Spider (22 page)

The first shock: he told me to sit down, frowned at my file, lifted his head, took off his spectacles—and I was staring straight into eyes the same cold shade of blue as my father’s!

I shrank back in my chair (a hard wooden one). He had the same hair as my father, black, lank, and oily, combed straight back off a narrow forehead and flopping about his temples: he frequently pushed a hand through it when he frowned. The same narrow nose, the same pencil-thin mustache neatly hedging the top lip, the same wiry build and tone of pent explosive energy: what jest was this? “You’ve been in Ganderhill,” he said, without preamble, and I was relieved to discover that his voice, at least, was his own, “how long?”

I shuffled on my chair and cleared my throat. All I could seem to manage was a sort of helpless croaking sound. He frowned at me. “Almost twenty years, Mr. Cleg. You were very disturbed on admittance”—here he replaced his spectacles and read from the file—“ ‘negativistic... withdrawn... uncooperative... aggressive.’ You settled down fairly quickly, however, you formed friendships, became a steady worker, and for the last ten years you’ve held a position of trust in the vegetable gardens, a trust you haven’t abused.” He took off his spectacles again and glared at me with those familiar glacial eyes. “How would you like to try life on the outside?”

This was what I’d dreaded. Even so, I had no response prepared. I stirred uneasily, I looked out of the windows, I looked at the walls: happily the naval battles were gone. “Well?” said Dr. Jebb, tapping on his desk with the point of a pencil: tap tap tap tap tap.

Still I said nothing, still I squirmed there in perplexity and dismay. “Mr. Cleg,” he said, rubbing his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, “let me see if I can guess what you’re thinking. On the one hand”—he stopped rubbing, lifted his eyes to the ceiling, formed a steeple with his fingers and rested his chin on the peak—“on the one hand you’re anxious about leaving Ganderhill. You have friends here, a routine, work”—he began counting my blessings on his fingers—“a certain”—here he lifted his eyebrows, communicated irony—“seniority in the patient community, and a deep familiarity with the workings of the hospital.” (Hospital now, was it?) “To leave all this—to enter an unknown world— this is threatening, you sense the difficulties, the dangers that lie ahead—and you’re right, of course, there will be difficulties, your trepidation is perfectly understandable.” He laid his hands flat on his desk and glared at me with understanding. My own hands were behaving very strangely by this point, they appeared to be twisting round, rotating on their wrists, turning back to front: I pressed them between my thighs and clutched my sock for comfort. “On the other hand,” said Dr. Jebb, “you imagine what life must be like outside Ganderhill—without locked doors and high walls. You imagine how it must be to drink a glass of beer in the evening, meet women. The prospect goes some way to overcoming your apprehensions.” (Drink beer? Meet
women?)
“It is, I agree, a dilemma, please don’t think I’m unaware of this.”

Some response, clearly, was expected of me, but I could not speak without smoking, and I could not smoke without speaking. After an uncomfortable few moments he resumed. “Mr. Cleg, let me see if I can sum up your career here. When you first came to Ganderhill you were a very sick boy; in fact you were displaying most of the classic symptoms of schizophrenia. You were hallucinating floridly in the visual, auditory and olfactory spheres; your affective reactions were bizarrely inappropriate; you suffered marked body delusions, you were regressed, you had ideas of persecution and thought injection.” He glanced at the file. “You were aggressive on the ward and frequently had to be isolated in a safe room, in restraints. You showed no awareness of your environment, nor any awareness of why you’d been brought to Ganderhill in the first place. My point is,” he said, closing the file, “that all that has changed.”

“Changed,” I murmured.

“Changed,” he said. “You have for the past ten years assumed a steadily increasing measure of responsibility for your own life. The hospital milieu has imposed demands on you, Mr. Cleg, demands relating to grooming, punctuality, competence, sociability, and cooperation; these demands you have met. Your therapy has been implicit in your daily round of tasks and contacts: there’s no more we can do for you.”

“No more,” I said faintly.

“I need your bed, Mr. Cleg.”

My
bed!

“Ganderhill is overcrowded, and I find you are well enough to leave us. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t discharge you to community care?”

“Yes!” I suddenly cried, without at all meaning to; shocked at my own temerity I fell silent.

“And that is?”

Silence.

“That is, Mr. Cleg?”

Nothing.

“Mr. Cleg, I wonder if you trust your own ability to function adequately in society. Is this the problem?”

Still nothing.

“I think perhaps it’s time we talked about your mother.”

“She’s none of your business!” I shouted.

“Ah. So that’s it. None of my business.” He took off his spectacles; a small smile played about his thin bloodless lips, a smile I knew well from my boyhood, a smile that augured no good for me. “Mr. Cleg,” he said, suddenly serious and stern, “I am your responsible medical officer.
None of your business is none of my business
.”

By the time I got back to the vegetable gardens the men were coming in for lunch, so I came back in with them. I was silent and morose in the dining hall, and they left me to myself. At about half past two in the afternoon I abandoned what I was doing (tending a bonfire of garden rubbish) and made my way up to the shed. I closed the door behind me, sat on a box, and with the knife we used for cutting the eyes out of potatoes for seeding I opened my wrists. Twenty minutes later Fred Sims found me there with my blood dripping into a flowerpot full of earth. They stitched me up in the infirmary, and by suppertime I was in a safe room on a hard-bench ward, wearing an untearable canvas gown and being very closely watched.

I
scribbled on through the long slow hours of the night. I smoked thin ones almost continuously, lighting each from the butt of the one before. The worm in my lung did not waken, I believe as a result of the smoking. Sporadic outbursts from the attic, nothing I hadn’t endured before. I was very attentive to sensations from the empty space in my torso, for I now had reason to think it infested with spiders. I pictured webby constructions glistening in the darkness, damp silk traplines flung from breastbone to backbone, pelvis to rib. Scuttling creatures, weaving and spinning inside me— to what end? For six days I was on hard-bench, and after my ten years in Block F the shock was a rude one.

It all came back to me. Doorless lavatories, the humiliation of being always visible, always accessible to hostile eyes. And the smells! Coarse bleach, most vividly, those chipped tile floors were mopped two, three, four times a day with boiling water and coarse bleach: there always seemed to be someone working his way up the corridor, or back and forth across the dayroom, with an old institution mop, its head a floppy tangle of gray hemp, and a tin bucket with a metal attachment on the inside lip and a handle that you depressed to make the teeth of the thing come together on your mophead and squeeze out the filthy water. I had forgotten too the daily humiliation of having to ask for the smallest quantities of the most basic suplies: a few sheets of toilet paper, a pinch of tobacco, a drop of hot water. Perhaps the request would be granted; but more usually you stood there shifting your weight from foot to foot as the attendant frowned with annoyance and told you to come back later—that, or he subjected you to a glance of cold appraisal, permitted a dead pause to occur, then ignored you—all for three hard sheets of toilet paper, for a few coarse strands of pale tobacco from the tin! Oh, civility is wasted on a lunatic, this was the message chiseled into the cold brick heart of Ganderhill, wasted on a lunatic on a hard-bench ward.

Six days I was on hard bench, and then one morning they brought me down to the end of the ward to see Dr. Jebb. He showed me into the side room and we sat down. Green walls, a barred window, a light bulb, a table, two wooden chairs—nothing else. A tin ashtray in the middle of the table. I was in gray shirt and trousers, and laceless shoes. He was in his black suit, and wearing a tie that immediately riveted my attention, for this tie, dark green, had no design but a single crest, in which the dominant figure, a shield flanked by a pair of dragons and surmounted by a sort of winged helmet, displayed a snake coiled around a staff At the time I had no way of grasping the full meaning of Jebb’s crest; only later was I able to interpret it in terms of the changes occurring inside my body, and my death. Nonetheless it provoked a sensation of unease in me. “Please smoke,” he said. Silence, then, for some minutes as with trembling fingers I rolled myself a thin one, and he removed his spectacles and produced that familiar rubbing of the eyes with thumb and forefinger—how often had I seen that same gesture, that same weary impatience, in the kitchen of number twenty-seven! Then, with a small dismissive wave of the fingers at my bandaged wrists: “Quite unnecessary, Mr. Cleg, and very melodramatic. I’m disappointed in you.”

I was not strong. I had been on hard bench for a week, I had been thoroughly humiliated, I had nothing I could call my own, no shoelaces, no belt, not even a sock down my trousers. I was in no condition to hold off this cold-eyed creature, this copy of my father—this Cleg-Jebb!—or whatever he was. Silence was my only weapon, the retreat of the Spider into the back parts, down some hole, and this I attempted as the voice rose and fell, boomed and hissed, and “Jebb” shrank away, became tiny, and vast distances opened up in that green-walled bleach-stinking room. But after a moment or two—panic. Long years in Block F, long years being my own man in the vegetable gardens—something had atrophied, and struggle as I might I could not escape the tiny booming figure on the far side of the vast table. It grew dark in the room, the familiar nightmare was upon me, and I was stiff and heavy and pinned, squirming, in the front of my brain, unable to escape the boom and hiss, the eyes, the hands, of this Cleg-Jebb creature across the table. “A cry for help,” he boomed, “sheer panic,” he boomed, “the necessity of facing up,” he hissed, as I squirmed, not the Spider anymore,
he
was the Spider and I the fly! “Escape responsibility for the accident,” he hissed, “you killed your mother,” he boomed, and I rose wildly to my feet and pointed a trembling finger at him. “You did!” I shouted. “Not me,
you!”

The door opening—attendants—smartly down to a safe room and only then, only then did the Spider at last regain the old nimbleness, and down a hole he scuttled and left me rocking back and forth in the corner.

Three more months I spent in Ganderhill, one on hard bench, two back in Block F. There were more interviews with the superintendent, in the course of which he reconstructed my “history.” Then, one cool and misty morning at the beginning of October, he discharged me. See me standing in front of the main gates, under the clock, in a shabby gray suit, and clutching a cardboard suitcase with very little in it; see me turn my head from side to side, imagine my dismay. In my pocket three pound notes, some coppers, and a scrap of paper with Mrs. Wilkinson’s address written on it.

C
leg-jebb had reconstructed my history, but he had reconstructed it wrong wrong wrong, it was bad history. If he knew anything of my father’s plan to send me to Canada he did not indicate it; if he understood my terror at the prospect, if in other words he’d learned the truth about what really happened to my mother—he didn’t indicate this either, It was not hard to imagine what would come next: I’d be lured down the allotments some foggy night, and there, fortified by drink and Hilda, my father would batter me senseless with a gardening tool. He would dig another hole (again displaying that weirdly incongruous solicitude for his potato plants) and then, still under the approving gaze of Hilda, he’d dump me in and cover me up, and without the benefit of even a winding sheet I would soon become a meal for the maggots, the beetles, the flesh-worms, leaving nothing behind me but a heap of long bones, detached and uncoupled and growing more so with every shift of the earth until my brittle frame lost what little coherence and integrity it may once tenuously have possessed in life and was scattered widely in London soil! Then, down at the Dog and Beggar, when the men said, “Where’s that boy of yours, Horace?” or, “Where’s young Dennis?” my father would say, with his twitchy little smile, perhaps wiping the beer froth off his lip: “He’s joined his mother in Canada”—and Hilda would be unable to suppress a hoarse belch of unlovely laughter, and that would be my epitaph.

I sat in my bedroom and heard them murmuring in the kitchen below. Then the scrape of chair legs, Hilda came upstairs briefly, and a few minutes later they left by the back door. I came downstairs and went out after them. I saw them go down the alley, arm in arm, and turn right at the end, off to the Rochester. Back upstairs then, where I took out from under my bed a stolen ball of brown string. I cut a length and tied one end to the leg of my bed. The other end I let out through the window, and it landed in a tangled coil in the yard outside the back door. Then downstairs again, and I brought the string in through the kitchen window (opened half an inch) and tied it to one of the knobs on the gas stove. Back upstairs, and sitting by my open window I reeled in the string till it was taut between my fingers. At this point I began gently to tug it; you can guess my purpose.

I was upstairs and downstairs for the next half hour, adjusting the string, trying to make it work. The string would tighten but the knob on the gas stove wouldn’t turn, and if I pulled harder it frayed where it rubbed against the bottom of the window. I began to think of some sort of mechanism that would make it run smoothly, some sort of spool mounted on a spindle or bobbin, but how to attach such a thing inconspicuously to the kitchen window? Then I heard the ring of hobnails in the alley, and raised voices, so I untied the string from the knob, ran upstairs and hauled in my line. Into the yard they came, Horace and Hilda and Harold and Glad, arm in arm and much the worse for drink—Hilda roaring with laughter at her own unsteadiness as she broke free of my father (who was the soberer of the two) and went crashing into the outhouse, where I heard her shouting and banging against the door, trying to light the candle. The others came in and the kitchen light was turned on, then Hilda emerged, still pulling her skirt down, and even before she reached the back door she was loudly expressing her astonishment that she should live with a plumber unable to fix his own toilet. It was a proper disgrace (she didn’t mind telling us) and by this time Gladys was shrieking in the kitchen, and then I heard Hilda say: “Come on, Glad,
’ave
something, it’ll do you good.” I closed my door and returned to the window, and tried to block out their noise. When at last Harold and Glad went off I listened carefully by my door: Hilda came up first, my father close behind her; he would not pass out in his chair by the stove tonight.