Free Spider by Patrick McGrath

encounter—best put it behind him, forget about it, return to the routines of everyday life, those stable routines that he’d known, so it seemed, forever.

    My father’s resolution remained firm until, I would guess, about the middle of the afternoon. He was overhauling the plumbing of a warehouse in East Ham with his mate Archie Boyle, a cheery fat youth with hair the color of a carrot. I see him on a wooden stepladder, his shins braced against the top step, working with hammer and wrench on a length of old lead piping high in the dust and the gloom. Every clang of his hammer echoes dully through the empty building, and over this reverberating clangor comes the sharp, thin sound, from down the other end, of Archie’s whistling; he is at work preparing sections of new pipe for my father to install. In his left hand my father grips the wrench, which is locked upon an antiquated octagonal nut that over the years has fused with its pipes, and with the right he wields the hammer, and with it delivers a series of steady blows to the shank of the wrench, in an effort to loosen the nut. Each hammer blow resounds through the warehouse like the tolling of some awful funereal requiem bell, flakes of rust drift free, and he has to turn his head to keep them from getting in his eyes. Slowly the nut starts to turn. My father’s mind, lulled by the steady dirgelike clangor of his hammer blows, superimposed, in that big empty chamber, like some sort of eerie gothic symphony, on the slow tuneless whistling of Archie Boyle, has drifted, again, to the events of last night, to the sight of Hilda with her coat pushed back, her hands on her hips, bare-legged, one knee crooked so her skirt rides up her white thigh, grinning her chinny grin from the shadows—and with that image the idea of having her, there in the alley, that tart (how he savors the word!), up against the wall, with her skirt pushed up round her waist—
    Suddenly from out of the pipe leaps a great hissing spurt of cold water. It hits him square in the chest and almost knocks him off the ladder. From all around the loosened nut spring jets of hissing water—the pipes have not been shut off at the mains. Archie comes trotting down the warehouse as my father descends the ladder, dripping wet and cursing, while the water sprays the ceiling and the top of the wall, then runs down to form a spreading puddle on the concrete floor. “Bloody hell!” shouts my father as he strides away to shut off the water. He does not need to be told that this is his fault.
    When he returns, Archie, still whistling, is hard at work with bucket and mop. No great problem, after all; but as my father angrily resumes work on the eight-sided nut he knows that if it hadn’t been for Hilda this wouldn’t have happened. The pair resume their tasks; but all the while, outside the dusty warehouse windows, the light is thickening in the bleak gray November afternoon; and as it thickens my father cannot keep his thoughts from turning, again and again, to Hilda, to his tart, and the longing comes back like a fever, and his resolutions are all forgotten.

    Soon afterwards the two plumbers left the empty warehouse. With the descent of darkness a damp, chilly fog had drifted in from the river, and my father pulled his cap low and tied his scarf tightly about his throat. After parting with Archie he mounted his bicycle and pedaled off in the direction of Kitchener Street. The moisture of the fog gathered round his spectacles and made his eyes smart as through obscure, deserted streets he rode, past black walls that glistened slickly where they caught the diffuse glow of the streetlamps, then retreated once more into inky indistinctness. Occasionally a figure hurried by, the footsteps becoming suddenly loud then just as quickly receding into silence. My father’s route carried him along streets that tended down toward the docks, and as it did so the fog became denser, the city more deserted, the atmosphere more