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“It wasn’t magic,” said Spider, offended. “It was a miracle.”
Fat Charlie pushed past him and stomped up the stairs. He walked into the bathroom, put in the plug, and turned on the taps. He leaned out into the hall. “I don’t care what it’s called. You’re doing it in my house, and you stopped me coming home last night.”
He took off the day-before-yesterday’s clothes. Then he put his head back around the door. “And the police are investigating me at work. Did you tell Grahame Coats that there were financial irregularities going on?”
“Of course I did,” said Spider.
“Hah! Well, he only suspects me, that’s what.”
“Oh, I don’t think he does,” said Spider.
“Shows all you know,” said Fat Charlie. “I talked to him. The police are involved. And then there’s Rosie. And you and I are going to have a very long conversation about Rosie when I get out of the bath. But first of all, I’m going to get into the bath. I spent yesterday night wandering around. I got the only sleep of the night in the backseat of a taxi. By the time I woke up it was five in the morning and my taxi driver was turning into Travis Bickle. He was conducting a monologue. I told him he might as well give up looking for Maxwell Gardens, and that it obvious
ly wasn’t a Maxwell Gardens kind of night, and eventually he agreed so we went and had breakfast in one of those places taxi drivers have breakfast. Eggs and beans and sausages and toast, and tea you could stand a spoon up in. When he told the other taxi drivers he’d been driving all around last night looking for Maxwell Gardens, well, I thought blood was going to be spilled. It wasn’t. But it looked a pretty close thing for a minute there.”
Fat Charlie stopped to take a breath. Spider looked guilty.
“After,” said Fat Charlie. “After my bath.” He shut the bathroom door.
He climbed into the bath.
He made a whimpering noise.
He climbed out of the bath.
He turned off the taps.
He wrapped a towel around his midriff and opened the bathroom door. “No hot water,” he said much, much too calmly. “Do you have any idea why we have no hot water?”
Spider was still standing in the hallway. He hadn’t moved. “My hot tub,” he said. “Sorry.”
Fat Charlie said, “Well, at least Rosie doesn’t. I mean, she wouldn’t have—” And then he caught the expression on Spider’s face.
Fat Charlie said, “I want you out of here. Out of my life. Out of Rosie’s life. Gone.”
“I like it here,” said Spider.
“You’re ruining my bloody life.”
“Tough.” Spider walked down the hallway and opened the door to Fat Charlie’s spare room. Golden tropical sunlight flooded the hallway momentarily, then the door was closed.
Fat Charlie washed his hair in cold water. He brushed his teeth. He rummaged through his laundry hamper until he found a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that were, by virtue of being at the bottom, practically clean once more. He put them on, along with a purple sweater with a teddy bear on it his mother had once given him that he had never worn but had never got around to giving away.
He went down to the end of the corridor.
The boom-chagga-boom of a bass and drums penetrated the door.
Fat Charlie rattled the door handle. It didn’t budge. “If you don’t open this door,” he said, “I’m going to break it down.”
The door opened without warning, and Fat Charlie lurched inward, into the empty box room at the end of the hall. The view through the window was the back of the house behind, what little you could see of it through the rain that was now lashing the windowpane.
Still, from somewhere only a wall’s thinness away, a stereo was playing too loudly: everything in the box room vibrated to a distant boom-chagga-boom.
“Right,” said Fat Charlie conversationally. “You realize, of course, that this means war.” It was the traditional war cry of the rabbit when pushed too far. There are places in which people believe that Anansi was a trickster rabbit. They are wrong, of course; he was a spider. You might think the two creatures would be easy to keep separate, but they still get confused more often than you would expect.
Fat Charlie went into his bedroom. He retrieved his passport from the drawer by his bed. He found his wallet where he had left it in the bathroom.
He walked down to the main road, in the rain, and hailed a taxi.
