Spider

by McGrath, Patrick

  A bit of trouble with the crowds at first—the eyes! the thought patterns! The air was thick with them, and again I became uncoupled, I stood in the middle of Victoria Coach Station gripping my suitcase and frozen like a statue. But this was London, after all, and I knew London, and soon I was shuffling off to look for a number twenty-seven bus, or was it a thirty-seven, or a hundred and thirty-seven?

  In the late afternoon I fetched up at Mrs. Wilkinson’s door. I’d got lost several times, for the city had changed in ways I couldn’t understand. I knocked; she opened the door. “Mr. Cleg?” she said. “We’ve been expecting you.” I shuffled in, exhausted and confused and very close to tears, and not for one moment did I realize who she was. It’s only now that I can appreciate the implications of those first words of hers. “We’ve been expecting you,” she might have said, “so we can finish the job we started in Kitchener Street, twenty years ago.”

  I wrapped my limbs with fresh newspaper, I found clean socks in the chest of drawers and threw the old ones into the hole behind the gas fire. Then flat on my back on my bed, hands behind my head, legs crossed at the ankles, to watch cigarette smoke curling and coiling beneath the ceiling. Down my trousers, between my thighs, in my sock, the thick solid pressure of her house keys. They are bound together with a stout rubber band to keep them from clanking against each other and so betraying their presence.

  The bell at last, and I am up off my bed and smartly down the stairs even as the first of the dead souls emerge blinking from their holes. All as usual in the kitchen—the mustached one dripping ash into her saucepans, the tarpaulin on the table freshly wiped and smelling of bleach, the hissy bubble of porridge as steam rises from the pot and mingles with cigarette smoke in the glare of wintry sunshine at the window over the sink. Dead souls shuffle in, I drink tea, no milk, much sugar. I do not eat now, my intestines coiled about my backbone as they are, but I do drink tea, it flushes out the spiders.

  Then Hilda is filling the doorway, glowering from a great height and asking have we seen her house keys? A spasm of guilty excitement down there where the weighted sock sprawls between my wrapped thighs. Oh she is frowning, oh magnificent terror, oh the fury, oh to imagine surrendering and with delicious shame extracting my sock and handing it over with trembling fingers and averted eyes, cheeks burning, and craving punishment, begging for humiliation, abasement, pain! But I hold my peace, I gaze (foxlike!) with blank eyes and open mouth, shake my slow head as her gimlet eyes wheel round to me, burn into my soul, but the truth of it is there is no soul, only spiders now, only spiders! Then frowning like thunder she is gone, and I drink more tea, touch my sock, roll a fat one, conceal my glee.

  Then out, out into the sharp clear air, but not without a final encounter by the front door, not without her asking me was I sure I knew nothing of her house keys? Blank mute useless shrugging from the wily Spider, whose whole secret presence is down in his sock while the face above registers only dumb bewildered ignorance.

  I walk quickly at first, quickly for me, past the park, where the crows flap in the bare branches, past the padlocked churchyard, then sharp left and down along the railway viaduct (glimpses of the gasworks through the arches), and then, with steadily slackening pace, to the canal. Greeny-black in the morning light, sudden bursts of sparkling diamonds on the water, wintry sunshine—and there’s my mother on the humpbacked bridge with her back to me, and I stop dead, become uncoupled, stare with astonishment, with giddy elation, at the clarity of her form against the light. With her face still obscured by the headscarf she crosses over and is lost behind a wall on the other side, on the Kitchener Street side.

  And now at last I move down the path to the bridge, and for the first time in twenty years I clasp the iron railing, feel how cold it is, and shuffle forward. Oh, terror now! Oh with that first shuffling footstep a chaos of turbulence and a roiling of fluids inside me, and voices start up, cackles of incredulous laughter, groans of dread, but in spite of it all I cross the bridge; groping blindly forward with both hands on the railing, I do cross the bridge.

  And now I am shuffling along streets both familiar and strange, oddly empty, oddly desolate somehow. I come upon a man with a horse. They are standing down the end of a dead-end street under a high brick wall. The man is wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up; the horse wears only a bridle. I stand at the other end and watch as the man takes the hanging reins and, half-turned toward the horse, leads it slowly down the middle of the street. He begins to run, shouting at the horse now, which lifts high its hooves, the iron shoes ringing on the cold cobblestones, and pulls back its lips from its teeth as the long head comes up and utters a loud whinny. They come toward me up the empty street, the half-turned running man in white shirtsleeves, and the high-stepping horse, tossing its head; clouds billow as their breath turns to mist in the cold air. The man slows the horse as they approach my end of the street, slows it to a walk, then turns the beast—I gaze at its heaving flanks!—and trots it back to the wall at the other end.

  I drift away, looking for my mother. On the corner I see a pub burned out by fire, its white brickwork seared and blackened with smoke and its windows merely black holes, empty of glass, sightless eyes. Over the door, which is boarded up, hangs the sign, but the metal has been warped by heat and the paintwork so badly singed that the name is unreadable. I turn another corner—and find myself in the shadow of the Spleen Street gasworks.

  Oh Christ the knob on the gas stove the knob the knob the knob on the kitchen stove oh Christ spare me this: a fluted nubbin of some hard material fixed by a recessed screw to a pipe attached to the gas ring. In one of the knobs a screw with its face to the window: a couple of turns with a screwdriver and it protruded enough to let me tie a piece of string to it, and the string I then led not out the window but down to a staple nailed to the floor then across the floor and under the door to a nail I’d hammered into the side of the staircase, just off the floor, then straight up vertically to the top of the stairs. When I pulled it it grew taut from knob to staple, from staple to nail, and from nail up to me; and when I gently tugged it the knob turned a fraction and gas began seeping into the kitchen—

  Oh I tear my eyes away, I turn my back on the massive domes, their flaking rust-red paintwork horribly vivid in the morning sunshine and their crisscross struts and uprights multiplying endlessly over my head; horror is here, the horror of reproduction, so with eyes averted I shuffle off. I must go home, I tell myself, I must go home, I must go home to Kitchener Street, where my mother is waiting for me by the back door.

  Now the streets are achingly familiar and memories rise in clusters from the deep forgotten recesses of my mind and I become uncoupled for minutes on end and have to lean against a wall and with fumbling fingers try and roll one, and the worm in my lung seems to be stirring. A woman with a string bag bulging with parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with string stands in front of me and asks me am I feeling poorly? I push myself off the wall and lurch away. I must go home to my mother! Then I am coming down Victory Street and not this corner, not the next, but the one after is Kitchener Street. Listen to them now! What a filthy racket! But on he comes, the game old Spider, flannels flapping on newspaper limbs, thirty yards, fifteen—oh a great pounding in my chest now, the worm awakens, and then I am at the corner, and turning the corner, and gazing at—

  Nothing. A fence of corrugated tin. What is happening to me? Through a gap in the fence I see a cratered wasteground. It is strewn with heaps of brick and rubble, and weeds with purple flowers, and here and there lengths of black rubber piping, rusty tin cans, old shoes, car tires. What is happening to me? Gales of laughter, a barking dog. Is this my doing?

  Back at my table now. Badly shaken by what I saw this morning, very fragile, very brittle. I had plunged down the street in wild panic, reeling from lamppost to lamppost like a drunkard until I reached where number twenty-seven ought to be. A hole in the fence: I’d pressed my eye to it and found another hole, a shallow pit
littered with chunks of brick, slate, lumber, rubbish, the same purple-flowered weeds bristling in the breeze; and a voice had said: this is your doing.

  And then, as I leaned against the fence, helpless and weeping, a smell had come, and then a memory, dislodged from the underside of some deep flap of my mind: I saw myself sitting at the window of my room above the kitchen, watching Horace and Hilda leave for the pub. Then I saw myself walking slowly down the stairs, along the passage, and into the kitchen. I saw myself attach my trapline: I tied one end of the string to the screw on the knob of the gas stove, then led it carefully through the staple and under the door and out into the passage to the nail in the side of the staircase. From halfway up the stairs I gently pulled it round the nail and then, climbing to the top of the stairs, I tied it to a banister. Then I went back into my room and waited for their return.

  I saw myself again sitting at the window with the light off.

  I remember there was a sort of buzzing in my ears that drowned all other sounds, so that when Horace and Hilda returned they seemed to be weaving down the yard in utter silence, and in slow motion; their movements were clumsy and uncoordinated, and I had to stuff a blanket in my mouth to stifle the wave of laughter the spectacle provoked in me. Finally they reached the back door and came in; I heard loud voices for some minutes, and then Hilda’s slow heavy tread on the stairs, Hilda’s alone. This produced a silent cry of exultation in the tense young Spider, how hard it was to stifle my laughter then! I waited, for five minutes, ten minutes, twenty-five minutes—twenty-five minutes that felt like twenty-five years! Then I crept silently out of my room: the house was dark and silent, the kitchen door was closed. Barely daring to breathe I sat at the top of the stairs and untied my string from the banister. Gently, oh gently I reeled it in; in my mind’s eye I saw it grow taut from knob to staple, from staple to nail, and from nail to me; I held it a long moment, thinking: my string in my fingers, his life in my hands. Then I tugged—it moved—enough. I tied the string to the banister and slipped back into my room.

  Sleepless with triumph I sat cross-legged on my bed in the darkness. I rocked with silent laughter. Then slowly, slowly from below, at last there rose to my eager, waiting nostrils the faint but unmistakable smell of gas—

  Yes, this was my doing all right. I’d pushed myself off the fence; the panic had subsided and I felt strangely calm (though in all the excitement the worm in my lung had awoken). I noticed then that the even-numbered houses on the other side were intact, though their windows were boarded up; and that there were buildings still standing on this side down the end.

  I moved on, steadier now, I set my course for the end of the street. There I found three houses: number fifty-three, boarded up; number fifty-five, also boarded up; and the Dog and Beggar. The Dog and Beggar! I leaned against the wall and I laughed, yes, imagine that, imagine your old Spider at this point leaning against a wall with his big chin lifted high and giving out a brief hoarse wheeze of silent laughter. But after a moment or two he pushed himself off the wall, shuffled up to the door of the public bar, and went in.

  The door swung shut behind him. Nothing had changed. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and cold sunshine washed in from the window by the door. A small coal fire was burning in the grate, and at the table close by sat an old man with a glass of beer, otherwise the room was empty. The wooden floor, the mirror over the mantelpiece, the brass rail at ankle height under the chipped old bar—nothing had changed here. The smells of the old man’s pipe, last night’s beer, the crackle of burning coal; on the bar a newspaper folded to the sports page... In shuffled the Spider and sank onto a chair near the door. All was still and silent; dust danced in the streaming wintry sunlight and a clock ticked somewhere off behind the bar.

  Spider sat as though entranced and listened to the ticking clock, watching the motes of dust. A man appeared behind the bar, polishing a glass on his apron. It was him! It was Ernie Ratcliff! The same thin hands, the same narrow eyes, the same air of weasel cunning, though the hair was sparser now, the bitterness was etched deeper in the lines of the face. He glanced at Spider: “What’ll it be?” he said. Spider gazed at the man. Ernie Ratcliff—one of the last people to see his mother alive! “Looking for your old man, Mrs. Cleg? He was here but I believe he’s gone.” Almost the last friendly words she’d heard, and not so friendly at that, Ratcliff was never what you’d call a friendly man. “What’ll it be then?” he repeated, setting down the polished glass and wiping his hands on his apron. Spider shuffled to his feet and dug through his many pockets, unearthing a few coppers, a threepenny bit, some halfpennies. He came to the bar and spilled the coins onto the counter. Ratcliff glanced at them and wordlessly reached for a glass.

  Spider sits by the door with a half of mild. Nothing happens. A second old man joins the first, they murmur to one another and then fall silent. Spider examines the pattern on the frosted glass partition; it suggests to him a leafy plant of some kind, the flowering sprout of a root vegetable, a turnip perhaps. Yes, this was his doing, gelc sinned all right. He tries the beer—an immediate hiss of distaste from the lung-worm, a flurry of activity among the spiders. He remembers his mother’s story about the spiders in the elm trees, and thinks of his own insides, and the creatures that have hatched there. I am an egg-bag, he thinks, and I should be dangling by a thread from a branch. He sits there in the warmth until half past three, when Ernie Ratcliff kicks him out.

  In the days that followed Spider was often in the Dog and Beggar. He would wander up and down Kitchener Street for an hour or so, hoping for a glimpse of his mother, though at some level he knew from the moment he laid eyes on that pitful of rubbish where number twenty-seven used to be that he’d never see her again. So what drew him back? God knows, perhaps merely to regard the desolation and say to himself, this is your doing, you did this. After the third or fourth time he was able to brave it without becoming hopelessly distressed; a curious calm then, a sense of slowing down, of a coming to resolution, not unconnected to the constant reassuring presence of the loaded sock hanging down his trousers. It was a sad, vague, sleepy calm, more a melancholy, and it was only disturbed by the nightly shrieking from the attic and the writhing of the lung-worm trapped inside his body. He moved slowly but with purpose now within his given compass, and whiled away some hours each day in the public bar of the Dog. It remained to him only to settle accounts with Hilda.

  Then one afternoon he left the Dog and followed the old familiar route down to the canal, over the bridge and up the hill to Omdurman Close, and so to the allotments. By this time of the afternoon the sun was sinking toward the river and there was a perceptible thickening of the light. Down the path he shuffled to his father’s gate; the place was deserted. He entered the allotment and got to his knees in the potato patch, then stretched out flat on the wintry soil. He lay there motionless for several minutes. There was an odd silence on the allotments, its depth and stillness intensified somehow by the faint and distant barking of a dog. There was silence, too, in the earth, so he scrambled slowly to his feet and made his way round to the back of the shed, where he had a clear view over the wasteground that had once been the Slates, beyond it a sprawl of warehouses and docks, and beyond that the river. The sun by this time had chalked the sky a sort of powdery reddish color that grew deeper and richer even as he watched. Already the river was shimmering with the lights of the city, and now a flotilla of little flecky-edged clouds formed a long streaming sinking line above the sun, their undersides burnished by the last rays as they followed it down. Tower Bridge was etched black against the red, and directly above it he saw what looked like a few broken lines of illegible molten script. Then he turned and shambled off through the gloom of the garden, in the fading, the dying, of the day...

  Oh I throw down my pencil with disgust. I am not mellow or melancholy or maudlin, I am in foul humor, these last days have been utter hell. I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, and I cannot escape the constant, pervasive, almost paralyzing s
ense that everything around me is turning silent and empty and dead. The very air seems filled with death! It’s occurred to me more than once that I am dead—the presence in my body of the worm and the spiders would seem to suggest this, the withering of my vital organs, the smell of rot and decay that seeps continuously from my rind now—aren’t these signs of death? When did it happen? Was there a moment of death, a moment at which you could say then he lived, then he was dead? I don’t think so. I think it’s been gradual, a slow death that began the day I stood beneath the Ganderhill clock with my cardboard suitcase and my three pound notes—though it occurs to me even as I write this that perhaps it began even earlier, that it began the night my mother died, and that since then I’ve just been burning down, smoldering to ash and dust inside myself while preserving merely the outward motions, the jerky gestures and postures of life. So perhaps it’s not been a life at all, but a crumbling, held together by sticks and bits of string, a child’s construction; and now all that’s left is ash and dust, and the spiders that feed on such compost. There’s the bell for supper but I shall not go down. Hilda is down there somewhere, probably still hunting for her house keys. I know she thinks I have them, for she’s been in here looking for them, her smell is in the room and won’t go away. They’re still in my sock but the irony is I can’t seem to pluck up the courage to use them—I have the idea that were I to unlock the door to the attic stairs and go up I’d be torn to pieces and eaten; so I suffer their outrages rather than confront them. And as always it’s the journal and the tobacco alone that provide what little scaffolding I have.