Anansi Boys

It would be fair to say that Rosie had, that evening, just had the most wonderful night of her life: magical, perfect, utterly fine. She could not have stopped smiling, not even if she had wanted to. The food had been fabulous, and once they had eaten Fat Charlie had taken her dancing. It was a proper dance hall, with a small orchestra and people in pastel clothes who glided across the floor. She felt as if they had traveled in time together and were visiting a gentler age. Rosie had enjoyed dancing lessons from the age of five, but had no one to dance with.

“I didn’t know you could dance,” she told him.

“There are so many things about me you do not know,” he said.

And that made her happy. Soon enough, she and this man would be married. There were things about him she did not know? Excellent. She would have a lifetime in which to find them out. All sorts of things.

She noticed the way other women, and other men, looked at Fat Charlie as she walked beside him, and she was happy she was the woman on his arm.

They walked through Leicester Square, and Rosie could see the stars shining up above them, the starlight somehow crisply twinkling, despite the glare of the streetlights.

For a brief moment, she found herself wondering why it had never been like this with Fat Charlie before. Sometimes, somewhere deep inside herself, Rosie had suspected that perhaps she had only kept going out with Fat Charlie because her mother disliked him so much; that she had only said yes when he had asked her to marry him because her mother would have wanted her to say no —

Fat Charlie had taken her out to the West End once. They’d gone to the theater. It was a birthday surprise for her, but there had been a mix-up on the tickets, which, it turned out, had actually been issued for the day before; the management were both understanding and extremely helpful, and they had managed to find Fat Charlie a seat behind a pillar in the stalls, while Rosie took a seat in the upper circle behind a violently giggly hen party from Norwich. It had not been a success, not as these things were counted.

This evening, though, this evening had been magic. Rosie had not had many perfect moments in her life, but whatever the total was, it had just gone up by one.

She loved how she felt when she was with him.

And once the dancing was done, after they had stumbled out into the night, giddy on movement and champagne, then Fat Charlie—and, she thought, why did she think of him as Fat Charlie anyway? for he wasn’t the least bit fat—put his arm around her and said, “Now, you’re coming back to my place,” in a voice so deep and real it made her abdomen vibrate; and she said nothing about working the next day, nothing about there’d be time enough for that kind of thing when they were married, nothing at all, in fact, while all the time she thought about how much she didn’t want the evening to end, and how very very much she wished—no, she needed—to kiss this man on the lips, and to hold him.

And then, remembering she had to say something, she said yes.

In the cab back to his flat, her hands held his, and she leaned against him and stared at him as the light from passing cars and streetlamps illuminated his face.

“You have a pierced ear,” she said. “Why didn’t I ever notice before that you have a pierced ear?”

“Hey,” he said with a smile, his voice a deep bass thrum, “how do you think it makes me feel, when you’ve never even noticed something like that, even when we’ve been together for, what is it now?”

“Eighteen months,” said Rosie.

“For eighteen months,” said her fiancee.

She leaned against him, breathed him in. “I love the way you smell,” she told him. “Are you wearing some kind of cologne?”

“That’s just me,” he told her.

“Well, you should bottle it.”

She paid the taxi while he opened the front door. They went up the stairs together. When they got to the top of the stairs, he seemed to be heading along the corridor, toward the spare room at the back.

“You know,” she said, “the bedroom’s here, silly. Where are you going?”

“Nowhere. I knew that,” he said. They went into Fat Charlie’s bedroom. She closed the curtains. Then she just looked at him, and was happy.

“Well,” she said, after a while, “aren’t you going to try to kiss me?”

“I guess I am,” he said, and he did. Time melted and stretched and curved. She might have kissed him for a moment, or for an hour, or for a lifetime. And then—

“What was that?”

He said, “I didn’t hear anything.”

“It sounded like someone in pain.”

“Cats fighting, maybe?”

“It sounded like a person.”

“Could have been an urban fox. They can sound a lot like people.”

She stood there with her head tipped to one side, listening intently. “It’s stopped now,” she said. “Hmm. You want to know the strangest thing?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, his lips now nuzzling her neck. “Sure, tell me the strangest thing. But I’ve made it go away now. It won’t bother you again.”

“The strangest thing,” said Rosie, “is that it sounded like you.”

Fat Charlie walked the streets, trying to clear his head. The obvious course of action was to bang on his own front door until Spider came down and let him in, then to give Spider and Rosie a piece of his mind. That was obvious. Perfectly, utterly obvious.

He just needed to go back to his flat and explain the whole thing to Rosie, and shame Spider into leaving him alone. That was all he had to do. How hard could that be?

Harder than it ought to be, that was for certain. He was not quite sure why he had walked away from his flat. He was even less certain how to find his way back. Streets he knew, or thought he knew, seemed to have reconfigured themselves. He found himself walking down dead ends, exploring endless cul-de-sacs, stumbling through the tangles of late-night London residential streets.

Sometimes he saw the main road. There were traffic lights on it, and the lights of fast-food places. He knew that once he got onto the main road he would be able to find his way back to his house, but whenever he walked to the main road he would wind up somewhere else.

Fat Charlie’s feet were starting to hurt. His stomach rumbled, violently. He was angry, and as he walked he became angrier and angrier.

The anger cleared his head. The cobwebs surrounding his thoughts began to evaporate; the web of streets he was walking began to simplify. He turned a corner and found himself on the main road, next to the all-night “New Jersey Fried Chicken” outlet. He ordered a family pack of chicken, and sat and finished it off without any help from anyone else in his family. When that was done he stood on the pavement until the friendly orange light of a For Hire sign, attached to a large black cab, came into view, and he hailed the cab. It pulled up next to him, and the window rolled down.

“Where to?”

“Maxwell Gardens,” said Fat Charlie.

“You taking the mickey or something?” asked the cab driver. “That’s just around the corner.”

“Will you take me there? I’ll give you an extra fiver. Honest.”

The cabbie breathed in loudly through his clenched teeth: it was the noise a car mechanic makes before asking you whether you’re particularly attached to that engine for sentimental reasons. “It’s your funeral,” said the cabbie. “Hop in.”

Fat Charlie hopped. The cabbie pulled out, waited for the lights to change, went around the corner.

“Where did you say you wanted to go?” asked the cabbie.

“Maxwell Gardens,” said Fat Charlie. “Number 34. It’s just past the off-license.”

He was wearing yesterday’s clothes, and he wished he wasn’t. His mother had always told him to wear clean underwear, in case he was hit by a car, and to brush his teeth, in case they needed to identify him by his dental records.