Anansi Boys

“Exactly,” said Fat Charlie. Then he said, “Do what?” but Spider had already hailed a cab.

“We are men with troubles,” said Spider to the world. “Our father is no more. Our hearts are heavy in our chests. Sorrow settles upon us like pollen in hay fever season. Darkness is our lot, and misfortune our only companion.”

“Right, gentlemen,” said the cabbie, brightly. “Where am I taking you?”

“To where the three remedies for darkness of the soul may be found,” said Spider.

“Maybe we could get a curry,” suggested Fat Charlie.

“There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life,” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song.”

“Curry’s nice too,” pointed out Fat Charlie, but nobody was listening to him.

“In any particular order?” asked the cabbie.

“Wine first,” Spider announced. “Rivers and lakes and vast oceans of wine.”

“Right you are,” said the cabbie, and he pulled out into the traffic.

“I have a particularly bad feeling about all this,” said Fat Charlie, helpfully.

Spider nodded. “A bad feeling,” he said. “Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.”

“Seek not to ask for whom the bell tolls,” intoned the cabbie. “It tolls for thee.”

“Whoa,” said Spider. “Now that’s a pretty heavy koan you got there.”

“Thank you,” said the cabbie.

“That’s how it ends, all right. You are some kind of philosopher. I’m Spider. This is my brother, Fat Charlie.”

“Charles,” said Fat Charlie.

“Steve,” said the cabbie. “Steve Burridge.”

“Mister Burridge,” said Spider, “how would you like to be our personal driver this evening?”

Steve Burridge explained that he was coming up to the end of his shift and would now be driving his cab home for the night, that dinner with Mrs. Burridge and all the little Burridges awaited him.

“You hear that?” said Spider. “A family man. Now, my brother and I are all the family that we have left. And this is the first time we’ve met.”

“Sounds like quite a story,” said the cabbie. “Was there a feud?”

“Not at all. He simply did not know that he had a brother,” said Spider.

“Did you?” asked Fat Charlie. “Know about me?”

“I may have done,” said Spider. “But things like that can slip a guy’s mind so easily.”

The cab pulled over to the curb. “Where are we?” asked Fat Charlie. They hadn’t gone very far. He thought they were somewhere just off Fleet Street.

“What he asked for,” said the cabbie. “Wine.”

Spider got out of the cab and stared at the grubby oak and grimy glass exterior of the ancient wine bar. “Perfect,” he said. “Pay the man, Brother.”

Fat Charlie paid the cabbie. They went inside: down wooden steps to a cellar where rubicund barristers drank side by side with pallid money market fund managers. There was sawdust on the floor, and a wine list chalked illegibly on a blackboard behind the bar.

“What are you drinking?” asked Spider.