Anansi Boys

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.”

Grahame Coats smiled sympathetically on the outside. He picked up his Fanta and walked with Rosie to the table in the corner. Rosie’s mother radiated ill-will just as an old iron radiator can radiate chill into a room, but Grahame Coats was perfectly charming and entirely helpful, and he agreed with her on every point. It was indeed appalling what the cruise companies thought they could get away with these days; it was disgusting how sloppy the administration of the cruise ship had been allowed to get; it was shocking how little there was to do in the islands; and it was, in every respect, outrageous what passengers were expected to put up with: ten days without a bathtub, with only the tiniest of shower facilities. Shocking.

Rosie’s mother told him about the several quite impressive enmities she had managed to cultivate with certain American passengers whose main crime, as Grahame Coats understood it, was to overload their plates in the buffet line of the Squeak Attack, and to sunbathe in the spot by the aft deck pool that Rosie’s mother had decided, on the first day out, was undisputedly hers.

Grahame Coats nodded, and made sympathetic noises as the vitriol dripped over him, tching and agreeing and clucking until Rosie’s mother was prepared to overlook her dislike both of strangers and people connected in some way to Fat Charlie, and she talked, and she talked, and she talked. Grahame Coats was barely listening. Grahame Coats pondered.

It would be unfortunate, Grahame Coats was thinking, if someone was to return to London at this precise point in time and inform the authorities that Grahame Coats had been encountered in Saint Andrews. It was inevitable that he would be noticed one day, but still, the inevitable could, perhaps, be postponed.

“Let me,” said Grahame Coats, “suggest a solution to at least one of your problems. A little way up the road I have a holiday house. Rather a nice house I like to think. And if there’s one thing I have a surplus of, it’s baths. Would you care to come back and indulge yourselves?”

“No, thanks,” said Rosie. Had she agreed, it is to be expected that her mother would have pointed out that they were due back at the Williamstown Port for pickup later that afternoon, and would then have chided Rosie for accepting such invitations from virtual strangers. But Rosie said no.

“That is extremely kind of you,” said Rosie’s mother. “We would be delighted.”