Spider

by McGrath, Patrick

  When I got back to my room I found the journal where I’d left it, open on the table with the pencil down its spine. I immediately replaced it in its hole, the grate behind the disused gas fire; and it was ironic, I thought, down on my hands and knees at the fireplace, keeping a journal was supposed to help me sort out the muddle I made between memory and sensation, and here it was simply increasing the confusion. I slept badly; my insides were still hurting, and there was much activity in the attic; later they began hauling trunks about. This was followed by a period of silence, and then I heard them outside my door. I must have tiptoed across the room half a dozen times and flung it open, but the wretched creatures, imps or whatever they are, were always too quick for me.

  The next day it rained, and I thought seriously about going back to Kitchener Street. I don’t know what it was that prevented me—hardly the need to preserve in my memory some sort of aura about the place, some glow of innocence; Kitchener Street was blackly contaminated long before any of these events occurred, every brick of the place oozed time and evil, and not only Kitchener Street, the whole festering warren was bad, bad from the day it was built. So no, it wasn’t that, perhaps it was the very reverse of that, the prospect of seeing (as only I, only I, could see) how much darker the brickwork was, how much more it oozed, how much more it had absorbed of the moral squalor such an architecture invariably breeds in its tenants.

  The allotment was a different story. After the rain stopped I once again made my shambling way up the hill to Omdurman Close, and so to the railway bridge. I was in fragile condition, but I managed to get across without mishap. A few minutes later I was standing at the gate of my father’s garden. A scarecrow stood among the potatoes (I must have missed it before), five feet tall, made of sacking stuffed with rags and tied off at the wrists and ankles with twine. Arms outspread, it was nailed to a crude cross of two-by-fours, and had clearly seen several seasons’ service: its clothes were weathered to a uniform gray-brown color, and the bowler that was perched atop the lumpy, eyeless head, and nailed to the backboard, was faded by rain and streaked with droppings. For some minutes we stared at one another, this creature and I, until a gust of wind came up and ruffled the loose sacking and gave me a start. It was hard not to notice that the ragged edges of the sacking were stained a blackish color. Overhead thick banks of gray cloud were moving in low from the river, and the wind was freshening; it occurred to me that we might have a storm. It also occurred to me to make a gesture of remembrance, so I gathered a small bunch of dandelions and a few sprigs of thistlegrass, and then (no one was about) I opened the gate and slipped down the path and scattered my simple bouquet on the potato patch. Then I stretched out flat on the soil.

  After a few moments I felt stronger, so instead of going back the way I’d come I continued on down past the allotments to a steep path that gave onto a warren of streets and alleys that for some reason had always been called the Slates. Down the path I scrambled then stood a moment at the bottom getting my breath back. Off to the east I saw a long low line of factory buildings with thin chimneys drifting smoke, while to the south, two or three hundred yards away, there was a corrugated-tin fence. But where were the Slates? All around me the ground was scattered with bricks and rocks and lumps of concrete with shorn-off iron cables sticking out of them, and not far off the ground dipped to form a gully in which water had collected, bleak tufty patches of grass round the edges. Scraps of paper drifted across this waste-ground as I turned in every direction looking for the Slates. Had they gone? How could they have gone? Or was my memory playing me false again? Arduously I made my way back up the path to the allotments, then along to the railway bridge again. Had I completely misplaced the Slates in my mind? And if I had, was the rest of my “map” similarly faulty? Oh, this was worrying, this troubled me sorely. It had been a long day for the old Spider, and wearily he trudged home, coming in very quietly so as to avoid Mrs. Wilkinson, who would doubtless be wanting an explanation of his visit in the night.

  The next day I went down to the river, to a pebbly strand where as a boy I used to watch the barges and steamers; in those days they ran on coal, and constantly coughed cloudy spumes of black smoke into the sky. You reached the strand at low tide by a set of tarry wooden steps beside an old pub called the Crispin. Down I’d go to sniff around the boats moored there, old battered working boats with smelly tarpaulins spread across their decks, all puddled with rainwater and green with fungus. Often I’d climb onto the deck and creep under a tarpaulin, in among the iron chains and the damp timbers, and settle myself in a thick oily coil of rotting rope—I loved to be alone in that damp gloom with the muted screaming of the gulls outside as they wheeled and flapped over the water. The Crispin was still there, and so were the tarry steps, though they looked unsafe now and I didn’t go down. But I peered over the edge, and the beached boats were there too, and across the water the cranes poked at the sky just as I’d always remembered them. This was some comfort, anyway; my geography wasn’t totally skewed.

  I changed after my mother died. When she was alive I was a good boy, that is, I fell foul of my father’s temper now and then and had to go down the cellar, but there was nothing abnormal in this, all boys make mistakes and are punished. But before my mother died I was a quiet boy, solitary and pensive, who read a good deal; I had no friends among the children of Kitchener Street, and I tended to drift off by myself whenever I could, down to the canal, or down to the river, especially in damp and foggy weather. I was tall for my age, tall and thin and brainy and shy, and boys like this are never popular, particularly with their fathers, who look for hardy, masculine traits. Mothers are different in this regard, this is my observation; my mother certainly was. She came from a better family than my father, she married down, you see, and she appreciated books and art and music; she encouraged me to read, and during those long evenings we’d spend in the kitchen while my father was out drinking she’d draw me out, encourage me to talk, to share with her my ideas and fantasies, and sometimes I would go to bed quietly amazed at all that I’d said, that so much was in my head, when so often I felt—or rather, was made to feel—that there was nothing in my head at all, that I was a gangling, tongue-tied numbskull with big knees and clumsy hands, unlikely ever to be of any use to anybody. Later I realized that my mother understood me because she too was alien to her environment—the women of Kitchener Street had no time for her taste, her delicacy, her culture, they were women like Hilda, primitives by comparison. So she understood what I suffered and she alone enabled me to be truly myself in those few fleeting hours we had together before my father stove in her skull with a spade. After that, you see, I was quite, quite alone, and without her love, her influence, without, simply, her presence I quickly went adrift. That’s why I changed from a good boy to a bad boy.

  Not that this happened without provocation. For Hilda I was, at first, a source of amusement. Later she came to fear me, but in those first weeks she used this big blushing lad, no longer a child and not yet a man, as a butt of her vulgar humor. She teased me, she laughed at me, she flaunted her body at me; and because she was so often in the kitchen, even when my father was out of the house, I could avoid her only by going to the canal (though this of course involved going out through the kitchen) or by hiding myself down in the coal cellar, or by staying in my room—though not even my room was a sanctuary anymore, for she felt no compunction about coming up and poking around to her heart’s content. Did I receive any support from my father in this? Was he any sort of an ally? He was not. The very reverse, in fact; he shared her jokes, in that sly, quiet way of his, he exchanged winks and nods and secret smiles with Hilda when she set about “getting a rise” out of me. It quickly reached the point that whenever I was in the kitchen with Horace and Hilda I would see signals passing back and forth between them that suggested only one thing, ridicule, though if I said anything they denied it, and so I grew to mistrust my own perceptions, but that’s what I think was going on. Why would they
do this? Why would they so persistently taunt me in this manner? It was only years later, in Canada, that I realized I functioned for Horace and Hilda as an outlet for the guilt and anxiety that had settled on them in the weeks following my mother’s death, settled on them not in any acute or panicky form but rather as a condition of existence, a way of being, in the wake of the murder. Much as Hilda could try to laugh it off, play the boisterous life-loving blonde as before—and extensive though my father’s powers of repression were—at some level they were secreting the toxins that the act of murder will always and inevitably decoct in the human heart, and if they weren’t to turn those toxins on each other then there must be an outlet, a conduit for it. I was that conduit, I was to channel and absorb the poison, and so I did; in the process I was contaminated by it, it shriveled me, it killed something inside me, made me a ghost, a dead thing, in short it turned me bad.

  Perhaps the cruelest aspect of the situation was that my grief could be shared with no one. At first it wasn’t grief, it was desperation. Where was she? Where was my mother? I could get no answer, and if I broached the subject with my father he would instantly grow tense and furious and remind me of the conversation we’d had on the Saturday morning I first saw Hilda with him in bed. But I always forgot that conversation, for the sense of loss I felt, the sheer panic of not knowing, would overwhelm whatever fragile inhibitions he’d instilled in me, and out it came, out it blurted; and again that terrible quiet anger, and all I took away with me was that I was not yet to know. And in time my feelings changed, desperation and urgency gave way to a chronic ache, a gnawing sense of absence, of emptiness, which left me curiously vulnerable to the sustained contempt that Horace and Hilda were directing at me. But it was not only that I was alone, for if I ever made reference to it in front of Hilda—and on two occasions, driven beyond endurance by her goads and gibes, I did this, I tearfully cried out: “You’re not my mother!”—then she would pretend to be greatly surprised, she would turn to my father, who’d glance at her from hooded eyes, an almost imperceptible smile playing at the edges of his mouth—and she’d say: “Not your mother?”

  “No,” I cried, “my mother’s dead!” More silent mockery, another glance exchanged. “Dead?”—and so it would go until I fled the kitchen, unable any longer to hold back my tears, and clasping tight to myself a set of memories, and their associated emotions, that no one would confirm. So she lived only in me, now, this is what I came to realize, and the realization made me that much more tenacious, for I intuitively understood that if she died in me she died forever. You see, I’d heard my father tell the man next door that she’d gone to stay with her sister in Canada.

  I developed in time my two-head system. The front of my head was what I used with other people in the house, the back of my head was for when I was alone. My mother lived in the back of my head, but not the front; I grew expert at moving from back to front and back again, and it seemed to make life easier. The back of my head was the real part of my life, but in order to keep everything there fresh and healthy then I had to have a front head to protect it, like tomatoes in a greenhouse. So when I was downstairs I would speak and eat and move and to their eyes be me, and only I knew that “I” wasn’t there, this was only the greenhouse they were seeing; I was in the back, that was where Spider lived, up the front was Dennis.

  Life became easier for me after that. I didn’t mind being a bad boy, because I knew of course that it was Dennis who was a bad boy; and when my father took me down the coal cellar it was Dennis who went with him and leaned his head on the beam and curled his little finger round the rusty nail— while all the time Spider was upstairs in his bedroom!

  It followed that if my mother lived only in the back part of my head then so did her murder. Because if I couldn’t refer to her by name downstairs, then how much greater by extension was my inability to allude to her death, and the way in which she’d been dumped in the earth like a sack of rubbish? During those first weeks I didn’t realize what had happened to her, and I persuaded myself that indeed she had gone to Canada, as I’d heard my father say to more than one of the neighbors. But she didn’t have a sister in Canada! Wouldn’t I have known about a sister in Canada? Wouldn’t she have mentioned her as we sat by the stove in the kitchen, those long winter evenings with the rain drumming on the windows and the ring of hobnailed boots on cobblestones as the men made their way down the alley behind the yard? She would have mentioned this sister, she’d have received letters postmarked Winnipeg or Vancouver, with stamps with the king’s head on them, and she’d have showed them to me, read them to me, and together we’d have conjured scenes of Canadian winters, Canadian Christmases—her sister’s family clustered about a dressed fir (“all your little cousins, Spider”), the smell of a fat duck roasting in the kitchen of a log house with a cedar-shingled roof and a stout brick chimney coughing woodsmoke into the damp Canadian sky. Together we would paint these pictures in the yellow gloom of number twenty-seven, and for an hour or so we would be far from that dreary slum, we too would be part of the family gathered at the open hearth, pine logs blazing and children—my little cousins—opening gifts with cries of pleasure. Why would she go to her sister’s and leave me behind? This troubled me, up in my bedroom with my elbows on the windowsill, this provoked a sharp jab of bewildered pain until I remembered that there was no sister, no log house, no little cousins, there was only the absence of my mother, only, now, the memory of her, and downstairs a fat woman indifferent to me (when I wasn’t the butt of her humor), and a cold, uncaring father. This, as I say, went on for several weeks, and it wasn’t until we were close to our own Christmas that they began to take proper note of me, for by then, bad boy that I was (the Dennis part, I mean) I realized I no longer had to obey my father’s order not to speak of her. And when I realized this, and they saw that I’d realized it, they couldn’t ignore me anymore.

  My father was still working at the time, so there was money coming into the house. This meant nights in the Rochester and people coming back to Kitchener Street afterwards. I’d see them spilling from the alley into the back yard, clutching bottles, their breath coming in a big cloud of mist so they looked like a single beast, a many-legged monster-horse stamping down the yard. They puffed steam, they roared in several voices at the same time, and I could never sleep when it was like this in the house, there was so much noise down there, loud voices and drunken singing, the clinking of bottles and stamping of boots on the floor. Often there were people in the house I’d never seen before. I’d watch them from my bedroom window as they reeled through the back door to the outhouse, or from my perch in the darkness at the top of the stairs I’d see them kissing and fondling each other in the passage below.

  There was no Christmas tree in number twenty-seven, no decorations, no gifts, only a clump of mistletoe tied with string to the neck of the light bulb that dangled from the kitchen ceiling, and this permitted them to handle each other more licentiously than usual. Then bottles were opened as Horace got down on his hands and knees to coax some heat from the stove. Hilda had had him bring in the armchairs from the parlor, and into one of these she’d settle herself with a large glass of ruby port as the singing and the hilarity started up. Despite the hubbub her laughter was always recognizable from upstairs even with the kitchen door closed. Once, I remember, I heard the kitchen door open—the noise swelled for a moment—and then came a furtive whispering in the passage. I was at the top of the stairs in my pajamas. I retreated into my room as I heard people coming along the passage. Through the crack in my door I saw a man and a woman come up the stairs: he was fat and wearing a dark suit, she, carrying her shoes, someone I’d seen in the house before, a friend of Hilda’s, handsome in a way though as I think of her now I remember how life and drink had drained the color from her skin and the light from her eyes, she was a gray and sallow woman, and though she too laughed constantly her eyes were dead and so were her teeth, and her breath smelled foul. Her hair was dyed black and her n
ame was Gladys. Along the upstairs landing they tiptoed and then into my parents’ bedroom, pulling the door behind them though of course it didn’t close properly, there was something wrong with it. Not very long after this I heard the bed creaking and Gladys quietly groaning; then there was silence. I crept down the landing, and getting onto my hands and knees as I had the day Hilda first came to the house I had a look at them. Gladys was lying on the bed smoking a cigarette. They hadn’t turned the light on, so there was only the dim glow that seeped in from the streetlamp. The fat man was on the far side of the bed struggling into his trousers and at the same time counting out pound notes. I crept back to my own room, and five minutes later I heard the pair of them go back downstairs.

  I stayed in my room, sitting by the window, and waited for them all to leave. It was after midnight when they went shambling off down the yard in twos and threes, no longer the horse-monster they had been earlier, too drunk for that now, and then I heard Horace and Hilda come upstairs. I waited another half hour before going down with a candle. The kitchen was disgusting: dirty glasses, empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays, Hilda’s black shoes on the table, one upright, one on its side (why were they on the table?), and a foul stink of cigarette smoke and alcohol. Gladys was sprawled sleeping in one of the armchairs in her coat, and on the arm of the chair, close to where her sagging, snoring head lay pillowed on the shoulder of a dangling arm, stood a tumbler half-full of brown ale (black in the candlelight) with a cigarette butt floating in it, decomposing, shreds of tobacco drifting loose. I moved the tumbler to the kitchen table and took Hilda’s shoes and set them on the floor. Then I stood gazing down at Gladys for a few minutes, holding the candle up under my chin so I could feel the warmth of the flame; the fire in the stove was dying and the chill of the night was creeping into the kitchen. And as I gazed at the woman sprawled there in the shadows I thought about the noises she’d made upstairs and the sight of her suspendered legs on the bed and her dress bunched up round her waist. There was someone sleeping in the other chair but it wasn’t the fat man, it was Harold Smith. Then I went out through the back door into the cold and had a wank in the outhouse, and when I pulled the chain the water came right up to the rim before very slowly draining away: he still hadn’t fixed it. When I came back in I found some old cheddar in the cupboard and a crust of a loaf in the bread box, so I sat at the table and, still by candlelight, among the snoring drunks, I ate my supper, washing it down with a glass of brown ale from an unfinished bottle by the sink.