Spider

by McGrath, Patrick

  But what is wrong with me, that in order to save my life I must bury it within wheels, wheels strung on radials forming compartments—allotments!—containing only dead things, fetid, empty chambers where shadows and feathers, coal dust and dead flies, drift about, where the smell of gas is pervasive, and this is all there is—these holes, I mean, these smelly holes I’ve built around the Spider to save him from the gales and storms of the world? What sort of life is it, that can only take its existence dead at the hub of this ragged, wheel-like structure of empty cells?

  When I was taken away from Kitchener Street there was some delay before they made up their minds what to do with me. I remember very little of that period: a blur of men and rooms, and the air everywhere crowded with thought patterns, always a sense of terrible tension, like the tension my father could generate in the kitchen at mealtimes. Then I felt catastrophe was imminent, and I felt my own wrongness most intensely. The light was never clear, I seemed always to be in shadow and so did the others, the men who went with me from room to room, all in thick shadow, as though a permanent twilight had gathered in those rooms and rendered all forms and faces indistinct, and their voices too grew hollow, grew deep, they boomed and echoed from out of the shadows that clung to them and the air, the dusk, through which I moved was thick with thought patterns not my own. I lived and moved in terror then, constant terror, desperately reaching back into the back parts until at last I crawled, exhausted, into that hole where for some short period of time at least I could be safe.

  Later the world came more sharply into focus again. Shadows receded and I no longer had this booming echo of voices in my ears, I came to distinguish one man from another and although I knew they meant to do me harm there was at the same time the feeling that it might not happen yet, or that when it did happen it would happen with such suddenness and from such an unexpected quarter that there was little point in maintaining more than a reasonable degree of vigilance as I went about my routines. Routines! These were the days of routine. From morning to night all was routine, each day like the one before it, and the one to come after, and there was in this some comfort for me, at least during the quiet periods when I felt that I could cope with the thought patterns, when they didn’t mount up and mount up against me, filling the air with their staticky buzz and hum and click and clack like a blizzard of germs in constant excitation around my ears and the back of my head until there was no escaping them, not even back there in the quiet flaps and recesses where only the Spider could crawl—when that was happening then no routine on earth could dull the harrowing of the terror of the disaster that was imminently to befall me. Later though they always seemed to know when it was about to happen and they took me to a safe room, kept me out of harm’s way until I was quiet again. But what makes it all so disturbing to remember now—and I didn’t tell you this earlier, for I have only just remembered it—was that at those times there was always, always, always the pervasive and overwhelming and filthy smell of gas.

  Time passed. Twenty years, this was my Canada. Oh enough. My Canada—my Ganderhill! With your walls of faded red brick, your barred gates and locked doors, your courtyards and corridors, your flower gardens where men in ill-fitting flannels and squeaky shoes sat twitching and writhing on wooden benches, while their restless mad eyes gazed out over the terraces to a cricket field far below, and beyond that the perimeter wall, and beyond that rolling farmland and the wooded hills of Sussex in the distance... During the later years in Ganderhill I worked in the vegetable gardens;

  I wore stout black boots and baggy yellow corduroy trousers.

  I remember in the summer the smell of fresh-mown grass, a smell that comes back to me so strongly now that I stop writing, almost convinced that it is in the room—the smell of fresh-mown grass, here in this chilly midnight garret! Flere, in this bleak season of fogs and rain, at the top of this morgue of a house—fresh-mown grass! Outside in the dark wet streets dead leaves clog gutters and drains and drift in heaps between high black metal railings with spiked, spearlike tips; and the Spider smells fresh-mown grass! Oh, see me seated at this rickety table in all my shirts and jerseys, pencil poised over the smudged page of the journal and the long horse-head lifted, heavy with shadow in the hollows of the cheeks and the eye sockets, a knobbled stubbled bulb of a head as it lifts, sniffing, a dead thin one hanging from its lip, into the gloom as the memories of asylum cricket come drifting back and bring in their train the smell of fresh-mown grass! Fool, Spider! But better you smell grass than gas.

  What to tell you of those years? Mr. Thomas was the first of them to grow distinct when the world began to come back into focus; he never threatened to shatter me with his eyes, the way other men did. Those mild brown eyes of his: the skin around them was crosshatched with tiny crinkled lines, and they reassured me, I don’t know why. There was the pipe, too, the constant pipe, and I don’t know why that reassured me either but it did, the steady sucking, punctuated, every few minutes, when he took it from between his lips, by the exhalation of smoke; perhaps the smell of the tobacco, the fragrance. After supper I’d stay on the ward, I’d read, I’d play cards, do a jigsaw. It was a quiet life.

  The first ward I was on in Ganderhill was what they called a hard-bench ward. Not difficult to find the reason for that: there wasn’t a soft chair in the place (apart of course from in the attendants’ room by the stairwell). Men did a great deal of sleeping in those wards and I was no exception. After breakfast I stretched myself out on a bench, the woodwork all cankered with cigarette burns, and using my shoe for a pillow I’d doze off and try and stay comatose for as much of the day as I could. Who cared? Nobody cared. On the hard-bench wards men were mute, incontinent, hallucinated. If I couldn’t get a bench I simply curled up on the floor under a blanket. Nobody cared. We were all immobile and withdrawn up there, and in this there was a certain comfort. What I didn’t like were the doorless lavatories, I could never get used to them, it was an agony of humiliation to me to sit on the toilet in a doorless lavatory, exposed to the stray glance of any passing eye: it occurs to me now that much of the later trouble I had with my intestines (they were pulled to the back of my body and twisted about my spine from arse to skull like a snake) may have originated in the disturbance of the excretory function that I suffered on the hard-bench wards.

  I learned to roll fat ones and thin ones on a hard-bench ward, we took our tobacco seriously there. It’s an odd thing, no matter how deep a man may be sunk in his own melancholy, his own madness—adrift, you’d think, all lines to the social body cut—yet he’d never fail to give you his butt to light your own with, there is no madness so deep that it excludes you from the community of tobacco. Here’s another odd thing: a man gets a proper cigarette from an attendant, a Woodbine, a Senior Service. He sits on a bench and smokes. A second man stands nearby, arms hanging limp at his sides, face blank, dumbly waiting. In due time he is given the butt. This he smokes until it burns his fingers, and then he drops it on the floor. A third man immediately picks it up, and careless of burning his fingers he smokes the rest of it.

  On a hard-bench ward nothing was expected of you except that you fail. You were there because you had failed, failing was what you did, you would fail again. In this there was comfort for the Spider, a certain vigilance could be relaxed. What was comforting was the indifference: nobody cared about anything but his own damage. Routine was basic and solid, a few rude struts to give the day shape: lining up for meals at the front of the ward, shuffling there for twenty minutes, then down the narrow stairs, gates clanging, keys on bars, the shouts of distant attendants, a file of gray patients in ill-fitting shirts and trousers, flapping shoes—no belts or shoelaces on a hard-bench ward—to line up in the vast clattering barn of a dining hall, and pass along trestle tables behind which kitchen workers in greasy white aprons dolloped onto your plate soggy servings of mashed vegetables and horse-meat, or dogmeat, or stale cod. For pudding, spotted dick and custard with lumps. In the late afternoon the day
shift went off, and for the hours before supper we were locked up or else herded together in the dayroom under the supervision of a single attendant. This I hated, to be crowded in with the others like that, and vainly I begged to be allowed to join the two or three privileged men who wandered the ward by themselves.

  From time to time someone became upset—I remember John Giles, a big man, furious about the withdrawal of his privileges, storming up and down his room; as I passed on my way down to the dayroom I remember thinking: John’s about to blow. I may have mentioned it to someone, I don’t remember—then suddenly the sound of a window smashing, and it was John Giles of course. Out of the dayroom we poured, but not before the attendants were running down the ward from either end—what a racket their boots made on the tiles!—to where John, spitting and cursing, stood trembling in his doorway and clutching a great ugly jagged piece of glass. They didn’t rush him, not with that piece of glass in his hand. “Put it down, John,” one of them said, “come on, John, do us all a favor”—but John was way over the top, he spat and snarled and told them what he’d do to them if they got any closer. Two of them then went into a room. A moment later out they came, at a run, with a mattress held up before them like a shield. Then they were on top of poor John and all I could see were his arms and legs flailing from the sides of the mattress as he struggled there, pinned against the door, his shouts muffled by the mattress. In due course he let go of the glass and shortly after that they trussed him up in buckles and stout canvas webbing and marched him off to a safe room at the end of the ward, where he shouted himself hoarse and then fell asleep. But I tell you the story only for the sequel. Down in the yard a week later, poking around in a flower bed, I found a shard of glass shaped like a dagger, and looking up, realized it came from the window John Giles had smashed. I took it back up to the ward and showed it to Mr. Thomas. He led me into a side room, where on the table he had reconstructed the entire window, every fragment in place as though it were a jigsaw puzzle—every fragment, that is, but one. He took my glass dagger and slipped it into the last thin gap, it completed the shattered window, and with a grunt of satisfaction he turned to me and said, “I was worried about that one, Dennis, I lost sleep over that one, I could see someone losing their eye.” And then he put a hand on my shoulder, and I walked back out onto the ward—odd thing, this—almost choking for the sheer joy of that hand on my shoulder.

  A quiet life, then, for I did settle down. And it was only after I had settled down that I could bring myself to think about Kitchener Street again. Often, as I sat on a bench on the terrace and watched the men working in the vegetable gardens, hoeing, or seeding, I would think of my father in his allotment on a Sunday, perhaps doing the same work as them, for one potato patch is very much like another. But having thought this I would immediately remember that my father’s potato patch was in fact very different from any other, for the simple reason that my mother had been buried in it. And with that thought, unless I was careful, such a flood would be set roiling and seething within me that at times it was your old Spider who got trussed up in canvas webbing and marched off down to a safe room (his head twisting to escape the smell of the gas)! But in time I learned that there were ways of thinking about Kitchener Street and the tragedy without losing control (it all has to do with compartments) and in time I was able to think such thoughts even when, in later years, I had a job in the vegetable gardens myself. A particularly rich seam of memories was uncovered, I recall, when I was forking the institution’s compost one very blustery day in the autumn.

  I pause; it is very late now. I take a moment to relight the dead one. The house is utterly silent around me; outside, the rain has stopped, and the streets too are silent. An odd thing, to sit here with the book before me, the pencil in my fingers, remembering a time of remembering. Is it always thus, I wonder? Smoke is drifting in lazy coils toward the faintly crackling light bulb overhead; I lean back, fingers linked behind my head, my outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, and watch it diffuse in the gloom. Is a memory always and only the echo of its last occasion? Which in turn is just an echo of the one before? A flicker of unease in my belly at this, a small spurt of alarm: like the cross-strutting of the gasworks uprights, the horror of multiplicity is there, the horror of reproduction; and yet what I remembered that blustery day in the vegetable gardens (I was leaning on the handle of a garden fork, the smell of the compost strong in my nostrils) what I remembered seems now so fresh, so crisp, so sharp and clear to me that I cannot doubt, I cannot doubt, for the simple reason that I saw it, I was there, hanging around the allotments in the days after Christmas in case my mother came back again. And my father, you see, was working his compost.

  A well-made compost heap (this is the gardener speaking) is a layered structure that heats up and decomposes quickly. Kitchen rubbish, dead leaves, plant residue—all this makes for good compost, all this contributes to the good dark crumbly matter that enriches even the thinnest soil. Add a layer of manure, or even blood meal, then some soil, and dust it with wood ash. This is how my father built up his compost heap over the autumn, layer by layer to a height of five feet, the whole contained in an enclosure of wooden posts and wire-mesh fencing. He’d moistened each layer as he’d built it, and with his hands he’d scooped out a shallow depression in the top to make a puddle where rainwater could collect.

  The day I remembered he was turning the heap, letting it air so as to ensure uniform decomposition and prevent overheating; but barely had he lifted the first forkful than to his astonishment he saw that the heap was moving, that the exposed interior was alive. He took out his spectacles (I was watching him from behind the shed in the next allotment, Jack Bagshaw’s; it was a gloomy damp day, and cold) and he found that his compost was infested with black maggots.

  He had never seen maggots like these before. They were swarming all over the compost, all over the decaying horse manure, the potato peelings, the grass clippings and ground bone, swarming and seething, these plump little black things, and what insect, my father must have wondered as he stood there scratching his head (I am still peering round the side of Jack Bagshaw’s shed), what insect laid eggs that hatched so late in the year—though he would then have realized that the heat generated by the decomposing compost would be enough to incubate the creatures, and beetles, he would have thought, beetles. But what English beetle produced a grub like this? I saw him pick one up and examine it on the tip of his finger: a sleek, fat, soft-bodied, humpbacked grub, and as it squirmed there he must have felt the slime of it moisten the soil that grimed his finger so he wiped it off on the seat of his trousers and then with his fork uncovered a deeper layer of the heap. Again the swarming of innumerable black grubs, and he knew that the whole heap was infested. I watched him lean on his pitchfork and gaze, frowning, at his ruined compost, but even as he began to turn over in his mind how he would rid his garden of its parasites the chill of the winter air began to be felt by the maggots, and as they lost their heat so their activity slowed, and they began to die. And it was at that moment that I saw my father suddenly stiffen, and shrink back, and clutch the fork to his chest as though to defend himself—and his eyes darted about him in what looked like terror, intense terror, and I knew, I knew, that he’d felt something brush by him.

  I didn’t move, I didn’t breathe. I saw him shiver, then throw down the pitchfork and turn toward the shed—but then the shed began to shudder (it was growing dark), to shudder as it must have shuddered the night he’d copulated with Hilda in the armchair, the night my mother discovered them there. Then it started to rain, and I watched my father backing away from the shed, his face alive with horror, backing down the path as the shed heaved and shook on its foundations with ten times the violence it had the night Hilda sprawled in the armchair with her skirt up round her waist, and him on his knees on the edge of the chair with his trousers open and his pencil of a penis sticking out between the buttons. It was a mockery, this, a dark travesty of the spectacle my mother mu
st have observed the night she was murdered, and before he’d even reached the gate he could hear the awful gasps and groans of Hilda at pleasure, and by this time the air was dense with that terrible black energy, and he fled, I watched him go, I watched him push his bicycle up the path and scramble onto it as if the very devils of hell were after him, and only then did I climb over into the allotment and begin shouting and jumping up and down, making mud of the soil, as the dusk rapidly descended.

  I was there the following Sunday when my father destroyed the compost heap. I came up through the Slates, up the slope at the back of the allotments, and along behind the sheds to Jack Bagshaw’s. My father had not been idle; during the week he’d been coming after work to spread mulch on the soil to prevent beetles from reaching his potatoes in the spring, and he’d cleaned up the cuttings and dead weeds likely to harbor larvae clusters. But Sunday was for burning the compost and destroying the maggots inside it, and so I watched him dig a shallow pit (needless to say on the far side of the allotment from my mother’s grave) and in the pit he laid the foundations of a bonfire, clumps of newspaper, kindling wood, and a few old planks that he’d stored under a tarpaulin behind his shed all winter. He soon had a good blaze going, I could feel it from where I was hiding, then he began to fork on the garden debris, much of which was damp, and the bonfire smoked profusely. But when he added the first mounds of compost the smoke grew so dense that all I could see of him was a shadow moving back and forth and forking up compost and flinging it onto the fire, and I remembered a picture I’d once seen of hell, a sort of cavern with dripping black walls and thick black smoke from somewhere down below, and in the smoke the devil was clutching a pitchfork not unlike my father’s, his long barbed tail flicking up behind him in the gloom. Damp though it was the compost somehow burned, or smoldered at least, and the smell of it, the manure and the rotting vegetables, was so bad I had to creep away, back behind the sheds and down to the Slates, and from there I made my way to the river. Even from down by the Crispin I could see the smoke as it climbed into the gray wintry sky, a long thin column that leaned to the west the higher it rose and eventually drifted away into nothingness off toward the setting sun.