Spider

by Patrick Mcgrath

  I stopped dead in my tracks and dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow. I had not been expecting to see her, not after so long, not after being disappointed so often. I ran past the shed to the top of the steps and gazed down at the tea garden. It was deep in shadow, for it was after five by this time and the sun was low in the sky. I stood at the top of the steps—to either side of me a squat brick post with a stone ball on top—and raked the area with my eyes. There!—by the tangled pile of branches and lumber in the far corner— surely I saw for an instant a figure slipping through the gloom! I came quickly down the steps, and then I was running across the field; reaching the wall I peered up the wooded slope that climbed to the higher terraces. Did I see her? I clambered up the slope, twigs and dead branches snapping beneath my boots. Halfway up I stopped and gazed wildly about me: a profound silence hung there in the trees, and it was too dark now to distinguish anything clearly. For several minutes I stood there, making no sound or movement; then I crunched back down to the field, which looked more desolate than ever as darkness rapidly came on. My immediate excitement subsided somewhat, and was replaced by a vague thrilling of anticipation, a sense that something momentous had just been set in motion. I went back across the field and back up the steps, gathering my tools on the way, and put them back in the shed before returning to Block F with the rest of the men.

  Ah, she tormented me, like they torment me. Listen to them now! Surely I must be damned and twisting in hell to endure this, surely I must be dead already, dead and gone, and this wrapped corpse of mine animated merely by some odd freak gust of ghoul’s breath, to endure this! And yes, she tormented me: in the months and years that followed, on countless occasions I caught glimpses as fleeting, as tantalizing, as the one I’ve described—that small slim figure in coat and headscarf, clutching her handbag and standing, say, in the dappled shade of the elm tree by the wall, on a summer afternoon, her head turned away, and me on my knees in a bed of cabbages or lettuce or spring onions, and I would drop my trowel, rise to my feet, and a moment later be leaping the rows of vegetables (thinking always, in my madness, this time, this time)—and finding only a mocking play of light and shadow as sunshine sifted through the canopy of leaves overhead. There was one summer, I remember, when her presence was especially vivid, when I would see her almost daily, and I even heard her say my name as I worked alone in the gardens, heard her whisper: “Spider! Spider!”—and I whirled around to nothing, nobody, silence. But late that summer—it must have been September, we’d had one of the best summers in living memory, and Ganderhill was so rich in fresh vegetables we were selling them to neighboring villages—late that summer there was a string of afternoons when I’d gaze south from the terrace and the sky was transformed: a bluish golden light of extraordinary intensity, a great broad strip of radiance centered on a point due south of my own precise position, was spread across the sky, filling somewhere between a sixth and a quarter of it from the horizon up as high as the eye could see—and I understood something, then, in my wonder at the sheer splendor and magnificence of the spectacle, of the nature of my mother’s presence in Ganderhill. Sad thing, though, that later in the year, in the late autumn and winter, when she stayed among the shadows and only came at dusk, I lost the insight, and felt again frustration and at times angry impatience that she could go on teasing and tormenting me like this. Yet I would rather have had her phantom presence than nothing.

  These then I call the good years, Spider at peace. In the evenings I played billiards with Derek Shadwell, and later (Derek died in Ganderhill) with Frank Tremble. I read the paperbacks that passed from hand to hand in Block F, very occasionally a newspaper, almost never did I listen to the wireless (large events were unfolding, apparently, during the early years, but I wanted no part of them). I held my mother’s presence close, in the back parts where I’d always held her, and mentioned her to no one, not even Derek when he was alive. I became a good gardener, and fresh vegetables being generally a scarce and valued commodity in Ganderhill my access to these goods contributed much to my status in the institution. Dr. Austin Marshall maintained an affable warmth toward me and almost always remembered my name when he came limping across the terraces with his cane. Often he had his dogs with him, a pair of large glossy-coated Irish setters toward which I displayed an affection I did not feel; I used to think with some pleasure of what John Giles would do to those dogs after he’d finished with the superintendent.

  (See me out on the landing now, both hands gripping the handle of the door to the attic stairs, shaking it and weeping brokenly as their laughter shrieks and howls about my ears, useless of course, it’s locked of course, so see me shuffle back to my table where I sink, stiffly crackling, onto my chair and reach for the tobacco to roll myself a fat one, I need it. It ebbs now as with trembling fingers I light my cigarette and get a good harsh mouthful down, feel it sucking down the pipe, pushing down the terror, emerging in thick cloudy coils and whorls into my one remaining lung where a worm lies dozing in the lower part, the segments of its plump white body heaped atop each other in a circular formation. Smoke rapidly fills the sac, is absorbed by grayish spongy tissue, enters the system of lacelike filaments that trace their forking circuits (still!) across the pulpy inside surface of my rind, and so to skull and brain. Nothing looks so bleak after a smoke.)

  Every afternoon at about four o’clock we would gather in the shed for a cup of tea, the half-dozen of us who worked in the vegetable gardens, with Fred Sims, our attendant. Sims was a quiet fellow who could be relied on to give us news. I remember the day he told us that the superintendent was retiring. Rain was pattering on the roof of the shed, we were inside on wooden boxes, us in our yellow corduroys, him in his black uniform and peaked cap, and the door was open. There was an uneasy shuffling at this piece of information; men in our position did not welcome change. “Retiring?” said Frank Tremble. “What, Dr. Austin Marshall?”

  Sims nodded, his eyes on the floor as he removed a shred of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. More shuffling. “Why’s that then, Fred?”

  He lifted his eyebrows and shrugged. “Too old, they want a younger man.”

  “Younger man, eh.”

  He took off his cap and scratched his head. He was very thin on top. “Seems they’ve picked him already,” he said. “Who is he, Fred?”

  “It’s a Dr. Jebb, from London.”

  “Jebb,” said Frank.

  “Never heard of him,” said Jimmy. “What’s he like then?”

  “He’s got new ideas,” said Sims.

  A very uneasy silence at this point, a good bit more shuffling of boots on floorboards. Around us in the gloom tools hung from nails in the walls, spades, rakes, forks, mattocks, hoes, trowels, shears. On the floor, battered watering cans, piles of flowerpots, stacks of wooden boxes. Shelves with bundles of markers held together by rubber bands, flats for seedlings, coiled hoses, balls of twine, knives, pencils, spoons, scissors, bales of netting, old newspapers. Strong smell of earth and dampness. Outside, a steady downpour of rain. “New ideas,” said Jimmy. “Looks like you’re out of a job then, Fred.” We had a good laugh about that, but even so there was planted in all of us, that afternoon, the seeds of anxiety, for none of us wanted change, not Frank, not Jimmy, not Sims, not me.

  (Derek, of course, didn’t live to see the changes that came with Dr. Jebb, and he was fortunate not to. I remember him once telling me that every time he smoked a cigarette his mother had to sleep with a sailor. Poor old Derek, his mother was dead, though of course I didn’t say this to him. We were playing billiards at the time, and the worst of it was, he said, shooting a cannon and sinking the red ball, he was smoking more than ever! I think it might have been this that finally drove him to it.)

  After the summer of splendid light, as I came to think of it, my mother’s phantom presence in Ganderhill became increasingly rare. That summer was the peak, the acme, in this regard, and there was even a period—a few days, no more—when the weather came under
the control of my own thoughts and actions. Those were exhilarating days, but the effort involved in maintaining splendid light proved in the end too much for me, so I slowly allowed it to slip away. After that, as I say, her appearances became more fleeting and irregular, and in the last years I barely glimpsed her more than three or four times, and always at dusk, in the vicinity of the old tea garden, now planted with beds of cabbages, spring onions and potatoes, with a line of cucumber frames along the south side.

  One day Sims told us that Dr. Austin Marshall had cleared out his office and left. There was a farewell banquet in the staff social club, where he was presented with a handsome wheelchair specially constructed in the Ganderhill workshop, for apparently his bad leg was now making it impossible for him to get around. There were speeches, and everyone was very moved. There was talk of a knighthood in the New Year’s Honors List.

  After this, a breathless pause, so it seemed, in Ganderhill, as we awaited developments. The news Sims told us was alternately alarming and reassuring. Jebb reportedly intended to hire more psychiatrists. On the other hand, he generously increased the tobacco allowance. Sims’ attitude toward the new superintendent was cagey and watchful, and so was mine.

  I was called to his office one morning at the end of June. I’d seen the man on the terraces, though only from a distance; not for him the tweeds, the dogs, the genial affability of his predecessor. No, Jebb stormed along in a turbulent cloud of purpose and vigor, which only served to deepen my foreboding; he wore a dark suit. I sat outside his office on a hard chair in the corridor, soil under my fingernails and clad in my yellow corduroys: I’d come straight from the vegetable gardens. I sat there for thirty minutes, not smoking, and finally the door opened and a group of senior attendants came shuffling out, looking grim. Dr. Jebb then peered at me from the doorway. “I won’t keep you a minute,” he said, and went back in, closing the door. Fifteen minutes later he called me in.

  The first shock: he told me to sit down, frowned at my file, lifted his head, took off his spectacles—and I was staring straight into eyes the same cold shade of blue as my father’s!

  I shrank back in my chair (a hard wooden one). He had the same hair as my father, black, lank, and oily, combed straight back off a narrow forehead and flopping about his temples: he frequently pushed a hand through it when he frowned. The same narrow nose, the same pencil-thin mustache neatly hedging the top lip, the same wiry build and tone of pent explosive energy: what jest was this? “You’ve been in Ganderhill,” he said, without preamble, and I was relieved to discover that his voice, at least, was his own, “how long?”

  I shuffled on my chair and cleared my throat. All I could seem to manage was a sort of helpless croaking sound. He frowned at me. “Almost twenty years, Mr. Cleg. You were very disturbed on admittance”—here he replaced his spectacles and read from the file—“ ‘negativistic... withdrawn... uncooperative... aggressive.’ You settled down fairly quickly, however, you formed friendships, became a steady worker, and for the last ten years you’ve held a position of trust in the vegetable gardens, a trust you haven’t abused.” He took off his spectacles again and glared at me with those familiar glacial eyes. “How would you like to try life on the outside?”

  This was what I’d dreaded. Even so, I had no response prepared. I stirred uneasily, I looked out of the windows, I looked at the walls: happily the naval battles were gone. “Well?” said Dr. Jebb, tapping on his desk with the point of a pencil: tap tap tap tap tap.

  Still I said nothing, still I squirmed there in perplexity and dismay. “Mr. Cleg,” he said, rubbing his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, “let me see if I can guess what you’re thinking. On the one hand”—he stopped rubbing, lifted his eyes to the ceiling, formed a steeple with his fingers and rested his chin on the peak—“on the one hand you’re anxious about leaving Ganderhill. You have friends here, a routine, work”—he began counting my blessings on his fingers—“a certain”—here he lifted his eyebrows, communicated irony—“seniority in the patient community, and a deep familiarity with the workings of the hospital.” (Hospital now, was it?) “To leave all this—to enter an unknown world— this is threatening, you sense the difficulties, the dangers that lie ahead—and you’re right, of course, there will be difficulties, your trepidation is perfectly understandable.” He laid his hands flat on his desk and glared at me with understanding. My own hands were behaving very strangely by this point, they appeared to be twisting round, rotating on their wrists, turning back to front: I pressed them between my thighs and clutched my sock for comfort. “On the other hand,” said Dr. Jebb, “you imagine what life must be like outside Ganderhill—without locked doors and high walls. You imagine how it must be to drink a glass of beer in the evening, meet women. The prospect goes some way to overcoming your apprehensions.” (Drink beer? Meet women?) “It is, I agree, a dilemma, please don’t think I’m unaware of this.”

  Some response, clearly, was expected of me, but I could not speak without smoking, and I could not smoke without speaking. After an uncomfortable few moments he resumed. “Mr. Cleg, let me see if I can sum up your career here. When you first came to Ganderhill you were a very sick boy; in fact you were displaying most of the classic symptoms of schizophrenia. You were hallucinating floridly in the visual, auditory and olfactory spheres; your affective reactions were bizarrely inappropriate; you suffered marked body delusions, you were regressed, you had ideas of persecution and thought injection.” He glanced at the file. “You were aggressive on the ward and frequently had to be isolated in a safe room, in restraints. You showed no awareness of your environment, nor any awareness of why you’d been brought to Ganderhill in the first place. My point is,” he said, closing the file, “that all that has changed.”

  “Changed,” I murmured.

  “Changed,” he said. “You have for the past ten years assumed a steadily increasing measure of responsibility for your own life. The hospital milieu has imposed demands on you, Mr. Cleg, demands relating to grooming, punctuality, competence, sociability, and cooperation; these demands you have met. Your therapy has been implicit in your daily round of tasks and contacts: there’s no more we can do for you.”

  “No more,” I said faintly.

  “I need your bed, Mr. Cleg.”

  My bed!

  “Ganderhill is overcrowded, and I find you are well enough to leave us. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t discharge you to community care?”

  “Yes!” I suddenly cried, without at all meaning to; shocked at my own temerity I fell silent.

  “And that is?”

  Silence.

  “That is, Mr. Cleg?”

  Nothing.

  “Mr. Cleg, I wonder if you trust your own ability to function adequately in society. Is this the problem?”

  Still nothing.

  “I think perhaps it’s time we talked about your mother.”

  “She’s none of your business!” I shouted.

  “Ah. So that’s it. None of my business.” He took off his spectacles; a small smile played about his thin bloodless lips, a smile I knew well from my boyhood, a smile that augured no good for me. “Mr. Cleg,” he said, suddenly serious and stern, “I am your responsible medical officer. None of your business is none of my business.”

  By the time I got back to the vegetable gardens the men were coming in for lunch, so I came back in with them. I was silent and morose in the dining hall, and they left me to myself. At about half past two in the afternoon I abandoned what I was doing (tending a bonfire of garden rubbish) and made my way up to the shed. I closed the door behind me, sat on a box, and with the knife we used for cutting the eyes out of potatoes for seeding I opened my wrists. Twenty minutes later Fred Sims found me there with my blood dripping into a flowerpot full of earth. They stitched me up in the infirmary, and by suppertime I was in a safe room on a hard-bench ward, wearing an untearable canvas gown and being very closely watched.

  I scribbled on through the
long slow hours of the night. I smoked thin ones almost continuously, lighting each from the butt of the one before. The worm in my lung did not waken, I believe as a result of the smoking. Sporadic outbursts from the attic, nothing I hadn’t endured before. I was very attentive to sensations from the empty space in my torso, for I now had reason to think it infested with spiders. I pictured webby constructions glistening in the darkness, damp silk traplines flung from breastbone to backbone, pelvis to rib. Scuttling creatures, weaving and spinning inside me— to what end? For six days I was on hard-bench, and after my ten years in Block F the shock was a rude one.

  It all came back to me. Doorless lavatories, the humiliation of being always visible, always accessible to hostile eyes. And the smells! Coarse bleach, most vividly, those chipped tile floors were mopped two, three, four times a day with boiling water and coarse bleach: there always seemed to be someone working his way up the corridor, or back and forth across the dayroom, with an old institution mop, its head a floppy tangle of gray hemp, and a tin bucket with a metal attachment on the inside lip and a handle that you depressed to make the teeth of the thing come together on your mophead and squeeze out the filthy water. I had forgotten too the daily humiliation of having to ask for the smallest quantities of the most basic suplies: a few sheets of toilet paper, a pinch of tobacco, a drop of hot water. Perhaps the request would be granted; but more usually you stood there shifting your weight from foot to foot as the attendant frowned with annoyance and told you to come back later—that, or he subjected you to a glance of cold appraisal, permitted a dead pause to occur, then ignored you—all for three hard sheets of toilet paper, for a few coarse strands of pale tobacco from the tin! Oh, civility is wasted on a lunatic, this was the message chiseled into the cold brick heart of Ganderhill, wasted on a lunatic on a hard-bench ward.