Bottled Spider

by John Gardner

  Just after eleven the Salvation Band — Lucy called it the Salvanation Band — arrived on the Keepsake. People gathered around to sing carols, and the children became even more excited. ‘He knows something’s in the air,’ Charlotte said, nodding towards Ben, who was bobbing up and down in the front room window seat, his eyes gleaming. ‘It’s times like this that I long to be able to explain things to him.’ He was making happy tooting noises while his arms moved wildly, flailing the air in an independent, uncontrolled spasm. Suzie felt a stirring of emotion as the band started to play ‘Good Christian Men, Rejoice’ and she realized this lovely little boy heard nothing of the band playing carols or the people singing. It was so sad that it was unlikely Ben would ever have any inkling of the Christ Child’s birth, the ageless story of Bethlehem.

  In the afternoon, while the house seemed to get even messier, their conversation inevitably turned to past Christmases.

  ‘Do you remember —?’ became a standard opening to a flood of recollections from childhood.

  ‘Were they good Christmases in the olden days, when you were little?’ Lucy asked, and they all laughed, munched mince pies and sipped tea while they prepared to make this one a good Christmas.

  When Suzie looked at Charlotte’s face as they talked and trimmed the tree it was like looking in the mirror; and when she looked at the whole person it was like looking in a long mirror. As children their twin-like personalities were woven together, their minds plaited, so one could almost tell exactly what the other was thinking. Their love for one another surpassed the normal blood-sharing of sisters. If anyone had seriously asked if one would give her life for the other, they would have immediately replied yes without having to stop and think. Yes, of course, they would both have said. Naturally.

  *

  On the road to Overton, just outside Laverstoke, a couple of miles out of Whitchurch there is a long stretch of thatch. This length of thatch is the longest in England, covering an entire row of cottages. There are gardens in front, with a picturesque well. A colour photograph, preferably taken in summer, could easily adorn a box of chocolates, or make a pretty jigsaw puzzle. One that poor little Ben would adore trying his hand at.

  These cottages are often mistaken for almshouses, granted to impoverished and impotent folk of good character from the parish for a peppercorn rent, and to any others deemed socially acceptable to occupy a granted cottage in perpetuity. But these are not in fact the almshouses associated with the Whitchurch/Laverstoke area. The Laverstoke ones lie down a turning to the right, just past the thatched cottages. Two pairs of small 1850s red brick cottages, with a little gloss-painted brown timber thrown in for good measure. A porch at the front and a garden round the back, with a tiny bit of grass out front and room for a flowerbed where you could grow hollyhocks and lupins in summer and generally make the place a shade more attractive than it is in reality.

  Having reached the first of these cottages after a long and circuitous tramp over lanes, across fields, through ditches, ‘o’er bush, o’er briar’ as Puck has it in the midsummer play by W. Shakespeare, Golly ceased singing and marched up to his mother’s front door, knocking loudly with his gloved right hand.

  Soon, he thought. In the bleak midwinter.

  There was the sound of shuffling feet and the door opened, allowing the pungent scent of cabbage to be released into the porch.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ said Golly. ‘Surprise! Merry Christmas.’

  ‘Bugger me,’ said the small, slightly stooping, stick-clutching, thin, frail, smiling elderly lady. ‘Well, double bugger me, if it en’t our Golly.’ She turned her head and shouted over her shoulder, ‘Kath. Our Kath. Come here, it’s our Golly.’

  Under his breath, Golly whispered, ‘Oh shit, that’s torn it. Our Kath’s here.’

  ‘Why didn’t you warn me, Golly?’ The elderly, thin and frail lady reached forward to clasp him in a Christmas hug. I squeeze too hard and I’ll snap her in two like an old bit of stick, Golly thought as she hugged him as tightly as her strength would allow, which he reckoned was about equal to being sandwiched between two aggressive cabbage whites. Over her shoulder he saw our Kath skulking by the kitchen door. Golly kicked back and closed the front door behind him.

  ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes, Golly, and there’s no mistake,’ said Mum, noticing that Kath had sidled along the passage that stood in for a hallway. Mrs Goldfinch turned her head again. ‘Isn’t he, Kath? Sight for sore eyes, our Golly?’

  ‘Soothing balm and no mistake. Do you the power of good if you’d got a bad dose of pink eye.’ Kath was always thought to be the joker of the Goldfinch family.

  ‘Conjunctivitis,’ her mother corrected.

  ‘That an’ all,’ Kath said nodding.

  Mum Goldfinch, baptized seventy-four years ago in the name Ailsa Austin, wreathed in smiles, like a cat’s anus, proudly led Golly into the kitchen and then through to the back sitting room with its scenes of Regency men and women on the wallpaper: powdered wigs and fans and all that. She put down her stick and reached up with her trembling and twisted old hands to remove Golly’s hat; then his mask. She looked at him with her big old black eyes and saw the two faces, the deep lightning-flash red ridge, and the thunderstone scar running from chin to hairline. She gazed at his contorted mouth, saw the divided, wrenched nose, and the kinked eyes one above the other. She looked on his ruined, frightening mask of a face, and felt nothing but love for him, her only son, who had come so hard and early into the world.

  ‘You don’t half look well, our Golly.’ She grinned her toothless grin and remembered all those years ago. ‘He looks well, our Kath, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Spectacular. Don’t know how you do it, Golly.’

  ‘Eff off,’ he muttered wittily.

  ‘Why didn’t you give me some warning, Golly? I got nothing in the house. Hardly nothing at all.’

  It didn’t matter, he wanted to say, but Kath’s dark eye was on him. It’s not my fault, he thought. It’s not fair. What had Mr Gregory said when he’d caught him with the girl? ‘You are an abomination, boy. You are the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet.’ And as if he were back in the school, at that time, Golly clutched at his ears and gave out a keening wail. ‘Stop it,’ he shouted. ‘Just stop it,’ he screeched so loudly that his mum stepped back and Kath cringed. They knew Golly’s rages.

  Then the calm returned. ‘I come to see you, Mum. Christmas, I come to see you and I couldn’t warn you because I’m not supposed to be here. I come on a job for Idle Jack Hobday at the market. I got to do something for him, fix something. Anyway you’ve got nothing in the house.’

  This was stupid. If he knew his mum she had enough for forty days and forty nights in the house, Christmas. Always stocked up at Christmas, and rationing wouldn’t have changed a thing because when they still lived in London people said that if it was out there Alisa Goldfinch knew where to find it.

  ‘Doing something here for Idle Jack down Berwick Street Market? You haven’t been going around with that Mickey Mangle again have you, Golly? Or that Billy Joy-Joy and Bruce Bubble? They’re a bad crowd. Only get you in trouble.’

  ‘Give me me duffel coat, they did. And Mickey give me boots.’

  ‘Yes. Found before they was lost, I’ll be bound.’

  Here we go. Always the same with Mum. I always gets this everlasting gramophone record about people who’re good to me. Always asking questions. No wonder they used to call her Beaky. Beaky Goldfinch, always getting her nose into things, and the nose was like a beak as well.

  ‘Beaky,’ he said now, almost under his breath.

  ‘I’ll give you Beaky, my boy.’

  ‘Oh, Mam, come on.’ She’ll get her nose stuck in something one day. Specially with that damn great wen on the end. A cyst, they called it, and she never gets anything done about it. Doctor said it was a herbaceous cyst and she wouldn’t have it done. Could’ve had it off. Proper. In the hospital, same as she could have had his problem fixed
, but no, his mum wouldn’t have it done even. Mum wouldn’t let them touch her cyst and wouldn’t let them operate on his face. Go into those places and you never comes out again, she said. ‘Golly, I couldn’t risk it, having you in there. In hospital. You don’t know what people get up to in them hospitals when they’ve put you asleep. They admitted to me as how they’d be using you as a guinea pig. Practise on you, that’s what they were going to do.’

  He was building up a head of steam. Now, here in her back sitting room he asked if they had rooks where he was born.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Something terrible the noise of the rooks when they rose from the trees across the cricket pitch, Golly. You remember that? You remember the rooks cawing out of them trees? Never, you was but a tiny babe.’

  ‘I had a dream. Rooks flying out of the trees.’

  Kill Jo Benton, and when he did, when she was struggling against him as he pulled on the wire, and gave the final tug on it and felt her body go limp, just as those big black rooks came flapping from the skeletal trees. Whatever else, Golly had a sharp intelligence and a dramatic imagination that helped remove him from any accountability of his actions. To Golly, in the black ingenuity of his mind, he was simply obeying orders. Killing was his bleak reason for being. He was an executioner in the human abattoir.

  ‘It’s alright then, Mum. I won’t be any bother. Just sleep here. Have a bite to eat and sleep for a bit. Then I have to go out. Tonight. Late.’

  ‘Poachin’!’ Triumphant, full of glee, lips drawn back, gap-toothed in a grotesque grin. ‘That’s what you’re on, innit, Golly? Poachin’. They got you poachin’.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said with a big, long-drawn laugh. Relieved she’d got a reason for him being there. ‘Yeah, Mum, I go poachin’ alright.’

  ‘Well I don’t want the police round here. We’re respectable here. Respectable house, I got. Make sure you en’t seen going out in the night and coming back in at all hours.’

  Kath was starting to get agitated. ‘I got to be off, Mum,’ she said. ‘I got to meet Keith.’

  ‘Who’s Keith?’ he asked.

  ‘Who d’you think, Golly?’ His mum being sarky now. ‘She’s got a man over the other side of Whitchurch. At her age? You be careful, my girl. You shut the gate of the field when you get in there.’ She dropped her voice. ‘On your back.’

  ‘I’m not goin’ in any fields, but I have to go now. I’ll miss my bus else. You take care, Golly. And you, Mam, and have a merry Christmas.’

  ‘Kath, you listen to me before you get out that door. You never seen Golly. Right, my girl? Never seen him?’

  ‘Course I haven’t, Mam. I’ll bring Keith over Boxing night.’ Raised her voice. ‘You’ll be gone by then, Golly, won’tcher?’

  ‘Well gone.’ He would be an’ all. May be gone long time before that. He’d go out around four o’clock in the morning. Maybe see Father Christmas finishing his rounds. By six he’d be in the trees back of Falcon Cottage and he’d stay there as long as he wanted. Stay there. Bide his time. Then, when she was alone, he’d either entice her out ... No ... That’d be more dangerous. No, he’d just wait, then when she was alone he’d be on her and kill her with the wire. Kill easy. Kill easy as falling off a log.

  He looked around the room. She’d pictures of the King and Queen framed, over the mantel; and another one, print of a painting, sort of Victorian looking, big wagon load of hay stuck in a ford. There was good thick curtains at the window, blotting out the weather and peeping Toms. She had a nice sofa an’ all. He could kip on that. Then, when it was done he’d hide up here in the warm for a day. Maybe two days. She’d have food alright.

  ‘You just sit there, Golly,’ she called through from the kitchen. ‘I’m making you a spot of tea. I’ve cooked a nice tongue. Cooked it the way you like it, done with leeks. And I’ve got some brawn. Really nice. The butcher give me a bit extra. You just sit there quietly and rest, Golly. Lovely to have you here for Christmas.’

  ‘Right, Mum. I may be back later in the day tomorrow. Christmas Day.’ Might not get back to her for a long time though. He knew the art of waiting when it was all over; afterwards. He’d learned that, waiting. Like the one outside Cambridge. When he was there he stood, silent, in the clump of trees and bushes, behind that cottage. He just stood, stock still for hours after he’d done it.

  He could smell the summer dust in the midst of those trees, heard the father come back, heard him cry out and come running outside again screaming.

  Then the police came and he waited still as a stone. Like a rock in the middle of an arbour.

  The doctor came and more police, swarming all over the place, but they didn’t cross to the other side of the garden, right out to the trees. It was as if there was an invisible wall and they couldn’t cross it.

  Then the ambulance came and went away again. Sunset and they all went, leaving two uniformed men. The father had been taken away. Taken to a relative, the papers said next day. He liked to read about it in the papers. Gave it a sense of reality somehow.

  He stayed there hours into the night. When it was safe he left, stole away. Crossed the fields, smoked a fag, remembered the way she died. Pretty little thing. Died like a bird in his hands, with the wire. Snared her with the wire. Waiting, that’s the secret.

  ‘Nice bit of tongue, Golly?’ His mum came in from the kitchen and lit the lamps and switched on the wireless. ‘Runs on a battery, Golly. I got two batteries. One gets juiced up at Dave Cox’s garage and I change them round every Monday when Dave brings the paraffin for the lamps. That tongue good, is it, Golly?’

  ‘Yes, Mum, I like a bit of tongue.’ He laughs and it hurts his throat. ‘Like a bit of tongue and pickle.’

  ‘Always did, didn’t you, Golly? Bit of tongue was your favourite. Tongue pie and cold shoulder, that’s what you got,’ and she cackled with mirth. ‘It’s so good, Golly. So good having you here even for a little bit of Christmas.’

  ‘Yeah, Mum. It’s good.’ Got to stand in the trees later. Maybe a long time. Kill her dead, and he remembers the very first time. The time the man saw him and said he would send a lady in the night to give him his orders, and now, at last he knew the lady’s name ’cos she used to buy fruit from Idle Jack’s stall in Berwick Street Market. ‘Yes, Miss Baccus,’ Idle Jack would say. ‘A nice pair of pears. You got ’em, Miss Baccus.’ Twitting her, and she would laugh with him, and she would smile at Golly. ‘How are you, Golly?’ she’d ask. ‘And how’s your cousin, Lavender?’

  Miss Baccus was Lavender’s landlord. Always in and out of Lavender’s building.

  *

  ‘You’ve got enough to feed an army, Charles.’

  ‘I know, it’s always the same, isn’t it? I’ve been storing up what I could lay my hands on since the summer in the hope we’d all be here for Christmas. Thanks, Suzie. Thanks for coming, Suzie. It’s so good to be together for Christmas.’

  Suzie had been upstairs, wrapping presents. Doing little name tags. Making the parcels look interesting. A piece of ribbon here, some sealing wax there. Now she was in the kitchen again, watching Charlotte going through everything for the umpteenth time. Just like her mother. The difference was that the house was a rubbish tip and they hadn’t really finished the tree, the kitchen was awash and — oh, everything.

  ‘Oh, confound it!’ Her father’s daughter. His dying words. ‘Brandy. I haven’t got any brandy for the brandy sauce. I meant to go into the White Hart this morning. Oh, confound it.’

  ‘Want me to go down and get some?’ Suzie was almost into her overcoat before Charlotte replied.

  ‘Would you? Suze, would you really? I hate not to have everything in before Christmas Day.’

  ‘Won’t take me more than fifteen minutes. I’ll be down there and back in no time. Might even have a glass of sherry.’ Might even get picked up, she thought. When will I get a man of my own? She thought of Dandy Tom. She could easily — don’t even think of it, Suzie.

  ‘Don’t have more tha
n one,’ her sister called to her. ‘I’ve got a bottle of Dry Fly. Thought we’d have a drop of sherry after I’ve got the children to bed.’

  It was stingingly cold outside. Cold and dark. Most people were inside doing their last bits and pieces for the great day, and the blackouts were up. She had her torch though and in a few minutes her eyes grew accustomed to the blackness and she could see in the dimness.

  Don’t have more than one. Not a chance, Suzie thought. Her inner, private, life was stuck like a magnet on the sex she’d never had. Nor was likely to at this rate. Oh Dandy Tom, she pined. You’d be the catch of the season. Mustn’t eat or drink after nine, though. She wanted to go to church fasting and in a state of grace.

  She came to the edge of the Common and passed the white walls of the vet’s surgery, then Dr Bartholomew’s house with its beautiful windows. Seventeenth-century, Charlotte said. Bartholomew, she wondered. Was it the odious Barry Forbes who’d said he was a friend of the doctor’s son? Yes, was it Paul? She could do without people like Forbes. Money men. Smoothies. Silk ties. Heavy tailored suits. The chink of money.

  Ahead of her she saw a light come on and off as someone went into the White Hart.

  Yes, she’d have a sherry. In the saloon bar. To hell with it. It was Christmas. And she fumbled at the door, opened it and stepped into the warm twinkling, friendly bar. Faces turned towards her. A couple of locals were talking, heads close together, to a flashy looking young man — wide boy, she immediately noted — and a group of four RAF officers were carousing in the other corner. Jovial, pilot’s wings on their left breasts, medal ribbons below on three of them. Top buttons of their jackets undone. Fighter pilots.

  ‘Tally ho! Popsy behind you, six o’clock. Look out ... break Jem!’ One of them called, laughing. It was in no way offensive. Boys. Boys, who could die tomorrow fighting for the skies. Come to that we could all die tomorrow, that was the nature of war these days. Every one was in it now, everyone’s a target now.