by Neil Gaiman
“You were at Mum’s cremation,” said Fat Charlie.
“I thought about coming over to talk to you after the service,” said Spider. “I just wasn’t certain that it would be a good idea.”
“I wish you had.” Fat Charlie thought of something. He said, “I would have thought you’d have been at Dad’s funeral.”
Spider said, “What?”
“His funeral. It was in Florida. Couple of days ago.”
Spider shook his head. “He’s not dead,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I’d know if he were dead.”
“He’s dead. I buried him. Well, I filled the grave. Ask Mrs. Higgler.”
Spider said, “How’d he die?”
“Heart failure.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. That just means he died.”
“Well, yes. He did.”
Spider had stopped smiling. Now he was staring down into his coffee as if he suspected he was going to be able to find an answer in there. “I ought to check this out,” said Spider. “It’s not that I don’t believe you. But when it’s your old man. Even when your old man is my old man.” And he made a face. Fat Charlie knew what that face meant. He had made it himself, from the inside, enough times, when the subject of his father came up. “Is she still living in the same place? Next door to where we grew up?”
“Mrs. Higgler? Yes. Still there.”
“You don’t have anything from there, do you? A picture? Maybe a photograph?”
“I brought home a box of them.” Fat Charlie had not opened the large cardboard box yet. It was still sitting in the hall. He carried the box into the kitchen and put it down on the table. He took a kitchen knife and cut the packing tape that surrounded it; Spider reached into the box with his thin fingers, riffling through the photographs like playing cards, until he pulled out one of their mother and Mrs. Higgler, sitting on Mrs. Higgler’s porch, twenty-five years earlier.
“Is that porch still there?”
Fat Charlie tried to remember. “I think so,” he said.
Later, he was unable to remember whether the picture grew very big, or Spider grew very small. He could have sworn that neither of those things had actually happened; nevertheless, it was unarguable that Spider had walked into the photograph, and it had shimmered and rippled and swallowed him up.
Fat Charlie rubbed his eyes. He was alone in the kitchen at six in the morning. There was a box filled with photographs and papers on the kitchen table, along with an empty mug, which he placed in the sink. He walked along the hall to his bedroom, lay down on his bed and slept until the alarm went off at seven fifteen.
CHAPTER FOUR
WHICH CONCLUDES WITH AN EVENING OF WINE, WOMEN AND SONG
FAT CHARLIE WOKE UP.
Memories of dreams of a meeting with some film-star brother mingled with a dream in which President Taft had come to stay, bringing with him the entire cast of the cartoon. Tom and Jerry. He showered, and he took the tube to work.
All through the workday something was nagging at the back of his head, and he didn’t know what it was. He misplaced things. He forgot things. At one point, he started singing at his desk, not because he was happy, but because he forgot not to. He only realized he was doing it when Grahame Coats himself put his head around the door of Fat Charlie’s closet to chide him. “No radios, Walkmans, MP3 players or similar instruments of music at the office,” said Grahame Coats, with a ferrety glare. “It bespeaks a lackadaisical attitude, of the kind one abhors in the workaday world.”
“It wasn’t the radio,” admitted Fat Charlie, his ears burning.
“No? Then what, pray tell, was it?”
“It was me,” said Fat Charlie.
“You?”
“Yes. I was singing. I’m sorry—”
“I could have sworn it was the radio. And yet I was wrong. Good Lord. Well, with such a wealth of talents at your disposal, with such remarkable skills, perhaps you should leave us to tread the boards, entertain the multitudes, possibly do an end-of-the-pier show, rather than cluttering up a desk in an office where other people are trying to work. Eh? A place where people’s careers are being managed.”
“No,” said Fat Charlie. “I don’t want to leave. I just wasn’t thinking.”
“Then,” said Grahame Coats, “you must learn to refrain from singing—save in the bath, the shower, or perchance the stands as you support your favorite football team. I myself am a Crystal Palace supporter. Or you will find yourself seeking gainful employment elsewhere.”
Fat Charlie smiled, then realized that smiling wasn’t what he wanted to do at all, and looked serious, but by that point Grahame Coats had left the room, so Fat Charlie swore under his breath, folded his arms on the desk and put his head on them.
“Was that you singing?” It was one of the new girls in the Artist Liaison department. Fat Charlie never managed to learn their names. They were always gone by then.
“I’m afraid so.”
“What were you singing? It was pretty.”
Fat Charlie realized he didn’t know. He said, “I’m not sure. I wasn’t listening.”
She laughed at that, although quietly. “He’s right. You should be making records, not wasting your time here.”
Fat Charlie didn’t know what to say. Cheeks burning, he started crossing out numbers and making notes and gathering up Post-it notes with messages on them and putting those messages up on the screen, until he was sure that she had gone.
Maeve Livingstone phoned: Could Fat Charlie please ensure that Grahame Coats phoned her bank manager. He said he’d do his best. She told him pointedly to see that he did.
Rosie called him on his mobile at four in the afternoon, to let him know that the water was now back on again in her flat and to tell him that, good news, her mother had decided to take an interest in the upcoming wedding and had asked her to come round that evening and discuss it.
“Well,” said Fat Charlie. “If she’s organizing the dinner, we’ll save a fortune on food.”
“That’s not nice. I’ll call you tonight and let you know how it went.”
Fat Charlie told her that he loved her, and he clicked the phone off. Someone was looking at him. He turned around.
Grahame Coats said, “He who maketh personal phone calls on company time, lo he shall reap the whirlwind. Do you know who said that?”
“You did?”
“Indeed I did,” said Grahame Coats. “Indeed I did. And never a truer word was spoken. Consider this a formal warning.” And he smiled then, the kind of self-satisfied smile that forced Fat Charlie to ponder the various probable outcomes of sinking his fist into Grahame Coats’s comfortably padded midsection. He decided that it would be a toss-up between being fired and an action for assault. Either way, he thought, it would be a fine thing…
Fat Charlie was not by nature a violent man; still, he could dream. His daydreams tended to be small and comfortable things. He would like to have enough money to eat in good restaurants whenever he wished. He wanted a job in which nobody could tell him what to do. He wanted to be able to sing without embarrassment, somewhere there were never any people around to hear him.
This afternoon, however, his daydreams assumed a different shape: he could fly, for a start, and bullets bounced off his mighty chest as he zoomed down from the sky and rescued Rosie from a band of kidnapping scoundrels and dastards. She would hold him tightly as they flew off into the sunset, off to his Fortress of Cool, where she would be so overwhelmed with feelings of gratitude that she would enthusiastically decide not to bother with the whole waiting-until-they-were-married bit, and would start to see how high and how fast they could fill their jar…
The daydream eased the stress of life in the Grahame Coats Agency, of telling people that their checks were in the post, of calling in money the agency was owed.
At 6:00 PM Fat Charlie turned off his computer, and walked down the five flights of stairs to the street. It had not rained. Overhead, the starlings were wheeling and ch
eeping: the dusk chorus of a city. Everyone on the pavement was hurrying somewhere. Most of them, like Fat Charlie, were walking up Kingsway to Holborn tube. They had their heads down and the look about them of people who wanted to get home for the night.
There was one person on the pavement who wasn’t going anywhere, though. He stood there, facing Fat Charlie and the remaining commuters, and his leather jacket flapped in the wind. He was not smiling.
Fat Charlie saw him from the end of the street. As he walked toward him everything became unreal. The day melted, and he realized what he had spent the day trying to remember.
“Hello, Spider,” he said, when he got close.
Spider looked like a storm was raging inside him. He might have been about to cry. Fat Charlie didn’t know. There was too much emotion on his face, in the way he stood, so the people on the street looked away, ashamed.
“I went out there,” he said. His voice was dull. “I saw Mrs. Higgler. She took me to the grave. My father died, and I didn’t know.”
Fat Charlie said, “He was my father too, Spider.” He wondered how he could have forgotten Spider, how he could have dismissed him so easily as a dream.
“True.”
The dusk sky was crosshatched with starlings; they wheeled and crossed from rooftop to rooftop.
Spider jerked, and stood straight. He seemed to have come to a decision. “You are so right,” he said. “We got to do this together.”
“Exactly,” said Fat Charlie. Then he said, “Do what?” but Spider had already hailed a cab.
“We are men with troubles,” said Spider to the world. “Our father is no more. Our hearts are heavy in our chests. Sorrow settles upon us like pollen in hay fever season. Darkness is our lot, and misfortune our only companion.”
“Right, gentlemen,” said the cabbie, brightly. “Where am I taking you?”
“To where the three remedies for darkness of the soul may be found,” said Spider.
“Maybe we could get a curry,” suggested Fat Charlie.
“There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life,” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song.”
“Curry’s nice too,” pointed out Fat Charlie, but nobody was listening to him.
“In any particular order?” asked the cabbie.
“Wine first,” Spider announced. “Rivers and lakes and vast oceans of wine.”
“Right you are,” said the cabbie, and he pulled out into the traffic.
“I have a particularly bad feeling about all this,” said Fat Charlie, helpfully.
Spider nodded. “A bad feeling,” he said. “Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.”
“Seek not to ask for whom the bell tolls,” intoned the cabbie. “It tolls for thee.”
“Whoa,” said Spider. “Now that’s a pretty heavy koan you got there.”
“Thank you,” said the cabbie.
“That’s how it ends, all right. You are some kind of philosopher. I’m Spider. This is my brother, Fat Charlie.”
“Charles,” said Fat Charlie.
“Steve,” said the cabbie. “Steve Burridge.”
“Mister Burridge,” said Spider, “how would you like to be our personal driver this evening?”
Steve Burridge explained that he was coming up to the end of his shift and would now be driving his cab home for the night, that dinner with Mrs. Burridge and all the little Burridges awaited him.
“You hear that?” said Spider. “A family man. Now, my brother and I are all the family that we have left. And this is the first time we’ve met.”
“Sounds like quite a story,” said the cabbie. “Was there a feud?”
“Not at all. He simply did not know that he had a brother,” said Spider.
“Did you?” asked Fat Charlie. “Know about me?”
“I may have done,” said Spider. “But things like that can slip a guy’s mind so easily.”
The cab pulled over to the curb. “Where are we?” asked Fat Charlie. They hadn’t gone very far. He thought they were somewhere just off Fleet Street.
“What he asked for,” said the cabbie. “Wine.”
Spider got out of the cab and stared at the grubby oak and grimy glass exterior of the ancient wine bar. “Perfect,” he said. “Pay the man, Brother.”
Fat Charlie paid the cabbie. They went inside: down wooden steps to a cellar where rubicund barristers drank side by side with pallid money market fund managers. There was sawdust on the floor, and a wine list chalked illegibly on a blackboard behind the bar.
“What are you drinking?” asked Spider.
“Just a glass of house red, please,” said Fat Charlie.
Spider looked at him gravely. “We are the final scions of Anansi’s line. We do not mourn our father’s passing with house red.”
“Er. Right. Well, I’ll have what you’re having then.”
Spider went up to the bar, easing his way through the crush of people as if it was not there. In several minutes he returned, carrying two wineglasses, a corkscrew, and an extremely dusty wine bottle. He opened the bottle with an ease that left Fat Charlie, who always wound up picking fragments of cork from his wine, deeply impressed. Spider poured from the bottle a wine so tawny it was almost black. He filled each glass, then put one in front of Fat Charlie.
“A toast,” he said. “To our father’s memory.”
“To Dad,” said Fat Charlie, and he clinked his glass against Spider’s—managing, miraculously, not to spill any as he did so—and he tasted his wine. It was peculiarly bitter and herby, and salt. “What is this?”
“Funeral wine, the kind you drink for gods. They haven’t made it for a long time. It’s seasoned with bitter aloes and rosemary, and with the tears of brokenhearted virgins.”
“And they sell it in a Fleet Street wine bar?” Fat Charlie picked up the bottle, but the label was too faded and dusty to read. “Never heard of it.”
“These old places have the good stuff, if you ask for it,” said Spider. “Or maybe I just think they do.”
Fat Charlie took another sip of his wine. It was powerful and pungent.
“It’s not a sipping wine,” said Spider. “It’s a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.” He took a huge swig. Then he made a face. “It tastes better that way, too.”
Fat Charlie hesitated, then took a large mouthful of the strange wine. He could imagine that he was able to taste the aloes and the rosemary. He wondered if the salt was really tears.
“They put in the rosemary for remembrance,” said Spider, and he began to top up their glasses. Fat Charlie started to try and explain that he wasn’t really up for too much wine tonight and that he had to work tomorrow, but Spider cut him off. “It’s your turn to make a toast,” he said.
“Er. Right,” said Fat Charlie. “To Mum.”
They drank to their mother. Fat Charlie found that the taste of the bitter wine was beginning to grow on him; he found his eyes prickling, and a sense of loss, profound and painful, ran through him. He missed his mother. He missed his childhood. He even missed his father. Across the table, Spider was shaking his head; a tear ran down Spider’s face and plopped into the wineglass; he reached for the bottle and poured more wine for them both.
Fat Charlie drank.
Grief ran through him as he drank, filling his head and his body with loss and with the pain of absence, swelling through him like waves on the ocean.
His own tears were running down his face, splashing into his drink. He fumbled in his pockets for a tissue. Spider poured out the last of the black wine, for both of them.
“Did they really sell this wine here?”
“They had a bottle they didn’t know they had. They just needed to be reminded.”
Fat Charlie blew h
is nose. “I never knew I had a brother,” he said.
“I did,” said Spider. “I always meant to look you up, but I got distracted. You know how it is.”
“Not really.”
“Things came up.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things. They came up. That’s what things do. They come up. I can’t be expected to keep track of them all.”
“Well, give me a f’rinstance.”
Spider drank more wine. “Okay. The last time I decided that you and I should meet, I, well, I spent days planning it. Wanted it to go perfectly. I had to choose my wardrobe. Then I had to decide what I’d say to you when we met. I knew that the meeting of two brothers, well, it’s the subject of epics, isn’t it? I decided that the only way to treat it with the appropriate gravity would be to do it in verse. But what kind of verse? Am I going to rap it? Declaim it? I mean, I’m not going to greet you with a limerick. So. It had to be something dark, something powerful, rhythmic, epic. And then I had it. The perfect first line: Blood calls to blood like sirens in the night. It says so much. I knew I’d be able to get everything in there—people dying in alleys, sweat and nightmares, the power of free spirits uncrushable. Everything was going to be there. And then I had to come up with a second line, and the whole thing completely fell apart. The best I could come up with was Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty got a fright.”
Fat Charlie blinked. “Who exactly is Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty?”
“It’s not anybody. It’s just there to show you where the words ought to be. But I never really got any further on it than that, and I couldn’t turn up with just a first line, some tumpties and three words of an epic poem, could I? That would have been disrespecting you.”
“Well…”
“Exactly. So I went to Hawaii for the week instead. Like I said, something came up.”
Fat Charlie drank more of his wine. He was beginning to like it. Sometimes strong tastes fit strong emotions, and this was one of those times. “It couldn’t always have been the second line of a poem, though,” he said.