Anansi Boys

“Thanks,” said Fat Charlie. He went back to his bath. Afterward, he went to bed, and dreamed uncomfortable dreams.

IN HIS HOUSE ON THE CLIFF TOP, GRAHAME COATS WAS ALSO having the strangest dreams, dark and unwelcome, if not actually unpleasant. He could not remember them properly when he woke, but he would open his eyes the next morning with a vague impression that he had spent the night stalking smaller creatures through the long grass, despatching them with a blow of his paw, rending their bodies with his teeth.

In his dreams, his teeth were weapons of destruction.

He woke from the dreams feeling disturbed, with the day slightly charged.

And, each morning, a new day would begin and here, only a week away from his old life, Grahame Coats was already experiencing the frustration of the fugitive. He had a swimming pool, true, and cocoa trees, and grapefruit and nutmeg trees; he had a full wine cellar and an empty meat cellar and media center. He had satellite television, a large DVD collection, not to mention art, thousands of dollars’ worth of art, all over the walls. He had a cook, who came in each day and cooked his meals, a housekeeper and a groundskeeper (a married couple who came in for a few hours each day). The food was excellent, the climate was—if you liked warm, sunny days—perfect, and none of these things made Grahame Coats as happy as he felt was his due.

He had not shaved since leaving England, which had not yet endowed him with a beard, merely given him a thin covering of the kind of facial hair that makes men look shifty. His eyes sat in panda-dark sockets, and the bags beneath his eyes were so dark as to appear to be bruises.

He swam in the pool once each day, in the morning, but otherwise avoided the sun; he had not, he told himself, amassed an ill-gotten fortune to lose it to skin cancer. Or to anything else at all.

He thought about London too much. In London, each of his favorite restaurants had a maître d‘ who called him by name and ensured he left happy. In London there were people who owed him favors, and there was never any difficulty in getting firs

t-night tickets, and for that matter in London there were theaters to have first nights in. He had always thought he would make a fine exile; he was starting to suspect that he had been wrong.

Needing someone to blame, he came to the conclusion that the entire affair was Maeve Livingstone’s fault. She had led him on. She had attempted to rob him. She was a vixen, a minx, and a hussy. She had deserved everything she had coming to her. She had gotten off easily. Should he be interviewed on television, he could already hear the bruised innocence in his voice as he explained that he had been defending his property and his honor from a dangerous madwoman. Frankly, it was some kind of miracle that he’d made it out of that office alive…

And he had liked being Grahame Coats. He was now, as always while he was on the island, Basil Finnegan, and it irked him. He didn’t feel like a Basil. His Basilhood had been hard-won—the original Basil had died as an infant, and had a birth-date close to Grahame’s own. One copy of the birth certificate, along with a letter from an imaginary clergyman, later, and Grahame possessed a passport and an identity. He had kept the identity alive—Basil had a solid credit history, Basil traveled to exotic places, Basil had bought a luxury house on Saint Andrews without ever seeing it. But in Grahame’s mind, Basil had been working for him, and now the servant had become the master. Basil Finnegan had eaten him alive.

“If I stay here,” said Grahame Coats. “I shall go mad.”

“What you say?” asked the housekeeper, duster in hand, leaning in at the bedroom door.

“Nothing,” said Grahame Coats.

“Sound like you say if you stay in you go mad. You ought to go for a walk. Walking good for you.”

Grahame Coats did not go for walks; he had people to do that for him. But, he thought, perhaps Basil Finnegan went for walks. He put on a broad-brimmed hat and exchanged his sandals for walking shoes. He took his cell phone, instructed the groundskeeper to come and get him when he called, and set out from the house on the cliff edge, heading toward the nearest town.

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it’s true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It’s not even coincidence. It’s just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.

So it was that Grahame Coats walked into a small café on the road to Williamstown, in order to purchase a soft drink and to have somewhere to sit while he called his gardener to tell him that he should come and pick him up.

He ordered a Fanta and sat down at a table. The place was practically empty: two women, one young, one older, sat in the far corner, drinking coffee and writing postcards.

Grahame Coats gazed out, across the road at the beach. It was paradise, he thought. And it might behoove him to get more deeply involved with local politics—perhaps as a sponsor of the arts. He had already made several substantial donations to the island’s police force, and it might even become necessary to make sure that…

A voice from behind him, thrilled and tentative, said, “Mister Coats?” and his heart lurched. The younger of the women sat down beside him. She had the warmest smile.

“Fancy running into you here,” she said. “You on your holidays too?”

“Something like that.” He had no idea who this woman was.

“You remember me, don’t you? Rosie Noah. I used to go out with Fat, with Charlie Nancy. Yes?”

“Hello. Rosie. Yes, of course.”

“I’m on a cruise, with my mum. She’s still writing postcards home.”

Grahame Coats glanced back over his shoulder to the back of the little café, and something resembling a South American mummy in a floral dress glared back at him.

“Honestly,” continued Rosie, “I’m not really a cruise sort of person. Ten days of going from island to island. It’s nice to see a familiar face, isn’t it?”

“Absatively,” said Grahame Coats. “Should I take it that you and our Charles are no longer, well, an item?”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose you should. I mean, we’re not.”