Anansi Boys

by Neil Gaiman

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it’s true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It’s not even coincidence. It’s just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.

  So it was that Grahame Coats walked into a small café on the road to Williamstown, in order to purchase a soft drink and to have somewhere to sit while he called his gardener to tell him that he should come and pick him up.

  He ordered a Fanta and sat down at a table. The place was practically empty: two women, one young, one older, sat in the far corner, drinking coffee and writing postcards.

  Grahame Coats gazed out, across the road at the beach. It was paradise, he thought. And it might behoove him to get more deeply involved with local politics—perhaps as a sponsor of the arts. He had already made several substantial donations to the island’s police force, and it might even become necessary to make sure that…

  A voice from behind him, thrilled and tentative, said, “Mister Coats?” and his heart lurched. The younger of the women sat down beside him. She had the warmest smile.

  “Fancy running into you here,” she said. “You on your holidays too?”

  “Something like that.” He had no idea who this woman was.

  “You remember me, don’t you? Rosie Noah. I used to go out with Fat, with Charlie Nancy. Yes?”

  “Hello. Rosie. Yes, of course.”

  “I’m on a cruise, with my mum. She’s still writing postcards home.”

  Grahame Coats glanced back over his shoulder to the back of the little café, and something resembling a South American mummy in a floral dress glared back at him.

  “Honestly,” continued Rosie, “I’m not really a cruise sort of person. Ten days of going from island to island. It’s nice to see a familiar face, isn’t it?”

  “Absatively,” said Grahame Coats. “Should I take it that you and our Charles are no longer, well, an item?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose you should. I mean, we’re not.”

  Grahame Coats smiled sympathetically on the outside. He picked up his Fanta and walked with Rosie to the table in the corner. Rosie’s mother radiated ill-will just as an old iron radiator can radiate chill into a room, but Grahame Coats was perfectly charming and entirely helpful, and he agreed with her on every point. It was indeed appalling what the cruise companies thought they could get away with these days; it was disgusting how sloppy the administration of the cruise ship had been allowed to get; it was shocking how little there was to do in the islands; and it was, in every respect, outrageous what passengers were expected to put up with: ten days without a bathtub, with only the tiniest of shower facilities. Shocking.

  Rosie’s mother told him about the several quite impressive enmities she had managed to cultivate with certain American passengers whose main crime, as Grahame Coats understood it, was to overload their plates in the buffet line of the Squeak Attack, and to sunbathe in the spot by the aft deck pool that Rosie’s mother had decided, on the first day out, was undisputedly hers.

  Grahame Coats nodded, and made sympathetic noises as the vitriol dripped over him, tch-ing and agreeing and clucking until Rosie’s mother was prepared to overlook her dislike both of strangers and people connected in some way to Fat Charlie, and she talked, and she talked, and she talked. Grahame Coats was barely listening. Grahame Coats pondered.

  It would be unfortunate, Grahame Coats was thinking, if someone was to return to London at this precise point in time and inform the authorities that Grahame Coats had been encountered in Saint Andrews. It was inevitable that he would be noticed one day, but still, the inevitable could, perhaps, be postponed.

  “Let me,” said Grahame Coats, “suggest a solution to at least one of your problems. A little way up the road I have a holiday house. Rather a nice house I like to think. And if there’s one thing I have a surplus of, it’s baths. Would you care to come back and indulge yourselves?”

  “No, thanks,” said Rosie. Had she agreed, it is to be expected that her mother would have pointed out that they were due back at the Williamstown Port for pickup later that afternoon, and would then have chided Rosie for accepting such invitations from virtual strangers. But Rosie said no.

  “That is extremely kind of you,” said Rosie’s mother. “We would be delighted.”

  The gardener pulled up outside soon after in a black Mercedes, and Grahame Coats opened the back door for Rosie and her mother. He assured them he would absatively have them back in the harbor well before the last boat back to their ship.

  “Where to, Mister Finnegan?” asked the gardener.

  “Home,” he said.

  “Mister Finnegan?” asked Rosie.

  “It’s an old family name,” said Grahame Coats, and he was sure it was. Somebody’s family anyway. He closed the back door and went around to the front.

  MAEVE LIVINGSTONE WAS LOST. IT HAD STARTED OUT SO well: she had wanted to be at home, in Pontefract, and there was a shimmer and a tremendous wind, and in one ectoplasmic gusting, she was home. She wandered around the house for one last time, then went out into the autumn day. She wanted to see her sister in Rye, and before she could think, there she was in the garden at Rye, watching her sister walking her springer spaniel.

  It had seemed so easy.

  That was the point she had decided that she wanted to see Grahame Coats, and that was where it had all gone wrong. She was, momentarily, back in the office in the Aldwych, and then in an empty house in Purley, which she remembered from a small dinner party Grahame Coats had hosted a decade back, and then…

  Then she was lost. And everywhere she tried to go only made matters worse.

  She had no idea where she was now. It seemed to be some kind of garden.

  A brief downpour of rain drenched the place and left her untouched. Now the ground was steaming, and she knew she wasn’t in England. It was starting to get dark.

  She sat down on the ground, and she started to sniffle.

  Honestly, she told herself. Maeve Livingstone. Pull yourself together. But the sniffling just got worse.

  “You want a tissue?” asked someone.

  Maeve looked up. An elderly gentleman with a green hat and a pencil-thin moustache was offering her a tissue.

  She nodded. Then she said, “It’s probably not any use, though. I won’t be able to touch it.”

  He smiled sympathetically and passed her the tissue. It didn’t fall through her fingers, so she blew her nose with it and dabbed at her eyes. “Thank you. Sorry about that. It all got a bit much.”

  “It happens,” said the man. He looked her up and down, appraisingly. “What are you? A duppy?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so…what’s a duppy?”

  “A ghost,” he said. With his pencil moustache, he reminded her of Cab Calloway, perhaps, or Don Ameche, one of those stars who aged but never stopped being stars. Whoever the old man was, he was still a star.

  “Oh. Right. Yes, I’m one of them. Um. You?”

  “More or less,” he said. “I’m dead, anyway.”

  “Oh. Would you mind if I asked where I was?”

  “We’re in Florida.” he told her. “In the buryin‘ ground. It’s good you caught me,” he added. “I was going for a walk. You want to come along?”

  “Shouldn’t you be in a grave?” she asked, hesitantly.

  “I was bored,” he told her. “I thought I could do with a walk. And maybe a spot of fishin‘.”

  She hesitated, then nodded. It was nice to hav
e someone to talk to.

  “You want to hear a story?” asked the old man.

  “Not really,” she admitted.

  He helped her to her feet, and they walked out of the Garden of Rest.

  “Fair enough. Then I’ll keep it short. Not go too long. You know, I can tell one of these stories so it lasts for weeks. It’s all in the details—what you put in, what you don’t. I mean, you leave out the weather and what people are wearing, you can skip half the story. I once told a story—”

  “Look,” she said, “if you’re going to tell a story, then just tell it to me, all right?” It was bad enough walking along the side of the road in the gathering dusk. She reminded herself that she wasn’t going to be hit by a passing car, but it did nothing to make her feel more at ease.

  The old man started to talk in a gentle sing-song. “When I say ‘Tiger,’” he said, “You got to understand it’s not just the stripy cat, the India one. It’s just what people call big cats—the pumas and the bobcats and the jaguars and all of them. You got that?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Good. So…a long time ago,” he began, “Tiger had the stories. All the stories there ever were was Tiger stories, all the songs were Tiger songs, and I’d say that all the jokes were Tiger jokes, but there weren’t no jokes told back in the Tiger days. In Tiger stories all that matters is how strong your teeth are, how you hunt and how you kill. Ain’t no gentleness in Tiger stories, no tricksiness, and no peace.”

  Maeve tried to imagine what kind of stories a big cat might tell. “So they were violent?”

  “Sometimes. But mostly what they was, was bad. When all the stories and the songs were Tiger’s, that was a bad time for everyone. People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song. And in Tiger times all the songs were dark. They began in tears, and they’d end in blood, and they were the only stories that the people of this world knew.

  “Then Anansi comes along. Now, I guess you know all about Anansi—”

  “I don’t think so,” said Maeve.

  “Well, if I started to tell you how clever and how handsome and how charming and how cunning Anansi was, I could start today and not finish until next Thursday,” began the old man.

  “Then don’t,” said Maeve. “We’ll take it as said. And what did this Anansi do?”

  “Well, Anansi won the stories—won them? No. He earned them. He took them from Tiger, and made it so Tiger couldn’t enter the real world no more. Not in the flesh. The stories people told became Anansi stories. This was, what, ten, fifteen thousand years back.

  “Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren’t just thinking of hunting and being hunted anymore. Now they’re starting to think their way out of problems—sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. They still need to keep their bellies full, but now they’re trying to figure out how to do it without working—and that’s the point where people start using their heads. Some people think the first tools were weapons, but that’s all upside down. First of all, people figure out the tools. It’s the crutch before the club, every time. Because now people are telling Anansi stories, and they’re starting to think about how to get kissed, how to get something for nothing by being smarter or funnier. That’s when they start to make the world.”

  “It’s just a folk story,” she said. “People made up the stories in the first place.”

  “Does that change things?” asked the old man. “Maybe Anansi’s just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa in the dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg, pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy story about a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers. Because now the folk who never had any thought in their head but how to run from lions and keep far enough away from rivers that the crocodiles don’t get an easy meal, now they’re starting to dream about a whole new place to live. The world may be the same, but the wallpaper’s changed. Yes? People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.”

  “You’re telling me that before the Anansi stories the world was savage and bad?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  She digested this. “Well,” she said cheerily, “it’s certainly a good thing that the stories are now Anansi’s.”

  The old man nodded.

  And then she said, “Doesn’t Tiger want them back?”

  He nodded. “He’s wanted them back for ten thousand years.”

  “But he won’t get them, will he?”

  The old man said nothing. He stared into the distance. Then he shrugged. “Be a bad thing if he did.”

  “What about Anansi?”

  “Anansi’s dead,” said the old man. “And there ain’t a lot a duppy can do.”

  “As a duppy myself,” she said, “I resent that.”

  “Well,” said the old man, “Duppies can’t touch the living. Remember?”

  She pondered this a moment. “So what can I touch?” she asked.

  The look that flickered across his elderly face was both wily and wicked. “Well,” he said. “You could touch me.”

  “I’ll have you know,” she told him, pointedly, “that I’m a married woman.”

  His smile only grew wider. It was a sweet smile and a gentle one, as heartwarming as it was dangerous. “Generally speaking, that kind of contract terminates in a till death us do part.”

  Maeve was unimpressed.

  “Thing is,” he told her, “you’re an immaterial girl. You can touch immaterial things. Like me. I mean, if you want, we could go dancing. There’s a place just down the street here. Won’t nobody notice a couple of duppies on their dance floor.”

  Maeve thought about it. It had been a long time since she had gone dancing. “Are you a good dancer?” she asked.

  “I’ve never had any complaints,” said the old man.

  “I want to find a man—a living man—called Grahame Coats,” she said. “Can you help me find him?”

  “I can certainly steer you in the right direction,” he said. “So, are you dancing?”

  A smile crept about the edges of her lips. “You asking?” she said.

  THE CHAINS THAT HAD KEPT SPIDER CAPTIVE FELL AWAY. THE pain, which had been searing and continuous like a bad toothache that occupied his entire body, began to pass.

  Spider took a step forward.

  In front of him was what appeared to be a rip in the sky, and he moved toward it.

  Ahead of him he could see an island. He could see a small mountain in the center of the island. He could see a pure blue sky, and swaying palm trees, a white gull high in the sky. But even as he saw it the world seemed to be receding. It was as if he were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. It shrank and slipped from him, and the more he ran toward it the further away it seemed to get.

  The island was a reflection in a puddle of water, and then it was nothing at all.

  He was in a cave. The edges of things were crisp—crisper and sharper than anywhere that Spider had ever been before. This was a different kind of place.

  She was standing in the mouth of the cave, between him and the open air. He knew her. She had stared into his face in a Greek restaurant in South London, and birds had come from her mouth.

  “You know,” said Spider, “I have to say, you’ve got the strangest ideas about hospitality. You come to my world, I’d make you dinner, open a bottle of wine, put on some soft music, give you an evening you would never forget.”

  Her face was impassive; carved from black rock it was. The wind tugged at the edges of her old brown coat. She spoke then, her voice high and lonely as the call of a distant gull.

  “I took you,” she said. “Now, you will call
him.”

  “Call him? Call who?”

  “You will bleat,” she said. “You will whimper. Your fear will excite him.”

  “Spider does not bleat,” he said. He was not certain this was true.

  Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

  “If you kill me,” said Spider, “my curse will be upon you.” He wondered if he actually had a curse. He probably did; and if he didn’t, he was sure that he could fake it.

  “It will not be I that kills you,” she said. She raised her hand, and it was not a hand but a raptor’s talon. She raked her talon down his face, down his chest, her cruel claws sinking into his flesh, tearing his skin.

  It did not hurt, although Spider knew that it would hurt soon enough.

  Beads of blood crimsoned his chest and dripped down his face. His eyes stung. His blood touched his lips. He could taste it and smell the iron scent of it.

  “Now,” she said in the cries of distant birds. “Now your death begins.”

  Spider said, “We’re both reasonable entities. Let me present you with a perhaps rather more feasible alternative scenario that might conceivably have benefits for both of us.” He said it with an easy smile. He said it convincingly.

  “You talk too much,” she said, and shook her head. “No more talking.”

  She reached into his mouth with her sharp talons, and with one wrenching movement she tore out his tongue.

  “There,” she said. And then she seemed to take pity on him, for she touched Spider’s face in a way that was almost kindly, and she said, “Sleep.”

  He slept.

  ROSIE’S MOTHER, NOW BATHED, REAPPEARED REFRESHED, INVIGORATED and positively glowing.

  “Before I give you both a ride into Williamstown, can I give you a hasty guided tour of the house?” asked Grahame Coats.

  “We do have to get back to the ship, thanks all the same,” said Rosie, who had not been able to convince herself that she wanted a bath in Grahame Coats’s house.

  Her mother checked her watch. “We have ninety minutes,” she said. “It won’t take more than fifteen minutes to get back to the harbor. Don’t be ungracious, Rosie. We would love to see your house.”