Spider Read online

  I stared, blinking, at the floor and watched two or three tears fall between my feet. A shadow fell across the cell; I looked up, startled: it was John Giles, the giant. “Got any snout?” he said. I shook my head; he shuffled off.

  I ate my supper in my cell, from a paper plate with a wooden spoon, and shortly afterwards I was issued a pair of blankets and three sheets of toilet paper. Then my gate was slammed closed with a great clattering bang! and the lights were turned off, all but one or two that spread a dim glow down the middle of the corridor, enough for me to see the man in the opposite cell. I lay down on my bunk, and for the first time learned to use a shoe for a pillow. The sounds of the ward changed; the men I’d seen curled on their bunks with their knees pulled up to their chins seemed to awaken with the darkness, and now there arose such a piteous clamor of groans, and cries, and whimpers that I clapped my hands to my ears and lay there, on the concrete, rigid, my eyes wide and staring at the ceiling, where the glow from the corridor cast a weirdly elongated grid of bars across the plaster. Even so I couldn’t escape the voices, and after some minutes I was pacing back and forth across the cell, still clutching my head and muttering feverishly to try and drown out with my own voice the unbearable anguish of theirs. Then there was an attendant at my gate. “Settle down, son,” he murmured, “don’t get upset.” I said nothing; I stood in my cell and gazed at the man. After some moments he said, “Lie down, son,” and I did. He went away, and I heard him silence the moaning and whimpering, until the ward was almost quiet. I lay there for what seemed an eternity, watching the skewed grid of shadows on the ceiling, and then I began to see the cobwebs in the roof of my father’s shed; from this I derived comfort of some kind, for I managed to sleep then.

  The next days passed in alternating cycles of monotony and hell. I easily became distraught and agitated—hardly surprising—and soon I’d lost my shirt and trousers and was locked up in an untearable canvas gown. Oh, this was the low point; I shudder, now, to think of what I must have been going through to do the things I did. Such was my despair, my pain, the sheer bloody wretchedness and misery of my isolation that I flung off my gown and used my own feces to write my name on the wall—my real name, that is, Spider,

  I mean, daubed and smeared in damp brown clots across the plaster—and now see me, hunkered naked on my hams and grinning at the wall where my own name drips in shit in letters two feet high, and for a few brief minutes I am my own creature, not theirs, not theirs. But then see how I’m marched ungently down to the bathroom while my cell is scrubbed down with hot water and coarse bleach, confirmed, in their eyes, as a lunatic, by this dirty deed, though in my own eyes the reverse!

  Bad days, then, though in time I learned, as I say, to build up the old two-head system and give them a lunatic while the Spider stood aloof. This was partly due to tobacco: in Ganderhill tobacco was one of those rude struts men used to give their days shape. There was an issue after breakfast and an issue after supper, from the tin at the front of the ward. I soon learned to join the others when they lined up for it, though it wasn’t so much the tobacco that yielded the pleasure, it was, oddly, the scarcity of the stuff, the paltriness of the morning issue that made you impatient for the evening (having smoked it all by noon) and then in turn it was finishing the evening issue that made you look forward so avidly in the long sleepless hours of the night to the morning. The pleasure was all in the delay, the anticipation; and this is how they made you their creature, for if you got into trouble you lost your tobacco, and the whole sweet rhythm of anticipation and satisfaction disappeared from the day; and what a bleak and dreary day that made it! So this too prompted me to build up the old two-head system, for if I gave them a good lunatic they gave me tobacco, twice a day, for me to hoard or smoke as I chose. Not that tobacco could do everything: men still banged their heads against the wall till they bled, they tore out their stitches, they burned holes in their flesh with cigarettes, they stuffed their gowns down the toilet then flushed till the water flooded the cell and went streaming down the corridor. For this was a hard-bench ward, and we were there because we failed; but I did learn to give them a good lunatic, and it was at that point they decided I was ready to see Dr. Austin Marshall.

  The interview was not a long one. It took place in his office; he sat, I stood, with Mr. Thomas behind me at the door.

  There was a file open on the desk; I realized that this was my file; somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that I had a file. He poked at his pipe with a matchstick. “You’re very young to be so sick,” he murmured, gazing up at me with the pipe clasped between his fingers. “How are you getting along on the ward?”

  “Fine,” I said. (I’d been told to say this.)

  “Sir,” said Mr. Thomas quietly.

  “Sir,” I said.

  “Like to try and make a go of it downstairs, Dennis?”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  “Yes,” he murmured as his eyes returned to my file. Then: “Why did you do it, son? Any idea?”

  “I didn’t mean to, sir. It was a mistake.”

  “Sorry you did it, then?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well that’s a start. Eh, Mr. Thomas? That’s a start, eh?”

  “Yes sir,” said Mr. Thomas from the door.

  “Don’t suppose you’ll ever do it again,” said Dr. Austin Marshall. “Only got one mother after all.” He looked up with raised eyebrows; I had been told on no account to mention what my father had done. Mr. Thomas cleared his voice, a reminder. I stayed silent. The superintendent scribbled in my file for some moments, then said briskly: “Let’s try him out on a downstairs ward, see how he gets along. Block B, Mr. Thomas—can I leave the details to you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Jolly good. Don’t know any naval history, I suppose, Dennis?” he said, rising to his feet and waving vaguely with his pipe stem at a painting in oils of a sea battle. I couldn’t look at the thing, all that smoke and blood, screaming men in a burning sea as mainmasts were shattered and cannons belched flame, I could hear it, I could smell it, I wanted no part of it. “No, of course you don’t,” he said. “Still, you should, East End boy like yourself. It’s the Royal Navy made this country great, am I right, Mr. Thomas?”

  “Quite right sir.”

  “Jolly good then. Well off you go.”

  Off we went, and so began my first stint on a downstairs ward. In later years I found it to be generally true that you only got to see Dr. Austin Marshall when you least needed him. Odd, eh?

  The sea gull has settled on the pilings in the river and I seem unable to tear my eyes away from it. Ugly fat thing, with its beady eyes and webbed feet, now it lifts its hooked beak and lets out a screechy croak, you can imagine that beak coming at your face, pluck out an eye like a cockle, leave an empty socket and a bloody cheek—bloody cheek! Bloody nerve! Bloody nerve, nerve, nervous disease—I hate birds. The water’s boiling and frothing round my pilings now, whitecaps further out, strong current running, wash you out to sea like a scrap of flotsam, death by water, death by gas, death by hemp hemp hemp: they should have strung Horace up by the neck and let him swing. Horace—Horrors! Horrors Cleg! Horrors and his bird Hilda, they should’ve strung’em both up! Tower Bridge a dim gray structure of pencils and string against the failing light of this blustery afternoon, long strips of dark gray cloud sweeping out across the western sky, a few ragged, jagged tears between with the light shafting through, me on my bench leaning on the umbrella as the wind spits bits of river in my face and the gull lifts off the piling with more screechy croaks and an untidy flap of dirty wings before wheeling off on the wind and letting me rise at last to my feet and shuffle off home.

  Upstairs without being seen and out with the book. Like a fox, the Spider, for when she found my rope and tablets in the fireplace she didn’t find the book: I was just too clever for her. For inside the flue, directly behind the mantelpiece that sticks out over the gas fire, there’s a narrow shelf, a ledge, and I stand the
book on this ledge and wedge it firm with an upright brick. Only one way to retrieve it when it’s wedged on its ledge: flat on my back with my head up against the gas fire, my arm through the gap, into the fireplace, up the chimney—I grope, I stretch—and my fingers are just able to reach the brick and lift it down, and the book comes tumbling after; and despite the brown bag it is dirtier than ever now. Pencils: these I’ve been stealing from around the house, no sense letting her know what I’m up to, and I’m using the old Ganderhill system for these, the sock down the trousers. So out with my pencil, open the book, and gaze out the window at the sky, now dark, and return in my mind to the old days.

  Life was certainly better on a downstairs ward. Tobacco and books; a room with a door; fresh air out on the terraces. This last was my great joy. There were benches on the terraces (my life has been a journey from bench to bench, and will end on a bench with a lid!) from which I had a clear view over the vegetable gardens and the cricket field, the wall down at the bottom, and beyond it farmland that gradually yielded to wooded hills in the distance. When the wind blew from the south it carried up from the farm a rich smell of manure, and this too gave me pleasure. For a lad who’d grown up on Kitchener Street, for whom the allotments and the working Thames were all he knew of nature, this sweep of countryside was true glory. And the skies it gave me! My skies were London skies, but these were blue, with high white clouds moving across in stately caravan, and my spirit exulted, something was awoken in your old Spider when first he met those skies, and it’s still there, faint now, and burning low, but it’s there. And I remember how, one day, sitting on a bench at the back of Block B, I watched the men at work in the vegetable gardens, in their flapping yellow corduroys and their green jerseys, and when I went back in (they gave us only half an hour on the terrace) the men in the vegetable gardens were still there, and I thought: this is the work for me.

  It took years. At times I’d become agitated, I’d do something stupid, and back upstairs I’d go. Always John Giles was there to meet me, though his grin was a goonish one now, for after he bit off an attendant’s ear they’d pulled all his teeth out. John only got downstairs once in twenty years, even after they began giving him electric shocks; he’s up in hard bench today. But I was different, I was learning to give them a good lunatic, and as time passed, and Spider made his life more secure in the back parts, it became less and less vital to maintain my claims on the ward. The goading diminished, the agitation subsided, and I spent longer periods downstairs. I sat on the terrace and watched the men in the vegetable gardens, thinking: this is the work for me.

  Yes, this was the work for me. Ah dear God, are they starting again? Is this them with their voices crackling at me from the light bulb again? And me thinking I wouldn’t go through another night of it. I look at my fingers—they seem so far away from me, at first I think I see a crab of some type lying there on the open page, a yellow crab with horny pincers, a creature unrelated to me. I follow it up my arm to my shoulder, I need to do this to confirm that the thing is a part of me, or at any rate connected to this composite, this loosely assembled and unraveling weave of gristle, husk and bone. For I am almost empty now, the foul taste in my mouth attests to this, and of course the smell of gas, and I wonder (such are my thoughts at night) what they will find when they cut me open after death (if I’m not dead already)? An anatomical monstrosity, surely: my small intestine is wrapped tightly around the lower part of my spine and ascends in a taut snug spiral, thickening grossly into the colon about halfway up, which twists around my upper spine like a boa constrictor, the rectum passing through my skull and the anus issuing from the top of my head where an opening has been created between the bones joining the top of my skull, which I constantly finger in wondering horror, a sort of mature excretory fontanelle (my hair would be matted and stinking but for the blessed rain that daily cleanses me). Since this occurred (late one night earlier in the week) I have tried not to eat, for the movement of matter through the intestines has become painfully vivid to me, a series of jerky spasms as though a worm of some kind were crawling round my backbone. Other organs have been compressed against my skeleton so as to create a void or emptiness in the trunk of my body, and I haven’t yet learned why this is occurring. One of my lungs has disappeared; there is a worm in the other but fortunately smoking remains possible. A single thin pipe takes water from my stomach (squashed flat and ridged against my rib cage) and this pipe alone drops through the void and connects to the thing between my legs that hardly resembles a formed male organ at all anymore. There is material rotting slowly inside me, the composting remains of organs I no longer need, and it is because the odors given off by this process have begun to seep through the pores of my skin (my skin! my husk, my shell, my rind!) that I have now wrapped my torso and all my limbs in newspaper and corrugated cardboard held in place with string, sticky tape, rubber bands, whatever I have been able to steal around the house. All this, all this I can live with; what preys upon my mind now is the thought that my body is being prepared for something, that I am being evacuated internally so as to make room for something else: and even as I write these words, even as I draw a wavering line beneath them, a loud cackle suddenly comes from the light bulb, and from the attic a volley of stamping that shakes the walls and sets the light bulb swinging on its cord, and I sit here terrified, clutching the table with both hands as the swinging bulb throws the room into wildly shifting blocks of light and shadow.

  It subsides to a flicker and a crackle and I stand up from the table, I must leave the room if only for five minutes. I shuffle to the door and there’s an ominous howl from above as I lay hands on the knob and turn it, but their wrath I can endure for a short time at least. Down the darkened landing to the lavatory, where I stand over the toilet and with trembling fingers unbutton my trousers. A small pipelike apparatus, something from a plumber’s toolbox, protrudes and begins urinating tiny black spiders into the bowl, where they curl up into points and float on the water. I appear to be infested; I appear to be playing host to a colony of spiders; I appear to be an egg-bag.

  Back in my room I stand at the table leaning on my hands and gaze out at the leafless trees in the park below. Illuminated dimly by the glow of the streetlamp, their fingery boughs form a pale tracery against the darkness. The night sky is cloudy, there is no moon. Nothing is moving out there. I sink with a rustle of newsprint and cardboard into my chair and pick up my pencil. I’d thought I wouldn’t go through another night of it; in this as in all else I am wrong, I delude myself with the idea that I am free, have control, can act. It is not so. I am their creature.

  This is the work for me, I’d thought as I watched the men in the vegetable gardens. After numerous requests I was given my chance, and I did not disappoint them. By this time I had spent almost ten years in Ganderhill and was a well-known figure. I had a room on Block F and a few legitimate possessions (a few illicit possessions too, squirreled away in one hole or another). I was comfortable, I had my niche; I was known as something of a solitary, though I did maintain a sort of friendship with Derek Shadwell, a man from Nigeria who, like me, had been wrongly accused of murdering his mother; Derek and I played billiards together in the dayroom every evening. I was on good terms with the attendants, and was regularly greeted on the terraces by Dr. Austin Marshall. It was in a way the apex of my career in Ganderhill, to claim a place on the working party in the vegetable gardens; and I was confident that by application of what my father had taught me as a boy I’d be able to do all that was asked of me there.

  At the eastern end of one of the terraces a set of stone steps descended to a patch of lonely ground about the size of a football field, enclosed on one side by a section of the periphery wall, in the shadow of which stood an old elm tree. Perpendicular to the wall on the southern side another set of steps descended a slope that gave onto the cricket field, while to the north there was a steep climb through an uncultivated patch of bushes and trees to the higher terraces. It had a dere
lict, forsaken look to it, this lonely field, and had once been a tea garden, for a few pieces of old-fashioned garden furniture—a pair of wicker chairs, a wrought-iron table— stood rotting and rusting under the elm. Elsewhere flourished clumps of weeds and patches of wild grass, and this being October dead leaves lay heaped against the wall in damply moldering drifts in which colonies of spotted toadstools had sprung up. Close to the wall at the foot of the wooded slope there was an unsightly heap of waste lumber and dead branches. My first morning in the vegetable gardens I was put to work clearing this ground for planting in the spring.

  I had a wheelbarrow and a garden fork; there were spades and mattocks in the shed, when I needed them.

  I went to work. I was younger then, I was strong, I could lift heavy boulders into the barrow, wheel them to the steps and carry them up to the pile behind the shed. It was a windy spot, and though the work warmed me I kept my donkey jacket on, with the collar turned up. I’d also been issued yellow corduroy trousers, black boots, and a green jersey. It took me a day to clear the boulders and make a start on the dead leaves; the work tired me, but it exhilarated me too, and when I stopped briefly to smoke a roll-up I leaned on the fork and gazed out over the landscape, and felt at peace. Previously I’d had a job in the Ganderhill workshop, standing beside Derek Shadwell hammering pallets all day, with nothing but a small barred window with a view of a wall, and no light but what came from a dusty, crackling fluorescent tube.

  I made progress with the leaves, wheeling my barrowloads up the slope and along the terrace to the compost heap, this one much bigger than my father’s, for it claimed the organic refuse of the entire institution. In the course of these journeys with my wheelbarrow I passed the other men in the working party, who would say, “All right, Dennis?” or, “Take it easy, Dennis,” and I would say, “All right, Jimmy,” or whatever. With the leaves and the boulders cleared I set to work cutting the weeds down, and when this was done I grubbed out the roots with a mattock. It was on the third or fourth afternoon, having dumped a load of weeds and roots on the compost, and while wheeling my empty barrow back along the path toward the shed, that I saw a small figure in a black coat and headscarf at the top of the steps, her back toward me; no sooner had I seen her than she slipped down the steps.