Spider

by McGrath, Patrick

  I bet you have, I thought, as I retreated toward the door. “Mr. Cleg,” she said, “don’t be silly.” Still moving backwards I groped behind me for the door handle. She was a big woman, but I felt I could handle myself if I had to; fortunately it did not come to that. “Then I leave you to your own devices, Mr. Cleg,” she said, and went out, shaking her head. There is no lock on the bathroom door (there are no locks anywhere in this house except, significantly, on the door to the attic stairs, and of course the dispensary) but through careful arrangement of my towel I managed to cover the keyhole; and then at last I clambered into the bathtub and stretched my lanky limbs: there was no smell at all.

  I find myself for some reason thinking about the coal cellar in Kitchener Street. My mother once trod on a rat down there, so she’d always have me go down for her. After a while I began going down for no reason at all, I simply grew to like it there in the darkness with the smell of coal dust in my nostrils, and I can never smell coal these days without remembering the cellar, and perhaps this is why I’m thinking of it now. My sense of smell has always been acute, and it occurs to me that this whole thing about gas might have something to do with it—I am oversensitive, in an olfactory way, and this could cause me to detect nuances of odor that are perhaps imperceptible to a normal nose, or that perhaps don’t even exist at all? But I shan’t dwell on it any further; the smell has disappeared, it was probably a mistake, and I was a fool to make such a fuss about it. Oddly enough I remember now how the streets used to smell when I was a boy: of beer. There was a brewery not far from the canal, and most days the air would be filled with that distinctive brewery smell—malty, yeasty, whatever it is. My mother hated it, but then she hardly ever drank—a glass or two of mild on a Saturday night—because for her drink was associated with my father’s moods. She once told me when we were sitting by ourselves in the kitchen that she thought ours would have been a happy house if my father didn’t drink. I don’t believe this; I believe that my father’s cruelty to my mother would have occurred even if he’d never touched a drop, though perhaps in a different form. This is because it had to do with his nature, with what was—or rather, was not—inside him.

  But it’s strange that I should have liked the cellar, because that’s where he belted me. I remember once (I’m not sure if this was before or after my mother’s death) he told me to stop scraping the tines of my fork across my plate, he said it irritated him. Well I did it again, and he went off the deep end. The cellar’s natural gloom was always thick with coal dust, which drifted in the air like tiny points of blackness, the devil’s germs, I used to think, and they invaded your eyes and mouth and nostrils, even the very pores of your skin, and I always came up feeling blackened by the place, and this, too, was a sensation I enjoyed, for I liked to imagine myself a coal-black boy who could move through darkness without being seen. I also remember the sounds: how the stairs creaked when I went down, and how they creaked differently when my father was coming down behind me. Then, as well as the creaking, there would be the unbuckling of his belt—the clank of prong and buckle, and the slither of leather pulled through trouser loops—and I can never hear those sounds now without thinking of pain, though the pain of the belting was never as bad as the minutes that preceded it: my father’s rage, the way he ground his teeth together and pulled his lips apart and hissed at me to get down the cellar—the anticipation, I mean, was worse than the event itself.

  The cellar was lit, like the kitchen, by a single bulb on the end of a braided brown cord, and cramped and low-ceilinged as it was down there this bulb did little more than emphasize the depth of the shadows that colonized great blocks of space around the walls. I used to have fantasies down there involving ghosts and chains and torture—how gleefully I tortured my father! I took a sharp knife to those little webs of skin between his fingers, and sliced them open! In the middle of the floor stood a beam, a blackened, worm-holed, hoary beam that supported the floor above; beside it dangled the light bulb, shedding a circle of dim, yellowy light on the floor. Into this circle I stepped and began to unbutton the thick gray wool trousers that came down to my kneecaps and were held up by a pair of striped braces, which all boys wore in those days. The trousers would fall in an untidy heap about my boots, followed by my thick winter underpants, and then without a word I’d cross my arms on the beam and lean my head on them, and bend over at the waist. I’d pretend then that there was a different Spider leaning against the beam, or even tied to the beam, or even nailed to the beam—with me taking the belt to him! Often I’d imagine my father nailed to the beam.

  He would take up a position behind me, stamp his boots once or twice, the belt now folded back upon itself and gripped just below the buckle. There was an old nail halfdriven into the beam, just above where I laid my arms, and I’d curl my little finger round it and think of something else. Often I thought about the rats that lived in the cellar and were regularly caught in the traps my father set out and baited with poisoned cheese. I used to check these traps at least once a day, and if there was a rat I’d put it in my pocket and later, when I went fishing in the canal, I’d use it for bait by hammering a nail through its ear then bending the nail and tying it to a piece of string. I don’t know what I expected to catch in the gasworks canal, there was nothing down there but old boots and a few mud-colored carp, perhaps a rusty bicycle— what a fool I was, in my thick gray trousers, squatting on the edge (not far, I realize, from where my bench is today, though on the other side) with my socks bunched about my boots and my big kneecaps jutting out to either side as I dangled the string in the water and watched it seamlessly fuse with its own reflection and then sprout, on the black surface of the canal, an image of my own hunched form that a moment later, with the breeze, would shimmer into a thousand shardlike fragments! I was, I suppose, in my imagination, a black boy, deep in some jungle, hunkered on a log in loincloth and facepaint... Then my father’s hatred came slicing through, and all I knew was pain.

  He was doing his drinking at the Earl of Rochester by this stage. This was a much larger pub than the Dog and Beggar; it was where Hilda and her friends generally spent their evenings, being close to Spleen Street, and this was fortunate, for in his dealings with Hilda the further he was from Kitchener Street the better. Often I followed him when he left the house after supper, I’d slip down the alley behind him, flitting from doorway to dustbin, holding to the shadows, and he never suspected a thing. I’d watch him through the window of the Rochester, I’d see him sitting there with Hilda and Nora and the others, and often he seemed isolated, excluded— he did not belong to their world, I realized later, the world of tarts and bookies and crooks, his world was the lonely, circumscribed world of the jobbing plumber, and he was not an innately sociable man. Sometimes, peering in at him from the pavement, I thought of how I sat at the back of the classroom each day without ever really being present: this was how my father sat in the pub with Hilda and the rest, gazing into the crowd with an absent expression on his face, just letting the hubbub swirl about him—until, that is, she laid a palm on his thigh, and this brought him back to life. Oh, Hilda was at her “best” in a pub, she loved to laugh and be saucy, she loved to banter with the men, and weep with the women, and she loved her port, how that woman did love her sweet port! So she’d bring him back to life and he’d take a drink of his mild, produce a twitch or two of that furtive grin of his, bask a moment in the glow of Hilda’s warm boozy light; then her attention would be drawn elsewhere, and off he’d drift again. Back and forth went the banter, others joined them, rounds of drinks came and went (somehow there was always money for another round, though often it was my father who paid for the last of the evening), and then, finally, after sitting quietly in his chair all night, like a good child he was rewarded: for when time was called he got to walk Hilda back to Spleen Street. I’d follow them at a distance as they veered off into the back streets and alleyways, and in one of those alleyways, deep in the shadows, they would spend some minutes in
each other’s arms. Then Hilda would undo his fly buttons, ease out his thin, stiffened cock, and bring him to climax in a few deft strokes. She would slip away from him soon after, and he would walk home. I wasn’t always present for the last part of their evening, for I had to be back before he got in; but I can imagine it all too well.

  It’s not hard, then, for me to see my father stamping off down the alley of an evening, after yet another unhappy meal in his own kitchen, and imagine what he was thinking. I wonder if he ever contemplated the idea of simply going down the Dog as he used to, avoiding the Earl of Rochester altogether, avoiding Hilda Wilkinson altogether, quietly subsiding into his old life which, narrow and constricted though it was, promised at least the mild benefits of predictability, and a sort of harmony? He did not, of course; only a wistful nostalgia could resurrect his old life, his life before Hilda; he had felt too often her breasts beneath his hands, the softness of her belly pressed against his own, best of all the sheer giddy euphoria of her fingers fumbling at his fly buttons—and as the memory of these sensations flooded him he stiffened, even as he strode forward, in his trousers, and all doubt, all wavering, vanished. The thing was beyond his control.

  There was one night in the Rochester that I remember very well. It was a bloody awful night, made more bloody than it need have been because my father was still stewing in the bad feeling he’d carried away from Kitchener Street with him. He seemed more ill at ease than usual as he sat there among Hilda’s people, amid the gilt and mirrors of the big busy pub, and I wonder if he didn’t see one of the regulars from the Dog come in—this would have caused him anxiety, I know, the thought that Ernie Ratcliff would hear about this, Ratcliff a man who loved gossip and slander above all else. So there he sat, for more than an hour, frowning and morose, and not even Hilda could warm him up. When they left the pub she was cool and haughty, she wouldn’t let him take her arm as they walked off together into the night. Going down an alley near Spleen Street (I was close behind them at this point, creeping silently through the darkness and black as a shadow) my father tried to push her up against the wall. She was having none of it! Oh, she turned on him then, and he shrank back from her—what a spitfire she was when her dander was up! Her eyes blazed. “Don’t put yourself out, do you, plumber?” she cried. “You don’t make much of a bloody effort, eh? I don’t know why I bother with you, sitting there all night like an undertaker—what is your problem then? Eh?” She was warming to it now, the chin was out, the coat was pushed back, hands on the hips of a straining skirt. My father had turned away and was facing up the alley, toward where I was crouched behind a dustbin. “Give it a rest, Hilda,” he said wearily, pulling out his tobacco.

  “Give it a rest? That’s a laugh, coming from you. Give me a rest, plumber. Sit there all night like a bloody corpse and then want to feel me up down an alley. What’s your problem? Ain’t you been paid for the pipes yet?”

  I saw him stiffen then, for this one cut him to the quick. At the other end of the alley the streetlamp cast splinters of light into the cracks between the cobblestones and along the edges of the bricks. Paid for the pipes? Paid for the pipes? Was that what it was all about? He’d had no cash from her for his work, he knew he’d never be paid—is that how she saw it, though, payment for services rendered? All color drained from him, he slipped his tobacco pouch back in his pocket. Hilda glanced at him, assumed an airy nonchalance, tossed her big chin. “That it, plumber? That the truth of it?” He stood there, white with rage, still with his back to her, and struggled to bring himself under control. He wanted nothing so much as to hit her very hard, this I could see, I knew that look—he wanted to hurt her really badly, hurt her as she’d just hurt him. “Come’ere, plumber,” he heard her say.

  He didn’t move.

  “Come on, plumber.” A silky tone now. Sweet Hilda now. He turned. Coat still pushed back, hands still on her hips, she was leaning against the wall with one knee crooked so her skirt rode up, and she was grinning at him. “Come’ere,” she murmured. Over he went, meek dog he was. One hand still on her hip, with the other she clasped the back of his skull, drew him to her, kissed him softly on the mouth. His hands were on her thighs, working the skirt up; suddenly he was inflamed, overwhelmed with desire for the woman, he wanted to have her now, this moment, up against this wall, he was stiff in his trousers and already fumbling with the buttons, he was blind and panting with passion—but Hilda, still kissing him, reached down, took hold of his wrists, pushed his hands off her, broke away from him. She laughed once, quite hoarsely, and with a shiver closed her coat. “No more, plumber,” she said, catching his wrists as he came crowding in on her again, “I’m off home.” My father began whispering furiously, again reached for her, was again pushed away. Then I saw her put her hand on his cheek. “I’m off home,” she said again, “it’s cold out here. Goodnight, plumber”—and shaking her head as he tried for the last time to hold her, she slipped away, went swaying down the alley toward the light, leaving my father in a heated confusion of anger and desire, a very flux of contradictory emotion.

  Hilda was a prostitute, you see. She was a tart, and she paid my father with the services of a tart, though he didn’t realize it until that night in the alley. When he got home half an hour later—he had smoked a cigarette by the canal, despite the cold of the night—he found to his annoyance that my mother was waiting up for him. I heard his boots in the yard, and then I heard him come in through the back door. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, with a cup of tea, and he did not see her until he switched the light on. Her face, as she turned toward him, was puffy around the eyes, the way it got when she had been crying. “Still up?” he muttered as he sat down heavily at the other end of the table and bent to unlace his boots. He could not look at her.

  “Where have you been, Horace?” she said quietly. There was a trace of accusation in her voice, accusation tempered with misery. The door from the kitchen into the passage was open, so I crept out of bed (I’d only been home a short while myself) and sat at the top of the stairs, in my pajamas, to listen. Did my father, even at this stage, have any decency at all left in him? Did her unhappiness catch at his heart and tear him, tear him between an involuntary spurt of compassion for my mother, for whose pain he alone was responsible— and his intense irritation with her, not only because she was a hindrance to him in his tawdry affair with Hilda Wilkinson but also because she complicated the clean hard thrust of his desire? His heart was not yet completely turned to stone, I believe; she aroused in him still, I think, traces of the responsibility he’d once felt for her, but the guilt triggered by these feelings he was forced violently to suppress, and for one simple reason: he could maintain his lust for Hilda only if he simultaneously hardened himself against my mother—if, in other words, he made a sort of unnatural compartmentalization of his emotions: the only alternative was to flounder about in muddle and indecision, a flaccid, unmanly condition he was anxious to avoid. So while one tiny voice cried out to him to comfort my mother, to wipe away the tears from those bleary eyes, take her in his arms and make everything all right again—an opposite and equal impulse told him to make her suffer, intensify the crisis, provoke the breakdown and dissolution of whatever frayed bonds still held them together. So he did not comfort her, he set his jaw in a thin, hard line, pulled off his boots, one by one, and rubbed his feet. “Down the pub,” he said.

  “Down the Dog?”

  “Yes.”

  “Liar! You’re a liar, Horace!” she cried. Oh, it was hard for me to hear her voice cracking like that, she such a stranger to anger! “I went down the Dog and you weren’t there!” Now she was sitting upright at the end of the table with the tears streaming down and a sort of watery light gleaming in her eyes, fury and misery combined.

  “I went somewhere else after a bit,” my father said angrily. “What were you down the Dog for? It’s not Saturday.”

  She didn’t answer this, just sat there staring at him as the tears came fl
ooding down her cheeks, not even bothering to wipe them away.

  My father shrugged, dropping his eyes and rubbing his feet once more. “I went down the Earl of Rochester.” I heard him say it, and I thought, why would he tell her that? How could he go down there again, with her likely to come looking for him? “What are you chasing after me for?” he said angrily. “Can’t a man have a drink after his work?”

  “I won’t live like this,” said my mother, quiet again after her outburst, and wiping her face with her apron. “I wasn’t meant to live like this.”

  “That’s not my fault,” said my father, as a voice in his head said: oh yes it is.

  “Yes it is,” said my mother, for an uncanny moment becoming the articulation of his conscience.

  “It’s not!” he shouted—and I could stand no more. Down the stairs I pattered, along the passage, barefoot and feigning sleepiness. My mother turned toward me, and the sight of her tear-streaked face upset me badly. “It’s all right, Spider,” she murmured, blinking once or twice as she rose wearily from the table and smoothed her apron across her stomach in that way she had. “Your father and me, we’re just having a talk.”

  “You woke me up,” I said, or something of the sort, I don’t remember exactly.

  “It’s all right now,” she said again, “we’re all coming to bed now.” She took my hand; I was taller than her, even in my bare feet. “Come on, my big Spider,” she said, “back up to bed,” and up the stairs we went. My father sat there at the table for another ten minutes or so, then I heard him turn off the light and come upstairs. My mother was awake, lying on her back in that huge bed of theirs and staring at the ceiling; the glow from the streetlamp outside sifted through the curtains and created queer rhomboid grids of light and shadow overhead. My father undressed and climbed in on his side, and the pair of them lay there in the darkness, silent and sleepless, for more than an hour.