Remember Why You Fear Me (23 page)

She told you she didn’t love you anymore, and this time she made you believe her. And that’s why you straightaway go and pack your suitcase, numb as you are, and embarrassed too—putting in the clothes you thought you’ll need, shirts, trousers, socks, what else? Underpants. She tells you there’s no rush, in that sympathetic way of hers, but there is a rush, you want to get out of the house as soon as possible, you think the faster you go the more sorry she’ll feel for you, the quicker she’ll tell you she wants you back. You carry the suitcase out to the car, and you’ve perhaps packed too much, what did you think you were doing, you’re not going on holiday!—and you should have used the new suitcase, the one with the wheels, but it’s too late now. And maybe you actually enjoy staggering under the weight of the case, maybe that feels good. You see she’s looking out of the window at you, and you pretend you haven’t noticed, she actually waves at you, and you don’t respond—where’s Laura? Couldn’t Laura have come to wave you off too? And you suppose there’ll be solicitors and things to deal with now, there’ll be all sorts of shit to arrange, but there’s a part of you that knows too, isn’t there, that you’ll never see your family again? That this is it? Which is stupid, because you’ll probably see them tomorrow, maybe you’ll pop back, you can at least swap suitcases. But as you pull off the drive, as you hit the main road, still not looking at Sheila, seeing
through
Sheila, you know this’ll be the last glimpse of your wife you’ll ever get and it isn’t nearly good enough.

You’ve never needed to look for hotels near your house before, and suddenly they seem to be everywhere. And you wonder why, who would want to holiday in a town like yours? You could stop right away, but you want to drive for a bit, and you put on the radio, and you listen to a song, and you say you won’t stop the car, you won’t even consider a hotel, not ’til the radio plays a song you like. And after an Elton John and something by a girl group you’ve never heard of you say that’s enough, that’s enough, the very next hotel you see. And there’s one, and it looks fine, it even has a nice gravel driveway that makes that nice crunching sound when your car drives over it, it’ll do.

The girl at reception seems to be too young to be working there. She asks you how long you want to stay. You say you don’t know. You say just one night, then you’ll see how it goes. She tells you there’s a special off-season discount, four nights for the price of three. She doesn’t make it sound special, not with that bored voice she’s got, she doesn’t care whether you take the discount or not. You take it. She gives you a key. It’s not like one of those swish electronic keys from that posh hotel you went to with Sheila on that last holiday of yours—and that was a good holiday, remember, you didn’t argue once, no one got angry—and when was that anyway, it must have been before Laura, that was years ago—sorry, no, the receptionist is still talking, but it’s just about what time dinner is served, and you don’t care, you’re not hungry and you may never eat again, and you turn the key over in your hand and it’s just an ordinary Yale key, old-fashioned, and old-fashioned feels reassuring somehow, and you like the feel of the key’s teeth biting into your skin. The receptionist tells you you’re in room five, you say that’s fine, she tells you it’s right down the corridor, and you say fine, and you go right down the corridor to find it.

The room is small. There’s no bathroom, just a sink in one corner. A cracked mirror is above it. There’s a little TV set on a table, one of those old-fashioned TVs, it’s got an aerial on top, it wouldn’t surprise you if it were black and white, and now old-fashioned doesn’t feel reassuring, it just feels somewhat cheap. The ceiling is polystyrene tiles, the walls are breezeblock. A small square window, it doesn’t open. A lamp on each side of the bed, but no tea service, no phone. And the bed is big, and that’s good, but it feels hard, and that isn’t—hard, and cold, and maybe a little damp, and maybe it’s because of that cold, maybe it’s because you let a little warm air in when you entered.

You decide you’ve changed your mind about the four nights for three discount. You’ll tell the receptionist in the morning. Provided she hasn’t left for school.

You take your clothes off. You wished you’d packed some pyjamas. You shiver. You look at yourself in the cracked mirror and you don’t see what looks so bad, not really, you can’t see why Sheila wouldn’t want you. You even wiggle your eyebrows. You don’t bother with the kissy face.

You lock the door, take out the key, put it on the bedside table. You wash. You climb into bed. You lie on your back, think about the day, about your marriage, think about whether if you had a job to get up for in the morning Sheila would still say you were useless. You stare up at the polystyrene ceiling and think right at it, direct all your thinking into it, hard—you count the indentations in it, there are grooves in the polystyrene, random, mostly shallow, it looks like the previous occupants of the room must have thrown things up against it for fun. You wonder whether it’d be fun if you did the same, leave some marks of your own. You think yes, maybe, maybe in the morning. You turn off the light. You pull the covers up. You sleep.

You wake, and it’s still dark outside—and normally you’d just close your eyes and go back to sleep, you’ve made yourself a nice warm patch in the bed, but there’s an unfamiliarity about the surroundings that disturbs you, and you remember you’re in a hotel room, and remember
why
you’re in a hotel room, and something churns inside.

Reach across to the watch on the bedside table. The clock face glares at you. It’s a little after three o’clock.

Your stomach churns again, and you realize it’s hunger. You should have had something to eat last night after all. You wonder whether they’d do room service—no, not in a little hotel like this, not in the middle of the night. Besides, there’s no phone, is there, no phone. Is there a kettle in the room? With sachets of tea and coffee and powdered milk, because sometimes they put a digestive biscuit in there. Sometimes even a custard cream. But there wasn’t a kettle in the room. You saw there wasn’t when you first came in.

You stare up at the ceiling. And see the bulge.

You don’t think about the bulge for a bit, you’re still thinking about the existence or non-existence of the kettle and its powdered milk and its potential attendant biscuit possibilities. But you start to focus upon the bulge, try to work out the shape of it. Is it even really there? It’s black on black. It’s not over your head, it sags down towards your feet. It looks to you like the ceiling is bending inwards somehow, as if a sheet of wallpaper has come free, and is dangling there limp—but no, not quite like that, because the bulge tapers back up to the ceiling again, it’s as if the wallpaper instead has an enormous air bubble in it. Hanging over you, wetly, because your eyes have adjusted, you can see now this black is a different black, there’s something oily about it—and it’s moving ever so slightly, it’s rippling. It’s peculiar what shadows can do.

And besides, you remember, there is no wallpaper on the ceiling.

You wonder whether maybe there’s a kettle after all. Custard creams, you could at least look. And you reach out for the bedside lamp. You blink from the light.

It’s important you don’t exaggerate what it is you see.

The spider does not fill the entire ceiling. It’s not that big. It might fill three quarters of it—and that’s because its legs are outstretched at the moment. If it were hunched up properly, the way spiders usually sit, it’d take up no more than two thirds, maybe.

Mind you, you freeze.

The first things you think of gives you flashes of relief. The spider isn’t directly above you. It’s mostly on the other side of the room. If you sat bolt upright now, you wouldn’t even touch it. If you were sitting on the end of the bed, though, you suppose there’d be contact, you suppose the top of your head would be grazing its belly. But you’re not doing that. You’re not doing that, so that’s all right.

(Belly? Abdomen? Is that the right word? Um. Thorax?)

The second thing is—it looks like an ordinary spider. It doesn’t have any strange colours on its body. No weird markings. You saw a documentary once, you think, or maybe it was a comic book movie, and it said that the really poisonous spiders had weird colourful markings on them, the nasty foreign ones. This is just a regular black spider—you can see bits of colour on it, certainly, but that’s because it’s so very big and you’re so very close to it, be reasonable—the abdomen (yes, you think, it is abdomen) is fleshier than you might have thought, there are lines of red veins on it. No, this is an ordinary spider, a safe spider, a house spider. Ordinary, of course, in the sense you ignore the fact it’s ten-foot long from side to side.

You watch the spider, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Maybe, you think, it’s asleep. Its body heaves a bit, but that’s just regular breathing, isn’t it? Or snoring.

You strain to hear. But the spider isn’t making a single sound.

You think you’re coping with this really very well indeed. Well done. Sheila would probably be panicking.

Your brain tries to send you another message of comfort. It’s not over your head, it’s not poisonous, Steve, you’re fine. You realize that the brain is trying a bit too hard, it’s doing its best to stop you from screaming. (Why shouldn’t you scream? No, don’t scream. Don’t scream. The spider.
The spider wouldn’t like it
. You won’t scream then. Good. Good. Don’t scream. Don’t scream.)

It must be asleep. It might be asleep.

If spiders sleep.

No, of course they sleep. (But how come they end up in the bath and sink every morning? What have they been doing in the darkness, to get there?)

You could make a run for it.

You could make a run for the door, especially if the spider is asleep. The door is on the far corner of the room. You could get out of bed—don’t
run
for the door, that might startle it,
tiptoe
to the door. The spider’s body isn’t blocking the door. There’s a leg near it, but still.

You’re naked. You’ve left your clothes on the floor. Near the sink. Near the TV. Near the mirror. Near the spider.

You really wish you’d packed your pyjamas.

It’s not that you fear running into a hotel corridor at three in the morning without any clothes on. Maybe you should, but that’s not the worry, you think a giant spider might be seen as extenuating circumstances. It’s just that—and this might seem an odd thing to realize suddenly, but—you’ve got skin. And any part of the spider could reach out and touch your skin. And you know right away—you don’t want that to happen, not at any cost. You don’t want your skin touched. No touching of the skin, please. If you had your pyjamas on, that’d be your armour. You wouldn’t mind the spider touching your pyjamas. (Well. You would. But.) But not the skin. Not
you
.

You could make a run for it. If the spider is asleep. (But is it pre-tending?) You could make a run for the door. But you’re not going to.

You don’t want the light on. Suddenly, you don’t want the light on. The light might wake the spider up. In the light, the spider can’t fail to see you. And very carefully, very gently, you stretch your hand out from underneath the bed sheets. You realize you’ve tucked yourself deep down so that every last bit of you, right up to your eyes, is hidden. You hadn’t even known you’d done this. Now this single hand breaks cover, bravely it reaches out across the wide expanse between the safety of the bed and the glare of the bedside lamp—it grasps for the switch—it flicks it off.

Blackness again. And right away, you think maybe you’ve made a big mistake.

Perhaps the spider will leave. If you go back to sleep, it might be gone by morning.

And it occurs to you—only now—where did it come from? The window is too small, the door is locked. Not up through the sink this time, certainly—it’d have pulled up all the plumbing in the process.

And wide eyed you stare up into the darkness, try to make out the black bulge. Is it still there? You can’t be sure. You think you see something move—and then you swivel your head, fast, to your left side, and something in the darkness there shifts as well—and back to the right side, and on the right, the same—you close your eyes tight now, all you can see is the blackness in your head, and here, even here, you can see the faint outlines of shapes, and the shapes are moving, and the shapes are moving towards you.

You open your eyes. In a moment you’ve grabbed for the light. You think if you brush anything you shouldn’t, anything hairy, you’ll scream. You don’t. Because what you’re tracing with your fingers is the wire to the lamp, smooth and plastic, it’s really nothing like a spider leg, and you’re pulling at it now hard, and the lamp is rocking on its stand, loud and clumsy so the spider can hear, and you’ve found it, you’ve found the switch, and you press it.

And the spider has gone.

There’s a thrill of relief to that. Just for a moment.

Because—of course—this means it wasn’t asleep. (You were right not to make a run for it. You were right not to make a run for it. Well done, you.) It wasn’t asleep, and it’s moved. It’s moved, lightning fast. Where has it moved to?

It’s not on the ceiling anymore. It’s not on the walls, not to the left or to the right. And that leaves only one place, and you shift in the bed slowly,
very
slowly, because you know you’re right, and you don’t want to move at all because you don’t want to attract attention, but you have to be sure, and—

And three of its legs are now tickling the headboard behind you. And that’s not the worst of it, there’s another leg, and it’s longer than those three legs somehow, it’s on the bed itself, it’s nestled lazily against the side pillow. The side pillow that’s just inches away from the other pillow, the pillow on which you’d buried your head and pressed your cheeks and touched with your eyes and ears and mouth, oh God. Oh God, and you gasp. You can’t help it, and a gasp isn’t bad in the circumstances—but you’re so close to the spider, and the noise causes the spider to flinch. Maybe not even the noise, maybe flinching from the very breath from inside you, God, maybe it feels you’ve just
spat
on it. You back away, rucking up the sheets as you do so, yanking them free from where they’d been tucked in, damaging your fortress, damaging your cover.