Spider Read Free Page A

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