“Oh,” said a woman’s voice at the other end of the line. “I thought Grahame would be phoning me himself.”
“He’s a bit tied up. So he’s um, delegated it,” said Fat Charlie. “To me. So. Can I help?”
“I’m not sure. I was rather wondering—well, the bank manager was wondering—when the rest of the money from Morris’s estate would be coming through. Grahame Coats explained to me, the last time—well, I think it was the last time—when we spoke—that it was invested—I mean, I understand that these things take time—he said otherwise I could lose a lot of money—”
“Well,” said Fat Charlie, “I know he’s on it. But these things do take time.”
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose they must do. I called the BBC and they said they’d made several payments since Morris’s death. You know, they’ve released the whole of Morris Livingstone, I Presume on DVD now? And they’re bringing out both series of Short Back and Sides for Christmas.”
“I didn’t know,” admitted Fat Charlie. “But I’m sure Grahame Coats does. He’s always on top of that kind of thing.”
“I had to buy my own DVD,” she said, wistfully. “Still, it brought it all back. The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the BBC club. Made me miss the spotlight, I can tell you that for nothing. That was how I met Morris, you know. I was a dancer. I had my own career.”
Fat Charlie told her that he’d let Grahame Coats know that her bank manager was a bit concerned, and he put down the phone.
He wondered how anyone could ever miss the spotlight.
In Fat Charlie’s worst nightmares, a spotlight shone down upon him from a dark sky onto a wide stage, and unseen figures would try to force Fat Charlie to stand in the spotlight and sing. And no matter how far or how fast he ran, or how well he hid, they would find him and drag him back onto the stage, in front of dozens of expectant faces. He would always awake before he actually had to sing, sweating and trembling, his heart beating a cannonade in his chest.
A day’s work passed. Fat Charlie had worked there almost two years. He had been there longer than anyone except Grahame Coats himself, for the staff turnover at the Grahame Coats Agency tended to be high. And still, nobody had been pleased to see him.
Fat Charlie would sometimes sit at his desk and stare out of the window as the loveless gray rain rattled against the glass, and he would imagine himself on a tropical beach somewhere, with the breakers crashing from an impossibly blue sea onto the impossibly yellow sands. Often Fat Charlie would wonder if the people on the beach in his imagination, watching the white fingers of the waves as they wriggled toward the shore, listening to the tropical birds whistling in the palm trees, whether they ever dreamed of being in England, in the rain, in a cupboard-sized room in a fifth-floor office, a safe distance from the dullness of the pure golden sand and the hellish boredom of a day so perfect that not even a creamy drink containing slightly too much rum and a red paper umbrella can do anything to alleviate it. It comforted him.
He stopped at the off-license on the way home and bought a bottle of German white wine, and a patchouli-scented candle from the tiny supermarket next door, and picked up a pizza from the Pizza Place nearby.
Rosie phoned from her yoga class at 7:30 PM to let him know that she was going to be a little late, then from her car at 8:00 PM to let him know she was stuck in traffic, at 9:15 to let him know that she was now just around the corner, by which time Fat Charlie had drunk most of the bottle of white wine on his own, and consumed all but one lonely triangle of pizza.
Later, he wondered if it was the wine that made him say it.
Rosie arrived at 9:20, with towels, and a Tescos bag filled with shampoos, soaps, and a large pot of hair mayonnaise. She said no, briskly but cheerfully, to a glass of the white wine and the slice of pizza—she had, she explained, eaten in the traffic jam. She had ordered in. So Fat Charlie sat in the kitchen, and poured himself the final glass of white wine, and picked the cheese and the pepperoni from the top of the cold pizza while Rosie went off to run the bath and then started, suddenly and quite loudly, to scream.
Fat Charlie made it to the bathroom before the first scream had finished dying away, and while Rosie was filling her lungs for the second. He was convinced that he would find her dripping with blood. To his surprise and relief, she was not bleeding. She was wearing a blue bra and panties, and was pointing to the bath, in the center of which sat a large brown garden spider.
“I’m sorry,” she wailed. “It took me by surprise.”
“They can do that,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ll just wash it away.”
“Don’t you dare,” said Rosie, fiercely. “It’s a living thing. Take it outside.”
“Right,” said Fat Charlie.
“I’ll wait in the kitchen,” she said. “Tell me when it’s all over.”
When you have drunk an entire bottle of white wine, coaxing a rather skittish garden spider into a clear plastic tumbler using only an old birthday card becomes more of a challenge to hand-eye coordination than it is at other times; a challenge that is not helped by a partially unclothed fiancée on the edge of hysterics, who, despite her announcement that she would wait in the kitchen, is instead leaning over your shoulder and offering advice.
But soon enough, despite the help, he had the spider inside the tumbler, the mouth of which was firmly covered by a card from an old schoolfriend which told him that YOU ARE ONLY AS OLD AS YOU FEEL (and, on the inside humorously topped this with SO STOP FEELING YOURSELF YOU SEX MANIAC—HAPPY BIRTHDAY).
He took the spider downstairs and out of the front door, into the tiny front garden, which consisted of a hedge, for people to throw up in, and several large flagstones with grass growing up between them. He held the tumbler up. In the yellow sodium light, the spider was black. He imagined it was staring at him.
“Sorry about that,” he said to the spider, and, white wine slooshing comfortably around inside him, he said it aloud.
He put the card and the tumbler down on a cracked flagstone, and he lifted the tumbler, and waited for the spider to scuttle away. Instead, it simply sat, unmoving, on the face of the cheerful cartoon teddy bear on the birthday card. The man and the spider regarded each other.
Something that Mrs. Higgler said came to him then, and the words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Perhaps it was the devil in him. Probably it was the alcohol.
“If you see my brother,” said Fat Charlie to the spider, “tell him he ought to come by and say hello.”
The spider remained where it was, and raised one leg, almost as if it were thinking it over, then it scuttled across the flagstone toward the hedge, and was gone.