Spider by Patrick McGrath Read Free Book Online Page B

felt reluctant to sit by the canal, and I wondered, as I do every morning, whether today I would cross the bridge and revisit Kitchener Street. But I didn’t revisit Kitchener Street, not that day, nor did I go to the canal, I went to the river instead, for I knew that I should only become morbid if I watched the rain spotting the black surface of the canal, for the rain carries ideas, this I learned in Canada, where it rains almost all the time. Along the towpath I went then climbed up to the main road—how fast everything seemed to be moving in the rain!—crossed over, then threaded my way through narrow streets to an alley between the warehouses, then to a set of worn stone steps descending to the river itself. Oh, the river! Great broad swirling stream, old Father Thames in the raw gray day! On the far side, the cranes of Rotherhithe poking at me through the mist like fingers, or insects. On the lower steps, as I gingerly descended, a creeping green slime, and one of the steps was eaten away and the rest were crumbling and pocked. At the foot of the steps the water churned and eddied, gray-green like the sky, the thick, lowering blanket of sky, spitting rain, soaking me through, my cap a soggy, useless thing by this point so I tossed it into the river and watched it float away. I love the wetness of a day like this, I love wetness and darkness and skies like thick gray blankets, for it is only at such times that I feel at home in the world.
    I made my way in a state of some exhilaration back across the main road (there was some honking and emotion in the traffic, for I had one of my forgetful moments, I became uncoupled), then back along the towpath. Close to my bench I left the canal and quite on impulse moved up the hill to Omdurman Close, until I stood on the bridge across the railway lines. Far below me the rails glistened, bedewed iron cobwebs, but no imps could terrorize me in weather like this, this was my day! Over the bridge then, a damp ecstatic squelch it was, for the rain was really very heavy now—and at the other end I stood and gazed upon the allotments spread beneath me, strip by strip, in a sort of haze, each one fenced off, tenanted by its shed. Nothing, nothing had changed here! Down the path I shuffled, muddy, puddled path though it was, careless of its mud and its puddles, until I stood again at the gate to my father’s allotment.
    Nothing had changed. I opened the gate and advanced down the path, the potato plants to either side of me bedraggled and flattened like prostrate courtiers, as the rain splattered onto the soil and formed pools in the troughs between the rows. Set back from the shed, off to the right of it, the compost heap, a soggy thing this day, its eggshells and peelings congealing in a slick moist fecund mash, and there before me the shed itself, cleansed by the rain, I felt no black horror from it, none of the sheer giddy waves of horror that my father provoked from the place and which came in time to haunt him to the very threshold of his sanity—none of that, nor, as I turned toward the soil again, did I feel the horror there either, there was peace in the soil, for the rain brings peace to the living and the dead, to all things under the ground and under the water, they all rest in the rain, I knelt down in the potato patch and laid my head on the soil; and then a voice said: “Here! What do you think you’re doing?”
    Here! Here! Here here here here here! It echoed as I turned, stumbling, toward the source, a bearded figure in a cap and raincoat on the other side of the fence. Here! Here! Here here here here here! The imps took up the cry, damn them, damn their filthy souls to hell! Oh, I fled, I went squelching and weeping back up the path and over the bridge with the sounds of their filthy voices ringing in my ears until I was back on the bench, a damp and heaving wreck, I should have known, I told myself, I should have known, they never rest, I must be cunning, I must