his shoulder, toward the chapel door. But Fat Charlie’s father was not there, only his mother’s friends and distant relations, mostly big women in black hats, blowing their noses and dabbing at their eyes and shaking their heads.
It was during the final hymn, after the button had been pressed and Fat Charlie’s mother had trundled off down the conveyor belt to her final reward, that Fat Charlie noticed a man of about his own age standing at the back of the chapel. It was not his father, obviously. It was someone he did not know, someone he might not even have noticed, at the back, in the shadows, had he not been looking for his father—and then there was the stranger, in an elegant black suit, his eyes lowered, his hands folded.
Fat Charlie let his glance linger a moment too long, and the stranger looked at Fat Charlie and flashed him a joyless smile of the kind that suggested that they were both in this together. It was not the kind of expression you see on the faces of strangers, but still, Fat Charlie could not place the man. He turned his face back to the front of the chapel. They sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a song Fat Charlie was pretty sure his mother had always disliked, and the Reverend Wright invited them back to Fat Charlie’s Great-Aunt Alanna’s for something to eat.
There was nobody at his Great-Aunt Alanna’s whom he did not already know. In the years since his mother had died, he sometimes wondered about that stranger: who he was, why he was there. Sometimes Fat Charlie thought that he had simply imagined him—
“So,” said Rosie, draining her Chardonnay, “you’ll call your Mrs. Higgler and give her my mobile number. Tell her about the wedding and the date—that’s a thought: do you think we should invite her?”
“We can if we like,” said Fat Charlie. “I don’t think she’ll come. She’s an old family friend. She knew my dad back in the dark ages.”
“Well, sound her out. See if we should send her an invitation.”
Rosie was a good person. There was in Rosie a little of the essence of Francis of Assisi, of Robin Hood, of Buddha and of Glinda the Good: the knowledge that she was about to bring together her true love and his estranged father gave her forthcoming wedding an extra dimension, she decided. It was no longer simply a wedding: it was now practically a humanitarian mission, and Fat Charlie had known Rosie long enough to know never to stand between his fiancee and her need to Do Good.
“I’ll call Mrs. Higgler tomorrow,” he said.
“Tell you what,” said Rosie, with an endearing wrinkle of her nose, “call her tonight. It’s not late in America, after all.”
Fat Charlie nodded. They walked out of the wine bar together, Rosie with a spring in her step, Fat Charlie like a man going to the gallows. He told himself not to be silly: After all, perhaps Mrs. Higgler had moved, or had her phone disconnected. It was possible. Anything was possible.
They went up to Fat Charlie’s place, the upstairs half of a smallish house in Maxwell Gardens, just off the Brixton Road.
“What time is it in Florida?” Rosie asked.
“Late afternoon,” said Fat Charlie.
“Well. Go on then.”
“Maybe we should wait a bit. In case she’s out.”
“And maybe we should call now, before she has her dinner.”
Fat Charlie found his old paper address book, and under H was a scrap of an envelope, in his mother’s handwriting, with a telephone number on it, and beneath that,
The phone rang and rang.
“She’s not there,” he said to Rosie, but at that moment the phone at the other end was answered, and a female voice said “Yes? Who is this?”
“Um. Is that Mrs. Higgler?”
“Who is this?” said Mrs. Higgler. “If you’re one of they damn telemarketers, you take me off your list right now or I sue. I know my rights.”
“No. It’s me. Charles Nancy. I used to live next door to you.”
“Fat Charlie? If that don’t beat all. I been looking for your number all this morning. I turn this place upside down, looking for it, and you think I could find it? What I think happen was I had it written in my old accounts book. Upside down I turn the place. And I say to myself, Callyanne, this is a good time to just pray and hope the Lord hear you and see you right, and I went down on my knees, well, my knees are not so good any more, so I just put my hands together, but anyway, I still don’t find your number, but look at how you just phone me up, and that’s even better from some points of view, particularly because I ain’t made of money and I can’t afford to go phoning no foreign countries even for something like this, although I was going to phone you, don’t you worry, given the circumstances—”
And she stopped, suddenly, either to take a breath, or to take a sip from the huge mug of too-hot coffee she always carried in her left hand, and during the brief quiet Fat Charlie said, “I want to ask my dad to come to my wedding. Getting married.” There was silence at the end of the line. “It’s not till the end of the year, though,” he said. Still silence. “Her name’s Rosie,” he added, helpfully. He was starting to wonder if they had been cut off; conversations with Mrs. Higgler were normally somewhat one-sided affairs, often with her doing your lines for you, and here she was, letting him say three whole things uninterrupted. He decided to go for a fourth. “You can come too if you want,” he said.
“Lord, lord, lord,” said Mrs. Higgler. “Nobody tell you?”
“Told me what?”
So she told him, at length and in detail, while he stood there and said nothing at all, and when she was done he said “Thank you, Mrs. Higgler.” He wrote something down on a scrap of paper, then he said, “Thanks. No, really, thanks,” again, and he put down the phone.
“Well?” asked Rosie. “Have you got his number?”
Fat Charlie said, “Dad won’t be coming to the wedding.” Then he said, “I have to go to Florida.” His voice was flat, and without emotion. He might have been saying, “I have to order a new checkbook.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Funeral. My dad’s. He’s dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She put her arms around him, and held him. He stood in her arms like a shop-window dummy. “How did it, did he—was he ill?”
Fat Charlie shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
And Rosie squeezed him tightly, and then she nodded, sympathetically, and let him go. She thought he was too overcome with grief to talk about it.
He wasn’t. That wasn’t it at all. He was too embarrassed.
There must be a hundred thousand respectable ways to die. Leaping off a bridge into a river to save a small child from drowning, for example, or being mown down in a hail of bullets while single-handedly storming a nest of criminals. Perfectly respectable ways to die.
Truth to tell, there were even some less-than-respectable ways to die that wouldn’t have been so bad. Spontaneous human combustion, for example: it’s medically dodgy and scientifically unlikely, but even so, people persist in going up in smoke, leaving nothing behind but a charred hand still clutching an unfinished cigarette. Fat Charlie had read about it in a magazine: he wouldn’t have minded if his father had gone like that. Or even if he’d had a heart attack running down the street after the men who had stolen his beer money.
This is how Fat Charlie’s father died.
He had arrived in the bar early, and had launched the karaoke evening by singing “What’s New Pussycat?” which song he had belted out, according to Mrs. Higgler, who had not been there, in a manner that would have caused Tom Jones to be festooned in flung feminine undergarments, and which brought Fat Charlie’s father a complimentary beer, courtesy of the several blonde tourists from Michigan who thought he was just about the cutest thing they’d ever seen.
“It was their fault,” said Mrs. Higgler, bitterly, over the phone. “They was encouragin’ him!” They were women who had squeezed into tube tops, and they had reddish too-much-sun-too-early tans, and they were all
