He stopped. A woman with a red spangly dress and a microphone was heading for their table with an enormous smile on her face. She was making for Fat Charlie. She said into her microphone, “What’s your name, darlin‘?” She put the microphone into Fat Charlie’s face.
“Charlie Nancy,” said Fat Charlie. His voice caught and wavered.
“And where you from, Charlie?”
“England. Me and my friends. We’re all from England.”
“And what do you do, Charlie?”
Everything slowed. It was like diving off a cliff into the ocean. It was the only way out. He took a deep breath and said it. “I’m between jobs,” he started. “But I’m really a singer. I sing. Just like you.”
“Like me? What kind of things you sing?”
Fat Charlie swallowed. “What have you got?”
She turned to the other people at Fat Charlie’s table. “Do you think we could get him to sing for us?” she asked, gesturing with her microphone.
“Er. Don’t think so. No. Absatively out of the question,” said Grahame Coats. Daisy shrugged, her hands flat on the table.
The woman in the red dress turned to the rest of the room. “What do we think?” she asked them.
There was a rustle of clapping from the diners at the other tables, and more enthusiastic applause from the serving staff. The barman called out, “Sing us something!”
The singer leaned in to Fat Charlie, covered the mike, and said, “Better make it something the boys know.”
Fat Charlie said, “Do they know ‘Under the Boardwalk’?” and she nodded, announced it, and gave him the microphone.
The band began to play. The singer led Fat Charlie up to the little stage, his heart beating wildly in his chest.
Fat Charlie began to sing, and the audience began to listen.
All he had wanted was to buy himself some time, but he felt comfortable. No one was throwing things. He seemed to have plenty of room in his head to think in. He was aware of everyone in the room: the tourists and the serving staff, and the people over at the bar. He could see everything: he could see the barman measuring out a cocktail, and the old woman in the rear of the room filling a large plastic mug with coffee. He was still terrified, still angry, but he took all the terror and the anger, and he put it into the song, and let it all become a song about lazing and loving. As he sang, he thought.
What would Spider do? thought Fat Charlie. What would my dad do?
He sang. In his song, he told them all exactly what he planned to do under the boardwalk, and it mostly involved making love.
The singer in the red dress was smiling and snapping her fingers and shimmying her body to the music. She leaned into the keyboard player’s microphone and began to harmonize.
I’m actually singing in front of an audience, thought Fat Charlie. Bugger me.
He kept his eyes on Grahame Coats.
As he entered the last chorus, he began to clap his hands above his head, and soon the whole room was clapping along with him, diners and waiters and chefs, everyone except Grahame Coats, whose hands were beneath the tablecloth, and Daisy, whose hands were flat on the table. Daisy was looking at him as if he was not simply barking mad, but had picked an extremely odd moment to discover his inner Drifters.
The audience clapped, and Fat Charlie smiled and he sang, and as he sang he knew, without any shadow of a doubt, that everything was going to be all right. They were going to be just fine, him and Spider and Daisy and Rosie, too, wherever she was, they’d be okay. He knew what he was going to do: it was foolish and unlikely and the act of an idiot, but it would work. And as the last notes of the song faded away, he said, “There’s a young lady at the table I was sitting at. Her name’s Daisy Day. She’s from England too. Daisy, can you wave at everyone?”
Daisy gave him a sick look, but she raised a hand from the table, and she waved.
“There’s something I wanted to say to Daisy. She doesn’t know I’m going to say this.” If this doesn’t work, whispered a voice at the back of his head, she’s dead. You know that? “But let’s hope she says yes. Daisy? Will you marry me?”
The room was quiet. Fat Charlie stared at Daisy, willing her to understand, to play along.
Daisy nodded.
The diners applauded. This was a floor show. The singer, the ma?tre d‘, and several of the waitresses descended on the table, hauled Daisy to her feet, and pulled her over to the middle of the floor. They pulled her over to Fat Charlie, and, as the band played “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” he put his arm around her.
“You got a ring for her?” asked the singer.
He put his hand into his pocket. “Here,” he said to Daisy. “This is for you.” He put his arms around her and kissed her. If anyone is going to get shot, he thought, it will be now. Then the kiss was over, and people were shaking his hand and hugging him—one man, in town, he said, for the music festival, insisted on giving Fat Charlie his card—and now Daisy was holding the lime he had given her with a very strange expression on her face; and when he looked back to the table they had been sitting at, Grahame Coats was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WHICH PROVES TO BE UNLUCKY FOR SOME