Spider

Down to the river again today. For some reason that I haven’t bothered to work out I no longer want to sit by the canal, though it may, it now occurs to me, have to do with the prospect of the gasworks over by Spleen Street. Misty today, not as damp as yesterday, and the smell of gas has almost disappeared. I find some comfort in this rickety structure of wooden pilings in the river, greenish where the water washes round it, dark brown for the rest, stained with creosote, and I can smell the creosote from here if I try hard enough. Otherwise there’s wood smoke in the air, I see it rising from the tin chimney of a battered Dutch barge a hundred yards downstream, and about halfway across the river begins the mist, a soft curtain that contains the eye, that permits me to review, without distraction, the brief glimpse I had in her shadowy bedroom of the ratty fur. That she still has it—what am I to make of this? I am calm now, I can turn these things over quietly in my mind. A sea gull alights with a scream on the pilings and from somewhere off behind me a hooter sounds, some factory. A schoolboy stops by my bench and tries to make me give him a cigarette. “Go on, mister,” he says, “just one.” But I shake my head, I don’t even shift my gaze from the pilings heaving up from the gray-green Thames and the misty curtain beyond. You’d think my resolve would be strengthened by what I saw at the back of Mrs. Wilkinson’s wardrobe. Why wasn’t it then? Something was confusing the logic of it all. What was it? That the creatures in the attic should be urging me to kill her, was this it? Were they not her creatures? Perhaps not. Perhaps they were anybody’s creatures; or nobody’s. Or perhaps they issued, as at times I was convinced they did, from some deep hole in the back reaches of my own sick mind—what then?

Earth; water; gas; and hemp: these are Spider’s elements. When I returned from the river I went straight up to my room and got out my rope. I have had it in the grate behind the gas fire for the last ten days. I found it by the canal one afternoon and knew immediately that I’d need it. It’s not the sort of thick rope in whose oily coils I used to curl up as a boy, down on the boats, it’s much thinner rope than that, cord, you’d call it, three wiry braided strands of dark green hemp. It’s not clean; the oil and grime of long service have stained it black in places, and also, now, there’s the soot of the fireplace on it. It’s about twelve feet long, fraying at one end and woven into a loop at the other, the loop reinforced by a steel ring. I take it up between my fingers; I like its rough grimy texture. I grip it in my fists and snap it taut: it is good strong cord, still serviceable. I loop it over my arm and lay it on my bed. I sit at my table, chair turned toward the bed, I smoke a thin one and look at my rope. A knock at the door: suddenly she is in the room with me.

“Mister Cleg,” she says, in that way of hers—she has a bundle in her arms—and then she sees the rope. I am still on my chair. “Not on your bed, Mr. Cleg,” she cries, “that filthy thing!” Clutching her bundle in one arm she picks up my rope and tosses it onto the floor, where it sprawlingly uncoils with a sort of dull muted ropy clatter. She brushes at the blanket with the side of a fat hand and then sets down her bundle. At the top of the heap is an umbrella, tightly furled. “Mr. Cleg, if I can’t stop you walking in the rain I can at least give you an umbrella. One umbrella. Now this”— she lifted up a rubbery thing, pale orange, shaped like a flatfish, and dangled it at me—“is your hot-water bottle. You can fill it in the kitchen before you go to bed. This”—she picked up an overcoat that looked third-hand at least, probably the offcast of some tramp she’d met—“is your winter coat.” It was pale gray with a fine herringbone pattern that immediately gave my eyes trouble, all those thin slanting parallel lines in zigzag rows. “And this”—she brandished a threadbare blue blanket with a number of cigarette burns— “is your extra blanket.”

I stared at this bizarre collection in silent perplexity. What did these objects have in common? She had turned her back and bottom to me, she was fussing with my bed now, putting on the extra blanket. She glanced over her shoulder. “Nothing to say, Mr. Cleg? Cat got your tongue?” (What a revolting idea.) Did she realize, I suddenly thought, what I wanted the rope for? Sudden intense anxiety in the Spider. “There,” she said, finishing with the bed; then, glancing at the floor: “Can I take this away? It’s really too dirty to be in a bedroom.” Immediately I reached for it, pulled it to me and clasped its tangled coils in my lap. “Just please don’t put it on your bed then,” she said. “I think that’s oil and I’ll never get it out. ” She was standing at the end of the bed now. She seemed very huge today, terrifyingly huge. “Nothing to say, Mr. Cleg?” She set her head on one side and folded her arms under her breast. “I’m worried about you.”

I shrank back, tightly clutching my rope. How desperately I wanted to withdraw from the gaze of those eyes, they bored into me, they splintered me, I was about to shatter and I could not get away, I was hypnotized like a rat before a snake. Overhead the bulb leapt to sputtering crackling life though the light was not switched on. The room grew darker, her eyes glittered at me. “You do remember,” she said—and her voice came as though from the depths of a deep stone well, hollow and booming and ominous—“you do remember that you’re seeing the doctor again tomorrow.” BOOM boom boom boom—the words kept booming in the room even after she’d left. I went to the window and stared at the streetlamp, which had just been lit. I was trembling uncontrollably; the rope slipped from my fingers and tumbled to the floor with that same ropy clatter, and slowly the echoes faded away. But oh, I thought, this will be a bad night, this will be a nasty one, how will I get myself through this one?

What a Spider was seen in the first pale light of dawn! What a broken haggard shadow of an echo of a joke of a man! What a husk, what a wreck, what a wretch! But he lived, he lived. I stood at my table leaning on my hands and gazing at the sky: the night was over, I had come through. There was silence; the shrieking had ceased, the furor was ended, I was the fragile vessel caught on the open sea in a storm by night that limps at dawn into some small cove or harbor with his mainmast splintered and his helmsman roped to the wheel, bleary with fatigue and spent terror. Small comfort, the haven of daylight, but comfort nonetheless. Cardboard crackled as I shifted my limbs, moved to the bed, lay on my back and gazed at a damp-stained ceiling that an hour before had been a demon’s dark canvas of hellish forms in coils and knots that squirmed, spat, oozed with filth and violence. But for now the ebb of night, the heave and swell of silent dawn: my Pacific.

The beached Spider lay on his bed with his legs crossed at the ankles and watched the smoke of a thin one rise in a slender column that broke into whorls and faded away. He thought of his rope in the fireplace, and he knew it was almost finished, this sorry jig of his, this jig in hell; enough, he murmured to the silence, enough enough enough.

Dr. McNaughten was in Mrs. Wilkinson’s office when I left the kitchen after breakfast. “Good God, man, what’s happened to you!” he cried as I shuffled in. “Sit down!” I sat. He peered at me, frowning, then went to the door and shouted for Mrs. Wilkinson. “Has this man been taken off his medication?” he said, not troubling to lower his voice.

“Of course not, doctor,” said Mrs. Wilkinson in hushed tones, drawing him away from the door so that I could hear no more of their conversation. A few minutes later he was back with me. “Dennis,” he said, “I believe you’ve been hoarding your medication. Tell me frankly: have you?”

What did it matter now? A shrug, a sigh from the weary Spider. The doctor frowned at me, then went to the window, where he stood with his back to me; one hand was in his trouser pocket, the other was drumming on the sill. Silence; after some minutes the door opens. It is Mrs. Wilkinson. She goes to the desk and spills onto it a dozen or so soot-stained tablets; she is also carrying my rope, and this too she puts on the desk. I sit up with an involuntary start of alarm: where is my book? Dr. McNaughten looks at me, shaking his head. “Thank you Mrs. Wilkinson,” he says. He returns to the window, and again stands with his back to me, gazing out. Eventually, and without turning, he speaks. “I’m almost convinced that I should commit you,” he says, “but I want to give you one last chance.”

¦

When I got back up to my room I found to my great relief that the book was safe. I was not to be sent back to Ganderhill; Dr. McNaughten had a number of reasons for this decision, one of which was that before I stopped taking my medicine I was apparently making “progress.” Toward what, he didn’t say.

Even when a man has nothing to call his own he finds ways of acquiring possessions; he then finds ways of concealing his possessions from the attendants. What you did on a hard-bench ward was tie one end of a piece of string to a belt loop, and the other end to the top of a sock, then have the sock dangle down the inside of your trousers. In it you kept tobacco, sewing materials, pencil and paper, other bits of string—whatever