Spider (2 page)

On Sunday mornings I often watched my father leaving for the allotments, where he had his vegetable garden. I’d see him outside the back door, in the cool, misty air of the early morning, his breath turning to smoke as he pulled on his cap and wrapped a scarf tightly about his throat, then went down on one knee to knot a piece of string round each of his ankles so his trousers wouldn’t be caught in the bicycle chain. The bicycle was leaning against the outhouse wall; he’d wheel it down the yard and through the gate into the alley, and shortly afterwards I’d see him cycling away.

He rode a bicycle in a rigid, upright manner, my father, and I can picture him now, on autumn mornings, in the old threadbare jacket he used for gardening, his cap pulled low, gliding through the deserted streets and taking a sort of grim pleasure in the fresh, smoky silence and in his own solitude within it. He passed the milkman, whose horse snorted and pawed the ground before unloading a steaming heap of ginger-colored bricks of dung upon the cobblestones, and as it snorted great clouds of smoke issued from its blackened and distended nostrils. Sometimes my father would get off his bicycle and trowel the fresh dung into a paper bag, later to add it to his compost heap. Then on through the quiet narrow streets in a southwesterly direction toward the gasworks which, lightly cloaked in the early morning mist, achieved a sort of grandeur, and mystery, despite the smell. Across the canal, then up a long rise and down Omdurman Close to the railway embankment. Halfway across the railway bridge, when he was within sight of the allotments, he dismounted and took a moment or two to roll himself a cigarette. By means of this small ceremony he was able to savor for a few sweet seconds more the prospect of the day that lay before him.

I haven’t yet been back to Kitchener Street; I feel apprehensive about crossing the canal and seeing again those blackened bricks, imbued as they are in my memory with the sounds and smells of the tragedy that occurred there. One day I must do it, I know, but not yet, not yet. I did, however, climb the hill to Omdurman Close last week, and even stepped out onto the bridge over the railway lines, clutching tight to the railing. From a point exactly halfway across the bridge—I dared not look down at the meshwork of tracklines far below—I saw that the allotments were still there, beyond the embankment on the far side, and still apparently in use, for the smoke of a gardener’s bonfire was sweeping into the turbulent air of that windy October afternoon. But barely had I decided to go further, and see what had become of my father’s garden, and of the shed he’d built at the bottom of it, than a goods train went wildly shrieking beneath me, and in a sort of shambling panic I scampered back the way I’d come and was a few moments later clinging limply to a lamppost with my heart leaping and racing in my chest and my ears ringing with the sound of the train, a terrible sound that for a few seconds turned into a howl of mockery from some tribe of invisible imps, so it seemed! How easily I am thrown into turmoil, these days.

I’m something of a gardener myself, you see. In fact gardening is probably the only good thing that came of the years I spent abroad, learning how to grow vegetables, though I never took to it with the same passion as my father. For him that narrow strip of soil was not merely a source of fresh vegetables, it was, I believe, a sort of sanctuary, a sort of spiritual haven. Having crossed the bridge he would wobble down the narrow path beside the embankment, past the allotments of his fellow gardeners, working men like himself who would already be hoeing, perhaps, or digging, or perhaps simply pacing up and down between the rows with their hands clasped behind their backs and their brows knit as they contemplated their potatoes or their runner beans or their carrots or cabbages or peas. “Morning Horace,” they would murmur, as my father slowly steered his bicycle along the path. Silent and abstracted these men may have been, manifestly anxious about slow growth, or blight, or wilt, or a damp summer and marauding crows, but these men were at peace, as I have been at peace in a garden, they were happy.

The first hour of the Sunday morning was when my father reflected on the state of things in the garden, and it was an hour from which he derived a measure of quiet joy incomprehensible to any but a fellow gardener. That hour, in the crisp, early air, with the dew still wet on the cabbage leaves, was in a way what he worked for, for he experienced then a sense of fulfilment that I don’t believe he found anywhere else in his narrow, constricted existence. He inspected, he pondered, he poked at the soil with the toe of a boot, he squatted on his hams to examine this plant or that, laid a veined and tender vegetable leaf upon the calloused skin of his palm, and peered at it through his spectacles. Then after a while he would go to his shed, a trim, square structure knocked together from waste lumber and tar paper, and there, in the cobwebby gloom, he would hang up his jacket and fetch out what tools he needed, and the day’s work began. This is the barest sketch of my father’s allotment (I shall show you more of it in due course), but it was by means of this thin strip of soil and its shed that he was able to carve out within the larger frame of his life a compartment in which to enjoy autonomy and fellowship; and it was this that made existence tolerable for him, and for others like him. In a very real sense the allotment was the spiritual core and flavor of a life that was otherwise loveless, monotonous, and gray.

I
haven’t even told you my name yet! It’s Dennis, but my mother always called me Spider. I am a baggy, threadbare sort of a customer, really—my clothes have always seemed to flap about me like sailcloth, like sheets and shrouds—I catch a glimpse of them sometimes as I hobble through these empty streets, and they always look vacant, untenanted, the way the flannel flaps and hollows about me, as though I were nothing and the clothes were clinging merely to an idea of a man, the man himself being elsewhere, naked. These feelings disappear when I reach my bench, for there I am anchored, I have a wall behind me and water in front of me, and as long as I don’t look at the gasworks all is well. But I had a bit of a shock yesterday, for I discovered that nothing fit me anymore. I noticed it first when I got up from the bench: my trousers barely reached the tops of my ankles, and from the ends of my sleeves my wrists were poking out to an absurd length, like sticks, before flowering suddenly into these long floppy hands of mine. When I arrived back at the house everything seemed to have returned to normal, and it occurred to me that the problem might be with my body rather than my clothes? Of course I wouldn’t think of speaking to Mrs. Wilkinson about any of this, she has already made her views clear on the subject: she has forbidden me to wear more than one of any article of clothing at any one time, no more than one pair of trousers, one shirt, one jersey, and so on, though naturally I defy her on this as I like to wear as many of my clothes as I can, I find it reassuring, and since returning from Canada reassurance is something I am simply not getting enough of Probably the whole thing was just some sort of perceptual error, I have occasionally been troubled this way in the past.

I am a much taller man than my father was, but in other respects I resemble him. He was wiry and shortsighted; he wore round, horn-rimmed spectacles that made him appear owlish. His eyes had a deceptively mild, watery sort of look to them, and when he took his spectacles off you realized what a startlingly pale-blue color they were. But I’ve seen those eyes of his fire up with anger, and when that happened there was nothing mild and watery about him at all, and as often as not I’d be taken down the coal cellar and feel the back of his belt. Not that he’d let anyone else ever see his anger, he was much too careful for that—but my mother and myself, we saw it, he had no other outlet for it, we were the only people in the world weaker than he was. I remember my mother used to say, “Run down the Dog, Spider, and tell your father his supper’s on the table,” and that’s when I knew I’d see that furious pale light come up. The Dog was the pub on the corner of Kitchener Street, the Dog and Beggar. It was not a big pub; there were four rooms, the public bar, the saloon bar, and two small snugs where private conversation could be had, each room separated from the others by a wooden screen inset with panels of frosted glass. My father drank in the public bar, and I can still recall pushing open the door and being immediately assailed by a welter of sounds and smells, men’s talk, their barks of laughter, thick smoke, beer, sawdust on the bare boards, and in the winter a small coal fire burning in the grate. Above the mantelpiece, I remember, was a mirror with a black toucan on it and the words guinness is good for you. I couldn’t read the first word, I only knew that something was good for you. There wasn’t anything good for me in the public bar of the Dog and Beggar: I’d see him at the bar, his back bent, leaning with his elbows on the counter and one boot up on the brass rail that ran the length of it at ankle height; someone would say, “Here’s Horace’s boy,” or, “Here’s your boy, Horace,” and I’d see him turn toward me, a cigarette hanging from his lips, and in his eyes there’d be only that cold loathing that came of being reminded, again, of the fact of his family and the house to which he must return from the careless sanctuary of the public bar. I’d blurt out my message, my little voice piping like a tin whistle among those shuffling, grunting men, those cattle at their beer, and he would tell me to go on back to the house, he’d be along shortly. No one would know, only I, only I, how intense, how venomous, was the hatred he felt toward me at that moment, and I’d hurry away as quick as I could. I was never able to tell my mother how much I disliked going into the Dog and delivering her message, for my father disguised his feelings so effectively she would have laughed to hear me explain what was really going on.

When he was in this frame of mind—and drinking only made things worse, drinking broke down his reserve—mealtimes were hell. I would sit at the kitchen table gazing at the ceiling, where an unshaded bulb dangled on the end of a braided brown cord. I tended always to slip into reverie in that poky little kitchen, with its clanging pots and dripping tap and ever-present smell of boiling cabbage, it made those ghastly meals tolerable. Outside the twilight darkened into night, and from over by the railway embankment came the scream of a whistle as some suburban train went steaming by. My mother put in front of me a plate of boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, and stewed neck of mutton, the meat coming away from the bone in stringy grayish patches. There was a terrible tension in the room as I picked up my knife and fork. I knew my father was watching me, and this made things worse, for I was a clumsy boy at the best of times, only poorly in control of those long, gangling limbs of mine. I stuffed a large lump of potato in my mouth, but it was too hot so I had to cough it back onto my plate. “For Christ’s
sake
—!” he hissed between clenched teeth. My mother glanced at him, her own fork poised over a potato that sat like a plug in a greasy puddle of thin gravy. “Don’t lose your temper,” she murmured, “it’s not the boy’s fault.”

The meal progressed in painful silence. There were no further train noises from over by the railway embankment, nor was there anything moving on Kitchener Street. Cutlery clattered on cheap china as we ate our neck of mutton and the tap dripped into the sink with a steady plop plop plop. The bulb overhead continued to spread a sickly yellow light over the room, and having devoured my food I sat once more gazing at the ceiling with my lips faintly moving, pausing only to pick at a shred of mutton caught between my teeth. “Put the kettle on then, Spider,” said my mother, and I rose to my feet. As I did so I banged one of my kneecaps against the side of the table, jarring it violently such that my father’s plate moved several inches to the left. I felt him stiffen then, I felt his grip tighten on his fork, onto the end of which he had just scraped a soggy pile of pale limp cabbage; but mercifully he said nothing. I lit the gas. At last he finished eating, laid his knife and fork across the middle of his plate, placed his hands on the edge of the table, elbows arched outward at a sharp angle, and prepared to get up from the table. “Off down the pub, I suppose,” said my mother, still at work on her last potato, which she had cut into a number of very small pieces, and without lifting her eyes to my father’s face.

I cast a quick fearful glance at him; and in the way his jaw worked I knew what he thought of the pair of us, his gangling, useless son and his mutely reproachful wife, who sat there making little pokes and stabs at her potato and refusing to meet his eye. He took his cap and jacket from the hook on the back of the door and went out without a word. The kettle came to the boil. “Make us a nice cup of tea then, Spider,” said my mother, rising from her chair and brushing at her cheek as she began to gather the dirty plates.

❖

Later I would go up to my bedroom, and I think I should tell you about that room, for so much of all this is based on what I saw and heard, and even
smelled,
from up there. I was at the back of the house, at the top of the stairs, and I had a view of the yard and the alley beyond. It was a small room, and probably the dampest in the house: there was a large patch on the wall opposite my bed where the paper had come away and the plaster beneath had started literally to erupt— there were crumbly, greenish lumps of moist plaster swelling from the wall, like buboes or cankers, that turned to powder if you touched them. My mother was constantly at my father to do something about it, and though he’d replastered the wall once, within a month they were back, the problem being leaky drainpipes and decaying mortar in the brickwork, all of which my mother thought he should be able to fix but which he never had. I would lie awake at night and by whatever moonlight penetrated the room I would gaze at these shadowy lumps and nodules, and in my boyish imagination they became the wens and warts of some awful humpbacked night-hag with an appalling skin disease, a spirit damned for her sins against men to be trapped, tormented, in the bad plaster of an old wall in a slum. At times she left the wall and entered my nightmares (I was plagued by nightmares, as a boy), and then when I woke in the night in terror I would see her sneering in the corner of the room, turned away from me, her head cloaked in shadow and her eyes glittering from that horrible knobbly skin, the smell of her breath befouling the air; then I would sit up in bed, screaming at her, and it was only when my mother came in and turned the light on that she returned to her plaster, and I would then have to have the light on for the rest of the night.