Patrick McGrath - Spider

I’ve mentioned that I lived in Canada for the last twenty years. About those years I intend to say nothing at all, apart from this: I spent much time, in Canada, thinking about the events I am here describing, and I arrived at certain conclusions that would never, for obvious reasons, have occurred to me at the time; these I shall disclose as we go forward. As regards my father’s first glimpse of Hilda Wilkinson, my guess is that he heard her before he saw her—she was a loud woman (especially when she had a drink in her hand), and there was a slightly hoarse edge to her voice, a sort of huskiness, that some men seem to find attractive. I see my father sitting stiffly in the Dog in his hard-backed chair by the fire, while on the far side of the room Hilda stands at the center of a lively group of drinkers. Up comes that laugh of hers, and for the first time he becomes aware of it. I see him startled, I see him turning, I see him frowning as he seeks the source of the noise—but he cannot locate it, for the Dog is crowded and he is not wearing his spectacles. He is far too guarded a man to allow my mother or anybody else to know what’s going on, so the image he constructs of Hilda that night is assembled from the gleanings of a series of furtive, shortsighted glances, taken when he goes to the bar, or out to the Gents—he catches a glimpse, perhaps, between a group of men, of her neck (flushed pink with warmth and alcohol) and the back of her head, the blonde hair piled and pinned atop it in an untidy heap; or, a little later, he sees her hand for a moment, with its pale plump fingers grasping a glass of sweet port and a cigarette; or staring, apparently absently, at the floor, he discovers a white ankle and a foot in a scuffed black high-heeled shoe—and all the while he hears that hoarse-tinged voice erupting in husky laughter.

As he walked my mother home, his hobnail boots ringing on the stones of the alley, my father still held in his mind’s eye these scraps and fragments of the laughing woman in the public bar. My parents had sexual intercourse that night, as they did every Saturday night, but I don’t think that either of them was really in the here-and-now. My mother was distracted by a headful of her own concerns, and my father was still thinking about his blonde; and in his imagination, I would guess, it was with her that he copulated, not my mother.

He was back in the Dog the next night, and Ratcliff had leisure to rest a forearm on the bar and drink a small whisky with him and pass a few remarks about Saturday’s football. It was in the course of this exchange that my father fleetingly glimpsed, behind the other’s head, in the snug opposite, a large, flushed face beneath an untidy pile of blonde hair; and a moment later he caught the tones of that boisterous voice again. A rapid flare of heat inside him, and he lost all interest in the landlord’s talk. “Customer, Ernie,” he murmured, indicating the snug, and Ratcliff glanced over his shoulder. In a low voice he said: “It’s that fat tart Hilda Wilkinson”— then made his way in a leisurely manner down the bar to serve the woman.

Little enough occurred that night in terms of an actual encounter. My father stayed in the public bar, straining to see and hear what went on in the snug, while at the same time attempting to learn what he could from Ernie Ratcliff, though the landlord proved disappointing, for this night he wished only to talk about football. At one point my father noticed another woman come up to the bar, one of the group that had surrounded Hilda the night before, a small woman in a hat who pushed empty glasses across the counter and asked in quiet, mannish tones for a bottle of stout and a sweet port.

He did not leave until closing time. The night was cool, and a slight rain had begun to fall. He stood on the pavement with his cap pulled low and spent some moments rolling a cigarette. A sudden splash of yellow light some yards away, at the corner, told him that the door of the snug had opened, and glancing up he saw that Hilda Wilkinson and her friend had emerged. For a moment she gazed straight at him, and he met her gaze from the corners of his eyes, his tongue on the edge of his cigarette paper. For the first time he saw her clearly—and what a glorious woman she was, a spirited woman, bosomy and fair-skinned, a yacht of a woman! With her ratty fur coat flapping about her, and the rain drizzling down on her bare head, and lit still by the glow from the pub, she gazed squarely at my father, her big chin uplifted, and suddenly dear God how he wanted her, this he knew with more certainty than he’d ever known anything in his life before! Then the door swung closed, the glow disappeared, and the two women hurried off together into the rain and the night.

Iclosed the book and, leaning over in my chair, pushed it under the linoleum where it peels away from the floor by the skirting board. I felt drained by my effort of memory and conjecture. It was late, the house was silent and in darkness, even the attic above me was still. I lay down on the bed, on top of the thin blankets, without getting undressed. I smoked, staring at the light as it swung almost imperceptibly on its cord. The silence seemed to grow thick all about me. I continued staring at the ceiling, and slowly became preoccupied with the light bulb, a glowing filament inside a fragile shell of thin gray brittle glass. For some minutes I continued staring, my exhausted brain empty of all images but the bulb, which had begun to crackle at me; and then I became aware of the smell of gas. It was very faint, so faint that for a few moments I thought I must have imagined it. But then I smelled it again. I lifted my head from the pillow and looked about me. There is one outlet in the wall where there used to be a gas lamp, and there is an upright gas fire installed in the fireplace like a screen, but it too has been shut off for years. I got off the bed and, pulling the chair across the floor, clambered onto it to sniff the dead pipe in the wall. Nothing. I went down on my hands and knees and put my nose to the gas fire. It was hard to tell what was there, it was so indefinite, at one moment leading me to think it was here inside the room, the next convincing me that it was only the memory of a smell, a memory that some obscure chain of associations had set off as a result of my writing.

There was a third possibility, though it took several minutes for it to dawn on me: that the smell was coming from me, from my own body.

This was a shock. I straightened up and tried to smell myself. Nothing. I staggered upright, clutching the end of the bed, and opened my shirt and trousers, fumbling clumsily at the buttons in my haste. Was it there? Again that awful uncertainty—I would seem to have it, then it was gone. I sat hunched on the bed, clutching myself round the shins, my forehead on my knees. Did I have it? Was there gas? Was it seeping from my groin? I lifted my head and turned it helplessly from side to side. Gas from my groin? It was at that moment that I became aware of a noise in the attic overhead, quiet laughter followed by a sort of bump—then there was silence again.

I had little sleep the rest of that night, and the light stayed on. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, but it wouldn’t go away, a terrible nagging uncertainty persisted.

I was particularly uneasy at breakfast, for I had the feeling that they could destroy me, any of them, with just a glance; I felt like a light bulb. It wasn’t until I reached the canal that some semblance of normality returned, and as with trembling fingers I rolled a cigarette, and the minutes slipped by me in that lonely place, so did the events of the night come to seem like a waking nightmare of some kind; after a while I was able to shrug it off.