“No. I don’t even think they look alike. I don’t know. I’m so confused.”
“So which one of them did you break up with?”
Rosie blew her nose. “I broke up with Spider. That’s Fat Charlie’s brother.”
“But you weren’t engaged to him.”
“No, but I thought I was. I thought he was Fat Charlie.”
“So you broke up with Fat Charlie as well?”
“Sort of. I just haven’t told him yet.”
“Did he, did he know about this, this brother thing? Was it some kind of evil kinky conspiracy they did to my poor girl?”
“I don’t think so. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t marry him.”
“No,” agreed her mother. “You certainly cannot. Not one bit.” Inside, in her head, she did a victory jig and set off a large but tasteful celebratory display of fireworks. “We can find you a good boy. Don’t you worry. That Fat Charlie. He was always up to no good. I knew it the first moment I saw him. He ate my wax fruit. I knew he was trouble. Where is he now?”
“I’m not sure. Spider said he might have been taken away by the police,” said Rosie.
“
Rosie began to cry, if anything even harder than before. She pulled out another wad of paper tissues and blew her nose with an extreme honk. She swallowed bravely. Then she cried some more. Her mother patted the back of Rosie’s hand as reassuringly as she knew how. “Of course you can’t marry him,” she said. “You can’t marry a convict. But if he’s in prison you can easily break off the engagement.” A spectre of a smile haunted the corners of her lips as she said, “I could call on him for you. Or go there on a visitor’s day and tell him he’s a lousy crook and you never want to see him again. We could get a restraining order, as well,” she added helpfully.
“Th-that’s not why I can’t marry Fat Charlie,” said Rosie.
“No?” asked her mother, raising one perfectly penciled eyebrow.
“No,” said Rosie. “I can’t marry Fat Charlie because I’m not in love with him.”
“Of course you aren’t. I always knew that. It was a girlish infatuation, but now you see the true—”
“I’m in love,” continued Rosie, as if her mother had not spoken, “with Spider. His brother.” The expression that made its way across her mother’s face then was a cloud of wasps arriving at a picnic. “It’s okay,” said Rosie. “I’m not going to marry him, either. I’ve told him I never want to see him again.”
Rosie’s mother pursed her lips. “Well,” she said, “I can’t pretend I understand any of this, but I can’t say it’s bad news, either.” The gears in her head shifted, and the cogs interlocked in new and interesting ways: ratchets ratchetted and springs resprung. “You know,” she said, “what would be the best thing for you right now? Have you thought about taking a little holiday? I’m happy to pay for it, all the money I’m saving on the wedding after all —”
That may have been the wrong thing to say. Rosie began to sob into her tissues once again. Her mother went on, “Anyway, it would be my treat. I know you’ve got holiday time you haven’t used at work. And you said things were quiet right now. At a time like this, a girl needs to get away from everything and simply relax.”
Rosie wondered whether she’d misjudged her mother all these years. She sniffed and swallowed and said, “That would be nice.”
“Then it’s settled,” said her mother. “I shall come with you, to take care of my baby.” In her head, underneath the grand finale of the fireworks display, she added,
“Where are we going?” asked Rosie.
“We’re going to go,” said her mother, “on a cruise.”
Fat Charlie was not handcuffed. That was good. Everything else was bad, but at least he wasn’t in handcuffs. Life had become a confused blur filled with too-sharp details: the duty sergeant scratching his nose and signing him in—“Cell six is free”—through a green door and then the smell of the cells, a low-level stench he had never before encountered but which was immediately and horribly familiar, a pervasive fug of yesterday’s vomit and disinfectant and smoke and stale blankets and unflushed toilets and despair. It was the smell of things at the bottom, and that was where Fat Charlie seemed to have ended up.
“When you need to flush the lavvy,” said the policeman accompanying him down the corridor, “you press the button in your cell. One of us’ll be by, sooner or later, to pull the chain for you. Stops you trying to flush away the evidence.”
“Evidence of what?”
“Leave it out, Sunshine.”
Fat Charlie sighed. He’d been flushing away his own bodily waste products since he’d been old enough to take a certain pride in the activity, and the loss of that, more than the loss of his liberty, told him that everything had changed.
“It’s your first time,” said the policeman.
“Sorry.”
“Drugs?” said the policeman.
“No, thank you,” said Fat Charlie.
“Is that what you’re in for?”
“I don’t know what I’m in for,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m innocent.”
“White-collar crime, eh?” said the policeman, and he shook his head. “I’ll tell you something the blue-collar boys know without being told. The easier you make it on us, the easier we make it on you. You white-collar people. Always standing up for your rights. You just make it harder on yourselves.”
He opened the door to cell six. “Home sweet home,” he said.
The cell-stench was worse inside the room, which had been painted in the kind of speckled paint that resists graffiti and contained only a shelflike bed, low to the ground, and a lidless toilet in the corner.
Fat Charlie put the blanket he’d been issued down on the bed.
“Right,” said the policeman. “Well. Make yourself at home. And if you get bored, please don’t block the toilet with your blanket.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I often wonder that myself,” said the policeman. “Why indeed? Perhaps it breaks the monotony. I shouldn’t know. Being a law-abiding sort with a police pension waiting for me, I’ve never actually had to spend much time in the cells.”
“You know, I didn’t do it,” said Fat Charlie. “Whatever it was.”
“That’s good,” said the policeman.
“Excuse me,” said Fat Charlie. “Do I get anything to read?”
“Does this look like a lending library to you?”
“No.”
“When I was a young copper, bloke asked me for a book, I went and found him the book I’d been reading. J. T. Edson, it was, or maybe Louis L’Amour. He only went and blocked up his toilet with it, didn’t he? Won’t catch me doing that again in a hurry.”
Then he went out and locked the door, with Fat Charlie on the inside and himself on the outside.
The oddest thing, thought Grahame Coats, who was not given to self-inspection, was how normal and chipper and generally good he felt.
The captain told them to fasten their safety belts, and mentioned that they would be landing soon on Saint Andrews. Saint Andrews was a small Caribbean island which, on declaring independence in 1962, had elected to demonstrate its freedom from colonial rule in a number of ways, including the creation of its own judiciary and a singular lack of extradition treaties with the rest of the world.
The plane landed. Grahame Coats got off and walked across the sunny tarmac dragging his wheeled bag
