spider

I guess I first realised about two and a half months ago. A certain inability to communicate meaningfully with people was the first symptom. The exasperating aspect of all these conditions, of course, is the intangibility of the symptoms. My recognition of them could itself just be a symptom of paranoia, or oncoming insanity, although the latter was the end result anyway. In its lesser form this speech deficiency manifested itself as interminable silences, between myself and people who I would, before the onset of my illness, have naturally chatted away to, even if it was about something totally insignificant, with no problem at all. This in itself is something that everyone experiences from time to time, so another difficulty is deciding the boundary on one side of which lies normal peoples' problems, and on the other the outward signs of my condition. Far more worrying was the frustrating complete inability to speak my mind when I needed to. Even before this malady began to make itself felt, I've been one of those people who gets an enormous headfuck over something, and my natural inclination to bottle leads to this weed growing and growing in my head, until it feels like I will explode. I would have been dead a long time ago, no doubt, if it wasn't for the quite breathtaking support I get from my close friends. The number of times I have turned up on Sally's doorstep, a damp unlit cigarette clamped in my mouth, and she has allowed me to just unload on her, to scream and rant and weep, until the last vestiges of the demons are finally exorcised, are beyond count. But most recently that hasn't materialised. My head has been a cauldron, broiling and festering, until all that's left is a dark rotting mess, and though I have tried and tried to let out my feelings of waste and self-loathing and anger, I have been unable to. And once or twice Sally has demanded that I tell her what's going on, and all I can do is stare fixedly ahead and reach for another cigarette, or shake my head hopelessly. But even worse than that, darker and more sinister, and infinitely more painful, is the unplaceable emptiness. Before, my absolute love for her has led me to attempt the sole unselfish act in my life, which was to ignore her totally for a week, in the hope that she would finally realise her mistake and go back to a happy existence without me. By the end of the week, of course, I weakened and went back to her, more in love than I was before. But now I can't help feeling like the upper vessel of an egg timer, after the sand has trickled away, leaving me empty and vacuous. My love for her is still there, strong as ever, but some crucial part of my heart, a tiny, tiny thing, has been knocked out as if with a hammer, and like a pane of glass the rest of my being has shattered outwards, forever changed by this woeful event.

It took me a while to discover the root cause of all these faults in my life, but it came one night when I was lying awake staring at the ceiling, in the fixed hopeless pose of all serial insomniacs. I was lying there listening to my body's natural rhythms, the irregular drip-drip, drip-drip of my heart and the swelling wave-roar of my breathing, when I felt something stir in my abdomen, slightly above and to the right of my sternum. I stopped breathing and concentrated on that spot. What was it? Then I felt it again, a definite shift as if something was stealthily drawing itself along inside me. The thing shifted again, and I sat up, pawing at my chest. I realised how silly I must look, and sank back into the mattress. Although I waited, whatever it was didn't move again, and eventually the librium kicked in, sending me to sleep.
Normally I don't dream, apart from the recurring spiral staircase one when I'm in my deepest states of depression, where the stairway I'm running up is getting narrower and narrower, and yet I can't stop moving up the stairs, and I can't turn around, until I'm squashed like an aphid. But this one was new. I was sitting alone in a hospital room, like the ones they have in A & E when you break your arm, with a high green-covered bed, and a curtain on a rail in the ceiling. It was dark, but I could see in a mirror something glowing dark-red and implacable inside my chest, something arachnid-like with legs and a bloated abdomen. And I could see the corrupted filth flowing around my body like a foetid soup, my very essence tainted and vile. In a frenzy I took a knife and slashed at my arm, until the unblood came out, first seeping, then gushing out, black and stinking. I knew that this was weakening the spider-thing, draining it of its power, ruining its foul work. I cut again and again, the skin splitting and easing apart like taut animal fat, the filth welling up and over, covering the floor and the bed. Then I woke up, sat on the edge of my own bed, a shard of glass from my broken water jug in my hand, blood oozing between the fingers, and dripping down to join that in my lap, running from my arm in a steady trickle down to the elbow and onto my legs.

Just thinking about it leaves me gasping for air. Some cancer, some parasite, is living in my body, and its poison is running thickly through my veins. I know what it wants. It wants my brain. Or, more specifically, my mind. It's already started on that. First my unconscious, then my conscious, cell by cell, thought by thought, chipping away at my soul until I'm lying in pieces on the floor. Devouring me one bite at a time. Well it can't have me. I've got it all sorted out, what I'm gonna do. When it gets too far, I'll do the classic railway bridge leap, headfirst onto the oily ballast below. If I go, you're coming with me, asshole.

I'm in my room doing my homework. It seems so absurdly mundane that I should have to do homework and washing up and people's birthday cards when I'm rotting away from within, maybe mere weeks from death. Not that the homework ever gets done. That's a rarity these days. Today is an exception because my English tutor has delivered me an ultimatum - write an essay or I'm off the course. This shouldn't bother me much, but English is the one subject I like, and getting chucked off a course is only one step away from being chucked out of the Sixth Form, which for some reason I really don't want to happen. Stupid, because it can't affect me, I'm probably half-spider already. Every second is a second closer to the inevitable. Then again it always has been. Life is just one big wake-up call. But now the inevitable seems more inevitable. Now...now that I'm this. I hold my hand up, twist it in the light, clench and unclench my fist, watch the tendons running like wires under the skin. This, this hand that used to belong to me, now belongs to something else. Every second my flesh becomes more saturated with the life-force of this black being which is possessing me. All that's missing is the mind to control the body, and it'll have that soon. I stand up, I'll show this spider-thing. My family are watching television in the living room. Some inane soap, no doubt. It just makes it easier to get past to the kitchen, no creaking stairs in our house. This hand is not my hand. The door is open, so I don't have to try and turn the handle quietly. This body is not my body. I open a drawer, and select the sharpest-looking knife I can find. It gleams dully in the March dusk light, which paints the kitchen an ethereal shade of grey, and leaves cobwebbed shadows in the corners. This pain is not my pain. I recite it like a mantra. This hand is not my hand. This body is not my body. This pain is not my pain. This pain is not my pain. I put a cutting board on the kitchen table, and place my left hand on the board. I feel like an executioner. Maybe the hand should wear a blindfold? This pain is not my pain. The point of the knife I rest on my hand, in the gap between the tendons of my index and middle fingers. Except it's not my hand, it doesn't belong to me anymore. I put my right palm on the heel of the knife handle, and push the knife down with all my strength into the hand resting on the cutting board in front of me. After a few seconds I pull the knife out, and feel the thrill of blade on bone, but there's no pain. The pain isn't mine. Carefully, conscientiously, I take the knife and the bleeding chopping board, put them in the washing-up bowl, and run the water. When the bowl is full, I turn off the taps, and wash both items, watching the slow-motion explosion of scarlet. The blood pumps into the water, contrasting sharply at first with the grey of the bowl, and then mixing to form a uniform pink. I snap out of my reverie. I empty the bowl, dry my hands, and turn to leave. The flat crack of a drip striking the floor makes me look down. With annoyance I notice the circle of blood on the linoleum. Quickly I tear off some kitchen towel, deftly wipe away the drip, and with the tissue held to my hand, walk back upstairs. This pain is not my pain, I remind myself on the way up. The door closed behind me, I sit back down in front of my homework. This pain is not my pain. Oh shit. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck. What is wrong with me?

First came the pestilence. Then came the drought. It's like some mutant cancer gutted my insides like a fire, and has left a dusty emptiness, a desert for love, life, or happiness. A scary sense of distance from myself has developed, as if I'm watching my actions from a remote point, with the dramas playing out in front of me a mere amusement, a laughable story which will soon disappear. All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players. That's all I am, an unwitting player in someone's twisted play. They all have their exits. Yes, some closer than others. If only I could prolong the life of this player, write in a plot-twist to get me out. It was all a dream, and me lived happily ever after. And me married X. And X had twins. And me got a job. And it's not much but it's enough to be going along with. And me and X moved out of their flat and into a house with a small garden and a dog. And then X ran off with Y, and got custody of the children. And me stepped out of the mirror and looked at himself, and said, 'look at you, your life amounts to nothing'. Sounds like fun, what a lot I've got to look forward to. In real life, me skins up another joint, and tells his mum and dad that he's going for a walk.

The worst thing, or maybe the best thing, is that no-one else knows. No matter how personal the things I've unloaded on Sally, I've never had the guts to reveal to her just how evil and twisted I am, how black my head really is, because it's just not worth the risk of losing her. So it's just me and god who know. Of course now I have the spider to blame, it's not my fault, except that I was flawed before the onset of my condition, and it is just an excuse, something to cover up my own culpability, and the spider was only able to get in because of a weakness in myself somewhere, which means that I am at fault, ultimately. So what do you think, god? Am I beyond hope? I wonder what sound the pearly gates make when they close in your face. I suppose it's asking too much to expect you to get me out of this one, isn't it. I'd make a crap christian. Too weak to make the commitments. Too proud to supplicate myself. Too scorning of my potential contemporaries to immerse myself in the culture. So what do you think, god? What do you say? What fate will befall this tainted soul? How will it all end? Huh, don't want to spoil the surprise, eh? Fine. Be that way. I'll find out for myself.

Every step I take tightens my chest further. Maybe this is how an asthma sufferer feels. I am nervous because I am going round to Sally's. I shouldn't be worried that I'm going to see my girlfriend, that's not healthy, but I am. I haven't been for weeks, but I tread the route as one walks a path that they've followed a thousand times before. I take the short cut that strictly speaking we're not allowed to use, but every kid in the village must use it on a more-or-less daily basis. I step over the well-trodden sagging chain link fence, and into the primary school field. This council property is something of a village thoroughfare, and if you walk through here at the right time of night then you see the wan coven of junkies, crouched in a tight circle like cultists, worshipping whatever narcotic is currently the fashion. My mouth is dry, and the sickly Mayfair Light which I'm refusing to admit is dead, is not helping. I finally give up and drop the butt as I duck beneath the trees that border the field. One step and I'm immersed in thick vegetation. Two steps, avoiding the ankle breaking hole to the left. Three steps and I'm on Sally's road. In a daze, feeling slightly ill from smoking far more cigarettes than I'm used to, I ring her doorbell. In a daze I watch the door open, her face flare into that brilliant pyrotechnic smile that I first fell in love with. In a daze I receive her welcoming hug, but I'm not too out of it to notice the unintentional rigidity in that first embrace, a declaration of the strange state of affairs that is now existing between us. How can I explain?
Once in her room, I sit down on the swiss cheese, a mangy old sofa so full of hot rock burns that the stuffing is barely contained in places. The biggest ones are named. Brenda the blim burn. Harry the hot rock. The bottomless Pete. This room used to be the centre of my world. What happened? I pull out my Rizla packet and select a skin, but Sally stops me.
'I've got one rolled'. This suits me. I replace the packet, being careful to put the Rizla under the flap for safekeeping. She sits cross-legged on the floor in front of me, and places an ashtray between us.
'Do you want to light it?' A gracious offer, which I accept. A brief almond of light, a melting scorch of paper, and I remove the lit joint in a puff of smoke. She's playing with the stringy hem of her trousers, a sure sign of insecurity from Sally. What is it, it seems as if all the little things that I love her for are being presented anew for me, to admonish me for my insensitive behaviour. As if she knows instinctively she's being watched, she looks up, searchingly at my face.
'What's up?' she says. I love her for this, her directness, but how is it that I'm able to view her coldly and without feeling.
'You can't pretend that nothing's wrong, you haven't been here in two months'. It's been six weeks, in fact, but I don't feel like pointing that out to her. I take a good first toke, and hold it down for ten seconds before exhaling in a hazy cloud. Why not try and explain? If anyone's going to understand, it'll be Sally. I consider how to start.
'I have a strange condition, an illness.' I begin, and then stop, wondering how to go on.
'What's the matter, can't get it up?' she asks, and laughs, a staccato laugh with a bitter edge that is not deliberate, but is nevertheless hurtful. All of a sudden I realise that she's been crying. Maybe it's a redness around her eyes, or the tenor of her voice, but it's suddenly blatantly obvious to me that she has been. I also realise that it's not going to work. There's no way I can explain this to her. I open my mouth, trying to form the words to say it, but it won't come. Instantly her bitterness melts away, and there she is, Sally as I've always known her. She unfolds herself and climbs onto the sofa beside me, putting her arm round my shoulders. I link fingers with her right hand and we sit there in comfortable silence, sharing the joint and our misery.

Maybe it's for a reason. Maybe it's for the best that I die now. Maybe it's my destiny. Who knows, in 10 years maybe my future's booked to coincide with someone else's in a bloody catastrophe, erasing theirs forever, and this condition is divine intervention to stop that occurring. Maybe I'm a terrorist. At least then I'd be fighting for something I believe in. Or maybe I'm wanted. Maybe in another life I save the world, and I'm being summoned to my death now so that my reincarnation takes place on schedule. Don't be stupid, reincarnation isn't for losers. And anyway, with my karma I must only qualify for a slug, or possibly I will be consumed by this parasite only to turn into one myself. Maybe it's all a big mistake. Maybe it's not me. I feel helpless, frustrated, like there should be an appeal court or something I can go to, some way out of this. What am I talking about? There is a way out. There's always a way out.

The rug floats thickly up, like levitating syrup, and attacks my stuffed bear. The two roll over and over, until they become a single entity, but at the same time retaining their individual existence, like two immiscible liquids, momentarily reforming as their separate selves, but then descending back into the mire. I blink happily, and turn to the candle on my floor. It is almost unbearably beautiful. The colour from it bleeds into the background, streaming out and dissipating like gas. My lateral vision speeds away into the distance, leaving the candle as the centre of my world, the focus of everything. Everything else is futile. Everything ends here. This is all. The flame has a curious tactile quality, or at least it appears to. Unthinkingly I stretch out my hand, but to my surprise I feel no pain, only a cold glow, and even more strangely, I feel the colour tangerine. The flame embraces my hand like a balm, and I close my eyes, enjoying the feeling. Suddenly I feel intense pain, and I jerk the hand away, my eyes open. The candle is back to its unassuming self. Inexplicably tired by this turn of events, I stretch out face down on the floor, and watch with interest the technicolour ranks of carpet fibres marching inexorably onwards with a fluid, flowing action, regimented and yet at the same time formless.

I am standing at the scene of my death. Of course I can't state that with absolute certainty, because there are no absolute certainties, but I can say with a reasonable level of conviction that this is where I will meet my end. The wind fans my cigarette to a bright glowing red, and sucks the resulting smoke over the bridge parapet and down towards the tracks below. What is this fundamental flaw in me that has left me such an emotional cripple? What is so wrong? Why have I cut myself, stabbed myself, and burned myself? What has illicited this self-mutilation? The hand doesn't hurt nearly as much as it should, which is worrying. Maybe I am losing control. My ability to make rational decisions has disappeared, quite literally. Every decision is pure emotion at the moment, and in my current state of instability, that isn't good. An Intercity appears around the corner, accelerating towards me. A dirty yellow snout, a business-like expression, concentrating on getting from A to B. My coat flaps about me as the first engine surges underneath the bridge, the long line of anonymous carriages, then the crescendo of the approaching second engine. And as suddenly as the maelstrom started, it has gone. Just a toy receding into the distance. How easy it would be. If the driver wasn't looking then he wouldn't even feel the low 'thud' as my body went beneath the wheels. So quick, so easy, so surgical. So tempting. I haven't been in to school all week, and I've ignored the phone. All my time is spent either sat in my bedroom, or here. I love the feeling of being home when the world thinks you're at school. Living a secret life, a life that doesn't exist. It exists in no-one's head but your own, so for a while, you disappear. A refugee from society. A displaced victim of social conformity versus social exclusion.

Tranquillity is a wonderful thing. Quietly, I ponder myself. It's quite hard to be entirely rational about the destruction of my self, what makes me, me. All the values however small and pathetic, that make up how I see myself, are eroded, crumble away as I clutch at them. Ironic, really, that only now when I finally turn to them in my hour of direst need, are they becoming non-existent, evaporating into the ether in front of my eyes. I feel like running into a crowded street and screaming "look! I'm here! I exist!" I have a horrible feeling that they would just walk through me, unseeing. I think my grip, my influence on this world is slipping. In a small way, everyone effects the world around them. People know who I am. They may disturb their lives to phone me, my existence is worth a disruption in their life-circle. But now that power is receding. I'm a paperweight sitting on a circle of fabric on the floor, but I'm slipping through a hole in the floorboards, and as I fall, my influence is pulled through with me, my orbit of existence getting smaller and smaller, until it disappears altogether. When I'm gone, will the hole remain? Will people see the gap that I've left, or will it seal itself, my life forgotten forever? Most probably. That would be for the best, anyway. I've caused enough crap in people's lives without continuing the habit in death. Fuckwitt. It's all shit anyway, this criticism of the self. I've heard that self-deprecation is just an unconscious act to attempt to obliterate an over-inflated ego or feeling of worth. And I loathe that also. Thoughts like this twist over and over in my mind, fighting against each other and against me, until I can find only negativity in everything I do and think, and every route I try to follow only reinforces this feeling in me. The flaw runs deep and wide, the scar I hold inside. Not a scar of a long past-accident, but a red gash, constantly re-opened, never allowed to heal, cut and slashed until the pure surface of the original is not even a memory. I open my eyes, and look down at the scene of devastation that was, in distant memory only, my arm. The red weals of scratches running in near-perfect parallel lines diagonally across its width, the irritated edges around the areas where my repeated hacking with a broken protractor has left massive open wounds, and the deep, deep cuts, least prominent of all, where the blood is only just starting to crust around the edges. The waves upon waves of searing pain wash over my mind, saturating and permeating it at every level, soothing it with their serrated edges, and stimulating it to clear rational thought. I shift slightly, cold in only my blood-soaked trousers, and reclose my eyes.

I'm back on the swiss cheese, playing with bottomless Pete, picking holes in something already long past any hope of repair. The smoke from our two joints rises to the ceiling, where it, presumably, mingles to form a single cloud, but even that link between us is invisible. We couldn't look much more separate and defensive. I sit at one end of the sofa clutching my knees, Sally at the other end hugging a cushion. We don't even share an ashtray. When we skinned up, her effort was slightly more successful than mine, and although I know it is churlish, I sneak jealous glances at her joint, grudging her her success. The rift between us has opened up to a yawning gulf, and I am conscious that this is wholly my fault. She is hurt that I won't share my feelings with her, and no doubt assumes that this is because they relate to her. We're listening to Neil Young because Sally's in a deep retro phase where only material released before 1975 can be considered 'good music'. Plodding basslines and hawaiian guitars. As the days fly past will we lose our grasp, or fuse it in the sun? To my surprise, it's me who breaks the silence.
'It's not your fault'. She nods. At least we're thinking on the same wavelength. 'It's me, I'm wrong.'
'I can tell that,' she snorts, 'I've never seen you this fucked up'. And then, gentler, 'I could have helped you know. I still can.' We haven't had a teary reconciliation yet, and I'm quite glad. Every subsequent one seems more fake than the last. More an acceptance that we need someone, than a falling back in love. It feels like a rational deal, a trade-off is being done, rather than an action based on love. I shake my head.
'No, it's me, only I-'
'Don't be such a cock. You don't get brownie points from me for being all "heroic" and insisting on shouldering all the responsibility'. She's gabbling to stop herself from crying, 'All this time you've been "consulting with your inner soul" and you just left me here to wonder what the hell's going on. I am your girlfriend you know, you don't have to be afraid of me.' She stops waving the joint around (a habit she has while talking), puts it to her mouth and takes a long, shuddering toke. 'Everything's gone out of this relationship.' She says, exhaling.
'I know'. She looks up at me, a movement which twists a needle in my heart. She has been thinking about this moment.

Twenty minutes later, I step out of her house and shut the front door quietly behind me. I start to walk down the road in the direction of home, but a violent coughing fit stops me in my tracks. Through the blurry not-tears, not entirely brought on by my coughing, I see someone transparent detach themselves from my body, wipe their mouth clean from their hacking cough of a second before, and continue down the road. The stranger is me, that much I can tell from the increasingly opaque figure walking away from me, or at least he looks like me. But I have no respect for any of this person's values, anything he stands for. I don't understand what drives him, and I have nothing fundamentally in common with him in any way at all. A fresh coughing fit racks my body, and I am forced to sit down on the nearest wall. I taste blood in my mouth, and I hold out my hand to catch it, but it falls straight through my outstretched palm, and disappears before it strikes the floor. Despite the coughing, I am vaguely aware that I am fading into invisibility. The fluid being coughed up is thick and black now, and is accumulating in the cracks of the pavement. I feel no bitterness as my body, this incarnation of me, gives up, and the organs all start failing at once. At the same time I rock forward on my feet, high over the gleaming tracks, and begin the gentle descent, in fluttering slow-motion, my destiny rushing forward to meet me. I give one last wheezy cough, and watch without surprise as the spider pulls itself out through my stomach, and into the world, fresh as springtime. The bloated creature lowers itself to the ground, and starts the slow crawl to wherever it's going. Suddenly I realise, my brain working with complete lucidity, that this is my chance. Finally it is exposed, weak, at my mercy. I draw together my last life energies, and lift my foot. The thing emits a frightened screech, a nails-on-blackboard noise, or is it just my imagination? I bring down my foot, and yell triumphantly as I hurtle down towards the tar-sticky sleepers. And in my moment of victory, of final retribution, transparency passes into invisibility, tangibility turns into non-existence, and I cease to be. A hundred yards away, someone who I can't remember ever having known, turns left towards the school playing field. One step and he's immersed in thick vegetation. Two steps, taken with confidence as if he's always know about the ankle-breaking hole there. Three steps and he emerges into brilliant sunshine that makes him smile. As he continues on, a black insect-like thing drags itself in the opposite direction, unseen by the old man walking his dog, searching for a new home.