Anansi Boys

The gardener pulled up outside soon after in a black Mercedes, and Grahame Coats opened the back door for Rosie and her mother. He assured them he would absatively have them back in the harbor well before the last boat back to their ship.

“Where to, Mister Finnegan?” asked the gardener.

“Home,” he said.

“Mister Finnegan?” asked Rosie.

“It’s an old family name,” said Grahame Coats, and he was sure it was. Somebody’s family anyway. He closed the back door and went around to the front.

Maeve Livingstone was lost. It had started out so well: she had wanted to be at home, in Pontefract, and there was a shimmer and a tremendous wind, and in one ectoplasmic gusting, she was home. She wandered around the house for one last time, then went out into the autumn day. She wanted to see her sister in Rye, and before she could think, there she was in the garden at Rye, watching her sister walking her springer spaniel.

It had seemed so easy.

That was the point she had decided that she wanted to see Grahame Coats, and that was where it had all gone wrong. She was, momentarily, back in the office in the Aldwych, and then in an empty house in Purley, which she remembered from a small dinner party Grahame Coats had hosted a decade back, and then—

Then she was lost. And everywhere she tried to go only made matters worse.

She had no idea where she was now. It seemed to be some kind of garden.

A brief downpour of rain drenched the place and left her untouched. Now the ground was steaming, and she knew she wasn’t in England. It was starting to get dark.

She sat down on the ground, and she started to sniffle.

Honestly, she told herself. Maeve Livingstone. Pull yourself together. But the sniffling just got worse.

“You want a tissue?” asked someone.

Maeve looked up. An elderly gentleman with a green hat and a pencil-thin moustache was offering her a tissue.

She nodded. Then she said, “It’s probably not any use, though. I won’t be able to touch it.”

He smiled sympathetically and passed her the tissue. It didn’t fall through her fingers, so she blew her nose with it and dabbed at her eyes. “Thank you. Sorry about that. It all got a bit much.”

“It happens,” said the man. He looked her up and down, appraisingly. “What are you? A duppy?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so—what’s a duppy?”

“A ghost,” he said. With his pencil moustache, he reminded her of Cab Calloway, perhaps, or Don Ameche, one of those stars who aged but never stopped being stars. Whoever the old man was, he was still a star.

“Oh. Right. Yes, I’m one of them. Um. You?”

“More or less,” he said. “I’m dead, anyway.”

“Oh. Would you mind if I asked where I was?”

“We’re in Florida.” he told her. “In the buryin’ ground. It’s good you caught me,” he added. “I was going for a walk. You want to come along?”

“Shouldn’t you be in a grave?” she asked, hesitantly.

“I was bored,” he told her. “I thought I could do with a walk. And maybe a spot of fishin’.”

She hesitated, then nodded. It was nice to have someone to talk to.

“You want to hear a story?” asked the old man.

“Not really,” she admitted.

He helped her to her feet, and they walked out of the Garden of Rest.

“Fair enough. Then I’ll keep it short. Not go too long. You know, I can tell one of these stories so it lasts for weeks. It’s all in the details—what you put in, what you don’t. I mean, you leave out the weather and what people are wearing, you can skip half the story. I once told a story—”

“Look,” she said, “if you’re going to tell a story, then just tell it to me, all right?” It was bad enough walking along the side of the road in the gathering dusk. She reminded herself that she wasn’t going to be hit by a passing car, but it did nothing to make her feel more at ease.

The old man started to talk in a gentle sing-song. “When I say ‘Tiger,’ “ he said, “You got to understand it’s not just the stripy cat, the India one. It’s just what people call big cats—the pumas and the bobcats and the jaguars and all of them. You got that?”

“Certainly.”

“Good. So—a long time ago,” he began, “Tiger had the stories. All the stories there ever were was Tiger stories, all the songs were Tiger songs, and I’d say that all the jokes were Tiger jokes, but there weren’t no jokes told back in the Tiger days. In Tiger stories all that matters is how strong your teeth are, how you hunt and how you kill. Ain’t no gentleness in Tiger stories, no tricksiness, and no peace.”

Maeve tried to imagine what kind of stories a big cat might tell. “So they were violent?”

“Sometimes. But mostly what they was, was bad. When all the stories and the songs were Tiger’s, that was a bad time for everyone. People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song. And in Tiger times all the songs were dark. They began in tears, and they’d end in blood, and they were the only stories that the people of this world knew.

“Then Anansi comes along. Now, I guess you know all about Anansi—”