Spider

a shower like the scales of a cod under the fishmonger’s knife! Oh see him fumbling there, the poor monster, fumbling with his pencil with those great misshapen paws—the pencil so tiny and delicate now as he tries to grasp and manipulate it—and I tear my eyes away, force myself back to the book and as I do so up comes a shriek of laughter, and it’s impossible not to hear Hilda’s voice in it, the touch of hoarseness and the fierce hiss of threat in the tone.

Breakfast is a trial, for their eyes possess the means to destroy me; more hazardous still is crossing the hallway to the front door, and my nightmare is to become uncoupled halfway over. Fearing it makes it occur, so I find myself at the end of breakfast attempting not to think about becoming uncoupled; I rarely succeed. Then she comes out of her office and I am gripped with terror. “Mister Cleg!” she’ll cry. “Where is your overcoat?” Or, “Where is your cap?” One day she said: “We really must get those fingernails clipped.” Her face has started to break up the way it did in Kitchener Street, eyes and chin and hair and nose separated one from another and all afloat so I must bring them together with my mind in order to make a face. She doesn’t try to conceal her deadness and animality now, it’s evident in her fingers, which clench and unclench with barely suppressed rage and hunger. She wears the same cardigan she did the night she took my father down the gasworks canal, and I sometimes think she will open it and push her breasts at me, as she did that other night, and there’s movement in my lung at this thought. She is biding her time though; every encounter breaks off abruptly and uncertainly, leaving me bewildered. Once she said to me: “Mr. Cleg, what do you know about the bread knife?” That day she was up in my room again, I could smell her when I got back. It was as though a pack of wild animals had been living up there, not even tobacco and an open window could rid the room of the odor.

The streets give me no comfort: everything is losing color, becoming bleached and dry. The weather is part of it: a string of these cold, clear days when the light is so strong and bright that my eye has no warm pockets of color or shadow or dampness into which it can slip for safety. There is always this glare now, the streets and walls and windows all look hard, like metal, the way they push white light back at me and make my poor eyes dart this way and that to escape it, and I can no longer sit by the canal or the river so I go down Kitchener Street and while away the hours in the Dog and Beggar. One visit I remember vividly: I was crossing the bridge over the canal when I became aware of a thought pattern not my own: Everything I touch dies. If you love me you die. If I touch you you die. Everything I love dies.

This stopped me. Whose thought pattern was this? My father’s. It was my father for the first time coming out in me. More strangeness followed. When I reached the Dog I didn’t shuffle over to my usual table at the back. Instead I leaned on the counter with my foot on the rail, just as he had always done. Again it was him coming out in me, and I had no power to control it. Ernie Ratcliff was hostile, his face too breaks apart when he gets close to me, and it occurs to me that he is dead and either a ghost or a zombie like me. I bought my half of mild and stood there for more than an hour. Out with the tobacco and papers, and again it was him, it was Horace at the bar rolling a thin one, and I the helpless victim or vessel of his imposture. I had been appropriated, I felt, dragooned, impressed, and I watched in futile rage as he behaved in his old ways, leaned on his elbows, let the cigarette dangle from between his lips, turned whenever the door opened, kept himself to himself. What he didn’t do was drink his mild—the lung-worm has forbidden this, so he stood in the Dog without drinking, stood there in a world of wet, dying of thirst, so it seemed! As in a way was I.

My father began taking over my thoughts and movements more and more frequently after that, and the Spider was helpless to prevent it. It was my father who began slipping into Hilda’s room at night, and during the day, whenever he was in the house, he watched her hungrily from shifty, furtive eyes that always slid away when she became aware of him. He began to take note of when she went to the bathroom and the lavatory, and he tried to catch glimpses of her through the keyhole, but I don’t believe he succeeded more than twice. Then, to my horror, in the Dog one afternoon, he attempted a conversation with Ernie Ratcliff Oh dear God the humiliation! He had no aptitude for it, no ease, it had been years since he’d practised casual conversation with a stranger. He stood at the bar in the way I’ve described and just blurted it out. Ernie Ratcliff was down the end of the counter murmuring in low tones to an old man with no teeth and a white stubble on his chin. “Remember Horace?” my father said, and it came out in a load croak that immediately silenced Ratcliff and the old man. “What’s that, mate?” one of them said. Their eyes bored into him; he tried again.

“Remember Horace?”

“Now which Horace would that be?” said Ratcliff “Cleg,” said my father. “Horace Cleg.”

Ernie Ratcliff exchanged a glance with the old man, and then began polishing a beer glass with his dishcloth. “Friend of yours, was he?” he murmured.

My father tried to laugh but it didn’t work; he was close to panic. “Died in the war, did Horace Cleg,” said the old man. “Died in the Blitz.”

Ernie Ratcliff produced a bitter snort. “Took out the whole bloody street, that one did. Still, he was beyond caring by that point.”

The old man shook his head. “Beyond caring,” he said. “I never seen a man lose his interest in life like Horace Cleg did. Destroyed him, what happened.”

“Destroy anyone,” remarked Ernie Ratcliff, “lose your missus like that.”

“Gassed, she was,” said the old man, turning toward my father. “Gassed in her own kitchen. Nice woman, too. Hilda, her name was, Hilda Cleg, her boy turned the gas on.” The old man paused, lifted his glass with a trembling hand. He fixed my father with a watery eye and whispered: “She were dead by the time Horace got to her!”

There was a silence then, and the clock could be heard ticking somewhere off behind the bar. “Whatever happened to that boy?” said Ernie Ratcliff after a while, but my father didn’t hear the answer, for he’d already fled the pub, never to return.

¦

The days that followed grew increasingly strange for the Spider. The oppressive sense that everyone and everything around him was dead rarely left him now, and for this he knew himself to be responsible. He became aware too that a terrible catastrophe was about to occur, but he had no clear idea what it was or from which direction it would come. It was at around this time that he decided to be buried at sea.

Then one night as he sat in the cupboard under the kitchen sink a fresh memory erupted into consciousness. He was in his room in Kitchener Street, and he was dreaming. He was standing on a dusty road that stretched in a straight line to the distant flat horizon, and there was nothing in the landscape at all except for a low wicket fence of white posts that ran beside the road at ankle height. He was walking toward the horizon when he fell into the carcass of a chicken and was trapped in its bones. Then the night-hag came out of the wall and stuck her fingers through the bones, trying to get at him, hissing, “Spider! Spider!” Then he noticed that he was naked and covered with a soft black fungus. He stroked himself, which made him piss, and when this happened it immediately started to rain, and the rain hammered so hard at his window that he woke up to the smell of gas in the room. All perspective was distorted, none of the lines of the floor or the ceiling seemed to join up, and the door was a vast distance from the bed, though the walls on either side of him were so close together it was like being in an alley. On the floor were the fly boxes he had been working on before he fell asleep, so he climbed off the bed and sat on the floor, picking the flies off the ends of the pins and putting them in his mouth. All the time the smell of the gas was growing stronger and making him laugh, though the odd thing was that while he laughed he felt nothing. Then after some minutes he felt sick, and with that came a sudden overwhelming sensation of guilt and desolation. He went to the window and opened it and hung over the sill in the driving rain, limp as a rag doll until it passed, and then he began laughing once more, though again there was only a dead feeling inside. He had earlier stuffed a blanket under the door; he heard the door being pushed open and then, still limp, he was half dragged, half carried down the stairs and out the front door into the rain. He noticed then that he’d wet his pants. He stared at the open door of number twenty-seven and saw his father lurching out backwards dragging Hilda behind him, and this made him laugh more, though it puzzled him in a vague sort of way. Later he noticed the neighbors standing on the pavement in small groups in the rain and he could see at once that none of them was alive, that they were ghosts. After that he remembered a black car with its headlights on, and he remembered the way the rain was caught slanting across its beams, and there was also an ambulance with a red cross on the side. He remembered Hilda being loaded onto a stretcher and covered with a sheet, and this started him laughing all over again, but even so he was puzzled, and dimly sensed that some sort of mistake had occurred.

Late one night before the chanting started Spider lay on his back by the fireplace and groped for his book. Out