Anansi Boys

He opened the little kit of useful amenities he had been given, and put on his eyeshade, and pushed his seat back as far as it would go, which was most of the way. He thought about Rosie, although the Rosie in his mind kept shifting, morphing into someone smaller who wasn’t really wearing much of anything. Fat Charlie guiltily imagined her dressed, and was mortified when he realized that she seemed to be wearing a police uniform. He felt terrible about this, he told himself, but it didn’t seem to make much of an impression. He ought to feel ashamed of himself. He ought to….

Fat Charlie shifted in his seat and emitted one small, satisfied snore.

He was still in an excellent mood when he landed at Heathrow. He took the Heathrow Express into Paddington and was pleased to note that in his brief absence from England the sun had decided to come out. Every little thing, he told himself, is going to be all right.

The only odd note, which added a flavor of wrongness to the morning, occurred halfway through the train journey. He was staring out of the window, wishing he had bought a newspaper at Heathrow. The train was passing an expanse of green—a school playing field, perhaps, when the sky seemed, momentarily, to darken, and, with a hiss of brakes, the train stopped at a signal.

That did not disturb Fat Charlie. It was England in the autumn: the sun was, by definition, something that only happened when it wasn’t cloudy or raining. But there was a figure standing on the edge of the green by a stand of trees.

At first glance, he thought it was a scarecrow.

That was foolish. It could not have been a scarecrow. Scarecrows are found in fields, not on football pitches. Scarecrows certainly aren’t left on the edge of the woodland. Anyway, if it was a scarecrow it was doing a very poor job.

There were crows everywhere, after all, big black ones.

And then it moved.

It was too far away to be anything more than a shape, a slight figure in a tattered brown raincoat. Still, Fat Charlie knew it. He knew that if he had been close enough, he would have seen a face chipped from obsidian, and raven-black hair, and eyes that held madness.

Then the train jerked and began to move, and in moments the woman in the brown raincoat was out of sight.

Fat Charlie felt uncomfortable. He had practically convinced himself by now that what had happened, what he thought had happened, in Mrs. Dunwiddy’s front room had been some form of hallucination, a high-octane dream, true on some level but not a real thing. Not something that had happened; rather, it was symbolic of a greater truth. He could not have gone to a real place, nor struck a real bargain, could he?

It was only a metaphor, after all.

He did not ask himself why he was now so certain that everything would soon begin to improve. There was reality, and there was reality, and some things were more real than others.

Faster and faster, the train rattled him further into London.

SPIDER WAS ALMOST HOME FROM THE GREEK RESTAURANT, napkin pushed against his cheek, when someone touched him on the shoulder.

“Charles?” said Rosie.

Spider jumped, or at least, he jerked and made a startled noise.

“Charles? Are you all right? What happened to your cheek?”

He stared at her. “Are you you?” he asked.

“What?”

“Are you Rosie?”

“What kind of a question is that? Of course I’m Rosie. What did you do to your cheek?”

He pressed the napkin against his cheek. “I cut it,” he said.

“Let me see?” She took his hand away from his cheek. The center of the white napkin was stained crimson, as if he had bled into it, but his cheek was whole and untouched. “There’s nothing there.”

“Oh.”

“Charles? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am. Unless I’m not. I think we should go back to my place. I think I’ll be safer there.”

“We were going to have lunch,” said Rosie, in the tone of voice of one who worries that she’ll only understand what’s actually going on when a TV presenter leaps out and reveals the hidden cameras.

“Yes,” said Spider. “I know. I think someone just tried to kill me, though. And she pretended she was you.”

“Nobody’s trying to kill you,” said Rosie, failing to sound like she wasn’t humoring him.

“Even if nobody’s trying to kill me, can we skip lunch and go back to my place? I’ve got food there.”

“Of course.”

Rosie followed him down the road, wondering when Fat Charlie had lost all that weight. He looked good, she thought. He looked really good. They walked into Maxwell Gardens in silence.

He said, “Look at that.”

“What?”

He showed her. The fresh bloodstain had vanished from the napkin. It was now perfectly white.

“Is it a magic trick?”

“If it is, I didn’t do it,” he said. “For once.” He dropped the napkin into a bin. As he did so, a taxi pulled up in front of Fat Charlie’s house, and Fat Charlie got out, rumpled and blinking and carrying a white plastic bag.