Remember Why You Fear Me

by Robert Shearman

  Then he went upstairs to her wardrobe, and pulled out all of Janet’s clothes. He didn’t smell many, he didn’t stroke them—well, maybe one or two. He pulled out her favourite summer dress.

  He put all her belongings into a big heap on the sitting room floor. Like a funeral pyre, waiting for a light.

  And then he said goodbye to his wife. And he cried. Without sound, but it was real, and it was long, and it hurt.

  He hurt. And he grieved. And he let Janet go. He let every trace of her go.

  He went to the bathroom mirror to wash his face. He knew now it wouldn’t be his face looking back at him. He knew, too, that it wouldn’t be his wife’s. And he was so tired, so very tired.

  He looked at her. He tried to look away. Tried to blink, even—but he wasn’t able to blink, he wasn’t able to close his eyes, and they opened wide and large and sore.

  She wouldn’t let him close his eyes. She wanted him to see her at last. She wouldn’t let him not see.

  He felt his eyes harden from lack of moisture. Felt little cracks appear in them. There was no water in his head left, he’d wasted it all, he’d wept it all away. She’d taken Janet’s life, and now she was taking his, and she didn’t care, she didn’t care, she never had, and he wanted his eyes to crack, let them fissure, let them pop. But they didn’t, they didn’t.

  “And now,” he said, and he smiled, and the smile was big and broad and sticky. “Now, let’s have some fun.”

  CUSTARD

  CREAM

  She said that she didn’t love you anymore, and this time you actually believed her. For once it had the whiff of truth to it—because oh, yes, she’d often say she didn’t love you, but you’d always known better; she’d shout it out sometimes, loud so the neighbours could hear—though she didn’t care, why should she care about such stuff when she had a strop on?—at the very top of her voice she’d scream that she didn’t love you and that she’d never loved you and that she just wished you’d go away. You’d beat a retreat then. Of course you would. You might nip to the pub for a pint or three, wait until she’d simmered down. And by the time you’d come back home, opening the front door very softly and creeping about on tiptoes—yes, you know the drill!—she’d be sobbing in the kitchen, so much easier to reason with, so much more pliable—all the venom out of her now, all that’s left the tears and snot. And you’d take her hand and squeeze it, but gently this time, you didn’t want to hurt her, and she might even squeeze back—but even if she didn’t, even if she didn’t, it was okay, you’d know it was okay, the shouting had stopped, you’d already won.

  But there’d been no shouting this time. “Steve, I don’t love you anymore,” she said, as calmly as you like, as if she’d been practising, as if she’d been taking lessons, and then she was the one holding your hand, giving your hand a squeeze, and looking so sympathetic you thought it might make you puke. And it wasn’t the quietness that alarmed you, sincere though it made it sound—it was the ‘anymore’, I don’t love you ‘anymore’, not pretending that she’d never loved you at all, in fact suggesting that there had been love once, accepting the basic fact of her love from the get go, accepting that all those other times she’d wanted you out of her life were just melodramatic freak-outs. But now it was real. This time it was real. It was real. And it was the ‘anymore’ that clinched it and finally did your marriage in.

  But “Why?” you couldn’t help but ask. And she said you were useless. You were good for nothing. And there was no blame to it, she wasn’t accusing you, and so there was no way you could defend yourself. “Not useless at everything, surely?” you said, and you waggled your eyebrows at her, that would surely make her laugh, it always did, your little jokey attempts at seduction, it was only by joking you’d ever got her into bed. The way you’d pull your kissy face. Now she just stared at the kissy face as if she’d never seen it before, as if it were, what, something horrible like a stroke symptom. She conceded that you weren’t useless at everything. She’d been a little unfair. She thought for a moment, and said you were good at getting rid of the spiders.

  You actually laughed at that. Just a bit. But she wasn’t joking.

  And later that evening, staring up at the hotel room ceiling before turning out the light, and replaying the conversation in your head, and trying to work out what you should have said to make it end better, later on, you thought, well, fair enough—fair enough, you are good at getting rid of spiders. There’s a certain elegance to it even. The way you can sweep them up into a glass, quickly, without fuss, without snapping off any of their legs. Keeping your hand flat over the mouth of the glass so the spider can’t escape. Tipping the spider into the toilet bowl and flushing it away. You don’t think the spider ever suffered much—it looked only a bit bemused as it bobbed about treading water, then a good yank at the chain and it was sucked down the whirlpool and it was gone forever—and you’d tried to be kinder still, you used to tip the spider out of the window so it could live on in peace in the garden, but Sheila hadn’t liked that, she said the spider would find a way back in, the spider had to die—flush it away so there’d not even be a body. Because Sheila was scared of spiders, properly scared, and it was a real fear, you know, pretty phobic.

  And you hadn’t even noticed it when you were courting, maybe she was just braver then, maybe she was keeping it a secret—and as you stood at the altar, the vicar talking, “Do you, Steven Edward Baird,” and asking the congregation whether there was any just cause or impediment, not one of your in-laws raised their hands, not one said, “Don’t go through with it, mate, she’s mental for spiders!” Mental for spiders indeed; after you’d used a glass to scoop the spider up she’d throw the glass away so she’d never run the risk of drinking from it, of her lips touching where a spider’s body had been—you’d get through a lot of glasses that way, she bought them in bulk cheap at the discount store in town. Because your house certainly did seem to attract a lot of spiders; more than your fair share, surely; every morning, more or less, you’d find one or two of the buggers in the bath or the sink, and there’d be telltale traces of cobwebs in the corners of the rooms and Sheila would just stare at them in dread until you’d get a broom and brush them away—and, oh, Sheila couldn’t sleep in a room that had a spider in it, there was no telling what a spider might get up to in the dark. Sometimes, you have to admit, that was when you could lose your temper. Sometimes, when it was late at night, and you were tired. Sometimes, but you could hardly be blamed for that.

  Especially when the rest of the time you were good, you’d get rid of the spiders for her, you’d be her knight in shining armour. Even if you were her knight for only a couple of minutes each day. Or rather, you had been her knight in shining armour; but now she preferred you disposed of them without her knowing, she didn’t want to know a thing about it, you had to enter rooms and check them in advance, and subtly too, she needed you to check them but needed you to never to acknowledge you were, even mentioning the word ‘spider’ was enough to set her off itching. It was no good telling her that spiders couldn’t hurt her. No good saying they were more scared of her than she was of them—particularly this last, “Well, why do the bastards keep following me around then?” And it really wasn’t a clever idea chasing her around with a spider in your hands, just for fun—”look, it’s only a little one!”—telling her you were going to put it down her neck. That had been on the honeymoon. She’d hit you with a bottle. You’d needed stitches. It had been so awkward explaining what had happened to that clinic in Marbella.

  But since she’d brought it up, you said to her, “Well, if I go, what will you do about the spiders?” And she said that Laura would have to get rid of them—and that was a joke, Laura, your four year old daughter, on her way to becoming an arachnophobe as bad as her mother—and little surprise of that the way Sheila carried on. You’d told Sheila that once, you told Sheila she was going to give Laura a complex, she already refused to sleep with the lights off in case th
e spiders came to get her—”you’re damaging our daughter!”—and you thought Sheila would be so angry, you thought she might hit you, or at least try to hit you, but instead it was worse. It was worse, she just sat down and cried. Oh, she must have recognized the truth of it. And now, as soon as Laura was mentioned, Sheila could tell she’d made a mistake—”It doesn’t matter, does it, we’ll sort it out,” she said, and waved her hand at you dismissively—as if you were the one making a fuss about spiders, as if it were your insanity, not hers—”Laura and I will cope without you, we’ll cope better without you.”

  She told you she didn’t love you anymore, and this time she made you believe her. And that’s why you straightaway go and pack your suitcase, numb as you are, and embarrassed too—putting in the clothes you thought you’ll need, shirts, trousers, socks, what else? Underpants. She tells you there’s no rush, in that sympathetic way of hers, but there is a rush, you want to get out of the house as soon as possible, you think the faster you go the more sorry she’ll feel for you, the quicker she’ll tell you she wants you back. You carry the suitcase out to the car, and you’ve perhaps packed too much, what did you think you were doing, you’re not going on holiday!—and you should have used the new suitcase, the one with the wheels, but it’s too late now. And maybe you actually enjoy staggering under the weight of the case, maybe that feels good. You see she’s looking out of the window at you, and you pretend you haven’t noticed, she actually waves at you, and you don’t respond—where’s Laura? Couldn’t Laura have come to wave you off too? And you suppose there’ll be solicitors and things to deal with now, there’ll be all sorts of shit to arrange, but there’s a part of you that knows too, isn’t there, that you’ll never see your family again? That this is it? Which is stupid, because you’ll probably see them tomorrow, maybe you’ll pop back, you can at least swap suitcases. But as you pull off the drive, as you hit the main road, still not looking at Sheila, seeing through Sheila, you know this’ll be the last glimpse of your wife you’ll ever get and it isn’t nearly good enough.

  You’ve never needed to look for hotels near your house before, and suddenly they seem to be everywhere. And you wonder why, who would want to holiday in a town like yours? You could stop right away, but you want to drive for a bit, and you put on the radio, and you listen to a song, and you say you won’t stop the car, you won’t even consider a hotel, not ’til the radio plays a song you like. And after an Elton John and something by a girl group you’ve never heard of you say that’s enough, that’s enough, the very next hotel you see. And there’s one, and it looks fine, it even has a nice gravel driveway that makes that nice crunching sound when your car drives over it, it’ll do.

  The girl at reception seems to be too young to be working there. She asks you how long you want to stay. You say you don’t know. You say just one night, then you’ll see how it goes. She tells you there’s a special off-season discount, four nights for the price of three. She doesn’t make it sound special, not with that bored voice she’s got, she doesn’t care whether you take the discount or not. You take it. She gives you a key. It’s not like one of those swish electronic keys from that posh hotel you went to with Sheila on that last holiday of yours—and that was a good holiday, remember, you didn’t argue once, no one got angry—and when was that anyway, it must have been before Laura, that was years ago—sorry, no, the receptionist is still talking, but it’s just about what time dinner is served, and you don’t care, you’re not hungry and you may never eat again, and you turn the key over in your hand and it’s just an ordinary Yale key, old-fashioned, and old-fashioned feels reassuring somehow, and you like the feel of the key’s teeth biting into your skin. The receptionist tells you you’re in room five, you say that’s fine, she tells you it’s right down the corridor, and you say fine, and you go right down the corridor to find it.

  The room is small. There’s no bathroom, just a sink in one corner. A cracked mirror is above it. There’s a little TV set on a table, one of those old-fashioned TVs, it’s got an aerial on top, it wouldn’t surprise you if it were black and white, and now old-fashioned doesn’t feel reassuring, it just feels somewhat cheap. The ceiling is polystyrene tiles, the walls are breezeblock. A small square window, it doesn’t open. A lamp on each side of the bed, but no tea service, no phone. And the bed is big, and that’s good, but it feels hard, and that isn’t—hard, and cold, and maybe a little damp, and maybe it’s because of that cold, maybe it’s because you let a little warm air in when you entered.

  You decide you’ve changed your mind about the four nights for three discount. You’ll tell the receptionist in the morning. Provided she hasn’t left for school.

  You take your clothes off. You wished you’d packed some pyjamas. You shiver. You look at yourself in the cracked mirror and you don’t see what looks so bad, not really, you can’t see why Sheila wouldn’t want you. You even wiggle your eyebrows. You don’t bother with the kissy face.

  You lock the door, take out the key, put it on the bedside table. You wash. You climb into bed. You lie on your back, think about the day, about your marriage, think about whether if you had a job to get up for in the morning Sheila would still say you were useless. You stare up at the polystyrene ceiling and think right at it, direct all your thinking into it, hard—you count the indentations in it, there are grooves in the polystyrene, random, mostly shallow, it looks like the previous occupants of the room must have thrown things up against it for fun. You wonder whether it’d be fun if you did the same, leave some marks of your own. You think yes, maybe, maybe in the morning. You turn off the light. You pull the covers up. You sleep.

  You wake, and it’s still dark outside—and normally you’d just close your eyes and go back to sleep, you’ve made yourself a nice warm patch in the bed, but there’s an unfamiliarity about the surroundings that disturbs you, and you remember you’re in a hotel room, and remember why you’re in a hotel room, and something churns inside.

  Reach across to the watch on the bedside table. The clock face glares at you. It’s a little after three o’clock.

  Your stomach churns again, and you realize it’s hunger. You should have had something to eat last night after all. You wonder whether they’d do room service—no, not in a little hotel like this, not in the middle of the night. Besides, there’s no phone, is there, no phone. Is there a kettle in the room? With sachets of tea and coffee and powdered milk, because sometimes they put a digestive biscuit in there. Sometimes even a custard cream. But there wasn’t a kettle in the room. You saw there wasn’t when you first came in.

  You stare up at the ceiling. And see the bulge.

  You don’t think about the bulge for a bit, you’re still thinking about the existence or non-existence of the kettle and its powdered milk and its potential attendant biscuit possibilities. But you start to focus upon the bulge, try to work out the shape of it. Is it even really there? It’s black on black. It’s not over your head, it sags down towards your feet. It looks to you like the ceiling is bending inwards somehow, as if a sheet of wallpaper has come free, and is dangling there limp—but no, not quite like that, because the bulge tapers back up to the ceiling again, it’s as if the wallpaper instead has an enormous air bubble in it. Hanging over you, wetly, because your eyes have adjusted, you can see now this black is a different black, there’s something oily about it—and it’s moving ever so slightly, it’s rippling. It’s peculiar what shadows can do.

  And besides, you remember, there is no wallpaper on the ceiling.

  You wonder whether maybe there’s a kettle after all. Custard creams, you could at least look. And you reach out for the bedside lamp. You blink from the light.

  It’s important you don’t exaggerate what it is you see.

  The spider does not fill the entire ceiling. It’s not that big. It might fill three quarters of it—and that’s because its legs are outstretched at the moment. If it were hunched up properly, the way spiders usually sit, it’d take up no mo
re than two thirds, maybe.

  Mind you, you freeze.

  The first things you think of gives you flashes of relief. The spider isn’t directly above you. It’s mostly on the other side of the room. If you sat bolt upright now, you wouldn’t even touch it. If you were sitting on the end of the bed, though, you suppose there’d be contact, you suppose the top of your head would be grazing its belly. But you’re not doing that. You’re not doing that, so that’s all right.

  (Belly? Abdomen? Is that the right word? Um. Thorax?)

  The second thing is—it looks like an ordinary spider. It doesn’t have any strange colours on its body. No weird markings. You saw a documentary once, you think, or maybe it was a comic book movie, and it said that the really poisonous spiders had weird colourful markings on them, the nasty foreign ones. This is just a regular black spider—you can see bits of colour on it, certainly, but that’s because it’s so very big and you’re so very close to it, be reasonable—the abdomen (yes, you think, it is abdomen) is fleshier than you might have thought, there are lines of red veins on it. No, this is an ordinary spider, a safe spider, a house spider. Ordinary, of course, in the sense you ignore the fact it’s ten-foot long from side to side.

  You watch the spider, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Maybe, you think, it’s asleep. Its body heaves a bit, but that’s just regular breathing, isn’t it? Or snoring.

  You strain to hear. But the spider isn’t making a single sound.

  You think you’re coping with this really very well indeed. Well done. Sheila would probably be panicking.

  Your brain tries to send you another message of comfort. It’s not over your head, it’s not poisonous, Steve, you’re fine. You realize that the brain is trying a bit too hard, it’s doing its best to stop you from screaming. (Why shouldn’t you scream? No, don’t scream. Don’t scream. The spider. The spider wouldn’t like it. You won’t scream then. Good. Good. Don’t scream. Don’t scream.)