His laugh was raucous and infectious, and he seemed to be having a better time than any of the other people at the party, that was for certain. He instructed the barman in the preparation of a cocktail he called a "Double Entendre" which, while it seemed to begin with a base of champagne, he explained was actually scientifically nonalcoholic. It contained a splash of this and a splash of that until it went a vivid purple color, and he handed them out to the partygoers, pressing them upon them with joy and enthusiasm until even the people who had been sipping fizzy water warily, as if it might go off, were knocking back the purple drinks with pleasure.

And then, with the logic of dreams, he was leading them all down to the pool, and was proposing to teach them the trick of Walking on the Water. It was all a matter of confidence, he told them, of attitude, of attack, of knowing how to do it. And it seemed to the people at the party that Walking on the Water would be a very fine trick to master, something they had always known how to do, deep down in their souls, but they had forgotten, and that this man would remind them of the technique of it.

Take off your shoes,he said to them, so they took off their shoes, Sergio Rossis and Christian Louboutins and Rene Caovillas lined up side by side with Nikes and Doc Martens and anonymous black leather agent-shoes, and he led them, in a sort of a conga line, around the side of the swimming pool and then out onto its surface. The water was cool to the touch, and it quivered, like thick jelly, under their feet; some women, and several men, tittered at this, and a couple of the younger agents began jumping up and down on the surface of the pool, like children at a bouncy castle. Far below them the lights of Los Angeles shone through the smog, like distant galaxies.

Soon every inch of the pool was taken up with partygoers-standing, dancing, shaking or bouncing up and down on the water. The press of the crowd was so strong that the fly guy, the Charlie-in-his-dream, stepped back onto the concrete poolside to take a falafel-sashimi ball from a silver plate.

A spider dropped from a jasmine plant onto the fly guy's shoulder. It scuttled down his arm and onto the palm of his hand, where he greeted it with a delightedHeyyy.

There was a silence, as if he was listening to something the spider was saying, something only he could hear; then he said,Ask, and you shall receive. Ain't that the truth?

He placed the spider down, carefully, on a jasmine leaf.

And at that selfsame moment, each of the people standing barefoot on the surface of the swimming pool remembered that water was a liquid, and not a solid, and that there was a reason why people did not commonly walk, let alone dance or even bounce, on water, viz., its impossibility.

They were the movers and the shakers of the dream machine, those people, and suddenly they were flailing, fully dressed, in from four to twelve feet of water, wet and scrabbling and terrified.

Casually, the fly guy walked across the pool, treading on the heads of people, and on the hands of other people, and never once losing his balance. Then, when he reached the far end of the pool, where everything dropped into a steep hill, he took one huge jump and dove into the lights of Los Angeles at night, which shimmered and swallowed him like an ocean.

The people in the pool scrambled out, angry, upset, confused, wet, and in some cases, half-drowned....

It was early in the morning in South London. The light was blue-gray.

Fat Charlie got out of bed, troubled by his dream, and walked to the window. The curtains were open. He could see the sunrise beginning, a huge blood orange of a morning sun surrounded by gray clouds tinged with scarlet. It was the kind of sky that makes even the most prosaic person discover a deeply buried urge to start painting in oils.

Fat Charlie looked at the sunrise.Red sky in the morning, he thought.Sailor's warning.

His dream had been so strange.A party in Hollywood. The secret of Walking on the Water. And that man, who was him and was not him....

Fat Charlie realized that heknew the man in his dream, knew him from somewhere, and he also realized that this would irritate him for the rest of the day if he let it, like a snag of dental floss caught between two teeth, or the precise difference between the wordslubricious andlascivious, it would sit there, and it would irritate him.

He stared out of the window.

It was barely six in the morning, and the world was quiet. An early dog-walker, at the end of the road, was encouraging a Pomeranian to defecate. A postman ambled from house to house and back to his red van. And then something moved on the pavement beneath his house, and Fat Charlie looked down.

A man was standing by the hedge. When he saw that Fat Charlie, in pajamas, was looking down at him, he grinned, and waved. A moment of recognition that shocked Fat Charlie to the core: he was familiar with both the grin and the wave, although he could not immediately see how. Something of the dream still hung about Fat Charlie's head, making him uncomfortable, making the world seem unreal. He rubbed his eyes, and now the person by the hedge was gone. Fat Charlie hoped that the man had moved on, wandered down the road into the remnants of the hanging morning mist, taking whatever awkwardnesses and irritants and madnesses he had brought away with him.

And then the doorbell rang.

Fat Charlie pulled on his dressing gown, and he went downstairs.

He had never fastened the safety chain before opening a door, never in his life, but before he turned the handle he clicked the head of the chain into place, and he pulled the front door open six inches.

"Morning?" he said, warily.

The smile that came through the crack in the door could have illuminated a small village.

"You called me and I came," said the stranger. "Now. You going to open this door for me, Fat Charlie?"

"Who are you?" As he said it, he knew where he had seen the man before: at his mother's funeral service, in the little chapel at the crematorium. That was the last time he had seen that smile. And he knew the answer, knew it even before the man could say the words.

"I'm your brother," said the man.

Fat Charlie closed the door. He slipped off the safety chain and opened the door all the way. The man was still there.

Fat Charlie was not entirely sure how to greet a potentially imaginary brother he had not previously believed in. So they stood there, one on one side of the door, one on the other, until his brother said, "You can call me Spider. You going to invite me in?"

"Yes. I am. Of course I am. Please. Come in."

Fat Charlie led the man upstairs.

Impossible things happen. When they do happen, most people just deal with it. Today, like every day, roughly five thousand people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things, and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses. Most of them will say the equivalent, in their own language, of "Funny old world, isn't it?" and just keep going. So while part of Fat Charlie was trying to come up with logical, sensible, sane explanations for what was going on, most of him was simply getting used to the idea that a brother he hadn't known he had was walking up the staircase behind him.

They got to the kitchen and stood there.

"Would you like a cup of tea?"

"Got any coffee?"

"Only instant, I'm afraid."

"That's fine."

Fat Charlie turned on the kettle. "You come far, then?" he asked.

"Los Angeles."

"How was the flight?"

The man sat down at the kitchen table. Now he shrugged. It was the kind of shrug that could have meant anything.

"Um. You planning on staying long?"

"I haven't really given it much thought." The man-Spider-looked around Fat Charlie's kitchen as if he had never been in a kitchen before.

"How do you take your coffee?"

"Dark as night, sweet as sin."

Fat Charlie put the mug down in front of him, and passed him a sugar bowl. "Help yourself."

While Spider spooned teaspoon after teaspoon of sugar into his coffee, Fat Charlie sat opposite him, and stared.

There was a family resemblance between the two men. That was unarguable, although that alone did not explain the intense feeling of familiarity that Fat Charlie felt on seeing Spider. His brother looked like Fat Charlie wished he looked in his mind, unconstrained by the faintly disappointing fellow that he saw, with monotonous regularity, in the bathroom mirror. Spider was taller, and leaner, and cooler. He was wearing a black-and-scarlet leather jacket, and black leather leggings, and he looked at home in them. Fat Charlie tried to remember if this was what the fly guy had been wearing in his dream. There was something larger-than-life about him: simply being on the other side of the table to this man made Fat Charlie feel awkward and badly constructed, and slightly foolish. It wasn't the clothes Spider wore, but the knowledge that if Fat Charlie put them on he would look as if he were wearing some kind of unconvincing drag. It wasn't the way Spider smiled-casually, delightedly-but Fat Charlie's cold, incontrovertible certainty that he himself could practice smiling in front of a mirror from now until the end of time and never manage a single smile one half so charming, so cocky, or so twinklingly debonair.

"You were at Mum's cremation," said Fat Charlie.

"I thought about coming over to talk to you after the service," said Spider. "I just wasn't certain that it would be a good idea."

"I wish you had." Fat Charlie thought of something. He said, "I would have thought you'd have been at Dad's funeral."

Spider said, "What?"

"His funeral. It was in Florida. Couple of days ago."

Spider shook his head. "He's not dead," he said. "I'm pretty sure I'd know if he were dead."

"He's dead. I buried him. Well, I filled the grave. Ask Mrs. Higgler."

Spider said, "How'd he die?"

"Heart failure."

"That doesn't mean anything. That just means he died."

"Well, yes. He did."

Spider had stopped smiling. Now he was staring down into his coffee as if he suspected he was going to be able to find an answer in there. "I ought to check this out," said Spider. "It's not that I don't believe you. But when it's your old man. Even when your old man is my old man." And he made a face. Fat Charlie knew what that face meant. He had made it himself, from the inside, enough times, when the subject of his father came up. "Is she still living in the same place? Next door to where we grew up?"

"Mrs. Higgler? Yes. Still there."

"You don't have anything from there, do you? A picture? Maybe a photograph?"

"I brought home a box of them." Fat Charlie had not opened the large cardboard box yet. It was still sitting in the hall. He carried the box into the kitchen and put it down on the table. He took a kitchen knife and cut the packing tape that surrounded it; Spider reached into the box with his thin fingers, riffling through the photographs like playing cards, until he pulled out one of their mother and Mrs. Higgler, sitting on Mrs. Higgler's porch, twenty-five years earlier.

"Is that porch still there?"

Fat Charlie tried to remember. "I think so," he said.

Later, he was unable to remember whether the picture grew very big, or Spider grew very small. He could have sworn that neither of those things had actually happened; nevertheless, it was unarguable that Spider had walked into the photograph, and it had shimmered and rippled and swallowed him up.

Fat Charlie rubbed his eyes. He was alone in the kitchen at six in the morning. There was a box filled with photographs and papers on the kitchen table, along with an empty mug, which he placed in the sink. He walked along the hall to his bedroom, lay down on his bed and slept until the alarm went off at seven fifteen.

CHAPTER FOUR

WHICH CONCLUDES WITH AN EVENING OF WINE, WOMEN AND SONG

FAT CHARLIEWOKE UP.

Memories of dreams of a meeting with some film-star brother mingled with a dream in which President Taft had come to stay, bringing with him the entire cast of the cartoon. Tom and Jerry . He showered, and he took the tube to work.

All through the workday something was nagging at the back of his head, and he didn't know what it was. He misplaced things. He forgot things. At one point, he started singing at his desk, not because he was happy, but because he forgot not to. He only realized he was doing it when Grahame Coats himself put his head around the door of Fat Charlie's closet to chide him. "No radios, Walkmans, MP3players or similar instruments of music at the office," said Grahame Coats, with a ferrety glare. "It bespeaks a lackadaisical attitude, of the kind one abhors in the workaday world."

"It wasn't the radio," admitted Fat Charlie, his ears burning.

"No? Then what, pray tell, was it?"

"It was me," said Fat Charlie.

"You?"

"Yes. I was singing. I'm sorry-"

"I could have sworn it was the radio. And yet I was wrong. Good Lord. Well, with such a wealth of talents at your disposal, with such remarkable skills, perhaps you should leave us to tread the boards, entertain the multitudes, possibly do an end-of-the-pier show, rather than cluttering up a desk in an office where other people are trying to work. Eh? A place where people's careers are being managed."

"No," said Fat Charlie. "I don't want to leave. I just wasn't thinking."

"Then," said Grahame Coats, "you must learn to refrain from singing-save in the bath, the shower, or perchance the stands as you support your favorite football team. I myself am a Crystal Palace supporter. Or you will find yourself seeking gainful employment elsewhere."

Fat Charlie smiled, then realized that smiling wasn't what he wanted to do at all, and looked serious, but by that point Grahame Coats had left the room, so Fat Charlie swore under his breath, folded his arms on the desk and put his head on them.

"Was that you singing?" It was one of the new girls in the Artist Liaison department. Fat Charlie never managed to learn their names. They were always gone by then.

"I'm afraid so."

"What were you singing? It was pretty."

Fat Charlie realized he didn't know. He said, "I'm not sure. I wasn't listening."

She laughed at that, although quietly. "He's right. You should be making records, not wasting your time here."

Fat Charlie didn't know what to say. Cheeks burning, he started crossing out numbers and making notes and gathering up Post-it notes with messages on them and putting those messages up on the screen, until he was sure that she had gone.

Maeve Livingstone phoned: Could Fat Charlieplease ensure that Grahame Coats phoned her bank manager. He said he'd do his best. She told him pointedly to see that he did.

Rosie called him on his mobile at four in the afternoon, to let him know that the water was now back on again in her flat and to tell him that, good news, her mother had decided to take an interest in the upcoming wedding and had asked her to come round that evening and discuss it.

"Well," said Fat Charlie. "If she's organizing the dinner, we'll save a fortune on food."

"That's not nice. I'll call you tonight and let you know how it went."

Fat Charlie told her that he loved her, and he clicked the phone off. Someone was looking at him. He turned around.

Grahame Coats said, "He who maketh personal phone calls on company time, lo he shall reap the whirlwind. Do you know who said that?"

"You did?"

"Indeed I did," said Grahame Coats. "Indeed I did. And never a truer word was spoken. Consider this a formal warning." And he smiled then, the kind of self-satisfied smile that forced Fat Charlie to ponder the various probable outcomes of sinking his fist into Grahame Coats's comfortably padded midsection. He decided that it would be a toss-up between being fired and an action for assault. Either way, he thought, it would be a fine thing....