Anansi Boys

“Mister Coats? It’s Maeve Livingstone on the phone. I know you said to put her through to Fat Charlie, but he’s off this week, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Shall I tell her you’re out?”

Grahame Coats pondered. Before a sudden heart attack had carried him off, Morris Livingstone, once the best-loved short Yorkshire comedian in the country had been the star of such television series as Short Back and Sides and his own Saturday-night variety-game show Morris Livingstone, I Presume. He had even had a top-ten single back in the eighties, with the novelty song, “It’s Nice Out (But Put It Away).” Amiable, easygoing, he had not only left all his financial affairs in the control of the Grahame Coats Agency, but he had also appointed, at Grahame Coats’s suggestion, Grahame Coats himself as trustee of his estate.

It would have been criminal not to give in to temptation like that.

And then there was Maeve Livingstone. It would be fair to say that Maeve Livingstone had, without knowing it, featured for many years in starring and costarring roles in a number of Grahame Coats’s most treasured and private fantasies.

Grahame Coats said, “Please. Put her through,” and then, solicitously, “Maeve, how lovely to hear from you. How are you?”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

Maeve Livingstone had been a dancer when she met Morris, and had always towered over the little man. They had adored each other.

“Well, why don’t you tell me about it?”

“I spoke to Charles a couple of days ago. I was wondering. Well, the bank manager was wondering. The money from Morris’s estate. We were told we would be seeing something by now.”

“Maeve,” said Grahame Coats, in what he thought of as his dark velvet voice, the one he believed that women responded to, “the problem is not that the money is not there—it’s merely a matter of liquidity. As I’ve told you, Morris made a number of unwise investments toward the end of his life, and although, following my advice, he made some sound ones as well, we do need to allow the good ones to mature: we cannot pull out now without losing almost everything. But worry ye not, worry ye not. Anything for a good client. I shall write you a check from my own bank account in order to keep you solvent and comfortable. How much does the bank manager require?”

“He says that he’s going to have to start bouncing checks,” she said. “And the BBC tell me that they’ve been sending money from the DVD releases of the old shows. That’s not invested, is it?”

“That’s what the BBC said? Actually, we’ve been chasing them for money. But I wouldn’t want to put all the blame on BBC Worldwide. Our bookkeeper’s pregnant, and things have been all at sixes and sevens. And Charles Nancy, who you spoke to, has been rather distraught—his father died, and he has been out of the country a great deal—”

“Last time we spoke,” she pointed out, “you were putting in a new computer system.”

“Indeed we were, and please, do not get me started on the subject of bookkeeping programs. What is it they say—to err is human, but to really, er, mess things up, you need a computer. Something like that. I shall investigate this forcefully, by hand if necessary, the old-fashioned way, and your moneys shall be wending their way to you. It’s what Morris would have wanted.”

“My bank manager says I need ten thousand pounds in right now, just to stop them bouncing checks.”

“Ten thousand pounds shall be yours. I am writing a check for you even as we speak.” He drew a circle on his notepad, with a line going off the top of it. It looked a bit like an apple.

“I’m very grateful,” said Maeve, and Grahame Coats preened. “I hope I’m not becoming a bother.”

“You are never a bother,” said Grahame Coats. “No sort of bother at all.”

He put down the phone. The funny thing, Grahame Coats always thought, was that Morris’s comedic persona had always been that of a hardheaded Yorkshireman, proud of knowing the location of every penny.

It had been a fine game, thought Grahame Coats, and he added two eyes to the apple, and a couple of ears. It now looked, he decided, more or less like a cat. Soon enough it would be time to exchange a life of milking hard-to-please celebrities for a life of sunshine, swimming pools, fine meals, good wines, and, if possible, enormous quantities of oral sex. The best things in life, Grahame Coats was convinced, could all be bought and paid for.

He drew a mouth on the cat and filled it with sharp teeth, so it looked a little like a mountain lion, and as he drew he began to sing, in a reedy tenor voice,

“When I were a young man my father would say
It’s lovely outside, you should go out to play,
But now that I’m older, the ladies all say,
It’s nice out, but put it away—”

Morris Livingstone had bought and paid for Grahame Coats’s penthouse flat on the Copacabana and for the installation of the swimming pool on the island of Saint Andrews, and you must not imagine that Grahame Coats was not grateful.

“It’s nice out, but put it awaaaay.”

Spider felt odd.

There was something going on: a strange feeling, spreading like a mist through his life, and it was ruining his day. He could not identify it, and he did not like it.

And if there was one thing that he was definitely not feeling, it was guilty. It simply wasn’t the kind of thing he ever felt. He felt excellent. Spider felt cool. He did not feel guilty. He would not have felt guilty if he was caught red-handed holding up a bank.

And yet there was, all about him, a faint miasma of discomfort.

Until now Spider had believed that gods were different: they had no consciences, nor did they need them. A god’s relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes.

Spider kept himself amused. That was what he did. That was the important bit. He would not have recognized guilt if he had an illustrated guide to it with all the component parts clearly labeled. It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck. But something had changed—inside him or outside, he was not sure—and it bothered him. He poured himself another drink. He waved a hand and made the music louder. He changed it from Miles Davis to James Brown. It still didn’t help.

He lay on the hammock, in the tropical sunshine, listening to the music, basking in how extremely cool it was to be him—and for the first time even that, somehow, wasn’t enough.

He climbed out of the hammock and wandered over to the door. “Fat Charlie?”

There was no answer. The flat felt empty. Outside the windows of the flat, there was a gray day, and rain. Spider liked the rain. It seemed appropriate.

Shrill and sweet, the telephone rang. Spider picked it up.

Rosie said, “Is that you?”

“Hullo Rosie.”

“Last night,” she said. Then she didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Was it as wonderful for you as it was for me?”

“I don’t know,” said Spider. “It was pretty wonderful for me. So, I mean, that’s probably a yes.”

“Mmm,” she said.

They didn’t say anything.