"Of course he was!" said Mrs Higgler, fiercely, "But you can't judge him like you would judge a man. You got to remember, Fat Charlie, that your father was a god."

"A god among men?"

"No. Just a god." She said it without any kind of emphasis, as flatly and as normally as she might have said "he was diabetic" or simply "he was black."

Fat Charlie wanted to make a joke of it, but there was that look in Mrs. Higgler's eyes, and suddenly he couldn't think of anything funny to say. So he said, softly, "He wasn't a god. Gods are special. Mythical. They do miracles and things."

"That's right," said Mrs. Higgler. "We wouldn't have told you while he was alive, but now he is gone, there can't be any harm in it."

"He was not a god. He was my dad."

"You can be both," she said. "It happens."

It was like arguing with a crazy person, thought Fat Charlie. He realized that he should just shut up, but his mouth kept going. Right now his mouth was saying, "Look. If my dad was a god, he would have had godlike powers."

"He did. Never did a lot with them, mind you. But he was old. Anyway, how do you think he got away with not working? Whenever he needed money, he'd play the lottery, or go down to Hallendale and bet on the dogs or the horses. Never win enough to attract attention. Just enough to get by."

Fat Charlie had never won anything in his whole life. Nothing whatsoever. In the various office sweepstakes he had taken part in, he was only able to rely on his horse never making it out of the starting gate, or his team being relegated to some hitherto unheard-of division somewhere in the elephants' graveyard of organized sport. It rankled.

"If my dad was a god-something which I do not for one moment concede in any way, I should add-then why aren'tI a god too? I mean, you're saying I'm the son of a god, aren't you?"

"Obviously."

"Well then, why can't I bet on winning horses or do magic or miracles or things?"

She sniffed. "Your brother got all that god stuff."

Fat Charlie found that he was smiling. He breathed out. It was a joke after all, then.

"Ah. You know, Mrs. Higgler, I don't actually have a brother."

"Of course you do. That's you and him, in the photograph."

Although he knew what was in it, Fat Charlie glanced over at the photograph. She was mad all right. Absolutely barking. "Mrs. Higgler," he said, as gently as possible. "That'sme . Just me when I was a kid. It's a mirrored door. I'm standing next to it. It's me, and my reflection."

"It is you, and it is also your brother."

"I never had a brother."

"Sure you did. I don't miss him. You were always the good one, you know. He was a handful when he was here." And before Fat Charlie could say anything else she added, "He went away, when you are just a little boy."

Fat Charlie leaned over. He put his big hand on Mrs. Higgler's bony hand, the one that wasn't holding the coffee mug. "It's not true," he said.

"Louella Dunwiddy made him go," she said. "He was scared of her. But he still came back, from time to time. He could be charming when he wanted to be." She finished her coffee.

"I always wanted a brother," said Fat Charlie. "Somebody to play with."

Mrs. Higgler got up. "This place isn't going to clean itself up," she said. "I've got garbage bags in the car. I figure we'll need a lot of garbage bags."

"Yes," said Fat Charlie.

He stayed in a motel that night. In the morning, he and Mrs. Higgler met, back at his father's house, and they put garbage into big black garbage bags. They assembled bags of objects to be donated to Goodwill. They also filled a box with things Fat Charlie wanted to hold on to for sentimental reasons, mostly photographs from his childhood and before he was born.

There was an old trunk, like a small pirate's treasure chest, filled with documents and old papers. Fat Charlie sat on the floor going through them. Mrs. Higgler came in from the bedroom with another black garbage bag filled with moth-eaten clothes.

"It's your brother give him that trunk," said Mrs. Higgler, out of the blue. It was the first time she had mentioned any of her fantasies of the previous night.

"I wish I did have a brother," said Fat Charlie, and he did not realize he had said it aloud until Mrs. Higgler said, "I already told you. Youdo have a brother."

"So," he said. "Where would I find this mythical brother of mine?" Later, he would wonder why he had asked her this. Was he humoring her? Teasing her? Was it just that he had to say something to fill the void? Whatever the reason, he said it. And she was chewing her lower lip, and nodding.

"You got to know. It's your heritage. It's your bloodline." She walked over to him and crooked her finger. Fat Charlie bent down. The old woman's lips brushed his ear as she whispered, "...need him...tell a..."

"What?"

"I say," she said, in her normal voice, "if you need him, just tell a spider. He'll come running."

"Tell a spider?"

"That's what I said. You think I just talkin' for my health? Exercisin' my lungs? You never hear of talkin' to the bees? When I was a girl in Saint Andrews, before my folks came here, you would go tell the bees all your good news. Well, this is just like that. Talk to spider. It was how I used to send messages to your father, when he would vanish off."

"...right."

"Don't you say 'right' like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm a crazy old lady who don't know the price of fish. You think I don't know which way is up?"

"Um. I'm quite sure you do. Honestly."

Mrs. Higgler was not mollified. She was far from gruntled. She picked up her coffee mug from the table and cradled it, disapprovingly. Fat Charlie had done it now, and Mrs. Higgler was determined to make sure that he knew it.

"I don't got to do this, you know," she said. "I don't got to help you. I'm only doing it because your father, he was special, and because your mother, she was a fine woman. I'm telling you big things. I'm telling you important things. You should listen to me. You should believe me."

"I do believe you," said Fat Charlie, as convincingly as he could.

"Now you're just humoring an old woman."

"No," he lied. "I'm not. Honestly I'm not." His words rang with honesty, sincerity and truth. He was thousands of miles from home, in his late father's house, with a crazy old woman on the verge of an apoplectic seizure. He would have told her that the moon was just some kind of unusual tropical fruit if it would have calmed her down, and meant it, as best he could.

She sniffed.

"That's the trouble with you young people," she said. "You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forget more than you ever know. You don't know nothin' about your father, you don't know nothin' about your family. I tell you your father is a god, you don't even ask me what god I talking about."

Fat Charlie tried to remember the names of some gods. "Zeus?" he suggested.

Mrs. Higgler made a noise like a kettle suppressing the urge to boil. Fat Charlie was fairly sure that Zeus had been the wrong answer. "Cupid?"

She made another noise, which began as a sputter and ended in a giggle. "I can just picture your dad wearing nothin' but one of them fluffy diapers, with a big bow and arrow." She giggled some more. Then she swallowed some coffee.

"Back when he was a god," she told him. "Back then, they called him Anansi."

NOW, PROBABLY YOUKNOW SOME ANANSI STORIES. PROBABLYthere's no one in the whole wide world doesn't know some Anansi stories.

Anansi was a spider, when the world was young, and all the stories were being told for the first time. He used to get himself into trouble, and he used to get himself out of trouble. The story of the Tar-Baby, the one they tell about Bre'r Rabbit? That was Anansi's story first. Some people thinks he was a rabbit. But that's their mistake. He wasn't a rabbit. He was a spider.

Anansi stories go back as long as people been telling each other stories. Back in Africa, where everything began, even before people were painting cave lions and bears on rock walls, even then they were telling stories, about monkeys and lions and buffalo: big dream stories. People always had those proclivities. That was how they made sense of their worlds. Everything that ran or crawled or swung or snaked got to walk through those stories, and different tribes of people would venerate different creatures.

Lion was the king of beasts, even then, and Gazelle was the fleetest of foot, and Monkey was the most foolish, and Tiger was the most terrible, but it wasn't stories about them people wanted to hear.

Anansi gave his name to stories. Every story is Anansi's. Once, before the stories were Anansi's, they all belonged to Tiger (which is the name the people of the islands call all the big cats), and the tales were dark and evil, and filled with pain, and none of them ended happily. But that was a long time ago. These days, the stories are Anansi's.

Seeing we were just at a funeral, let me tell you a story about Anansi, the time his grandmother died. (It's okay: she was a very old woman, and she went in her sleep. It happens.) She died a long way from home, so Anansi, he goes across the island with his handcart, and he gets his grandmother's body, and puts it on the handcart, and he wheels it home. He's going to bury her by the banyan tree out the back of his hut, you see.

Now, he's passing through the town, after pushing his grandmother's corpse in the cart all morning, and he thinksI need some whisky . So he goes into the shop, for there is a shop in that village, a store that sells everything, where the shopkeeper is a very hasty-tempered man. Anansi, he goes in and he drinks some whisky. He drinks a little more whisky, and he thinks, I shall play a trick on this fellow, so he says to the shopkeeper, go take some whisky to my grandmother, sleeping in the cart outside. You may have to wake her, for she's a sound sleeper.

So the shopkeeper, he goes out to the cart with a bottle, and he says to the old lady in the cart, "Hey, here's your whisky," but the old lady she not say anything. And the shopkeeper, he's just getting angrier and angrier, for he was such a hasty-tempered man, saying get up, old woman, get up and drink your whisky, but the old woman she says nothing. Then she does something that the dead sometimes do in the heat of the day: she flatulates loudly. Well, the shopkeeper, he's so angry with this old woman for flatulating at him that he hits her, and then he hits her again, and now he hits her one more time and she tumbles down from the handcart onto the ground.

Anansi, he runs out and he starts a-crying and a-wailing and a-carrying on, and saying my grandmother, she's a dead woman, look what you did! Murderer! Evildoer! Now the shopkeeper, he says to Anansi, don't you tell anyone I done this, and he gives Anansi five whole bottles of whisky, and a bag of gold, and a sack of plantains and pineapples and mangos, to make him hush his carrying-on, and to go away.

(He thinks he killed Anansi's grandmother, you see.) So Anansi, he wheels his handcart home, and he buries his grandmother underneath the banyan tree.

Now the next day, Tiger, he's passing by Anansi's house, and he smells cooking smells. So he invites himself over, and there's Anansi having a feast, and Anansi, having no other option, asks Tiger to sit and eat with them.

Tiger says, Brother Anansi, where did you get all that fine food from, and don't you lie to me? And where did you get these bottles of whisky from, and that big bag filled with gold pieces? If you lie to me, I'll tear out your throat.

So Anansi, he says, I cannot lie to you, Brother Tiger. I got them all for I take my dead grandmother to the village on a handcart. And the storekeeper gave me all these good things for bringing him my dead grandmother.

Now, Tiger, he didn't have a living grandmother, but his wife had a mother, so he goes home and he calls his wife's mother out to see him, saying, grandmother, you come out now, for you and I must have a talk. And she comes out and peers around, and says what is it? Well, Tiger, he kills her, even though his wife loves her, and he places her body on a handcart.

Then he wheels his handcart to the village, with his dead mother-in-law on it. Who want a dead body? he calls. Who want a dead grandmother? But all the people they just jeered at him, and they laughed at him, and they mocked him, and when they saw that he was serious and he wasn't going anywhere, they pelted him with rotten fruit until he ran away.

It wasn't the first time Tiger was made a fool of by Anansi, and it wouldn't be the last time. Tiger's wife never let him forget how he killed her mother. Some days it's better for Tiger if he's never been born.

That's an Anansi story.

'Course, all stories are Anansi stories. Even this one.

Olden days, all the animals wanted to have stories named after them, back in the days when the songs that sung the world were still being sung, back when they were still singing the sky and the rainbow and the ocean. It was in those days when animals were people as well as animals that Anansi the spider tricked all of them, especially Tiger, because he wanted all the stories named after him.

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

What's that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.

No, he never changed his shape. It's just a matter of how you tell the story. That's all.

CHAPTER THREE

IN WHICH THERE IS A FAMILY REUNION

FAT CHARLIEFLEW HOME TO ENGLAND; AS HOME AS HE WAS GOing to get, anyway.

Rosie was waiting for him as he came out of the customs hall carrying a small suitcase and a large, taped-up cardboard box. She gave him a huge hug. "How was it?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Could've been worse."

"Well," she said, "at least you don't have to worry about him coming to the wedding and embarrassing you anymore."

"There is that."

"My mum says that we ought to put off the wedding for a few months as a mark of respect."

"Your mum just wants us to put off the wedding, full stop."

"Nonsense. She thinks you're quite a catch."

"Your mother wouldn't describe a combination of Brad Pitt, Bill Gates, and Prince William as 'quite a catch.' There is nobody walking the earth good enough to be her son-in-law."

"She likes you," said Rosie, dutifully, and without conviction.

Rosie's mother did not like Fat Charlie, and everybody knew it. Rosie's mother was a high strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries, and feuds. She lived in a magnificent flat in Wimpole Street with nothing in the enormous fridge but bottles of vitaminized water and rye crackers. Wax fruit sat in the bowls on the antique sideboards and was dusted twice a week.

Fat Charlie had, on his first visit to Rosie's mother's place, taken a bite from one of the wax apples. He had been extremely nervous, nervous enough that he had picked up an apple-in his defense, an extremely realistic apple-and had bitten into it. Rosie had signed frantically. Fat Charlie spat out the lump of wax into his hand and thought about pretending that he liked wax fruit, or that he'd known all along and had just done it to be funny; however, Rosie's mother had raised an eyebrow, walked over, taken the remains of the apple from him, explained shortly just how much real wax fruit cost these days, if you could find it, and then dropped the apple into the bin. He sat on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon with his mouth tasting like the inside of a candle, while Rosie's mother stared at him to ensure that he did not try to take another bite out of her precious wax fruit or attempt to gnaw on the leg of a Chippendale chair.

There were large color photographs in silver frames on the sideboard of Rosie's mother's flat: photographs of Rosie as a girl and of Rosie's mother and father, and Fat Charlie had studied them intently, looking for clues to the mystery that was Rosie. Her father, who had died when Rosie was fifteen, had been an enormous man. He had been first a cook, then a chef, then a restaurateur. He was perfectly turned-out in every photograph, as if dressed by a wardrobe department before each shot, rotund and smiling, his arm always crooked for Rosie's mother to hold.

"He was an amazing cook," Rosie said. In the photographs, Rosie's mother had been curvaceous and smiling. Now, twelve years on, she resembled a skeletal Eartha Kitt, and Fat Charlie had never seen her smile.

"Does your mum ever cook?" Fat Charlie had asked, after that first time.

"I don't know. I've never seen her cook anything."

"What does she eat? I mean, she can't live on crackers and water."