Spider by McGrath Patrick

Author:McGrath, Patrick [McGrath, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction.Horror, Fiction.Literature.Modern, Adapted into Film
ISBN: 9780140146424
Google: hkdfQgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0679736301
Barnesnoble: 0679736301
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1990-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

I think what distressed me most after Hilda moved into number twenty-seven was seeing my mother’s clothes being worn by a prostitute. It was not only the idea of trespass and violation, there was the daily spectacle of what happened to the clothes when Hilda put them on. My mother was a slender woman, she had a slim, delicate figure, boyish almost, whereas Hilda was all curves, she was fleshy. So my mother’s clothes were tight on her, and became as a result provocative; what had been demure on my mother was tarty on Hilda, but then that was the nature of the woman, everything she touched in some way became tarty.

I began, I remember, to watch her, for she provoked in me a sort of appalled fascination. It’s difficult to talk about this, but to see the dresses, the aprons, the cardigans that still, for me, carried the aura of my mother, to see them transfigured, charged with the sort of physical invitation that was stamped on all Hilda’s gestures, all her speech, the way she walked, the way she swung her bottom—this affected me strongly. Often I followed her when she went shopping, or in the evening when she would slip on that mangy fur and go clicking down the alley in her heels, my mother’s lipstick on her mouth, my mother’s underwear next to her skin, my mother’s husband on her arm—I’d slip down the alley behind them, move (like an African boy) from shadow to shadow, silent, invisible, a phantom, a ghost. When they drank in the Earl of Rochester I watched them through the windows, I was outside in the cold and darkness, and I peeped in at them as they basked and drank in the bright, sociable warmth of the bar. I found a way into the yard at the back of the pub and this gave me access to the windows of the lavatories; standing on a barrel I would look down on Hilda when she came out to the Ladies, I’d see her with her underpants at her ankles and her dress hitched up, her bottom not touching the toilet seat; then, having wiped herself, it was out with the compact and a quick go with my mother’s powder and lipstick. She never saw me, though once, I remember, as I craned on tiptoe to see what she was doing, the barrel wobbled beneath my feet and she looked up—but not before I’d ducked my head and regained my balance. As I say, I experienced a sort of appalled fascination at the sheer brazenness of the creature, I watched her as you might some exotic wild animal, with a mixture of awe and fear, and a sense of wonder that such a form of life could exist. She was a force of nature, this is how I thought of her at the time.

As for my father, for him my contempt knew no bounds. He was no exotic, no force of nature; in

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