Songs From Spider Street (11 page)

He drove past it twice a day, once on his way to work and once on his way
home. It lay just off the homeward side of his journey and, if there were
enough cars lined up at the red light in front of him, he sometimes sat
alongside it.

In the
summer, he had the window wound down and he’d lean out a little to stare along
its green, leafy length. It stretched for maybe 100 yards and then turned a
corner. Very occasionally he saw a rabbit hop into the middle of the path, sit
in the dappled sunlight and look towards the road for a second before
continuing its journey into the undergrowth.

It always
looked cool and inviting in the sticky heat, while it seemed like a shelter
from the wind and rain during the winter months.

It was only a
path between an industrial estate and a patch of overgrown land near the river
but he always wondered what lay around the bend. He’d never seen anyone walking
along it in either direction, coming or going.

Maybe it led
to the Emerald City. Or an ancient fairy castle. Or a muddy old scrapyard
guarded by paranoid Alsatians. Wherever it would take him, he wanted to find
out.

It was only a
few miles from home and he vowed to drive back there one day and take a walk
down that path.

That evening he tried to explain to his wife about the path. He hoped to
entice her with its mystery, include her in its promise of hidden prospects and
beguile her with its air of tranquillity.

She looked at
him briefly before returning her attention to the plate in front of her. “So
what’s so special about it?”

Although it
was unkind of him, he knew, whenever he looked at her now she seemed suffused
with a sort of greyness that hadn’t been there when they’d met. As if something
vital had been drained from her and replaced with nothing.

“It just
looks so peaceful and calm down there, you know. It makes you feel that maybe
the perfect escape lies down that lane,” he said, emphasising his point with a
flurry of hand gestures.

His wife
glanced at their daughter, spooning peas into her mouth with intense
concentration, before looking up at him again. “It’s just a path.”

He sighed,
too softly for her to hear. “But you haven’t seen it, Jen. Maybe we should take
a walk down there sometime, then you’d see what I mean,” he ventured,
optimistically.

Jen looked at
him as if she was afraid of him, then returned her attention to the plate in
front of her.

She has no
imagination, he thought. Just as well, though, otherwise God knows what she
might imagine he was up to all those nights he was ‘working late’.

Three months later, he was promoted and the family moved to another city
and a bigger house. Soon his wife became pregnant again and their son, Chris,
was born healthy and pink. And there was plenty of room for him to grow in the
new house.

He forgot
about the path and its promise for a while. Except when it came time to tell
his eager daughter her bedtime story. Then he would always tell her a tale of a
magic path that led to a strange and wonderful land where unusual and special
things happened. He quite impressed himself with his inventiveness and thought
once or twice about writing it all down.

But he was no
writer and imagined what Jen would say about him wasting his time like that
instead of devoting his time to the family or the repairs that needed doing. So
he crumpled up the pages in his head and tossed them into the corner alongside
all his other ambitions.

She hated the place. Her father had been in here for nearly three months
now and the thrice-weekly visits were starting to drain her.

Pulling into
the car park, she sat staring at the old hospital. Built in the 1920s, it had
pretensions to some sort of reassuring grandeur with its huge windows and its
twin-columned portico; a temple of health and healing run by kindly,
enlightened miracle workers. But it just looked like death to her.

The air in
the corridors smelt as though it was unfit for human consumption. It was heavy
with disinfectant, antiseptic and the odd stale waft of God knows what.

Her father’s
ward was clean enough, at first glance, but the smell still clung to the place;
a clinging staleness beyond the reach of any cleaning product or diligent
nurse. Maybe it’s just the stench of withered hope, she thought.

She hadn’t
thought about him by name since he’d been in here. She felt as if it wasn’t
allowed to have an identity, or for him to be her father. He was only allowed
to be a suffering lump of flesh that justified the doctors’ and nurses’ jobs.

He always
greeted her with a smile, if he wasn’t asleep, and a cheery “Hello, sweetheart.”
Yet somehow he wasn’t her father. Now there was something missing and she
wished desperately that she could find it and return it to him.

She felt like
a toy; a doll trapped underwater, tangled in weeds and drowning, but on fire at
the same time. The conversations between them, the forced normality, made her
want to scream and lash out at someone.

Sometimes she
would look at her father, knowing that the thing was eating him away inside,
and feel so scared that she could no longer speak. It was eating her away, too.

Her mother,
happy in her new life across the water, hadn’t come to see him. Someone once
said that we live alone and we die alone. But they forgot to add that in
between people spend most of their time trying to prove to you how alone you
really are, she thought.

It was a summer of wasps and sticky heat, she remembered, when her father
had shown her the path.

It was on a
trip to see her grandmother. They’d been stuck in traffic and the car was
stiflingly hot, despite having all the windows open. Her father had tilted his
head back and said: “Look, there it is, sweetheart. Across the road.”

She’d raised
her head from her book. “What, daddy? What is?”

“The path,”
he’d said, quietly, perhaps hoping his wife wouldn’t hear.

“Oooh, right.”
The little girl she’d been had pressed her nose against the glass and peered
through the traffic at the unremarkable gap that led off the road. “The one
where the prince jumped on the frog to get home and where all the duck
musicians gathered to play music for the moon?”

Her father
had chuckled. “Yes, that’s it,” he’d said.

“Look, mum,
look!”

While her
mother had begun to chide her father for inventing such nonsense, she’d focused
on the green leafy road to her fairytale paradise and the colours had seemed to
grow more intense by the second. When the car sped away, leaving the path
behind, she’d been disappointed that no small figures had emerged from the
undergrowth to wave her off.

She’d made a
groaning noise. Her brother, who had so far been absorbed in his latest battery-operated
gizmo, began to tease her and a fight began. By the time their mother had
broken things up, the path seemed like it was a million miles away. And it
might as well have been.

She’d
forgotten about it then; it became a lost card shuffled into the deck of
childhood memories. For years it hadn’t entered her mind, either as a direct
yearning or even a fugitive wisp of memory.

Then suddenly
her father had mentioned it. Towards the end, when the pain had got so bad that
the doctors had increased his morphine dosage to such a level that it had
unlocked the gates of his mind; then all sorts of things had come spilling from
his tongue.

His longing
to discover the secret destination of the path rose to the surface of the
muddied pond again and again.

She would
squeeze his hand tight and pray that, in his mind, he would finally make the
elusive journey along its short leafy stretch, before it was too late.

As she stepped out of the hospital’s main doors the sunlight acted like
an acid, dissolving her determination not to cry. She’d controlled herself in
front of the doctor and the over-attentive nurses but now she was no longer
able to hold back.

Finally she
managed to dry her eyes and took her mobile phone from her pocket. Her brother’s
voice greeted her from the other end of the connection.

“It’s Dad. He’s
gone, Chris,” was all she could say before her throat closed up with the
tension. She turned away quickly as two visitors passed her on their way into
the hospital, feeling the need to hide her grief while thinking it desperately
unfair that she should have to.

Her brother
made a soft groaning sound at the other end of the phone. Chris hadn’t spoken
to his father for several years, and the one time he’d visited him at the
hospital the old man had been sleeping.

“Right,” was
all the reply he made. There was a brief conversation in which Chris took on
the lion’s share of the funeral arrangements. Then he was gone and she was left
with silence.

She stared
down at her shoes. Under the right toe was a dead moth, grey and shedding tiny
wing scales around its corpse. Although she was sure she hadn’t killed it,
merely trodden on it because it was lying there, she felt its feather-weight
add to the burden of death that she had to endure.

She stamped
through her anger and helplessness to her car.

Once she’d parked down a side street it took a few minutes to make some
perfunctory repairs to her make-up. She didn’t expect to meet anyone but did it
just in case. Her tears had dried for the time being.

Relying on a
faulty memory from childhood, she looked for the industrial estate near the
river. Even once she’d found it, she had trouble locating the path. The
overgrown piece of land had disappeared under rows of houses long ago.

When she did
find it, she was disappointed. It seemed so very ordinary. Not at all how she
remembered it. Yet her father had woven beautiful children’s stories around it
and it obviously meant something special to him.

She felt she
had to keep faith with him and do what her father had never had time to do. So
she picked her way around some discarded food cartons and took her first few
steps down the path.

It was just a
dirt path with nothing magical hiding under the plants that fringed it. Some of
the foliage had been cut down when the houses were built, and the area was now
more open to the sky.

After about
100 yards the path took a turn to the left and headed towards the river. Then
it broadened out and she found herself on an open piece of ground, hemmed in on
one side by trees.

The ground
was sodden and covered with wild flowers that thrived in the damp. Some species
were as tall as her, making the most of the absence of people to spread
themselves out.

She continued
to follow the path, unable to see very far ahead of her because of the
abundance of foliage. To the right, the ground simply fell away until it
finally met the backs of the houses.

Somewhere
nearby she could hear the river rushing softly by and the cars on the road
adding their voices to the strange song. Yet it seemed silent and still despite
the sounds, the flowers acting as nodding guardians to their perfect little
world.

Then she
pushed past a bush that was beginning to grow across the path, and there was
the river. It seemed very high up the banks and was running very fast, but it
didn’t make as much noise as she’d expected.

She hadn’t
looked at any maps before she came, but somehow she knew there had to be a
footbridge across the water and, sure enough, she came across it within a few
minutes – a broken old wooden bridge.

Wooden slats
hung out over the river, the planking splintered and broken, suspended above
the rushing silver just a dozen feet below.

Then she drew
in her breath too quickly, painfully, as she saw where the bridge led. Her hand
pressed on her chest as she tried to hold in the shock and the discomfort.

A sense of
unease crept over her. There, beyond the broken timbers on the far bank, was an
exact copy of the hospital where her father had just died.

Yet it seemed
almost twice the size of the building she had left just hours before; a
deformation of the hospital whose corridors she had walked for months. And
there were other things about its appearance that seemed odd and unnatural.

Its greyness
seemed to be an exaggerated hue; an ideal grey, soaking up light and never
returning it. The surface of the building was blotched, as if with a fungus,
and seemed to be in a state of near-terminal decay. One of the pillars of the
portico was cracked right through with a grey-black growth spilling from the
narrow fissure.

The sign was
still intact but many of the letters had disappeared, making a meaningless
jumble, with the only continuous run of letters forming the word ‘pit’ above
the door.

There was no
road leading to the place. It sat in the middle of a field and, even where the
bridge ended on the opposite bank, there seemed to be nothing but grass,
undisturbed and untrodden.

As she stared
in disbelief, the sun seemed to rise higher in the sky, shining in her eyes and
forcing her to squint even harder at the unsettling sight before her.

Behind the
glass doors, the entrance hall was dark and filled with a voice whispering of
emptiness. From the blackness behind each window came broken night-time sobs,
answered by even more feeble cries in the darkness.

She looked up
to the second floor, to the room where her father would have been. The inkiness
inside seemed limitless, overwhelming. For a second she thought she saw someone
who looked like one of the doctors, moving past the window. But that was
impossible: whoever it was would have to be twice the size of a normal man.

The
impression of immenseness was close to overwhelming. Fear rushed at her as she
felt a sense of enormous size and of a limitless blackness within the
structure. Its suffocating mass seemed to bear down on her.