Spider

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.

I think what distressed me most after Hilda moved into number twenty-seven was seeing my mother’s clothes being worn by a prostitute. It was not only the idea of trespass and violation, there was the daily spectacle of what happened to the clothes when Hilda put them on. My mother was a slender woman, she had a slim, delicate figure, boyish almost, whereas Hilda was all curves, she was fleshy. So my mother’s clothes were tight on her, and became as a result provocative; what had been demure on my mother was tarty on Hilda, but then that was the nature of the woman, everything she touched in some way became tarty.

I began, I remember, to watch her, for she provoked in me a sort of appalled fascination. It’s difficult to talk about this, but to see the dresses, the aprons, the cardigans that still, for me, carried the aura of my mother, to see them transfigured, charged with the sort of physical invitation that was stamped on all Hilda’s gestures, all her speech, the way she walked, the way she swung her bottom—this affected me strongly. Often I followed her when she went shopping, or in the evening when she would slip on that mangy fur and go clicking down the alley in her heels, my mother’s lipstick on her mouth, my mother’s underwear next to her skin, my mother’s husband on her arm—I’d slip down the alley behind them, move (like an African boy) from shadow to shadow, silent, invisible, a phantom, a ghost. When they drank in the Earl of Rochester I watched them through the windows, I was outside in the cold and darkness, and I peeped in at them as they basked and drank in the bright, sociable warmth of the bar. I found a way into the yard at the back of the pub and this gave me access to the windows of the lavatories; standing on a barrel I would look down on Hilda when she came out to the Ladies, I’d see her with her underpants at her ankles and her dress hitched up, her bottom not touching the toilet seat; then, having wiped herself, it was out with the compact and a quick go with my mother’s powder and lipstick. She never saw me, though once, I remember, as I craned on tiptoe to see what she was doing, the barrel wobbled beneath my feet and she looked up—but not before I’d ducked my head and regained my balance. As I say, I experienced a sort of appalled fascination at the sheer brazenness of the creature, I watched her as you might some exotic wild animal, with a mixture of awe and fear, and a sense of wonder that such a form of life could exist. She was a force of nature, this is how I thought of her at the time.

As for my father, for him my contempt knew no bounds. He was no exotic, no force of nature; in a barbaric and cowardly rage he had murdered my mother and now he was enjoying the tainted rewards of that act. He would sit there in the Rochester grinning and simpering as he sipped his mild, a furtive, grinning man, a weasel with blood on his twitchy paws, secretive, crafty, lascivious, cruel, and malignant. I had reason to hate him, had I not? He murdered my mother and turned me bad in the process; he infected me with his filth, and the hatred I bore him was intense.

For a time I made a pretence of going off to school in the morning, though after a week or two I didn’t even bother with this anymore. I no longer slept at night, and it was too much effort to leave the house at half past eight and then wander about down the canal all day, or go down the river and mess about in the boats. No, I’d just stay in my room and work on my insect collection and keep an eye on the back yard, see who was coming and going.

Hilda often had her friends over during the day, tarts for the most part. Harold Smith and Gladys were the most frequent visitors. I would come down to the kitchen and sit in a chair with my knees pulled up to my chin and my arms wrapped around my shins, and say nothing, just listen, they didn’t seem to mind, they chattered on, gossiped away about the various petty dramas that lent spice and tint to their seedy lives. Hilda was never slow to produce the sweet port. “Now not a word to your father,” she’d say to me as she poured us all a tot in a teacup (I’d developed a taste for port myself, since Hilda moved in). Gladys always seemed to have a problem. “If it’s not one thing it’s another, eh Glad?” Hilda would murmur as she scrubbed the stove or peeled the potatoes and Glad sat at the table smoking Woodbines and patting at her black-dyed hair in a worried manner as she described some fresh calamity involving her landlord or her “gentleman” of the moment, while Harold Smith grinned his cynical dead grin and cleaned his fingernails and said nothing. But it was Hilda I was really watching, and as she went about her scrubbing and peeling I noted with secret fascination how her arms and thighs and breasts swelled and shifted beneath the skirts and aprons that had once graced the slender figure of my mother.

One incident stands out vividly from this period. In January it would be dark by five o’clock in the afternoon, so that by the time my father came home the streetlamps would be lit. I’d see him from my bedroom window as he wheeled his bicycle in from the alley and leaned it against the outhouse wall. His toolbag was slung over his shoulder, and he had a black scarf wrapped about his neck. He knelt down to undo the strings he’d tied round his ankles, and tucked them into his trouser pocket. Then, briskly rubbing his hands together, he stamped down the yard and in through the back door. Hilda was making dinner, I could hear the clatter of saucepans and the rumbling that came from the pipes when water was running in the sink. A murmur of voices, the scrape of chair legs—he’d have hung his jacket and scarf on the hook on the kitchen door and sat down at the table. Hilda would put a bottle of beer in front of him, then out with his papers and tobacco tin while she laid the table. How smoothly, you notice, Hilda had assumed my mother’s role in the everyday domestic routines, she played the woman of the house to perfection; but notice also with what contemptible complacency my father accepted this!

I could tell something odd was going on as soon as I entered the kitchen. There was a way (I’d been aware of this before) that Hilda and my father would sometimes watch me from the corners of their eyes, and I could sense them doing it tonight. What used to drive me mad was that as soon as I became conscious of it they’d be looking elsewhere and behaving perfectly normally—too normally—and it was true of that night, there was a strange artificiality to everything they did. There was also a funny smell in the room, though I couldn’t identify what it was. Not the food, I’m sure, for we were having kippers and I know what a kipper smells like. Without a word I took my place at the table; without a word I started on my kipper. I could still feel them glancing at me, and then at each other, though I was never able actually to see them doing it. Then I cut into my potato, and dead in the middle of the halved potato there was a dark stain.

I stared at it with some unease. Then a syrupy fluid began to ooze out of the potato, the thick, slow discharge of what after a moment or two I recognized as blood. I looked up, startled, to see my father and Hilda, their knives and forks poised aloft over their plates, openly grinning at me. The light bulb suddenly crackled overhead and for a moment I thought it was laughter. Again my eyes fell upon the oozing potato, and now the blood appeared to be congealing in a viscous puddle under my kipper.

What did they expect me to do? Something odd was happening to the light in the room; there was only the one bulb, unshaded, dangling from a braided brown cord, and the light it shed was harsh and yellowy. It seemed now to be fluctuating—for some moments to be growing steadily dimmer, until we were all engulfed in shadow, and all I could see of Hilda and my father were the whites of their teeth and eyes, and the glitter of their eyes—and then it slowly grew brighter again, and they appeared to be behaving perfectly normally. Then with sickening inexorability the light again thickened, and this time the crackling of the bulb