Anansi Boys

Chapter Fourteen

Charlie woke to a banging on a door. Disoriented, he looked around: he was in a hotel room; various unlikely events clustered inside his head like moths around a naked bulb, and while he tried to make sense of them he let his feet get up and walk him to the hotel room door. He blinked at the diagram on the back of the door which told him where to go in case of fire, trying to remember the events of the previous night. Then he unlocked the door and pulled it open.

Daisy looked up at him. She said, “Were you asleep in that hat?”

Charlie put his hand up and felt his head. There was definitely a hat on it. “Yes,” he said. “I think I must have been.”

“Bless,” she said. “Well, at least you took your shoes off. You know you missed all the excitement, last night?”

“I did?”

“Brush your teeth,” she said helpfully. “And change your shirt. Yes, you did. While you were—” and then she hesitated. It seemed quite improbable, on reflection, that he really had vanished in the middle of a séance. These things did not happen. Not in the real world. “While you weren’t there. I got the police chief to go up to Grahame Coats’s house. He had those tourists.”

“Tourists—?”

“It was what he said at di

“Are they okay?”

“They’re both in the hospital.”

“Oh.”

“Her mum’s in rough shape. I think your fiancée will be okay.”

“Will you stop calling her that? She’s not my fiancée. She ended the engagement.”

“Yes. But you didn’t, did you?”

“She’s not in love with me,” said Charlie. “Now, I’m going to brush my teeth and change my shirt, and I need a certain amount of privacy.”

“You should shower too,” she said. “And that hat smells like a cigar.”

“It’s a family heirloom,” he told her, and he went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

The hospital was a ten-minute-walk from the hotel, and Spider was sitting in the waiting room, holding a dog-eared copy of Entertainment Weekly magazine as if he were actually reading it.

Charlie tapped him on the shoulder, and Spider jumped. He looked up warily and then, seeing his brother, he relaxed, but not much. “They said I had to wait out here,” Spider said. “Because I’m not a relation or anything.”

Charlie boggled. “Well, why didn’t you just tell them you were a relative? Or a doctor?”

Spider looked uncomfortable. “Well, it’s easy to do that stuff if you don’t care. If it doesn’t matter if I go in or I don’t, it’s easy to go in. But now it matters, and I’d hate to get in the way or do something wrong, and I mean, what if I tried and they said no, and then—what are you gri

“Nothing really,” said Charlie. “It just all sounds a bit familiar. Come on. Let’s go and find Rosie. You know,” he said to Daisy, as they set off down a random corridor, “there are two ways to walk through a hospital. Either you look like you belong there—here you go Spider. White coat on back of door, just your size. Put it on—or you should look so out of place that no one will complain that you’re there. They’ll just leave it for someone else to sort out.” He began to hum.

“What’s that song?” asked Daisy.

“It’s called ‘Yellow Bird,’ “ said Spider.

Charlie pushed his hat back on his head, and they walked into Rosie’s hospital room.

Rosie was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine, and looking worried. When she saw the three of them come in, she looked more worried. She looked from Spider to Charlie and back again.

“You’re both a long way from home,” was all she said.

“We all are,” said Charlie. “Now, you’ve met Spider. This is Daisy. She’s in the police.”

“I’m not sure that I am anymore,” said Daisy. “I’m probably in all kinds of hot water.”

“You’re the one who was there last night? The one who got the island police to come up to the house?” Rosie stopped. She said, “Any word on Grahame Coats?”

“He’s in intensive care, just like your mum.”

“Well, if she comes to before he does,” said Rosie, “I expect she’ll kill him.” Then she said, “They won’t talk to me about my mum’s condition. They just say that it’s very serious, and they’ll tell me as soon as there’s anything to tell.” She looked at Charlie with clear eyes. “She’s not as bad as you think she is, really. Not when you get time to know her. We had a lot of time to talk, locked up in the dark. She’s all right.”

She blew her nose. Then she said, “They don’t think she’s going to make it. They haven’t directly said that to me, but they sort of said it in a not-saying-it sort of way. It’s fu

Charlie said, “Me too. I figured even if there was a nuclear war, it would still leave radioactive cockroaches and your mum.”

Daisy stepped on his foot. She said, “Do they know anything more about what hurt her?”

“I told them,” said Rosie. “There was some kind of animal in the house. Maybe it was just Grahame Coats. I mean it sort of was him, but it was sort of someone else. She distracted it from me, and it went for her—” She had explained it all as best she could to the island police that morning. She had decided not to talk about the blonde ghost-woman. Sometimes minds snap under pressure, and she thought it best if people did not know that hers had.

Rosie broke off. She was staring at Spider as if she had only just remembered who he was. She said, “I still hate you, you know.” Spider said nothing, but a miserable expression crept across his face, and he no longer looked like a doctor: now he looked like a man who had borrowed a white coat from behind a door and was worried that someone would notice. A dreamlike tone came into her voice. “Only,” she said, “only when I was in the dark, I thought that you were helping me. That you were keeping the animal away. What happened to your face? It’s all scratched.”

“It was an animal,” said Spider.

“You know,” she said, “Now I see you both at once, you don’t look anything alike at all.”

“I’m the good-looking one,” said Charlie, and Daisy’s foot pressed down on his toes for the second time.

“Bless,” said Daisy, quietly. And then, slightly louder, “Charlie? There’s something we need to talk about outside. Now.”

They went out into the hospital corridor, leaving Spider inside.

“What?” said Charlie.

“What what?” said Daisy.

“What have we got to talk about?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are we out here? You heard her. She hates him. We shouldn’t have left them alone together. She’s probably killed him by now.”

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.