"Lord, lord, lord," said Mrs. Higgler. "Nobody tell you?"
"Told me what?"
So she told him, at length and in detail, while he stood there and said nothing at all, and when she was done he said "Thank you, Mrs. Higgler." He wrote something down on a scrap of paper, then he said, "Thanks. No, really, thanks," again, and he put down the phone.
"Well?" asked Rosie. "Have you got his number?"
Fat Charlie said, "Dad won't be coming to the wedding." Then he said, "I have to go to Florida." His voice was flat, and without emotion. He might have been saying, "I have to order a new checkbook."
"When?"
"Tomorrow."
"Why?"
"Funeral. My dad's. He's dead."
"Oh. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." She put her arms around him, and held him. He stood in her arms like a shop-window dummy. "How did it, did he- was he ill?"
Fat Charlie shook his head. "I don't want to talk about it," he said.
And Rosie squeezed him tightly, and then she nodded, sympathetically, and let him go. She thought he was too overcome with grief to talk about it.
He wasn't. That wasn't it at all. He was too embarrassed.
There must be a hundred thousand respectable ways to die. Leaping off a bridge into a river to save a small child from drowning, for example, or being mown down in a hail of bullets while single-handedly storming a nest of criminals. Perfectly respectable ways to die.
Truth to tell, there were even some less-than-respectable ways to die that wouldn't have been so bad. Spontaneous human combustion, for example: it's medically dodgy and scientifically unlikely, but even so, people persist in going up in smoke, leaving nothing behind but a charred hand still clutching an unfinished cigarette. Fat Charlie had read about it in a magazine: he wouldn't have minded if his father had gone like that. Or even if he'd had a heart attack running down the street after the men who had stolen his beer money.
This is how Fat Charlie's father died.
He had arrived in the bar early, and had launched the karaoke evening by singing "What's New Pussycat?" which song he had belted out, according to Mrs. Higgler, who had not been there, in a manner that would have caused Tom Jones to be festooned in flung feminine undergarments, and which brought Fat Charlie's father a complimentary beer, courtesy of the several blonde tourists from Michigan who thought he was just about the cutest thing they'd ever seen.
"It was their fault," said Mrs. Higgler, bitterly, over the phone. "They was encouragin' him!" They were women who had squeezed into tube tops, and they had reddish too-much-sun-too-early tans, and they were all young enough to be his daughters.
So pretty soon he's down at their table, smoking his cheroots and hinting strongly that he was in Army Intelligence during the war, although he was careful not to say which war, and that he could kill a man in a dozen different ways with his bare hands without breaking a sweat.
Now he takes the bustiest and blondest of the tourists on a quick spin around the dance floor, such as it was, while one of her friends warbled "Strangers in the Night" from the stage. He appeared to be having a fine time, although the tourist was somewhat taller than he was, and his grin was on a level with her bosom.
And then, the dance done, he announced it was his turn again, and, because if there was one thing you could say about Fat Charlie's father it was that he was secure in his heterosexuality, he sang "I Am What I Am" to the room, but particularly to the blondest tourist on the table just below him. He gave it everything he had. He had just got as far as explaining to anyone listening that as far as he was concerned his life would not actually be worth a damn unless he was able to tell everybody that he was what he was, when he made an odd face, pressed one hand to his chest, stretched the other hand out, and toppled, as slowly and as gracefully as a man could topple, off the makeshift stage and onto the blondest holidaymaker, and from her onto the floor.
"It was how he always would have wanted to go," sighed Mrs. Higgler.
And then she told Fat Charlie how his father had, with his final gesture, as he fell, reached out and grasped at something, which turned out to be the blonde tourist's tube top, so that at first some people thought he had made a lust-driven leap from the stage with the sole purpose of exposing the bosom in question, because there she was, screaming, with her br**sts staring at the room, while the music for "I Am What I Am" kept playing, only now without anyone singing.
When the onlookers realized what had actually happened they had two minutes' silence, and Fat Charlie's father was carried out and put into an ambulance while the blonde tourist had hysterics in the ladies' room.
It was the br**sts that Fat Charlie couldn't get out of his head. In his mind's eye they followed him accusatively around the room, like the eyes in a painting. He kept wanting to apologize to a roomful of people he had never met. And the knowledge that his father would have found it hugely amusing simply added to Fat Charlie's mortification. It's worse when you're embarrassed about something you were not even there to see: your mind keeps embroidering the events and going back to it and turning it over and over, and examining it from every side. Well, yours might not, but Fat Charlie's certainly did.
As a rule, Fat Charlie felt embarrassment in his teeth, and in the upper pit of his stomach. If something that even looked like it might be embarrassing was about to happen on his television screen Fat Charlie would leap up and turn it off. If that was not possible, say if other people were present, he would leave the room on some pretext and wait until the moment of embarrassment was sure to be over.