Patrick McGrath - Spider

I was up early the next morning, and still in excellent spirits. The day was gloomy and damp, and this I welcomed, for I have always enjoyed rain and mist and darkness. I sat at my table until I heard the bell for breakfast, smoking, gazing at the blanket of cloud, and working out what I would say to Mrs. Wilkinson. I was one of the first in the kitchen that morning; I sat at the table, drumming my fingers, and as the dead souls appeared one by one I greeted them loudly. Little response, of course; in they came, shuffling and grunting, settling down to their porridge with lowered eyes. I couldn’t eat; I drank tea instead, cup after cup, with plenty of sugar and no milk. My fingers were drumming, my feet were tapping, I was smiling at the world. I announced to the dead souls that I would shortly be leaving them. Little response to this either, though a few fishlike eyes did flicker up from porridge bowls and cast glances my way. Yes, I told them, soon they wouldn’t be seeing Mr. Cleg anymore, I was taking lodgings elsewhere in town (I remained vague about precisely where). Yes, I said, I should be taking a suite of rooms, my residence in the garret—I pointed at the ceiling—was purely temporary, a stopgap measure while I found my feet. In Canada, I told them, I had been accustomed to certain amenities, a billiard table, a library—how could a person live in a house that lacked a library? I drank more tea; I expanded upon my theme. But barely was I launched than I saw them turning toward the door. Mrs. Wilkinson was standing there with her arms folded across her chest. I fell silent. “Go on, Mr. Cleg,” she said. “This is most informative.”

Her sarcasm was like acid. “Mr. Cleg,” she said, advancing into the room. I turned sideways in my chair, averted my face to the wall and crossed my legs. I began to fumble with my tobacco. “Mr. Cleg,” she said, “I do sincerely wish I could provide you with a billiard table and a library, but this is not a rich house, and so we must shift for ourselves—as you do, Mr. Cleg, I wish more of the residents would get out for a stroll.”

Still sideways in my chair, my face still averted, I grew rigid. I burned with humiliation. From my trembling fingers shreds of tobacco spilled onto my trousers. Several moments passed. A weary sigh, then, from my tormentor. “Mr. Cleg, how many shirts are you wearing? What about our agreement?” Agreement! I was frozen stiff by this point. I abandoned the effort to roll a cigarette. My fingers hung poised and immobile, a paper between two fingers of the left hand, a pinch of tobacco in the right. Silence. What was she doing? Then, from one of the dead souls: “She’s gone, Mr. Cleg,” and I slowly relaxed, though my fingers kept twitching for at least another quarter of an hour.

Not until I was safely out of the front door did my spirits begin to rally. The woman is a monster! But I put her out of my mind, I was in much too good a humor to let her spoil it, and soon I was bubbling with exuberance once more. For some reason I felt reluctant to sit by the canal, and I wondered, as I do every morning, whether today I would cross the bridge and revisit Kitchener Street. But I didn’t revisit Kitchener Street, not that day, nor did I go to the canal, I went to the river instead, for I knew that I should only become morbid if I watched the rain spotting the black surface of the canal, for the rain carries ideas, this I learned in Canada, where it rains almost all the time. Along the towpath I went then climbed up to the main road—how fast everything seemed to be moving in the rain!—crossed over, then threaded my way through narrow streets to an alley between the warehouses, then to a set of worn stone steps descending to the river itself. Oh, the river! Great broad swirling stream, old Father Thames in the raw gray day! On the far side, the cranes of Rotherhithe poking at me through the mist like fingers, or insects. On the lower steps, as I gingerly descended, a creeping green slime, and one of the steps was eaten away and the rest were crumbling and pocked. At the foot of the steps the water churned and eddied, gray-green like the sky, the thick, lowering blanket of sky, spitting rain, soaking me through, my cap a soggy, useless thing by this point so I tossed it into the river and watched it float away. I love the wetness of a day like this, I love wetness and darkness and skies like thick gray blankets, for it is only at such times that I feel at home in the world.

I made my way in a state of some exhilaration back across the main road (there was some honking and emotion in the traffic, for I had one of my forgetful moments, I became uncoupled), then back along the towpath. Close to my bench I left the canal and quite on impulse moved up the hill to Omdurman Close, until I stood on the bridge across the railway lines. Far below me the rails glistened, bedewed iron cobwebs, but no imps could terrorize me in weather like this, this was my day! Over the bridge then, a damp ecstatic squelch it was, for the rain was really very heavy now—and at the other end I stood and gazed upon the allotments spread beneath me, strip by strip, in a sort of haze, each one fenced off, tenanted by its shed. Nothing, nothing had changed here! Down the path I shuffled, muddy, puddled path though it was, careless of its mud and its puddles, until I stood again at the gate to my father’s allotment.

Nothing had changed. I opened the gate and advanced down the path, the potato plants to either side of me bedraggled and flattened like prostrate courtiers, as the rain splattered onto the soil and formed pools in the troughs between the rows. Set back from the shed, off to the right of it, the compost heap, a soggy thing this day, its eggshells and peelings congealing in a slick moist fecund mash, and there before me the shed itself, cleansed by the rain, I felt no black horror from it, none of the sheer giddy waves of horror that my father provoked from the place and which came in time to haunt him to the very threshold of his sanity—none of that, nor, as I turned toward the soil again, did I feel the horror there either, there was peace in the soil, for the rain brings peace to the living and the dead, to all things under the ground and under the water, they all rest in the rain, I knelt down in the potato patch and laid my head on the soil; and then a voice said: “Here! What do you think you’re doing?”

Here! Here! Here here here here here! It echoed as I turned, stumbling, toward the source, a bearded figure in a cap and raincoat on the other side of the fence. Here! Here! Here here here here here! The imps took up the cry, damn them, damn their filthy souls to hell! Oh, I fled, I went squelching and weeping back up the path and over the bridge with the sounds of their filthy voices ringing in my ears until I was back on the bench, a damp and heaving wreck, I should have known, I told myself, I should have known, they never rest, I must be cunning, I must be like the fox.

Mrs. Wilkinson saw me coming in, soggy bit of flotsam that I was, and she wasn’t at all happy that I was so wet. But I ignored her as I shuffled upstairs, heedless also of the dead souls who emerged from the dayroom to peer at my dripping and beleaguered shell. I sat on the side of my bed with my elbows on my knees, a sad and sorry water-spider indeed— and then she came barging in, without knocking, all brisk matronly zeal. “Out of those wet things, Mr. Cleg,” she said, “we don’t want you catching your death of cold.”

I was totally debilitated by this point, my exuberance, my energy, all evaporated, vanished like the mist. I rose rather wearily to my feet and permitted her to make a start on my buttons. After a moment I felt more engaged, I brushed her fingers from me and continued with the buttons myself. She swept out. “A hot bath for you, Mr. Cleg,” she cried, “I’d no idea you’d get yourself soaked to the skin.” I could hear her in the bathroom down the passage, humming to herself as hot water came coughing and gushing from the old brass taps. When I was ready I wrapped myself, shivering, in the faded old dressing gown I’d had since the colonies, and padded down the passage.