“True.”
The dusk sky was crosshatched with starlings; they wheeled and crossed from rooftop to rooftop.
Spider jerked, and stood straight. He seemed to have come to a decision. “You are so right,” he said. “We got to do this together.”
“Exactly,” said Fat Charlie. Then he said, “Do what?” but Spider had already hailed a cab.
“We are men with troubles,” said Spider to the world. “Our father is no more. Our hearts are heavy in our chests. Sorrow settles upon us like pollen in hay fever season. Darkness is our lot, and misfortune our only companion.”
“Right, gentlemen,” said the cabbie, brightly. “Where am I taking you?”
“To where the three remedies for darkness of the soul may be found,” said Spider.
“Maybe we could get a curry,” suggested Fat Charlie.
“There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life,” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song.”
“Curry’s nice too,” pointed out Fat Charlie, but nobody was listening to him.
“In any particular order?” asked the cabbie.
“Wine first,” Spider announced. “Rivers and lakes and vast oceans of wine.”
“Right you are,” said the cabbie, and he pulled out into the traffic.
“I have a particularly bad feeling about all this,” said Fat Charlie, helpfully.
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.”
“Seek not to ask for whom the bell tolls,” intoned the cabbie. “It tolls for thee.”
“Whoa,” said Spider. “Now that’s a pretty heavy koan you got there.”
“Thank you,” said the cabbie.
“That’s how it ends, all right. You are some kind of philosopher. I’m Spider. This is my brother, Fat Charlie.”
“Charles,” said Fat Charlie.
“Steve,” said the cabbie. “Steve Burridge.”
“Mister Burridge,” said Spider, “how would you like to be our personal driver this evening?”
Steve Burridge explained that he was coming up to the end of his shift and would now be driving his cab home for the night, that dinner with Mrs. Burridge and all the little Burridges awaited him.
“You hear that?” said Spider. “A family man. Now, my brother and I are all the family that we have left. And this is the first time we’ve met.”
“Sounds like quite a story,” said the cabbie. “Was there a feud?”
“Not at all. He simply did not know that he had a brother,” said Spider.
“Did
“I may have done,” said Spider. “But things like that can slip a guy’s mind so easily.”
The cab pulled over to the curb. “Where are we?” asked Fat Charlie. They hadn’t gone very far. He thought they were somewhere just off Fleet Street.
“What he asked for,” said the cabbie. “Wine.”
Spider got out of the cab and stared at the grubby oak and grimy glass exterior of the ancient wine bar. “Perfect,” he said. “Pay the man, Brother.”
Fat Charlie paid the cabbie. They went inside: down wooden steps to a cellar where rubicund barristers drank side by side with pallid money market fund managers. There was sawdust on the floor, and a wine list chalked illegibly on a blackboard behind the bar.
“What are you drinking?” asked Spider.
“Just a glass of house red, please,” said Fat Charlie.
Spider looked at him gravely. “We are the final scions of Anansi’s line. We do not mourn our father’s passing with house red.”
“Er. Right. Well, I’ll have what you’re having then.”
Spider went up to the bar, easing his way through the crush of people as if it was not there. In several minutes he returned, carrying two wineglasses, a corkscrew, and an extremely dusty wine bottle. He opened the bottle with an ease that left Fat Charlie, who always wound up picking fragments of cork from his wine, deeply impressed. Spider poured from the bottle a wine so tawny it was almost black. He filled each glass, then put one in front of Fat Charlie.
“A toast,” he said. “To our father’s memory.”
“To Dad,” said Fat Charlie, and he clinked his glass against Spider’s—managing, miraculously, not to spill any as he did so—and he tasted his wine. It was peculiarly bitter and herby, and salt. “What is this?”
“Funeral wine, the kind you drink for gods. They haven’t made it for a long time. It’s seasoned with bitter aloes and rosemary, and with the tears of brokenhearted virgins.”
“And they sell it in a Fleet Street wine bar?” Fat Charlie picked up the bottle, but the label was too faded and dusty to read. “Never heard of it.”
“These old places have the good stuff, if you ask for it,” said Spider. “Or maybe I just think they do.”
Fat Charlie took another sip of his wine. It was powerful and pungent.
“It’s not a sipping wine,” said Spider. “It’s a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.” He took a huge swig. Then he made a face. “It tastes better that way, too.”
Fat Charlie hesitated, then took a large mouthful of the strange wine. He could imagine that he was able to taste the aloes and the rosemary. He wondered if the salt was really tears.
“They put in the rosemary for remembrance,” said Spider, and he began to top up their glasses. Fat Charlie started to try and explain that he wasn’t really up for too much wine tonight and that he had to work tomorrow, but Spider cut him off. “It’s your turn to make a toast,” he said.
“Er. Right,” said Fat Charlie. “To Mum.”
They drank to their mother. Fat Charlie found that the taste of the bitter wine was beginning to grow on him; he found his eyes prickling, and a sense of loss, profound and painful, ran through him. He missed his mother. He missed his childhood. He even missed his father. Across the table, Spider was shaking his head; a tear ran down Spider’s face and plopped into the wineglass; he reached for the bottle and poured more wine for them both.
Fat Charlie drank.
Grief ran through him as he drank, filling his head and his body with loss and with the pain of absence, swelling through him like waves on the ocean.
His own tears were running down his face, splashing into his drink. He fumbled in his pockets for a tissue. Spider poured out the last of the black wine, for both of them.
“Did they really sell this wine here?”
“They had a bottle they didn’t know they had. They just needed to be reminded.”
Fat Charlie blew his nose. “I never knew I had a brother,” he said.
“I did,” said Spider. “I always meant to look you up, but I got distracted. You know how it is.”
“Not really.”
“Things came up.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things. They came up. That’s what things do. They come up. I can’t be expected to keep track of them all.”
“Well, give me a f’rinstance.”
Spider drank more wine. “Okay. The last time I decided that you and I should meet, I, well, I spent days planning it. Wanted it to go perfectly. I had to choose my wardrobe. Then I had to decide what I’d say to you when we met. I knew that the meeting of two brothers, well, it’s the subject of epics, isn’t it? I decided that the only way to treat it with the appropriate gravity would be to do it in verse. But what kind of verse? Am I going to rap it? Declaim it? I mean, I’m not going to greet you with a limerick. So. It had to be something dark, something powerful, rhythmic, epic. And then I had it. The perfect first line:
