Spider

grew suddenly very loud, it rose almost to a screech, and as I sat there barely daring to breathe it was impossible not to hear in its crackle voices of derision, and ridicule, and when I looked down at my plate—I was unable to watch Hilda and my father anymore, for they terrified me now, they were transformed, they were like animals of some kind, there was nothing in their faces that I could read as human, and this set the hair on my neck prickling —when I looked down at my plate the blood was faintly glowing, there was a pale incandescence to it, and I stared at it in a state now of frozen shock even as the light slowly came up again and returned the kitchen to that strangely unstable state of false normalcy in which knives and forks clattered on plates and Horace and Hilda ponderously chewed their food and drank their tea and the crackle of the light bulb was once more muted and intermittent, and the tap dripped steadily into the sink. On my plate the halved potato sat in a pool of congealed dripping stained brown by the juices of the kipper.

I would not get up from the table, I would not give them the satisfaction. “I thought you liked kippers,” murmured Hilda, glancing up at me as she brought a freighted forkful to her own mouth, and I saw how my father’s eyes slid toward her at this, and how his lips produced that fleeting twisty twitch of amused contempt, no sooner detected than it disappeared. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction; wordlessly I sliced into my kipper and began noisily to chew, my eyes now fixed on Hilda’s face. “Whatever are you doing?” she said, picking up her teacup. “There—you’ve swallowed a bone!” I began coughing, for the kipper has a bony skeleton and I had been careless. I brought up onto my plate a damp gob of half-chewed fish with many tiny needle-thin bones embedded in it and sticking out; my father said, “Oh for God’s sake, Dennis.”

Oh for God’s sake, Dennis—can you begin to imagine the fury this aroused in me? Was this not execrable treatment, this vile provocation? But I would not give him the satisfaction, and I held in my feelings, I bottled up my rage and my hatred, for my time would come, this I had known since Christmas, my time would come and then he’d be sorry.

Later they went out to the pub and I went back to my insects. When I heard them returning down the alley I turned off the light and watched them from my window as they came through the gate and into the yard. My father was unsteady, and Hilda was angry with him, this was clear from her unsmiling expression and the way she hurried across the yard and through the back door, while he clumsily closed the gate then made a visit to the outhouse. Footsteps on the stairs—Hilda on her way up to bed. But when, a few moments later, my father came into the house, I did not hear him come up after her, and as the minutes ticked by I realized he had settled himself in the kitchen, even though the light had not been switched on. After a while I tiptoed along the landing and watched Hilda as she slept; her clothes and underwear were draped over a chair, and one stocking had slipped off onto the floor. Then quickly downstairs, and as I’d suspected my father had stayed in the dark kitchen to drink more beer, then passed out. Silently I drew close to him. With his head back and his mouth open, and still in his cap and scarf, he was snoring gently in the chair by the stove, a quart bottle of beer and a half-empty glass on the floor beside him. By the pale gleam of moonlight that came sifting in through the window over the sink I examined him carefully; I still had all my rage bottled up inside me, and I realized I could do to him whatever I wanted; and with the thought came an enormously sweet sense of power, of control.

I opened the bread tin and took out the bread knife. I made a few feints and thrusts with it, imagining how it would be to stick it in my father’s neck. Soundlessly I waved it in front of his face, dancing around like an African boy; he didn’t wake up. The moonlight flashed on the blade of the knife as round and round the kitchen I danced, lifting my knees high and wildly shaking my head, still without making a sound. Tiring of this I put the knife back in the bread tin and filled my palm with stale crumbs. These I then slowly dribbled onto my father’s upturned face, and though he twitched and snorted, and brushed at the crumbs with a jerky hand, still he did not awaken, such was the depth of his stupor.

After the kipper and potato incident Hilda became far less sanguine about me. She decided, I think, that she could no longer tolerate the risk I posed to her newfound security—she had come too far to see it all snatched from her through the wild talk of a boy. For I’d seen the look in her eyes at the table that night, I’d seen the alarm when I’d coughed up a mouthful of bony fish; and with that alarm had come a new, worried watchfulness, I caught it often in the days that followed, she became alert to me in a way she’d never been before. And of course it wasn’t simply the safe berth in number twenty-seven that she stood to lose; if they ever dug up my father’s potato patch, and established that Hilda had been with him that night—then she’d lose a lot more than a safe berth. She’d swing.

And so the atmosphere of number twenty-seven became even more fraught with tension, there was a new edginess, a shortness of temper in both of them that I was quick to exploit. Hilda no longer dispensed teacups of port to Harold and Glad with the same air of merry complicity—no more “just a drop to warm you up, Glad, you’ve had a long night.” No, Hilda was feeling the strain, she was snappy and preoccupied as she went about her tasks in the kitchen. I tried to make things worse. I stole her bucket and took it down the canal, where I filled it with stones and sank it. She was furious about losing her bucket, she searched high and low for it, for of course she couldn’t scrub the floor or the yard or the front doorstep without a bucket. I can see her sitting at the kitchen table when my father came home from work that day (I was listening on the stairs); with a headscarf tied around her hair (all up in curlers) she sipped her tea and said: “I’ve searched high and low—buckets don’t just disappear.” Grunts from my father, and it was hard to interpret them. Was he indifferent to her lost bucket? Or was he knitting his brows, exposing his bottom teeth in that familiar grimace of angry perplexity, and perhaps, at the same time, casting his eyes at the ceiling, up at my room, laying responsibility for the lost bucket at my door? I suspect he was. When I came downstairs for supper Hilda came right out and asked me what I knew about her bucket. I sat in my chair, shrugged my shoulders, gazed at the ceiling and said nothing. “Dennis!” snapped my father. “Answer your mother when she asks you a question.”

This was rich. “Mother?” I said, sitting forward in my chair, laying my hands flat on the table and staring straight at her through slitted eyes. “You’re not my mother.”

“Oh not this again!” said Hilda, turning toward my father. He frowned, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. “Let’s have our supper,” he said wearily. I exulted inwardly at the strained silence in which the meal was eaten.

Later that night I again heard them talking in the kitchen, so out I crept to the top of the stairs to listen. The door was only slightly ajar, and their voices were low, so I had to strain to catch what they said. But after a minute or two I made some sense of it. They were talking about me. They were talking about sending me to Canada.

I crept back into my room and closed the door. I turned off the light and settled by the window, my elbows on the sill, my chin in my palms. There was a moon that night, and beyond the alley it gleamed on row upon row of damp slate roofs. My father sent my mother to Canada, and she was down among the potatoes now. Then I thought of him passed out and slack-jawed in his chair in the kitchen below, and an idea started to take shape in my mind, and it had to do with gas.

¦

In the days that followed I did nothing to make the situation worse than it already was. I couldn’t get my mother’s bucket back, it was gone for good, but at least I didn’t steal anything else. I was quiet and normal at mealtimes, and there was no repetition of that distortion and crackling of the light. Nothing was said, but we were deeply suspicious of each other, and this increased the tension already stifling the house; none of us was eager to exacerbate it. A trying period, then, the only incident of any significance being my father’s one clumsy attempt to throw dust in my eyes.

I was often down the allotments during this time—this would be late January, when there was little for gardeners to do. I liked it best at dusk, about half past four in the afternoon, particularly those ten or twenty minutes before darkness proper descended, when the sky was gray-blue but on the ground the shadows had thickened and objects were rapidly losing definition. Then that feeling I’ve always had for fogs and rainfall was aroused, and I happily roamed from garden to garden and felt only barely visible. But there was one afternoon—the allotments were deserted, except for me— when to my surprise I saw my father cycling down the path along the front fence, parallel to the railway embankment; I was in Jack Bagshaw’s allotment, so I slipped behind his shed and, as I’d often done before, peered from round the side to see what he was up to.

He pushed open the gate to his allotment and wheeled his bicycle up the path, and leaned it against the shed. Then he came round to the compost heap and stared straight at me; I immediately pulled back. “Dennis,” he called.

I said nothing; I barely moved, I barely breathed.