Spider (19 page)

“Mister Cleg,” she says, in that way of hers—she has a bundle in her arms—and then she sees the rope. I am still on my chair. “Not on your bed, Mr. Cleg,” she cries, “that filthy thing!” Clutching her bundle in one arm she picks up my rope and tosses it onto the floor, where it sprawlingly uncoils with a sort of dull muted ropy clatter. She brushes at the blanket with the side of a fat hand and then sets down her bundle. At the top of the heap is an umbrella, tightly furled. “Mr. Cleg, if I can’t stop you walking in the rain I can at least give you an umbrella. One umbrella. Now this”— she lifted up a rubbery thing, pale orange, shaped like a flatfish, and dangled it at me—“is your hot-water bottle. You can fill it in the kitchen before you go to bed. This”—she picked up an overcoat that looked third-hand at least, probably the offcast of some tramp she’d met—“is your winter coat.” It was pale gray with a fine herringbone pattern that immediately gave my eyes trouble, all those thin slanting parallel lines in zigzag rows. “And this”—she brandished a threadbare blue blanket with a number of cigarette burns— “is your extra blanket.”

I stared at this bizarre collection in silent perplexity. What did these objects have in common? She had turned her back and bottom to me, she was fussing with my bed now, putting on the extra blanket. She glanced over her shoulder. “Nothing to say, Mr. Cleg? Cat got your tongue?” (What a revolting idea.) Did she realize, I suddenly thought, what I wanted the rope for? Sudden intense anxiety in the Spider. “There,” she said, finishing with the bed; then, glancing at the floor: “Can I take this away? It’s really too dirty to be in a bedroom.” Immediately I reached for it, pulled it to me and clasped its tangled coils in my lap. “Just please don’t put it on your bed then,” she said. “I think that’s oil and I’ll never get it out. ” She was standing at the end of the bed now. She seemed very huge today, terrifyingly huge. “Nothing to say, Mr. Cleg?” She set her head on one side and folded her arms under her breast. “I’m worried about you.”

I shrank back, tightly clutching my rope. How desperately I wanted to withdraw from the gaze of those eyes, they bored into me, they splintered me, I was about to shatter and I could not get away, I was hypnotized like a rat before a snake. Overhead the bulb leapt to sputtering crackling life though
the light was not switched on.
The room grew darker, her eyes glittered at me. “You do remember,” she said—and her voice came as though from the depths of a deep stone well, hollow and booming and ominous—“you do remember that you’re seeing the doctor again tomorrow.” BOOM boom boom boom—the words kept booming in the room even after she’d left. I went to the window and stared at the streetlamp, which had just been lit. I was trembling uncontrollably; the rope slipped from my fingers and tumbled to the floor with that same ropy clatter, and slowly the echoes faded away. But oh, I thought, this will be a bad night, this will be a nasty one, how will I get myself through this one?

What a Spider was seen in the first pale light of dawn! What a broken haggard shadow of an echo of a
joke
of a man! What a husk, what a wreck, what a wretch! But he lived, he lived. I stood at my table leaning on my hands and gazing at the sky: the night was over, I had come through. There was silence; the shrieking had ceased, the furor was ended, I was the fragile vessel caught on the open sea in a storm by night that limps at dawn into some small cove or harbor with his mainmast splintered and his helmsman roped to the wheel, bleary with fatigue and spent terror. Small comfort, the haven of daylight, but comfort nonetheless. Cardboard crackled as I shifted my limbs, moved to the bed, lay on my back and gazed at a damp-stained ceiling that an hour before had been a demon’s dark canvas of hellish forms in coils and knots that squirmed, spat,
oozed
with filth and violence. But for now the ebb of night, the heave and swell of silent dawn: my Pacific.

The beached Spider lay on his bed with his legs crossed at the ankles and watched the smoke of a thin one rise in a slender column that broke into whorls and faded away. He thought of his rope in the fireplace, and he knew it was almost finished, this sorry jig of his, this jig in hell; enough, he murmured to the silence, enough enough enough.

D
r. McNaughten was in Mrs. Wilkinson’s office when I left the kitchen after breakfast. “Good God, man, what’s happened to you!” he cried as I shuffled in. “Sit down!” I sat. He peered at me, frowning, then went to the door and shouted for Mrs. Wilkinson. “Has this man been taken off his medication?” he said, not troubling to lower his voice.

“Of course not, doctor,” said Mrs. Wilkinson in hushed tones, drawing him away from the door so that I could hear no more of their conversation. A few minutes later he was back with me. “Dennis,” he said, “I believe you’ve been hoarding your medication. Tell me frankly: have you?”

What did it matter now? A shrug, a sigh from the weary Spider. The doctor frowned at me, then went to the window, where he stood with his back to me; one hand was in his trouser pocket, the other was drumming on the sill. Silence; after some minutes the door opens. It is Mrs. Wilkinson. She goes to the desk and spills onto it a dozen or so soot-stained tablets; she is also carrying my rope, and this too she puts on the desk. I sit up with an involuntary start of alarm: where is my book? Dr. McNaughten looks at me, shaking his head. “Thank you Mrs. Wilkinson,” he says. He returns to the window, and again stands with his back to me, gazing out. Eventually, and without turning, he speaks. “I’m almost convinced that I should commit you,” he says, “but I want to give you one last chance.”

❖

When I got back up to my room I found to my great relief that the book was safe. I was not to be sent back to Ganderhill; Dr. McNaughten had a number of reasons for this decision, one of which was that before I stopped taking my medicine I was apparently making “progress.” Toward what, he didn’t say.

E
ven when a man has nothing to call his own he finds ways of acquiring possessions; he then finds ways of concealing his possessions from the attendants. What you did on a hard-bench ward was tie one end of a piece of string to a belt loop, and the other end to the top of a sock, then have the sock dangle down the inside of your trousers. In it you kept tobacco, sewing materials, pencil and paper, other bits of string—whatever you had that was of use or value. Men grew attached to their socks: life was cut to the bone on a hard-bench ward, and this was a way to flesh it, make you feel more than a mere creature of the institution. Men fought bitterly to retain their socks, when the attendants decided to confiscate them. When that happened you’d lose your clothes as well as your sock and be thrown into a safe room in an untearable canvas gown, or you’d be straitjacketed, buckled and trussed like a game bird lest you break your knuckles hammering on the wall.

During the later years in Ganderhill I had a room on a good downstairs ward in Block F and enjoyed all the privileges the institution could give me. But in the early years I was usually up among the sad men, and often in a safe room in a strait-jacket. I remember the first time it happened, how a couple of attendants had begun talking about me while I sat smoking on the other side of the dayroom. Glancing over at me, the one attendant then told the other that I was here because I’d murdered my mother. Naturally I disputed this; I told them it was not me but my father who had killed her. They laughed and then for a while they talked of other things. But after a few minutes they were again discussing me, and again it was said that I’d killed my mother. Again I contradicted them; they told me not to get upset, not to get myself into a “state.”

This was rich. I remember that I began to rock backwards and forwards on the bench (a thing I couldn’t control) and my fingers were trembling violently. The Spider was making desperate scurrying movements, back and forth, backwards and forwards, so it felt, seeking with growing desperation some niche or cranny to crawl into. Rapidly the dayroom grew dark, and the two attendants sat watching me with animal intensity as my rocking grew violent. There was noise, screaming, then they had me pinned to the floor as the light ebbed and swelled. Then came the weirdly familiar clank of buckles, and the frenzied Spider, with the sensation of sudden constriction as they tightened the straps, at last saw his hole and slipped into it, and nothing more until he found himself in a safe room, trussed like a Christmas chicken and the single thought going round and round and round in his head that it was his
father,
his
father,
his father his father his father...

Not easy to think of those times now (perhaps it’s a mark of my so-called progress that I can dwell upon them at all) but it was to a great extent the work of those first years in Ganderhill to learn to endure such goading—which eventually I did: there came a time when I could hear them attempting to awaken the violence in me, when they’d murmur, one to another, about my mother, and instead of growing agitated—starting to rock and tremble, to scuttle about like a crab in search of a stone—instead of all that the Spider developed structures that could withstand provocation, he tirelessly rebuilt, he rehearsed with constant industry, and so became able to withstand the goads, and as this began to happen then so did the goading subside, and he was left alone. Life in Ganderhill began at that moment to improve.

I am sitting by the river, my furled umbrella leaning against the bench beside me. An overcast day, and very windy. I am drowsy from my medicine, perhaps this too helps me think of the early Ganderhill years without agitation. Other patients—John Giles, Derek Shadwell—would never do to me what the attendants did: with each other we had no reason to doubt, or lie. It occurs to me though that a function of the goading, deliberate or otherwise, was to force me to face and understand what had happened in Kitchener Street: this was why, you see, when I
did,
it eventually stopped, though this was not effected speedily, no, it took years, there were frequent collapses that would see the Spider once more curled like an infant under a blanket, or asleep on a bench with his head on a shoe. But what was happening during this period was the further development of the two-head system: back there where the Spider lived, that’s where we find the sad, true tale of Kitchener Street (the one I’m telling you now). And on the ward, in the dayroom, Ganderhill inmate Dennis Cleg moved unperturbed, a mask, a ghost, a puppet, among false rumors, scandalous imputations and provocative goads—for the Spider was elsewhere! (Until, that is, Dr. Austin Marshall retired and a new medical superintendent took over, and this man managed, in the space of two afternoons, to undermine all my work; but of him more in due course.)

Bad years, then, the early years, years of persecution. The first months were the hardest in this regard, before I adapted to their ways. (It is much more difficult to speak of those days: see how upright I sit on my bench now, staring at the pilings in the river as a screaming sea gull sweeps by in the gusting wind, and how white-knuckled my bony hands are, clasped on the handle of the umbrella.) For they would have made me their creature had I not found the means to resist. See me, then, in a cold tiled room at the front of the admissions ward, bathed and disinfected, stark naked and shivering: a long, ribbed, skinny boy, his pimpled skin white as milk, with terror in his eyes. They have taken my clothes away and are about to issue me the standard grays of the institution. So the old me, the lad from Kitchener Street, the Spider of London, has been stripped away; and before I assume the uniform of a lunatic there are these few minutes that I am naked in that bleak tiled room, that I am truly nothing, neither the one thing nor the other, and here’s an odd thing: I am seized, in those minutes of bare shivering nothingness, with a feeling so intense as to make me laugh out loud; and the attendant turns from the table, where he is busy with my few pitiful possessions, and frowns at me as I hop from foot to foot and try to stifle waves of an inexplicable joy—soon extinguished as I struggle into a shirt too small and trousers too wide, and a pair of thick-soled asylum shoes from which the laces have been removed. He has taken my pencil, and the few coppers I possessed, and sealed them up in a brown envelope with my name and the date scrawled on the front, and told me they’ll be returned to me when I leave. So while I entered that room as Spider of London, I stepped out of it a lunatic, unrecognizable to myself; and the terror, momentarily extinguished by that brief odd gush of hilarity, returned then, and all I was aware of was the touch of alien material on my skin, and the alien smells in my nostrils. Now I was afraid, desperately afraid, more frightened than ever I remembered being in my life before, and all I wanted was to be back in my room above the kitchen in number twenty-seven. But that odd laughter: I believe, now, that what I was feeling was relief.

John Giles was the first patient I encountered on the admissions ward, John with his great shoulders and shaggy eyebrows. He was admitted to Ganderhill the same day as me: when I first saw him he was facing a wall near the front of the ward and chattering to himself with great rapidity and animation. Beyond him, further down the ward, a little bald man sat on the floor moaning gently as he plucked repeatedly at the collar of his shirt, and beyond him, frozen to his spot like a statue, a man stood gazing at his own open palm and splayed fingers. I must have paused, there on the threshold, for I remember the attendant murmuring, “Come on, son, down we go.”

Down we went. A few men wandered the ward, most were locked in cells with barred gates for doors and bunks of solid concrete. These men wore canvas gowns and lay sleeping on the concrete with their knees drawn up to their chins. One man, his eyes wild and his hair standing up off his head in damp spikes, rushed to the gate as I passed and gripping the bars cackled at me till the attendant moved toward him with an uplifted hand and he shrank back with a whimper of distress. Halfway down the ward the gate of an empty cell was unlocked and rolled back on rattling metal casters. “Here we are, son,” said the attendant. “I won’t lock you up for the time being.” I stood there staring in: a small barred window high in the wall, a lidless, seatless concrete toilet, and a concrete bunk. “Just stay out of trouble, son,” he said, “and we’ll soon have you downstairs.” He was as tall as me, this man, whose name I later learned was Mr. Thomas. He turned and made his way back down the ward, glancing from side to side as with one hand he gently slapped a large key into the palm of the other. See me then: sitting on the edge of the concrete bunk with my elbows on my knees, my hands dangling limp between my legs, and my head hung low. There was a hot choking feeling in my throat;