Her lips moved, as if she were trying to find the right words to say.
Spider waited.
Her mouth opened.
His first thought was that she was eating something, because the thing he saw between her teeth was brown, and was certainly not a tongue. Then it moved its head and its eyes, little black-bead eyes, stared at him. Rosie opened her mouth impossibly wide and the birds came out.
Spider said “Rosie?” and then the air was filled with beaks and feathers and claws, one after the other. Birds poured out from her throat, each accompanied by a tiny coughing-choking noise, in a stream directed at him.
He threw up an arm to protect his eyes, and something hurt his wrist. He flailed out, and something flew at his face, heading for his eyes. He jerked his head backward, and the beak punctured his cheek.
A moment of nightmare clarity: there was still a woman sitting opposite him. What he could no longer understand was how he could ever have mistaken her for Rosie. She was older than Rosie, for a start, her blue-black hair streaked here and there with silver. Her skin was not the warm brown of Rosie’s skin but black as flint. She was wearing a ragged ochre raincoat. And she grinned and opened her mouth wide once more, and now inside her mouth he could see the cruel beaks and crazy eyes of seagulls….
Spider did not stop to think. He acted. He grabbed the handle of the coffeepot, swept it up in one hand, while with the other he pulled off the lid; then he jerked the pot toward the woman in the seat opposite him. The contents of the pot, scalding hot black coffee, went all over her.
She hissed in pain.
Birds crashed and flapped through the air of the cellar restaurant, but now there was nobody sitting opposite him, and the birds flew without direction, flapping into walls wildly.
The proprietor said, “Sir? Are you hurt? I am sorry. They must have come in from the street.”
“I’m fine,” said Spider.
“Your face is bleeding,” said the man. He handed Spider a napkin, and Spider pressed it against his cheek. The cut stung.
Spider offered to help the man get the birds out. He opened the door to the street, but now the place was as empty of birds as it had been before his arrival.
Spider pulled out a five-pound note. “Here,” he said. “For the coffee. I’ve got to go.”
The proprietor nodded, gratefully. “Keep the napkin.”
Spider stopped and thought. “When I came in,” he asked, “was there a woman with me?”
The proprietor looked puzzled—possibly even scared, Spider could not be sure. “I do not remember,” he said, as if dazed. “If you had been alone, I would not have seated you back there. But I do not know.”
Spider went back out into the street. The day was still bright, but the sunlight no longer seemed reassuring. He looked around. He saw a pigeon, shuffling and pecking at an abandoned ice cream cone; a sparrow on a window ledge; and, high above, a flash of white in the sunlight, its wings extended, a seagull circled.
* Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.
CHAPTER
NINE
IN WHICH
FAT CHARLIE
ANSWERS THE DOOR
AND
SPIDER
ENCOUNTERS FLAMINGOS
FAT CHARLIE’S LUCK WAS CHANGING. HE COULD FEEL IT. THE plane on which he was returning home had been oversold, and he had found himself bumped up to first class. The meal was excellent. Halfway across the Atlantic, a flight attendant came over to inform him that he had won a complimentary box of chocolates, and presented it to him. He put it in his overhead locker, and ordered a Drambuie on ice.
He would get home. He would sort everything out with Grahame Coats—after all, if there was one thing that Fat Charlie was certain of, it was the honesty of his own accounting. He would make everything good with Rosie. Everything was going to be just great.
He wondered if Spider would already be gone when he got home, or whether he would get the satisfaction of throwing him out. He hoped it would be the latter. Fat Charlie wanted to see his brother apologize, possibly even grovel. He started to imagine the things that he was going to say.
“Get out!” said Fat Charlie, “And take your sunshine, your Jacuzzi, and your bedroom with you!”
“Sorry?” said the flight attendant.
“Talking,” said Fat Charlie. “To myself. Just um.”
But even the embarrassment he felt at this wasn’t really that bad. He didn’t even hope the plane would crash and end his mortification. Life was definitely looking up.
He opened the little kit of useful amenities he had been given, and put on his eyeshade, and pushed his seat back as far as it would go, which was most of the way. He thought about Rosie, although the Rosie in his mind kept shifting, morphing into someone smaller who wasn’t really wearing much of anything. Fat Charlie guiltily imagined her dressed, and was mortified when he realized that she seemed to be wearing a police uniform. He felt terrible about this, he told himself, but it didn’t seem to make much of an impression. He ought to feel ashamed of himself. He ought to….
Fat Charlie shifted in his seat and emitted one small, satisfied snore.
He was still in an excellent mood when he landed at Heathrow. He took the Heathrow Express into Paddington and was pleased to note that in his brief absence from England the sun had decided to come out. Every little thing, he told himself, is going to be all right.
The only odd note, which added a flavor of wrongness to the morning, occurred halfway through the train journey. He was staring out of the window, wishing he had bought a newspaper at Heathrow. The train was passing an expanse of green—a school playing field, perhaps, when the sky seemed, momentarily, to darken, and, with a hiss of brakes, the train stopped at a signal.
That did not disturb Fat Charlie. It was England in the autumn: the sun was, by definition, something that only happened when it wasn’t cloudy or raining. But there was a figure standing on the edge of the green by a stand of trees.
At first glance, he thought it was a scarecrow.
That was foolish. It could not have been a scarecrow. Scarecrows are found in fields, not on football pitches. Scarecrows certainly aren’t left on the edge of the woodland. Anyway, if it was a scarecrow it was doing a very poor job.
There were crows everywhere, after all, big black ones.
And then it moved.
It was too far away to be anything more than a shape, a slight figure in a tattered brown raincoat. Still, Fat Charlie knew it. He knew that if he had been close enough, he would have seen a face chipped from obsidian, and raven-black hair, and eyes that held madness.
Then the train jerked and began to move, and in moments the woman in the brown raincoat was out of sight.
Fat Charlie felt uncomfortable. He had practically convinced himself by now that what had happened, what he thought had happened, in Mrs. Dunwiddy’s front room had been some form of hallucination, a high-octane dream, true on some level but not a real thing. Not something that had happened; rather, it was symbolic of a greater truth. He could not have gone to a real place, nor struck a real bargain, could he?