Spider

by Patrick Mcgrath

  I’m something of a gardener myself, you see. In fact gardening is probably the only good thing that came of the years I spent abroad, learning how to grow vegetables, though I never took to it with the same passion as my father. For him that narrow strip of soil was not merely a source of fresh vegetables, it was, I believe, a sort of sanctuary, a sort of spiritual haven. Having crossed the bridge he would wobble down the narrow path beside the embankment, past the allotments of his fellow gardeners, working men like himself who would already be hoeing, perhaps, or digging, or perhaps simply pacing up and down between the rows with their hands clasped behind their backs and their brows knit as they contemplated their potatoes or their runner beans or their carrots or cabbages or peas. “Morning Horace,” they would murmur, as my father slowly steered his bicycle along the path. Silent and abstracted these men may have been, manifestly anxious about slow growth, or blight, or wilt, or a damp summer and marauding crows, but these men were at peace, as I have been at peace in a garden, they were happy.

  The first hour of the Sunday morning was when my father reflected on the state of things in the garden, and it was an hour from which he derived a measure of quiet joy incomprehensible to any but a fellow gardener. That hour, in the crisp, early air, with the dew still wet on the cabbage leaves, was in a way what he worked for, for he experienced then a sense of fulfilment that I don’t believe he found anywhere else in his narrow, constricted existence. He inspected, he pondered, he poked at the soil with the toe of a boot, he squatted on his hams to examine this plant or that, laid a veined and tender vegetable leaf upon the calloused skin of his palm, and peered at it through his spectacles. Then after a while he would go to his shed, a trim, square structure knocked together from waste lumber and tar paper, and there, in the cobwebby gloom, he would hang up his jacket and fetch out what tools he needed, and the day’s work began. This is the barest sketch of my father’s allotment (I shall show you more of it in due course), but it was by means of this thin strip of soil and its shed that he was able to carve out within the larger frame of his life a compartment in which to enjoy autonomy and fellowship; and it was this that made existence tolerable for him, and for others like him. In a very real sense the allotment was the spiritual core and flavor of a life that was otherwise loveless, monotonous, and gray.

  I haven’t even told you my name yet! It’s Dennis, but my mother always called me Spider. I am a baggy, threadbare sort of a customer, really—my clothes have always seemed to flap about me like sailcloth, like sheets and shrouds—I catch a glimpse of them sometimes as I hobble through these empty streets, and they always look vacant, untenanted, the way the flannel flaps and hollows about me, as though I were nothing and the clothes were clinging merely to an idea of a man, the man himself being elsewhere, naked. These feelings disappear when I reach my bench, for there I am anchored, I have a wall behind me and water in front of me, and as long as I don’t look at the gasworks all is well. But I had a bit of a shock yesterday, for I discovered that nothing fit me anymore. I noticed it first when I got up from the bench: my trousers barely reached the tops of my ankles, and from the ends of my sleeves my wrists were poking out to an absurd length, like sticks, before flowering suddenly into these long floppy hands of mine. When I arrived back at the house everything seemed to have returned to normal, and it occurred to me that the problem might be with my body rather than my clothes? Of course I wouldn’t think of speaking to Mrs. Wilkinson about any of this, she has already made her views clear on the subject: she has forbidden me to wear more than one of any article of clothing at any one time, no more than one pair of trousers, one shirt, one jersey, and so on, though naturally I defy her on this as I like to wear as many of my clothes as I can, I find it reassuring, and since returning from Canada reassurance is something I am simply not getting enough of Probably the whole thing was just some sort of perceptual error, I have occasionally been troubled this way in the past.

  I am a much taller man than my father was, but in other respects I resemble him. He was wiry and shortsighted; he wore round, horn-rimmed spectacles that made him appear owlish. His eyes had a deceptively mild, watery sort of look to them, and when he took his spectacles off you realized what a startlingly pale-blue color they were. But I’ve seen those eyes of his fire up with anger, and when that happened there was nothing mild and watery about him at all, and as often as not I’d be taken down the coal cellar and feel the back of his belt. Not that he’d let anyone else ever see his anger, he was much too careful for that—but my mother and myself, we saw it, he had no other outlet for it, we were the only people in the world weaker than he was. I remember my mother used to say, “Run down the Dog, Spider, and tell your father his supper’s on the table,” and that’s when I knew I’d see that furious pale light come up. The Dog was the pub on the corner of Kitchener Street, the Dog and Beggar. It was not a big pub; there were four rooms, the public bar, the saloon bar, and two small snugs where private conversation could be had, each room separated from the others by a wooden screen inset with panels of frosted glass. My father drank in the public bar, and I can still recall pushing open the door and being immediately assailed by a welter of sounds and smells, men’s talk, their barks of laughter, thick smoke, beer, sawdust on the bare boards, and in the winter a small coal fire burning in the grate. Above the mantelpiece, I remember, was a mirror with a black toucan on it and the words guinness is good for you. I couldn’t read the first word, I only knew that something was good for you. There wasn’t anything good for me in the public bar of the Dog and Beggar: I’d see him at the bar, his back bent, leaning with his elbows on the counter and one boot up on the brass rail that ran the length of it at ankle height; someone would say, “Here’s Horace’s boy,” or, “Here’s your boy, Horace,” and I’d see him turn toward me, a cigarette hanging from his lips, and in his eyes there’d be only that cold loathing that came of being reminded, again, of the fact of his family and the house to which he must return from the careless sanctuary of the public bar. I’d blurt out my message, my little voice piping like a tin whistle among those shuffling, grunting men, those cattle at their beer, and he would tell me to go on back to the house, he’d be along shortly. No one would know, only I, only I, how intense, how venomous, was the hatred he felt toward me at that moment, and I’d hurry away as quick as I could. I was never able to tell my mother how much I disliked going into the Dog and delivering her message, for my father disguised his feelings so effectively she would have laughed to hear me explain what was really going on.

  When he was in this frame of mind—and drinking only made things worse, drinking broke down his reserve—mealtimes were hell. I would sit at the kitchen table gazing at the ceiling, where an unshaded bulb dangled on the end of a braided brown cord. I tended always to slip into reverie in that poky little kitchen, with its clanging pots and dripping tap and ever-present smell of boiling cabbage, it made those ghastly meals tolerable. Outside the twilight darkened into night, and from over by the railway embankment came the scream of a whistle as some suburban train went steaming by. My mother put in front of me a plate of boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, and stewed neck of mutton, the meat coming away from the bone in stringy grayish patches. There was a terrible tension in the room as I picked up my knife and fork. I knew my father was watching me, and this made things worse, for I was a clumsy boy at the best of times, only poorly in control of those long, gangling limbs of mine. I stuffed a large lump of potato in my mouth, but it was too hot so I had to cough it back onto my plate. “For Christ’s sake—!” he hissed between clenched teeth. My mother glanced at him, her own fork poised over a potato that sat like a plug in a greasy puddle of thin gravy. “Don’t lose your temper,” she murmured, “it’s not the boy’s fault.”

  The meal progressed in painful silence. There were no further train noises from over by the railway embankment, nor was there anything moving on Kitchener Street. Cutlery clattered on cheap china as we ate our neck of mutton and the t
ap dripped into the sink with a steady plop plop plop. The bulb overhead continued to spread a sickly yellow light over the room, and having devoured my food I sat once more gazing at the ceiling with my lips faintly moving, pausing only to pick at a shred of mutton caught between my teeth. “Put the kettle on then, Spider,” said my mother, and I rose to my feet. As I did so I banged one of my kneecaps against the side of the table, jarring it violently such that my father’s plate moved several inches to the left. I felt him stiffen then, I felt his grip tighten on his fork, onto the end of which he had just scraped a soggy pile of pale limp cabbage; but mercifully he said nothing. I lit the gas. At last he finished eating, laid his knife and fork across the middle of his plate, placed his hands on the edge of the table, elbows arched outward at a sharp angle, and prepared to get up from the table. “Off down the pub, I suppose,” said my mother, still at work on her last potato, which she had cut into a number of very small pieces, and without lifting her eyes to my father’s face.

  I cast a quick fearful glance at him; and in the way his jaw worked I knew what he thought of the pair of us, his gangling, useless son and his mutely reproachful wife, who sat there making little pokes and stabs at her potato and refusing to meet his eye. He took his cap and jacket from the hook on the back of the door and went out without a word. The kettle came to the boil. “Make us a nice cup of tea then, Spider,” said my mother, rising from her chair and brushing at her cheek as she began to gather the dirty plates.

  ♦

  Later I would go up to my bedroom, and I think I should tell you about that room, for so much of all this is based on what I saw and heard, and even smelled, from up there. I was at the back of the house, at the top of the stairs, and I had a view of the yard and the alley beyond. It was a small room, and probably the dampest in the house: there was a large patch on the wall opposite my bed where the paper had come away and the plaster beneath had started literally to erupt— there were crumbly, greenish lumps of moist plaster swelling from the wall, like buboes or cankers, that turned to powder if you touched them. My mother was constantly at my father to do something about it, and though he’d replastered the wall once, within a month they were back, the problem being leaky drainpipes and decaying mortar in the brickwork, all of which my mother thought he should be able to fix but which he never had. I would lie awake at night and by whatever moonlight penetrated the room I would gaze at these shadowy lumps and nodules, and in my boyish imagination they became the wens and warts of some awful humpbacked night-hag with an appalling skin disease, a spirit damned for her sins against men to be trapped, tormented, in the bad plaster of an old wall in a slum. At times she left the wall and entered my nightmares (I was plagued by nightmares, as a boy), and then when I woke in the night in terror I would see her sneering in the corner of the room, turned away from me, her head cloaked in shadow and her eyes glittering from that horrible knobbly skin, the smell of her breath befouling the air; then I would sit up in bed, screaming at her, and it was only when my mother came in and turned the light on that she returned to her plaster, and I would then have to have the light on for the rest of the night.

  As for school, I was never happy there, and I tried to avoid the place as much as I could. I had no friends, I didn’t want any friends, I didn’t like any of them, and over the years they’d learned to leave me alone. I shudder to think of those days, even now: there were long rows of desks in a vast, high-ceilinged barn of a classroom with wooden floorboards, and sitting at each desk a bored child with a pencil and an exercise book. I was at the back of the row closest to the windows, which were set high in the wall so I could not gaze off into space and escape the tedium, and through those windows streamed the light of the day, and in it there was a constant thick drift and swirl of dust. The effect of dust dancing in sunlight has always for me been soporific, doubly so when there came from the front of the room the dull flat weary tones of some disaffected teacher in a shabby suit and heavy leather shoes who paced back and forth in front of the blackboard—a distant world, dusty eons from my own— interrupting himself to chalk up a word, or some numbers, the chalk scraping on the board with a hideous screech that had the pupils squirming, and the dust swirled as they shuffled on the floorboards with their shoes, and your Spider drifted further and further away, further into the back parts of his mind where no one could follow. Rarely was I called upon in class to answer a question; other boys and girls were better at that than I was, confident clever children who could rise smartly to their feet and tell the teacher what he wanted to hear. These children sat at the front of the classroom, closest to the blackboard; back here in the netherlands was where the “slower” children sat, a fat boy called Ivor Jones who was less popular even than me and was made to cry in the playground every day as a matter of routine, and a very messy girl named Wendy Wodehouse whose nose was always running with snot, and whose dress was always filthy, and who smelled, and who craved affection so avidly that she’d pull her knickers down behind the toilets if you asked her, and there were rumors she did other things as well. These were my closest neighbors at the back of the class, Ivor Jones and Wendy Wodehouse, but there was no sort of alliance possible between us, in fact we hated each other more bitterly than the other children hated us, because to each other we presented an image of our own pathetic isolation. I doubt I was missed when I stopped going to school; there would have been a neat line of absents in the register, and one less set of homework to mark. Nobody cared.

  On Saturday nights my mother and father always went to the pub together. From my bedroom window, where I sat with my elbows on the sill and my chin in my hands, I’d see them leave through the back door and go down the yard, then through the gate and into the alley. They always sat at the same small round table in the public bar, close to the fireplace. They didn’t have a great deal to say to one another; from time to time my father went up to the bar, and the landlord, a man called Ratcliff, served him. “Same again, is it, Horace?” he’d say, and my father would nod, his cigarette between his lips as he fumbled for change in his trousers.

  I’ve mentioned that I lived in Canada for the last twenty years. About those years I intend to say nothing at all, apart from this: I spent much time, in Canada, thinking about the events I am here describing, and I arrived at certain conclusions that would never, for obvious reasons, have occurred to me at the time; these I shall disclose as we go forward. As regards my father’s first glimpse of Hilda Wilkinson, my guess is that he heard her before he saw her—she was a loud woman (especially when she had a drink in her hand), and there was a slightly hoarse edge to her voice, a sort of huskiness, that some men seem to find attractive. I see my father sitting stiffly in the Dog in his hard-backed chair by the fire, while on the far side of the room Hilda stands at the center of a lively group of drinkers. Up comes that laugh of hers, and for the first time he becomes aware of it. I see him startled, I see him turning, I see him frowning as he seeks the source of the noise—but he cannot locate it, for the Dog is crowded and he is not wearing his spectacles. He is far too guarded a man to allow my mother or anybody else to know what’s going on, so the image he constructs of Hilda that night is assembled from the gleanings of a series of furtive, shortsighted glances, taken when he goes to the bar, or out to the Gents—he catches a glimpse, perhaps, between a group of men, of her neck (flushed pink with warmth and alcohol) and the back of her head, the blonde hair piled and pinned atop it in an untidy heap; or, a little later, he sees her hand for a moment, with its pale plump fingers grasping a glass of sweet port and a cigarette; or staring, apparently absently, at the floor, he discovers a white ankle and a foot in a scuffed black high-heeled shoe—and all the while he hears that hoarse-tinged voice erupting in husky laughter.

  As he walked my mother home, his hobnail boots ringing on the stones of the alley, my father still held in his mind’s eye these scraps and fragments of the laughing woman in the public bar. My parents had sexual intercourse that night, as they did e
very Saturday night, but I don’t think that either of them was really in the here-and-now. My mother was distracted by a headful of her own concerns, and my father was still thinking about his blonde; and in his imagination, I would guess, it was with her that he copulated, not my mother.

  He was back in the Dog the next night, and Ratcliff had leisure to rest a forearm on the bar and drink a small whisky with him and pass a few remarks about Saturday’s football. It was in the course of this exchange that my father fleetingly glimpsed, behind the other’s head, in the snug opposite, a large, flushed face beneath an untidy pile of blonde hair; and a moment later he caught the tones of that boisterous voice again. A rapid flare of heat inside him, and he lost all interest in the landlord’s talk. “Customer, Ernie,” he murmured, indicating the snug, and Ratcliff glanced over his shoulder. In a low voice he said: “It’s that fat tart Hilda Wilkinson”— then made his way in a leisurely manner down the bar to serve the woman.

  Little enough occurred that night in terms of an actual encounter. My father stayed in the public bar, straining to see and hear what went on in the snug, while at the same time attempting to learn what he could from Ernie Ratcliff, though the landlord proved disappointing, for this night he wished only to talk about football. At one point my father noticed another woman come up to the bar, one of the group that had surrounded Hilda the night before, a small woman in a hat who pushed empty glasses across the counter and asked in quiet, mannish tones for a bottle of stout and a sweet port.