Spider (17 page)

A quiet life, then, for I did settle down. And it was only after I had settled down that I could bring myself to think about Kitchener Street again. Often, as I sat on a bench on the terrace and watched the men working in the vegetable gardens, hoeing, or seeding, I would think of my father in his allotment on a Sunday, perhaps doing the same work as them, for one potato patch is very much like another. But having thought this I would immediately remember that my father’s potato patch was in fact very different from any other, for the simple reason that my mother had been buried in it. And with that thought, unless I was careful, such a
flood
would be set roiling and seething within me that at times it was your old Spider who got trussed up in canvas webbing and marched off down to a safe room (his head twisting to escape the smell of the gas)! But in time I learned that there were ways of thinking about Kitchener Street and the tragedy without losing control (it all has to do with compartments) and in time I was able to think such thoughts even when, in later years, I had a job in the vegetable gardens myself. A particularly rich seam of memories was uncovered, I recall, when I was forking the institution’s compost one very blustery day in the autumn.

I pause; it is very late now. I take a moment to relight the dead one. The house is utterly silent around me; outside, the rain has stopped, and the streets too are silent. An odd thing, to sit here with the book before me, the pencil in my fingers, remembering a time of remembering. Is it always thus, I wonder? Smoke is drifting in lazy coils toward the faintly crackling light bulb overhead; I lean back, fingers linked behind my head, my outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, and watch it diffuse in the gloom. Is a memory always and only the echo of its last occasion? Which in turn is just an echo of the one before? A flicker of unease in my belly at this, a small spurt of alarm: like the cross-strutting of the gasworks uprights, the horror of multiplicity is there, the horror of reproduction; and yet what I remembered that blustery day in the vegetable gardens (I was leaning on the handle of a garden fork, the smell of the compost strong in my nostrils) what I remembered seems now so fresh, so crisp, so sharp and clear to me that I cannot doubt, I cannot doubt, for the simple reason that I saw it, I was there, hanging around the allotments in the days after Christmas in case my mother came back again. And my father, you see, was working his compost.

A well-made compost heap (this is the gardener speaking) is a layered structure that heats up and decomposes quickly. Kitchen rubbish, dead leaves, plant residue—all this makes for good compost, all this contributes to the good dark crumbly matter that enriches even the thinnest soil. Add a layer of manure, or even blood meal, then some soil, and dust it with wood ash. This is how my father built up his compost heap over the autumn, layer by layer to a height of five feet, the whole contained in an enclosure of wooden posts and wire-mesh fencing. He’d moistened each layer as he’d built it, and with his hands he’d scooped out a shallow depression in the top to make a puddle where rainwater could collect.

The day I remembered he was turning the heap, letting it air so as to ensure uniform decomposition and prevent overheating; but barely had he lifted the first forkful than to his astonishment he saw that the heap was moving, that the exposed interior was
alive.
He took out his spectacles (I was watching him from behind the shed in the next allotment, Jack Bagshaw’s; it was a gloomy damp day, and cold) and he found that his compost was infested with black maggots.

He had never seen maggots like these before. They were swarming all over the compost, all over the decaying horse manure, the potato peelings, the grass clippings and ground bone, swarming and seething, these plump little black things, and what insect, my father must have wondered as he stood there scratching his head (I am still peering round the side of Jack Bagshaw’s shed), what insect laid eggs that hatched so late in the year—though he would then have realized that the heat generated by the decomposing compost would be enough to incubate the creatures, and
beetles,
he would have thought,
beetles.
But what English beetle produced a grub like this? I saw him pick one up and examine it on the tip of his finger: a sleek, fat, soft-bodied, humpbacked grub, and as it squirmed there he must have felt the slime of it moisten the soil that grimed his finger so he wiped it off on the seat of his trousers and then with his fork uncovered a deeper layer of the heap. Again the swarming of innumerable black grubs, and he knew that the whole heap was infested. I watched him lean on his pitchfork and gaze, frowning, at his ruined compost, but even as he began to turn over in his mind how he would rid his garden of its parasites the chill of the winter air began to be felt by the maggots, and as they lost their heat so their activity slowed, and they began to die. And it was at that moment that I saw my father suddenly stiffen, and shrink back, and clutch the fork to his chest as though to defend himself—and his eyes darted about him in what looked like terror, intense terror, and I knew, I knew, that he’d felt something brush by him.

I didn’t move, I didn’t breathe. I saw him shiver, then throw down the pitchfork and turn toward the shed—but then the shed began to shudder (it was growing dark), to shudder as it must have shuddered the night he’d copulated with Hilda in the armchair, the night my mother discovered them there. Then it started to rain, and I watched my father backing away from the shed, his face alive with horror, backing down the path as the shed heaved and shook on its foundations with ten times the violence it had the night Hilda sprawled in the armchair with her skirt up round her waist, and him on his knees on the edge of the chair with his trousers open and his pencil of a penis sticking out between the buttons. It was a mockery, this, a dark travesty of the spectacle my mother must have observed the night she was murdered, and before he’d even reached the gate he could hear the awful gasps and groans of Hilda at pleasure, and by this time the air was dense with that terrible black energy, and he fled, I watched him go, I watched him push his bicycle up the path and scramble onto it as if the very devils of hell were after him, and only then did I climb over into the allotment and begin shouting and jumping up and down, making mud of the soil, as the dusk rapidly descended.

I was there the following Sunday when my father destroyed the compost heap. I came up through the Slates, up the slope at the back of the allotments, and along behind the sheds to Jack Bagshaw’s. My father had not been idle; during the week he’d been coming after work to spread mulch on the soil to prevent beetles from reaching his potatoes in the spring, and he’d cleaned up the cuttings and dead weeds likely to harbor larvae clusters. But Sunday was for burning the compost and destroying the maggots inside it, and so I watched him dig a shallow pit (needless to say on the far side of the allotment from my mother’s grave) and in the pit he laid the foundations of a bonfire, clumps of newspaper, kindling wood, and a few old planks that he’d stored under a tarpaulin behind his shed all winter. He soon had a good blaze going, I could feel it from where I was hiding, then he began to fork on the garden debris, much of which was damp, and the bonfire smoked profusely. But when he added the first mounds of compost the smoke grew so dense that all I could see of him was a shadow moving back and forth and forking up compost and flinging it onto the fire, and I remembered a picture I’d once seen of hell, a sort of cavern with dripping black walls and thick black smoke from somewhere down below, and in the smoke the devil was clutching a pitchfork not unlike my father’s, his long barbed tail flicking up behind him in the gloom. Damp though it was the compost somehow burned, or smoldered at least, and the smell of it, the manure and the rotting vegetables, was so bad I had to creep away, back behind the sheds and down to the Slates, and from there I made my way to the river. Even from down by the Crispin I could see the smoke as it climbed into the gray wintry sky, a long thin column that leaned to the west the higher it rose and eventually drifted away into nothingness off toward the setting sun.

When it was almost dark I made my way back up to the allotments. I saw no sign of my father, so I climbed the fence and approached what was left of the bonfire. The pit was still heaped with compost, and in the middle of it a round core glowed and smoldered in the gloom and crackled suddenly as the heat caught a stray twig or stick of straw and consumed it. Over by the shed all that was left was a patch of pale damp ground inside a wire-mesh fence. I unbuttoned my trousers and pissed into the smoldering compost, and as the piss hissed in the pit a column of steam rose into the darkness, stinking of charred manure.

All this I remembered as I leaned on a garden fork in flapping yellow corduroys and gazed out over the Ganderhill wall, over farmland and wooded uplands, at fat white clouds kicking across a blustery blue sky one fresh autumn afternoon in the early 1950s.

W
hat else to tell you? Almost all I know about what happened at Kitchener Street I worked out during that period. For when I settled down and was able once more to think about that time—the terrible autumn and winter, I mean, of my thirteenth year, when my father first met Hilda Wilkinson—what I found was a jumble of partial impressions: scenes viewed from my bedroom window, scraps of talk overheard from the top of the stairs, mealtimes in that poky kitchen, and glimpses of my father at work in his allotment. But as regards the order and meaning of those scraps: that was what I pieced together, like a shattered window, in the quiet years that followed, fragment by fragment until the picture was whole. And oddly, as my childhood took shape, so did I, Spider, become more coherent, firmer, stronger—I began to have substance. Hard to believe, no? Hard to believe, given the sorry creature I am today, tonight, as I sit here scribbling (out of terror) in the crow’s nest of this shabby ship of a house and swamped, almost, by the surge and flood of sheer
life
that crashes round me—a fragile vessel I am today, but back then, it seems, building on the bedrock of routine, and bit by bit reconstructing the events of that time (the appearance of Hilda and the subsequent murder of my mother, the destruction of my home, and the tragedy that followed), back then I looked, for a while, before my discharge, like a man.

Picture me then, a young man: Spider at twenty-five, tall and lean as I am today but there’s something about me—can you see it?—a vitality, a flame, even if it is a mad one, still it’s there, in the sheen of my skin, in my restless energy as I work in the vegetable gardens from morning to night, it’s there in my eyes—not like the dull filmed glaze that clouds the hollowed eyes of the Spider these days. A handsome man, even! See me in the gardens in shirtsleeves and yellow corduroys, a wiry, muscular figure turning the soil on that Sussex hillside, in that brisk air, framed against the sky—can you see me?—leaves swirl about me, red leaves, golden leaves, swirling down from the elm tree by the wall, and I pause in my work, I thrust my spade in the soil and turn, again, to the landscape I grew so to love, the sweep of the terraces, the cricket field, the perimeter wall with its old bricks glowing a soft rufous-red in the fresh clear air, and beyond the wall the farm and the hills, the trees a vivid slash of color this autumn afternoon. Oh, out with the Rizla, and the paper flutters wildly between my fingers as the tin of Old Holborn appears, and the wind molds the rough fabric of the gray asylum shirt to the bones of my lean trunk, and the thick yellow corduroy flaps about my shanks! Tonight you see me in decay, a brittle bulb housing a flickering, faltering coil, but in those days I had a body, and a vigorous spirit burned inside it!

But enough, enough of this pathetic nostalgia, this romantic drivel. What am I saying, that I was a hero? Standing on my windy hillside, clutching a spade? A hero? This lunatic? I lived among the criminally insane, and I knew routine, community, and order. Whatever strength or structure I had, it came from without, not within, and if you need proof of that then look at what’s happened since my discharge—look at me
now,
scribbling
out of terror in
this lonely room, engaged in some pitiful attempt to drown out the voices from the attic. And not even institutional structure was enough at times! At times the Spider collapsed, the whole flimsy scaffolding came to bits and he fell, poor fool, he tumbled to earth with a crash, and awoke in a safe room with his shell all in pieces around him.

But the important thing is that slowly I pieced together an account of what happened, and as the story grew firmer then I grew firmer with it. Conversely, when the story collapsed then so did I, but I rebuilt, I rebuilt, and each time the edifice grew stronger, better buttressed, the struts and braces pulling it together till it was tight, till it was whole. And so was I. And then they discharged me.

There’s irony here, as you will learn. Much was changing; there were pills now, for people like me, and there were also changes afoot in Ganderhill—most notably, the departure of the medical superintendent, Dr. Austin Marshall.

Dr. Austin Marshall was a gentleman, a tall, kindly gentleman in well-tailored tweeds who walked with a limp as a result of a motorcycle accident in medical school that had left him with a steel pin in his hip. A gentleman: it was a rare day I didn’t see Dr. Austin Marshall limping across the terrace, and he had a kind word for each man he encountered; he remembered one’s name, too. “Ah, Dennis,” he would say, pausing to lean on his stick. “How are we today?” He would turn his head to the south and gaze out over that magnificent view, a squire, so he seemed, surveying his demesne. “Good day to be out on a horse,” he’d say. “What about that, Dennis? Fancy a canter, do you? Of course you do!” He’d pat me on the arm and then chuckling gently off he’d limp, and on encountering another inmate he’d again stop, again turn his head to the south and, addressing the man by name, again make his friendly remarks about horseback riding. His conversational gambits were few, but the warmth behind them was genuine; he was a fine medical superintendent, and we all loved him, with the exception of John Giles, who tried to murder him whenever he could.