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“I’m very grateful,” said Maeve, and Grahame Coats preened. “I hope I’m not becoming a bother.”
“You are never a bother,” said Grahame Coats. “No sort of bother at all.”
He put down the phone. The funny thing, Grahame Coats always thought, was that Morris’s comedic persona had always been that of a hardheaded Yorkshireman, proud of knowing the location of every penny.
It had been a fine game, thought Grahame Coats, and he added two eyes to the apple, and a couple of ears. It now looked, he decided, more or less like a cat. Soon enough it would be time to exchange a life of milking hard-to-please celebrities for a life of sunshine, swimming pools, fine meals, good wines, and, if possible, enormous quantities of oral sex. The best things in life, Grahame Coats was convinced, could all be bought and paid for.
He drew a mouth on the cat and filled it with sharp teeth, so it looked a little like a mountain lion, and as he drew he began to sing, in a reedy tenor voice,
“When I were a young man my father would say
It’s lovely outside, you should go out to play,
But now that I’m older, the ladies all say,
It’s nice out, but put it away…”
Morris Livingstone had bought and paid for Grahame Coats’s penthouse flat on the Copacabana and for the installation of the swimming pool on the island of Saint Andrews, and you must not imagine that Grahame Coats was not grateful.
“It’s nice out, but put it awaaaay.”
SPIDER FELT ODD.
There was something going on: a strange feeling, spreading like a mist through his life, and it was ruining his day. He could not identify it, and he did not like it.
And if there was one thing that he was definitely not feeling, it was guilty. It simply wasn’t the kind of thing he ever felt. He felt excellent. Spider felt cool. He did not feel guilty. He would not have felt guilty if he was caught red-handed holding up a bank.
And yet there was, all about him, a faint miasma of discomfort.
Until now Spider had believed that gods were different: they had no consciences, nor did they need them. A god’s relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes.
Spider kept himself amused. That was what he did. That was the important bit. He would not have recognized guilt if he had an illustrated guide to it with all the component parts clearly labeled. It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck. But something had changed—inside him or outside, he was not sure—and it bothered him. He poured himself another drink. He waved a hand and made the music louder. He changed it from Miles Davis to James Brown. It still didn’t help.
He lay on the hammock, in the tropical sunshine, listening to the music, basking in how extremely cool it was to be him…and for the first time even that, somehow, wasn’t enough.
He climbed out of the hammock and wandered over to the door. “Fat Charlie?”
There was no answer. The flat felt empty. Outside the windows of the flat, there was a gray day, and rain. Spider liked the rain. It seemed appropriate.
Shrill and sweet, the telephone rang. Spider picked it up.
Rosie said, “Is that you?”
“Hullo Rosie.”
“Last night,” she said. Then she didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Was it as wonderful for you as it was for me?”
“I don’t know,” said Spider. “It was pretty wonderful for me. So, I mean, that’s probably a yes.”
“Mmm,” she said.
They didn’t say anything.
“Charlie?” said Rosie.
“Uh-huh?”
“I even like not saying anything, just knowing you’re on the other end of the phone.”
