NEWSLETTER

"I’m Gloria. You haven’t seen two largish spiders have you?” Gloria, it transpired, bred spiders. She had always thought it was blank males who collected exotic or venomous creatures to make themselves more interesting or to feel powerful because they had one of the only five Armored Mist frogs in the world stashed under their bed, as one suitor in a pub had recounted to her.

She had directed Gloria to the spider paste. “Kelvin. Melvin,” Gloria had obituarized. “I let them out for exercise,” she explained when asked how they had escaped. The hatred that Gloria had launched had been quite unjustified and unbalanced and relations hadn’t much improved.

“Have the locks been changed?’ she asked. “I’m in the second-floor flat and I can’t get in.”

“No one’s changed the locks.” The male voice insisted.

“Could you let me in please?”

“I don’t know who you are.” There was a receiver-replacing conversation-terminating clack on the intercom. She pressed the other buttons, but no one responded. In the darkness she could just perceive that the names by the buzzers on the intercom looked different, but she couldn’t make out the letters. She wondered what to do. Wait for someone to go in or come out? Call for a locksmith? It was cold.

As she wandered out into the driveway, she looked back up at her flat and she saw a woman at the window looking down at her. Shocked, she didn’t quite know how to react. The interloper was a woman at the wrong end of middle age, unlikely to be a burglar, but very possibly mentally ill. The interloper was unfazed, observing her for a few moments before slowly retreating to the inner reaches of the flat.

She hit her own buzzer: “Who are you?”

“Sorry?”

“What are you doing in my flat?”

“I don’t know who you’re looking for, but this is the second-floor flat.’

“I know. I’ve lived in it for seven years.”

“No. I’ve lived here for seven years.”

“If you don’t let me in, I’ll call the police.”

“If you don’t go away, I’ll call the police.”

“This has gone far enough.”

“This has gone far enough. If it’s your flat why is it that I’m in here and you’re out there?” Another conversation-terminating clack.

Was this some elaborate practical joke? Television chicanery? She looked around for concealed chucklers. If it were a joke, she would exact terrible revenge. She retrieved her phone from her bag, but, to top it all, it wouldn’t work. Gagging with rage she strode over to the nearest pay phone and called the police. After hanging on for several minutes, she explained that someone was in her flat. She then paced up and down in the driveway for 20 minutes, past the orange bathtub that had been there for months and which, certainly, would be there for months to come. Eventually the police shot past with the sirens going. A few minutes later, they drove back and stopped in her driveway.

Two police officers emerged from the car with that caution police officers exhibit in case someone starts shooting at them. One was a policewoman who must have been the result of some equal-opportunity mania, almost a dwarf, tubby, and with a look that said she couldn’t believe she had been accepted for the job. The other was a towering, wall-wide veteran to whom she re-explained her predicament.

The police drew down the woman in her flat. Her name was Mrs. Gardiner. Her name was inscribed by the bell. Mrs. Gardiner swiftly produced correspondence from utility companies that enthroned her as the rightful occupant. The mystery man from the ground-floor flat maintained Mrs. Gardiner had been living there for years. They went upstairs to the flat—Rolf’s pool table vanished—where her claim that the curtains in the back bedroom were red was proved wrong. All her belongings were gone. The flat had been totally redecorated, refurnished.

She was asked to provide any evidence that she lived there. She could have sworn she had a letter from her bank in her bag, but it was gone. Mrs. Gardiner now studied her with the compassion reserved for the mentally ill who have just done something awful to themselves. The policeman couldn’t have been more sympathetic as tears bunched in her eyes.

‘I’d like to help,” said the policeman. “But you see how it looks. This lady has proof of residence. You don’t. Your keys don’t fit any of the locks. The neighbors say they’ve never seen you before. Are you on some medication?”

Mrs. Gardiner commented, “She needs help.”

The rage and the weariness made her leave. She couldn’t bear to see how they looked at her. She didn’t know what to do. She walked over to the nearby newsagent run by a barely counter-high Asian woman who greeted her.

“You know me, don’t you?”

“Of course,” the newsagent replied, but as soon as she replied she realized that she would have said the same thing to a complete stranger.

“Do you know what’s going on over the road?”

“What’s going on over the road? Something’s always going on over there.”

Mechanically she started walking toward the underground. She’d deal with this tomorrow. Stay with someone tonight and get on the case tomorrow, but none of her friends lived in the area. She tried her phone again: Still not working. Stopping at the only working payphone, she tried her friends. The first attempts produced no reply. Then when she phoned Don, who was almost the last person on whose sofa she’d consider sleeping, a non-Don voice answered.

“Could I speak to Don?”

“You’ve got a wrong number.”

She punched the number again, extremely slowly to make sure she got it right, but only got the non-Don voice.

She took the tube back into Victoria and went into the first OK-looking cheap hotel. All she wanted to do was curl up. The receptionist ran her credit card and then announced it was no good. With only a few pounds in cash, she went out to the cashpoint on the corner, and after she had tapped in her number three times, the machine ate her card.

It was now gone 11 and she took stock of how badly she stank. She made another round of phone calls. The numbers were unavailable, no one was there, or an unfriendly voice would deny the person she was looking for. Finally, she returned to her office hoping to spend the night there, but when her key froze in the lock of the front door she wasn’t surprised.

There was one last call to make, the one she dreaded most of all. When a strange voice answered her parents’ number, she knew they were gone as well.

She caught the last train back to Brixton, and in the passageway between the two platforms, she sank down and gave way to tears.

TIBOR FISCHER


CRUSHED MEXICAN SPIDERS | 1 | 2 |

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