Anansi Boys

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 fiancé.

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.