“We’re going in,” said Spider, and he smiled at her.
Fat Charlie wanted to protest, to stand his ground, but he found himself swept inside, hating himself.
He caught up with Spider on the stairs. “I’ll go in,” he said. “But I won’t sing.”
“You’re already in.”
“I know. But I’m not singing.”
“Not much point in saying you won’t go in if you’re already in.”
“I can’t sing.”
“You telling me I inherited all the musical talent as well?”
“I’m telling you that if I have to open my mouth in order to sing in public, I’ll throw up.”
Spider squeezed his arm, reassuringly. “You watch how I do it,” he said.
The birthday girl and two of her friends stumbled up onto the little dais, and giggled their way through “Dancing Queen.” Fat Charlie drank a gin and tonic somebody had put into his hand, and he winced at every note they missed, at every key change that didn’t happen. There was a round of applause from the rest of the birthday group.
Another of the women took the stage. It was the pixieish one who had asked Fat Charlie where they were going. The opening chords sounded to “Stand by Me,” and she began, using the phrase in its most approximate and all-encompassing way, to sing along: she missed every note, came in too soon or too late on every line, and misread most of them. Fat Charlie felt for her.
She climbed down from the stage and came toward the bar. Fat Charlie was going to say something sympathetic, but she was glowing with joy. “That was so great,” she said. “I mean, that was just amazing.” Fat Charlie bought her a drink, a large vodka and orange. “That was such a laugh,” she told him. “Are you going to do it? Go on. You have to do it. I bet you won’t be any crapper than I was.”
Fat Charlie shrugged, in a way that, he hoped, indicated that he contained within him depths of crap as yet unplumbed.
Spider walked over to the little stage as if a spotlight was following him.
“I bet this will be good,” said the vodka and orange. “Did someone say you were his brother?”
“No,” muttered Fat Charlie, ungraciously. “I said that he was my brother.”
Spider began to sing. It was “Under the Boardwalk.”
It wouldn’t have happened if Fat Charlie had not liked the song so much. When Fat Charlie was thirteen he had believed that “Under the Boardwalk” was the greatest song in the world (by the time he was a jaded and world-weary fourteen-year-old, it had become Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry”). And now Spider was singing his song, and singing it well. He sang it in tune, he sang it as if he meant it. People stopped drinking, stopped talking, and they looked at him, and they listened.
When Spider finished singing, people cheered. Had they been wearing hats, they might well have flung them into the air.
“I can see why you wouldn’t want to follow that,” said the vodka and orange to Fat Charlie. “I mean, you can’t follow that, can you?”
“Well…” said Fat Charlie.
“I mean,” she said with a grin, “you can see who’s got all the talent in your family.” She tipped her head, as she said it, and tilted her chin. It was the chin-tilt that did it.
Fat Charlie headed toward the stage, putting one foot in front of the other in an impressive display of physical dexterity. He was sweating.
The next few minutes passed in a blur. He spoke to the DJ, chose his song from the list—“Unforgettable”—waited for what seemed like a brief eternity, and was handed a microphone.
His mouth was dry. His heart was fluttering in his chest.
On the screen was his first word: Unforgettable…
Now, Fat Charlie could really sing. He had range and power and expression. When he sang his whole body became an instrument.
The music started.
In Fat Charlie’s head, he was all ready to open his mouth, and to sing. “Unforgettable,” he would sing. He would sing it to his dead father and to his brother and the night, telling them all that they were things it was impossible to forget.
Only he couldn’t do it. There were people looking up at him. Barely two dozen of them, in the upstairs room of a pub. Many of them were women. In front of an audience, Fat Charlie couldn’t even open his mouth.
He could hear the music playing, but he just stood there. He felt very cold. His feet seemed a long way away.
He forced his mouth open.
“I think,” he said, very distinctly, into the microphone, over the music, and heard his words echoing back from every corner of the room. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
There was no graceful exit from the stage.
After that, everything got a bit wobbly.
THERE ARE MYTH-PLACES. THEY EXIST, EACH IN THEIR own way. Some of them are overlaid on the world; others exist beneath the world as it is, like an underpainting.