European garden spider (‘Araneus diadematus’), female, grey with mottled white abdomen. 17 mm.
Her flat had the same layout as I remembered. There was the kitchen in which I’d lost my treasured bouncy ball, the French windows, the overgrown garden. As Josh had said, there was hardly any furniture, and from the direction of the back door there rose a fetid smell. There was no fridge. Dylan sang from somewhere too indistinctly to make out, a radio probably. I had heard her singing to the radio before, through the ceiling, in her gruff, rasping voice. Motown, Smokey Robinson. Several flies buzzing in time with the strip lighting danced around the unshaded ceiling light bulb, trapped. Though the sunshine outside was still blinding, the interior of these rooms was dark, mould-smelling.
‘I knew you’d come eventually,’ she said, and I saw her standing in the corner, then. She was barefoot and wearing a stained nightie with a greeting card teddy bear on it with a heart-shaped nose. Her grey straggled hair reached past her armpits. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked as though she had lost even more teeth since I had seen her face close up, in the hallway. I felt a sudden, dismaying wave of pity, and I think she sensed it, because she pointed at the door. ‘Get the fuck out of my house.’ Slurring, drunk as usual and me, as she had said, judging her.
I looked at the empty pile of bottles next to the overflowing kitchen bin, and had a thought. ‘We have booze,’ I said. ‘In the flat.’
She said nothing, but I knew her interest was piqued. ‘Shall I go and get it?’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s have a drink together.’
She bowed her head slightly in acquiescence, and I hurtled upstairs. Josh, naked but for basketball shorts, was in the kitchen smoking a joint. I made a beeline for the sideboard – a great, hulking piece of early twentieth-century furniture that he’d salvaged from the curb. All that was left was the 4am stuff: Cherry B, Crème de Peche, a dash of Cointreau. I grabbed it all. It would have to do.
‘On it already?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s for her.’ At the word her, I nodded downstairs.
‘I meant to ask you about that, actually,’ said Josh. ‘I swear I heard you both, a couple of weeks ago. Pissed in the hall.’
‘Yeah, that was me,’ I said. ‘Christ, I was hammered. You’ll never believe this, but she was going on about us being judgemental of her sad existence and I ended up . . . hugging her.’
‘You should be careful.’ He tapped the joint against the side of a teacup, and watched the ash fall.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Letting people like that into your life. She’ll take advantage. She’s mental, you know. All she wants is a slight crack in the door and boom! She’s in. There’ll be no getting rid of her.’
‘She seems lonely,’ I said. ‘You’re too cynical.’
‘You’re naïve. You mark my words. You’ll be filling in her benefit forms and picking up her coke before you know it.’
‘I thought your Albanians delivered to the door?’ I said. ‘See you later.’
‘It’s not great,’ I said, as I entered, ‘but it’s better than nothing.’
She had moved to the centre of the floor and was sitting there cross-legged, smoking a fag, ashing into a Perspex bowl of cigarette butts that was almost overflowing.
‘I’ll get us some glasses, shall I?’ I said, when she made no response. I started opening unit doors and rummaging around, eventually settling for a cracked teacup and a ramekin.
‘Bottoms up,’ I necked it, the artificial peaches turning sickly in my mouth. I shuffled over onto the floor and sat down next to her, shifting slightly when I realised that the laminate was sticky, sliding a cushion beneath myself. Silence. Dylan croaked on despite the awkwardness. The song was ‘Just Like a Woman’.
‘I used to like this one’, I said, ‘when I was a teenager. I liked how cruel he sounded. The disdain in his voice.’ It was true. It had given me a thrill, this song, and not just because of its evocative talk of amphetamines and pearls, the mythology that it had been written about Edie Sedgwick, but because it felt like he truly hated this woman, this debutante, whoever she was.
‘Your mother always said it was misogynistic,’ said the neighbour, after we had listened to another verse. ‘But then that’s the type of woman she wanted to be. Parties. Cocktail cigarettes. Touched a nerve.’
It sounded like Stella. The aspiring middle-class party girl who never could quite wear a kaftan comfortably. My mother had secretly smoked Sobranies the entire time she had been married to my father. I found them once when I was very small and rummaging in her dressing table, opening her silver case with my clumsy fingers to reveal the candy-coloured stripes inside. The smell and, I hate to say it, taste of them is unmistakable. Perhaps you’ve chewed tobacco and so know to an extent what I am talking about, but unless you’ve actually eaten a cigarette in the belief that it’s some kind of sherbet sweet, it’s difficult to convey the level of nausea it elicits.
She looked at me, expecting a reaction, but what could I say? She may never have worn a bra, but my mother had not been built to be a hippy; it was plain for anyone to see.
‘I prefer “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, now,’ I said, taking another swig of Crème de Peche. ‘I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul . . . ’ my reedy voice came out louder than I’d intended in the staleness of the room and I abruptly stopped singing. The neighbour looked at me as though I were the mad one.
‘How is the old slag, anyway? Still shagging her way around the West Country with some toy boy, last I heard.’
I considered contradicting this. No one likes to hear their mother spoken of that way, but to be completely honest, it wasn’t too far off the mark. I presumed she was talking about Ziggy, the latest slightly-useless-but-ultimately-benevolent stoner she had shacked up with in Cornwall, but then it could equally have been River, or Floyd, or even Xavier. It depended how far back you wanted to go.
I suppose I could have told her about life with Stella; the constant moving, the rows and the rages, the time in the orchard when she had made a half-articulated confession about what had gone on with them in that house. ‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ she had said. ‘Or your father.’
Then another time: ‘There are things in life that are fine to be blasé about. But the hearts of other people are not one of them. I learned that the hard way, and it still haunts me today.’
But judging by the hatred I could detect in the cadences of this stranger’s voice, I gathered the neighbour knew much more than I did about the whole, messy affair.
‘Send her my love.’
‘I can’t. I don’t know your name.’
‘It’s Coral. Tell her Coral sends her regards. The old bitch.’
The fury in her voice threw me. People never normally hated Stella. She was too charismatic, and too talented at making people feel good about themselves, for that. Even my father, despite the baffled wonderment she inspired in him, never said a bad word about her.
Coral reached for the bottle of Cointreau and lit a cigarette. ‘I have to say, the day you moved in, I thought for a second it was her, gone blonde. I watched you through the net curtains, unloading your stuff out of the car. It was uncanny. Same face. Like she’d come back to wreck it all, all over again.’
‘Wreck what?’
‘Everything she touched. She was a careless woman, your mother. Careless with money, careless with objects. You couldn’t lend her a dress or a record without her losing it, or breaking it. I remember I lent her my white cheesecloth summer dress once, for a garden party she sneaked off to in Chelsea, with some rich friend of hers. She jumped in an ornamental pond. “It was just so hot,” she said, when she came home dripping, her skirt muddy and covered with weeds, all torn. Ruined. She was careless with people, too.’
‘Wait . . . did you live here? In this house?’
‘Don’t catch on quick, do you, you stupid cow? Granted, you were a child, so I doubt you’d remember much about me, but how else would I have known your cunt of a mother?’
‘Don’t talk about her like that.’ Even I have limits. I topped up my drink.
‘After what she did, I’ll talk about her any way I want. I imagine I know her better than you do. I’ve lived with her long enough. The world wasn’t formed the moment you walked into it, love.’
‘I know that. Believe me, I’m well aware of that.’
‘I’ve lived here since the early seventies, way before her time. Helped break into the place myself. I’m the only one left now, obviously, but I was one of the very first. Me and your father, and Rowan and Mikey, and some goggled-eyed groupie whose name I can’t remember, who I think was Swedish. This was before your mam would have had blood in her knickers. I’d been kicked out of my squat in Chalk Farm, so we decided to start a “new model for communal living–”.’ She said ‘communal living’ with real venomous sarcasm ‘–and we broke into this place, which was all boarded up.’
‘I knew it had been a squat,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t realise how long for.’
‘I’m the last man standing. They not tell you anything?’ Coral said. ‘I suppose your dad was always too busy skinning up and lamenting the death of the counter-culture, the pretentious arse. He was a poser, Bryn, but his heart was in the right place. At least he believed in what he was doing, unlike your ma. You know the first thing we did when we moved in was remove the bathroom doors? Bathroom doors were bourgeois, you see, and why should we feel any shame about nudity, and bodily functions? We weren’t squeamish about sex, either. Gawd, when we first moved in here, no one was allowed to sleep in the same bed – I say bed but it were bleeding mattresses on palettes, nightmare for your back – two nights in a row. You weren’t allowed to own things, let alone people.’
‘I had a bed when we came here,’ I said.
‘It was the eighties by then. Everyone had calmed down. Still shagging each other like rabbits, of course, not that you’d have known. Do you remember anything about that time? I suppose you don’t.’
‘Parts,’ I said. ‘I remember how the house and garden looked, and some things that happened, but it’s all very hazy. We weren’t here for long. I know that it didn’t end well.’
‘Oh, you were here long enough,’ said Coral, as she downed the last few drops of liqueur. ‘Speaking of, it’s about time you buggered off. I’ve got someone coming round, or “calling on me” as that posh tart who lives upstairs would say. Do you think you could get her to stop her and her mates braying in the hallway all hours of the day and night? Ridiculous accents. It’s like having Margaret Thatcher in your living room, and eleven years was quite enough.’
I stood up and made my way to the door. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But do you think you would mind if I visited again? I know there was no love lost between yourself and Stella, but I’m ever so keen to hear more about that time, and about my own childhood. You see, I’m not really sure I know much about it at all. She won’t discuss it. It makes her cry.’
Coral let out a bitter laugh.
‘And I don’t really know any friends of my parents. She’s never mentioned you. My dad lives up in the mountains somewhere in Wales, we don’t really talk, and it would just be so good to hear something about how it was, then. This house is so different now . . . ’
Tailing off, it occurred to me that I was drunk, and I stood, swaying slightly on her threshold, waiting for her response, but all she said was, ‘Take care’, and closed the door quietly, leaving me alone in the shadowed hall. I wanted a cigarette, but I had smoked them all, and the kitchen was empty. Josh had undoubtedly gone for a nap, and Lou hadn’t been home for several days, so I gave up the search for tobacco and went to lie down on my bed.
The room was mercifully cool, the window having been open all afternoon and the early evening sun was in the process of disappearing behind the terraced houses opposite. As I scrunched up my pillow to a comfortable consistency, I could hear Coral’s wind chimes gently nudging each other in the garden below. I thought about her strange, furniture-less flat, with its crystals hanging from every window frame but no couch, and I wondered who it was who would visit her and if they wished her well or if, any moment now, the screaming would start. The feathers and teeth of my dream-catcher were shifting slightly in the breeze, and as I watched the sky turn pink through the knotted cells, it occurred to me just how much the netting resembled a spider’s web. I thought of all the spiders’ webs I had ever seen since I was a child, listing them as you might see them in a curator’s catalogue: ‘Robin Hood’s Bay, Gate Post, 1996 (?), medium-sized.’
As I did this, a recollection began to form itself in my mind. An afternoon of playing in the undergrowth outside, in the garden of that house, that summer, with Gabriel, the first ever boy to hold my hand. His mother, Vita, had been in my mother’s consciousness-raising group, and had stayed with her here at the house during the Brixton riots, before I was born. They moved to Manchester not long after we left Longhope, his father sick of the sus laws, the constant stop and search; not wanting the same biweekly ordeal for his young son once he grew tall and muscular, the overnight leap from child to perceived threat.
I had seen Vita and Gabriel only once since then, one August when we were older but still easy around one another in that pre-pubescent way, and they had come to the country to visit us. The two of us had been walking through the main village street in the late morning, towels rolled neatly under our arms, on our way to swim, when we heard the high-pitched whooping of an ill-conceived monkey impression. Three children, several years younger than us, followed us all the way to the river, gibbering ceaselessly, and Gabs never said a word, even as they sat above us in the trees as we swam, mocking in their arm gestures as they scratched their armpits. I remember how high he held his head as he walked, and how I had said nothing because I did not have the words, even as we reached the safety of the kitchen and sipped our home-made lemonades, shaken but relishing the sharpness. This was the point at which he tried to raise the topic of what Stella called ‘that awful summer’.
‘Do you ever think about it?’ he had asked me. ‘Do you ever think about her?’
I don’t remember what I said in reply. It was the last time I saw him. My mother stayed in touch with Vita and later told me that he had had a breakdown in his first year of university and had come back to his mother’s house, to lie quietly in his room.
I have always struggled to think of him as grown. Instead, Gabriel is cemented in the garden of that summer, grinning chubby-faced in the hours we spent lying in the wildflowers, eating them, crushing them between our fat little fingers, splitting their stems to reveal the lurid chlorophyll beneath, our hands linked, giggling while our mothers sat inside drinking herbal tea, and a fat-bodied garden spider spun a web across the entire width of the dark void left by the propped-open French windows. We sang, ‘Daisy, daisy, give me your answer, do.’
Finally, when it was growing dark and we were called inside, for supper, we stood together looking at the web as it blocked our path, its engorged queen plump and hideous in the centre, and I cried at the sight of it, as Gabs gripped my hand tighter, because when you’re five a spider is enough to make you that scared. Nearly two decades later, drunk, I lay there on my bed thinking of how the first boy to kiss me had also been the gentlest, because he had been afraid of the horrible creature but refused, despite my wailing entreaties, to wreck its home and cut it lose from its translucent thread; we would just have to stay outside and miss our cake and sleep under the stars. And as I wept for him in a half-sleep, I remembered something else, a flicker of a moment that had long been lost: a woman’s face appearing behind the web as she stood there bony in a pair of cut-off denim shorts, red hair long enough to almost reach her waist, and plucked the spider from its web delicately between her two fingers, laughing.