Only he couldn’t do it. There were people looking up at him. Barely two dozen of them, in the upstairs room of a pub. Many of them were women. In front of an audience, Fat Charlie couldn’t even open his mouth.
He could hear the music playing, but he just stood there. He felt very cold. His feet seemed a long way away.
He forced his mouth open.
“I think,” he said, very distinctly, into the microphone, over the music, and heard his words echoing back from every corner of the room. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
There was no graceful exit from the stage.
After that, everything got a bit wobbly.
THERE ARE MYTH-PLACES. THEY EXIST, EACH IN THEIR own way. Some of them are overlaid on the world; others exist beneath the world as it is, like an underpainting.
There are mountains. They are the rocky places you will reach before you come to the cliffs that border the end of the world, and there are caves in those mountains, deep caves that were inhabited long before the first men walked the earth.
They are inhabited still.
CHAPTER
FIVE
IN WHICH WE
EXAMINE
THE MANY
CONSEQUENCES OF THE
MORNING
AFTER
FAT CHARLIE WAS THIRSTY.
Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt.
Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead.
Fat Charlie opened his eyes, which was a mistake, in that it let daylight in, which hurt. It also told him where he was (in his own bed, in his bedroom), and because he was staring at the clock on his bedside table, it told him that the time was 11:30.
That, he thought, one word at a time, was about as bad as things could get: he had the kind of hangover that an Old Testament God might have smitten the Midianites with, and the next time he saw Grahame Coats he would undoubtedly learn that he had been fired.
He wondered if he could sound convincingly sick over the phone, then realized that the challenge would be convincingly sounding anything else.
He could not remember getting home last night.
He would phone the office, the moment he was able to remember the telephone number. He would apologize—crippling twenty-four-hour flu, flat on his back, nothing that could be done….
“You know,” said someone in the bed next to him, “I think there’s a bottle of water on your side. Could you pass it over here?”
Fat Charlie wanted to explain that there was no water on his side of the bed, and that there was, in fact, no water closer than the bathroom sink, if he disinfected the toothbrush mug first, but he realized he was staring at one of several bottles of water, sitting on the bedside table. He reached his hand out, and closed fingers that felt like they belonged to someone else around one of them, then, with the sort of effort people usually reserve for hauling themselves up the final few feet of a sheer rock face, he rolled over in bed.
It was the vodka and orange.
Also, she was naked. At least, the bits of her he could see were.
She took the water, and pulled the sheet up to cover her chest. “Ta. He said to tell you,” she said, “when you woke, not to worry about calling work and telling them you were ill. He said to tell you he’s already taken care of it.”
Fat Charlie’s mind was not put at rest. His fears and worries were not allayed. Then again, in the condition he was in, he only had room in his head for a single thing to worry about at once, and right now he was worrying about whether or not he would make it to the bathroom in time.
“You’ll need more liquids,” said the girl. “You’ll need to replenish your electrolytes.”
Fat Charlie made it to the bathroom in time. Afterward, seeing he was there already, he stood under the shower until the room stopped undulating, and then he brushed his teeth without throwing up.
When he returned to the bedroom, the vodka and orange was no longer there, which was a relief to Fat Charlie, who had started to hope that she might have been an alcohol-induced delusion, like pink elephants or the nightmarish idea that he had taken to the stage to sing on the previous evening.
He could not find his dressing gown, so he pulled on a tracksuit, in order to feel dressed enough to visit the kitchen, at the far end of the hall.
His phone chimed, and he rummaged through his jacket, which was on the floor beside the bed, until he found it, and flipped it open. He grunted into it, as anonymously as he could, just in case it was someone from the Grahame Coats Agency trying to discern his whereabouts.
“It’s me,” said Spider’s voice. “Everything’s okay.”
“You told them I was dead?”
“Better than that. I told them I was you.”
“But.” Fat Charlie tried to think clearly. “But you’re not me.”
“Hey. I know that. I told them I was.”
“You don’t even look like me.”
“Brother of mine, you are harshing a potential mellow here. It’s all taken care of. Oops. Gotta go. The big boss needs to talk to me.”
“Grahame Coats? Look, Spider—”
But Spider had put down the phone, and the screen blanked.
Fat Charlie’s dressing gown came through the door. There was a girl inside it. It looked significantly better on her than it ever had on him. She was carrying a tray, on which was a water glass with a fizzing Alka-Seltzer in it, along with something in a mug.
“Drink both of these,” she told him. “The mug first. Just knock it back.”
“What’s in the mug?”
“Egg yolk, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, salt, dash of vodka, things like that,” she said. “Kill or cure. Now,” she told him, in tones that brooked no argument. “Drink.”
Fat Charlie drank.
“Oh my god,” he said.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “But you’re still alive.”
He wasn’t sure about that. He drank the Alka-Seltzer anyway. Something occurred to him.
“Um,” said Fat Charlie. “Um. Look. Last night. Did we. Um.”
She looked blank.
“Did we what?”
“Did we. You know. Do it?”
“You mean you don’t remember?” Her face fell. “You said it was the best you’d ever had. That it was as if you’d never made love to a woman before. You were part god, part animal, and part unstoppable sex machine….”
Fat Charlie didn’t know where to look. She giggled.
“I’m just winding you up,” she said. “I’d helped your brother get you home, we cleaned you up, and, after that, you know.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” she said, “you were completely out cold, and it’s a big bed. I’m not sure where your brother slept. He must have the constitution of an ox. He was up at the crack of dawn, all bright and smiling.”