Anansi Boys

The totem creatures were dancing now, the dances of their kind. The Bird Woman danced the wheeling dance of birds, fanning her tail feathers, tossing back her beak.

There was only one creature on the mountainside who did not dance.

Tiger lashed his tail. He was not clapping or singing or dancing. His face was bruised purple, and his body was covered in welts and in bite marks. He had padded down the rocks, a step at a time, until he was close to Charlie. “The songs aren’t yours,” he growled.

Charlie looked at him, and sang about Tiger, and about Grahame Coats, and those who would prey upon the innocent. He turned: Spider was looking up at him with admiration. Tiger roared in anger, and Charlie took the roar and wound his song around it. Then he did the roar himself, just like Tiger had done it. Well, the roar began just as Tiger’s roar had, but then Charlie changed it, so it became a really goofy sort of roar, and all the creatures watching from the rocks started to laugh. They couldn’t help it. Charlie did the goofy roar again. Like any impersonation, like any perfect caricature, it had the effect of making what it made fun of intrinsically ridiculous. No one would ever hear Tiger roar again without hearing Charlie’s roar underneath it. “Goofy sort of a roar,” they’d say.

Tiger turned his back on Charlie. He loped through the crowd, roaring as he ran, which only made the crowd laugh the harder. Tiger angrily retreated back into his cave.

Spider gestured with his hands, a curt movement.

There was a rumble, and the mouth of Tiger’s cave collapsed in a small rock slide. Spider looked satisfied. Charlie kept singing.

He sang the song of Rosie Noah and the song of Rosie’s mother: he sang a long life for Mrs Noah and all the happiness that she deserved.

He sang of his life, all of their lives, and in his song he saw the pattern of their lives as a web that a fly had blundered into, and with his song he wrapped the fly, made certain it would not escape, and he repaired the web with new strands.

And now the song was coming to its natural end.

Charlie realized, with no little surprise, that he enjoyed singing to other people, and he knew, at that moment, that this was what he would spend the rest of his life doing. He would sing: not big, magical songs that made worlds or recreated existence. Just small songs that would make people happy for a breath, make them move, make them for a little while, forget their problems. And he knew that there would always be the fear before performing, the stage fright, that would never go away, but he also understood that it would be like jumping into a swimming pool—only uncomfortably chill for a few seconds—and then the discomfort would pass and it would be good…

Never this good. Never this good again. But good enough.

And then he was done. Charlie hung his head. The creatures on the cliff top let the last notes die away, stopped stamping, stopped clapping, stopped dancing. Charlie took off his father’s green fedora and fanned his face with it.

Under his breath, Spider said, “That was amazing.”

“You could have done it too,” said Charlie.

“I don’t think so. What was happening at the end? I felt you doing something, but I couldn’t really tell what it was.”

“I fixed things,” said Charlie. “For us. I think. I’m not really sure…” And he wasn’t. Now the song was over, the content of the song was unraveling like a dream in the morning.

He pointed to the cave mouth that was blocked by rocks. “Did you do that?”

“Yeah,” said Spider. “Seemed the least I could do. Tiger will dig his way out eventually, though. I wish I’d done something worse than just shut the door on him, to be honest.”

“Not to worry,” said Charlie. “I did. Something much worse.”

He watched the animals disperse. His father was nowhere to be seen, which did not surprise him. “Come on,” he said. “We ought to be getting back.”

SPIDER WENT BACK TO SEE ROSIE AT VISITING TIME. HE WAS carrying a large box of chocolates, the largest that the hospital gift shop sold.

“For you,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“They told me,” she said, “that they think my mum’s going to pull through. Apparently she opened her eyes and asked for porridge. The doctor said it’s a miracle.”

“Yup. Your mother asking for food. Certainly sounds like a miracle to me.”

She swatted his arm with her hand, then left her hand resting on his arm.

“You know,” she said, after a while, “You’re going to think this is silly of me. But when I was in the dark, with Mum, I thought that you were helping me. I felt like you were keeping the beast at bay. That if you hadn’t’ve done what you were doing, he would have killed us.”

“Um. I probably helped.”

“Really?”