Patrick McGrath - Spider

I was coming into the house one afternoon a few weeks ago after some hours spent walking the streets. I was crossing the hall, making for the stairs, when I happened to glance toward the kitchen, which is located at the end of a short passage at the back of the hall, off to the left of the staircase. The passage was dark, but the light was on in the kitchen, and she was standing in the middle of the room leaning over the table with her sleeves rolled up and a rolling pin in her hands. Nothing unusual in this, of course; she was helping the little woman, who was attempting a steak-and-kidney pudding, perhaps she was instructing her in the English method. But what riveted my attention to this brightly lit scene, framed as it was in the kitchen door at the end of that short dark passage, was the way she handled the roller, the way she rose up on her toes and leaned on the thing so that all the strength and weight of those beefy shoulders was transmitted down her powerful arms, through her wrists, and into the thick fingers of her hamlike hands, the nails of which, I saw with a very real thrill of recognition and horror, and despite the powdering of flour upon them, were filthy. For a moment past and present slid seamlessly together, assumed identity, and there was one woman only leaning on that rolling pin, and that woman was Hilda Wilkinson; at that moment the woman in the kitchen was transfigured, her hair was blonde with black roots, her bosom strained against the fabric of an apron not her own, and her sturdy legs were planted on the kitchen floor like a pair of tree trunks, lifting and sinking as she rose on her toes with every downward thrust! of the pin upon the pastry. I had drawn close by this time, I had entered the passage and was gaping at her as she turned, panting hoarsely, to the door, and brushed a strand of damp hair from her forehead. Her chin! How could I have missed it? She had Hilda’s chin, big and puggy, prognathous, the very same! “Ah, Mr. Cleg,” she said—and I was back in 1957 with my landlady once more.

A pause; I could think of nothing to say as she stood there at the table, turned toward me, a question in her face. “Did you want something, Mr. Cleg?”

“No,” I said, but it came out in a sort of croaky whisper. “No,” I said, more successfully, and it was only with the greatest of effort that I managed to get moving again, for I had become, for those few moments in the passage, uncoupled.

“No?” she said, as I shuffled away, and the familiar spike of mockery was in her voice. “A nice cup of tea, Mr. Cleg?” But I had to get upstairs, so off I fled without another word. Once I’d gained the safety of my room I stood at the window and gazed down at the park and attempted to roll a cigarette; but my hands were trembling badly, and I spilled half the tobacco onto the floor, and it was some minutes before I was sufficiently recovered to get down on my hands and knees and retrieve it.

At first I didn’t realize what I must do. I often find that it’s not until everyone has gone to bed that I can think properly in this house, there’s too much interference otherwise, too many thought patterns clogging the waves, if you know what I mean—this is not the least of the reasons I spend so much time down at the canal, because if I’m not careful these thought patterns of theirs crowd out my own, and I can’t have that, I can’t have other people’s thoughts in my head, I had quite enough of that in Canada. It’s the same when they’re all awake in the house, even if I am in my room with the door closed, and let me tell you this: dead souls they may be, but the thoughts they think are grotesque, and this is connected to the creatures in the attic, but I’ll get to them later. No, what I realized as soon as I could think clearly—that is, at the dead of night—was that I must confirm the very vivid impression I’d had in the hallway; there was no point in thinking about anything else until that was done.

It was about three in the morning when I realized that if I knew who she was then she must know who I was—and the implications of that were very disquieting, though it was to take me some further days to think them through with any precision.

The following day was damp and cold. After breakfast I left the house as usual, but instead of going to the canal I went into the little park across the street. Now Mrs. Wilkinson’s house stands on the north side of a square that must once have been impressive. Today though those grand houses with their stuccoed facades and Corinthian columns are shabby and decrepit, many have been torn down and those that remain are tenanted only by rats or ghosts or flotsam like me. So I sat on a bench in the park in the middle of this dilapidated square, beneath leafless trees and a slate-gray sky, amid empty bottles and cigarette packets, and tossed bread crumbs to the crows that live here; and with one eye I watched for her to come out.

It was after eleven when she finally emerged in her winter coat, a shopping bag on her arm, and without so much as a glance toward the park she marched off down the street. I gave her a clear five minutes; then back in, across the hall, and up the stairs to the top floor where she, like me, has her room, though she is on the other side of the house from me. I paused at the top of the stairs to listen; nothing but the radio going quietly in the dayroom, where the dead souls listlessly killed time. Then along the corridor to her door—another pause, another moment of listening intently to the house— then turn the doorknob, and—nothing! Locked! She’d locked her door!

A setback, this. I made my way back downstairs, out through the front door and across the street to the park once more, where I resumed my seat on the bench and tried to think the thing through. She locked her door. The only other door in the house that was locked was the one that opened onto the attic stairs (and of course the dispensary). Far from damping my curiosity, this development had quite the opposite effect, it inflamed my urge to know what the woman was hiding: I had to get hold of her keys.

Occupied with these thoughts, and making no progress at all, I absently pulled out of my pocket a slice of dried toast I’d saved from breakfast and began crumbling it in my fingers and scattering the crumbs on the ground around the bench. Soon the crows flapped down, and when the toast was all crumbled I took out my tobacco and rolled myself a thin one. And there I sat, deep in thought, my outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, smoking among the crows.

This business of the thought patterns: it seems to have grown much worse over the last few days. Why should this be so? Full moon, perhaps? But no, the moon is just a clipping of fingernail, like the crescent of candlelight in the outhouse door. The dead souls, perhaps, have become animated, for some obscure reason, and are generating cerebral energy of an uncharacteristically heavy voltage? But I spent an hour in the dayroom after supper and there was no sign of any vitality at all, less than usual, if that’s possible—they sat there in their accustomed chairs like a group of tailor’s dummies, stupefied with medication, faces like suet, trembling hands, in ill-fitting clothes stained with food and drool (God how they do drool!), waiting for El Mustachio to appear with the cocoa. I should talk! I, too, drool, I tremble, I shamble, and as you know at times I become uncoupled; but God help me if I ever turn into one of them, pull the plug, please, if that happens, let me at least pursue the enigma of my childhood while I have the will for it, and if that dries up then string me from the nearest rafter and let me dangle like the Spider I am! Then in comes the little woman with her tray, and this is all the life we’ll see in here tonight, the small dull ghost of a spark struggling to feeble life in the dead eyes of my companions at the prospect of a cup of weak cocoa made from milk powder and treacly with the sugar that produces these rolls of flab on their bellies and under their chins. They all have fat bodies here, you see—fat breasts, fat thighs, fat fingers, fat faces, and dry hair that’s always flaky with particles of dead skin; and when they stir their cocoa, these zombies, the dandruff comes drifting down into the cups like clouds of light snow. I turn away, I turn toward the window then and rub a hand across my own skull, which is shaved to a stubble from ear to temple, and bristled on top with a few thick tufts precisely the same shade of brown as my mother’s. I can scratch that nubbled skull of mine for minutes on end without a single flake of dead skin coming away, for my skin is like leather, stretched taut as it is over the sharp bones of this long, lean, horse’s head of mine: yes, stubbled leather, this is my head; hooknailed spiderlegs, these are my fingers; and my body just a shell with little in it now but the fetid gassy compost of what was once a heart, a soul, a life— so who am I to curl a lip at the zombies, I who have all the brittle resilience of an eggshell, a light bulb, a Ping-Pong ball? No, it isn’t them crowding the air with thought patterns, it’s coming from somewhere else, it’s coming from the attic. Every night I hear them now, I haven’t slept a wink, and all that’s held them off so far and given me relief is the writing I’ve been doing in my journal.