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?”
“Well, I tell him about his brother, when he out here last week.”
Mrs. Dunwiddy pulled her hand out of the turkey. “That’s not the end of the world,” she said.
“I tell him how he can contact his brother.”
“Ahh,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. She could disapprove with just that one syllable. “And?”
“He’s turned up in Hingland. Boy’s at his wit’s end.”
Mrs. Dunwiddy took a large handful of wet cornbread and rammed it into the turkey with a force that would have made the turkey’s eyes water, if it still had any. “Can’t get him to go away?”
“Nope.”
Sharp eyes peered through thick lenses. Then Mrs. Dunwiddy said, “I done it once. Can’t do it again. Not that way.”
“I know. But we got to do something.”
Mrs. Dunwiddy sighed. “It’s true what they say. Live long enough, you see all your birds come home to roost.”
“Isn’t there another way?”
Mrs. Dunwiddy finished stuffing the turkey. She picked up a skewer, pinned the flap of skin closed. Then she covered the bird with silver foil.
“I reckon,” she said, “I put it on to cook late tomorrow morning. It be done in the afternoon, then I put it back into a hot oven early evening, to get it all ready for dinner.”
“Who you got comin’ to dinner?” asked Mrs. Higgler.
“You,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, “Zorah Bustamonte, Bella Noles. And Fat Charlie Nancy. By the time that boy gets here, he have a real appetite.”
Mrs. Higgler said, “He’s coming here?”
“Aren’t you listening, girl?” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. Only Mrs. Dunwiddy could have called Mrs. Higgler “girl” without sounding foolish. “Now, help me get this turkey into the fridge.”
IT WOULD BE FAIR TO SAY THAT ROSIE HAD, THAT EVENING, JUST had the most wonderful night of her life: magical, perfect, utterly fine. She could not have stopped smiling, not even if she had wanted to. The food had been fabulous, and once they had eaten Fat Charlie had taken her dancing. It was a proper dance hall, with a small orchestra and people in pastel clothes who glided across the floor. She felt as if they had traveled in time together and were visiting a gentler age. Rosie had enjoyed dancing lessons from the age of five, but had no one to dance with.
“I didn’t know you could dance,” she told him.
“There are so many things about me you do not know,” he said.
And that made her happy. Soon enough, she and this man would be married. There were things about him she did not know? Excellent. She would have a lifetime in which to find them out. All sorts of things.
She noticed the way other women, and other men, looked at Fat Charlie as she walked beside him, and she was happy she was the woman on his arm.
They walked through Leicester Square, and Rosie could see the stars shining up above them, the starlight somehow crisply twinkling, despite the glare of the streetlights.
For a brief moment, she found herself wondering why it had never been like this with Fat Charlie before. Sometimes, somewhere deep inside herself, Rosie had suspected that perhaps she had only kept going out with Fat Charlie because her mother disliked him so much; that she had only said yes when he had asked her to marry him because her mother would have wanted her to say no….