Spider blinked. “This?” he asked. “This is your house?”
“Well, not exactly. But the principle’s the same. I mean, we’re in my spare room, and you’re a guest. Um.”
Spider sipped his drink and luxuriated deeper in the hot water. “They say,” he said, “that houseguests are like fish. They both stink after three days.”
“Good point,” said Fat Charlie.
“But it’s hard,” said Spider. “Hard when you’ve gone a lifetime not seeing your brother. Hard when he didn’t even know you existed. Harder still when you finally see him and learn that, as far as he’s concerned, you’re no better than a dead fish.”
“But,” said Fat Charlie.
Spider stretched in the tub. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I can’t stay here forever. Chill. I’ll be gone before you know it. And, for my part, I will never think of you as a dead fish. And I appreciate that we’re both under a lot of stress. So let’s say no more about it. Why don’t you go and get yourself some lunch—leave your front-door key behind—and then go and see a movie.”
Fat Charlie put on his jacket and went outside. He put his door key down beside the sink. The fresh air was wonderful, although the day was gray and the sky was spitting drizzle. He bought a newspaper to read. He stopped at the chippie and bought a large bag of chips and a battered saveloy for his lunch. The drizzle stopped, so he sat on a bench in a churchyard and read his newspaper and ate his saveloy and chips.
He very much wanted to see a film.
He wandered into the Odeon, bought a ticket for the first thing showing. It was an action-adventure, and it was already on when he went inside. Things blew up. It was great.
Halfway through the film it occurred to Fat Charlie that there was something that he was not remembering. It was in his head somewhere, like an itch an inch behind his eyes, and it kept distracting him.
The film ended.
Fat Charlie realized that, although he had enjoyed it, he had not actually managed to keep much of the film he had just seen in his head. So he bought a large bag of popcorn and sat through it again. It was even better the second time.
And the third.
After that, he thought that perhaps he ought to think about getting home, but there was a late-night double feature of Eraserhead and True Stories, and he had never actually seen either film, so he watched them both, although he was, by now, really quite hungry, which meant that by the end he was unsure of what Eraserhead had actually been about, or what the lady was doing in the radiator, and he wondered if they’d let him stay and watch it again, but they explained, very patiently, over and over, that they were going to close for the night, and inquired as to whether he didn’t have a home to go to, and wasn’t it time for him to be in bed?
And of course, he did, and it was, although the fact of it had slipped his mind for a while. So he walked back to Maxwell Gardens and was slightly surprised to see that the light was on in his bedroom.
The curtains were drawn as he reached the house. Still, there were silhouettes on the window, moving about. He thought he recognized both of the silhouettes.
They came together; they blended into one shadow.
Fat Charlie uttered one deep and terrible howl.
IN MRS. DUNWIDDY’S HOUSE THERE WERE MANY PLASTIC animals. The dust moved slowly through the air in that place, as if it were better used to the sunbeams of a more leisurely age, and could not be doing with all this fast modern light. There was a transparent plastic cover on the sofa, and chairs that crackled when you sat down on them.
In Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house there was pine-scented hard toilet paper—shiny, uncomfortable strips of greaseproof paper. Mrs. Dunwiddy believed in economy, and pine-scented hard toilet paper was at the bottom of her economy drive. You could still get hard toilet paper, if you looked long enough and were prepared to pay more for it.
Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house smelled of violet water. It was an old house. People forget that the children born to settlers in Florida were already old men and women when the dour Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock. The house didn’t go that far back; it had been built in the 1920s, during a Florida land development scheme, to be the show house, to represent the hypothetical houses that all the other buyers would find themselves eventually unable to build on the plots of gatory swamp they were being sold. Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house had survived hurricanes without losing a roof tile.
When the doorbell rang, Mrs. Dunwiddy was stuffing a small turkey. She tutted, and washed her hands, then walked down the corridor to her front door, peering out at the world through her thick, thick glasses, her left hand trailing on the wallpaper.
She opened the door a crack and peered out.
“Louella? It’s me.” It was Callyanne Higgler.
“Come in.” Mrs. Higgler followed Mrs. Dunwiddy back to the kitchen. Mrs. Dunwiddy ran her hands under the tap, then recommenced taking handfuls of soggy cornbread stuffing and pushing them deep into the turkey.
“You expectin‘ company?”
Mrs. Dunwiddy made a noncommittal noise. “It always a good idea to be prepared,” she said. “Now, suppose you tell me what’s going on?”
“Nancy’s boy. Fat Charlie.”
“What about him?”