Anansi Boys

“It was what he said at dinner, something about us sending the two people in, the two at the house. It was your fiancée and her mother. He’d locked them up in his basement.”

“Are they okay?”

“They’re both in the hospital.”

“Oh.”

“Her mum’s in rough shape. I think your fiancée will be okay.”

“Will you stop calling her that? She’s not my fiancée. She ended the engagement.”

“Yes. But you didn’t, did you?”

“She’s not in love with me,” said Charlie. “Now, I’m going to brush my teeth and change my shirt, and I need a certain amount of privacy.”

“You should shower too,” she said. “And that hat smells like a cigar.”

“It’s a family heirloom,” he told her, and he went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

THE HOSPITAL WAS A TEN-MINUTE-WALK FROM THE HOTEL, and Spider was sitting in the waiting room, holding a dog-eared copy of Entertainment Weekly magazine as if he were actually reading it.

Charlie tapped him on the shoulder, and Spider jumped. He looked up warily and then, seeing his brother, he relaxed, but not much. “They said I had to wait out here,” Spider said. “Because I’m not a relation or anything.”

Charlie boggled. “Well, why didn’t you just tell them you were a relative? Or a doctor?”

Spider looked uncomfortable. “Well, it’s easy to do that stuff if you don’t care. If it doesn’t matter if I go in or I don’t, it’s easy to go in. But now it matters, and I’d hate to get in the way or do something wrong, and I mean, what if I tried and they said no, and then…what are you grinning about?”

“Nothing really,” said Charlie. “It just all sounds a bit familiar. Come on. Let’s go and find Rosie. You know,” he said to Daisy, as they set off down a random corridor, “there are two ways to walk through a hospital. Either you look like you belong there—here you go Spider. White coat on back of door, just your size. Put it on—or you should look so out of place that no one will complain that you’re there. They’ll just leave it for someone else to sort out.” He began to hum.

“What’s that song?” asked Daisy.

“It’s called ‘Yellow Bird,’ ” said Spider.

Charlie pushed his hat back on his head, and they walked into Rosie’s hospital room.

Rosie was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine, and looking worried. When she saw the three of them come in, she looked more worried. She looked from Spider to Charlie and back again.

“You’re both a long way from home,” was all she said.

“We all are,” said Charlie. “Now, you’ve met Spider. This is Daisy. She’s in the police.”

“I’m not sure that I am anymore,” said Daisy. “I’m probably in all kinds of hot water.”

“You’re the one who was there last night? The one who got the island police to come up to the house?” Rosie stopped. She said, “Any word on Grahame Coats?”

“He’s in intensive care, just like your mum.”

“Well, if she comes to before he does,” said Rosie, “I expect she’ll kill him.” Then she said, “They won’t talk to me about my mum’s condition. They just say that it’s very serious, and they’ll tell me as soon as there’s anything to tell.” She looked at Charlie with clear eyes. “She’s not as bad as you think she is, really. Not when you get time to know her. We had a lot of time to talk, locked up in the dark. She’s all right.”

She blew her nose. Then she said, “They don’t think she’s going to make it. They haven’t directly said that to me, but they sort of said it in a not-saying-it sort of way. It’s funny. I thought she’d live through anything.”

Charlie said, “Me too. I figured even if there was a nuclear war, it would still leave radioactive cockroaches and your mum.”

Daisy stepped on his foot. She said, “Do they know anything more about what hurt her?”

“I told them,” said Rosie. “There was some kind of animal in the house. Maybe it was just Grahame Coats. I mean it sort of was him, but it was sort of someone else. She distracted it from me, and it went for her….” She had explained it all as best shecould to the island police that morning. She had decided not to talk about the blonde ghost-woman. Sometimes minds snap under pressure, and she thought it best if people did not know that hers had.

Rosie broke off. She was staring at Spider as if she had only just remembered who he was. She said, “I still hate you, you know.” Spider said nothing, but a miserable expression crept across his face, and he no longer looked like a doctor: now he looked like a man who had borrowed a white coat from behind a door and was worried that someone would notice. A dreamlike tone came into her voice. “Only,” she said, “only when I was in the dark, I thought that you were helping me. That you were keeping the animal away. What happened to your face? It’s all scratched.”

“It was an animal,” said Spider.

“You know,” she said, “Now I see you both at once, you don’t look anything alike at all.”

“I’m the good-looking one,” said Charlie, and Daisy’s foot pressed down on his toes for the second time.