Tobi didn’t hear the operators response, her own scream drowned out his words. From her husband’s hair to her own, a beastie stirred, eight legs rolled and stretched towards her, she jumped up dropping the phone beside Jeff, from the corner of her eye she saw it moving effortlessly along her silky dyed strands. She screamed down the hallway, she screamed into the living room. Here, she started slapping at her own head in effort to dislodge the creepy crawly that adorned her brow. A speck of flashing, indescribable colours raced up towards her eye. She felt a multitude of miniscule legs on her eyelid, tickling her prickled skin.
Fangs met flesh again.
A vicious slap to the forehead and the demented spider fell to the floor. With one eye now blinded, Tobi begin to stamp with naked feet in the general direction of the scurrying arachnid. With venom leaking from her eye and reduced depth perception, she missed every time.
***
Mr. Spider danced his way across the fur of the carpet; every time he sought shelter a stomping foot blocked the way. The rapid changes in direction caused his heart to race, why must they single him out, two against one wasn‘t fair. All he did was protect himself. All he ever wanted was a nice place to call his own…
***
A poison worse than his own engulfed his being. It burned his eyes, blinding him. It flowed into his mouth drowning out his ability to breath. It soddened his young limbs, the vile liquid burrowing into joints rendering them immobile. The excruciating pain got worse. When Mr. Spider, who thought he knew the worst agony he’d ever experience in his little life, felt everything he ever knew burst into the hottest light imaginable. A pain so intense he could see it before the last of his burning eyes.
***
Half a bottle of nail varnish remover tipped on top and the gentle lick of a tea light flame had done the job. Sure the carpet was ruined, but the spider was dead.
Tobi, breathed a sigh of relief at the half sight of the dead, now incinerated to nothing but a crumbling black husk. All evidence of him ever existing now just a bite on her eye and a nip on her husband’s hand. Her eye and lid had swollen up in the briefest of moments. She’d best speak to a doctor before any real damage is done. Without any sense of urgency, she returned to the bedroom and picked up the phone. Jeff’s flickering tongue lolled about his mouth as he tried to pronounce words that didn’t even exist. A faraway gaze adorned his rolling eyes.
“Hello, I’m back!” Tobi announced, her voice induced by a tremor, “sorry, I’ve been bitten as well.”
“Okay, what bit you?” Thankfully, the operator had the gumption to stay on the line.
“A spider, a spider bit my husband and me. He bit me in my eye and my husband on the hand. We think it came in a banana box we were using to move some things.”
“Okay in order for the doctors to prescribe the correct anti-venom, we either need a photo of the spider, or we need you to catch it for us. Can you do that for me…?”
Mavis Trubshaw Has Left The Building
By Ziggy Kinsella
There was something dripping. Either in the house or in her head, she wasn’t sure. It was probably in her head. Most things were. There goes mad Mavis, talking to herself, banging herself on the head. Mad, mad, Mavis. The poor girl. She listened to the big plink-plonk sounds for a while and imagined she was caught in a water drop like a bird caught in a cage. She would fall, and when the drop hit the ground her cage would shatter and she would be free. She stayed with that image for a while, unable to let it go, it was so nice and perfect and she liked her water drop cage as it fell forever.
Then the plink-plonk sound faded and now she could hear a bird singing and that wasn’t nearly so nice. The sound dug into her head. Squeak-squawk-squeak. Little Mavis was being pecked by birds. Having her arms and legs pecked and her back pecked, and then they just pecked out her damned eyes and there she was lying on her back, all pecked to death. She opened her eyes and said, “pooh.” The birds were always spoiling her fun. Pissing on her chips, as Clare Morton was fond of saying in the old days. “Stop pissing on my chips, Mave.” She thought of squatting and pissing on Clare’s chips and it made her giggle.
Mavis swung her legs off the bed and touched her feet to the cold floor. The carpet was damp and beneath it the floorboards were rotting away. They were still strong enough to hold her weight though. She was light as a feather. Mavis shivered and pulled her dirty white night dress over her knees. She was the product of a lifetime of serial starvation, the sort of woman who could be caught up in a gust of half strong wind and blown all the way to Liverpool. She could go days now without eating, especially when it got in her head that someone was trying to poison her. You can’t catch me out like that. You think I’m going to eat that and let you kill me? She would go to a shop and buy some food and bring it back to the house and then she would sit and look at it for a long while. Mavis was suspicious of anything like that. Sometimes she could smell the poison, sometimes she could even hear it talking to her. She had always been fussy with her food, but over time her slavery to those who were out to poison her had wasted her flesh, thinned her unruly hair and dulled her eyes. She reached into the glass beside her bed and popped a set of false teeth into her mouth. Mavis smiled. Frowned. Smiled again. The chattering started. It came in waves and she told them to shut up but they weren’t going to listen to stupid old Mavis Trubshaw. They weren’t going to let her piss on their chips. The house started creaking as if the noise in her head had woken it up. The air shifted around her as she sat for a while, looking at the light grow outside the window, listening to the chattering and wondering what the world was up to without her.
“Your time has come,” she whispered. Her voice was triumphant in the shadow of the room.
The time has come, as the walrus said. And it had. The time has come to speak of many things. Such as? Sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. And death. Quiet. Peace. An end.
Like her mother before her, Mavis Trubshaw finally decided enough was enough. She’d thought of death before. Of course she had. But it had been an idle wish, a desire for the quietening of the senses to the point that there was no more pain. It was one thing to be mad, it was another to be mad and know that you were mad. And Mavis had known that she was crazy since she was a child.
The witch was right. She spent too much of her life looking inward and the things she had seen were as ugly as anything could be. And while Mavis could wallow in her own self-pity with the rest of them, it really was in her hands to do something about it.
“You can psychoanalyse me all you like,” she once told a doctor, “but it won’t do you any good. I know I’m wired up all wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
She grinned wolfishly at the mirror. Her wrinkles creased and for a moment she looked old and terrifying. Smile. Frown. Smile. Squeak-squawk-squeak.
Today, she would wear a roll neck jumper that had lost its shape, and a skirt that had never been washed in all the years she’d owned it (and that went for the rest of her clothes). The waistband of the skirt was tightened with a big safety pin (she had been a size 12 when she bought it, stole it, borrowed it). The hem was frayed and there was a coffee stain on the right hip. She stepped into a pair of red slippers and pulled her duffel coat on and tugged a wool hat over her unruly hair. She normally made herself up, in case she ran into the man of her dreams, but this was her last day on Earth and she could do what the hell she liked and besides, if the man of her dreams was going to come he would have done so by now. Mavis Trubshaw looked in the mirror again and smiled a crooked, half mad smile. Squeak-squawk-squeak.
The chattering in her head continued as she stepped out onto the lime green landing and took the stairs. The voices never said much of importance – most of the time it was background noise to her everyday life. Mostly they came out with a random set of words, like sit, building and peanuts, one on top of the other so it looked like the demons in her head were rifling through a dictionary or just trying to
prove they knew every word that had ever been spoken.
Space. Fritter. Book.
Word after word after word. Sometimes it was in other languages.
Merd. Toute bien. La Robe.
And some languages she didn’t even understand. She was 35 now and the noise had been there for twenty of those. Will Morgan said she’d inherited her mothers’ insanity. They had kissed once, a million moons ago, on the pier one cold night. He tasted of ash and beer and she had never been able to decide whether it was pleasant or not. Certainly the way he held her felt good, his hand cupped in the small of her back, his other stroking the hair above her right ear. She felt scared and safe at the same time, even though he treated her like a child, maybe it was because he did just that. She wondered where Morgan was now and if he ever thought of Mavis Trubshaw. A kiss. An insult. That was Morgan.
“Pooh!” She said. Will Morgan probably wouldn’t even remember her name if he saw it in a newspaper. Still, it would have been nice if things with Will Morgan had progressed a little more.
“It was just a dare,” she told the wall. “They put him up to it. Looking to make a fool of me but I kissed Will Morgan and no one can take that away.”
She would write her own obituary, put it beside her body, with instructions to the undertaker. That was a good idea. I would like to be cremated (just in case). Please don’t invite anyone to my funeral. Keep it short and sweet. Please don’t put anything in the paper. No one will miss me. And I won’t miss them.
Mavis walked up to the main road, bag clutched to her chest, feeling the winter cold in her bones and she wondered if death would be anything like life. ‘I’d like to stop thinking for a while’, she said to herself. ‘That would be nice, to be nothing for a while. Do you think we come back or do we go to heaven? I don’t know if I like the idea of heaven. Maybe I can be reborn into a body that works.’ She banged the side of her head as if she was trying to get a broken piece of machinery to work.
“You’re all wired up wrong,” she giggled.
It didn’t matter.
She was sure Sophie Crowe wouldn’t think bad of her. It was nice of her to let Mavis live in that old house, even if it was a strange place (but not as strange as Mavis Trubshaw). She had kept her part of the deal, kept it fed and happy and collected the pennies in the account. She had never failed to make her monthly deposits, and she supposed there must be a tidy sum there now. She wondered where the money would go to. Someone nice, she hoped. Mavis turned back and said, “sorry.”
But she couldn’t go on. The house knew it too.
***
Ewan Giggs was behind the counter of his ‘All Purpose Store’ as she pushed open the door. The little bell above her head jingled and he looked up from his newspaper, a rolled cigarette hanging between his thin, yellow lips. His eyes narrowed as Mavis shuffled up to the counter. Ewan Giggs had tried to poison her once, with ice cream. She had never quite forgiven him though she still used his shop. It was safer than the local supermarket where the shelves were chock full of poison and the staff were only too happy to help you kill yourself. Ewan didn’t smile. And he wasn’t particularly helpful.
“Do you have any painkillers?” Her words were punctuated by soft clicks, the result of loose fitting teeth.
Giggs looked at her with more than his usual disdain and then reached out to a shelf and put a box of paracetamol on the counter. He turned a page of his newspaper and scratched the back of his neck, smoke drifting around his face.
“Oh, I need more than one,” she said. “How many boxes do you have?”
He looked at her and then looked back at the shelf. Giggs had another four boxes each with 16 tablets. Five sixteen’s was a lot of pills, wasn’t it? Was that enough to kill her? She asked if that was all he had.Giggs straightened, his curiosity slightly piqued, if not his social conscience.He took the cigarette out of his mouth and his yellow tongue ran quickly over his bottom lip.
“Got Aspirin,” he grunted.“Ten boxes.”
“I’ll take those too.” She opened her bag and took out her purse. Could aspirin kill you? It was good for the heart, she knew. Would the aspirin counteract the paracetamol? Giggs put the tablets in a bag and took her money. She told him to keep the change and smiled. The shopkeeper flinched as if someone had goosed him. He put the money in the till and pretended to be busy with a shelf just in case Mavis Trubshaw decided to start a conversation.
***
She made her way back home, feeling lighter in her step. It was decided. Today was to be her last day. She swung the bag of pills and listened to the sound of traffic on the main road. A lorry roared past her, belching diesel fumes. The dust it raised seemed to grind in her lungs. Normally she was scared of the outside world (she didn’t venture out unless she had to) but today it held no fears for her. She even glimpsed the beauty of it, the way the colours flashed in front of her. Even those scritch-scratch sounds had a kind of purity about them which she hadn’t noticed before. There were children on the way to school and a woman Mavis half recognised walking her dog. The street hummed, in a nice way for once. As she stood by her front door, Mavis took a last look at the trees lining Belvidere Road.
Goodbye world. Goodbye. So long. Goodbye. Auf Wiedersein. Bien Venito.
She’d lived in the house ten years and not realised how pretty it looked outside. Maybe when she died her soul would inhabit a tree. She didn’t know why that sounded so good. Trees didn’t do much but grow. Lovers would carve their names on her. They would sit beneath her branches in summer and kiss and cuddle and maybe a bit more. Mavis liked the idea of that. Yes, she’d come back as a tree.
She opened her front door, closed it and pressed her back to the wood. She could see herself in the hall mirror, so cadaverously wan that it was a surprise she had the strength to move at all.
“I look like a corpse anyway,” she said. “May as well be one.”
Mavis took off her coat and dropped it on the floor and carried the bag of pills upstairs.
She ran a bath first and listened to the water sing to her. She took off her clothes and stepped into the cold water (she could never stand it hot). She scrubbed her bony white frame with a bar of carbolic soap and even washed her hair because it was a special day. She wanted to be nice and clean when she met her maker so she rubbed at her skin obsessively until it was pink and finally began to bleed. As she lay back in the water, her flesh stinging and quite delicious, the girl appeared at the doorway. It was unusual to see her during the day but not a total surprise. The girl looked at her, then smiled, “are you going to do it?”
“Yes.”
“Is it that bad?”
“Yes.” And it was. She had lived with it too long. Mavis Trubshaw had run out of steam and patience with all that inward looking. The girl understood that. The girl reached out and touched her. A tingle went through Mavis’ bones. “That’s nice,” she whispered.
“I’ll miss you,” said the girl.
“Thank you,” Mavis said. “You won’t be alone for long, don’t worry.”
“I know.”
“You’ll find a new friend. You don’t want an old frump like me anyway. Maybe a family will take the house and they’ll have a little girl your age who’ll be your friend.” She closed her eyes and smiled. When she opened them again, the girl was gone. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Mavis got out of the bath and dried herself carefully. She padded naked across the long landing to her bedroom. There she powdered her body and slipped into an old pair of panties and a bra that had seen better days. She tied back her hair and worked on her makeup for a while, plucking her already thin eyebrows, adding black liner to the top of her lashes, blending in a pale shadow above that. She added too much blusher to her gaunt cheeks and painted her lips bright red. She looked like a beautiful whore. She brushed the tangles out of her hair and with it falling over her shoulders she thought she looked more like a princess. She put on the wedding dress, the one her mother had worn for her
special day, the one she had intended to save for her own special occasion (was there any more special than this?). Mavis stepped into a pair of low heel sandals and stood in front of the mirror. Her mother would have been proud.
“Are you proud, mother?”
She danced to the music inside her head for a while and pretended the man of her dreams was sat on the bed watching her. Not Will Morgan, but some tall, handsome prince who could appreciate Mavis Trubshaw for what she was. Squeak-squawk-squeak. Mavis stopped and sighed. Was she excited? Was she scared? No, she was calm. Mavis Trubshaw was very calm.
She lined up the pills on the dressing table, popping them out of their foil cells. Little white soldiers, all standing in line. There were a lot of soldiers. How many should she take? She got herself a cup and a jug of water from downstairs and then started taking three at a time. The chattering grew in her head for a while and threatened to divert her attention but after a while it quietened down. Her stomach swelled with the water (look ma, I’m pregnant!) and she had to stop and go for a pee before she was halfway through the pills. When she had finished them all, she pulled up the sheets on the bed, puffed up the pillows and lay down, spreading the skirts of her wedding dress across the bed. There was no going back now. She lay there staring at the ceiling and for a while nothing much happened.
She closed her eyes. Her stomach gurgled. She opened her eyes again. The room was darkening. Was it night already? Where had the day gone?
The girl was there.
“Does it hurt?”
She tried to shake her head. No it didn’t hurt. She had thought it might but it didn’t. The girl reached out and Mavis felt the coldness of her palm on her cheek. She thought she smiled. She thought she cried. The chattering had stopped. She could hear a heartbeat, strong and slow. It was a beautiful sound. Mavis closed her eyes and drifted. After a while her mouth opened and the last breath rattled from her lungs.
The Spinetinglers Anthology 2011 Page 13
