by Neil Gaiman
“Well,” said Fat Charlie, “I know he’s on it. But these things do take time.”
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose they must do. I called the BBC and they said they’d made several payments since Morris’s death. You know, they’ve released the whole of Morris Livingstone, I Presume on DVD now? And they’re bringing out both series of Short Back and Sides for Christmas.”
“I didn’t know,” admitted Fat Charlie. “But I’m sure Grahame Coats does. He’s always on top of that kind of thing.”
“I had to buy my own DVD,” she said, wistfully. “Still, it brought it all back. The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the BBC club. Made me miss the spotlight, I can tell you that for nothing. That was how I met Morris, you know. I was a dancer. I had my own career.”
Fat Charlie told her that he’d let Grahame Coats know that her bank manager was a bit concerned, and he put down the phone.
He wondered how anyone could ever miss the spotlight.
In Fat Charlie’s worst nightmares, a spotlight shone down upon him from a dark sky onto a wide stage, and unseen figures would try to force Fat Charlie to stand in the spotlight and sing. And no matter how far or how fast he ran, or how well he hid, they would find him and drag him back onto the stage, in front of dozens of expectant faces. He would always awake before he actually had to sing, sweating and trembling, his heart beating a cannonade in his chest.
A day’s work passed. Fat Charlie had worked there almost two years. He had been there longer than anyone except Grahame Coats himself, for the staff turnover at the Grahame Coats Agency tended to be high. And still, nobody had been pleased to see him.
Fat Charlie would sometimes sit at his desk and stare out of the window as the loveless gray rain rattled against the glass, and he would imagine himself on a tropical beach somewhere, with the breakers crashing from an impossibly blue sea onto the impossibly yellow sands. Often Fat Charlie would wonder if the people on the beach in his imagination, watching the white fingers of the waves as they wriggled toward the shore, listening to the tropical birds whistling in the palm trees, whether they ever dreamed of being in England, in the rain, in a cupboard-sized room in a fifth-floor office, a safe distance from the dullness of the pure golden sand and the hellish boredom of a day so perfect that not even a creamy drink containing slightly too much rum and a red paper umbrella can do anything to alleviate it. It comforted him.
He stopped at the off-license on the way home and bought a bottle of German white wine, and a patchouli-scented candle from the tiny supermarket next door, and picked up a pizza from the Pizza Place nearby.
Rosie phoned from her yoga class at 7:30 PM to let him know that she was going to be a little late, then from her car at 8:00 PM to let him know she was stuck in traffic, at 9:15 to let him know that she was now just around the corner, by which time Fat Charlie had drunk most of the bottle of white wine on his own, and consumed all but one lonely triangle of pizza.
Later, he wondered if it was the wine that made him say it.
Rosie arrived at 9:20, with towels, and a Tescos bag filled with shampoos, soaps, and a large pot of hair mayonnaise. She said no, briskly but cheerfully, to a glass of the white wine and the slice of pizza—she had, she explained, eaten in the traffic jam. She had ordered in. So Fat Charlie sat in the kitchen, and poured himself the final glass of white wine, and picked the cheese and the pepperoni from the top of the cold pizza while Rosie went off to run the bath and then started, suddenly and quite loudly, to scream.
Fat Charlie made it to the bathroom before the first scream had finished dying away, and while Rosie was filling her lungs for the second. He was convinced that he would find her dripping with blood. To his surprise and relief, she was not bleeding. She was wearing a blue bra and panties, and was pointing to the bath, in the center of which sat a large brown garden spider.
“I’m sorry,” she wailed. “It took me by surprise.”
“They can do that,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ll just wash it away.”
“Don’t you dare,” said Rosie, fiercely. “It’s a living thing. Take it outside.”
“Right,” said Fat Charlie.
“I’ll wait in the kitchen,” she said. “Tell me when it’s all over.”
When you have drunk an entire bottle of white wine, coaxing a rather skittish garden spider into a clear plastic tumbler using only an old birthday card becomes more of a challenge to hand-eye coordination than it is at other times; a challenge that is not helped by a partially unclothed fiancée on the edge of hysterics, who, despite her announcement that she would wait in the kitchen, is instead leaning over your shoulder and offering advice.
But soon enough, despite the help, he had the spider inside the tumbler, the mouth of which was firmly covered by a card from an old schoolfriend which told him that YOU ARE ONLY AS OLD AS YOU FEEL (and, on the inside humorously topped this with SO STOP FEELING YOURSELF YOU SEX MANIAC—HAPPY BIRTHDAY).
He took the spider downstairs and out of the front door, into the tiny front garden, which consisted of a hedge, for people to throw up in, and several large flagstones with grass growing up between them. He held the tumbler up. In the yellow sodium light, the spider was black. He imagined it was staring at him.
“Sorry about that,” he said to the spider, and, white wine slooshing comfortably around inside him, he said it aloud.
He put the card and the tumbler down on a cracked flagstone, and he lifted the tumbler, and waited for the spider to scuttle away. Instead, it simply sat, unmoving, on the face of the cheerful cartoon teddy bear on the birthday card. The man and the spider regarded each other.
Something that Mrs. Higgler said came to him then, and the words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Perhaps it was the devil in him. Probably it was the alcohol.
“If you see my brother,” said Fat Charlie to the spider, “tell him he ought to come by and say hello.”
The spider remained where it was, and raised one leg, almost as if it were thinking it over, then it scuttled across the flagstone toward the hedge, and was gone.
ROSIE HAD HER BATH, AND SHE GAVE FAT CHARLIE A LINGERing peck on the cheek, and she went home.
Fat Charlie turned on the TV, but he found himself nodding so he turned it off, and went to bed, where he dreamed a dream of such vividness and peculiarity that it would remain with him for the rest of his life.
One way that you know something is a dream is that you are somewhere you have never been in real life. Fat Charlie had never been to California. He had never been to Beverly Hills. He had seen it enough, though, in movies and on television to feel a comfortable thrill of recognition. A party was going on.
The lights of Los Angeles glimmered and twinkled beneath them.
The people at the party seemed to divide neatly into the ones with the silver plates, covered with perfect canapés, and the ones who picked things off the silver plates, or who declined to. The ones who were being fed moved around the huge house gossiping, smiling, talking, each as certain of his or her relative importance in the world of Hollywood as were the courtiers in the court of ancient Japan—and, just as in the ancient Japanese court, each of them was certain that, just one rung up the ladder, they would be safe. There were actors who wished to be stars, stars who wanted to be independent producers, independent producers who craved the safety of a studio job, directors who wanted to be stars, studio bosses who wanted to be the bosses of other, less precarious studios, studio lawyers who wanted to be liked for themselves or, failing that, just wanted to be liked.
In Fat Charlie’s dream, he could see himself from inside and outside at the same time, and he was not himself. In Fat Charlie’s usual dreams he was probably just sitting down for an exam on double-entry bookkeeping that he had forgotten to study for in circumstances which made it a certainty that when he finally stood up he would discover that he had somehow neglected to put anything on below the waist when he got dressed that morning. In his dreams, Fat Charlie was him
self, only clumsier.
Not in this dream.
In this dream, Fat Charlie was cool, and beyond cool. He was slick, he was fly, he was smart, he was the only person at the party without a silver tray who had not received an invitation. And (this was something that was a source of astonishment to the sleeping Fat Charlie, who could think of nothing more embarrassing than being anywhere without an invitation) he was having a marvelous time.
He told each person who asked him a different story about who he was and why he was there. After half an hour, most of the people at the party were convinced that he was the representative of a foreign investment house, seeking to buy outright one of the studios, and after another half an hour it was common knowledge at the party that he would be putting in a bid for Paramount.
His laugh was raucous and infectious, and he seemed to be having a better time than any of the other people at the party, that was for certain. He instructed the barman in the preparation of a cocktail he called a “Double Entendre” which, while it seemed to begin with a base of champagne, he explained was actually scientifically nonalcoholic. It contained a splash of this and a splash of that until it went a vivid purple color, and he handed them out to the partygoers, pressing them upon them with joy and enthusiasm until even the people who had been sipping fizzy water warily, as if it might go off, were knocking back the purple drinks with pleasure.
And then, with the logic of dreams, he was leading them all down to the pool, and was proposing to teach them the trick of Walking on the Water. It was all a matter of confidence, he told them, of attitude, of attack, of knowing how to do it. And it seemed to the people at the party that Walking on the Water would be a very fine trick to master, something they had always known how to do, deep down in their souls, but they had forgotten, and that this man would remind them of the technique of it.
Take off your shoes, he said to them, so they took off their shoes, Sergio Rossis and Christian Louboutins and Renè Caovillas lined up side by side with Nikes and Doc Martens and anonymous black leather agent-shoes, and he led them, in a sort of a conga line, around the side of the swimming pool and then out onto its surface. The water was cool to the touch, and it quivered, like thick jelly, under their feet; some women, and several men, tittered at this, and a couple of the younger agents began jumping up and down on the surface of the pool, like children at a bouncy castle. Far below them the lights of Los Angeles shone through the smog, like distant galaxies.
Soon every inch of the pool was taken up with partygoers—standing, dancing, shaking or bouncing up and down on the water. The press of the crowd was so strong that the fly guy, the Charlie-in-his-dream, stepped back onto the concrete poolside to take a falafel-sashimi ball from a silver plate.
A spider dropped from a jasmine plant onto the fly guy’s shoulder. It scuttled down his arm and onto the palm of his hand, where he greeted it with a delighted Heyyy.
There was a silence, as if he was listening to something the spider was saying, something only he could hear; then he said, Ask, and you shall receive. Ain’t that the truth?
He placed the spider down, carefully, on a jasmine leaf.
And at that selfsame moment, each of the people standing barefoot on the surface of the swimming pool remembered that water was a liquid, and not a solid, and that there was a reason why people did not commonly walk, let alone dance or even bounce, on water, viz., its impossibility.
They were the movers and the shakers of the dream machine, those people, and suddenly they were flailing, fully dressed, in from four to twelve feet of water, wet and scrabbling and terrified.
Casually, the fly guy walked across the pool, treading on the heads of people, and on the hands of other people, and never once losing his balance. Then, when he reached the far end of the pool, where everything dropped into a steep hill, he took one huge jump and dove into the lights of Los Angeles at night, which shimmered and swallowed him like an ocean.
The people in the pool scrambled out, angry, upset, confused, wet, and in some cases, half-drowned…
It was early in the morning in South London. The light was blue-gray.
Fat Charlie got out of bed, troubled by his dream, and walked to the window. The curtains were open. He could see the sunrise beginning, a huge blood orange of a morning sun surrounded by gray clouds tinged with scarlet. It was the kind of sky that makes even the most prosaic person discover a deeply buried urge to start painting in oils.
Fat Charlie looked at the sunrise. Red sky in the morning, he thought. Sailor’s warning.
His dream had been so strange. A party in Hollywood. The secret of Walking on the Water. And that man, who was him and was not him…
Fat Charlie realized that he knew the man in his dream, knew him from somewhere, and he also realized that this would irritate him for the rest of the day if he let it, like a snag of dental floss caught between two teeth, or the precise difference between the words lubricious and lascivious, it would sit there, and it would irritate him.
He stared out of the window.
It was barely six in the morning, and the world was quiet. An early dog-walker, at the end of the road, was encouraging a Pomeranian to defecate. A postman ambled from house to house and back to his red van. And then something moved on the pavement beneath his house, and Fat Charlie looked down.
A man was standing by the hedge. When he saw that Fat Charlie, in pajamas, was looking down at him, he grinned, and waved. A moment of recognition that shocked Fat Charlie to the core: he was familiar with both the grin and the wave, although he could not immediately see how. Something of the dream still hung about Fat Charlie’s head, making him uncomfortable, making the world seem unreal. He rubbed his eyes, and now the person by the hedge was gone. Fat Charlie hoped that the man had moved on, wandered down the road into the remnants of the hanging morning mist, taking whatever awkwardnesses and irritants and madnesses he had brought away with him.
And then the doorbell rang.
Fat Charlie pulled on his dressing gown, and he went downstairs.
He had never fastened the safety chain before opening a door, never in his life, but before he turned the handle he clicked the head of the chain into place, and he pulled the front door open six inches.
“Morning?” he said, warily.
The smile that came through the crack in the door could have illuminated a small village.
“You called me and I came,” said the stranger. “Now. You going to open this door for me, Fat Charlie?”
“Who are you?” As he said it, he knew where he had seen the man before: at his mother’s funeral service, in the little chapel at the crematorium. That was the last time he had seen that smile. And he knew the answer, knew it even before the man could say the words.
“I’m your brother,” said the man.
Fat Charlie closed the door. He slipped off the safety chain and opened the door all the way. The man was still there.
Fat Charlie was not entirely sure how to greet a potentially imaginary brother he had not previously believed in. So they stood there, one on one side of the door, one on the other, until his brother said, “You can call me Spider. You going to invite me in?”
“Yes. I am. Of course I am. Please. Come in.”
Fat Charlie led the man upstairs.
Impossible things happen. When they do happen, most people just deal with it. Today, like every day, roughly five thousand people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things, and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses. Most of them will say the equivalent, in their own language, of “Funny old world, isn’t it?” and just keep going. So while part of Fat Charlie was trying to come up with logical, sensible, sane explanations for what was going on, most of him was simply getting used to the idea that a brother he hadn’t known he had was walking up the staircase behind him.
They got to the kitchen and stood there.
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
&nbs
p; “Got any coffee?”
“Only instant, I’m afraid.”
“That’s fine.”
Fat Charlie turned on the kettle. “You come far, then?” he asked.
“Los Angeles.”
“How was the flight?”
The man sat down at the kitchen table. Now he shrugged. It was the kind of shrug that could have meant anything.
“Um. You planning on staying long?”
“I haven’t really given it much thought.” The man—Spider—looked around Fat Charlie’s kitchen as if he had never been in a kitchen before.
“How do you take your coffee?”
“Dark as night, sweet as sin.”
Fat Charlie put the mug down in front of him, and passed him a sugar bowl. “Help yourself.”
While Spider spooned teaspoon after teaspoon of sugar into his coffee, Fat Charlie sat opposite him, and stared.
There was a family resemblance between the two men. That was unarguable, although that alone did not explain the intense feeling of familiarity that Fat Charlie felt on seeing Spider. His brother looked like Fat Charlie wished he looked in his mind, unconstrained by the faintly disappointing fellow that he saw, with monotonous regularity, in the bathroom mirror. Spider was taller, and leaner, and cooler. He was wearing a black-and-scarlet leather jacket, and black leather leggings, and he looked at home in them. Fat Charlie tried to remember if this was what the fly guy had been wearing in his dream. There was something larger-than-life about him: simply being on the other side of the table to this man made Fat Charlie feel awkward and badly constructed, and slightly foolish. It wasn’t the clothes Spider wore, but the knowledge that if Fat Charlie put them on he would look as if he were wearing some kind of unconvincing drag. It wasn’t the way Spider smiled—casually, delightedly—but Fat Charlie’s cold, incontrovertible certainty that he himself could practice smiling in front of a mirror from now until the end of time and never manage a single smile one half so charming, so cocky, or so twinklingly debonair.