Spider

the tarpaulin on the table freshly wiped and smelling of bleach, the hissy bubble of porridge as steam rises from the pot and mingles with cigarette smoke in the glare of wintry sunshine at the window over the sink. Dead souls shuffle in, I drink tea, no milk, much sugar. I do not eat now, my intestines coiled about my backbone as they are, but I do drink tea, it flushes out the spiders.

Then Hilda is filling the doorway, glowering from a great height and asking have we seen her house keys? A spasm of guilty excitement down there where the weighted sock sprawls between my wrapped thighs. Oh she is frowning, oh magnificent terror, oh the fury, oh to imagine surrendering and with delicious shame extracting my sock and handing it over with trembling fingers and averted eyes, cheeks burning, and craving punishment, begging for humiliation, abasement, pain! But I hold my peace, I gaze (foxlike!) with blank eyes and open mouth, shake my slow head as her gimlet eyes wheel round to me, burn into my soul, but the truth of it is there is no soul, only spiders now, only spiders! Then frowning like thunder she is gone, and I drink more tea, touch my sock, roll a fat one, conceal my glee.

Then out, out into the sharp clear air, but not without a final encounter by the front door, not without her asking me was I sure I knew nothing of her house keys? Blank mute useless shrugging from the wily Spider, whose whole secret presence is down in his sock while the face above registers only dumb bewildered ignorance.

I walk quickly at first, quickly for me, past the park, where the crows flap in the bare branches, past the padlocked churchyard, then sharp left and down along the railway viaduct (glimpses of the gasworks through the arches), and then, with steadily slackening pace, to the canal. Greeny-black in the morning light, sudden bursts of sparkling diamonds on the water, wintry sunshine—and there’s my mother on the humpbacked bridge with her back to me, and I stop dead, become uncoupled, stare with astonishment, with giddy elation, at the clarity of her form against the light. With her face still obscured by the headscarf she crosses over and is lost behind a wall on the other side, on the Kitchener Street side.

And now at last I move down the path to the bridge, and for the first time in twenty years I clasp the iron railing, feel how cold it is, and shuffle forward. Oh, terror now! Oh with that first shuffling footstep a chaos of turbulence and a roiling of fluids inside me, and voices start up, cackles of incredulous laughter, groans of dread, but in spite of it all I cross the bridge; groping blindly forward with both hands on the railing, I do cross the bridge.

And now I am shuffling along streets both familiar and strange, oddly empty, oddly desolate somehow. I come upon a man with a horse. They are standing down the end of a dead-end street under a high brick wall. The man is wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up; the horse wears only a bridle. I stand at the other end and watch as the man takes the hanging reins and, half-turned toward the horse, leads it slowly down the middle of the street. He begins to run, shouting at the horse now, which lifts high its hooves, the iron shoes ringing on the cold cobblestones, and pulls back its lips from its teeth as the long head comes up and utters a loud whinny. They come toward me up the empty street, the half-turned running man in white shirtsleeves, and the high-stepping horse, tossing its head; clouds billow as their breath turns to mist in the cold air. The man slows the horse as they approach my end of the street, slows it to a walk, then turns the beast—I gaze at its heaving flanks!—and trots it back to the wall at the other end.

I drift away, looking for my mother. On the corner I see a pub burned out by fire, its white brickwork seared and blackened with smoke and its windows merely black holes, empty of glass, sightless eyes. Over the door, which is boarded up, hangs the sign, but the metal has been warped by heat and the paintwork so badly singed that the name is unreadable. I turn another corner—and find myself in the shadow of the Spleen Street gasworks.

Oh Christ the knob on the gas stove the knob the knob the knob on the kitchen stove oh Christ spare me this: a fluted nubbin of some hard material fixed by a recessed screw to a pipe attached to the gas ring. In one of the knobs a screw with its face to the window: a couple of turns with a screwdriver and it protruded enough to let me tie a piece of string to it, and the string I then led not out the window but down to a staple nailed to the floor then across the floor and under the door to a nail I’d hammered into the side of the staircase, just off the floor, then straight up vertically to the top of the stairs. When I pulled it it grew taut from knob to staple, from staple to nail, and from nail up to me; and when I gently tugged it the knob turned a fraction and gas began seeping into the kitchen—

Oh I tear my eyes away, I turn my back on the massive domes, their flaking rust-red paintwork horribly vivid in the morning sunshine and their crisscross struts and uprights multiplying endlessly over my head; horror is here, the horror of reproduction, so with eyes averted I shuffle off. I must go home, I tell myself, I must go home, I must go home to Kitchener Street, where my mother is waiting for me by the back door.

Now the streets are achingly familiar and memories rise in clusters from the deep forgotten recesses of my mind and I become uncoupled for minutes on end and have to lean against a wall and with fumbling fingers try and roll one, and the worm in my lung seems to be stirring. A woman with a string bag bulging with parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with string stands in front of me and asks me am I feeling poorly? I push myself off the wall and lurch away. I must go home to my mother! Then I am coming down Victory Street and not this corner, not the next, but the one after is Kitchener Street. Listen to them now! What a filthy racket! But on he comes, the game old Spider, flannels flapping on newspaper limbs, thirty yards, fifteen—oh a great pounding in my chest now, the worm awakens, and then I am at the corner, and turning the corner, and gazing at—

Nothing. A fence of corrugated tin. What is happening to me? Through a gap in the fence I see a cratered wasteground. It is strewn with heaps of brick and rubble, and weeds with purple flowers, and here and there lengths of black rubber piping, rusty tin cans, old shoes, car tires. What is happening to me? Gales of laughter, a barking dog. Is this my doing?

Back at my table now. Badly shaken by what I saw this morning, very fragile, very brittle. I had plunged down the street in wild panic, reeling from lamppost to lamppost like a drunkard until I reached where number twenty-seven ought to be. A hole in the fence: I’d pressed my eye to it and found another hole, a shallow pit littered with chunks of brick, slate, lumber, rubbish, the same purple-flowered weeds bristling in the breeze; and a voice had said: this is your doing.

And then, as I leaned against the fence, helpless and weeping, a smell had come, and then a memory, dislodged from the underside of some deep flap of my mind: I saw myself sitting at the window of my room above the kitchen, watching Horace and Hilda leave for the pub. Then I saw myself walking slowly down the stairs, along the passage, and into the kitchen. I saw myself attach my trapline: I tied one end of the string to the screw on the knob of the gas stove, then led it carefully through the staple and under the door and out into the passage to the nail in the side of the staircase. From halfway up the stairs I gently pulled it round the nail and then, climbing to the top of the stairs, I tied it to a banister. Then I went back into my room and waited for their return.

I saw myself again sitting at the window with the light off.

I remember there was a sort of buzzing in my ears that drowned all other sounds, so that when Horace and Hilda returned they seemed to be weaving down the yard in utter silence, and in slow motion; their movements were clumsy and uncoordinated, and I had to stuff a blanket in my mouth to stifle the wave of laughter the spectacle provoked in me. Finally they reached the back door and came in; I heard loud voices for some minutes, and then Hilda’s slow heavy tread on the stairs, Hilda’s alone. This produced a silent cry of exultation in the tense young Spider, how hard it was to stifle my laughter then! I waited, for five minutes, ten minutes, twenty-five minutes—twenty-five minutes that felt like twenty-five years! Then I crept silently out of my room: the house was dark and silent, the kitchen door was closed. Barely daring to breathe I sat at the top of the stairs and untied my string from the banister. Gently, oh gently I reeled it in; in my mind’s eye I saw it grow taut from knob to staple, from staple to nail, and from nail to me; I held it a long moment, thinking: my string in my fingers, his life in my hands. Then I tugged—it moved—enough. I tied the string to the banister and slipped back into my room.

Sleepless with triumph I sat cross-legged on my bed in the darkness. I rocked with silent laughter. Then slowly, slowly from below, at last there rose to my eager, waiting nostrils the faint but unmistakable smell of gas —

Yes, this was my doing all right. I’d pushed myself off the fence; the panic had subsided and I felt strangely calm (though in all the excitement the worm in my lung had awoken). I noticed then that the even-numbered houses on the other side were intact, though their windows were boarded up; and that there were buildings still standing on this side down the end.