Patrick McGrath - Spider

I woke screaming and slipped out of bed and darted along the landing to my parents’ room, but the bed was empty, so I ran downstairs and along the narrow passage, all in darkness, to the kitchen.

I opened the door. My father was sitting at the table with a woman I had never seen before. “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter with you?” He rose to his feet and led me out of the kitchen into the passage, closing the door behind him. “Back upstairs,” he said, guiding me down the passage, “back to bed, Dennis.”

“Where’s my mum?” I said, trying to resist his forward propulsion.

“Come on, son, back to bed.”

“Where’s my mum?” I cried. “I don’t want to go back to bed, I had a dream!”

“That’s enough,” he said, pushing me down the passage. “I want my mum!”

“Don’t make me angry, Dennis! Your mum’s in the kitchen.”

“No she’s not!”

“Upstairs!” he hissed.

“You’re hurting me!” He was gripping my wrists too tightly as he forced me up the stairs, and his lips were pulled back from his teeth. “You’re hurting me,” I wailed—and he let me go, and leaned against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. “Go and get back into bed,” he said quietly, all his anger suddenly dissipated. “You can leave the light on. I’ll be up to see you later.”

I too grew calm. I began to climb the stairs. Halfway up I stopped and turned. “Who’s that lady?” I said.

He glanced up at me and took his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “What lady?”

“The one in the kitchen.”

“Don’t make me angry, Dennis. Go on up now.” As I climbed the stairs he returned to the kitchen and closed the door behind him.

It wasn’t until close to Christmas that I fully grasped the fact that my mother was dead. Even so, the events of the hours that followed were vivid in my mind, not only those I witnessed with my own eyes, but those that were so painful, later, in Canada, to reconstruct. Horace and Hilda walked home together in silence, and as they made their way through the narrow, empty, foggy streets she leaned on him, and for the first time he was allowed to support her, to put an arm around her shoulders and bear her weight. Having murdered he felt clear and calm, exhilarated even, though these emotions owed their existence more to a numbed state of shock than to any genuine emancipation; my father was a fool to think he would be spared the harrowing of guilt, and indeed this soon followed.

Hilda slept with him in Kitchener Street for what remained of the night. She hung her skirt and blouse in the wardrobe, among my mother’s clothes, then flung her underwear over a chair and climbed into bed. My father was eager for intercourse, but she permitted him no contact at all. Early the following morning I crept quietly into the room, and stood beside the bed, gazing at the bulk of her body beneath the blankets where my mother’s should have been, and at the pillow where her hair straggled across it in clumps of tangled yellow with black roots. The light that filtered through the curtains was gray and dim, and the room stank of stale alcohol. My father awoke with a start. His first sensation was of me standing mutely by the bed, the second, the foul taste of the phlegm in his mouth. Then the night came back, and he turned and cast a glance at Hilda’s body in the bed beside him. Then he looked at me again, and I saw that he was suddenly very frightened, and wanted a drink; but there was never anything in the house (this at my mother’s insistence) apart from an occasional bottle of beer. He felt an impulse to turn to Hilda for comfort, but she seemed to have become tainted by association with the events of the night and with his own guilty terror. At last he remembered a small bottle of whisky he had bought last Christmas and never drunk. I was back in my own room when he climbed out of bed, pulled on his vest and trousers and went down to the outhouse. Back into the kitchen a few minutes later, and into the parlor, where he found the whisky in the cupboard. There he sat in the gloom of that weird Saturday morning, not the least of the weirdness being his use of the parlor; I’d never known him sit alone in there before. The parlor was for company, and my parents very rarely had company—they weren’t very sociable people.

An hour later he was a little steadier, and he felt he could go up and see Hilda. The whisky had blurred the stark outlines of the night’s doings; the terror that had grown for a few minutes almost intolerable had receded, and been replaced by a sort of fragile confidence that they were going to get away with it (he must, I think, have thought from the start in terms of a “they,” in terms of a mutual, shared responsibility). Slowly, heavily, he climbed the stairs; I was in my own room, at my window with my chin in my hands. The morning was well advanced, but the fog still clung to the city and cloaked it in twilight. While he was downstairs I’d crept along the landing and had another look at the woman in my mother’s bed. She was still fast asleep and snoring; at one point I heard her mumble a few words, but they were indistinct. The room was dark and the awful sweet smell of port was still thick in the air; and there was another smell, I detected it at once, familiar as I was with my mother’s fragrance: this too was a woman’s smell, but it was Hilda’s smell, a warm, fleshy smell colored by strong perfume and the emanations of her fur, which, impregnated with fog, hung from the wardrobe door. There was also the smell of her feet, and the whole effect was of some large female animal, not terribly clean, possibly dangerous. Into the lair, into the den of this creature came my father, fortified by whisky; I listened closely from my own room, my door slightly ajar and my ear pressed close to it. I heard him get undressed and then climb into bed.

Her back was toward him, for she lay facing the curtained window and the gasworks beyond. Gingerly my father fitted his body to hers (I could hear the springs creak), his groin and belly forming a snug pocket for her bottom. With an arm laid lightly across her, he pressed his face into her hair (which smelled of cigarette smoke) and tried to fall asleep.

He could not sleep. The terror rose in him again. She stirred, and I heard a heaving in that big bed. Silently I crept out of my room and along the landing until I was outside the door, which was open a crack (it would never close properly, that door). Silently I sank to my knees and edged my head round the side of the door till I could see them. Hilda had turned in the bed, and without awakening she gathered my father into her arms. Again she mumbled indistinctly and the heavy breathing resumed, her bosom rose and fell, and my father, clasped tight, lay peacefully at last, and soon he too was asleep.

For some minutes I watched the sleeping couple, then I crept back to my room and busied myself with my insect collection, listening for when they should awake. I suppose what I wanted was to hear something, something that would help me find out where my mother—my real mother—had gone.

My father awoke in the middle of the afternoon. The room was still dark, for the curtains were closed and all that sifted through the cracks was the gray dimness of the persisting fog. Hilda was wakening too, disentangling her limbs from his, and as she did so the big flabby mattress heaved beneath her, the springs and joints of the old bed creaked and screamed, and once more I slipped down the landing to the bedroom door. Hilda stretched her limbs and yawned, and then, turning toward my father, sighed: “Plumber.” She gazed at him sleepily. It was hot in the bed, and I imagined my father wanting to wash his face and brush his teeth (I would), but Hilda had gathered him into her arms—and a moment later she came to life. On my knees at the bedroom door I saw movement in the blankets, then suddenly he was on top of her, in the gloom he was making a hump of the pair of them under those hot blankets. A small muddle as she hauled a pillow down under her bottom, then the bedclothes tented, they hollowed and bulged, flattened and billowed, the whole shifting shadowy mass groaning as one creature as the creaks and screams of the old night-machine settled into a rhythm that affected the watching young Spider strangely; and then, like a sportive whale, this quaking hill turned itself over (hoarse laughter, stifled grunting during this clumsy maneuver) and her blonde head came up from the hill and turned toward the window with chin lifted and she sank and rose, sank and rose, as if breasting heavy seas, and groaned. The old bed was creaking and grinding beneath her like the spars and booms of a galleon now, her groaning the howl of the wind in its topsail as on she plowed, lifting and plunging, her chin straining to the ceiling then sinking onto her breast, her thick white arms like columns beneath her as the tangled blonde clumps fell forward to conceal her face from the avid eyes of the watching Spider. Then at last she subsided, she expired, with a sustained wail that could have been pleasure and could have been pain, and after that a stillness settled on the room, the only sound an exhausted panting that steadily waned as the moments passed. Silence; then she heaved herself off my father and seated herself on the edge of the mattress, facing the door with her feet on the floor, and yawned.