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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.
“You were at Mum’s cremation,” said Fat Charlie.
