Spiders

A story

‘Spider!’ Jaqueline shouts from the kitchen. The Arsenal is on but I pause it and go in to see what the ruckus is. The microwave tings and Jaqueline pulls out the steaming bowl of reheated chili and pours it on the tortilla chips, using her sleeve like an oven mitten.

‘Where?’ I say.

She points into the corner above the fridge. I shrug. ‘It’ll get the flies,’ I say.

She nods. I take the opportunity to get some fresh beers from the fridge and we go back to dinner and the game.

At half time I go back to the kitchen to make coffee – we both have work in the morning – and see that there are now two spiders in the corner above the fridge. If I’m to get them, I’ll have to climb on a chair. They are big, so squishing them will also mark the paint and capturing them under a glass and piece of the paper is tricky, what with the angles and it being a corner and all. It’s all too much. I consider my options as the kettle boils and I spoon the coffee into the mugs. Once done, I’ve decided to let the spiders be. After all, there is enough room in this world for you and I.

Spurs score in the 91st minute and we groan and moan but Jaqueline’s right when she points out that if you don’t kill the game in the ninety minutes you had, you can’t complain when that kind of thing happens in extra time. The news is too depressing so I shower and then we cuddle for a while and go to sleep. I’m up very early and, as I’ve prepared my clothes the night before, I leave without waking Jaqueline and go to work. Work is such boring bullshit, I won’t even. I get home before Jaqueline and unpack the shopping I picked up on the way home. The spiders are still up there and now there are three. What makes it a little weird is that I’m not sure spiders are supposed to group together that closely. Not adult ones. Aren’t they like chemists? There has to be a legal distance between them. Is that true for chemists or did I dream it?

That night Jaqueline kills one with her shoe in the bedroom and, sure enough, leaves a mark on the wall that won’t come off unless you bring the paint with it.

‘Shit!’ she says.

‘Ditto,’ I tell her. I get the cobwebs out of the corners of the ceiling, twirling the broom and then taking the grey candy-floss downstairs and out into the garden, where I scrape the brush across the hedge.

The next day I wake up and there have to be ten spiders on the ceiling. It’s a Saturday and so we go out for a long walk on the beach. When we are on our way back we stop at the café and have some biscuits and coffee. We watch some football but we’re not interested much. It’s nice to watch a game and not have Arsenal involved. Not have that sick excited feeling in your stomach. Jaqueline points at the spiders that occasionally skitter across the floor. ‘Have you noticed how organized they seem?’ she asks.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘It’s like they’re not really spiders.’

They move in groups of six. Regimented somehow. ‘What are we going to do?’

She checks her watch and then pulls up the listings for the cinema. This is her perfect Saturday. I know this because we talked about it once. Our definition of a Lou Reed style ‘Perfect Day’ – we both agree that Lou had nailed it. A walk, something to eat and a movie then an early night.

‘All is Lost,’ Jaqueline reads out. ‘There’s an early showing. 6:15.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Robert Redford is a sailor whose boat is sinking.’

‘That could work.’

We’re not experts but we both like movies and we will occasionally listen to movie podcasts. We like going and seeing an early showing and then having something to talk about over dinner. I can’t do it the other way around. I get nervous during dinner and invariably rush. Then I need to pee all the way through the film.

We go to this new gourmet burger place after the film. They do this annoying thing of greeting you at the door, seating you and then asking you if you know how Ben’s Burgers works.

‘We order burgers, then we eat burgers and then we pay and leave?’ Jaqueline snarks. ‘Did I guess right?’

But the server is unfazed – ‘Ha, excellent,’ he shouts – and lays out the revolutionary ordering practices. We have two cold lagers which come in jackboot shaped glasses.

When we get back, we’re both interested to see what the spiders have been up to. We’re not disappointed. They’re in all the rooms now and their webs are everywhere. You have to make a karate-chopping gesture with the edge of your hand to get through the rooms and even then, we end up wearing the cobwebs like veils. I break the wispy cover of the toilet with a strident stream of beer piss.

Jaqueline has managed to chase them all out of the bedroom and swept the worst of the webs from the covers. She gives me a look and I hold up a hand and say: ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow,’ she agrees.

Sunday is a beautiful day, so we end up going to the beach for the whole day and we both get nicely burned. When we get back, I say ‘Right’ and I start cleaning away the cobwebs upstairs while Jaqueline works downstairs. We call for a pizza then watch one of those DIY shows. Jaqueline goes up early and lays out her clothes for the next day and makes sure her bag is ready. She has three nights in Oslo starting tomorrow.

The next day I wake up covered in spiders. Jaqueline is already showered and gone. She’s left me a note – a quote from Nietzsche in a large heart. I’m too tired to do much about the spiders. Once I get my shower and I’m dressed I head for work. I grab a coffee and a croissant on my way. In my lunchbreak I watch YouTube videos about how to get rid of spiders. An American guy with a goatee tells me that ‘Spiders are shy and stay in hidden places, so check corners and underneath the furniture.’ He then goes on to sell a number of products. I’m not going to spray our house with insecticide. There is advice on certain plants that spiders don’t like. I’m told to clear clutter that spiders love. But none of the advice feels particularly relevant to our situation. One thing I’ve noticed is that the spiders haven’t bit me. When I showered this morning, I was careful to check and there were no bites or rashes.

They don’t seem shy though.

I get home early and I watch TV. It’s always nice when Jaqueline goes away. I just veg out. Sometimes, I’ll just sit with the TV off and nothing happening and listen to the silence. By day three I’m ready for her to come home though. And I make a special effort to spruce the place up and even buy some of those plants – basil, lavender and mint – the internet suggested I buy. I create a little garden in the corner of the living room and the bedroom. When she comes through the door though she says straight away ‘Urgh! Spiders!’

I guess I’d got used to them, because it’s only watching Jaqueline tiptoeing across the hall and upstairs waving a hand in front of her face that it is obvious the spider situation has not improved. Even though she should have a day off after her trip she goes into work the next day and stays late.

I decide to cook a nice meal and as it’s Friday I get a really nice £15 bottle of wine. In the kitchen the cupboards are full of spiders and somehow, they’ve even managed to get into the fridge and the drawers. I chop onions and crush garlic, marinade the chicken strips and heat a mixture of olive oil and butter before adding the tomato puree and spices and then frying the vegetables and meat. The spiders are very good at getting out of the way and I’ve worked out that if you move decisively and ignore them then you don’t have to worry about stepping on them. They run up your legs and over your hands, but they won’t fall in the pan or get underfoot.

Jaqueline is in a great mood when she comes home. Rachel – her boss at work – has been getting positive reports back from Oslo. I already know that Jaqueline is wonderful at her job but the company has a toxic management culture and tend to praise sparingly and condemn and micromanage aggressively, so it’s good to hear how well she did and how finally she’s receiving some well-deserved praise. ‘Oslo loved me,’ she says. And her eyes widen as I put the plate in front of her. ‘Wow! My favourite.’

We finish the wine and then we sip a liqueur with almond biscuits I got from the Italian delicatessen by the bus stop. I’ve got a carefully chosen Spotify playlist on the speakers. She gives me a nice long kiss.

‘There you see,’ she says. ‘You can do it when you put your mind to it.’

I shake the duvet out while Jaqueline is in the shower and then I join her. When we’re back in the bedroom on the towels I can feel the little furry feet of the spiders on my back and arms and legs as we make love. And we are making love. Sometimes we fuck and that’s good. Sometimes we have sex and that’s still okay, but not the best and other times we really do make love. There’s a physical and emotional connection. It isn’t unusual for one of us to cry afterwards. I don’t know if it’s the absence or the pressure at work or what but we both end up crying after some of the most delicious orgasms ever. Ever.

We have a quiet weekend in the house and working in the garden. It’s getting a bit difficult getting into and out of the house because of the spiders that are now about knee deep. They try to get out of the way and it’s important to try and wade through them without lifting your foot, otherwise you’ll end up crushing them. That’s become unavoidable. Opening the back door to go and make coffee, the spiders just spill out onto the outside step. They scurry around trying to get re-orientated and then clamber over each other to get back in. Jaqueline looks up from where she’s been raking the cut grass and shields her eyes. ‘There are like too many spiders in the house,’ she says.

‘Obvs,’ I tell her.

I go out to Carrie’s on Sunday afternoon and she cuts my hair. ‘You have beautiful hair,’ she says. ‘So silky.’

I raise my eyebrows at myself in the mirror. ‘Okay, Flirty Gertie from number thirty.’

She laughs and then bows over the crown of my head. ‘What have you got here?’

I feel with my fingers. There’s a definite lump right on the crown of my head. ‘Huh!?’ I say.

‘Does it hurt?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I say. But it worries me and that evening, Jaqueline checks it out under the mirror. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I think you should go and see the doctor.’

‘You think?’

‘Can’t hurt,’ she says. Then she smells my hair, buries her face in it. ‘I love that. I could die in your hair.’

I can’t get an appointment with the doctor because it isn’t strictly an emergency, so I get off work early on Thursday and go and sit in the waiting room for his surgery, reading the gossip magazines. Ten tips on how to tell if your man is cheating on you. He examines the lump with a powerful light and tweezers. ‘It’s a bite,’ he says. ‘Quite a nasty one.’

‘Spider bite?’

‘Could be,’ he says, sitting down. ‘Have you noticed any other symptoms? Itchiness, headaches, change in appetite, temperature?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘None of those things.’

He shrugs and gives me a prescription for an ointment and some pills. ‘The swelling should go down in a matter of days,’ he says. ‘If it doesn’t, come back and see me.’

I’m always disappointed on seeing my doctor. I never feel he takes me seriously. I’ve thought of changing him a number of times, but I haven’t partly because I have a superstition that maybe I need his scepticism and inattention. Perhaps a too approachable doctor would end up finding something terribly wrong with me.

When I come in, I can’t actually see Jaqueline for a few moments. There’s just a tall lump of spiders on the sofa, and then she moves and they scamper away from her. ‘Oh hey,’ she says.

‘You fall asleep?’ I ask.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I was just sitting here.’

Lying in bed with Jaqueline beside me sleeping, something occurs to me. I lean over and careful not to shift too quickly I use the torch on my phone and I examine the top of her head, delicately lifting fronds of her hair out of place so I could see her scalp. She has one too. Right on the crown.

The spiders are now piled so high they are level with the bed and then cant up the walls. I look at them for a while. They move like the waves of the sea or the leaves in a windswept forest. A constant movement that is not agitated or reactive, it just simply is. Like watching raindrops in a puddle, they know what they’re doing and if you are open and receptive to them, you feel that if you stare long enough, they might tell you something.

Something secret about the universe.