Spider (13 page)

I
f you’ve ever kept a journal you’ll know how some nights it’s almost impossible to squeeze out a single sentence, while at other times the words come flooding onto the paper hour after hour until you’re empty, and then it feels not that you’ve been writing but that you’ve been
written?
I will never forget the night I spent in my father’s shed. I had long since discovered how to break into it: you pried loose by a few inches the board to which the metal staple that took the neck of the padlock was screwed, and then you squeezed in through the crack and pulled the door tightly shut behind you, so the board slipped back into place. But before I went into the shed I spent some minutes kneeling in the potato patch. Nothing but black soil this late in the season, but it wasn’t the potatoes I was there for. She felt my presence, I know she did, there was a
reaching up
to me, it was quite distinct, as I knew it would be, such was the bond between us: that was something my father couldn’t destroy with his tarts and his violence, not a bond like that. As soon as I felt her I lay down flat on the soil and whispered to her, and I shall not write what I said. Darkness had fallen and it was rapidly growing colder; tonight it would freeze, and there had been some talk of snow. But no cold could touch me then, I whispered to her till I’d said all I needed to, then I squeezed myself into the shed.

I knew where to find the matches and the candles, and I lit them all and placed them on the shelves and the floor until the place glowed like a church. Then I curled up in the armchair as best I could, wrapped in sacks to keep out the cold, and watched the candlelight flickering in the cobwebs up in the gloom of the rafters. After a few minutes I had to climb out from under the sacks and cover the case with the ferret in it: the way the light caught its glass eye made me uneasy. So there I lay curled in the old horsehair armchair, watching the cobwebs, and it’s strange to think of it now, for you’d expect me to have cried myself to sleep. But I didn’t, instead I lay there wide awake and clear-eyed, and oddly enough it was the idea of the spiders in the rafters watching over me that kept this Spider secure.

I fell asleep. When I awoke, some hours later, a few candles still burned, and I had a moment of confusion and dislocation; then, faintly at first, but growing stronger every moment, a sense of peace and joy, for my mother was with me.

My mother was with me, dim and shadowy to begin with but becoming more distinct with each passing second. She was standing before me in the candlelit shed among the tools and flowerpots and seed packets. Her clothes were cloyed and damp with the soil of the garden and her head was covered with a dark scarf, but how white her face was! Spotlessly white, healed, whole, radiant, and glowing! Those moments are woven deeply into the fabric of my memory—the candlelight, the webs shining in the rafters in the cold, though
I
was not cold, how could I feel the cold, wrapped as I was in the warmth and peace of her presence and the low, soft murmur of her voice, and above all the sense of
plenitude
I knew then, a plenitude I have searched for since and never found, not here in the empty streets of the East End of London, nor in the plains and mountains and cities of Canada, where I wandered alone and despairing for twenty years?

Later I slept again, dreamless sleep, and I awoke early on Christmas morning still calm and joyful from her visit in the night. I squeezed out of the shed and along the path to where I’d go down to the Slates, and so through the streets, deserted and silent so early in the morning, curtains still drawn closed and behind them sleeping men and women and children; and it made me feel queer to be out on the streets while behind the curtains of dark and silent houses families still slept. In some of those houses lived children who went to the same school as I did, and in my mind’s eye I saw them curled up in bed with their brothers and sisters like little warm animals as the Spider loped by in the early morning.

Soon I began running, for the day was cold, there was frost on the windowpanes, and the puddles on the pavement were skinned with ice and crunched under my boots. It was a clear day, the slate-gray of the early sky turning slowly bluish as I ran on. I was filled with a sense of exhilaration now, the glorious feeling of no longer being alone, no longer the stranded object and victim of my father’s house, for my mother was with me now, in a way she was flying with me through those cold streets down to the docks, and her presence inside me gave me courage and purpose and hope.

Later, bored and tired, I made my slow way back to Kitchener Street, where else was I to go? Through the streets I trudged and now there was light and life and movement in the houses I passed, smoke drifted from chimneys into the cold clear air and there was pain in my heart as I glimpsed through parlor windows the glow of coal fires with children gathered around them and the doors closed and the windows closed and me with nowhere to go but number twenty-seven and nothing to look forward to but a belting in the coal cellar and a night in my bedroom without supper.

Along the alley, down the yard, and in through the back door. My father wasn’t home, it was just Hilda; grim silence as I came in. “Here he is then. Lucky your father’s out, my lad, he’s off looking for you. Here’s your dinner.” She took it out of the oven and set it before me and I was simply too hungry to care, I ate it all, and she watched me in silence as I did so. Nothing was said about the rat.

So I ate my Christmas dinner in the chilly silence of the kitchen, then went upstairs to my room and waited with no little dread for my father’s return. It was around eight when I heard his boots in the alley, and then he was coming down the yard; he’d been at the Dog and Beggar, I could tell, and this was not good, a belting was always far worse when he’d been down the Dog for drinking seemed to loosen his anger. In through the back door, while upstairs I sat waiting for the summons, making a deliberate withdrawal as I did so into the deepest recesses of the back part of my head, where only Spider could go. Then—nothing happened! I was not summoned! I heard the scrape of chair legs as he sat down at the table, and then the murmur of voices—the door was shut, so I don’t know what they were talking about, though I’m sure it was about me. My father never did come to the bottom of the stairs and call me down for my belting, and so that strange and in a way glorious Christmas passed.

I
t was not hard, afterwards, to work out why I hadn’t been belted for the dead rat: they had to keep me sweet. For what prevented me from turning them in? Simply, the prospect of becoming homeless, though they didn’t know this. If I turned in Horace and Hilda I’d become a ward of the state, and be sent to an orphanage, and it was all too easy to imagine the sort of bullying that went on in such places, the loss of solitude, the regimentation. No, I was fond of my room in number twenty-seven, I took pleasure in my stark boy’s life, my insects, the canal, the docks and the river and the fogs; and now, in a way, I had my mother too. So no, I had no desire to trade my lot for the satisfaction of seeing those two swing, not yet anyway. But they didn’t know this, they couldn’t be sure just what I would do next, so it was in their interest to keep me sweet. Hence no belting.

What I didn’t realize until later was that Hilda to some extent enjoyed the same advantage as me. She too, you see, wanted that roof over her head—a man who owned his house was a rare creature in those days, and Hilda, being who she was, and
what
she was, would certainly have taken this very seriously. Consider, then, how she must have crowed when my mother was murdered—when she realized that
because
it was murder she could secure her own place under that safe roof! She wouldn’t have taken the slightest interest in my father otherwise, of this I’m certain, she was a cynical, cold-hearted parasite, out to get what she could from a man over whom she now wielded the power, in effect, of life and death—for she, like me, could shop him whenever she chose, and if she was clever about it she’d avoid going to the gallows by his side.

At what point did my father realize what his position was? It seemed that the Canada story had been generally accepted, and as for Hilda’s constant presence in number twenty-seven, this might have caused scandal in a street less inured to immorality and corruption, but on Kitchener Street such goings-on were commonplace. On Kitchener Street men routinely dispatched their wives to Canada and brought in prostitutes to share their beds; or themselves went to Canada while other men moved in to take their places. It barely aroused comment. So by Christmas, then, it looked as if they’d got away with it, as long, that is, as I kept my mouth shut.

I suppose my father finally understood the true state of affairs when Hilda came right out and told him. I didn’t actually hear her say it, but I remember watching him in the yard one evening, and it was clear that something of the sort must have occurred. When my mother was alive, you see, my father had always had a tendency, if he thought she was nagging him, of just walking out the back door. The habit was deeply ingrained in him, and so when I saw him go storming out (there’d been voices raised in the kitchen), I knew she had angered him. He stamped furiously down to the end of the yard, pulling on his jacket, but he stopped at the gate and seemed to become immobilized by indecision, unable either to go forward or turn back. I felt a little panicky when I saw this, I’m not sure why—I think maybe the only thing worse than having Hilda and Nora in the house (and I hated Nora almost as vehemently as I did Hilda, she was a corrupt and cynical little drunkard) was having them there without my father. He did at least represent some sort of security for me, and I felt that if I was thrown on the mercy of those two monsters I would surely perish. So I did not want to see him driven out, not at this stage (though this would change). It was dark outside, and it had just started to rain; he seemed then to come to a decision, for he turned back into the yard and made for the house; but after a few steps he once again lost his nerve, and instead of coming to the back door he went into the outhouse. As I sat there at the window I saw the faint glow of the candle he had lit as it seeped through the crescent-shaped hole in the door. It was raining hard by this time, and I could see the rain falling across the crescent of light, and I imagined my father behind that door with his trousers at his ankles and his elbows on his knees, and it occurred to me that we were
both
at that moment estranged from the women in the kitchen; and I wondered if his feelings at all resembled mine? Then I heard the toilet flush, the candle was snuffed out, and he emerged. He came back into the house shortly afterwards, and once more I heard the murmur of voices in the kitchen.

I
think what distressed me most after Hilda moved into number twenty-seven was seeing my mother’s clothes being worn by a prostitute. It was not only the idea of trespass and violation, there was the daily spectacle of what happened to the clothes when Hilda put them on. My mother was a slender woman, she had a slim, delicate figure, boyish almost, whereas Hilda was all curves, she was
fleshy.
So my mother’s clothes were tight on her, and became as a result provocative; what had been demure on my mother was tarty on Hilda, but then that was the nature of the woman, everything she touched in some way became tarty.

I began, I remember, to watch her, for she provoked in me a sort of appalled fascination. It’s difficult to talk about this, but to see the dresses, the aprons, the cardigans that still, for me, carried the aura of my mother, to see them transfigured, charged with the sort of physical invitation that was stamped on all Hilda’s gestures, all her speech, the way she walked, the way she swung her bottom—this affected me strongly. Often I followed her when she went shopping, or in the evening when she would slip on that mangy fur and go clicking down the alley in her heels, my mother’s lipstick on her mouth, my mother’s underwear next to her skin, my mother’s
husband
on her arm—I’d slip down the alley behind them, move (like an African boy) from shadow to shadow, silent, invisible, a phantom, a ghost. When they drank in the Earl of Rochester I watched them through the windows, I was outside in the cold and darkness, and I peeped in at them as they basked and drank in the bright, sociable warmth of the bar. I found a way into the yard at the back of the pub and this gave me access to the windows of the lavatories; standing on a barrel I would look down on Hilda when she came out to the Ladies, I’d see her with her underpants at her ankles and her dress hitched up, her bottom not touching the toilet seat; then, having wiped herself, it was out with the compact and a quick go with my mother’s powder and lipstick. She never saw me, though once, I remember, as I craned on tiptoe to see what she was doing, the barrel wobbled beneath my feet and she looked up—but not before I’d ducked my head and regained my balance. As I say, I experienced a sort of appalled fascination at the sheer brazenness of the creature, I watched her as you might some exotic wild animal, with a mixture of awe and fear, and a sense of wonder that such a form of life could exist. She was a force of nature, this is how I thought of her at the time.

As for my father, for him my contempt knew no bounds. He was no exotic, no force of nature; in a barbaric and cowardly rage he had murdered my mother and now he was enjoying the tainted rewards of that act. He would sit there in the Rochester grinning and simpering as he sipped his mild, a furtive, grinning man, a weasel with blood on his twitchy paws, secretive, crafty, lascivious, cruel, and malignant. I had reason to hate him, had I not? He murdered my mother and turned me bad in the process; he infected me with his filth, and the hatred I bore him was intense.

For a time I made a pretence of going off to school in the morning, though after a week or two I didn’t even bother with this anymore. I no longer slept at night, and it was too much effort to leave the house at half past eight and then wander about down the canal all day, or go down the river and mess about in the boats. No, I’d just stay in my room and work on my insect collection and keep an eye on the back yard, see who was coming and going.