Anansi Boys

“I take your point,” said the small ferretty thing. “Needs must, as they say, when the Devil drives.”

“That’s an example of what I’m saying,” said Tiger. “You just have to learn when to keep your mouth shut.”

“It’s an ill wind,” said the little animal, “that blows nobody any good.”

“Now you’re irritating me again,” said Tiger. “I’m trying to tell you. Don’t irritate me, and I won’t bite off your head.”

“You keep using the phrase ‘bite my head off.’ Now when you say ‘bite my head off,’ I take it I can assume that this is actually some kind of metaphorical statement, implying that you’ll shout at me, perhaps rather angrily?”

“Bite your head off. Then crunch it. Then chew it. Then swallow it,” said Tiger. “Neither of us can leave until Anansi’s child forgets we’re here. The way that bastard seems to have arranged things, even if I kill you in the morning you’ll be reincarnated back in this blasted cave by the end of the afternoon. So don’t irritate me.”

The small white animal said, “Ah well. Another day—“

“If you say ‘another dollar,’ ” said Tiger, “I will be irritated, and there will be serious consequences. Don’t. Say anything. Irritating. Do you understand?”

There was a brief silence in the cave at the end of the world. It was broken by a small, weasely voice saying, “Absatively.”

It started to say, “Oww!” but the noise was suddenly and effectively silenced.

And then there was nothing in that place but the sound of crunching.

The thing they don’t tell you about coffins in the literature, because frankly it’s not much of a selling point to the people who are buying them, is just how comfortable they are.

Mr. Nancy was extremely satisfied with his coffin. Now that all the excitement was over, he’d gone back to his coffin and was comfortably dozing. Every once in a while he would wake and remember where he was, then he’d roll over and go back to sleep.

The grave, as has been pointed out, is a fine place, not to mention a private one, and is thus an excellent place to get a little downtime. Six feet down, best kind there is. Another twenty years or so, he thought, and he would have to think about getting up.

He opened one eye when the funeral started.

He could hear them up above him: Callyanne Higgler and the Bustamonte woman and the other one, the thin one, not to mention a small horde of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren, all of them sighing and wailing and crying their eyes out for the late Mrs. Dunwiddy.

Mr. Nancy thought about pushing one hand up through the turf and grabbing Callyanne Higgler’s ankle. It was something he’d wanted to do ever since he saw Carrie at a drive-in, thirty years earlier, but now that the opportunity presented itself, he found himself able to resist the temptation. Honestly, he couldn’t be bothered. She’d only scream and have a heart attack and die, and then the damn Garden of Rest would get even more crowded than it already was.

Too much like hard work, anyway. There were good dreams to be dreamed in the world beneath the soil. Twenty years, he thought. Maybe twenty-five. By that time, he might even have grandchildren. It’s always interesting to see how the grandchildren turn out.

He could hear Callyanne Higgler wailing and carrying on up above him. Then she stopped her sobbing long enough to announce, “Still. It’s not as if she don’t have a good life and a long one. That woman’s a hundred and three years old when she passes from us.”

“Hunnert and four!” said an irritated voice from under the ground beside him.

Mr. Nancy reached one insubstantial arm out and tapped the new coffin sharply on the side. “Keep it down, there, woman,” he barked. “Some of us is tryin’ to sleep.”

Rosie had made it clear to Spider that she expected him to get a steady job, the kind that involved getting up in the morning and going somewhere.

So one morning, the day before Rosie was to be discharged from the hospital, Spider got up early and went down to the town library. He logged on to the library computer, sauntered onto the Internet and, very carefully, cleared out all Grahame Coats’s remaining bank accounts, the ones that the police forces of several continents had so far failed to find. He arranged for the stud farm in Argentina to be sold. He bought a small, off-the-peg company, endowed it with the money, and applied for charitable status. He sent off an e-mail, in the name of Roger Bronstein, hiring a lawyer to administer the foundation’s business, and suggested that the lawyer might wish to seek out Miss Rosie Noah, late of London, currently of Saint Andrews, and hire her to Do Good.

Rosie was hired. Her first task was to find office space.

Following this, Spider spent four full days walking (and, at nights, sleeping on) the beach that circled most of the island, tasting the food in each of the dining establishments he encountered along the way until he came to Dawson’s Fish Shack. He tried the fried flying fish, the boiled green figs, the grilled chicken, and the coconut pie, then he went back into the kitchen and found the chef, who was also the owner, and offered him money enough for partnership and cooking lessons.

Dawson’s Fish Shack is now a restaurant, and Mr. Dawson has retired. Sometimes Spider’s out front and sometimes he’s back in the kitchen: you go down there and look for him, you’ll see him. The food is the best on the island. He’s fatter than he used to be, though not as fat as he’ll wind up if he keeps tasting everything he cooks.

Not that Rosie minds.

She does some teaching, and some helping out, and a lot of Doing Good, and if she ever misses London she never lets it show. Rosie’s mother, on the other hand, misses London continually and vocally, but takes any suggestion that she might want to return there as an attempt to part her from her as-yet-unborn (and, for that matter, unconceived) grandchildren.

Nothing would give this author greater pleasure than to be able to assure you that, following her return from the valley of the shadow of death, Rosie’s mother became a new person, a jolly woman with a kind word for everyone, that her newfound appetite for food was only matched by her appetite for life and all if had to offer. Alas, respect for the truth compels perfect honesty and the truth is that when she came out of hospital Rosie’s mother was still herself, just as suspicious and uncharitable as ever, although significantly more frail and now given to sleeping with the light on.

She announced that she would be selling her flat in London and would move to wherever in the world Spider and Rosie were, to be near her grandchildren; and, as time went on, she would drop pointed comments about the lack of grandchildren, the quantity and motility of Spider’s spermatozoa, the frequency and positions of Spider and Rosie’s sexual relations, and the relative cheapness and ease of in vitro fertilization, to the point where Spider seriously began to think about not going to bed with Rosie anymore, just to spite Rosie’s mother. He thought about this for about eleven seconds one afternoon, while Rosie’s mother was handing them photocopies of an article from a magazine that she had found which suggested that Rosie should stand on her head for half an hour after sex; and he mentioned these thoughts to Rosie that night, and she laughed and told him that her mother wasn’t allowed in their bedroom anyway, and that she wasn’t going to be standing on her head after making love for anybody.

Mrs. Noah has a flat in Williamstown, near Spider and Rosie’s house, and twice a week one of Callyanne Higgler’s many nieces looks in on her, does the vacuuming, dusts the glass fruit (the wax fruit melted in the island heat), and makes a little food and leaves it in the fridge, and sometimes Rosie’s mum eats it and sometimes she doesn’t.

Charlie’s a singer these days. He’s lost a lot of the softness. He’s a lean man now, with a trademark fedora hat. He has lots of different fedoras, in different colors; his favorite one is green.

Charlie has a son. His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

Nobody ever calls Charlie “Fat Charlie” anymore, and honestly, sometimes he misses it.

It was early in the morning in the summer, and it was already light. There was already noise coming from the room next door. Charlie let Daisy sleep. He climbed out of bed quietly, grabbed a T-shirt and shorts, and went