Spider pushed open the door to Fat Charlie’s spare room, and at the same time he opened the door to his bedroom. The picture windows at the end of the room showed a waterfall, which crashed down into a jungle pool far below. The sky though the windows was bluer than sapphires.
Rosie made a small noise.
She turned around, walked back down the hall, into the kitchen, and looked out of the window at the gray London sky, doughy and unwelcoming. She came back. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Charlie? What’s happening?”
“I’m not Charlie,” said Spider. “Look at me. Really look at me. I don’t even look like him.”
She made no pretense of humoring him any longer. Her eyes were wide and scared.
“I’m his brother,” said Spider. “I’ve screwed everything up. Everything. And I think probably the best thing I can do is just get out of all your lives and go away.”
“So where’s Fat—where’s Charlie?”
“I don’t know. We were having a fight. He went off to answer the door, and I went off to my room, and he didn’t come back.”
“He didn’t come back? And you didn’t even try to find out what had happened to him?”
“Er. He might have been taken away by the police,” said Spider. “It’s just an idea. I have no proof or anything.”
“What’s your name?” she demanded.
“Spider.”
Rosie repeated it. “Spider.” Outside the window, above the spray of the waterfall, she could see a flock of flamingos in the air, the sunlight blurring their wings in pink and white. They were stately and uncountable, and it was one of the most beautiful things Rosie had ever seen. She looked back at Spider, and looking at him, she could not understand how she had ever believed that this man was Fat Charlie. Where Fat Charlie was easygoing, open, and uncomfortable, this man was like a steel rod bent back and ready to snap. “You really aren’t him, are you?”
“I told you I wasn’t.”
“So. So who did I. Who have I. Who was it—who did I sleep with?”
“That would be me,” said Spider.
“I thought so,” said Rosie. She slapped him, as hard as she could, across his face. He could feel his lip start bleeding once more.
“I guess I deserved that,” he said.
“Of course you deserved it.” She paused. Then she said, “Did Fat Charlie know about this? About you? That you were going out with me?”
“Well, yes. But he…”
“You are both sick,” she said. “Sick, sick, evil men. I hope you rot in Hell.”
She took one last puzzled glance around the enormous bedroom and then out of the bedroom window at the jungle trees and the huge waterfall and the flock of flamingos, and she walked away down the hall.
Spider sat down on the floor with a thin trickle of blood coming from his lower lip, feeling stupid. He heard the front door slam. He walked over to the hot tub and dipped the end of a fluffy towel into the hot water. Then he wrung it out and put it on his mouth. “I don’t need any of this,” said Spider. He said it aloud; it’s easier to lie to yourself when you say things out loud. “I didn’t need any of you people a week ago and I don’t need you now. I don’t care. I’m done.”
The flamingos hit the window glass like feathery pink cannonballs, and the glass shattered, fragments of window flying across the room, scattering and embedding themselves in the walls, the floor, the bed. The air was filled with plummeting pale pink bodies, a confusion of huge pink wings, and curved black beaks. The roar of a waterfall exploded into the room.
Spider pushed back against the wall. There were flamingos between him and the door, hundreds of them: five-foot-tall birds, all legs and neck. He got to his feet and took several steps through a minefield of angry pink birds, each of them glowering at him through mad pink eyes. From a distance, they might have been beautiful. One of them snapped at Spider’s hand. It didn’t break the skin, but it hurt.
Spider’s bedroom was a large room, but it was rapidly filling with crash-landing flamingos. And there was a dark cloud in the blue sky above the waterfall that appeared to be another flock on its way.
They were pecking at him and clawing at him and buffeting him with their wings, and he knew that that was not actually the problem. The problem would be being suffocated under a fluffy pink blanket of feathers with birds attached. It would be an astonishingly undignified way to go, crushed by birds, and not even particularly intelligent birds.
Think, he told himself. They’re flamingos. Bird-brains. You’re Spider.
So? he thought back at himself, irritated. Tell me something I don’t know.
The flamingos on the ground were mobbing him. The ones in the air were diving toward him. He pulled his jacket over his head, and then the airborne flamingos began hitting him. It was like having someone firing chickens at you. He staggered and went down. Well, trick them, stupid.
Spider pushed himself to his feet and waded through the sea of wings and beaks until he reached the window, now an open jaw of jagged glass.