Anansi Boys Read online

Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad: there was pity in that expression, along with almost infinite compassion.

  She touched a finger to her lips and pulled him back toward the door. He looked back into the hospital room: Rosie did not appear to be killing Spider. Quite the opposite, if anything. “Oh,” said Charlie.

  They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You’d miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.

  Charlie turned his attention back to the corridor to find Daisy in conversation with several doctors and the police officer they had encountered the previous evening.

  “Well, we always had him figured as a bad man,” the police officer was saying to Daisy. “I mean, frankly, you only get this kind of behavior from foreigners. The local people, they simply wouldn’t do that kind of thing.”

  “Obviously not,” said Daisy.

  “Very. Very grateful,” said the police chief, patting her shoulder in a way that set Daisy’s teeth on edge. “This little lady saved that woman’s life,” he told Charlie, giving his shoulder a patronizing pat for good measure, before setting off with the doctors down the corridor.

  “So what’s happening?” asked Charlie.

  “Well, Grahame Coats is dead,” she said. “More or less. And they don’t hold out any hope for Rosie’s mum, either.”

  “I see,” said Charlie. He thought about this. Then he finished thinking and came to a decision. Said, “Would you mind if I just chatted to my brother for a bit? I think he and I need to talk.”

  “I’m going back to the hotel anyway. I’m going to check my e-mail. Probably going to have to say sorry on the phone a lot. Find out if I still have a career.”

  “But you’re a hero, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t think that’s what anyone was paying me for,” she said, a little wanly. “Come and find me at the hotel when you’re done.”

  Spider and Charlie walked down the Williamstown high street in the morning sun.

  “You know, that really is a good hat,” said Spider.

  “You really think so?”

  “Yeah. Can I try it on?”

  Charlie gave Spider the green fedora. Spider put it on, looked at his reflection in a shop window. He made a face and gave Charlie the hat back. “Well,” he said, disappointed, “it looks good on you, anyway.”

  Charlie pushed his fedora back onto his head. Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you. This hat was one of those, and Charlie was up to it. He said, “Rosie’s mum is dying.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I really, really never liked her.”

  “I didn’t know her as well as you did. But given time, I’m sure I would have really, really disliked her too.”

  Charlie said, “We have to try and save her life, don’t we?” He said it without enthusiasm, like someone pointing out it was time to visit the dentist.

  “I don’t think we can do things like that.”

  “Dad did something like it for mum. He got her better, for a while.”

  “But that was him. I don’t know how we’d do that.”

  Charlie said, “The place at the end of the world. With the caves.”

  “Beginning of the world, not the end. What about it?”

  “Can we just get there? Without all that candles-and-herbs malarkey?”

  Spider was quiet. Then he nodded, “I think so.”

  They turned together, turned in a direction that wasn’t usually there, and they walked away from the Williamstown high street.

  Now the sun was rising, and Charlie and Spider walked across a beach littered with skulls. They were not proper human skulls, and they covered the beach like yellow pebbles. Charlie avoided them where he could, while Spider crunched his way through them. At the end of the beach they took a left turn that was left to absolutely everything, and the mountains at the beginning of the world towered above them and the cliffs fell away below.

  Charlie remembered the last time he was here, and it seemed like a thousand years ago. “Where is everyone?” he said aloud, and his voice echoed against the rocks and came back to him. He said, loudly, “Hello?”

  And then they were there, watching him. All of them. They seemed grander, now, less human, more animal, wilder. He realized that he had seen them as people last time because he had expected to meet people. But they were not people. Arrayed on the rocks above them were Lion and Elephant, Crocodile and Python, Rabbit and Scorpion, and the rest of them, hundreds of them, and they stared at him with eyes unsmiling: animals he recognized; animals that no one living would be able to identify. All the animals that have ever been in stories. All the animals that people have dreamed of, worshipped, or placated.

  Charlie saw all of them.

  It’s one thing, he thought, singing for your life, in a room filled with diners, on the spur of the moment, with a gun barrel in the ribs of the girl you…

  That you…

  Oh.

  Well, thought Charlie, I can worry about that later.

  Right now he badly wanted either to breathe into a brown paper bag or to vanish.

  “There must be hundreds of them,” said Spider, and there was awe in his voice.

  There was a flurry in the air, on a nearby rock, which resolved itself into the Bird Woman. She folded her arms and stared at them.

  “Whatever it is you’re going to do,” Spider said, “you better do it soon. They aren’t going to wait around forever.”

  Charlie’s mouth was dry. “Right.”

  Spider said, “So. Um. What exactly do we do now?”

  “We sing to them,” said Charlie, simply.

  “What?”

  “It’s how we fix things. I figured it out. We just sing it all, you and I.”

  “I don’t understand. Sing what?”

  Charlie said, “The song. You sing the song, you fix things.” Now he sounded desperate. “The song.”

  Spider’s eyes were like puddles after the rain, and Charlie saw things in them he had not seen before: affection, perhaps, and confusion and, mostly, apology. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Lion watched them from the side of a boulder. Monkey looked at them from the top of a tree. And Tiger…

  Charlie saw Tiger. It was walking gingerly on four feet. Its face was swollen and bruised, but there was a glint in its eyes, and it looked as if it would be more than happy to even the score.

  Charlie opened his mouth. A small croaking noise came out, as if Charlie had recently swallowed a particularly nervous frog. “It’s no use,” he whispered to Spider. “This was a stupid idea, wasn’t it?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you think we can just go away again?” Charlie’s nervous glance swept the mountainside and the caves, took in each of the hundreds of totem creatures from before the dawn of time. There was one he had not seen the last time he had looked: a small man, with lemon yellow gloves and a pencil-thin moustache and no fedora hat to cover his thinning hair.

  The old man winked when he caught Charlie’s gaze.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

  Charlie filled his lungs, and he began to sing. “I am Charlie,” he sang. “I am Anansi’s son. Listen as I sing my song. Listen to my life.”

  He sang them the song of a boy who was half a god, and who was broken into two by an old woman with a grudge. He sang of his father, and he sang of his mother.

  He sang of names and words, of the building blocks beneath
the real, the worlds that make worlds, the truths beneath the way things are; he sang of appropriate ends and just conclusions for those who would have hurt him and his.

  He sang the world.

  It was a good song, and it was his song. Sometimes it had words, and sometimes it didn’t have any words at all.

  As he sang, all the creatures listening began to clap and to stamp and to hum along; Charlie felt like he was the conduit for a great song that took in all of them. He sang of birds, of the magic of looking up and seeing them in flight, of the sheen of the sun on a wing feather in the morning.

  The totem creatures were dancing now, the dances of their kind. The Bird Woman danced the wheeling dance of birds, fanning her tail feathers, tossing back her beak.

  There was only one creature on the mountainside who did not dance.

  Tiger lashed his tail. He was not clapping or singing or dancing. His face was bruised purple, and his body was covered in welts and in bite marks. He had padded down the rocks, a step at a time, until he was close to Charlie. “The songs aren’t yours,” he growled.

  Charlie looked at him, and sang about Tiger, and about Grahame Coats, and those who would prey upon the innocent. He turned: Spider was looking up at him with admiration. Tiger roared in anger, and Charlie took the roar and wound his song around it. Then he did the roar himself, just like Tiger had done it. Well, the roar began just as Tiger’s roar had, but then Charlie changed it, so it became a really goofy sort of roar, and all the creatures watching from the rocks started to laugh. They couldn’t help it. Charlie did the goofy roar again. Like any impersonation, like any perfect caricature, it had the effect of making what it made fun of intrinsically ridiculous. No one would ever hear Tiger roar again without hearing Charlie’s roar underneath it. “Goofy sort of a roar,” they’d say.

  Tiger turned his back on Charlie. He loped through the crowd, roaring as he ran, which only made the crowd laugh the harder. Tiger angrily retreated back into his cave.

  Spider gestured with his hands, a curt movement.

  There was a rumble, and the mouth of Tiger’s cave collapsed in a small rock slide. Spider looked satisfied. Charlie kept singing.

  He sang the song of Rosie Noah and the song of Rosie’s mother: he sang a long life for Mrs Noah and all the happiness that she deserved.

  He sang of his life, all of their lives, and in his song he saw the pattern of their lives as a web that a fly had blundered into, and with his song he wrapped the fly, made certain it would not escape, and he repaired the web with new strands.

  And now the song was coming to its natural end.

  Charlie realized, with no little surprise, that he enjoyed singing to other people, and he knew, at that moment, that this was what he would spend the rest of his life doing. He would sing: not big, magical songs that made worlds or recreated existence. Just small songs that would make people happy for a breath, make them move, make them for a little while, forget their problems. And he knew that there would always be the fear before performing, the stage fright, that would never go away, but he also understood that it would be like jumping into a swimming pool—only uncomfortably chill for a few seconds—and then the discomfort would pass and it would be good…

  Never this good. Never this good again. But good enough.

  And then he was done. Charlie hung his head. The creatures on the cliff top let the last notes die away, stopped stamping, stopped clapping, stopped dancing. Charlie took off his father’s green fedora and fanned his face with it.

  Under his breath, Spider said, “That was amazing.”

  “You could have done it too,” said Charlie.

  “I don’t think so. What was happening at the end? I felt you doing something, but I couldn’t really tell what it was.”

  “I fixed things,” said Charlie. “For us. I think. I’m not really sure…” And he wasn’t. Now the song was over, the content of the song was unraveling like a dream in the morning.

  He pointed to the cave mouth that was blocked by rocks. “Did you do that?”

  “Yeah,” said Spider. “Seemed the least I could do. Tiger will dig his way out eventually, though. I wish I’d done something worse than just shut the door on him, to be honest.”

  “Not to worry,” said Charlie. “I did. Something much worse.”

  He watched the animals disperse. His father was nowhere to be seen, which did not surprise him. “Come on,” he said. “We ought to be getting back.”

  SPIDER WENT BACK TO SEE ROSIE AT VISITING TIME. HE WAS carrying a large box of chocolates, the largest that the hospital gift shop sold.

  “For you,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “They told me,” she said, “that they think my mum’s going to pull through. Apparently she opened her eyes and asked for porridge. The doctor said it’s a miracle.”

  “Yup. Your mother asking for food. Certainly sounds like a miracle to me.”

  She swatted his arm with her hand, then left her hand resting on his arm.

  “You know,” she said, after a while, “You’re going to think this is silly of me. But when I was in the dark, with Mum, I thought that you were helping me. I felt like you were keeping the beast at bay. That if you hadn’t’ve done what you were doing, he would have killed us.”

  “Um. I probably helped.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I was in trouble as well, and I thought about you.”

  “Were you in very big trouble?”

  “Enormous. Yes.”

  “Will you pour me a glass of water, please?”

  He did. She said, “Spider, what do you do?”

  “Do?”

  “For a job.”

  “Whatever I feel like doing.”

  “I think,” she said, “I may stay here, for a bit. The nurses have been telling me how much they need teachers here. I’d like to see that I was making a difference.”

  “That might be fun.”

  “And what would you do, if I did?”

  “Oh. Well, if you were here, I’m sure I could find something to keep me busy.”

  Their fingers twined, tight as a ship’s knot.

  “Do you think we can make this work?” she asked.

  “I think so,” said Spider, soberly. “And if I get bored with you, I’ll just go away and do something else. So not to worry.”

  “Oh,” said Rosie, “I’m not worried.” And she wasn’t. There was steel in her voice beneath the softness. You could tell where her mother got it from.

  CHARLIE FOUND DAISY ON A DECK CHAIR OUT ON THE BEACH. He thought she was asleep in the sun. When his shadow touched her, she said, “Hello Charlie.” She didn’t open her eyes.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “Your hat smells like a cigar. Are you going to be getting rid of it soon?”

  “No,” said Charlie. “I told you. Family heirloom. I plan to wear it till I die, then leave it to my children. So. Do you still have a job with the police force?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “My boss said that it’s been decided that what I was suffering from was nervous exhaustion brought on by overwork, and I’m on sick leave until I feel well enough to come back.”

  “Ah. And when will that be?”

  “Not sure,” she said. “Can you pass the suntan oil?”

  He had a box in his pocket. He took it out and put it on the arm of the deck chair. “In a minute. Er.” He paused. “You know,” he said, “we’ve already done the big embarrassing one of these at gunpoint.” He opened the box. “But this is for you, from me. Well, Rosie returned it to me. And we can swap it for one you like. Pick out a different one. Probably it won’t even fit. But it’s yours. If you want it. And um. Me.”

  She reached into the box and took out the engagement ring.

  “Hmph. All right,” she said. “As long as you’re not just doing it to get the lime back.”

  TIGER PROWLED. HIS TAIL LASHED IRRITABLY FROM SIDE TO side as he pa
ced back and forth across the mouth of his cave. His eyes burned like emerald torches in the shadows.

  “Whole world and everything used to be mine,” said Tiger. “Moon and stars and sun and stories. I owned them all.”

  “I feel it incumbent on me to point out,” said a small voice from the back of the cave, “that you said that already.”

  Tiger paused in his pacing; he turned then and insinuated himself into the back of his cave, rippling as he walked, like a fur rug over hydraulic springs. He padded back until he came to the carcass of an ox, and he said, in a quiet voice, “I beg your pardon.”

  There was a scrabbling from inside the carcass. The tip of a nose protruded from the rib cage. “Actually,” it said, “I was, so to speak, agreeing with you. That was what I was doing.”

  Little white hands pulled a thin strip of dried meat from between two ribs, revealing a small animal the color of dirty snow. It might have been an albino mongoose, or perhaps some particularly shifty kind of weasel in its winter coat. It had a scavenger’s eyes.

  “Whole world and everything used to be mine. Moon and stars and sun and stories. I owned them all.” Then he said, “Would have been mine again.”

  Tiger stared down at the little beast. Then, without warning, one huge paw descended, smashing the rib cage, breaking the carcass into foul-smelling fragments, pinning the little animal to the floor; it wriggled and writhed, but it could not escape.

  “You are here,” said Tiger, his huge head nose to nose with the pale animal’s tiny head, “you are here under my sufferance. Do you understand that? Because the next time you say something irritating, I shall bite your head off.”

  “Mmmph,” said the weasely thing.

  “You wouldn’t like it if I bit off your head, would you?”

  “Nngk,” said the smaller animal. Its eyes were a pale blue, two chips of ice, and they glinted as it twisted uncomfortably beneath the weight of the huge paw.

  “So will you promise me that you will behave, and you will be quiet?” rumbled Tiger. He lifted his paw a little to allow the beast to speak.

  “Indeedy,” said the small white thing, extremely politely. Then, with one weasely movement, it twisted and sank its sharp little teeth into Tiger’s paw. Tiger bellowed in pain, whipped the paw back, sending the little animal flying through the air. It struck the rock ceiling, bounced over to a ledge, and from there it darted, like a dirty white streak, to the very back of the cave, where the ceiling got low and close to the floor, and where there were many hiding places for a small animal, places a larger animal could not go.