay, bringing with him the entire cast of the cartoon. Tom and Jerry . He showered, and he took the tube to work.
All through the workday something was nagging at the back of his head, and he didn’t know what it was. He misplaced things. He forgot things. At one point, he started singing at his desk, not because he was happy, but because he forgot not to. He only realized he was doing it when Grahame Coats himself put his head around the door of Fat Charlie’s closet to chide him. “No radios, Walkmans, MP3players or similar instruments of music at the office,” said Grahame Coats, with a ferrety glare. “It bespeaks a lackadaisical attitude, of the kind one abhors in the workaday world.”
“It wasn’t the radio,” admitted Fat Charlie, his ears burning.
“No? Then what, pray tell, was it?”
“It was me,” said Fat Charlie.
“You?”
“Yes. I was singing. I’m sorry—”
“I could have sworn it was the radio. And yet I was wrong. Good Lord. Well, with such a wealth of talents at your disposal, with such remarkable skills, perhaps you should leave us to tread the boards, entertain the multitudes, possibly do an end-of-the-pier show, rather than cluttering up a desk in an office where other people are trying to work. Eh? A place where people’s careers are being managed.”
“No,” said Fat Charlie. “I don’t want to leave. I just wasn’t thinking.”
“Then,” said Grahame Coats, “you must learn to refrain from singing—save in the bath, the shower, or perchance the stands as you support your favorite football team. I myself am a Crystal Palace supporter. Or you will find yourself seeking gainful employment elsewhere.”
Fat Charlie smiled, then realized that smiling wasn’t what he wanted to do at all, and looked serious, but by that point Grahame Coats had left the room, so Fat Charlie swore under his breath, folded his arms on the desk and put his head on them.
“Was that you singing?” It was one of the new girls in the Artist Liaison department. Fat Charlie never managed to learn their names. They were always gone by then.
“I’m afraid so.”
“What were you singing? It was pretty.”
Fat Charlie realized he didn’t know. He said, “I’m not sure. I wasn’t listening.”
She laughed at that, although quietly. “He’s right. You should be making records, not wasting your time here.”
Fat Charlie didn’t know what to say. Cheeks burning, he started crossing out numbers and making notes and gathering up Post-it notes with messages on them and putting those messages up on the screen, until he was sure that she had gone.
Maeve Livingstone phoned: Could Fat Charlie
Rosie called him on his mobile at four in the afternoon, to let him know that the water was now back on again in her flat and to tell him that, good news, her mother had decided to take an interest in the upcoming wedding and had asked her to come round that evening and discuss it.
“Well,” said Fat Charlie. “If she’s organizing the dinner, we’ll save a fortune on food.”
“That’s not nice. I’ll call you tonight and let you know how it went.”
Fat Charlie told her that he loved her, and he clicked the phone off. Someone was looking at him. He turned around.
Grahame Coats said, “He who maketh personal phone calls on company time, lo he shall reap the whirlwind. Do you know who said that?”
“You did?”
“Indeed I did,” said Grahame Coats. “Indeed I did. And never a truer word was spoken. Consider this a formal warning.” And he smiled then, the kind of self-satisfied smile that forced Fat Charlie to ponder the various probable outcomes of sinking his fist into Grahame Coats’s comfortably padded midsection. He decided that it would be a toss-up between being fired and an action for assault. Either way, he thought, it would be a fine thing—
Fat Charlie was not by nature a violent man; still, he could dream. His daydreams tended to be small and comfortable things. He would like to have enough money to eat in good restaurants whenever he wished. He wanted a job in which nobody could tell him what to do. He wanted to be able to sing without embarrassment, somewhere there were never any people around to hear him.
This afternoon, however, his daydreams assumed a different shape: he could fly, for a start, and bullets bounced off his mighty chest as he zoomed down from the sky and rescued Rosie from a band of kidnapping scoundrels and dastards. She would hold him tightly as they flew off into the sunset, off to his Fortress of Cool, where she would be so overwhelmed with feelings of gratitude that she would enthusiastically decide not to bother with the whole waiting-until-they-were-married bit, and would start to see how high and how fast they could fill their jar—
The daydream eased the stress of life in the Grahame Coats Agency, of telling people that their checks were in the post, of calling in money the agency was owed.
At 6:00 PM Fat Charlie turned off his computer, and walked down the five flights of stairs to the street. It had not rained. Overhead, the starlings were wheeling and cheeping: the dusk chorus of a city. Everyone on the pavement was hurrying somewhere. Most of them, like Fat Charlie, were walking up Kingsway to Holborn tube. They had their heads down and the look about them of people who wanted to get home for the night.
There was one person on the pavement who wasn’t going anywhere, though. He stood there, facing Fat Charlie and the remaining commuters, and his leather jacket flapped in the wind. He was not smiling.
Fat Charlie saw him from the end of the street. As he walked toward him everything became unreal. The day melted, and he realized what he had spent the day trying to remember.
“Hello, Spider,” he said, when he got close.
Spider looked like a storm was raging inside him. He might have been about to cry. Fat Charlie didn’t know. There was too much emotion on his face, in the way he stood, so the people on the street looked away, ashamed.
“I went out there,” he said. His voice was dull. “I saw Mrs. Higgler. She took me to the grave. My father died, and I didn’t know.”
Fat Charlie said, “He was my father too, Spider.” He wondered how he could have forgotten Spider, how he could have dismissed him so easily as a dream.
