"Well, I was quite looking forward to it, actually."

"Spider does not marry. I'm not the marrying kind."

"So my Rosie's not good enough for you, is that what you're saying?"

Spider did not answer. He walked out of the room.

Fat Charlie felt like he'd scored, somehow, in the argument. He got up from the sofa, picked up the empty foil cartons that had, the previous evening, held a chicken chow mein and a crispy pork balls, and he dropped them into the bin. He went into his bedroom, where he took off the clothes he had slept in in order to put on clean clothes, discovered that, due to not doing the laundry, he had no clean clothes, so brushed yesterday's clothes down vigorously-dislodging several stray strands of chow mein-and put them back on.

He went into the kitchen.

Spider was sitting at the kitchen table, enjoying a steak large enough for two people.

"Where did you get that from?" said Fat Charlie, although he was certain that he already knew.

"I asked you if you wanted lunch," said Spider, mildly.

"Where did you get the steak?"

"It was in the fridge."

"That," declaimed Fat Charlie, wagging his finger like a prosecuting attorney going in for the kill, "thatwas the steak I bought for dinner tonight. For dinner tonight for me and Rosie. The dinner I was going to be cooking for her! And you're just sitting there like a, a person eating a steak, and, and eating it, and-"

"It's not a problem," said Spider.

"What do you mean, not a problem?"

"Well," said Spider, "I called Rosie this morning already, and I'm taking her out to dinner tonight. So you wouldn't have needed the steak anyway."

Fat Charlie opened his mouth. He closed it again. "I want you out," he said.

"It's a good thing for man's desire to outstrip his something or other-grasp or reach or something-or what else is Heaven for?" said Spider, cheerfully, between mouthfuls of Fat Charlie's steak.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"It means I'm not going anywhere. I like it here." He hacked off another lump of steak, shoveled it down.

"Out," said Fat Charlie, and then the hall telephone rang. Fat Charlie sighed, walked into the hall, and answered it. "What?"

"Ah. Charles. Good to hear your voice. I know you're currently enjoying your well-earned, but do you think it might be within the bounds of possibility for you to swing by for, oh, half an hour or so, tomorrow morning? Say, around ten-ish?"

"Yeah. Course," said Fat Charlie. "Not a problem."

"Delighted to hear it. I'll need your signature on some papers. Well, until then."

"Who was that?" asked Spider. He had cleaned his plate and was blotting his mouth with a paper towel.

"Grahame Coats. He wants me to pop in tomorrow."

Spider said, "He's a bastard."

"So? You're a bastard."

"Different kind of bastard. He's not good news. You should find another job."

"I love my job!" Fat Charlie meant it when he said it. He had managed entirely to forget how much he disliked his job, and the Grahame Coats Agency, and the ghastly, lurking-behind-every-door presence of Grahame Coats.

Spider stood up. "Nice piece of steak," he said. "I've set my stuff up in your spare room."

"You've what?"

Fat Charlie hurried down to the end of the hall, where there was a room that technically qualified his residence as a two-bedroom flat. The room contained several cartons of books, a box containing an elderly Scalextric Racing set, a tin box filled with Hot Wheels cars (most of them missing tires), and various other battered remnants of Fat Charlie's childhood. It might have been a good-sized bedroom for a normal-sized garden gnome or an undersized dwarf, but for anyone else it was a closet with a window.

Or rather, it used to be, but it wasn't. Not anymore.

Fat Charlie pulled the door open and stood in the hallway, blinking.

There was a room, yes; that much was still true, but it was an enormous room. A magnificent room. There were windows at the far end, huge picture windows, looking out over what appeared to be a waterfall. Beyond the waterfall, the tropical sun was low on the horizon, and it burnished everything in its golden light. There was a fireplace large enough to roast a pair of oxen, upon which three burning logs crackled and spat. There was a hammock in one corner, along with a perfectly white sofa and a four-poster bed. Near the fireplace was something that Fat Charlie, who had only ever seen them in magazines, suspected was probably some kind of Jacuzzi. There was a zebra-skin rug, and a bear pelt hanging on one wall, and there was the kind of advanced audio equipment that mostly consists of a black piece of polished plastic that you wave at. On one wall hung a flat television screen that was the width of the room that should have been there. And there was more....

"What have you done?" asked Fat Charlie. He did not go in.

"Well," said Spider from behind him, "seeing as I'm going to be here for a few days, I thought I'd bring my stuff over."

"Bring your stuff?Bringing your stuff is a couple of carrier bags filled with laundry, some PlayStation games and a spider plant. This is...thisis...." He was out of words.

Spider patted Fat Charlie's shoulder as he pushed past. "If you need me," he said to his brother, "I'll be in my room." And he shut the door behind him.

Fat Charlie shook the doorknob. The door was now locked.

He went into the TV room, got the phone from the hall, and dialed Mrs. Higgler's number.

"Who the hell is this at this time of the morning?" she said.

"It's me. Fat Charlie. I'm sorry."

"Well? What you callin' about?"

"Well, I was calling to ask your advice. You see, my brother came out here."

"Your brother."

"Spider. You told me about him. You said to ask a spider if I wanted to see him, and I did, and he's here."

"Well," she said, noncommittally, "that's good."

"It's not."

"Why not? He's family, isn't he?"

"Look, I can't go into it now. I just want him to go away."

"Have you tried asking him nicely?"

"We just got through with all that. He says he isn't going. He's set up something that looks like the pleasure dome of Kublai Khan in my box room and, I mean, round here you need the council's permission just to put in double glazing. He's got some kind of waterfall in there. Not in there, it's on the other side of the window. And he's after my fiancee."

"How do you know?"

"He said so."

Mrs. Higgler said, "I'm not at my best before I have my coffee."

"I just need to know how to make him go away."

"I don't know," said Mrs. Higgler. "I will talk to Mrs. Dunwiddy about it." She hung up.

Fat Charlie went back down to the end of the corridor and knocked on the door.

"What is it now?"

"I want to talk."

The door clicked and swung open. Fat Charlie went inside. Spider was reclining, naked, in the hot tub. He was drinking something more or less the color of electricity from a long, frosted glass. The huge picture windows were now wide open, and the roar of the waterfall contrasted with the low, liquid jazz that emanated from hidden speakers somewhere in the room.

"Look," said Fat Charlie, "you have to understand, this is my house."

Spider blinked. "This?" he asked. "Thisis 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 ofEraserhead andTrue 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 whatEraserhead 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'SHOUSE THERE WERE MANY PLASTICanimals. 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 the1920 s, 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."