Spider

by Patrick Mcgrath

  When it was almost dark I made my way back up to the allotments. I saw no sign of my father, so I climbed the fence and approached what was left of the bonfire. The pit was still heaped with compost, and in the middle of it a round core glowed and smoldered in the gloom and crackled suddenly as the heat caught a stray twig or stick of straw and consumed it. Over by the shed all that was left was a patch of pale damp ground inside a wire-mesh fence. I unbuttoned my trousers and pissed into the smoldering compost, and as the piss hissed in the pit a column of steam rose into the darkness, stinking of charred manure.

  All this I remembered as I leaned on a garden fork in flapping yellow corduroys and gazed out over the Ganderhill wall, over farmland and wooded uplands, at fat white clouds kicking across a blustery blue sky one fresh autumn afternoon in the early 1950s.

  What else to tell you? Almost all I know about what happened at Kitchener Street I worked out during that period. For when I settled down and was able once more to think about that time—the terrible autumn and winter, I mean, of my thirteenth year, when my father first met Hilda Wilkinson—what I found was a jumble of partial impressions: scenes viewed from my bedroom window, scraps of talk overheard from the top of the stairs, mealtimes in that poky kitchen, and glimpses of my father at work in his allotment. But as regards the order and meaning of those scraps: that was what I pieced together, like a shattered window, in the quiet years that followed, fragment by fragment until the picture was whole. And oddly, as my childhood took shape, so did I, Spider, become more coherent, firmer, stronger—I began to have substance. Hard to believe, no? Hard to believe, given the sorry creature I am today, tonight, as I sit here scribbling (out of terror) in the crow’s nest of this shabby ship of a house and swamped, almost, by the surge and flood of sheer life that crashes round me—a fragile vessel I am today, but back then, it seems, building on the bedrock of routine, and bit by bit reconstructing the events of that time (the appearance of Hilda and the subsequent murder of my mother, the destruction of my home, and the tragedy that followed), back then I looked, for a while, before my discharge, like a man.

  Picture me then, a young man: Spider at twenty-five, tall and lean as I am today but there’s something about me—can you see it?—a vitality, a flame, even if it is a mad one, still it’s there, in the sheen of my skin, in my restless energy as I work in the vegetable gardens from morning to night, it’s there in my eyes—not like the dull filmed glaze that clouds the hollowed eyes of the Spider these days. A handsome man, even! See me in the gardens in shirtsleeves and yellow corduroys, a wiry, muscular figure turning the soil on that Sussex hillside, in that brisk air, framed against the sky—can you see me?—leaves swirl about me, red leaves, golden leaves, swirling down from the elm tree by the wall, and I pause in my work, I thrust my spade in the soil and turn, again, to the landscape I grew so to love, the sweep of the terraces, the cricket field, the perimeter wall with its old bricks glowing a soft rufous-red in the fresh clear air, and beyond the wall the farm and the hills, the trees a vivid slash of color this autumn afternoon. Oh, out with the Rizla, and the paper flutters wildly between my fingers as the tin of Old Holborn appears, and the wind molds the rough fabric of the gray asylum shirt to the bones of my lean trunk, and the thick yellow corduroy flaps about my shanks! Tonight you see me in decay, a brittle bulb housing a flickering, faltering coil, but in those days I had a body, and a vigorous spirit burned inside it!

  But enough, enough of this pathetic nostalgia, this romantic drivel. What am I saying, that I was a hero? Standing on my windy hillside, clutching a spade? A hero? This lunatic? I lived among the criminally insane, and I knew routine, community, and order. Whatever strength or structure I had, it came from without, not within, and if you need proof of that then look at what’s happened since my discharge—look at me now, scribbling out of terror in this lonely room, engaged in some pitiful attempt to drown out the voices from the attic. And not even institutional structure was enough at times! At times the Spider collapsed, the whole flimsy scaffolding came to bits and he fell, poor fool, he tumbled to earth with a crash, and awoke in a safe room with his shell all in pieces around him.

  But the important thing is that slowly I pieced together an account of what happened, and as the story grew firmer then I grew firmer with it. Conversely, when the story collapsed then so did I, but I rebuilt, I rebuilt, and each time the edifice grew stronger, better buttressed, the struts and braces pulling it together till it was tight, till it was whole. And so was I. And then they discharged me.

  There’s irony here, as you will learn. Much was changing; there were pills now, for people like me, and there were also changes afoot in Ganderhill—most notably, the departure of the medical superintendent, Dr. Austin Marshall.

  Dr. Austin Marshall was a gentleman, a tall, kindly gentleman in well-tailored tweeds who walked with a limp as a result of a motorcycle accident in medical school that had left him with a steel pin in his hip. A gentleman: it was a rare day I didn’t see Dr. Austin Marshall limping across the terrace, and he had a kind word for each man he encountered; he remembered one’s name, too. “Ah, Dennis,” he would say, pausing to lean on his stick. “How are we today?” He would turn his head to the south and gaze out over that magnificent view, a squire, so he seemed, surveying his demesne. “Good day to be out on a horse,” he’d say. “What about that, Dennis? Fancy a canter, do you? Of course you do!” He’d pat me on the arm and then chuckling gently off he’d limp, and on encountering another inmate he’d again stop, again turn his head to the south and, addressing the man by name, again make his friendly remarks about horseback riding. His conversational gambits were few, but the warmth behind them was genuine; he was a fine medical superintendent, and we all loved him, with the exception of John Giles, who tried to murder him whenever he could.

  I rise to my feet and stare out of the window. The first pale suggestion of dawn is apparent, a faint gray smudging out there over the North Sea somewhere. All is quiet in the attic now and my terror has abated, to some extent. My relationship to this book is changing: when I began to write I intended to record the conclusions I’d arrived at about the events of the autumn and winter of my thirteenth year; and in the process I thought I’d buttress and support myself, shore up my shaky identity, for since being discharged I have not been strong. But all this has changed; I write now to control the terror that comes when the voices start up in the attic each night. They have grown worse, you see, much worse, and it is only with the flow of my own words that I am able to block out the clamor of theirs. I dare not think of the consequences were I to stop writing and listen to them.

  And so began another day. I no longer knew which was worse, day or night. The silence and solitude of the night had once been my haven, my safe place away from the eyes and the voices and the thought processes, which seemed to be most active when others were awake in the house. Now I dread nightfall, for those damn creatures in the attic give me no rest. I was out there on the landing a few minutes ago, shaking the handle of the door that gives onto the attic stairs—no good, of course, it’s always locked. They’re her creatures, I must not forget this, this is why the door is always locked; but surely I can think of some way of getting at her keys?

  I smoke until breakfast time, watching the sky. Banks of billowing blue-gray cloud—this will be a damp day, today the rain will be spitting. I am wearing all my shirts and on top of them a black polo-neck jersey, and on top of that the jacket of my shabby gray suit. Suit trousers, thick gray socks (two pairs), and a large pair of thick-soled black leather shoes with ten close-set lace holes (eyelets) and a sort of flameshaped strip of leather stitched around the toecap and pricked with decorative perforations. Asylum shoes, these, made by the Ganderhill cobbler. I also have strips of brown wrapping paper and thin cardboard taped to my legs and torso, which crackle when I move.

  Breakfast was uneventful—dead, fishlike eyes over porridge bowls, the usual squeaky farts. Then straight out into the spittin
g rain, and off toward the canal, and the streets, thankfully, were empty save for the odd hurrying figure with an umbrella and a blind girl tapping along with her cane. I was noticing details of the world that were new to me, how the corrugated tin that fenced off a patch of wasteground was sharpened at the tips, like a line of spears; the way a brick wall had had bits of broken bottles set in a bed of concrete on top, and painted beneath it in large black letters the words no rubbish. There were weeds sprouting from the concrete, stiff, thistlelike growths, hardy, bristling things. Then under the viaduct, its arches stained black by the rain, and I was damp now, I could smell the dampness on me. A wind was blowing, there was dog shit on the pavement. From a wall dangled a piece of striped cloth and as the wind caught it it flapped at me, a message of some sort. I paused at the main road and waved the traffic on, waved it past me until I could cross over. I seemed to be making for the river; I’d thought I was going to the canal.

  The wind was stronger by the river, I had to button my jacket and turn up the collar. I found a bench: two concrete uprights each with a protruding arm to which the three gray-scarred greenish planks were bolted, three more bolted to the uprights for your back. It was damp, I didn’t care, I was damp. In front of me a rusty black railing then the river, gray-green and running strong and choppy in the wind. A structure of wooden pilings a few yards out. On the far side a terrace of houses beneath a forest of cranes leaning drunkenly in all directions as if about to collapse. Gray sky, the great bellying rolls of clouds ponderously pushing east before the wind. The drizzle is a haze that mists me, makes me damp, makes the black wool jersey smell strange. Out with the tobacco, and with the first good lungful comes the thought: today I shall try her room again.

  I came in from the river very damp, late in the afternoon, and went straight upstairs. I had had an idea that I might cross the canal, that I might go to Kitchener Street, finally see what it looked like, twenty years later; but once again something inside me—some deep-seated anxiety, some reluctance, or fear—would not allow me to set foot on the bridge, and I’d followed my usual route along the canal and so back to the house. Now I stood at my window and smoked a fat one as the light thickened and the crows flapped their wings in the bare branches of the trees in the park, and as I did so I heard the front door slam and a moment later I saw her going off down the street with a shopping bag on her arm. I stubbed out the roll-up in the tin I use for an ashtray and made my way quickly to her bedroom. This was something I’d done a few times now, whenever I knew for certain that she was out of the house. This time her door was unlocked; so without any hesitation I went in.

  Nothing unusual at first glance. You know what a messy woman she is, how she leaves her underwear all over the room, how she clutters her dressing table with cosmetics and so on, how she never makes her bed: clearly the years have gone some way to repairing these sluttish habits, for this room was neat and tidy, the bed made and not a scrap of underwear in sight. I quickly went through the chest of drawers and found nothing of interest, nor was there anything on or in the bedside table. There were, I noticed, three framed pictures on the walls, two scenic views of the Lake District and over the bed a Madonna and Child. At that point I came back out onto the landing to make sure she hadn’t returned: no sound, only the muted tones of dance music from the wireless in the dayroom. Then back in again, and over to the large dark wardrobe that stood against the wall facing the door. As I stealthily approached I found myself reflected in its long mirror, still in my damp black polo-neck jersey and shabby gray suit; and what a queer furtive creature I looked, tiptoeing long-legged across this gloomy bedroom, what a spider!

  I paused at the wardrobe, a hand on the door, and turned my head, once more to listen to the house, for five, ten, fifteen seconds: nothing but the faint, far-off wireless music. I opened the wardrobe—and there it was, the first thing I saw, though it was pushed way down to the end of the rack and almost concealed: that ratty old fur of hers.

  Then I heard the front door slam (fortunately it’s a door that’s hard to close quietly) and I rapidly crept away, leaving the room just as I’d found it, crept back to my own room, and, by this time literally trembling with emotion, stood at my window and tried to stay calm.

  There I stood for many minutes, my left arm pressed across my chest and the fingers clutching a bony shoulder, and between the still-trembling fingers of the other hand a fat one, I needed it. Slowly the trembling grew less violent, and as that happened the damp smell of the wool jersey rose once more to my nostrils, and finally I shook my head, shook off the last of the emotion, and took off my jacket. I hung it on the back of the door, then off with the ill-smelling jersey. But the odor persisted, and it was only then that I recognized it as gas.

  It was a long night. I still don’t know how I got through it, for it was probably the worst one yet. Despite further layers of brown paper taped to my torso, despite the layers of vests and shirts and jerseys on top, the smell of gas was with me until dawn. Of course I had the journal, and this alone, I believe, saved me from doing harm to myself or anybody else. A new strategy from the creatures in the attic: I kept my light on all night of course, and the bulb crackled at me as it usually did, and I paid it no attention—until, that is, the crackling grew suddenly loud, as it had in Kitchener Street the night I’ve described, but this time it was the voices that had taken over, and were producing a sort of chant that came out of the bulb, and the chant went: KILL her kill her kill her kill her KILL her kill her kill her kill her. At this I sat up rigid from my writing and focused my attention on the bulb, but when I did that the noise immediately decayed to a stat-icky buzz and I lost it. Back to work then, though as soon as I was absorbed in the writing the crackle again resolved to that terrible chant, and again I stopped, up came the head, and the chant turned to laughter that slowly faded away and all there was then was a faulty light bulb in an ill-wired house, and a desperate man tormented by messages that issued from he knew not where, the attic above him, the light bulb over his head, or some deep hole in the back reaches of his own sick mind. Oh it was a bad night, may I never, ever see the like of it again.

  Toward dawn it grew less intense and I paused, rolled a cigarette, looked over the pages of my book. They were scribbled and smudged, covered with words I had no real interest in reading, not now that the night was almost over. Something was happening to my handwriting, there was a definite slant and flow to it now, it was now a hand and not merely the cramped markings of a man who had read much but written little. It was a fluent hand, the hand of a writer, and in other circumstances, I reflected, I might have regarded these writings with satisfaction, with pride, even. But the circumstances of composition permitted me no such complacency; I took heart only from the faint gray hint of dawn tentatively fingering the eastern sky, and the promise it brought of some respite from these torments, at least for the few brief fleeting hours of daylight. Somewhere in the house a toilet flushed, the pipes rumbled, and in my mind’s eye I saw a dead soul in threadbare, grubby pajamas emerging from a lavatory with bleary eyes crusted with yellowy sleep-matter, foul of breath and yawning stupidly, and shuffling back to his narrow bed to slip again into the sweet oblivion of sleep; and at that moment I would have traded a hand, or an arm— or an arm and a leg!—to be a dead soul with an empty mind and the sweet possibility of sleep before me. To be awake is to be available to torment, and this is the full complete meaning of life.

  And would I today return to Kitchener Street, I asked myself, once more picking up my pencil? What would I find there? Would it bring me peace, or relief, to stand outside number twenty-seven, to see some stranger’s lace curtains drawn across the parlor window? Perhaps a new coat of paint on the front door, and the fanlight over it, the setting sun, scrubbed clean of the dust and grease that congealed there after Hilda moved in? Would I make my spidery way down the alley at the back, pause by the dustbins, perhaps dare to push open the gate into our yard, and see someone else’s washing flapping on
the clothesline, someone else’s bicycle leaned against the outhouse, in which, perhaps, the water still came up to the rim of the toilet when you pulled the chain, and sometimes slopped over? What would this do for me? Perhaps I’d turn away, shuffle down to the end of Kitchener Street, slip into the Dog and Beggar and nurse a half of mild by the fire. Cast surreptitious glances at Ernie Ratcliff, in his fifties now but weaselly as ever with his quick thin hands and his oiled hair and his damnable subtlety—though he wouldn’t recognize me, no, he wouldn’t see in this shabby ruin the shy lad who used to come looking for his dad when dinner was ready, he wouldn’t see that at all, he’d see a slow sad man, broken by mental illness and with barely the coppers in his pocket to buy the smallest glass of the cheapest beer in the meanest pub in London!