Spider

by McGrath, Patrick

  I was not strong. I had been on hard bench for a week, I had been thoroughly humiliated, I had nothing I could call my own, no shoelaces, no belt, not even a sock down my trousers. I was in no condition to hold off this cold-eyed creature, this copy of my father—this Cleg-Jebb!—or whatever he was. Silence was my only weapon, the retreat of the Spider into the back parts, down some hole, and this I attempted as the voice rose and fell, boomed and hissed, and “Jebb” shrank away, became tiny, and vast distances opened up in that green-walled bleach-stinking room. But after a moment or two—panic. Long years in Block F, long years being my own man in the vegetable gardens—something had atrophied, and struggle as I might I could not escape the tiny booming figure on the far side of the vast table. It grew dark in the room, the familiar nightmare was upon me, and I was stiff and heavy and pinned, squirming, in the front of my brain, unable to escape the boom and hiss, the eyes, the hands, of this Cleg-Jebb creature across the table. “A cry for help,” he boomed, “sheer panic,” he boomed, “the necessity of facing up,” he hissed, as I squirmed, not the Spider anymore, he was the Spider and I the fly! “Escape responsibility for the accident,” he hissed, “you killed your mother,” he boomed, and I rose wildly to my feet and pointed a trembling finger at him. “You did!” I shouted. “Not me, you!”

  The door opening—attendants—smartly down to a safe room and only then, only then did the Spider at last regain the old nimbleness, and down a hole he scuttled and left me rocking back and forth in the corner.

  Three more months I spent in Ganderhill, one on hard bench, two back in Block F. There were more interviews with the superintendent, in the course of which he reconstructed my “history.” Then, one cool and misty morning at the beginning of October, he discharged me. See me standing in front of the main gates, under the clock, in a shabby gray suit, and clutching a cardboard suitcase with very little in it; see me turn my head from side to side, imagine my dismay. In my pocket three pound notes, some coppers, and a scrap of paper with Mrs. Wilkinson’s address written on it.

  Cleg-jebb had reconstructed my history, but he had reconstructed it wrong wrong wrong, it was bad history. If he knew anything of my father’s plan to send me to Canada he did not indicate it; if he understood my terror at the prospect, if in other words he’d learned the truth about what really happened to my mother—he didn’t indicate this either, It was not hard to imagine what would come next: I’d be lured down the allotments some foggy night, and there, fortified by drink and Hilda, my father would batter me senseless with a gardening tool. He would dig another hole (again displaying that weirdly incongruous solicitude for his potato plants) and then, still under the approving gaze of Hilda, he’d dump me in and cover me up, and without the benefit of even a winding sheet I would soon become a meal for the maggots, the beetles, the flesh-worms, leaving nothing behind me but a heap of long bones, detached and uncoupled and growing more so with every shift of the earth until my brittle frame lost what little coherence and integrity it may once tenuously have possessed in life and was scattered widely in London soil! Then, down at the Dog and Beggar, when the men said, “Where’s that boy of yours, Horace?” or, “Where’s young Dennis?” my father would say, with his twitchy little smile, perhaps wiping the beer froth off his lip: “He’s joined his mother in Canada”—and Hilda would be unable to suppress a hoarse belch of unlovely laughter, and that would be my epitaph.

  I sat in my bedroom and heard them murmuring in the kitchen below. Then the scrape of chair legs, Hilda came upstairs briefly, and a few minutes later they left by the back door. I came downstairs and went out after them. I saw them go down the alley, arm in arm, and turn right at the end, off to the Rochester. Back upstairs then, where I took out from under my bed a stolen ball of brown string. I cut a length and tied one end to the leg of my bed. The other end I let out through the window, and it landed in a tangled coil in the yard outside the back door. Then downstairs again, and I brought the string in through the kitchen window (opened half an inch) and tied it to one of the knobs on the gas stove. Back upstairs, and sitting by my open window I reeled in the string till it was taut between my fingers. At this point I began gently to tug it; you can guess my purpose.

  I was upstairs and downstairs for the next half hour, adjusting the string, trying to make it work. The string would tighten but the knob on the gas stove wouldn’t turn, and if I pulled harder it frayed where it rubbed against the bottom of the window. I began to think of some sort of mechanism that would make it run smoothly, some sort of spool mounted on a spindle or bobbin, but how to attach such a thing inconspicuously to the kitchen window? Then I heard the ring of hobnails in the alley, and raised voices, so I untied the string from the knob, ran upstairs and hauled in my line. Into the yard they came, Horace and Hilda and Harold and Glad, arm in arm and much the worse for drink—Hilda roaring with laughter at her own unsteadiness as she broke free of my father (who was the soberer of the two) and went crashing into the outhouse, where I heard her shouting and banging against the door, trying to light the candle. The others came in and the kitchen light was turned on, then Hilda emerged, still pulling her skirt down, and even before she reached the back door she was loudly expressing her astonishment that she should live with a plumber unable to fix his own toilet. It was a proper disgrace (she didn’t mind telling us) and by this time Gladys was shrieking in the kitchen, and then I heard Hilda say: “Come on, Glad, ’ave something, it’ll do you good.” I closed my door and returned to the window, and tried to block out their noise. When at last Harold and Glad went off I listened carefully by my door: Hilda came up first, my father close behind her; he would not pass out in his chair by the stove tonight.

  The days that followed were filled with strangeness and terror. I couldn’t stay in the house, and when I got outside my steps would seem always to lead me, and against my conscious will, down to the allotments, down to my father’s vegetable garden—despite the fact that I knew he intended to kill me there. On very cold days I broke into the shed, where I lit candles and wrapped myself in potato sacks for warmth. Once, at dusk, I caught a glimpse of my mother by the remains of the compost heap; but when I ran over she disappeared. Another time I saw from the railway bridge that the shed was on fire, a furious, glorious blaze against the stillness and gloom of the afternoon; but the closer I approached the dimmer it became, and by the time I reached the gate the shed was as it always was. Frequently I lay on the frosty soil in order to feel my mother reaching up to me; often I was disappointed, but several times she called me to join her: this tore me sorely, the love and terror rising in my heart in equal measure, with equal passion, so it felt.

  At other times I went down the cellar and sat in the corner smelling the coal and watching the black germs dance in the few shafts of daylight that penetrated the hatches in the pavement above. It was cold down there, down in the hold, so I’d cloak my head and shoulders in a piece of dirty sacking like a monk’s cowl and pull my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them; I’d shiver and blow cold breath at the shafts of light and see the little germs, the imps, go spinning and swirling wildly round and round, and this made me laugh. One afternoon I sat very still and very quiet and a rat came creeping out and scurried along the wall in short runs, pausing every few feet to twitch its snout. After that I took the cheese out of the traps and scattered it in little pieces across the floor; then I could watch several of them at once. I loved their tails, how long and plump and pale they were, and furred with a down of light bristle as they twitched about behind them like wormy ropes on the deck of a ship. Hilda heard me laughing down there once and the door opened, light spilled in from above. “What you doing down there?” she cried. Sitting in my corner, in my cowl, in the shadows, I said nothing; she came down a little way in that queer sideways manner she had of descending stairs and then she saw the rats. A cry of horror, back up she went, and the door slammed shut behind her! More laughter from the shadows. When my father came home from work she
had him go down and set the traps. The next day there were two dead rats, I put them in my pocket, I reset the traps myself, I liked them just as well dead as alive. Once when I was down there in the corner I heard a voice say: “Spider!” It wasn’t my mother’s voice, it was a cracked and growly voice, like an old woman’s voice, and I realized it was the night-hag who lived in my wall. I didn’t go down the cellar after that.

  I took to hanging about under the bridge by the canal, where it was dark. There was much in the visual world by this point that caused me terrible anxiety—I constantly had the sensation that some awful catastrophe was about to occur, and this feeling became at times so overpowering that I sank to the ground against the wall beneath the bridge and covered my eyes and ears with my arms. It was the fear I had of my father sending me to join my mother in Canada, it was the fear of being attacked with a gardening tool at the moment I least expected it. I attempted not to let them know what I knew but I could not sleep in number twenty-seven anymore, and I barely ate a thing, why would I? Why would I touch meat or vegetables prepared by Hilda? Their faces were changing now: I could see them eating, their jaws moving, their eyes shining in the kitchen’s gloom, their teeth closing on pieces of food, but each feature was fixed in space separate and distinct from the rest, and it was only by combining fragments of their broken-up faces and hands that I could keep them in focus and remain alert to their activity. They soon lost whatever veneer or crust of humanity they may once have had, and in their broken-up aspect they showed their true nature, their deadness and animality, and when I saw this the sensation of impending disaster almost overwhelmed me and I fled the kitchen in terror, heedless of their cries and squeals of frustrated hunger, for they planned to eat me, I’d realized, they planned to eat me up.

  At night I grew calmer, partly as a function of darkness and partly because they were so often out of the house. Sometimes I followed them when they went to the Rochester, I watched them through the windows while they were at their drink, and when Hilda went to the Ladies I climbed on a barrel to see her pee. Other nights I stayed in the house and experimented with lengths of string dangled from my window down to the knob on the gas stove. Once when I was twitching the string and trying to get the knob to turn I felt my mouth fill up with small birds, which I crunched between my teeth, and then their feathers and blood and broken bones started to choke me, and I retched and retched but nothing came up. Another time I found a bottle of milk by the canal and in it was the putrefying corpse of a man my father had murdered the night before, and I opened the bottle and drank the milk. Another time I found a baby with a hole in the top of its head, and through the hole I sucked up and swallowed everything in the baby’s head until its face collapsed like an empty rubber mask. Later I remembered that this was how spiders devoured insects. That night I accidentally fell asleep and my father came in and compressed my skull with a plumber’s wrench, and when I woke up my head was pearshaped; this was so that it would fit the sack they’d prepared for me to be murdered in.

  They grew hungrier and hungrier as the days passed, and I knew it would soon be time. When Hilda looked at me saliva dribbled from her mouth and ran down her primitive chin. My father was more furtive in his display of appetite, he watched me always from the corners of his eyes. His hands I noticed looked like paws now. Deadness and animality: I had no name for creatures like this, I still don’t despite the fact that one of them at this moment lies sleeping on the other side of the house, secure in the knowledge that her creatures in the attic (despite their occasional treachery) will preserve her from harm. Listen to them!

  Listen to them. There is a rhythm to their activity, three distinct waves, each one rising and falling, each one separated from the last by a lull or hiatus during which I experience both relief and the torment of anticipating the next (the anticipation as intense as the wave itself). Each begins at the level of highest vehemence of the one preceding, so there is a massive increment of scale in volume and frenzy from the early part of the night to the later. And what is it that they do? Impossible to be precise: there is chanting and stamping, also hissing, screaming, cries and shouts that are only partially intelligible, gales of laughter, voices of people I have known saying wildly uncharacteristic things: Dr. Austin Marshall reciting filthy verses for example. They use my name freely, they play on it, they invert it: gelc, they call me, gelc, and recently they invented the chant: gelc SINNED gelc sinned gelc sinned gelc sinned gelc SINNED gelc sinned gelc sinned gelc sinned... They repeat it over and over, louder and louder, stamping all the while so the light bulb swings back and forth on its cord and I am plunged into shadow, then brought to lurid life, plunged into shadow, then back to lurid light—and I huddle on my chair with my legs drawn up to my chest and my head between my knees and my hands over my ears weeping weeping weeping as they push me to the very limits of what I can endure—then it breaks apart in screechy laughter—this gradually subsides, is followed by mumbling—and slowly I lift my head and catch trembling hold of the side of the table, perhaps pick up my pencil or roll a quick one while they gather themselves for the next— which begins, as I say, at the pitch of fiercest frenzy of the last!

  Three waves, followed by exhaustion. Finally I rise from my chair and stand gazing out the window, gazing east to catch the first faint hint of dawn, and again I tell myself: no more. I wander through the sleeping house, past doors behind which dead souls dream. I patter down the stairs and into the kitchen, out into the hallway again, glance in Mrs. Wilkinson’s office—and it is then that I see them: on top of her desk, splayed there in the gloom, her house keys. Her house keys. A quiet cry of joy inside your old Spider as he silently crosses the room and in one smooth swooping movement pockets the bunch. Then off, in long spidery strides, back up the stairs, back to his room, unseen, unheard, unbound.

  With my cardboard suitcase in my hand, and my three pound notes in my pocket, I turned for a last look at the gates of Ganderhill. Flanked by a pair of square towers, they were fifteen feet high and came to a sharp arch above which hung a huge clock that read one minute past ten. It was a fine clear morning, and the autumn sun was mellow on the bricks. A small door was set into the left-hand gate, and it was through this door that I had emerged. Mr. Thomas stood in the doorway; he was a senior attendant now, and had seen to the details of my discharge; he had also slipped me a couple of packets of Capstan Full Strength. He lifted his hand, I lifted mine; he stepped back in, and the door closed.

  Somehow I found my way into the village and boarded the correct bus. I sat by a window and smoked; I gazed at the countryside as we rumbled toward London, attempting to control strong surges of bewilderment and loss that at times almost overwhelmed me. I felt, in a way, as I had after my mother’s death—the same sense of friendless isolation in a strange and threatening world. Twenty years in Ganderhill, how well I knew the place! Its courtyards and passageways, its gardens and outhouses—imbued, all of it, with the fleeting whisper of her presence, as she showed herself shyly to me, now and then, in the dappled shade of an elm tree, on a lonely terrace at dusk. And oh, the rhythms and rituals that governed the life there—in all of this I had a place, and was seen to have a place. As I sat there on that slow bus to London, among the housewives with their shopping bags, I knew with utter certainty that I could hope for no better than that, not me, not the old Spider; and now it was gone for good, for Jebb would never have me back, he’d made that clear enough. There was an ominous cast to my thoughts now, for I felt the first dim stirrings of approaching disaster—out there on the far horizon something large and black and dreadful was moving toward me. For what had I to give this world into which I’d been so abruptly thrust, and what had it for me?

  Then we were on the main road and going at some speed. I tried to see what lay ahead, but could not, I could not imagine the way of life I was now to pursue. How would I live? Who would I be? Dennis Cleg, from Ganderhill? The lunatic? Oh surely not that—I could imagine, at least, the effect of that
, the cold eyes, the sneers, the whispering contempt—the thought patterns, in short. Suddenly I saw myself hurtling into a void, and for a few minutes I became uncoupled with terror and froze rigid in my seat with my cigarette halfway to my lips. Immediately I felt the eyes of the women on me, their heads inclining toward one another, the murmuring, the stifled laughter, the muffled snorts of scorn. It passed off soon enough thank God, and with an effort I stayed calm. Later I began to see streets and buildings and I knew we were on the outskirts of the city, and this gave me some small comfort; I am the Spider of London, after all! Over the river by Westminster Bridge, the Thames alive with light, sparkling green in the autumn sunshine, and the sight of it did me good. A little familiarity, that’s all, a little of what you know, this buttresses a soul, gives strength. I pulled out the slip of paper with Mrs. Wilkinson’s address on it: I knew the place, I’d often been over that way as a boy. It was in the East End, you see.