Spider

by Patrick Mcgrath

  An hour later he was a little steadier, and he felt he could go up and see Hilda. The whisky had blurred the stark outlines of the night’s doings; the terror that had grown for a few minutes almost intolerable had receded, and been replaced by a sort of fragile confidence that they were going to get away with it (he must, I think, have thought from the start in terms of a “they,” in terms of a mutual, shared responsibility). Slowly, heavily, he climbed the stairs; I was in my own room, at my window with my chin in my hands. The morning was well advanced, but the fog still clung to the city and cloaked it in twilight. While he was downstairs I’d crept along the landing and had another look at the woman in my mother’s bed. She was still fast asleep and snoring; at one point I heard her mumble a few words, but they were indistinct. The room was dark and the awful sweet smell of port was still thick in the air; and there was another smell, I detected it at once, familiar as I was with my mother’s fragrance: this too was a woman’s smell, but it was Hilda’s smell, a warm, fleshy smell colored by strong perfume and the emanations of her fur, which, impregnated with fog, hung from the wardrobe door. There was also the smell of her feet, and the whole effect was of some large female animal, not terribly clean, possibly dangerous. Into the lair, into the den of this creature came my father, fortified by whisky; I listened closely from my own room, my door slightly ajar and my ear pressed close to it. I heard him get undressed and then climb into bed.

  Her back was toward him, for she lay facing the curtained window and the gasworks beyond. Gingerly my father fitted his body to hers (I could hear the springs creak), his groin and belly forming a snug pocket for her bottom. With an arm laid lightly across her, he pressed his face into her hair (which smelled of cigarette smoke) and tried to fall asleep.

  He could not sleep. The terror rose in him again. She stirred, and I heard a heaving in that big bed. Silently I crept out of my room and along the landing until I was outside the door, which was open a crack (it would never close properly, that door). Silently I sank to my knees and edged my head round the side of the door till I could see them. Hilda had turned in the bed, and without awakening she gathered my father into her arms. Again she mumbled indistinctly and the heavy breathing resumed, her bosom rose and fell, and my father, clasped tight, lay peacefully at last, and soon he too was asleep.

  For some minutes I watched the sleeping couple, then I crept back to my room and busied myself with my insect collection, listening for when they should awake. I suppose what I wanted was to hear something, something that would help me find out where my mother—my real mother—had gone.

  ♦

  My father awoke in the middle of the afternoon. The room was still dark, for the curtains were closed and all that sifted through the cracks was the gray dimness of the persisting fog. Hilda was wakening too, disentangling her limbs from his, and as she did so the big flabby mattress heaved beneath her, the springs and joints of the old bed creaked and screamed, and once more I slipped down the landing to the bedroom door. Hilda stretched her limbs and yawned, and then, turning toward my father, sighed: “Plumber.” She gazed at him sleepily. It was hot in the bed, and I imagined my father wanting to wash his face and brush his teeth (I would), but Hilda had gathered him into her arms—and a moment later she came to life. On my knees at the bedroom door I saw movement in the blankets, then suddenly he was on top of her, in the gloom he was making a hump of the pair of them under those hot blankets. A small muddle as she hauled a pillow down under her bottom, then the bedclothes tented, they hollowed and bulged, flattened and billowed, the whole shifting shadowy mass groaning as one creature as the creaks and screams of the old night-machine settled into a rhythm that affected the watching young Spider strangely; and then, like a sportive whale, this quaking hill turned itself over (hoarse laughter, stifled grunting during this clumsy maneuver) and her blonde head came up from the hill and turned toward the window with chin lifted and she sank and rose, sank and rose, as if breasting heavy seas, and groaned. The old bed was creaking and grinding beneath her like the spars and booms of a galleon now, her groaning the howl of the wind in its topsail as on she plowed, lifting and plunging, her chin straining to the ceiling then sinking onto her breast, her thick white arms like columns beneath her as the tangled blonde clumps fell forward to conceal her face from the avid eyes of the watching Spider. Then at last she subsided, she expired, with a sustained wail that could have been pleasure and could have been pain, and after that a stillness settled on the room, the only sound an exhausted panting that steadily waned as the moments passed. Silence; then she heaved herself off my father and seated herself on the edge of the mattress, facing the door with her feet on the floor, and yawned.

  Still I knelt there by the door, gazing at the woman; I dared not move. From behind her in the bed my father murmured something and I saw her shake her head. Absently she scratched her ear, and this set her breasts wobbling. Her belly swelled like a soft white cushion; I was fascinated with the triangle of soft flesh beneath its crease, and the little tuft of curly black hair between her thick thighs. Again she yawned, and turned toward my father, and I drew back from the door. A moment later I heard her cross the floor to the wardrobe, I heard the hangers jangle as she pawed through my mother’s clothes; and on soundless feet I slipped back to my own room.

  Later she wanted to look over the house. I watched her pick her way carefully down our narrow stairs, descending in a sort of cautious sideways movement in a tight-belted dark blue dress with small white spots: my mother’s Sunday dress. I watched her go down, her bottom bulging and a plump hand on the banister, and as I listened to the clack of her heels I couldn’t help remembering the soft slushy shuffling sound my mother’s slippers made when she moved around the house. She had painted her mouth with my mother’s lipstick and fixed her hair with my mother’s comb; the scent, however, was all Hilda. Her belly was prominent in the thin material of the spotted blue dress, it was a generous, fleshy belly that sloped away at the flanks to the firm, trunklike roundness of her upper thighs, between which the material clung like a veil or curtain concealing a shadowy concavity. “Two-up two-down, is it?” she said as my father descended the stairs after her (she’d already stuck her nose into my room, but she hadn’t seen me, I was under the bed), then, without waiting for his answer: “I like a little house like this, Horace, I’ve always wanted one of these, Nora can tell you that.”

  Then—and note how casually she tossed this out—“You own it, eh?”

  You own it, eh: this is significant, we shall return to this later. Suffice for now that Hilda Wilkinson, a common prostitute, had spent her whole life drifting from lodging to lodging, often at the dead of night; a man who owned his own home was an attractive proposition—how much more attractive, should that man’s wife have disappeared! On she went, her awful boisterous voice ringing through the house, her motives plain as day: “Put your money in real property, that’s what I always say. This the parlor, is it, Horace? Now this is a nice room, you could entertain your friends in here.”

  Horace and Hilda spent an hour in the parlor and drank the rest of the whisky. From what I could hear she was comfortable in there, it seemed to appeal to some submerged yearning she had for gentility. She filled it to overflowing with her presence as she admired the modest fireplace with its polished brass scuttle, its poker and irons, and she expressed pleasure as well in the tiled mantelpiece, the oval mirror above it, and the five china geese hanging on a diagonal across the wall. She also liked the pattern of the wallpaper and the chintz cushion covers. The glass-fronted cabinet with its three pieces of Wedgwood: this pleased her too. “I do like a parlor, Horace,” she said, more than once, “gives a place respectability.” What did my father make of this, staving off, as he was, with whisky, an utter maelstrom of guilt when with every passing hour the murder like a virus gnawed deeper into the tissue of his vital organs?

  There was bacon in the house, and after finishing the whisky they moved to the kitchen. They ate
their breakfast as night fell; I smelled the bacon from upstairs, and it sharpened the edge of my own ravenous hunger, for I had eaten nothing all day; but I would not go down. I sat at the window and gazed at the glow from the kitchen, which barely penetrated the darkness in the yard. I saw Hilda go through the back door to the outhouse, and I was tempted then to go downstairs but the prospect of encountering her when she came back in deterred me. “You should fix that toilet of yours, Horace,” she said on her return. “Fine state of affairs when a plumber’s own toilet don’t work!”

  Ten minutes later they left for the Earl of Rochester, and I came downstairs. There was no bacon left, so I had to make do with bread and dripping.

  Would that awful day never end? I could think no more about it, that long evening I spent alone in the house with the smell of Hilda everywhere in my nostrils. I went out into the fog after my bread and dripping, and made for the canal, where I wandered along in a morose state, at times desperate, at times tearfully furious, kicking stones into the black water and taking what small comfort I could from the foggy darkness of the night. Where was my mother? Where was she? I returned to number twenty-seven after nine and came in through the back door; the house was empty. I ate more bread and dripping then went up to my room and got out my insect collection again. I heard my father come in late, alone; he sat up in the kitchen drinking beer until he passed out. I crept down around midnight and saw him slumped in a chair by the stove, still in his cap and scarf, and a cigarette adhering to his lower lip even as he slept.

  The next day was Sunday. As was his habit he went to his allotment. The fog had dissipated somewhat, it was a cool, cloudy morning, and it looked as if it might rain later. As he cycled through the empty streets he was still very much a man in crisis: barely thirty hours had elapsed since the murder, and he had not yet adjusted to the new territory he occupied. Murder sets a man apart, moves him into a separate world, narrow and constricted, bound and constrained by guilt, complicity, and the fear of betrayal. None of this he had fully realized, for he was still to some extent in shock; he pedaled his bicycle past curtained windows behind which slept a world from which he was now exiled forever, though this, as I say, was not yet apparent to him.

  That soon changed! There has always seemed to me to be a sort of bleak poetic justice in the fact that the allotment, to which my father had so often fled from his domestic life, should now be charged with the horror of my mother’s murder. He himself felt this only dimly as he pedaled through the streets that Sunday morning, but the closer he came to the railway bridge the stronger the impulse was to turn around and get as far away from the place as possible. But he did not turn round, for he was also aware of a vague, perverse stirring of excitement at the prospect of seeing again the ground beneath which she lay.

  Nothing, however, prepared him for the wave that hit him when he opened the gate and stood at the end of his path. For some moments it swirled about him in a sweeping, spinning movement, as though the allotment had become an active force field in a state of intense disturbance. It warped his perceptions: the shed and the vegetables seemed to turn black in front of his eyes, and before he had taken one step down the path he sensed a sort of thrashing and writhing all about him, and then for the few interminable moments it took him to reach the shed the suddenly dark, damp air of the morning swarmed with tiny malignant germs, and to pass through these swarms required no little determination. The effect was weakened somewhat when he gained the interior of the shed and shut the door on the garden’s malevolence, but outside it did not abate for a moment, the whole of that Sunday.

  (I know this feeling, I too have been tormented in this way, I too have felt them clacking and clicking round the back of my head like the teeth of a hound, like a cloud of chattering gnats, in fact the sound is rarely absent, though most of the time it is mercifully subdued, more of a hum than anything else.)

  ♦

  While my father was experiencing the first wave of horror that came off the soil of his allotment, I was back in my room at number twenty-seven. I didn’t yet know that my mother was dead, only that she wasn’t at home, and that a fat woman had been in her place in my parents’ bed. I was again busy with my collection, which helped distract me from all the worry and perplexity these changes were producing. As a boy I collected insects, flies mostly, which I pinned in boxes in artistic formations that I called tableaux. Dead leaves of various colors featured heavily in the boxes I’d set up in the autumn, but by this time many of them had become so brittle that they’d broken up into fragments and fallen away from the pins, forming little heaps at the bottom of the boxes. These I cleared out, also the feathers and twigs, and got out the fresh materials I’d been carefully collecting and which I kept in a cardboard box under my bed. All sorts of things were in that box, anything that looked as if it might come in handy, and I made no distinction between natural objects, twigs and feathers and so on, and matchsticks, bottle caps, bits of string, the cardboard and tinfoil of empty cigarette packets. I tried some pieces of eggshell, also a furry ball of blonde hair that I’d pulled off my mother’s comb earlier in the afternoon; a few fish bones, a few fins. It made a curious sort of assembly, and I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not. At some point during the afternoon, occupied thus, I heard footsteps outside. Rising from the floor I went to the window and coming down the yard was the woman I’d seen in bed with my father.

  I moved away from the window. I decided that I wouldn’t let her in, I wouldn’t go downstairs, she wouldn’t even know that I was in the house. All in vain; she came straight in through the back door without knocking, and I heard in the kitchen the familiar clatter of the kettle at the sink, the dull pop of the gas being lit, and the scrape of chair legs. I sank back onto the floor, careful to make no sound that would alert her to my presence. That too was all in vain; after she’d had her cup of tea she spent a few minutes in the parlor and then came up the stairs. I was at my door when she reached the landing, and I was gripping the knob tightly. She was on the other side, trying to turn it, and she was too strong for me; the knob turned, the door opened, she peered in at me. “Hello Dennis,” she said. “What you doing up here?”

  I wanted her out of my room! I mumbled something about my insects; in my mind’s eye I saw her on top of my father, going up and down and gasping like a fish. Suddenly she shuddered. “Those flies!” she said. “Do we have to have them in your bedroom?”

  I was downstairs in the kitchen with her when my father got home from the allotments. The strain of the past two days was quite apparent in his features. He had done no work on his garden; on the one occasion he’d stepped out of the shed and braved the allotment’s peculiar atmospheric energies he’d found himself unable to touch the soil. He’d gone back inside, back to the remains of the bottle of port. A cold rain began to fall late in the afternoon, slashing down in sheets and drumming on the roof over his head. It quickly grew dark, and the sense of horror became intense, rising to the pitch it’d been at when he’d first experienced it in the morning. As he left the shed the leaves of his root vegetables turned black once more and flailed about wildly like seaweed in a running tide. With his collar turned up and his cap pulled low he cycled back through the icy rain to Kitchener Street.

  It must have been a shock to him to see me sitting at the table with Hilda. “Raining, is it?” she said as my father dumped a string bag filled with potatoes into the sink. “I thought I heard rain. Still, you expect it, this time of the year.” My father made no reply to this; after taking off his jacket and cap he began washing the potatoes. I took the opportunity to slip off my chair and leave the kitchen. My father heard me. “Where you going, Dennis?” he said, turning from the sink, a paring knife in one hand and a half-peeled potato in the other. “Up to my room,” I said. He frowned like black thunder but said nothing, just turned back to his potatoes. The guilt was his, not mine!

  Oh, I throw down my pencil. The psychology of the murderer—how do I know anything about t
his? How do I know anything about any of this? All acquired overseas, during the long, uneventful years I spent in Canada. Enough, it is very late, I am tired, there is stamping in the attic but I cannot go on. The pain in my intestines has not gone away, it’s spread instead to my kidneys and liver, and I suspect that something very wrong is happening inside me, that it’s not the food at all (filthy though it is), but that something far worse is involved. I suspect, in fact, that my internal organs are starting to shrivel up, though I’m not clear why this should be so. How will I be able to function if my organs shrivel up? I am not possessed of great vitality, and can ill afford any shrinking or shriveling internally. Perhaps it’s just a transient phenomenon, like the gas smell, which thankfully has not returned.