Spider (11 page)

It must have been a shock to him to see me sitting at the table with Hilda. “Raining, is it?” she said as my father dumped a string bag filled with potatoes into the sink. “I thought I heard rain. Still, you expect it, this time of the year.” My father made no reply to this; after taking off his jacket and cap he began washing the potatoes. I took the opportunity to slip off my chair and leave the kitchen. My father heard me. “Where you going, Dennis?” he said, turning from the sink, a paring knife in one hand and a half-peeled potato in the other. “Up to my room,” I said. He frowned like black thunder but said nothing, just turned back to his potatoes. The guilt was his, not mine!

Oh, I throw down my pencil. The psychology of the murderer—how do
I
know anything about this? How do I know anything about
any
of this? All acquired overseas, during the long, uneventful years I spent in Canada. Enough, it is very late, I am tired, there is stamping in the attic but I cannot go on. The pain in my intestines has not gone away, it’s spread instead to my kidneys and liver, and I suspect that something very wrong is happening inside me, that it’s not the food at all (filthy though it is), but that something far worse is involved. I suspect, in fact, that my internal organs are starting to shrivel up, though I’m not clear why this should be so. How will I be able to function if my organs shrivel up? I am not possessed of great vitality, and can ill afford any shrinking or shriveling internally. Perhaps it’s just a transient phenomenon, like the gas smell, which thankfully has not returned.

I’d been writing about the death of my mother. I’d been sitting at my table describing the events of that terrible night and the day that followed, and in the process the memories had somehow become more vivid than the immediate situation— that familiar
running together
of past and present had occurred, and I must have gone into some sort of a trance. For when I came to I found myself in Mrs. Wilkinson’s bedroom.

I don’t know how it happened. It was very late, the house was dark and silent, and she was fast asleep. She was wearing some kind of headscarf tied beneath her chin and her hair was in rollers. There was white cream on her forehead and cheeks, and in the glow from the bulb in the corridor it shone with a ghostly pallor. I don’t know how long I stood there, nor what I was thinking of; I only came to when she awoke with a shudder and started up, one hand groping for the lamp on the bedside table. “Mr. Cleg!” she cried. “For heaven’s sake, what on
earth
do you think you’re doing? Get back to your own room!” She began clambering out of the bed. When I reached the door I turned back, intending somehow to explain that which was then, and remains now, inexplicable. She was sitting on the side of the bed, a curious figure in her nightgown, curlers, and facepaint, gaping at me, and in some odd way vulnerable as she’d never been before; an emotion stirred within me, something strong, though how precisely to define it is beyond me. I paused in the doorway. She flapped a hand at me as with the other she covered a yawn. “Out! Out!” she cried. “We’ll discuss this in the morning!”

When I got back to my room I found the journal where I’d left it, open on the table with the pencil down its spine. I immediately replaced it in its hole, the grate behind the disused gas fire; and it was ironic, I thought, down on my hands and knees at the fireplace, keeping a journal was supposed to help me sort out the muddle I made between memory and sensation, and here it was simply increasing the confusion. I slept badly; my insides were still hurting, and there was much activity in the attic; later they began hauling trunks about. This was followed by a period of silence, and then I heard them outside my door. I must have tiptoed across the room half a dozen times and flung it open, but the wretched creatures, imps or whatever they are, were always too quick for me.

The next day it rained, and I thought seriously about going back to Kitchener Street. I don’t know what it was that prevented me—hardly the need to preserve in my memory some sort of aura about the place, some glow of innocence; Kitchener Street was blackly contaminated long before any of these events occurred, every brick of the place oozed time and evil, and not only Kitchener Street, the whole festering warren was bad, bad from the day it was built. So no, it wasn’t that, perhaps it was the very
reverse
of that, the prospect of seeing (as only I, only I, could see) how much darker the brickwork was, how much more it oozed, how much more it had absorbed of the moral squalor such an architecture invariably breeds in its tenants.

The allotment was a different story. After the rain stopped I once again made my shambling way up the hill to Omdurman Close, and so to the railway bridge. I was in fragile condition, but I managed to get across without mishap. A few minutes later I was standing at the gate of my father’s garden. A scarecrow stood among the potatoes (I must have missed it before), five feet tall, made of sacking stuffed with rags and tied off at the wrists and ankles with twine. Arms outspread, it was nailed to a crude cross of two-by-fours, and had clearly seen several seasons’ service: its clothes were weathered to a uniform gray-brown color, and the bowler that was perched atop the lumpy, eyeless head, and nailed to the backboard, was faded by rain and streaked with droppings. For some minutes we stared at one another, this creature and I, until a gust of wind came up and ruffled the loose sacking and gave me a start. It was hard not to notice that the ragged edges of the sacking were stained a blackish color. Overhead thick banks of gray cloud were moving in low from the river, and the wind was freshening; it occurred to me that we might have a storm. It also occurred to me to make a gesture of remembrance, so I gathered a small bunch of dandelions and a few sprigs of thistlegrass, and then (no one was about) I opened the gate and slipped down the path and scattered my simple bouquet on the potato patch. Then I stretched out flat on the soil.

After a few moments I felt stronger, so instead of going back the way I’d come I continued on down past the allotments to a steep path that gave onto a warren of streets and alleys that for some reason had always been called the Slates. Down the path I scrambled then stood a moment at the bottom getting my breath back. Off to the east I saw a long low line of factory buildings with thin chimneys drifting smoke, while to the south, two or three hundred yards away, there was a corrugated-tin fence. But where
were
the Slates? All around me the ground was scattered with bricks and rocks and lumps of concrete with shorn-off iron cables sticking out of them, and not far off the ground dipped to form a gully in which water had collected, bleak tufty patches of grass round the edges. Scraps of paper drifted across this waste-ground as I turned in every direction looking for the Slates. Had they gone? How could they have gone? Or was my memory playing me false again? Arduously I made my way back up the path to the allotments, then along to the railway bridge again. Had I completely misplaced the Slates in my mind? And if I had, was the rest of my “map” similarly faulty? Oh, this was worrying, this troubled me sorely. It had been a long day for the old Spider, and wearily he trudged home, coming in very quietly so as to avoid Mrs. Wilkinson, who would doubtless be wanting an explanation of his visit in the night.

The next day I went down to the river, to a pebbly strand where as a boy I used to watch the barges and steamers; in those days they ran on coal, and constantly coughed cloudy spumes of black smoke into the sky. You reached the strand at low tide by a set of tarry wooden steps beside an old pub called the Crispin. Down I’d go to sniff around the boats moored there, old battered working boats with smelly tarpaulins spread across their decks, all puddled with rainwater and green with fungus. Often I’d climb onto the deck and creep under a tarpaulin, in among the iron chains and the damp timbers, and settle myself in a thick oily coil of rotting rope—I loved to be alone in that damp gloom with the muted screaming of the gulls outside as they wheeled and flapped over the water. The Crispin was still there, and so were the tarry steps, though they looked unsafe now and I didn’t go down. But I peered over the edge, and the beached boats were there too, and across the water the cranes poked at the sky just as I’d always remembered them. This was some comfort, anyway; my geography wasn’t totally skewed.

I
changed after my mother died. When she was alive I was a good boy, that is, I fell foul of my father’s temper now and then and had to go down the cellar, but there was nothing abnormal in this, all boys make mistakes and are punished. But before my mother died I was a quiet boy, solitary and pensive, who read a good deal; I had no friends among the children of Kitchener Street, and I tended to drift off by myself whenever I could, down to the canal, or down to the river, especially in damp and foggy weather. I was tall for my age, tall and thin and brainy and shy, and boys like this are never popular, particularly with their fathers, who look for hardy, masculine traits. Mothers are different in this regard, this is my observation; my mother certainly was. She came from a better family than my father, she married down, you see, and she appreciated books and art and music; she encouraged me to read, and during those long evenings we’d spend in the kitchen while my father was out drinking she’d draw me out, encourage me to talk, to share with her my ideas and fantasies, and sometimes I would go to bed quietly amazed at all that I’d said, that so much was in my head, when so often I felt—or rather, was made to feel—that there was nothing in my head at all, that I was a gangling, tongue-tied numbskull with big knees and clumsy hands, unlikely ever to be of any use to anybody. Later I realized that my mother understood me because she too was alien to her environment—the women of Kitchener Street had no time for her taste, her delicacy, her culture, they were women like Hilda, primitives by comparison. So she understood what I suffered and she alone enabled me to be truly myself in those few fleeting hours we had together before my father stove in her skull with a spade. After that, you see, I was quite, quite alone, and without her love, her influence, without, simply, her
presence
I quickly went adrift. That’s why I changed from a good boy to a bad boy.

Not that this happened without provocation. For Hilda I was, at first, a source of amusement. Later she came to fear me, but in those first weeks she used this big blushing lad, no longer a child and not yet a man, as a butt of her vulgar humor. She teased me, she laughed at me, she flaunted her body at me; and because she was so often in the kitchen, even when my father was out of the house, I could avoid her only by going to the canal (though this of course involved going out through the kitchen) or by hiding myself down in the coal cellar, or by staying in my room—though not even my room was a sanctuary anymore, for she felt no compunction about coming up and poking around to her heart’s content. Did I receive any support from my father in this? Was he any sort of an ally? He was not. The very reverse, in fact; he shared her jokes, in that sly, quiet way of his, he exchanged winks and nods and secret smiles with Hilda when she set about “getting a rise” out of me. It quickly reached the point that whenever I was in the kitchen with Horace and Hilda I would see signals passing back and forth between them that suggested only one thing, ridicule, though if I said anything they denied it, and so I grew to mistrust my own perceptions, but that’s what I
think
was going on. Why would they do this? Why would they so persistently taunt me in this manner? It was only years later, in Canada, that I realized I functioned for Horace and Hilda as an outlet for the guilt and anxiety that had settled on them in the weeks following my mother’s death, settled on them not in any acute or panicky form but rather as a condition of existence, a way of being, in the wake of the murder. Much as Hilda could try to laugh it off, play the boisterous life-loving blonde as before—and extensive though my father’s powers of repression were—at some level they were secreting the toxins that the act of murder will always and inevitably decoct in the human heart, and if they weren’t to turn those toxins on each other then there must be an outlet, a conduit for it. I was that conduit, I was to channel and absorb the poison, and so I did; in the process I was contaminated by it, it shriveled me, it killed something inside me, made me a ghost, a dead thing, in short it turned me
bad.

Perhaps the cruelest aspect of the situation was that my grief could be shared with no one. At first it wasn’t grief, it was desperation. Where was she? Where was my mother? I could get no answer, and if I broached the subject with my father he would instantly grow tense and furious and remind me of the conversation we’d had on the Saturday morning I first saw Hilda with him in bed. But I always forgot that conversation, for the sense of loss I felt, the sheer panic of
not knowing,
would overwhelm whatever fragile inhibitions he’d instilled in me, and out it came, out it blurted; and again that terrible quiet anger, and all I took away with me was that I was
not yet to know.
And in time my feelings changed, desperation and urgency gave way to a chronic ache, a gnawing sense of absence, of emptiness, which left me curiously vulnerable to the sustained contempt that Horace and Hilda were directing at me. But it was not only that I was alone, for if I ever made reference to it in front of Hilda—and on two occasions, driven beyond endurance by her goads and gibes, I did this, I tearfully cried out: “You’re not my mother!”—then she would pretend to be greatly surprised, she would turn to my father, who’d glance at her from hooded eyes, an almost imperceptible smile playing at the edges of his mouth—and she’d say: “Not your mother?”

“No,” I cried, “my mother’s dead!” More silent mockery, another glance exchanged. “Dead?”—and so it would go until I fled the kitchen, unable any longer to hold back my tears, and clasping tight to myself a set of memories, and their associated emotions, that no one would confirm. So she lived only in me, now, this is what I came to realize, and the realization made me that much more tenacious, for I intuitively understood that if she died in me she died forever. You see, I’d heard my father tell the man next door that she’d gone to stay with her sister in Canada.