Spider

by McGrath, Patrick

  My father was rolling a cigarette, his head lowered and his fingers busy with Rizla paper and Old Holborn, but his eyes were still on her. When it was rolled he lit it with a match and said: “Come down the allotments.”

  Yes, she could feel how wild he was, and it excited her. “Down the allotments?” she said, lifting her eyebrows and resting her tongue on her top lip. He turned toward the bar, nodded, and drank off the whisky. “When?” she said.

  For a few moments he was silent, waiting for the barmaid. He bought himself another whisky, a sweet port for her. They stood among the milling drinkers, and it was as though invisible threads bound them together. “I’ll go now,” he said, “you come down in a bit.”

  Hilda brought her port to her lips. She allowed a small pause to occur. “All right, plumber,” she said, “I don’t mind if I do.”

  I remember where I saw a hole: it’s behind the gas fire. It used to be a fireplace. There’s an empty grate and a chimney; that’ll do me nicely, I’ll just slip it in there. But I must stop for a minute, all night I’ve had the strangest sensation in my intestines, as though they were being twisted like a length of rubber hosing. Something odd is going on down there, though just exactly what I don’t know; probably something I ate.

  On I scribbled, on through the hours of darkness, getting down on paper my exact and detailed reconstruction of that terrible night, all I’d thought about during those long, empty years cooped up in Canada. I was in my bedroom when, not long after my father had stormed out, my mother called up the stairs to me. I came out onto the landing and there she was, down by the front door in her coat and headscarf. “I’m going out, Spider,” she said, “I shan’t be long.” She had put some lipstick on her mouth, I noticed, and a spot of rouge on each cheek—this was how she looked when she went out with my father on Saturday nights. It was only Friday, but after what had happened she could clearly sit no longer in the kitchen. “I’m going to meet your father,” she said, the last words I ever heard her say in life. I saw her leave the house through the back door, and I watched her as she stood pulling on her gloves in the yard. She’d left the light on in the kitchen and for a moment she was bathed in its glow; this I saw from my bedroom window. Then down the yard she went, a neat little woman off to meet her husband, and soon she was swallowed by the fog and lost to my view. But I was still with her, you see, I was still with her as I leaned on my windowsill and clouded the glass with my breath, I was with her as she moved down the alley, clutching her handbag, cautiously advancing by the dim gleam of the lamppost at the end of the alley. She did not know if my father was in the Dog, nor what sort of reception to expect should she come upon him there, but she could no longer sit weeping in the kitchen as he stayed out drinking and seethed with resentments she did not understand but which apparently, and through no fault of her own, were directed at her. She reached the Dog, stepped bravely into the public bar, and walked right up to the counter. “Evening Mrs. Cleg,” said Ernie Ratcliff. “Looking for your old man? He was here, but I believe he’s gone.” He peered about the room with his little weasel eyes. “No,” he said, “no sign of him, Mrs. Cleg.”

  “I see,” said my mother. “Thank you, Mr. Ratcliff.” She was turning away from the bar when a fresh thought struck her. “Mr. Ratcliff,” she said, “can you tell me where the Earl of Rochester is?”

  I see my father striding through fogbound streets toward the allotments. Down Spleen Street he strides, the looming gasworks barely visible above him, along Omdurman Close and across the bridge over the railway lines, a small dark figure striding through fog, the ring of his hobnailed boots muffled and dull on the pavement. When he reaches the top of the path he pauses; the fog is less dense up here, up on the high ground, and he can just make out the moon, and off to his left the first of the sheds. He stands there a moment or two, his figure smudged but distinct against the gray-black night with its dim blur of moonlight, with the allotments beneath him and beyond them a maze of streets and alleys falling away over toward the docks, whence through the fog comes the mournful hooting of the ships; and a few moments later he is unlocking the door of his own shed, and then he is in, and fumbling in his pockets for a match. It is cold and damp in the shed, and in the darkness, with its strong smell of earth, it is, he thinks, like being in a coffin. Then the match flares, he lights the candle on the box by the horsehair armchair, and the flame throws a dull unsteady glow upon the place. He opens a bottle of beer and paces the floor, his shadow huge and misshapen in the dim flickering light that the candle flame casts upon the crude plank walls and raftered gables of the roof. From out of the shadows of the back wall the eye of the stuffed ferret suddenly catches the candle flame and casts a sharp glittering sliver of light across the shed. The alcohol in my father’s system allows him no pause, no peace, in which he might consider what he is doing; he remains in a sort of fever, still driven by that single fixed instinct.

  Finally she comes. My father hears her outside and throws open the door. Cursing and stumbling, she picks her way up the path in her bare feet, clutching her shoes in one hand and a bottle of port in the other. “Shit!” she shouts as she sets a foot down in the potato patch. My father is grinning now, and against the dull light spilling from the open shed Hilda sees his white teeth shining as he comes forward to help her. She steps out of the soil back onto the path and he puts an arm around her shoulders; instantly they are cleaving to one another beneath the smoky moon; instantly the heat that has been simmering in my father since nightfall rekindles to a fury as they rock back and forth, pressed close to one another, there on the path outside the shed. Muffled snorts of laughter from Hilda, her face buried in my father’s collar, then slowly they come apart, and move toward the shed, then through the door, the door closes, and silence descends once more upon the allotments.

  (Dear God I wish silence would descend on this house! They’ve started up again, and they seem to be stamping up there now, they keep it up for minutes on end and then collapse, helpless, apparently, with laughter. I’ve been standing on my chair and banging on the ceiling with my shoe, but it does no good at all, in fact it only seems to make things worse. Mrs. Wilkinson has much to answer for, and the disturbance of my sleep by these creatures is not the least of it. And my insides still hurt!)

  ❖

  My mother stood just inside the door of the Earl of Rochester and gazed about her, bewildered. The pub was full, and by this hour a sort of collective madness had infected the patrons so that they talked and laughed and gesticulated like caricatures of men and women, like grotesque puppets, and my mother, meek of heart, and sober, was deeply intimidated. The air was thick with smoke, almost as thick as the fog outside; and in the crush of these people, whose loudness seemed to increase their size while diminishing their humanity, she could get no sort of an idea whether my father was present or not. Meek and sober though she was, she had determined upon a course of action: gripping her handbag she began to push her way through, with frequent mumbled apologies, glancing all about her as she advanced.

  At last she reached the bar. She waited patiently for the attention of a barmaid. Whenever one came near, however, some large, florid man would come crowding in from behind her, reaching over her shoulders with huge red fists clutching beermugs and spirit glasses, and begin to recite a long, complicated list of drinks; and the barmaid would be sent scurrying this way and that. This happened several times, and still my mother stood there at the counter, dwarfed by these giant boozers, until at last she won the undivided attention of a friendly young woman who said: “What can I get you, dear?”

  “I’m looking for my husband,” said my mother. A snort from the man beside her, and a series of uproarious comments from his companions as he repeated her words.

  “Who’s your husband, dear?” said the harried barmaid, not without sympathy, raising her voice to be heard over the racket.

  “Horace Cleg.”

  “What’s that?” said the barmaid.

 
“Horace Cleg,” said my mother.

  “Horace!” shouted the man beside her. “You’re wanted!”

  “Is he here?” said my mother, turning to the man.

  “Not if he’s got any sense he’s not!” said the man, and they all shouted with laughter.

  “Horace Cleg?” said the barmaid. “I don’t know him, dear. Regular, is he?”

  “No,” said my mother. “At least I don’t think so.”

  “Sorry, dear,” said the barmaid. “Can I get you something?”

  “No thank you,” said my mother, and turning away from the bar she pushed back through the crowd to the door, and a moment later found herself out in the fog once more.

  She had crossed the bridge over the railway lines and was standing on the path that ran along the allotments; she was staring at my father’s shed. The land behind it sloped away steeply, and the gabled roof stood out in sharp definition against the wispy fog and the night sky, in which the moon now seemed more a lump than a globe, like a huge potato. From round the edges of the door seeped a dimly flickering light, so she knew he was in there; what kept her out on the path were the odd muffled noises issuing from the shed; clearly he was not alone.

  After several minutes it grew quiet, and my mother, chilled by the night, began to think that she might quite simply walk up the path and knock on the door. But still she didn’t move, still she stood there shivering at the gate, staring at the shed and clutching her handbag tight. From the streets beyond the allotments came the desolate barking of a dog, and from the river, the foghorns; then suddenly, behind her, a goods train went steaming by on its way into the city and gave her a start. With no small effort, and no little courage, she opened the gate and walked quickly up the path to the door.

  I was plagued, as a boy, with nightmares; and that night I dreamed about the gasworks canal. A wild storm raged in my sleeping mind: the water was blacker than ever, violently churning, and darts of lightning sprang crackling, close overhead, between dense, lowering rainclouds, bulbous black things flecked and streaming at the edges with smoke. I was standing close to the edge of the canal as a skeleton surged up from the water, carried on the back of a wave, a skeleton housing some sort of sleek, seal-like creature squeezed tight within its rib cage. The whiskered snout of this awful black lumpy thing was pushed out from between the bones, and it exposed a set of tiny white teeth as it bleated pathetically at me; it was lifted by the canal waters almost to within my reach, then sank again with continued terrible bleatings, and I saw that all around me the canal was throwing up horrible things, a huge gray fish struggling in a sheathlike string bag whose tip was densely woven over its eyes and jaws like the toe of a sock; a boot made of tiny white bones; other whiskery seal-creatures, many of them trapped and struggling within sheets of netting, and several with human faces that bleated as they rose on black waves then sank again. With every cresting wave some new horror was lifted from the depths and exposed to me, and I knew with utter certainty and utter terror that I would be unable to keep my footing on the bank of the canal but would fall in among these bleating horrors. Suddenly then the picture of my father in shirtsleeves and flat cap digging a hole in the middle of his potato patch. It was foggy out there, but not foggy enough to obscure the pitted, knobbly lump of the moon. In the door of the shed I saw Hilda leaning against the woodwork with her ratty fur coat draped about her shoulders, smoking, the candle in the shed throwing a dim glow around her. After some minutes my father fell to his knees and with enormous care lifted from the soil a potato plant, cradling with one hand the leafy shoot, in the other the stemlike rhizome and its trailing, lacey rootlets. He placed it off to one side—how uncanny to observe the tenderness with which he handled the plant! The digging continued, the row of potato plants beside the hole grew longer; Hilda disappeared back into the shed and came out with a bottle of port and a teacup. Foghorns hooted from the river. Then I saw that my father was shoulder-deep in the hole, damp with sweat despite the chill of the fog. He tossed up the spade, then with some difficulty clambered up after it. The earth crumbled beneath his fingers, and several times he slipped back in. Hilda picked her way over from the shed, and still clutching her coat about her shoulders peered in. Worms, faintly visible, gleaming in the moonlight, writhe from the soil in the hole’s steep walls. Now my father emerges from the shed, in his arms a bundle partially wrapped in a bloodstained sack. It is a body, the head wrapped in sacking and tied round the neck with string. He lays it down at the edge of the hole, then rises from his knees and glances at Hilda, who is standing there among the uprooted potato plants. She pulls her coat tightly about her shoulders. My father nudges the body with his boot and it tumbles into the grave, coming to rest flat on its back with one arm pinned under it and the other flung untidily across its sack-tied head like a rag doll. Hilda comes to the edge of the hole and kicks in a little loose soil; then she shivers and returns to the shed. My father picks up the spade and begins to fill in the hole; it is with the greatest care that he replaces his potato plants.

  ❖

  I woke screaming and slipped out of bed and darted along the landing to my parents’ room, but the bed was empty, so I ran downstairs and along the narrow passage, all in darkness, to the kitchen.

  I opened the door. My father was sitting at the table with a woman I had never seen before. “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter with you?” He rose to his feet and led me out of the kitchen into the passage, closing the door behind him. “Back upstairs,” he said, guiding me down the passage, “back to bed, Dennis.”

  “Where’s my mum?” I said, trying to resist his forward propulsion.

  “Come on, son, back to bed.”

  “Where’s my mum?” I cried. “I don’t want to go back to bed, I had a dream!”

  “That’s enough,” he said, pushing me down the passage. “I want my mum!”

  “Don’t make me angry, Dennis! Your mum’s in the kitchen.”

  “No she’s not!”

  “Upstairs!” he hissed.

  “You’re hurting me!” He was gripping my wrists too tightly as he forced me up the stairs, and his lips were pulled back from his teeth. “You’re hurting me,” I wailed—and he let me go, and leaned against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. “Go and get back into bed,” he said quietly, all his anger suddenly dissipated. “You can leave the light on. I’ll be up to see you later.”

  I too grew calm. I began to climb the stairs. Halfway up I stopped and turned. “Who’s that lady?” I said.

  He glanced up at me and took his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “What lady?”

  “The one in the kitchen.”

  “Don’t make me angry, Dennis. Go on up now.” As I climbed the stairs he returned to the kitchen and closed the door behind him.

  It wasn’t until close to Christmas that I fully grasped the fact that my mother was dead. Even so, the events of the hours that followed were vivid in my mind, not only those I witnessed with my own eyes, but those that were so painful, later, in Canada, to reconstruct. Horace and Hilda walked home together in silence, and as they made their way through the narrow, empty, foggy streets she leaned on him, and for the first time he was allowed to support her, to put an arm around her shoulders and bear her weight. Having murdered he felt clear and calm, exhilarated even, though these emotions owed their existence more to a numbed state of shock than to any genuine emancipation; my father was a fool to think he would be spared the harrowing of guilt, and indeed this soon followed.

  Hilda slept with him in Kitchener Street for what remained of the night. She hung her skirt and blouse in the wardrobe, among my mother’s clothes, then flung her underwear over a chair and climbed into bed. My father was eager for intercourse, but she permitted him no contact at all. Early the following morning I crept quietly into the room, and stood beside the bed, gazing at the bulk of her body beneath the blankets where my mother’s should have been, and at the pillow where her hair stra
ggled across it in clumps of tangled yellow with black roots. The light that filtered through the curtains was gray and dim, and the room stank of stale alcohol. My father awoke with a start. His first sensation was of me standing mutely by the bed, the second, the foul taste of the phlegm in his mouth. Then the night came back, and he turned and cast a glance at Hilda’s body in the bed beside him. Then he looked at me again, and I saw that he was suddenly very frightened, and wanted a drink; but there was never anything in the house (this at my mother’s insistence) apart from an occasional bottle of beer. He felt an impulse to turn to Hilda for comfort, but she seemed to have become tainted by association with the events of the night and with his own guilty terror. At last he remembered a small bottle of whisky he had bought last Christmas and never drunk. I was back in my own room when he climbed out of bed, pulled on his vest and trousers and went down to the outhouse. Back into the kitchen a few minutes later, and into the parlor, where he found the whisky in the cupboard. There he sat in the gloom of that weird Saturday morning, not the least of the weirdness being his use of the parlor; I’d never known him sit alone in there before. The parlor was for company, and my parents very rarely had company—they weren’t very sociable people.

  An hour later he was a little steadier, and he felt he could go up and see Hilda. The whisky had blurred the stark outlines of the night’s doings; the terror that had grown for a few minutes almost intolerable had receded, and been replaced by a sort of fragile confidence that they were going to get away with it (he must, I think, have thought from the start in terms of a “they,” in terms of a mutual, shared responsibility). Slowly, heavily, he climbed the stairs; I was in my own room, at my window with my chin in my hands. The morning was well advanced, but the fog still clung to the city and cloaked it in twilight. While he was downstairs I’d crept along the landing and had another look at the woman in my mother’s bed. She was still fast asleep and snoring; at one point I heard her mumble a few words, but they were indistinct. The room was dark and the awful sweet smell of port was still thick in the air; and there was another smell, I detected it at once, familiar as I was with my mother’s fragrance: this too was a woman’s smell, but it was Hilda’s smell, a warm, fleshy smell colored by strong perfume and the emanations of her fur, which, impregnated with fog, hung from the wardrobe door. There was also the smell of her feet, and the whole effect was of some large female animal, not terribly clean, possibly dangerous. Into the lair, into the den of this creature came my father, fortified by whisky; I listened closely from my own room, my door slightly ajar and my ear pressed close to it. I heard him get undressed and then climb into bed.