Spider

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 this? 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.

I’d been writing about the death of my mother. I’d been sitting at my table describing the events of that terrible night and the day that followed, and in the process the memories had somehow become more vivid than the immediate situation— that familiar running together of past and present had occurred, and I must have gone into some sort of a trance. For when I came to I found myself in Mrs. Wilkinson’s bedroom.

I don’t know how it happened. It was very late, the house was dark and silent, and she was fast asleep. She was wearing some kind of headscarf tied beneath her chin and her hair was in rollers. There was white cream on her forehead and cheeks, and in the glow from the bulb in the corridor it shone with a ghostly pallor. I don’t know how long I stood there, nor what I was thinking of; I only came to when she awoke with a shudder and started up, one hand groping for the lamp on the bedside table. “Mr. Cleg!” she cried. “For heaven’s sake, what on earth do you think you’re doing? Get back to your own room!” She began clambering out of the bed. When I reached the door I turned back, intending somehow to explain that which was then, and remains now, inexplicable. She was sitting on the side of the bed, a curious figure in her nightgown, curlers, and facepaint, gaping at me, and in some odd way vulnerable as she’d never been before; an emotion stirred within me, something strong, though how precisely to define it is beyond me. I paused in the doorway. She flapped a hand at me as with the other she covered a yawn. “Out! Out!” she cried. “We’ll discuss this in the morning!”

When I got back to my room I found the journal where I’d left it, open on the table with the pencil down its spine. I immediately replaced it in its hole, the grate behind the disused gas fire; and it was ironic, I thought, down on my hands and knees at the fireplace, keeping a journal was supposed to help me sort out the muddle I made between memory and sensation, and here it was simply increasing the confusion. I slept badly; my insides were still hurting, and there was much activity in the attic; later they began hauling trunks about. This was followed by a period of silence, and then I heard them outside my door. I must have tiptoed across the room half a dozen times and flung it open, but the wretched creatures, imps or whatever they are, were always too quick for me.

The next day it rained, and I thought seriously about going back to Kitchener Street. I don’t know what it was that prevented me—hardly the need to preserve in my memory some sort of aura about the place, some glow of innocence; Kitchener Street was blackly contaminated long before any of these events occurred, every brick of the place oozed time and evil, and not only Kitchener Street, the whole festering warren was bad, bad from the day it was built. So no, it wasn’t that, perhaps it was the very reverse of that, the prospect of seeing (as only I, only I, could see) how much darker the brickwork was, how much more it oozed, how much more it had absorbed of the moral squalor such an architecture invariably breeds in its tenants.

The allotment was a different story. After the rain stopped I once again made my shambling way up the hill to Omdurman Close, and so to the railway bridge. I was in fragile condition, but I managed to get across without mishap. A few minutes later I was standing at the gate of my father’s garden. A scarecrow stood among the potatoes (I must have missed it before), five feet tall, made of sacking stuffed with rags and tied off at the wrists and ankles with twine. Arms outspread, it was nailed to a crude cross of two-by-fours, and had clearly seen several seasons’ service: its clothes were weathered to a uniform gray-brown color, and the bowler that was perched atop the lumpy, eyeless head, and nailed to the backboard, was faded by rain and streaked with droppings. For some minutes we stared at one another, this creature and I, until a gust of wind came up and ruffled the loose sacking and gave me a start. It was hard not to notice that the ragged edges of the sacking were stained a blackish color. Overhead thick banks of gray cloud were moving in low from the river, and the wind was freshening; it occurred to me that we might have a storm. It also occurred to me to make a gesture of remembrance, so I gathered a small bunch of dandelions and a few sprigs of thistlegrass, and then (no one was about) I opened the gate and slipped down the path and scattered my simple bouquet on the potato patch. Then I stretched out flat on the soil.

After a few moments I felt stronger, so instead of going back the way I’d come I continued on down past the allotments to a steep path that gave onto a warren of streets and alleys that for some reason had always been called the Slates. Down the path I scrambled then stood a moment at the bottom getting my breath back. Off to the east I saw a long low line of factory buildings with thin chimneys drifting smoke, while to the south, two or three hundred yards away, there was a corrugated-tin fence. But where were the Slates? All around me the ground was scattered with bricks and rocks and lumps of concrete with shorn-off iron cables sticking out of them, and not far off the ground dipped to form a gully in which water had collected, bleak tufty patches of grass round the edges. Scraps of paper drifted across this waste-ground as I turned in every direction looking for the Slates. Had they gone? How could they have gone? Or was my memory playing me false again? Arduously I made my way back up the path to the allotments, then along to the railway bridge again. Had I completely misplaced the Slates in my mind? And if I had, was the rest of my “map” similarly faulty? Oh, this was worrying, this troubled me sorely. It had been a long day for the old Spider, and wearily he trudged home, coming in very quietly so as to avoid Mrs. Wilkinson, who would doubtless be wanting an explanation of his visit in the night.

The next day I went down to the river, to a pebbly strand where as a boy I used to watch the barges and steamers; in those days they ran on coal, and constantly coughed cloudy spumes of black smoke into the sky. You reached the strand at low tide by a set of tarry wooden steps beside an old pub called the Crispin. Down I’d go to sniff around the boats moored there, old battered working boats with smelly tarpaulins spread across their decks, all puddled with rainwater and green with fungus. Often I’d climb onto the deck and creep under a tarpaulin, in among the iron chains and the damp timbers, and settle myself in a thick oily coil of rotting rope—I loved to be alone in that damp gloom with the muted screaming of the gulls outside as they wheeled and flapped over the water. The Crispin was still there, and so were the tarry steps, though they looked unsafe now and I didn’t go down. But I peered over the edge, and the beached boats were there too, and across the water the cranes poked at the sky just as I’d always remembered them. This was some comfort, anyway; my geography wasn’t totally skewed.

I changed after my mother died. When she was alive I was a good boy, that is, I fell foul of my father’s temper now and then and had to go down the cellar, but there was nothing abnormal in this, all boys make mistakes and are punished. But before my mother died I was a quiet boy, solitary and pensive, who read a good deal; I had no friends among the children of Kitchener Street, and I tended to drift off by myself whenever I could, down to the canal, or down to the river, especially in damp and foggy weather. I was tall for my age, tall and thin and brainy and shy, and boys like this are never popular, particularly with their fathers, who look for hardy, masculine traits. Mothers are different in this regard, this is my observation; my mother certainly was. She came from a better family than my father, she married down, you see, and she appreciated books and art and music; she