Spider (12 page)

I developed in time my two-head system. The front of my head was what I used with other people in the house, the back of my head was for when I was alone. My mother lived in the back of my head, but not the front; I grew expert at moving from back to front and back again, and it seemed to make life easier. The back of my head was the real part of my life, but in order to keep everything there fresh and healthy then I had to have a front head to protect it, like tomatoes in a greenhouse. So when I was downstairs I would speak and eat and move and
to their eyes
be me, and only I knew that “I” wasn’t there, this was only the greenhouse they were seeing; I was in the back, that was where Spider lived, up the front was Dennis.

Life became easier for me after that. I didn’t mind being a bad boy, because I knew of course that it was
Dennis
who was a bad boy; and when my father took me down the coal cellar it was Dennis who went with him and leaned his head on the beam and curled his little finger round the rusty nail— while all the time Spider was upstairs in his bedroom!

I
t followed that if my mother lived only in the back part of my head then so did her murder. Because if I couldn’t refer to her by name downstairs, then how much greater by extension was my inability to allude to her death, and the way in which she’d been dumped in the earth like a sack of rubbish? During those first weeks I didn’t realize what had happened to her, and I persuaded myself that indeed she had gone to Canada, as I’d heard my father say to more than one of the neighbors. But she didn’t
have
a sister in Canada! Wouldn’t I have known about a sister in Canada? Wouldn’t she have mentioned her as we sat by the stove in the kitchen, those long winter evenings with the rain drumming on the windows and the ring of hobnailed boots on cobblestones as the men made their way down the alley behind the yard? She would have mentioned this sister, she’d have received letters postmarked
Winnipeg
or
Vancouver,
with stamps with the king’s head on them, and she’d have showed them to me, read them to me, and together we’d have conjured scenes of Canadian winters, Canadian Christmases—her sister’s family clustered about a dressed fir (“all your little cousins, Spider”), the smell of a fat duck roasting in the kitchen of a log house with a cedar-shingled roof and a stout brick chimney coughing woodsmoke into the damp Canadian sky. Together we would paint these pictures in the yellow gloom of number twenty-seven, and for an hour or so we would be far from that dreary slum, we too would be part of the family gathered at the open hearth, pine logs blazing and children—my little cousins—opening gifts with cries of pleasure. Why would she go to her sister’s and leave me behind? This troubled me, up in my bedroom with my elbows on the windowsill, this provoked a sharp jab of bewildered pain until I remembered that there
was
no sister, no log house, no little cousins, there was only the absence of my mother, only, now, the memory of her, and downstairs a fat woman indifferent to me (when I wasn’t the butt of her humor), and a cold, uncaring father. This, as I say, went on for several weeks, and it wasn’t until we were close to our own Christmas that they began to take proper note of me, for by then, bad boy that I was (the Dennis part, I mean) I realized I no longer had to obey my father’s order not to speak of her. And when I realized this, and they saw that I’d realized it, they couldn’t ignore me anymore.

My father was still working at the time, so there was money coming into the house. This meant nights in the Rochester and people coming back to Kitchener Street afterwards. I’d see them spilling from the alley into the back yard, clutching bottles, their breath coming in a big cloud of mist so they looked like a single beast, a many-legged monster-horse stamping down the yard. They puffed steam, they roared in several voices at the same time, and I could never sleep when it was like this in the house, there was so much noise down there, loud voices and drunken singing, the clinking of bottles and stamping of boots on the floor. Often there were people in the house I’d never seen before. I’d watch them from my bedroom window as they reeled through the back door to the outhouse, or from my perch in the darkness at the top of the stairs I’d see them kissing and fondling each other in the passage below.

There was no Christmas tree in number twenty-seven, no decorations, no gifts, only a clump of mistletoe tied with string to the neck of the light bulb that dangled from the kitchen ceiling, and this permitted them to handle each other more licentiously than usual. Then bottles were opened as Horace got down on his hands and knees to coax some heat from the stove. Hilda had had him bring in the armchairs from the parlor, and into one of these she’d settle herself with a large glass of ruby port as the singing and the hilarity started up. Despite the hubbub her laughter was always recognizable from upstairs even with the kitchen door closed. Once, I remember, I heard the kitchen door open—the noise swelled for a moment—and then came a furtive whispering in the passage. I was at the top of the stairs in my pajamas. I retreated into my room as I heard people coming along the passage. Through the crack in my door I saw a man and a woman come up the stairs: he was fat and wearing a dark suit, she, carrying her shoes, someone I’d seen in the house before, a friend of Hilda’s, handsome in a way though as I think of her now I remember how life and drink had drained the color from her skin and the light from her eyes, she was a gray and sallow woman, and though she too laughed constantly her eyes were dead and so were her teeth, and her breath smelled foul. Her hair was dyed black and her name was Gladys. Along the upstairs landing they tiptoed and then into my parents’ bedroom, pulling the door behind them though of course it didn’t close properly, there was something wrong with it. Not very long after this I heard the bed creaking and Gladys quietly groaning; then there was silence. I crept down the landing, and getting onto my hands and knees as I had the day Hilda first came to the house I had a look at them. Gladys was lying on the bed smoking a cigarette. They hadn’t turned the light on, so there was only the dim glow that seeped in from the streetlamp. The fat man was on the far side of the bed struggling into his trousers and at the same time counting out pound notes. I crept back to my own room, and five minutes later I heard the pair of them go back downstairs.

I stayed in my room, sitting by the window, and waited for them all to leave. It was after midnight when they went shambling off down the yard in twos and threes, no longer the horse-monster they had been earlier, too drunk for that now, and then I heard Horace and Hilda come upstairs. I waited another half hour before going down with a candle. The kitchen was disgusting: dirty glasses, empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays, Hilda’s black shoes on the table, one upright, one on its side (why were they on the table?), and a foul stink of cigarette smoke and alcohol. Gladys was sprawled sleeping in one of the armchairs in her coat, and on the arm of the chair, close to where her sagging, snoring head lay pillowed on the shoulder of a dangling arm, stood a tumbler half-full of brown ale (black in the candlelight) with a cigarette butt floating in it, decomposing, shreds of tobacco drifting loose. I moved the tumbler to the kitchen table and took Hilda’s shoes and set them on the floor. Then I stood gazing down at Gladys for a few minutes, holding the candle up under my chin so I could feel the warmth of the flame; the fire in the stove was dying and the chill of the night was creeping into the kitchen. And as I gazed at the woman sprawled there in the shadows I thought about the noises she’d made upstairs and the sight of her suspendered legs on the bed and her dress bunched up round her waist. There was someone sleeping in the other chair but it wasn’t the fat man, it was Harold Smith. Then I went out through the back door into the cold and had a wank in the outhouse, and when I pulled the chain the water came right up to the rim before very slowly draining away: he still hadn’t fixed it. When I came back in I found some old cheddar in the cupboard and a crust of a loaf in the bread box, so I sat at the table and, still by candlelight, among the snoring drunks, I ate my supper, washing it down with a glass of brown ale from an unfinished bottle by the sink.

The next day was Christmas Eve, and I didn’t have to go to school. I wouldn’t have gone anyway; since becoming a bad boy I’d missed a lot of school, for I didn’t sleep at night anymore. I came downstairs at twelve o’clock. The kitchen had been cleaned up and Hilda was making mince pies. She smiled at me and I was immediately on my guard. Warmth in Hilda was a trap, for as soon as you relaxed she stuck a poisoned blade in you. I sat down at the table without a word. She was flattening out a lump of pastry dough with a rolling pin; her hands and arms were powdery with flour, though there was dirt under her fingernails and she smelled of jellied eels. She was wearing my mother’s apron—it was tight on her, as you’d expect, particularly at the bosom. “What you looking at me like that for?” she murmured, her thick white arms bearing down on the rolling pin. “Here’s your toast”— and she fished a plate out of the oven, on it a couple of stiff, charred slices of bread. “There’s dripping if you want it,” she said, “and the kettle’s on. Your dad might be home early today.”

What was her game? I examined the toast carefully and decided not to take the chance. I drank the tea, though, and detected nothing amiss. “Nora’s down the butcher’s,” said Hilda. “It’ll be a bloody wonder if everything gets done, you ask yourself if it’s worth it.” She glanced out the window over the sink. “I do wish she’d get a move on,” she said, and I felt myself going rigid and shifting into the back of my head where Spider lived. As soon as I was there I knew that they must have worked out a new strategy—they hoped by “winning me over” to secure my silence and complicity. It was a trap, you see, it was as if Hilda was saying to me: “Yes it’s true we murdered your mother but try and think of
me
as your mother now.” This was why she was baking mince pies and talking about the butcher, she was acting
as if
she was my mother. It didn’t come naturally to her, that was clear from the way she handled the rolling pin. My mother was far more deft with pastry, far superior to this ham-fisted prostitute putting on an act in a kitchen not her own; also, my mother never handled food until she’d thoroughly scrubbed her hands. Then this “Nora’s down the butcher’s”—what was Nora to me? Did she really think I would eat meat that had been touched by Nora? It was a subtle piece of theater but I was too clever for her. “What
are
you smiling at?” she said, pausing in her boisterous pastry-rolling and brushing at a strand of hair on her damp forehead. “You really have turned into a most peculiar boy just recently, I don’t wonder your father’s worried about you.” Oh, she was good, in my head I was applauding her, she was just like a mother.

She carried on this way until Nora came in from the butcher’s with the bird we were to eat for Christmas dinner. “Let’s have a look at it then,” said Hilda, wiping her hands on the apron once more. She snipped with the black kitchen scissors at the string tied around the newspaper the bird was wrapped up in. “Very nice, Nora,” she said when it lay there on the kitchen table, its plump pink skin stippled with points where the feathers had been plucked. Me, I had no interest in this carcass until Hilda thrust her hand up its arse and cried: “Where’s the giblets?”

“Not there?” said Nora.

“See for yourself!” And stepping aside, Hilda let Nora put her hand inside the bird. “He always leaves them in,” said Nora, “I didn’t think to look.”

“Back you go and get our giblets, Nora.
And
the feet,
and
the head! What does he think, he can do us out of half our bird? And tell him, Nora”—Nora was halfway out the back door by this time—“if there’s any more nonsense I’ll be down to see him myself.”

Shaking her head she turned the tap on and ran her hands under the cold water, then went back to filling her mince pies. I couldn’t help myself, I had to peer into the bird’s body: all I saw was a cavity in there, no organs at all, and it gave me a very queer feeling. I left the kitchen soon after and went down the cellar.

I was in my room when my father got home from work, and of course the first thing Hilda told him about was the bird coming back from the butcher’s without any giblets, and how Nora had had to go back and get them. “What, no giblets?” said my father—I was sitting at the top of the stairs listening to this, barely able to suppress my laughter. Then he too stuck his hand inside the bird, as I thought he might. “What’s this then?” I heard him say, and I knew exactly what happened next: from out of the cavity he pulled a packet of dead leaves, all tied up with string, and when he opened it up little chips of coal fell out, a few birds’ feathers, some broken twigs, and right in the middle a dead rat!

I spent that night, Christmas Eve, in the shed down the allotments. My father had guessed immediately who was responsible. “Where is he?” I heard him say, and a moment later he was stamping up the stairs. Then he was in the doorway of my bedroom, fairly trembling with fury, eyes blazing and bottom teeth pushed out. “Down the cellar,” he said,
“now!”

“Murderer,” I said. I was kneeling on the floor with my insects.

“Now!”
And with that he crossed the room in a single stride and, catching me by the collar, half dragged me across the floor. Down the stairs we went then, me in front, choking, him storming down behind me. When we reached the cellar door he let go of my collar for a moment, and that’s all I needed. Out through the kitchen past a bewildered Hilda and Nora, and into the yard, with him right behind me. “Get back here!” he shouted. The gate in the yard had been left open, fortunately for me, and I was through it in a flash and off down the alley. It was just getting dark; close to the end of the alley he caught up to me and crushed me against the wall and held me there, pinned to the bricks, while he tried to get his breath back. I went completely limp as he glared at me furiously. “Murderer,” I whispered, “murderer, murderer.” His frown darkened, he screwed up his features with perplexity—what was he to do about me, about
what I knew?
His breath grew more even, and I remained limp; his grip on me slackened slightly; I slipped out of his hands and again made a run for it. He chased me down to the end of the alley, but the spirit had left him, and as I darted off into the dusk, a fleeting, coatless, long-legged boy, he turned back, still in his shirtsleeves, and kicked in his anger at a dustbin standing against the wall. A black cat scrambled out from under the lid with a fishhead in its jaws and flickered away through the shadows. With his foot in some pain he hobbled back to the kitchen, where doubtless they talked about me for the rest of the night. I think, though, he must have taken off his boot and sock first, and found blood welling up under the nail of the big toe, turning it purple and black.