Bottled Spider

by John Gardner

  So the sisters moved quietly into their dreams, slipping away into untroubled sleep.

  For the last time.

  *

  Golly waited, and the hours ticked by. He aimed himself at the kitchen window which meant that he concentrated on watching the window and what was going on inside the house. It was as if he could project himself into the house, only he wouldn’t have used the word ‘project’. It was a word he didn’t know.

  For all morning there had been two adult people inside the house. He already knew there were two children. Eventually the mother of the children would take them out. That stood to reason, for all children were taken out to run off their excess energy on Christmas morning. The lady policeman was staying with a relative, he thought. The children belonged to the relative. Wait, Golly.

  It was cold, and occasionally he had waggled his toes violently inside his boots, or would take a slow step backwards or forwards so he wouldn’t keel over when he really wanted to move. He would also bend his legs, one at a time, lifting his foot up and bending at the knee, or lowering his bottom by bending both knees and straightening up slowly.

  He had learned these things from Mickey the Mangle. Mickey taught him how to exercise surreptitiously. Mickey had taught him that long word and Golly would show off by using it in front of people like Idle Jack up Berwick Street Market.

  ‘I got to go off for a surreptitious pee,’ he would say to Idle Jack Hobday, and Idle Jack would laugh at the way Golly spoke. ‘I’m going surreptitiously up the Blue Posts,’ he’d say and Idle Jack would tell him to go secretly as well.

  Now, as the morning wore on. Golly still waited. He was good at this. Waiting. His hand regularly strayed to the right outside pocket of his duffel coat, to make sure the wire was still there; that he could grasp it easily.

  There was a bang. A door closing at the front of the house. He couldn’t see the front door but knew someone had gone out. That must be the relative taking the children out. He knew that’s what it was. Then he saw the back door open and the lady policeman came out to empty things into the dustbin against the wall outside.

  She’s pretty, Golly thought. He could do it all with her in that blue dress. But he couldn’t take advantage of the prettiness, the long legs he could see as she walked back inside the house, into the kitchen. There wouldn’t be time for any of that. He grasped the wire. The windows were blank. Nobody moved against any of them now. Only in the kitchen window could he see movement. The lady policeman was at the sink, doing something, alone. Now, Golly. Go.

  He ran. A little unsteady after all that standing still and the cold.

  In the kitchen, Charlotte heard the footsteps and wondered what they were. Someone running out of the Manor grounds and along the side of the cottage. She felt no alarm.

  As he reached the back door his hat went flying. He grabbed the wire from his pocket, dragged down his mask, his hands holding the wire tightly. He pushed at the door, turned the handle and there she was, the lady policeman standing at the sink, running water from one of the taps. He was in. Kill.

  Charlotte saw his face and screamed, turned, making for the door to defend her children. Deep from within the cottage a child cried out a questioning, ‘Mummy?’ and Golly launched himself at her as she turned and tried to run. Screaming.

  He was on her. Wrists crossing as he looped the wire over her head and began to drag her back.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she cried. ‘Help! Help me. Oh dear! Oh dear me! Oh! Oh! Help me. Help. Help ...’

  ‘Mummy?’ Lucy called again from the front room.

  He gave a great heave, took a pace back, braced himself against the wall, near the door, and used all his strength. So strong, he was. He thought the wire was going through her neck he pulled so hard. He felt the crack in her neck, heard it, and the gurgle. Sounded like life was being expelled from her. She slumped against the wire and he held her up, then let her lower body fall to the floor, and as he did so this child crawled through the door leading to the rest of the house. The child was laughing and burbling as he came in, crawling, dragging his legs behind him. Smiling, thinking it was some kind of game.

  They locked eyes, man and child, and instinctively knew one another; aware that each had some profound defect, something malformed that made them brothers. The little boy reached out towards his silent mother, then looked at Golly again and intuitively recognized the evil in the devastated face. Stopped laughing. Assumed the face of rage.

  Golly let go of the wire and the upper part of her body went down to the floor, her head jolting with a thump, a sickening lifeless roll. Her eyes were open as the head rocked to one side, staring into the limitless future.

  The child raised itself on its arms, lifting its head, the face twisted in pain, distress and fear, teeth bared. From the child’s throat came a rising growl: a howl that encapsulated anguish, torment and dismay. It rose in a discordant fanfare of anger, a shriek of outrage as the child pulled itself to the body.

  It frightened Golly. The anger frightened him. For a second he knew remorse, then wrapped in fear he lunged for the kitchen door, pulling his mask back into place and leaving the door open, swinging, as he swept up his hat from the path and scampered through the low hedge that separated the cottage garden from the meadow and the stand of trees.

  The screaming followed him, snapping at his heels, trying to bring him down. And in his head the rooks clawed for the air from the bare skeletal trees.

  *

  Suzie and Ned were half-way up Church Street, almost at the Common, heading towards the Keepsake with Falcon Cottage on the right, when they heard the screams.

  Later, Suzie would maintain that it was at this moment she knew. She held Ned’s arm tighter, and slewed slightly to the right, pulling him on.

  ‘Quick,’ she said in a hollow empty voice.

  And, ‘Ned, for the sake of Christ.’

  From the screams and the shouts of female voices Ned also knew that something terrible and urgent had taken place.

  The children had started the screaming, Lucy, giving way to hysteria on recognizing her mother was dead, yet not quite comprehending the enormity of the fact; Ben’s happy tooting turned now to this awful howl. Later, somebody — Suzie didn’t know who — said it was the sound that you could associate with King Lear as he vented his great howls on his daughter Cordelia’s death.

  Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones ... She’s gone for ever!

  It had all moved wretchedly out of control. ‘The poor mites’ shrieks could’ve lifted the slates off,’ little Miss Palmer said. On hearing the screams she did not hesitate, but ran, summoned by these dreadful cries to Falcon Cottage. Miss Wren followed, both of them a shade ludicrous still wearing the garish paper hats they had got from the crackers pulled over Christmas lunch.

  Miss Palmer, a former nurse, had gone straight through to the kitchen and seeing the death and its violent nature and the certainty of it prised little Ben from his mother’s body, and with the certainty and common sense of a mannish woman, swung him up, taking Lucy by the scruff of the neck, transporting both children to the safety of Rose Cottage.

  Jenny Wren was in the hall, talking on the telephone when Suzie and Ned arrived. ‘Yes,’ she was saying. ‘Yes, the police, a doctor and an ambulance. Quickly.’ And thus occupied, she could not stop Suzie from going along the hallway to the kitchen.

  Charlotte’s face was hideously contorted, tongue lolling, lips pulled back as though she had purposely slid her thumbs into her mouth to make some ghastly children’s joke horror mask. She heard a gasp from Ned behind her, then Miss Wren’s quiet voice: ‘I shouldn’t touch anything, dear.’

  But all she could ask was, why is Jo Benton lying in Charlotte’s kitchen? And she looked up fully expecting to see Shirley Cox with Pip Magnus and ‘the Prof’ at the door. Then the facts reached into her mind and shocked her worse than anything she had experienced since her father was killed in the car and she’d rushed to get him from th
e wreckage. This was wreckage of a more unbelievable kind. This was a life’s total disaster.

  When she looked again, Ned and Miss Wren had gone and Constable Chris Long, the good dependable village bobby, stood in the doorway. ‘I think you should come out of here now, miss,’ he said, softly in his local burr.

  They had met a couple of times. Yesterday he had said, ‘You got promotion then, I saw in the paper.’ Chris Long, who kept the village safe from crime, knew everyone by name and a couple or three winters ago had walked five miles in snow up to his belly button from the police house to Overchurch Manor to make certain they were alright after the great blizzard because the telephone lines were down. Then, he’d gone on to every home in the village.

  Now he smothered her in his arms, helping to get her from the appalling sight in the kitchen. She allowed herself to be led away and seated in the front room, where only yesterday with Charlotte she had watched the Salvation Army Band playing carols, and Ben bouncing up and down on the window seat, with Lucy near to levitation with Christmas excitement.

  She couldn’t quite grasp it all; it was as though the facts were just within reach but kept eluding her, and the next thing she knew was the doctor being there — not Dr Blatty as she had somehow expected, but a young doctor with a calm, quiet manner who suggested they should take her upstairs and give her something. ‘Something to tranquillize her,’ he said.

  Only then did she realize that she was sobbing uncontrollably, weighed down with grief.

  *

  Golly didn’t stay. Didn’t stand silently in the trees until the people went away. That had been his plan: what he had thought best, but he stayed only a handful of minutes before his inner voice had told him to go, get out, and he had this horrible sense that something was wrong. He thought he could hear Miss Baccus calling to him.

  His legs seemed to have lost their ease. He tried to walk quickly and it became the toddle of a child. Then he tried to run and it became what it had been when he left Falcon Cottage — a scamper.

  It was as though, for the first time, he faced the enormity of what he had done. Taken a life. Stopped the lady policeman in her tracks. Stopped her dead. For ever. It was that child who had done it. Looked at him with the evil eye and would have caused him greater grief if he had stayed.

  Golly didn’t watch where he was going, didn’t follow the long, curving arc that he had come in by, but perhaps that was a good thing because he didn’t want to show himself on the streets or in the villages. Not yet.

  Overchurch Manor lay below him. He kept above the big house now, scrambling along on the edge of the rise until he got above the ruined stables and the dilapidated cottage that had once belonged to the head groom. Now, Golly took care even though his heart was thumping like a big drum. Slowly he made his way down, realizing that he could easily be seen from the top of the slope if anyone bothered to come right to the edge of the graveyard, or stepped beyond the gardens of the big houses in Henry Lane. The doctor’s house and the vet’s surgery, close to each other.

  At the broken-down cottage door he rolled himself into a ball and somersaulted in. Safe, he reckoned, out of breath, wheezing, safe with the smell of apples around him. They were still using the cottage to store apples: arranged in rows, none touching each other. Golly liked a nice apple. He reached out, took one, pulled down his mask and bit into the green fruit, then chewed the sour flesh, and shivered at the sharpness of it, but he went on eating it just the same.

  He would stay here, curled up, eating apples and thinking until it got dark. Funniest Christmas he’d ever had, this Christmas.

  Back in a corner of his mind, Golly saw the woman’s eyes, staring out into nothing. He had done that, not once but many times, stopped a human being from living, cut off life.

  ‘You must always do as you’re told, Golly,’ Lavender had said when he first went to live with her, after his mum had been ill and said she couldn’t cope any more. ‘Just do as you’re told and everything will go well. Get stupid and people will be really difficult. And you wouldn’t like that one bit.’

  He got on fine. They let him help in Berwick Street Market and other places, and he did exactly what he was told to do. After a while he saw Mickey the Mangle, Bruce the Bubble and Billy Joy-Joy again, and they were kind to him. He’d known them years ago, when he’d lived with his mum near the John Snow public house. The only one he didn’t get on with was Spellthorne. Manny Spellthorne, the one Lavender had to pay. Half of what she made went to Manny Spellthorne, and he beat her up rotten.

  He remembered how Spellthorne beat her up.

  He went to see her one morning soon after she had arrived at work.

  Lavender sat on the bed wearing only her wrap and he spoke to her. ‘Lavender, you okay? Lavender?’ She didn’t move, just sat there, back towards him, shoulders shaking a bit and her hair out of place, untidy.

  ‘I’m okay, Golly. But I won’t be working today. Anyone comes, tell Edith the Maid that they’re to go up to Dawn on the third floor.’

  ‘Dawn’s been down here, Lavender. A little while ago. Just after Spellthorne left.’

  ‘I know. I asked her to come down. Spellthorne hasn’t been very nice, Golly.’ And she turned around and he saw her face. For him it was worse than looking in the mirror. Both her eyes were all but closed and her lips were puffed out and split, a long deep split with a lot of blood, and a deep cut over her right eye.

  ‘Who done this, Lavender? Who done it?’

  ‘Never mind, Golly.’

  ‘Who done it? I’ll do them.’

  ‘No, Golly. Just put on your mask and hat. Then take me down the hospital.’

  Lavender was off work for over two months. ‘Contusions,’ was what one of the doctors said. Contusions, and that bone broken in her face. Nine weeks and they all near starved. If it hadn’t been for Golly doing the odd jobs they would’ve starved.

  In the Blue Posts one night, Golly told Mickey the Mangle about things. ‘I want to help her, Mickey. It’s that Manny Spellthorne.’

  ‘Ah, now, Golly, you take care. There’s a rule. You never come between a girl and her pimp. Manny Spellthorne’s Lavender’s pimp. You have to tread dead careful with pimps.’

  ‘Will you help me, Mickey?’

  ‘Don’t ask, Golly. Don’t ask me that, lad. And don’t ask Bruce or Billy Joy-Joy either. It’s not fair on them, see. We’re in a different kind of work. We don’t meddle with the pimps. Take my advice and just sit back. Wait for your destiny.’

  But he didn’t give up.

  September 1938 and Spellthorne was hanging around again. Didn’t hit her face this time but he bruised her and said he wanted more of her money. ‘You’re getting so as you’re not worth your keep any more, Lavender,’ Manny Spellthorne said to her. Golly knew because he stood near the door, listening every time Manny came up for his money.

  She rarely had problems with clients. Very rarely. But there was this one man. ‘Bugger can’t get it up,’ Lavender said. ‘Wastes my time. Says he’d do anything for me, and I know what’ll happen in the end. This’ll go on and finally he’ll say it’s my fault and he’ll want his money back. Then Manny’ll beat me up again, maybe kill me even.’

  Dawn said, ‘I don’t think he’d ask for his money back, Lavender, he’s a gent after all.’

  Later she threw the client out. A week or so later. ‘You’re an empty skin. Do anything for me, would you? Well do this, bugger off. You’re trouble.’

  Three weeks later. End of October and she said to Dawn, ‘I’ll swing for Manny Spellthorne. I wish he was dead.’

  That was when Golly found the piano wire in a dustbin at the bottom of Beak Street.

  You must always do as you’re told. Golly.

  That’s what he was going to do. It was the right thing.

  It was his destiny.

  Twenty

  She realized it was Christmas afternoon as she struggled up from sleep. The curtains were not even drawn and it was already getti
ng dark. The big, clumsy blackout frames stood propped against the wall between the windows. Why had Charlotte let her sleep like —? Then it came to her, hit her, the terrible, sobbing, grief-riven truths dropping into her head one by one: the nightmare. Only it wasn’t a nightmare. Charlotte was dead.

  She’s gone for ever.

  Suzie stumbled out of bed. Dizzy. Disoriented. Fumbling for her skirt, patting the bed with her palms. Who’d undressed her? The doctor? No, Jenny Wren, she remembered.

  She stepped into her grey skirt, did up the buttons at the front then slid the waistband round to the side.

  Still unsteady, with her head feeling twice its normal size; mouth dry, her tongue like a piece of sandpaper. Once before in her life she’d felt like this. A party in the school holidays when she was sixteen. She had drunk too much, was so ill. Never again.

  She struggled in the dark with the first blackout frame. Finally got it up, twisted the four little wooden blocks holding it against the old casement window frame. When she lifted the second frame it slipped and fell, the bump reverberating down through the whole cottage. She hauled it up again and fastened it in place. Rapid footsteps on the stairs. Someone must have heard. A tap at the door. She went over, switched on the light and pulled the door open.

  Molly Abelard had her back to the door, right hand in her raincoat pocket, a classic bodyguard pose. Tommy Livermore gently dropped his hand to Suzie’s shoulder and pushed lightly, walking her back into the room. Abelard remained outside, reaching in to close the door after her chief.

  ‘Suzie, I’m so, so terribly sorry,’ Dandy Tom said, eyes on her, and his face like the face of an undertaker. ‘Can we sit down?’ He indicated the bed, pulled the stool from Charlotte’s little dressing table and sat on it, opposite her and close.

  ‘What’s Abelard up to?’ she asked.