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“You ask me,” said her mother, “he smells fishy. Tell you what, next time you see him, you ask him about this cousin of his. I’m not saying she is his cousin, and I’m not saying she’s not. I’m just saying that if she is, then he has hookers and strippers and good-time girls in his family and is not the kind of person you should be seeing romantically.”
Rosie felt more comfortable, now her mother was once more coming down against Fat Charlie. “Mum. I won’t hear another word.”
“All right. I’ll hold my tongue. It’s not me that’s marrying him, after all. Not me that’s throwing my life away. Not me that’ll be weeping into my pillow while he’s out all night drinking with his fancy women. It’s not me that’ll be waiting, day after day, night after empty night, for him to get out of prison.”
“Mum!” Rosie tried to be indignant, but the thought of Fat Charlie in prison was too funny, too silly, and she found herself stifling
a giggle.
Rosie’s phone trilled. She answered it, and said “Yes,” and “I’d love to. That would be wonderful.” She put her phone away.
“That was him,” she said to her mother. “I’m going over there tomorrow night. He’s cooking for me. How sweet is that?” And then she said, “Prison indeed.”
“I’m a mother,” said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, “and I know what I know.”
GRAHAME COATS SATIN HIS OFFICE, WHILE THE DAY FADED into dusk, staring at a computer screen. He brought up document after document, spreadsheet after spreadsheet. Some of them he changed. Most of them he deleted.
He was meant to be traveling to Birmingham that evening, where a former footballer, a client of his, was to open a nightclub. Instead he called and apologized: some things were unavoidable.
Soon the light outside the window was gone entirely. Grahame Coats sat in the cold glow of the computer screen, and he changed, and he overwrote, and he deleted.
HERE’S ANOTHER STORY THEY TELL ABOUT ANANSI.
Once, long, long ago, Anansi’s wife planted a field of peas. They were the finest, the fattest, the greenest peas you ever did see. It would have made your mouth water just to look at them.
From the moment Anansi saw the pea field, he wanted them. And he didn’t just want some of them, for Anansi was a man of enormous appetites. He did not want to share them. He wanted them all.
So Anansi lay down on his bed and he sighed, long and loud, and his wife and his sons all came a-running. “I’m a-dying,” said Anansi, in this little weeny-weedy-weaky voice, “and my life is all over and done.”
At this his wife and his sons began to cry hot tears.
In his weensy-weak voice, Anansi says, “On my deathbed, you have to promise me two things.”
“Anything, anything,” says his wife and his sons.
“First, you got to promise me you will bury me down under the big breadfruit tree.”
“The big breadfruit tree down by the pea patch, you mean?” asks his wife.
“Of course that’s the one I mean,” says Anansi. Then, in his weensy-weak voice, he says, “And you got to promise something else. Promise me that, as a memorial to me, you going to make a little fire at the foot of my grave. And, to show you ain’t forgotten me, you going to keep the little fire burning, and not ever let it go out.”
“We will! We will!” said Anansi’s wife and children, wailing and sobbing.
“And on that fire, as mark of your respect and your love, I want to see a lickle pot, filled with saltwater, to remind you all of the hot salt tears you shed over me as I lay dying.”
“We shall! We shall!” they wept, and Anansi, he closed his eyes, and he breathed no more.
Well, they carried Anansi down to the big breadfruit tree that grew beside the pea patch, and they buried him six feet down, and at the foot of the grave they built a little fire, and they put a pot beside it, filled with saltwater.
Anansi, he waits down there all the day but when night falls he climbs out of the grave, and he goes into the pea patch, where he picks him the fattest, sweetest, ripest peas. He gathers them up, and he boils them up in his pot, and he stuffs himself with them till his tummy swells and tightens like a drum.
Then, before dawn, he goes back under the ground, and he goes back to sleep. He sleeps as his wife and his sons find the peas gone; he sleeps through them seeing the pot empty of water and refilling it; he sleeps through their sorrow.
Each night Anansi comes out of his grave, dancing and delighting at the cleverness of him, and each night he fills the pot with peas, and he fills his tummy with peas, and he eats until he cannot eat another thing.
Days go by, and Anansi’s family gets thinner and thinner, for nothing ever ripens that isn’t picked in the night by Anansi, and they got nothing to eat.
Anansi’s wife, she looks down at the empty plates, and she says to her sons, “What would your father do?”
