Anansi Boys

“I don’t think he has a phone number,” said Fat Charlie. “And the best way to find him is to go to Florida, and to drive up Highway A1A—that’s the coast road that runs up most of the east of the state. In the afternoon you may find him fishing off a bridge. In the evening he’ll be in a bar.”

“Such a charming man,” she said, wistfully. “What does he do?”

“I told you. He says it’s the miracle of the loafs and the fishes.”

She stared at him blankly, and he felt stupid. When his father said it, people would laugh. “Um. Like in the Bible. The miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Dad used to say that he loafs and fishes, and it’s a miracle that he still makes money. It was a sort of joke.”

A misty look. “Yes. He told the funniest jokes.” She clucked her tongue, and once more was all business. “Now, I need you back here at five-thirty.”

“Why?”

“To pick up your mother. And her belongings. Didn’t Dr. Johnson tell you we were discharging her?”

“You’re sending her home?”

“Yes, Mr. Nancy.”

“What about the, about the cancer?”

“It seems to have been a false alarm.”

Fat Charlie couldn’t understand how it could have been a false alarm. Last week they’d been talking about sending his mother to a hospice. The doctor had been using phrases like “weeks not months” and “making her as comfortable as possible while we wait for the inevitable.”

Still, Fat Charlie came back at 5:30 and picked up his mother, who seemed quite unsurprised to learn that she was no longer dying. On the way home she told Fat Charlie that she would be using her life savings to travel around the world.

“The doctors were saying I had three months,” she said. “And I remember I thought, if I get out of this hospital bed then I’m going to see Paris and Rome and places like that. I’m going back to Barbados, and to Saint Andrews. I may go to Africa. And China. I like Chinese food.”

Fat Charlie wasn’t sure what was going on, but whatever it was, he blamed his father. He accompanied his mother and a serious suitcase to Heathrow Airport, and waved her good-bye at the international departures gate. She was smiling hugely as she went through, clutching her passport and tickets, and she looked younger than he remembered her looking in many years.

She sent him postcards from Paris, and from Rome and from Athens, and from Lagos and Cape Town. Her postcard from Nanking told him that she certainly didn’t like what passed for Chinese food in China, and that she couldn’t wait to come back to London and eat proper Chinese food.

She died in her sleep in a hotel in Williamstown, on the Caribbean island of Saint Andrews.

At the funeral, at a South London crematorium, Fat Charlie kept expecting to see his father: perhaps the old man would make an entrance at the head of a jazz band, or be followed down the aisle by a clown troupe or a half-dozen tricycle-riding, cigar-puffing chimpanzees; even during the service Fat Charlie kept glancing back, over his shoulder, toward the chapel door. But Fat Charlie’s father was not there, only his mother’s friends and distant relations, mostly big women in black hats, blowing their noses and dabbing at their eyes and shaking their heads.

It was during the final hymn, after the button had been pressed and Fat Charlie’s mother had trundled off down the conveyor belt to her final reward, that Fat Charlie noticed a man of about his own age standing at the back of the chapel. It was not his father, obviously. It was someone he did not know, someone he might not even have noticed, at the back, in the shadows, had he not been looking for his father…and then there was the stranger, in an elegant black suit, his eyes lowered, his hands folded.

Fat Charlie let his glance linger a moment too long, and the stranger looked at Fat Charlie and flashed him a joyless smile of the kind that suggested that they were both in this together. It was not the kind of expression you see on the faces of strangers, but still, Fat Charlie could not place the man. He turned his face back to the front of the chapel. They sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a song Fat Charlie was pretty sure his mother had always disliked, and the Reverend Wright invited them back to Fat Charlie’s Great-Aunt Alanna’s for something to eat.

There was nobody at his Great-Aunt Alanna’s whom he did not already know. In the years since his mother had died, he sometimes wondered about that stranger: who he was, why he was there. Sometimes Fat Charlie thought that he had simply imagined him….

“So,” said Rosie, draining her Chardonnay, “you’ll call your Mrs. Higgler and give her my mobile number. Tell her about the wedding and the date…that’s a thought: do you think we should invite her?”

“We can if we like,” said Fat Charlie. “I don’t think she’ll come. She’s an old family friend. She knew my dad back in the dark ages.”

“Well, sound her out. See if we should send her an invitation.”