Anansi Boys Read online

  “I don’t think so. I’d remember.”

  She nodded, and said nothing as she drove.

  She parked the car, and they got out.

  It was chilly in the Florida dawn. The Garden of Rest looked like something from a movie: there was a low ground mist which threw everything into soft focus. Mrs. Higgler opened the small gate, and they walked through the cemetery.

  Where there had been only fresh earth filling his father’s grave, now there was turf, and at the head of the grave was a metal plaque with a metal vase built into it, and in the vase a single yellow silk rose.

  “Lord have mercy on the sinner in this grave,” said Mrs Higgler, with feeling. “Amen, amen, amen.”

  They had an audience: the two red-headed cranes which Fat Charlie had observed on his previous visit strutted toward them, heads bobbing, like two aristocratic prison visitors.

  “Shoo!” said Mrs. Higgler. The birds started at her, incuriously, and did not leave.

  One of them ducked its head down into the grass, came up again with a lizard struggling in its beak. A gulp and a shake, and the lizard was a bulge in the bird’s neck.

  The dawn chorus was beginning: grackles and orioles and mockingbirds were singing in the day in the wilderness beyond the Garden of Rest. “It’ll be good to be home again,” said Fat Charlie. “With any luck she’ll have made him leave by the time I get there. Then everything will be all right. I can sort everything out with Rosie.” A mood of gentle optimism welled up within him. It was going to be a good day.

  IN THE OLD STORIES, ANANSI LIVES JUST LIKE YOU DO OR I DO, in his house. He is greedy, of course, and lustful, and tricky, and full of lies. And he is good-hearted, and lucky, and sometimes even honest. Sometimes he is good, sometimes he is bad. He is never evil. Mostly, you are on Anansi’s side. This is because Anansi owns all the stories. Mawu gave him the stories, back in the dawn days, took them from Tiger and gave them to Anansi, and he spins the web of them so beautifully.

  In the stories, Anansi is a spider, but he is also a man. It is not hard to keep two things in your head at the same time. Even a child could do it.

  Anansi’s stories are told by grandmothers and by aunts in the West Coast of Africa and across the Caribbean, and all over the world. The stories have made it into books for children: big old smiling Anansi playing his merry tricks upon the world. Trouble is, grandmothers and aunts and writers of books for children tend to leave things out. There are stories that aren’t appropriate for little children anymore.

  This is a story you won’t find in the nursery tales. I call it,

  ANANSI and BIRD

  Anansi did not like Bird, because when Bird was hungry she ate many things, and one of the things that Bird ate was spiders, and Bird, she was always hungry.

  They used to be friends, but they were friends no longer.

  One day Anansi was walking, and he saw a hole in the ground, and that gave him an idea. He puts wood in the bottom of the hole, and he makes a fire, and he puts a cookpot in the hole and drops in roots and herbs. Then he starts running around the pot, running and dancing and calling and shouting, going, I feel good. I feel soooo good. Oh boy, all my aches and pains be gone and I never felt so good in my whole damn life!

  Bird hears the commotion. Bird flies down from the skies to see what all the fuss is about. She goes, What you singing about? Why you carrying on like a madman, Anansi?

  Anansi sings, I had a pain in my neck, but now it’s gone. I had a pain in my belly, but not any longer. I had creaks in my joints, but now I’m supple as a young palm tree, I’m smooth as Snake the morning after he sheds his skin. I’m powerful happy, and now I shall be perfect, for I know the secret, and nobody else does.

  What secret? asks Bird.

  My secret, says Anansi. Everyone going to give me their favorite things, their most precious things, just to learn my secret. Whoo! Whee! I do feel good!

  Bird hops a little closer, and she puts her head on one side. Then she asks, Can I learn your secret?

  Anansi looks at Bird with suspicion on his face, and he moves to stand in front of the pot in the hole, bubbling away.

  I don’t think so, Anansi says. May not be enough to go around. Don’t bother yourself about it.

  Bird says, Now Anansi, I know we haven’t always been friends. But I’ll tell you what. You share your secret with me, and I promise you no bird will never eat no spider ever again. We’ll be friends until the end of time.

  Anansi scratches his chin, and he shakes his head. It’s a mighty big secret, he says, making people young and spry and lusty and free from all pain.

  Bird, she preens. Bird she says, Oh, Anansi, I’m sure you know that I have always found you a particularly handsome figure of a man. Why don’t we lie by the side of the road for a little while, and I’m sure I can make you forget all your reservations about telling me your secret.

  So they lie by the side of the road, and they get to canoodling and laughing and getting all silly, and once Anansi has had what he wants Bird says, Now Anansi, what about your secret?

  Anansi says, Well, I wasn’t going to tell anyone. But I’ll tell you. It’s an herbal bath, in this hole in the ground. Watch, I’ll drop in these leaves and these roots. Now, anyone who goes into the bath they going to live forever, feeling no pain. I had the bath, and now I’m frisky as a young goat. But I don’t think I should let anyone else use the bath.

  Bird, she looks down at the bubbling water, and quick as anything she slips down into the pot.

  It’s awful hot, Anansi, she says.

  It’s got to be hot for the herbs to do their good things, says Anansi. Then he takes the lid of the pot and he covers the pot with it. It’s a heavy lid, and Anansi, he puts a rock on top of it, to weigh it down more.

  Bam! Bem! Bom! comes the knocking from inside the cookpot.

  If I let you out now, calls Anansi, all the good work of the bubbling bath will be undone. You just relax in there and feel yourself getting healthier.

  But maybe Bird did not hear him or believe him, because the knocking and the pushing kept on coming from inside the pot for a while longer. And then it stopped.

  That evening Anansi and his family had the most delicious Bird soup, with boiled Bird. They did not go hungry again for many days.

  Since that time, birds eat spiders every chance they get, and spiders and birds aren’t never going to be friends.

  There’s another version of the story where they talk Anansi into the cookpot, too. The stories are all Anansi’s, but he doesn’t always come out ahead.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IN WHICH A POT OF COFFEE COMES IN PARTICULARLY USEFUL

  IF ANYTHING WAS MAKING SPIDER GO AWAY, SPIDER DIDN’T know about it. On the contrary, Spider was having an excellent time being Fat Charlie. He was having such a good time being Fat Charlie he began to wonder why he hadn’t been Fat Charlie before. It was more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.1

  The bit of being Fat Charlie that Spider liked best was Rosie.

  Until now Spider had regarded women as more or less interchangeable. You didn’t give them a real name, or an address that would work for longer than a week, of course, or anything more than a disposable cell-phone number. Women were fun, and decorative, and terrific accessories, but there would always be more of them; like bowls of goulash coming along a conveyor belt, when you were done with one, you simply picked up the next, and spooned in your sour cream.

  But Rosie…

  Rosie was different.

  He couldn’t have told you how she was different. He had tried and failed. Partly it was how he felt when he was with her: as if, seeing himself in her eyes, he became a wholly better person. That was part of it.

  Spider liked knowing that Rosie knew where to find him. It made him feel comfortable. He delighted in the pillowy curves of her, the way she meant nothing but good to the world, the way she smiled. There was really nothing at all wrong with Rosie, apart from having to spend time away from her, a
nd, of course, he was beginning to discover, the little matter of Rosie’s mother. On this particular evening, while Fat Charlie was in an airport four thousand miles away in the process of being bumped up to first class, Spider was in Rosie’s mother’s flat in Wimpole Street, and he was learning about her the hard way.

  Spider was used to being able to push reality around a little, just a little but that was always enough. You just had to show reality who was boss, that was all. Having said that, he had never met anyone who inhabited her own reality quite so firmly as Rosie’s mother.

  “Who’s this?” she asked, suspiciously, as they walked in.

  “I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” said Spider.

  “Why is he saying that?” asked Rosie’s mother. “Who is he?”

  “I’m Fat Charlie Nancy, your future son-in-law, and you really like me,” said Spider, with utter conviction.

  Rosie’s mother swayed and blinked and stared at him. “You may be Fat Charlie,” she said, uncertainly, “but I don’t like you.”

  “Well,” said Spider, “you should. I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all-around wonderfulness. I don’t have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.”

  Rosie’s mother sniffed. She did not know what was going on, but whatever it was, she did not like it. Until now, she felt that she had got the measure of Fat Charlie. She might, she admitted to herself, have mishandled things a little in the beginning: it was quite possible that Rosie would not have attached herself to Fat Charlie with such enthusiasm if, following the first meeting of her mother and Fat Charlie, her mother had not expressed her opinion quite so vociferously. He was a loser, Rosie’s mother had said, for she could smell fear like a shark scenting blood across the bay. But she had failed to persuade Rosie to dump him, and now her main strategy involved assuming control of the wedding plans, making Fat Charlie as miserable as possible, and contemplating the national divorce statistics with a certain grim satisfaction.

  Something different was now happening, and she did not like it. Fat Charlie was no longer a large vulnerable person. This new, sharp creature confused her.

  Spider, for his part, was having to work.

  Most people do not notice other people. Rosie’s mother did. She noticed everything. Now she sipped her hot water from a bone china cup. She knew that she had just lost a skirmish, even if she could not have told you how or what the battle was about. So she moved her next assault to higher ground.

  “Charles, dear,” she said, “tell me about your cousin Daisy. I worry that your family is underrepresented. Would you like her to be given a larger role in the wedding party?”

  “Who?”

  “Daisy,” said Rosie’s mother, sweetly. “The young lady I met at your house the other morning, wandering around in her scanties. If she was your cousin, of course.”

  “Mother! If Charlie says she was his cousin…”

  “Let him talk for himself, Rosie,” said her mother, and she took another sip of hot water.

  “Right,” said Spider. “Daisy,” said Spider.

  He cast his mind back to the night of wine, women and song: he had brought the prettiest and funniest of the women back to the flat with them, after telling her that it was her idea, and then had needed her help in getting the semiconscious bulk of Fat Charlie up the stairs. Having already enjoyed the attentions of several of the other women during the course of the evening, he had brought the little funny one back with him rather as one might set aside an after-dinner mint, but he had found, on getting home and putting a cleaned-up Fat Charlie to bed, that he was no longer hungry. That one.

  “Sweet little cousin Daisy,” he continued, without a pause. “I am certain that she would love to be involved in the wedding, should she be in the country. Alas, she’s a courier. Always traveling. One day she’s here, the next, she’s dropping off a confidential document in Murmansk.”

  “You don’t have her address? Or her phone number?”

  “We can look for her together, you and I,” agreed Spider. “Zooming around the world. She comes, she goes.”

  “Then,” said Rosie’s mother, much as Alexander the Great might have ordered the sacking and pillaging of a little Persian village, “the next time she is in the country, you must invite her over. I thought she was such a pretty little thing, and I am sure that Rosie would just love to meet her.”

  “Yes,” said Spider. “I must. I really must.”

  EACH PERSON WHOEVER WAS OR IS OR WILL BE HAS A SONG. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.

  Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which had been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life, had a reassuring, marching sort of beat, and words that were about protecting the weak, and it had a chorus that began “Evildoers beware!” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits.

  And that is, more or less, everything you need to know about Daisy. The rest is details.

  Daisy’s father was born in Hong Kong. Her mother came from Ethiopia, of a family of wealthy carpet exporters: they owned a house in Addis Ababa, and another house and lands outside Nazret. Daisy’s parents met at Cambridge—he was studying computing before that was something that was seen as being a sensible career path, and she was devouring molecular chemistry and international law. They were two young people who were equally studious, naturally shy, and generally ill-at-ease. They were both homesick, but for very different things; however, they both played chess, and they met on a Wednesday afternoon, at the chess club. They were, as novices, encouraged to play together, and during their first game Daisy’s mother beat Daisy’s father with ease.

  Daisy’s father was nettled by this, enough that he shyly asked for a rematch on the following Wednesday, and on every successive Wednesday after that (excluding vacations and public holidays) for the next two years.

  Their social interaction increased as their social skills and her spoken English improved. Together, they held hands as part of a human chain and protested the arrival of large trucks loaded with missiles. Together, although as part of a much larger party, they traveled to Barcelona in order to protest the unstoppable flood of international capitalism and to register stern protests at corporate hegemonies. This was also the time they got to experience officially squirted tear gas, and Mr. Day’s wrist was sprained as he was being pushed out of the way by the Spanish police.

  And then, one Wednesday at the beginning of their third year at Cambridge, Daisy’s father beat Daisy’s mother at chess. He was made so happy by this, so elated and triumphant that, buoyed and emboldened by his conquest, he proposed marriage; and Daisy’s mother, who had been, deep down, afraid that as soon as he won a game he would lose interest in her, said yes, of course.

  They stayed in England and remained in academia, and they had one daughter, whom they called Daisy because at the time they owned (and, to Daisy’s later amusement, actually rode) a tandem—a bicycle built for two. They moved from university to university across Britain: he taught computer sciences while his wife wrote books that nobody wanted to read about international corporate hegemonies, and books that people did want to read about chess, its strategies and its history, and thus in a good year she would make more money than he did, which was never very much. Their involvement in politics waned as they grew older, and as they approached middle age they had become a happy couple with no interests beyond each other, chess, Daisy, and the reconstruction and debugging of forgotten operating
systems.

  Neither of them understood Daisy, not even a little.

  They blamed themselves for not having nipped her fascination with the police force in the bud when it first began to manifest, more or less at the same time that she began talking. Daisy would point out police cars in the same excited way that other little girls might point out ponies. Her seventh birthday party was held in fancy dress to allow her to wear her junior policewoman’s costume, and there are still photographs in a box in her parents’ attic of her face suffused with a seven-year-old’s perfect joy at the sight of her birthday cake: seven candles ringing a flashing blue light.

  Daisy was a diligent, cheerful, intelligent teenager who made both her parents happy when she went to the University of London to study law and computing. Her father had dreams of her becoming a lecturer in law; her mother nurtured dreams of her daughter taking silk, perhaps even becoming a judge and then using the law to crush corporate hegemonies whenever they appeared. And then Daisy went and ruined everything by taking the entry exams and joining the police force. The police welcomed her with open arms: on the one hand, there were directives on the need to improve the diversity of the force, while on the other, computer crime and computer-related fraud was on the increase. They needed Daisy. Frankly, they needed a whole string of Daisies.

  At this point, four years on, it would be fair to say that a career in the police force had failed to live up to Daisy’s expectations. It was not, as her parents had warned her repeatedly, that the police force was an institutionally racist and sexist monolith that would crush her individuality into something soul-destroying and uniform, that would make her as much a part of the canteen culture as instant coffee. No, the frustrating part of it was getting other coppers to understand that she was a copper, too. She had come to the conclusion that, for most coppers, police work was something you did to protect Middle England from scary people of the wrong social background, who were probably out to steal their cell phones. From where Daisy stood it was about something else. Daisy knew that a kid in his den in Germany could send out a virus that would shut down a hospital, causing more damage than a bomb. Daisy was of the opinion that the real bad guys these days understood FTP sites and high-level encryption and disposable prepaid cell phones. She was not sure that the good guys did.