by Neil Gaiman
Spider put his thin hand on top of Fat Charlie’s larger hand. “Enough about me,” he said. “I want to hear about you.”
“Not much to tell,” said Fat Charlie. He told his brother about his life. About Rosie and Rosie’s mother, about Grahame Coats and the Grahame Coats Agency, and his brother nodded his head. It didn’t sound like much of a life, now that Fat Charlie was putting it into words.
“Still,” Fat Charlie said, philosophically, “I figure that there are those people you read about in the gossip pages of newspapers. And they are always saying how dull and empty and pointless their lives are.” He held the wine bottle above his glass, hoping there was just enough of the wine left for another mouthful, but there was barely a drip. The bottle was empty. It had lasted longer than it had any right to have lasted, but now there was nothing left at all.
Spider stood up. “I’ve met those people,” he said. “The ones from the glossy magazines. I’ve walked among them. I have seen, firsthand, their callow, empty lives. I have watched them from the shadows when they thought themselves alone. And I can tell you this: I’m afraid there is not one of them who would swap lives with you at gunpoint, my brother. Come on.”
“Whuh? Where are you going?”
“We are going. We have accomplished the first part of tonight’s triune mission. Wine has been drunk. Two parts left to go.”
“Er…”
Fat Charlie followed Spider outside, hoping the cool night air would clear his head. It didn’t. Fat Charlie’s head was feeling like it might float away if it wasn’t firmly tied down.
“Women next,” said Spider. “Then song.”
IT IS POSSIBLY WORTH MENTIONING THAT IN FAT CHARLIE’S world, women did not simply turn up. You needed to be introduced to them; you needed to pluck up the courage to talk to them; you needed to find a subject to talk about when you did, and then, once you had achieved those heights, there were further peaks to scale. You needed to dare to ask them if they were doing anything on Saturday night, and then when you did, mostly they had hair that needed washing that night, or diaries to update, or cockatiels to groom, or they simply needed to wait by the phone for some other man not to call.
But Spider lived in a different world.
They wandered toward the West End, stopping when they reached a crowded pub. The patrons spilled out onto the pavement, and Spider stopped and said hello to what turned out to be a birthday celebration for a young lady named Sybilla, who was only too flattered when Spider insisted on buying a birthday round of drinks for her and for her friends. Then he told jokes (“…and the duck says, put it on my bill? Whaddayathink I am? Some kinda pervert?”) and he laughed at his own jokes, a booming, joyful laugh. He could remember the names of all the people around him. He talked to people and listened to what they said. When Spider announced it was time to find another pub, the entire birthday group decided, as one woman, that they were coming with him…
By the time they reached their third pub, Spider resembled someone from a rock video. He was draped with girls. They snuggled in. Several of them had kissed him, half-jokingly, half-seriously. Fat Charlie watched in envious horror.
“You his bodyguard?” asked one of the girls.
“What?”
“His bodyguard. Are you?”
“No,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m his brother.”
“Wow,” she said. “I didn’t know he had a brother. I think he’s amazing.”
“Me, too,” said another, who had spent some time cuddling Spider until forced away by the press of other bodies with similar ideas. She noticed Fat Charlie for the first time. “Are you his manager?”
“No. He’s the brother,” said the first girl. “He was just telling me,” she added, pointedly.
The second ignored her. “Are you from the States as well?” she asked. “You’ve sort of got a bit of an accent.”
“When I was younger,” said Fat Charlie. “We lived in Florida. My dad was American, my mum was from, well she was originally from Saint Andrews, but she grew up in…”
Nobody was listening.
When they moved on from there, the remnants of the birthday celebration accompanied them. The women surrounded Spider, inquiring where they were going next. Restaurants were suggested, as were nightclubs. Spider simply grinned and kept walking.
Fat Charlie trailed along behind them, feeling more left-out than ever.
They stumbled through the neon-and-striplight world. Spider had his arms around several of the women. He would kiss them as he walked, indiscriminately, like a man taking a bite from first one summer fruit, then another. None of them seemed to mind.
It’s not normal, thought Fat Charlie. That’s what it’s not. He was not even trying to keep up, merely attempting not to be left behind.
He could still taste the bitter wine on his tongue.
He became aware that a girl was walking along beside him. She was small, and pretty in a pixieish sort of way. She tugged at his sleeve. “What are we doing?” she asked. “Where are we going?”
“We’re mourning my father,” he said, “I think.”
“Is it a reality TV show?”
“I hope not.”
Spider stopped and turned. The gleam in his eyes was disturbing. “We are here,” he announced. “We have arrived. It is what he would have wanted.” There was a handwritten message on a sheet of bright orange paper on the door outside the pub. It said on it, Tonight. Upstair’s. KAROAKE.
“Song,” said Spider. Then he said, “It’s showtime!”
“No,” said Fat Charlie. He stopped where he was.
“It’s what he loved,” said Spider.
“I don’t sing. Not in public. And I’m drunk. And, I really don’t think this is a really good idea.”
“It’s a great idea.” Spider had a perfectly convincing smile. Properly deployed, a smile like that could launch a holy war. Fat Charlie, however, was not convinced.
“Look,” he said, trying to keep the panic from his voice. “There are things that people don’t do. Right? Some people don’t fly. Some people don’t have sex in public. Some people don’t turn into smoke and blow away. I don’t do any of those things, and I don’t sing either.”
“Not even for Dad?”
“Especially not for Dad. He’s not going to embarrass me from beyond the grave. Well, not any more than he has already.”
“‘Scuse me,” said one of the young women. “’Scuse me but are we going in? ‘Cause I’m getting cold out here, and Sybilla needs to wee.”
“We’re going in,” said Spider, and he smiled at her.
Fat Charlie wanted to protest, to stand his ground, but he found himself swept inside, hating himself.
He caught up with Spider on the stairs. “I’ll go in,” he said. “But I won’t sing.”
“You’re already in.”
“I know. But I’m not singing.”
“Not much point in saying you won’t go in if you’re already in.”
“I can’t sing.”
“You telling me I inherited all the musical talent as well?”
“I’m telling you that if I have to open my mouth in order to sing in public, I’ll throw up.”
Spider squeezed his arm, reassuringly. “You watch how I do it,” he said.
The birthday girl and two of her friends stumbled up onto the little dais, and giggled their way through “Dancing Queen.” Fat Charlie drank a gin and tonic somebody had put into his hand, and he winced at every note they missed, at every key change that didn’t happen. There was a round of applause from the rest of the birthday group.
Another of the women took the stage. It was the pixieish one who had asked Fat Charlie where they were going. The opening chords sounded to “Stand by Me,” and she began, using the phrase in its most approximate and all-encompassing way, to sing along: she missed every note, came in too soon or too late on every line, and misread most of them. Fat Charlie felt for her.
She climbed down from the
stage and came toward the bar. Fat Charlie was going to say something sympathetic, but she was glowing with joy. “That was so great,” she said. “I mean, that was just amazing.” Fat Charlie bought her a drink, a large vodka and orange. “That was such a laugh,” she told him. “Are you going to do it? Go on. You have to do it. I bet you won’t be any crapper than I was.”
Fat Charlie shrugged, in a way that, he hoped, indicated that he contained within him depths of crap as yet unplumbed.
Spider walked over to the little stage as if a spotlight was following him.
“I bet this will be good,” said the vodka and orange. “Did someone say you were his brother?”
“No,” muttered Fat Charlie, ungraciously. “I said that he was my brother.”
Spider began to sing. It was “Under the Boardwalk.”
It wouldn’t have happened if Fat Charlie had not liked the song so much. When Fat Charlie was thirteen he had believed that “Under the Boardwalk” was the greatest song in the world (by the time he was a jaded and world-weary fourteen-year-old, it had become Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry”). And now Spider was singing his song, and singing it well. He sang it in tune, he sang it as if he meant it. People stopped drinking, stopped talking, and they looked at him, and they listened.
When Spider finished singing, people cheered. Had they been wearing hats, they might well have flung them into the air.
“I can see why you wouldn’t want to follow that,” said the vodka and orange to Fat Charlie. “I mean, you can’t follow that, can you?”
“Well…” said Fat Charlie.
“I mean,” she said with a grin, “you can see who’s got all the talent in your family.” She tipped her head, as she said it, and tilted her chin. It was the chin-tilt that did it.
Fat Charlie headed toward the stage, putting one foot in front of the other in an impressive display of physical dexterity. He was sweating.
The next few minutes passed in a blur. He spoke to the DJ, chose his song from the list—“Unforgettable”—waited for what seemed like a brief eternity, and was handed a microphone.
His mouth was dry. His heart was fluttering in his chest.
On the screen was his first word: Unforgettable…
Now, Fat Charlie could really sing. He had range and power and expression. When he sang his whole body became an instrument.
The music started.
In Fat Charlie’s head, he was all ready to open his mouth, and to sing. “Unforgettable,” he would sing. He would sing it to his dead father and to his brother and the night, telling them all that they were things it was impossible to forget.
Only he couldn’t do it. There were people looking up at him. Barely two dozen of them, in the upstairs room of a pub. Many of them were women. In front of an audience, Fat Charlie couldn’t even open his mouth.
He could hear the music playing, but he just stood there. He felt very cold. His feet seemed a long way away.
He forced his mouth open.
“I think,” he said, very distinctly, into the microphone, over the music, and heard his words echoing back from every corner of the room. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
There was no graceful exit from the stage.
After that, everything got a bit wobbly.
THERE ARE MYTH-PLACES. THEY EXIST, EACH IN THEIR own way. Some of them are overlaid on the world; others exist beneath the world as it is, like an underpainting.
There are mountains. They are the rocky places you will reach before you come to the cliffs that border the end of the world, and there are caves in those mountains, deep caves that were inhabited long before the first men walked the earth.
They are inhabited still.
CHAPTER FIVE
IN WHICH WE EXAMINE THE MANY CONSEQUENCES OF THE MORNING AFTER
FAT CHARLIE WAS THIRSTY.
Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt.
Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead.
Fat Charlie opened his eyes, which was a mistake, in that it let daylight in, which hurt. It also told him where he was (in his own bed, in his bedroom), and because he was staring at the clock on his bedside table, it told him that the time was 11:30.
That, he thought, one word at a time, was about as bad as things could get: he had the kind of hangover that an Old Testament God might have smitten the Midianites with, and the next time he saw Grahame Coats he would undoubtedly learn that he had been fired.
He wondered if he could sound convincingly sick over the phone, then realized that the challenge would be convincingly sounding anything else.
He could not remember getting home last night.
He would phone the office, the moment he was able to remember the telephone number. He would apologize—crippling twenty-four-hour flu, flat on his back, nothing that could be done…
“You know,” said someone in the bed next to him, “I think there’s a bottle of water on your side. Could you pass it over here?”
Fat Charlie wanted to explain that there was no water on his side of the bed, and that there was, in fact, no water closer than the bathroom sink, if he disinfected the toothbrush mug first, but he realized he was staring at one of several bottles of water, sitting on the bedside table. He reached his hand out, and closed fingers that felt like they belonged to someone else around one of them, then, with the sort of effort people usually reserve for hauling themselves up the final few feet of a sheer rock face, he rolled over in bed.
It was the vodka and orange.
Also, she was naked. At least, the bits of her he could see were.
She took the water, and pulled the sheet up to cover her chest. “Ta. He said to tell you,” she said, “when you woke, not to worry about calling work and telling them you were ill. He said to tell you he’s already taken care of it.”
Fat Charlie’s mind was not put at rest. His fears and worries were not allayed. Then again, in the condition he was in, he only had room in his head for a single thing to worry about at once, and right now he was worrying about whether or not he would make it to the bathroom in time.
“You’ll need more liquids,” said the girl. “You’ll need to replenish your electrolytes.”
Fat Charlie made it to the bathroom in time. Afterward, seeing he was there already, he stood under the shower until the room stopped undulating, and then he brushed his teeth without throwing up.
When he returned to the bedroom, the vodka and orange was no longer there, which was a relief to Fat Charlie, who had started to hope that she might have been an alcohol-induced delusion, like pink elephants or the nightmarish idea that he had taken to the stage to sing on the previous evening.
He could not find his dressing gown, so he pulled on a tracksuit, in order to feel dressed enough to visit the kitchen, at the far end of the hall.
His phone chimed, and he rummaged through his jacket, which was on the floor beside the bed, until he found it, and flipped it open. He grunted into it, as anonymously as he could, just in case it was someone from the Grahame Coats Agency trying to discern his whereabouts.
“It’s me,” said Spider’s voice. “Everything’s okay.”
“You told them I was dead?”
“Better than that. I told them I was you.”
“But.” Fat Charlie tried to think clearly. “But you’re not me.”
“Hey. I know that. I told them I was.”
“You don’t e
ven look like me.”
“Brother of mine, you are harshing a potential mellow here. It’s all taken care of. Oops. Gotta go. The big boss needs to talk to me.”
“Grahame Coats? Look, Spider—”
But Spider had put down the phone, and the screen blanked.
Fat Charlie’s dressing gown came through the door. There was a girl inside it. It looked significantly better on her than it ever had on him. She was carrying a tray, on which was a water glass with a fizzing Alka-Seltzer in it, along with something in a mug.
“Drink both of these,” she told him. “The mug first. Just knock it back.”
“What’s in the mug?”
“Egg yolk, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, salt, dash of vodka, things like that,” she said. “Kill or cure. Now,” she told him, in tones that brooked no argument. “Drink.”
Fat Charlie drank.
“Oh my god,” he said.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “But you’re still alive.”
He wasn’t sure about that. He drank the Alka-Seltzer anyway. Something occurred to him.
“Um,” said Fat Charlie. “Um. Look. Last night. Did we. Um.”
She looked blank.
“Did we what?”
“Did we. You know. Do it?”
“You mean you don’t remember?” Her face fell. “You said it was the best you’d ever had. That it was as if you’d never made love to a woman before. You were part god, part animal, and part unstoppable sex machine…”
Fat Charlie didn’t know where to look. She giggled.
“I’m just winding you up,” she said. “I’d helped your brother get you home, we cleaned you up, and, after that, you know.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” she said, “you were completely out cold, and it’s a big bed. I’m not sure where your brother slept. He must have the constitution of an ox. He was up at the crack of dawn, all bright and smiling.”
“He went into work,” said Fat Charlie. “He told them he was me.”
“Wouldn’t they be able to tell the difference? I mean, you’re not exactly twins.”