Spider (3 page)

As for school, I was never happy there, and I tried to avoid the place as much as I could. I had no friends, I didn’t want any friends, I didn’t like any of them, and over the years they’d learned to leave me alone. I shudder to think of those days, even now: there were long rows of desks in a vast, high-ceilinged barn of a classroom with wooden floorboards, and sitting at each desk a bored child with a pencil and an exercise book. I was at the back of the row closest to the windows, which were set high in the wall so I could not gaze off into space and escape the tedium, and through those windows streamed the light of the day, and in it there was a constant thick drift and swirl of dust. The effect of dust dancing in sunlight has always for me been soporific, doubly so when there came from the front of the room the dull flat weary tones of some disaffected teacher in a shabby suit and heavy leather shoes who paced back and forth in front of the blackboard—a distant world, dusty eons from my own— interrupting himself to chalk up a word, or some numbers, the chalk scraping on the board with a hideous screech that had the pupils squirming, and the dust swirled as they shuffled on the floorboards with their shoes, and your Spider drifted further and further away, further into the back parts of his mind where no one could follow. Rarely was I called upon in class to answer a question; other boys and girls were better at that than I was, confident clever children who could rise smartly to their feet and tell the teacher what he wanted to hear. These children sat at the front of the classroom, closest to the blackboard; back here in the netherlands was where the “slower” children sat, a fat boy called Ivor Jones who was less popular even than me and was made to cry in the playground every day as a matter of routine, and a very messy girl named Wendy Wodehouse whose nose was always running with snot, and whose dress was always filthy, and who smelled, and who craved affection so avidly that she’d pull her knickers down behind the toilets if you asked her, and there were rumors she did other things as well. These were my closest neighbors at the back of the class, Ivor Jones and Wendy Wodehouse, but there was no sort of alliance possible between us, in fact we hated each other more bitterly than the other children hated us, because to each other we presented an image of our own pathetic isolation. I doubt I was missed when I stopped going to school; there would have been a neat line of
absents
in the register, and one less set of homework to mark. Nobody cared.

On Saturday nights my mother and father always went to the pub together. From my bedroom window, where I sat with my elbows on the sill and my chin in my hands, I’d see them leave through the back door and go down the yard, then through the gate and into the alley. They always sat at the same small round table in the public bar, close to the fireplace. They didn’t have a great deal to say to one another; from time to time my father went up to the bar, and the landlord, a man called Ratcliff, served him. “Same again, is it, Horace?” he’d say, and my father would nod, his cigarette between his lips as he fumbled for change in his trousers.

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.

I
closed 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.

But gas—why gas? I was at a loss to know what to make of it. Was it connected to the gasworks on the far side of the canal? They don’t have gasworks in Canada, so when I’d looked at the three great domes behind the factory it was the first sight I’d had of such things in two decades, though it’s the structural character that disturbs me, nothing more, the uprights comprise thousands of steel modules, and each of the four faces of each module is a frame with diagonal crossstruts; and stacked as they are to a great height, they repeat this crisscross pattern almost to infinity, and if I look at them too long I become absorbed in the pattern and the effect is horribly vertiginous—this is foolish, I know, but the sensation is real nonetheless. Is this why I suffered those bizarre sensations last night? I failed to find a connection.

I walked home slowly through the wet empty streets. It had begun to rain earlier in the afternoon (I had not gone back to the house for lunch), and the drizzle had persisted for several hours now. I was soaked through, but I didn’t care, it felt cleansing, and after the peculiarly unwholesome events of the night I welcomed this. On I went as the damp day thickened to dusk, past a long series of grimy brick arches, a smoke-blackened viaduct supporting the railway lines that slice across the East End streets, many of the arches bricked up now, or sealed off with sheets of corrugated tin behind which scrapyards and garages did their furtive business. From one of them a humped man in a shabby wheelchair suddenly emerged then went lurching round the corner, and I followed him under the arch, and coming out on the other side I saw, again, to the east, the gasworks, the rusty bulk of its trio of domes stained and streaked a dark reddish-brown in the drizzle.

I crept back into the house and went straight up to my room, where I intended to smoke, for I had smoked very little all day. I stood by my table as I groped for tobacco and papers, and gazed out of the window at the shabby square below, in the center of which stands a little park with spiked iron railings, a few bushes, a tree or two, a small pond, and some grass where the children play. It was almost dark. At the gate of the park, padlocked since 5:30 p.m., stood a single lamppost, a black iron stem rising from a fluted base, a short knobbed crosspiece near the top, and a glass box that housed an orb of light that spread a hazy, yellowy-gold glow through which the drizzle came drifting like flecks, like hints, or suggestions. My clever fingers plucked and spread tobacco in my paper, then I rolled the thing and licked the edge. I have a squat tin lighter with a hinged cap; with this I lit the cigarette, and then I smoked. Night fell, and the yellowy haze of the streetlamp strengthened and brightened in the blackening air, and still the rain came misting down through its corona on the slant, like so many memories drifting across some lost and benighted mind. I seated myself at the table and reached down for my book.

The following Sunday had dawned bright and clear, and before eight I heard my father in the kitchen downstairs, filling the kettle and turning on the gas. I heard the clatter of the big black skillet as he set it on the stove, I heard the bread tin being opened for the heel and crust of yesterday’s loaf. Then silence—the smell of bacon fat drifting up the stairs— he is sitting at the table drinking his tea from a chipped white enamel mug and dipping the bread into the hot fat. The scrape of chair legs—he is lacing up his boots—then out the back door, and from my bedroom window I watched him go down the yard to his bicycle.