Spider

by McGrath, Patrick

  “Who is she, son?” Anger stirring now.

  I gazed at the cobwebs; Spider tried to creep into a hole.

  “Who is she, Dennis?” The frown, the teeth.

  “She’s a tart.”

  “You cheeky monkey, I’ll smack your bloody head!” He was on his feet now, looming over the armchair.

  “She’s a fat tart!”

  He slapped me on the side of the head and I started to cry, I couldn’t help it. “You killed my mum,” I shouted through my tears. “Murderer! You murderer! You bloody murderer!”

  “You what?” He sank back onto his box. “You having me on, Dennis? You know what you’re saying?”

  I relapsed into sullen and defiant silence; much as the Spider wanted to stay in his hole that slap on the head had smoked him out, and the hot, ringing sensation prevented him from sealing himself off again. My father frowned; he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. Was I daft? he said. More scratching of his head as he sat there on his box. He kept glancing over at me as though he’d never seen me before, and then he’d look away. He started to tell me how daft I was acting, he said he didn’t know where I got my ideas from, he said I spent too much time by myself, he said I should have some mates, he’d had mates at my age, every young lad should have mates, on and on he went and as the hot, ringing sensation faded I found I could pull away, pull back into the dark secret places once more, and as I did so a peculiar thing happened: my father seemed to shrink. It was suddenly as if he was very far away, though at the same time I knew he was just a few feet from me. But to my eyes he was distant and tiny, and his voice sounded as though it were crossing an immense expanse of space before it reached me, and when it did reach me there was a hollow, tinny resonance to it that obscured the sense and meaning of the words so they were just echoes, empty echoes in a gloomy shed in which up among the rafters spiders spun webs that winked and glistened and twinkled in the candlelight and made me feel soft, and time stood still until I clearly heard him saying: “Dennis? Dennis? You still think I done her in?”

  I said nothing. He had swelled again to substance and reality, and the soft feeling went away.

  “Answer me, son. You still think I done in your mum?”

  What could I do? He frightened me. I shook my head.

  “Well thank God for that,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  We left the shed and made our way down the allotment path, him pushing his bicycle. As we passed my mother’s grave it occurred to me that he hadn’t offered to dig up the potato patch, but of course I didn’t say this (though I doubt we’d have found anything, she’d risen by this time, but he didn’t know that). Hilda was waiting for us in the kitchen. She looked anxiously at my father, who had a hand on my shoulder as we came in through the back door. Spider had by this point withdrawn to one of his most obscure holes. “All right then?” she said, and my father nodded, and with manifest relief she began to bustle. “Sit yourselves down,” she said, “I popped out and got something nice for your supper.” It was eels.

  So I sat there quietly in the kitchen and ate my eels, but not for one minute did I forget that for all my father’s talk they still planned to send me to Canada.

  It is very late at night as I write this, and I don’t know if you can understand the anxiety I feel at committing these thoughts to paper. If she should find this book the consequences would be appalling, and I don’t like to think about that, not in the light of what later transpired at Kitchener Street—when you learn the full story you will understand my trepidation. I am fairly satisfied with the fireplace as the site of concealment, although it does have the drawback of being very sooty in there—after only a few days the book became so filthy I had to put it in a brown paper bag before stuffing it away, using my mittens so as to keep my hands clean. This system worked well until yesterday morning, when I realized that if she found the sooty mittens her suspicions would be aroused and she’d go poking around in the fireplace to see what I was up to—which left me the problem (I’m being fastidious to the point of absurdity, you’ll say, but believe me, I cannot afford to take the chance) the problem of finding a safe place of concealment for the mittens (under the linoleum perhaps?) or, alternatively, of getting rid of them. I chose the latter, I threw them into the canal yesterday afternoon, and watched them become waterlogged then finally sink. What this means is that (a) I have to wash my hands every time I extract and replace the book (which necessitates a trip down the corridor to the bathroom), and (b) at some point I shall have to explain to her that I have lost the mittens, and as you can imagine this is not an interview I look forward to. But here is why it is so imperative that she hot find the book: you see, I think I know who she is.

  I was coming into the house one afternoon a few weeks ago after some hours spent walking the streets. I was crossing the hall, making for the stairs, when I happened to glance toward the kitchen, which is located at the end of a short passage at the back of the hall, off to the left of the staircase. The passage was dark, but the light was on in the kitchen, and she was standing in the middle of the room leaning over the table with her sleeves rolled up and a rolling pin in her hands. Nothing unusual in this, of course; she was helping the little woman, who was attempting a steak-and-kidney pudding, perhaps she was instructing her in the English method. But what riveted my attention to this brightly lit scene, framed as it was in the kitchen door at the end of that short dark passage, was the way she handled the roller, the way she rose up on her toes and leaned on the thing so that all the strength and weight of those beefy shoulders was transmitted down her powerful arms, through her wrists, and into the thick fingers of her hamlike hands, the nails of which, I saw with a very real thrill of recognition and horror, and despite the powdering of flour upon them, were filthy. For a moment past and present slid seamlessly together, assumed identity, and there was one woman only leaning on that rolling pin, and that woman was Hilda Wilkinson; at that moment the woman in the kitchen was transfigured, her hair was blonde with black roots, her bosom strained against the fabric of an apron not her own, and her sturdy legs were planted on the kitchen floor like a pair of tree trunks, lifting and sinking as she rose on her toes with every downward thrust! of the pin upon the pastry. I had drawn close by this time, I had entered the passage and was gaping at her as she turned, panting hoarsely, to the door, and brushed a strand of damp hair from her forehead. Her chin! How could I have missed it? She had Hilda’s chin, big and puggy, prognathous, the very same! “Ah, Mr. Cleg,” she said—and I was back in 1957 with my landlady once more.

  A pause; I could think of nothing to say as she stood there at the table, turned toward me, a question in her face. “Did you want something, Mr. Cleg?”

  “No,” I said, but it came out in a sort of croaky whisper. “No,” I said, more successfully, and it was only with the greatest of effort that I managed to get moving again, for I had become, for those few moments in the passage, uncoupled.

  “No?” she said, as I shuffled away, and the familiar spike of mockery was in her voice. “A nice cup of tea, Mr. Cleg?” But I had to get upstairs, so off I fled without another word. Once I’d gained the safety of my room I stood at the window and gazed down at the park and attempted to roll a cigarette; but my hands were trembling badly, and I spilled half the tobacco onto the floor, and it was some minutes before I was sufficiently recovered to get down on my hands and knees and retrieve it.

  At first I didn’t realize what I must do. I often find that it’s not until everyone has gone to bed that I can think properly in this house, there’s too much interference otherwise, too many thought patterns clogging the waves, if you know what I mean—this is not the least of the reasons I spend so much time down at the canal, because if I’m not careful these thought patterns of theirs crowd out my own, and I can’t have that, I can’t have other people’s thoughts in my head, I had quite enough of that in Canada. It’s the same when they’re all awake in the house, even if I am in my room with
the door closed, and let me tell you this: dead souls they may be, but the thoughts they think are grotesque, and this is connected to the creatures in the attic, but I’ll get to them later. No, what I realized as soon as I could think clearly—that is, at the dead of night—was that I must confirm the very vivid impression I’d had in the hallway; there was no point in thinking about anything else until that was done.

  It was about three in the morning when I realized that if I knew who she was then she must know who I was—and the implications of that were very disquieting, though it was to take me some further days to think them through with any precision.

  The following day was damp and cold. After breakfast I left the house as usual, but instead of going to the canal I went into the little park across the street. Now Mrs. Wilkinson’s house stands on the north side of a square that must once have been impressive. Today though those grand houses with their stuccoed facades and Corinthian columns are shabby and decrepit, many have been torn down and those that remain are tenanted only by rats or ghosts or flotsam like me. So I sat on a bench in the park in the middle of this dilapidated square, beneath leafless trees and a slate-gray sky, amid empty bottles and cigarette packets, and tossed bread crumbs to the crows that live here; and with one eye I watched for her to come out.

  It was after eleven when she finally emerged in her winter coat, a shopping bag on her arm, and without so much as a glance toward the park she marched off down the street. I gave her a clear five minutes; then back in, across the hall, and up the stairs to the top floor where she, like me, has her room, though she is on the other side of the house from me. I paused at the top of the stairs to listen; nothing but the radio going quietly in the dayroom, where the dead souls listlessly killed time. Then along the corridor to her door—another pause, another moment of listening intently to the house— then turn the doorknob, and—nothing! Locked! She’d locked her door!

  A setback, this. I made my way back downstairs, out through the front door and across the street to the park once more, where I resumed my seat on the bench and tried to think the thing through. She locked her door. The only other door in the house that was locked was the one that opened onto the attic stairs (and of course the dispensary). Far from damping my curiosity, this development had quite the opposite effect, it inflamed my urge to know what the woman was hiding: I had to get hold of her keys.

  Occupied with these thoughts, and making no progress at all, I absently pulled out of my pocket a slice of dried toast I’d saved from breakfast and began crumbling it in my fingers and scattering the crumbs on the ground around the bench. Soon the crows flapped down, and when the toast was all crumbled I took out my tobacco and rolled myself a thin one. And there I sat, deep in thought, my outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, smoking among the crows.

  This business of the thought patterns: it seems to have grown much worse over the last few days. Why should this be so? Full moon, perhaps? But no, the moon is just a clipping of fingernail, like the crescent of candlelight in the outhouse door. The dead souls, perhaps, have become animated, for some obscure reason, and are generating cerebral energy of an uncharacteristically heavy voltage? But I spent an hour in the dayroom after supper and there was no sign of any vitality at all, less than usual, if that’s possible—they sat there in their accustomed chairs like a group of tailor’s dummies, stupefied with medication, faces like suet, trembling hands, in ill-fitting clothes stained with food and drool (God how they do drool!), waiting for El Mustachio to appear with the cocoa. I should talk! I, too, drool, I tremble, I shamble, and as you know at times I become uncoupled; but God help me if I ever turn into one of them, pull the plug, please, if that happens, let me at least pursue the enigma of my childhood while I have the will for it, and if that dries up then string me from the nearest rafter and let me dangle like the Spider I am! Then in comes the little woman with her tray, and this is all the life we’ll see in here tonight, the small dull ghost of a spark struggling to feeble life in the dead eyes of my companions at the prospect of a cup of weak cocoa made from milk powder and treacly with the sugar that produces these rolls of flab on their bellies and under their chins. They all have fat bodies here, you see—fat breasts, fat thighs, fat fingers, fat faces, and dry hair that’s always flaky with particles of dead skin; and when they stir their cocoa, these zombies, the dandruff comes drifting down into the cups like clouds of light snow. I turn away, I turn toward the window then and rub a hand across my own skull, which is shaved to a stubble from ear to temple, and bristled on top with a few thick tufts precisely the same shade of brown as my mother’s. I can scratch that nubbled skull of mine for minutes on end without a single flake of dead skin coming away, for my skin is like leather, stretched taut as it is over the sharp bones of this long, lean, horse’s head of mine: yes, stubbled leather, this is my head; hooknailed spiderlegs, these are my fingers; and my body just a shell with little in it now but the fetid gassy compost of what was once a heart, a soul, a life— so who am I to curl a lip at the zombies, I who have all the brittle resilience of an eggshell, a light bulb, a Ping-Pong ball? No, it isn’t them crowding the air with thought patterns, it’s coming from somewhere else, it’s coming from the attic. Every night I hear them now, I haven’t slept a wink, and all that’s held them off so far and given me relief is the writing I’ve been doing in my journal.

  My journal! Can it still be called that? Picture me at the dead of night down on my hands and knees in front of an obsolete gas fire, groping around for a brown paper bag smudged all over with soot. Gingerly it’s withdrawn, and I clamber to my feet and tiptoe with it across the room to my table. I wipe my hands on my trousers and take it out of the bag. That poor exercise book, a few short weeks ago a pristine thing with a shiny green cover—now it curls at the corners, it’s imprinted with the black smudges of my thumbs, it’s something you simply wouldn’t handle unless you had to: it’s a dirty book. Having wiped my fingers and put the paper bag to one side, I open this dirty book and turn the pages to the most recent entry, adding, with every fingering, a little more soot, a little more of the dirt of the house, transferring it from the chimney to the fading whiteness of the pages before me. I read over the last entry, then turn to a clean page, and pausing a moment, my eyes on the window, my pencil between my fingers, to frame the first words of the first sentence that will once more promote the flow of my memories and the construction, alongside, of a reasoned edifice of plausible conjecture, I begin to write.

  I begin to write. And as I do a strange thing happens, the pencil starts to move along the faint blue lines of the page almost as though it had a will of its own, almost as though my memories of the events preceding the tragedy at Kitchener Street were contained not within the stubbled leather helmet of this head of mine but in the pencil itself, as though they were tiny particles all packed together in a long thin column of graphite, running across the page while my fingers, like a motor, provide merely the mechanical means of their discharge. When this happens I have the curious sensation not of writing but of being written, and it has come to arouse in me stirrings of terror, faint at first but growing stronger day by day.

  Yes, terror. Oh, I am a feeble creature, yes I know it, I know it better than you do, I am so easily thrown into turmoil, so easily frightened and panicked, and it’s getting worse, I haven’t told you this for I’d been hoping that it might not be true, that I might be imagining it, that it might “just be me”—but it’s not. The feeling of being like a light bulb: it is with me all the time now. I felt it during the interminable hour I forced myself to sit in the dayroom. It wasn’t their thought patterns that so badly upset me, the thought patterns are coming from the top of the house; it was just their dead eyes, only their dead eyes, a single glance from a pair of those dead eyes has the potential to shatter me, to shiver my glassy identity into a thousand particles and leave the thin, barely glowing coil of filament within—the residue, the ruin, of what was once a heart, a soul, a life—leave it nake
d and vulnerable, smelling of gas, to the gale of the world that will surely snuff it to extinction in a second: and this is why, now, I must avoid their eyes, this is why I must skulk about by night, pursue my restless investigation of the opaque past like a creature of the shadows, like a halved thing, a body without a soul, or perhaps a soul without a body—ghoul or ghost it barely matters, what matters is that I nurse this glowing coil so that it can at least see me out, see me to the end of this thing, and this is why I am so prone to terror now, for I am conscious always of the danger of shattering, which in turns makes me crave control, which is why the sensation of being formed, framed, written makes me so desperately afraid. For that which can write me can surely also destroy me?

  But I must go on, what real choice do I have? And perhaps, too (I have had a smoke and things never look quite so bleak after a smoke) I’m exaggerating my difficulties. I do, after all, have strategies, ways of coping, have had since I was a boy. For example there’s the familiar withdrawal into the more inaccessible compartments in my head: it was not only Spider the boy who shifted into the back room after his mother died, and let Dennis face the world. No, over the years Spider has learned that it is often necessary to allow Dennis to face the world, or “Mr. Cleg” for that matter; not only this, but intermediate compartments have become necessary—with Dr. McNaughten, for instance, who knows my history. The front of my head does not satisfy the doctor so he is permitted contact with what used to be the back of my head but is now a sort of chamber occupied by a Dennis Cleg with “my history”—but Spider’s never there! Spider’s elsewhere, though the doctor suspects nothing. Similarly with the dead souls: all is well provided Spider is elsewhere—but let me for a single moment show myself on the outer wheel of the web in which my fragile and beleaguered being lives— and this is the moment I am destroyed. This is how it is with me.