Spider

by Patrick Mcgrath

  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.

  The next day was Christmas Eve, and I didn’t have to go to school. I wouldn’t have gone anyway; since becoming a bad boy I’d missed a lot of school, for I didn’t sleep at night anymore. I came downstairs at twelve o’clock. The kitchen had been cleaned up and Hilda was making mince pies. She smiled at me and I was immediately on my guard. Warmth in Hilda was a trap, for as soon as you relaxed she stuck a poisoned blade in you. I sat down at the table without a word. She was flattening out a lump of pastry dough with a rolling pin; her hands and arms were powdery with flour, though there was dirt under her fingernails and she smelled of jellied eels. She was wearing my mother’s apron—it was tight on her, as you’d expect, particularly at the bosom. “What you looking at me like that for?” she murmured, her thick white arms bearing down on the rolling pin. “Here’s your toast”— and she fished a plate out of the oven, on it a couple of stiff, charred slices of bread. “There’s dripping if you want it,” she said, “and the kettle’s on. Your dad might be home early today.”

  What was her game? I examined the toast carefully and decided not to take the chance. I drank the tea, though, and detected nothing amiss. “Nora’s down the butcher’s,” said Hilda. “It’ll be a bloody wonder if everything gets done, you ask yourself if it’s worth it.” She glanced out the window over the sink. “I do wish she’d get a move on,” she said, and I felt myself going rigid and shifting into the back of my head where Spider lived. As soon as I was there I knew that they must have worked out a new strategy—they hoped by “winning me over” to secure my silence and complicity. It was a trap, you see, it was as if Hilda was saying to me: “Yes it’s true we murdered your mother but try and think of me as your mother now.” This was why she was baking mince pies and talking about the butcher, she was acting as if she was my mother. It didn’t come naturally to her, that was clear from the way she handled the rolling pin. My mother was far more deft with pastry, far superior to this ham-fisted prostitute putting on an act in a kitchen not her own; also, my mother never handled food until she’d thoroughly scrubbed her hands. Then this “Nora’s down the butcher’s”—what was Nora to me? Did she really think I would eat meat that had been touched by Nora? It was a subtle piece of theater but I was too clever for her. “What are you smiling at?” she said, pausing in her boisterous pastry-rolling and brushing at a strand of hair on her damp forehead. “You really have turned into a most peculiar boy just recently, I don’t wonder your father’s worried about you.” Oh, she was good, in my head I was applauding her, she was just like a mother.

  She carried on this way until Nora came in from the butcher’s with the bird we were to eat for Christmas dinner. “Let’s have a look at it then,” said Hilda, wiping her hands on the apron once more. She snipped with the black kitchen scissors at the string tied around the newspaper the bird was wrapped up in. “Very nice, Nora,” she said when it lay there on the kitchen table, its plump pink skin stippled with points where the feathers had been plucked. Me, I had no interest in this carcass until Hilda thrust her hand up its arse and cried: “Where’s the giblets?”

  “Not there?” said Nora.

  “See for yourself!” And stepping aside, Hilda let Nora put her hand inside the bird. “He always leaves them in,” said Nora, “I didn’t think to look.”

  “Back you go and get our giblets, Nora. And the feet, and the head! What does he think, he can do us out of half our bird? And tell him, Nora”—Nora was halfway out the back door by this time—“if there’s any more nonsense I’ll be down to see him myself.”

  Shaking her head she turned the tap on and ran her hands under the cold water, then went back to filling her mince pies. I couldn’t help myself, I had to peer into the bird’s body: all I saw was a cavity in there, no organs at all, and it gave me a very queer feeling. I left the kitchen soon after and went down the cellar.

  I was in my room when my father got home from work, and of course the first thing Hilda told him about was the bird coming back from the butcher’s without any giblets, and how Nora had had to go back and get them. “What, no giblets?” said my father—I was sitting at the top of the stairs listening to this, barely able to suppress my laughter. Then he too stuck his hand inside the bird, as I thought he might. “What’s this then?” I heard him say, and I knew exactly what happened next: from out of the cavity he pulled a packet of dead leaves, all tied up with string, and when he opened it up little chips of coal fell out, a few birds’ feathers, some broken twigs, and right in the middle a dead rat!

  I spent that night, Christmas Eve, in the shed down the allotments. My father had guessed immediately who was responsible. “Where is he?” I heard him say, and a moment later he was stamping up the stairs. Then he was in the doorway of my bedroom, fairly trembling with fury, eyes blazing and bottom teeth pushed out. “Down the cellar,” he said, “now!”

  “Murderer,” I said. I was kneeling on the floor with my insects.

  “Now!” And with that he crossed the room in a single stride and, catching me by the collar, half dragged me across the floor. Down the stairs we went then, me in front, choking, him storming down behind me. When we reached the cellar door he let go of my collar for a moment, and that’s all I needed. Out through the kitchen past a bewildered Hilda and Nora, and into the yard, with him right behind me. “Get back here!” he shouted. The gate in the yard had been left open, fortunately for me, and I was through it in a flash and off down the alley. It was just getting dark; close to the end of the alley he caught up to me and crushed me against the wall and held me there, pinned to the bricks, while he tried to get his breath back. I went completely limp as he glared at me furiously. “Murderer,” I whispered, “murderer, murderer.” His frown darkened, he screwed up his features with perplexity—what was he to do about me, about what I knew? His breath grew more even, and I remained limp; his grip on me slackened slightly; I slipped out of his hands and again made a run for it. He chased me down to the end of the alley, but the spirit had left him, and as I darted off into the dusk, a fleeting, coatless, long-legged boy, he turned back, still in his shirtsleeves, and kicked in his anger at a dustbin standing against the wall. A black cat scrambled out from under the lid with a f
ishhead in its jaws and flickered away through the shadows. With his foot in some pain he hobbled back to the kitchen, where doubtless they talked about me for the rest of the night. I think, though, he must have taken off his boot and sock first, and found blood welling up under the nail of the big toe, turning it purple and black.

  If you’ve ever kept a journal you’ll know how some nights it’s almost impossible to squeeze out a single sentence, while at other times the words come flooding onto the paper hour after hour until you’re empty, and then it feels not that you’ve been writing but that you’ve been written? I will never forget the night I spent in my father’s shed. I had long since discovered how to break into it: you pried loose by a few inches the board to which the metal staple that took the neck of the padlock was screwed, and then you squeezed in through the crack and pulled the door tightly shut behind you, so the board slipped back into place. But before I went into the shed I spent some minutes kneeling in the potato patch. Nothing but black soil this late in the season, but it wasn’t the potatoes I was there for. She felt my presence, I know she did, there was a reaching up to me, it was quite distinct, as I knew it would be, such was the bond between us: that was something my father couldn’t destroy with his tarts and his violence, not a bond like that. As soon as I felt her I lay down flat on the soil and whispered to her, and I shall not write what I said. Darkness had fallen and it was rapidly growing colder; tonight it would freeze, and there had been some talk of snow. But no cold could touch me then, I whispered to her till I’d said all I needed to, then I squeezed myself into the shed.

  I knew where to find the matches and the candles, and I lit them all and placed them on the shelves and the floor until the place glowed like a church. Then I curled up in the armchair as best I could, wrapped in sacks to keep out the cold, and watched the candlelight flickering in the cobwebs up in the gloom of the rafters. After a few minutes I had to climb out from under the sacks and cover the case with the ferret in it: the way the light caught its glass eye made me uneasy. So there I lay curled in the old horsehair armchair, watching the cobwebs, and it’s strange to think of it now, for you’d expect me to have cried myself to sleep. But I didn’t, instead I lay there wide awake and clear-eyed, and oddly enough it was the idea of the spiders in the rafters watching over me that kept this Spider secure.

  I fell asleep. When I awoke, some hours later, a few candles still burned, and I had a moment of confusion and dislocation; then, faintly at first, but growing stronger every moment, a sense of peace and joy, for my mother was with me.

  My mother was with me, dim and shadowy to begin with but becoming more distinct with each passing second. She was standing before me in the candlelit shed among the tools and flowerpots and seed packets. Her clothes were cloyed and damp with the soil of the garden and her head was covered with a dark scarf, but how white her face was! Spotlessly white, healed, whole, radiant, and glowing! Those moments are woven deeply into the fabric of my memory—the candlelight, the webs shining in the rafters in the cold, though I was not cold, how could I feel the cold, wrapped as I was in the warmth and peace of her presence and the low, soft murmur of her voice, and above all the sense of plenitude I knew then, a plenitude I have searched for since and never found, not here in the empty streets of the East End of London, nor in the plains and mountains and cities of Canada, where I wandered alone and despairing for twenty years?

  Later I slept again, dreamless sleep, and I awoke early on Christmas morning still calm and joyful from her visit in the night. I squeezed out of the shed and along the path to where I’d go down to the Slates, and so through the streets, deserted and silent so early in the morning, curtains still drawn closed and behind them sleeping men and women and children; and it made me feel queer to be out on the streets while behind the curtains of dark and silent houses families still slept. In some of those houses lived children who went to the same school as I did, and in my mind’s eye I saw them curled up in bed with their brothers and sisters like little warm animals as the Spider loped by in the early morning.

  Soon I began running, for the day was cold, there was frost on the windowpanes, and the puddles on the pavement were skinned with ice and crunched under my boots. It was a clear day, the slate-gray of the early sky turning slowly bluish as I ran on. I was filled with a sense of exhilaration now, the glorious feeling of no longer being alone, no longer the stranded object and victim of my father’s house, for my mother was with me now, in a way she was flying with me through those cold streets down to the docks, and her presence inside me gave me courage and purpose and hope.

  Later, bored and tired, I made my slow way back to Kitchener Street, where else was I to go? Through the streets I trudged and now there was light and life and movement in the houses I passed, smoke drifted from chimneys into the cold clear air and there was pain in my heart as I glimpsed through parlor windows the glow of coal fires with children gathered around them and the doors closed and the windows closed and me with nowhere to go but number twenty-seven and nothing to look forward to but a belting in the coal cellar and a night in my bedroom without supper.

  Along the alley, down the yard, and in through the back door. My father wasn’t home, it was just Hilda; grim silence as I came in. “Here he is then. Lucky your father’s out, my lad, he’s off looking for you. Here’s your dinner.” She took it out of the oven and set it before me and I was simply too hungry to care, I ate it all, and she watched me in silence as I did so. Nothing was said about the rat.

  So I ate my Christmas dinner in the chilly silence of the kitchen, then went upstairs to my room and waited with no little dread for my father’s return. It was around eight when I heard his boots in the alley, and then he was coming down the yard; he’d been at the Dog and Beggar, I could tell, and this was not good, a belting was always far worse when he’d been down the Dog for drinking seemed to loosen his anger. In through the back door, while upstairs I sat waiting for the summons, making a deliberate withdrawal as I did so into the deepest recesses of the back part of my head, where only Spider could go. Then—nothing happened! I was not summoned! I heard the scrape of chair legs as he sat down at the table, and then the murmur of voices—the door was shut, so I don’t know what they were talking about, though I’m sure it was about me. My father never did come to the bottom of the stairs and call me down for my belting, and so that strange and in a way glorious Christmas passed.

  It was not hard, afterwards, to work out why I hadn’t been belted for the dead rat: they had to keep me sweet. For what prevented me from turning them in? Simply, the prospect of becoming homeless, though they didn’t know this. If I turned in Horace and Hilda I’d become a ward of the state, and be sent to an orphanage, and it was all too easy to imagine the sort of bullying that went on in such places, the loss of solitude, the regimentation. No, I was fond of my room in number twenty-seven, I took pleasure in my stark boy’s life, my insects, the canal, the docks and the river and the fogs; and now, in a way, I had my mother too. So no, I had no desire to trade my lot for the satisfaction of seeing those two swing, not yet anyway. But they didn’t know this, they couldn’t be sure just what I would do next, so it was in their interest to keep me sweet. Hence no belting.

  What I didn’t realize until later was that Hilda to some extent enjoyed the same advantage as me. She too, you see, wanted that roof over her head—a man who owned his house was a rare creature in those days, and Hilda, being who she was, and what she was, would certainly have taken this very seriously. Consider, then, how she must have crowed when my mother was murdered—when she realized that because it was murder she could secure her own place under that safe roof! She wouldn’t have taken the slightest interest in my father otherwise, of this I’m certain, she was a cynical, cold-hearted parasite, out to get what she could from a man over whom she now wielded the power, in effect, of life and death—for she, like me, could shop him whenever she chose, and if she was clever about it she’d avoid going to the gallows by hi
s side.

  At what point did my father realize what his position was? It seemed that the Canada story had been generally accepted, and as for Hilda’s constant presence in number twenty-seven, this might have caused scandal in a street less inured to immorality and corruption, but on Kitchener Street such goings-on were commonplace. On Kitchener Street men routinely dispatched their wives to Canada and brought in prostitutes to share their beds; or themselves went to Canada while other men moved in to take their places. It barely aroused comment. So by Christmas, then, it looked as if they’d got away with it, as long, that is, as I kept my mouth shut.

  I suppose my father finally understood the true state of affairs when Hilda came right out and told him. I didn’t actually hear her say it, but I remember watching him in the yard one evening, and it was clear that something of the sort must have occurred. When my mother was alive, you see, my father had always had a tendency, if he thought she was nagging him, of just walking out the back door. The habit was deeply ingrained in him, and so when I saw him go storming out (there’d been voices raised in the kitchen), I knew she had angered him. He stamped furiously down to the end of the yard, pulling on his jacket, but he stopped at the gate and seemed to become immobilized by indecision, unable either to go forward or turn back. I felt a little panicky when I saw this, I’m not sure why—I think maybe the only thing worse than having Hilda and Nora in the house (and I hated Nora almost as vehemently as I did Hilda, she was a corrupt and cynical little drunkard) was having them there without my father. He did at least represent some sort of security for me, and I felt that if I was thrown on the mercy of those two monsters I would surely perish. So I did not want to see him driven out, not at this stage (though this would change). It was dark outside, and it had just started to rain; he seemed then to come to a decision, for he turned back into the yard and made for the house; but after a few steps he once again lost his nerve, and instead of coming to the back door he went into the outhouse. As I sat there at the window I saw the faint glow of the candle he had lit as it seeped through the crescent-shaped hole in the door. It was raining hard by this time, and I could see the rain falling across the crescent of light, and I imagined my father behind that door with his trousers at his ankles and his elbows on his knees, and it occurred to me that we were both at that moment estranged from the women in the kitchen; and I wondered if his feelings at all resembled mine? Then I heard the toilet flush, the candle was snuffed out, and he emerged. He came back into the house shortly afterwards, and once more I heard the murmur of voices in the kitchen.