Lucia

by Alex Pheby

  You do not move toward either of them.

  Now she has taken each end of the worm and is stretching it taut. She pinches head and tail between fingers and thumbs in a way that is both delighted and thoughtless. The worm’s Adam’s apple bulges at a point two thirds along.

  There is some idea that a worm, separated in two, will live on in both halves, that these will return to the soil and complete two separate lives, somehow. This has never rung true to you. You have seen the husks of dead worms in this garden. You have seen them wherever you go. Even if you had not, then where is the logic? Where would it stop? Can a worm reproduce in that way? Two, four, eight, sixteen?

  There must be rules.

  —Gently, gently!

  She turns because she doesn’t understand the word; she only understands your face. She makes her mouth into a comical ‘O’ and lowers the worm, still at full stretch, onto the grass. It snakes and contracts in one motion, thickening and making an ‘S’ in the sparse grass which is browner than it is green. Your daughter pats the worm with the flat of her fat hands, and pushes up, walking backwards, palms on the earth, hinging at the hips, upright, then away. She goes to the bottom of the garden where a privet hedge and a compost heap compete for dominance.

  The dog is barking now – three strident exclamations, then a pause only long enough to make you feel as if he might have stopped, before giving three more. You let him out.

  He runs first to the girl, making her wobble and put out her hands, then he races back to you. You ignore his earnest efforts to demonstrate his love, his devotion.

  As the sun rises it illuminates the overcast from behind, making a pearl of the lightest possible grey in the water dense blackness of an oncoming rain cloud.

  There are coats on the hooks inside. There are wellingtons arranged beside the door. There are sandals. Neither of you are wearing anything on your feet.

  You go to where she is sitting now with the dog at her side. He is sniffing at something the girl is looking very closely at. It is a spider’s web, glistening and perfect. At its centre is a round, brown spider, legs spread and waiting.

  Your daughter, immaculately and painstakingly, reaches out her right index finger toward it. An imperfect nail clipping, still attached, juts from the edge of her finger, but it is at a right angle and the tip of her finger meets the web first. She touches a thread with microscopic precision, the whorls of her fingerprint making contact and her breathing, or her pulse, or some electro-magnetic aura of which you are not aware, vibrates the gossamer like a violin string. The spider tenses – it can sense these very slight movements since its life depends on them – and your daughter sees this. Because she is such a good girl, she pulls her fingertip gently away. She doesn’t want to disturb the spider.

  At one edge of the web there is a cocoon – it is not a cocoon. A cocoon contains the genetic soup that facilitates the transition between a caterpillar (an ugly creature) and a butterfly (a beautiful one) through a process that is more or less mysterious, and it is not the time of year for it. It is a gnat bound in the same thread that forms this perfect web. If your daughter wished, she could play this web as one plays a harp, trace her finger across the strings and provoke music from it by virtue of her goodness. She could unwrap the cocoon, bring the gnat back to life, and let it loose.

  The dog brings its nose to the place where your daughter placed her finger, but you pull him back by the collar. She turns to look at you, and, emboldened by your smile, she touches the web again, in exactly the place she touched it before.

  Spiders are attracted by vibration, but also by patterns. The spider feels a pattern in the touching, then the withdrawing, then the touching again; it understands from it that there is a meal in its web. In a flash, it darts across, and, for the shortest time before it realises its mistake, the spider touches your daughter’s finger.

  When a child giggles the sound should be infectious. She giggles at the touch of the spider and turns to look at you. She wants to share this with you.

  You turn to the sky as it darkens. The wind picks up and, without prompting, the dog runs back to the house.

  You reach down for your daughter’s hand.

  —Come on. It’s about to rain.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my editors Sam Jordison and Eloise Millar, and also to Alex Billington, who typeset the manuscript and designed the illustrations (which are taken from the priest Imhotep’s Book of Coming Forth by Day, which can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

  I also acknowledge my debts to the fields of history, music, medicine (including dentistry), embryology, parasitology, film studies, Asian and Middle Eastern studies, Russian studies, English studies, Joyce studies, and Egyptology (among others). I have drawn on these areas of expertise freely and without consideration for anything other than the artistic requirements of this book. Any errors are mine, and any borrowings are from standard works in the public domain.