Fat Charlie was not by nature a violent man; still, he could dream. His daydreams tended to be small and comfortable things. He would like to have enough money to eat in good restaurants whenever he wished. He wanted a job in which nobody could tell him what to do. He wanted to be able to sing without embarrassment, somewhere there were never any people around to hear him.

This afternoon, however, his daydreams assumed a different shape: he could fly, for a start, and bullets bounced off his mighty chest as he zoomed down from the sky and rescued Rosie from a band of kidnapping scoundrels and dastards. She would hold him tightly as they flew off into the sunset, off to his Fortress of Cool, where she would be so overwhelmed with feelings of gratitude that she would enthusiastically decide not to bother with the whole waiting-until-they-were-married bit, and would start to see how high and how fast they could fill their jar....

The daydream eased the stress of life in the Grahame Coats Agency, of telling people that their checks were in the post, of calling in money the agency was owed.

At6 :00 PMFat Charlie turned off his computer, and walked down the five flights of stairs to the street. It had not rained. Overhead, the starlings were wheeling and cheeping: the dusk chorus of a city. Everyone on the pavement was hurrying somewhere. Most of them, like Fat Charlie, were walking up Kingsway to Holborn tube. They had their heads down and the look about them of people who wanted to get home for the night.

There was one person on the pavement who wasn't going anywhere, though. He stood there, facing Fat Charlie and the remaining commuters, and his leather jacket flapped in the wind. He was not smiling.

Fat Charlie saw him from the end of the street. As he walked toward him everything became unreal. The day melted, and he realized what he had spent the day trying to remember.

"Hello, Spider," he said, when he got close.

Spider looked like a storm was raging inside him. He might have been about to cry. Fat Charlie didn't know. There was too much emotion on his face, in the way he stood, so the people on the street looked away, ashamed.

"I went out there," he said. His voice was dull. "I saw Mrs. Higgler. She took me to the grave. My father died, and I didn't know."

Fat Charlie said, "He was my father too, Spider." He wondered how he could have forgotten Spider, how he could have dismissed him so easily as a dream.

"True."

The dusk sky was crosshatched with starlings; they wheeled and crossed from rooftop to rooftop.

Spider jerked, and stood straight. He seemed to have come to a decision. "You are so right," he said. "We got to do this together."

"Exactly," said Fat Charlie. Then he said, "Do what?" but Spider had already hailed a cab.

"We are men with troubles," said Spider to the world. "Our father is no more. Our hearts are heavy in our chests. Sorrow settles upon us like pollen in hay fever season. Darkness is our lot, and misfortune our only companion."

"Right, gentlemen," said the cabbie, brightly. "Where am I taking you?"

"To where the three remedies for darkness of the soul may be found," said Spider.

"Maybe we could get a curry," suggested Fat Charlie.

"There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life," said Spider. "These things are wine, women and song."

"Curry's nice too," pointed out Fat Charlie, but nobody was listening to him.

"In any particular order?" asked the cabbie.

"Wine first," Spider announced. "Rivers and lakes and vast oceans of wine."

"Right you are," said the cabbie, and he pulled out into the traffic.

"I have a particularly bad feeling about all this," said Fat Charlie, helpfully.

Spider nodded. "A bad feeling," he said. "Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island."

"Seek not to ask for whom the bell tolls," intoned the cabbie. "It tolls for thee."

"Whoa," said Spider. "Now that's a pretty heavy koan you got there."

"Thank you," said the cabbie.

"That's how it ends, all right. You are some kind of philosopher. I'm Spider. This is my brother, Fat Charlie."

"Charles," said Fat Charlie.

"Steve," said the cabbie. "Steve Burridge."

"Mister Burridge," said Spider, "how would you like to be our personal driver this evening?"

Steve Burridge explained that he was coming up to the end of his shift and would now be driving his cab home for the night, that dinner with Mrs. Burridge and all the little Burridges awaited him.

"You hear that?" said Spider. "A family man. Now, my brother and I are all the family that we have left. And this is the first time we've met."

"Sounds like quite a story," said the cabbie. "Was there a feud?"

"Not at all. He simply did not know that he had a brother," said Spider.

"Didyou ?" asked Fat Charlie. "Know about me?"

"I may have done," said Spider. "But things like that can slip a guy's mind so easily."

The cab pulled over to the curb. "Where are we?" asked Fat Charlie. They hadn't gone very far. He thought they were somewhere just off Fleet Street.

"What he asked for," said the cabbie. "Wine."

Spider got out of the cab and stared at the grubby oak and grimy glass exterior of the ancient wine bar. "Perfect," he said. "Pay the man, Brother."

Fat Charlie paid the cabbie. They went inside: down wooden steps to a cellar where rubicund barristers drank side by side with pallid money market fund managers. There was sawdust on the floor, and a wine list chalked illegibly on a blackboard behind the bar.

"What are you drinking?" asked Spider.

"Just a glass of house red, please," said Fat Charlie.

Spider looked at him gravely. "We are the final scions of Anansi's line. We do not mourn our father's passing with house red."

"Er. Right. Well, I'll have what you're having then."

Spider went up to the bar, easing his way through the crush of people as if it was not there. In several minutes he returned, carrying two wineglasses, a corkscrew, and an extremely dusty wine bottle. He opened the bottle with an ease that left Fat Charlie, who always wound up picking fragments of cork from his wine, deeply impressed. Spider poured from the bottle a wine so tawny it was almost black. He filled each glass, then put one in front of Fat Charlie.

"A toast," he said. "To our father's memory."

"To Dad," said Fat Charlie, and he clinked his glass against Spider's-managing, miraculously, not to spill any as he did so-and he tasted his wine. It was peculiarly bitter and herby, and salt. "What is this?"

"Funeral wine, the kind you drink for gods. They haven't made it for a long time. It's seasoned with bitter aloes and rosemary, and with the tears of brokenhearted virgins."

"And they sell it in a Fleet Street wine bar?" Fat Charlie picked up the bottle, but the label was too faded and dusty to read. "Never heard of it."

"These old places have the good stuff, if you ask for it," said Spider. "Or maybe I just think they do."

Fat Charlie took another sip of his wine. It was powerful and pungent.

"It's not a sipping wine," said Spider. "It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this." He took a huge swig. Then he made a face. "It tastes better that way, too."

Fat Charlie hesitated, then took a large mouthful of the strange wine. He could imagine that he was able to taste the aloes and the rosemary. He wondered if the salt was really tears.

"They put in the rosemary for remembrance," said Spider, and he began to top up their glasses. Fat Charlie started to try and explain that he wasn't really up for too much wine tonight and that he had to work tomorrow, but Spider cut him off. "It's your turn to make a toast," he said.

"Er. Right," said Fat Charlie. "To Mum."

They drank to their mother. Fat Charlie found that the taste of the bitter wine was beginning to grow on him; he found his eyes prickling, and a sense of loss, profound and painful, ran through him. He missed his mother. He missed his childhood. He even missed his father. Across the table, Spider was shaking his head; a tear ran down Spider's face and plopped into the wineglass; he reached for the bottle and poured more wine for them both.

Fat Charlie drank.

Grief ran through him as he drank, filling his head and his body with loss and with the pain of absence, swelling through him like waves on the ocean.

His own tears were running down his face, splashing into his drink. He fumbled in his pockets for a tissue. Spider poured out the last of the black wine, for both of them.

"Did they really sell this wine here?"

"They had a bottle they didn't know they had. They just needed to be reminded."

Fat Charlie blew his nose. "I never knew I had a brother," he said.

"I did," said Spider. "I always meant to look you up, but I got distracted. You know how it is."

"Not really."

"Things came up."

"What kind of things?"

"Things. They came up. That's what things do. They come up. I can't be expected to keep track of them all."

"Well, give me a f'rinstance."

Spider drank more wine. "Okay. The last time I decided that you and I should meet, I, well, I spent days planning it. Wanted it to go perfectly. I had to choose my wardrobe. Then I had to decide what I'd say to you when we met. I knew that the meeting of two brothers, well, it's the subject of epics, isn't it? I decided that the only way to treat it with the appropriate gravity would be to do it in verse. But what kind of verse? Am I going to rap it? Declaim it? I mean, I'm not going to greet you with a limerick. So. It had to be something dark, something powerful, rhythmic, epic. And then I had it. The perfect first line:Blood calls to blood like sirens in the night. It says so much. I knew I'd be able to get everything in there-people dying in alleys, sweat and nightmares, the power of free spirits uncrushable. Everything was going to be there. And then I had to come up with a second line, and the whole thing completely fell apart. The best I could come up with wasTum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty got a fright. "

Fat Charlie blinked. "Who exactly is Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty?"

"It's not anybody. It's just there to show you where the words ought to be. But I never really got any further on it than that, and I couldn't turn up with just a first line, some tumpties and three words of an epic poem, could I? That would have been disrespecting you."

"Well...."

"Exactly. So I went to Hawaii for the week instead. Like I said, something came up."

Fat Charlie drank more of his wine. He was beginning to like it. Sometimes strong tastes fit strong emotions, and this was one of those times. "It couldn'talways have been the second line of a poem, though," he said.

Spider put his thin hand on top of Fat Charlie's larger hand. "Enough about me," he said. "I want to hear about you."

"Not much to tell," said Fat Charlie. He told his brother about his life. About Rosie and Rosie's mother, about Grahame Coats and the Grahame Coats Agency, and his brother nodded his head. It didn't sound like much of a life, now that Fat Charlie was putting it into words.

"Still," Fat Charlie said, philosophically, "I figure that there are those people you read about in the gossip pages of newspapers. And they are always saying how dull and empty and pointless their lives are." He held the wine bottle above his glass, hoping there was just enough of the wine left for another mouthful, but there was barely a drip. The bottle was empty. It had lasted longer than it had any right to have lasted, but now there was nothing left at all.

Spider stood up. "I've met those people," he said. "The ones from the glossy magazines. I've walked among them. I have seen, firsthand, their callow, empty lives. I have watched them from the shadows when they thought themselves alone. And I can tell you this: I'm afraid there is not one of them who would swap lives with you at gunpoint, my brother. Come on."

"Whuh? Where are you going?"

"We are going. We have accomplished the first part of tonight's triune mission. Wine has been drunk. Two parts left to go."

"Er...."

Fat Charlie followed Spider outside, hoping the cool night air would clear his head. It didn't. Fat Charlie's head was feeling like it might float away if it wasn't firmly tied down.

"Women next," said Spider. "Then song."

IT IS POSSIBLYWORTH MENTIONING THAT IN FAT CHARLIE'Sworld, women did not simply turn up. You needed to be introduced to them; you needed to pluck up the courage to talk to them; you needed to find a subject to talk about when you did, and then, once you had achieved those heights, there were further peaks to scale. You needed to dare to ask them if they were doing anything on Saturday night, and then when you did, mostly they had hair that needed washing that night, or diaries to update, or cockatiels to groom, or they simply needed to wait by the phone for some other man not to call.

But Spider lived in a different world.

They wandered toward the West End, stopping when they reached a crowded pub. The patrons spilled out onto the pavement, and Spider stopped and said hello to what turned out to be a birthday celebration for a young lady named Sybilla, who was only too flattered when Spider insisted on buying a birthday round of drinks for her and for her friends. Then he told jokes ("...and the duck says,put it on my bill? Whaddayathink I am? Some kinda pervert? ") and he laughed at his own jokes, a booming, joyful laugh. He could remember the names of all the people around him. He talked to people and listened to what they said. When Spider announced it was time to find another pub, the entire birthday group decided, as one woman, that they were coming with him....

By the time they reached their third pub, Spider resembled someone from a rock video. He was draped with girls. They snuggled in. Several of them had kissed him, half-jokingly, half-seriously. Fat Charlie watched in envious horror.

"You his bodyguard?" asked one of the girls.

"What?"

"His bodyguard.Are you?"

"No," said Fat Charlie. "I'm his brother."

"Wow," she said. "I didn't know he had a brother. I think he's amazing."

"Me, too," said another, who had spent some time cuddling Spider until forced away by the press of other bodies with similar ideas. She noticed Fat Charlie for the first time. "Are you his manager?"

"No. He's the brother," said the first girl. "He was just telling me," she added, pointedly.

The second ignored her. "Are you from the States as well?" she asked. "You've sort of got a bit of an accent."

"When I was younger," said Fat Charlie. "We lived in Florida. My dad was American, my mum was from, well she was originally from Saint Andrews, but she grew up in...."