Gayle Burgoyne

 Every Spider is an Individual to Himself

Nic woke to a mist that picked out every spider web and stray spider thread. The world was suddenly full of spiders and every one was an individual to himself.
‘Don’t loiter around looking at webs, believing yourself something magical,’ his mum said as he left the house. ‘Time to grow up. Today’s your last chance to prove your commitment. If your borderline grades get downgraded, then–’
There followed the chain of disastrous events that began with conditional offers from substandard universities and ended with Nic dying in penury like an artist.
‘If you hadn’t depressed me with my tragic life a thousand times,’ Nic said, ‘it might actually scare me.’
His mum was afraid. What of? She’d been top of her year, won prizes and races and, even though the dates didn’t quite add up, she said she’d had successful careers across a number of industries.
In next door’s untidy hedge, spider webs bowed under the weight of millions of tiny water droplets. Each drop gleamed: a fairy light, a crystal ball. He took a step back – the clear globes were suspended in the air as if the world were made of a glittering beaded fabric, if only you knew how to look. How could he not believe himself magical? He’d gone to sleep in a world run by humans and woken to find it had been woven by spiders all along.
‘Go to school!’ his mum yelled out of the window then slammed it shut.
He couldn’t tear himself away. He wanted to cry – the world was so bright and alive when you noticed it. Absolutely he must not cry on the street, or anywhere. If he cried onto the spider webs that were already wet, perhaps no one would notice. Except the spiders, whose beautiful webs he’d burden. Off to prison camp then. He could force himself to turn up, with the promise that he’d describe the spider webs to Isobel when he was allowed to see her. She’d want to know everything so he’d better stock up.
Every tree and telegraph pole dazzled with the spider webs. Wing mirrors of cars that transported you to places you didn’t want to go; iron railings around care homes in which the living dead tried to forget what they’d done to their children; and street signs that offered no useful information for a sixteen-year-old boy lost in his life: all were decorated as if it were Halloween again and tomorrow the Day of the Dead. Even the barbed wire around the fenced-in garages was beautiful with shining webs.
He’d never used the word ‘beautiful’ before today. It came into his head unbidden, rising up from the place that he’d killed. He tried to unthink it but it was too late. This revealing word joined with ‘spider’ and he walked to school muttering, ‘Spider beautiful beside her.’ Perhaps on misty days even the tangled wire around Auschwitz had been beautiful with surprise spiders building their nets in which to catch the world.
One last look at the webs. Each droplet contained a miniature upside-down world, as did the drops on the tips of deciduous larch branches. When he’d showed Isobel the larch in the park transformed, he saw her upside-down face in one of the crystal balls.
She said, ‘Are we different in the upside-down crystal ball world, or is it like if we run away to Australia?’ She pulled her navy bobble hat down over her eyes and looked around.
‘What can you see?’ he said.
‘Mostly the stretched knit of the hat. When I turn my head I’m a new sort of insect, with one huge faceted eye that sees the world through a grid. Like my dad seems to. You go to prison to learn how to be a criminal, he says. That’s pretty much the sum total of his career advice. Though I don’t know how he’d know, he’s just dying slowly in a cubicle where he can’t even see over the sides. Everyone else in his office could have walked out of the building, they could have slumped over their keyboards, dead of the soul-dispersing work, pressing T and F and G and H and probably Y with their wrinkly foreheads into all eternity, which some AI in the future will think is a secret message from this past we’re already in, because he’s burnt the planet by driving short distances and being particular about fruit and veg in plastic, and he wouldn’t have a clue. And I’m supposed to believe this is success.’
What was success anyway? Nic wondered. These people walking along, driving along, cycling along, while he walked to school so slowly it barely registered as movement, were they succeeding at success? What did they do in their urgent lives that they couldn’t stop to look and feel the thrill of spider webs as he did? What did they know that he didn’t?
He’d been going to school and tutoring for as long as he could remember and still he didn’t know anything. When would he understand the world? At university? He couldn’t wait that long; he might choose the wrong one and set in motion the disastrous chain his mum warned him about. If he was already on the path to this mistake, however, then what was another day of school missed in the long, long thread of his life? Nothing. But this day would affect his attendance record. This day would definitely ruin his life.

In the car on the way back from tutoring the other day, he’d said to his mum, ‘What would you say if I killed myself?’
‘Jesus,’ she said.
‘That’s all you’d say?’
‘No, I’m saying that now. What a thing to say while I’m driving.’
‘All right, what would you say if I said I was going to kill myself?’
‘Are we really having this conversation?’
‘Is that what you’d say then, or is that what you’re saying now?’
‘I’m saying, don’t talk about suicide while I’m driving. Do you know how many kids kill themselves, and their friends, in car crashes?’
‘How many?’ Nic asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s not like I can look it up, I’m driving. A lot, that’s how many.’
‘I’m too young to drive.’
‘Why bother killing yourself, I mean, when you can just keep hanging around with those idiots from the park and let statistics do their work.’
‘Right, thanks, Mum. But if I did say–’
‘You have to let Isobel go, Nic. She’s going to do what she’ll do.’
Selective attention was very useful now he had a name for what he intuitively did when she tried to tell him Isobel was a lost cause. He said, ‘But if I did say…’
His mum heaved the sigh which indicated no one in the history of the universe had been as put upon as her, and forgot to indicate right. Someone honked. ‘Shit. All right, I’d say: “Please don’t kill yourself, we love you so much and there’s so much worse to come.” ’
‘Worse? Don’t you mean more?’ Nic asked.
‘Yes, that too. But what I mean is, bad times pass. It’s just that you don’t have enough experience to know that this time will – oh my god you’ve no idea – pale into insignificance compared to what else’ll happen in your life.’
‘So, you’re telling me I shouldn’t kill myself now because I’ll miss out on all the worse stuff to come?’
‘There are wonderful times to come too,’ she said. ‘Probably.’
‘But why should I hang around for years of misery and only a few days of being happy, possibly?’

‘What did she say?’ Isobel asked Nic when they met to smoke in the alley behind her house.
‘She kept saying, “Happy, possibly?”, until I said, “Yes, it’s an adverb, didn’t you have those in your day?” She doesn’t know the difference between an adjective and an adverb, but apparently you can still get a proper job, so I said, “Why do you send me to tutoring then?”. And she said, “I honestly don’t know, thanks a lot for circling me back to nihilism, Nic, as if I haven’t spent my whole life trying to get over it. Not that you’d ever think to ask whether I’m happy, possibly.” ’

Before he reached school, Nic turned off the road onto the path towards the woods. Where the muddy tracks diverged, he took the one less tramped upon and picked his way over the bouncy leaves. Minute by minute the spider webs in the trees and undergrowth were losing their brilliance and yet the spell remained. He went to the rope swing in the clearing.
He could become a tree surgeon, he’d thought, but that wasn’t what the thousands of pounds of tutoring were for.
‘They’re not real surgeons,’ his younger sister, Joni, had said.
‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘I do know that trees haven’t stepped on landmines like the kids in Cambodia who have their legs blown off and need the stumps tidying up.’
‘Whaaat?’ Joni said.
‘Though I don’t know what the real surgeons do when the kids your age, who don’t even get to go to school, have their guts ripped open and it all flops out like sausages in a big long string like in the butcher’s.’
‘Sausages?’ she said, looking at her dinner plate and letting a chewed mouthful slowly fall. She began to retch over the crockery he’d later have to scrub and dry and put away even though they had a dishwasher.
‘If you love trees so much,’ – his dad whisked away the plate; precious Joni must not be perturbed – ‘why would you want to go at them with a chainsaw, then chuck perfectly healthy wood in the chipper?’
‘Have you got your stuff for tutoring?’ his mum said. ‘Time to go.’
‘Oh, how Jesus wept,’ said Nic.

The rope swing was frayed. If he were a giant spider, his threads would be as thick as this blue plastic cord. He’d loop his unbreakable thread across the whole wood and live up there in the canopy. Then he wouldn’t have to hear his parents whisper that he might be on a downward spiral and is the bloody school going to do anything because the GP’s a waste of time, if you can even get an appointment because apparently your depressed son isn’t an urgent case when old people who keep voting this government in have their desperate loneliness to lump back and forth from the surgery.
Nic kicked the trunk of the huge oak from which the rope swing was hanging. Did Jesus weep to see the beautiful arms of an oak waving its bronze leaves to the ground? No, Jesus was a sap. But what kind of wood was his cross made out of?
Nic could become a furniture-maker.
‘What, like those places that have special sales every bank holiday,’ – his dad laughed – ‘and special sales every other day of the year, as if we’re all stupid enough to believe we’re getting a deal. I can just see you as one of those morons on the adverts.’
‘All that tutoring for interviews will stand me in good stead.’ Nic threw himself onto the sofa.
‘That’s the spirit.’ His mum glanced up from her phone with her eyes still crossed. ‘But to be clear, not furniture-making, ok?’
‘I think it’s just called carpentry,’ said his dad, in the newly-upholstered armchair.
‘No, there’s more to it than that. But anyway, not furniture. It’s a bit manual, don’t you think, Nic?’
‘Orthopaedic surgeons don’t seem to grumble about how much they get paid for their joint work.’ His dad flicked through a golfing magazine.
‘Yes, but he’s not going to be–’
‘Then what’s the tutoring for, for god’s sake?’ Nic punched a cushion. ‘Jesus was a carpenter, wasn’t he?’
‘We don’t believe in god.’
‘And he doesn’t believe in you,’ said Nic. ‘Or is just that you with me?’
‘Why do you have to be so sarcastic?’
‘Because you’re always so cynical.’

The frayed hanging rope drew Nic’s eyes up to where the limbs flared into fearsome tentacles. His octopus tree. There was a weird pink mushroom in the crook. He climbed onto the fallen branch that had torn off in a storm. It wasn’t a mushroom but the shiny bald head of a plastic doll face down in the muck.
Nic was, apparently, too imaginative to be a doctor, too lateral to be an engineer and too accepting to be a lawyer. He was wise to euphemisms, however. The school thought him hopeless at science, maths and English, and his parents said the other subjects were for thick kids. There seemed to be no use in the world for his observations on spider webs picked out by the mist or weird pink mushrooms that turned out to be plastic dolls. No use in the world for people like him and Isobel, who was under house arrest again after she’d forgotten to drink a bottle of water before her weigh-in. Forbidden to visit, he’d told his mum Isobel didn’t want to see him, though he should have made up a better lie because it prompted more whispering about depressive loops and the girl in the posh house on the corner who’d hanged herself when his mum was a teenager.
‘Hey, piss off, will you!’ someone shouted from higher up in the oak. ‘Go get your own tree.’ A head appeared above the bald doll. It was a girl, draped over a hidden limb like a fat lemur.
‘Is that your doll?’ Nic asked.
‘Why would it be mine?’
‘Because you’re both in the tree?’
‘So are the squirrels, but we’re not married.’
‘Right, yeah. How did you get up?’
‘The rope, dummy,’ she said.
He hadn’t thought of using the rope to climb. The rope was so frayed it was coming alive. Fuzzy like fur, a twist of turquoise pelts. The tails of the knot around the stick were, well, tails. The stick to swing on: an ancient leg bone. The bark had long gone from the stick, which was covered in tooth marks. Of a thousand dogs picking it up, dropping it at someone’s feet, then chasing and finding it, before another someone tied it with the blue rope to the limb of this oak tree. The tooth marks had worn smooth under the friction of a thousand trusting little hands wearing away the outer fibres of the wood. Through capillary action, and the attraction of liquid to itself and other surfaces, tree fibres drew water from the ground up and up to feed the branches and leaves. Then the tree made acorns for squirrels and jays to hide, to help them through the winter that was coming. This was Nic’s spider work. None of it would get him a grade.
‘Can I come up?’ Nic asked.
‘No,’ said the girl.
‘Why not?’
‘I’m trying to speak to the universe.’
‘Can I do that?’ He gripped the knotted rope.
‘There isn’t room.’
‘In the universe?’
‘Oh, go on then, but you have to be quiet.’

Her name was Laura. She had pink hair faded like the blue rope was faded.
‘I’m a nature writer,’ said Laura. ‘Well, I write pieces that are not quite real or unreal. I get paid sometimes, not much, but it’s a start. I do other stuff for money, it’s not important what. Not many people know what to do with my work. They say, “Is it real or not real?” And I say, “Well, it was real when I saw it but now I’ve written it down it’s not real.” Ceci n’est pas une pipe, you know.’
Nic nodded while clinging to his branch like a lemur. He’d look it up later.
‘It’s sort of spiritual, but not god. We’re all connected when you think of the world at the level of atoms. I’m trying to work out how to describe it better.’
‘Like how we’re all swapping electrons with the things around us,’ Nic said.
‘Are we?’
‘I think so. Or maybe not,’ he said quickly. ‘I’d have to check with my tutor. It’s how I think of it anyway,’ – and he should have stopped there but words poured from the secret place inside – ‘how we think we’re completely separate, but actually we’re frayed around the edges, fuzzy like this rope.’ Then he felt sick, waiting for Laura to laugh.
‘Go on,’ she said, and now he couldn’t stop.
We’re all walking around as if we’re distinct units, he said, saying this is me and that’s you, and I like this and I don’t like that and I don’t like you because you got all deep and twisted at so-and-so’s party, then ignored me after we hooked up. And all the while little pieces of ourselves are flying into the air, which contains tiny pieces of trees and leaves, and the particles of burnt rock oil that was made from ancient zooplankton and algae covered in stagnant water and mud quicker than they could decompose. Through the accumulation of more layers and intense heat and pressure they transformed. Dug up and burned, they’re fizzing and joining with our particles, and that’s even before you think about what we eat and drink.
‘Whoa,’ said Laura. ‘Whose this tutor of yours?’
‘Just some student twat. We only do the prescribed stuff though. He laughs when I talk like this. No one but Isobel takes me seriously.’
‘Who’s Isobel?’
‘A friend who wants to kill herself before she has to die slowly like her dad.’
‘We’re all dying slowly,’ said Laura.
‘Sometimes I wish it were quicker.’
‘No, no, you don’t!’
‘What do you know?’ Nic’s throat burned. Skip school, ruin your life: to get another lecture.
He swung his leg over the branch and hung ready to drop. With his fingertips, he could feel the ridges of the bark. His fingertips held on even though he wanted to drop.
‘Absolutely nothing,’ Laura said from the tree. ‘I don’t know anything. My university friends say, “We’re doing these well-paid jobs till we’re thirty, then we’ll have enough money to do what we really want.” But I went to a festival with my cousin and his mates, he’s thirty-five, thirty-six, and they were all married, it was a bit weird. Some even had kids, which they’d left with their parents so they could get off their faces. When I told them what my friends said, they all died laughing and my cousin said, “They’ll never do that. You make your own prison and then you don’t know how to get out of it. Look at us.” And I went, “Yeah, tragic, I thought I was supposed to be the clueless one.”
‘I didn’t know what to make of it. They knocked back two pills for breakfast, as if a magic remedy, then a top-up for elevenses. By Sunday they were zombies and on Tuesday they all had to chair the deliverables sign-off meeting, whatever that is. They were driving me bananas so when one of them asked what I did, I said, “I make friends with trees.” And the girls bleated, “Aaah, sweeeet”, and they all killed themselves laughing again, except for one guy who went quiet and said, “I used to do that. Whatever you do, don’t ever stop.” But he didn’t say what I shouldn’t stop and I couldn’t exactly ask. So I thought I might as well consult the trees because at least they won’t laugh.’
Nic’s fingertips had merged with the bark. His arm, shoulder and back muscles quivered because they loved to be used in this way. He lifted his knees to his chest then pulled himself up to raise his chin above the branch and threw out a leg to climb back on. He straddled the branch and faced Laura.
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-four,’ said Laura.
‘Aren’t you too old to be in a tree?’
‘How old’s that?’
‘Older than me?’
‘Then you’d better enjoy today because tomorrow you’ll be too old,’ she said.
He was about to say, ‘That’s ridiculous, I’ll still be the same age,’ but day by day he was growing older. He hadn’t reached sixteen in a single leap from twelve. Growth and change were gradual – the daily work of molecules assembling into cells then breaking apart, and doing it all again, forever into eternity. Easy to miss while zooming his telescopic eye on a point in the future when everything was settled and he knew exactly who to be. He was growing himself now, today, and soon this time would be history. And still growth didn’t stop, even when history had happened. Why would he stop changing? Why would he want to?
He said, ‘What do you know about nihilism?’
‘That it’s very tempting. And too easy.’
‘Isobel isn’t actually trying to kill herself,’ said Nic. ‘She doesn’t know what else to do, I guess.’
‘Or she’s waiting to be saved?’ Laura asked.
‘Maybe.’
‘Or needs to hear she’s worth saving?’
Nic thought for a moment. ‘Yes, that might be it.’
‘It’s not you she’s waiting to hear from?’
‘No. No way. Why would she be interested in me? She’s so good at everything. Except skipping, she’s terrible at that. She gets tangled up in the rope like she’s hanging herself from her own hand. Oh.’ Nic thought for another moment. ‘I wondered why she always does the skipping thing. She’s trying to make the other girls feel better about themselves. Isobel’s got too many choices. Her parents and teachers want her to do the hardest thing so they can show her off.’
‘What does she want to do?’
‘She doesn’t know,’ Nic said.
‘What does she do that doesn’t matter, that’s just her way of spending time?’
‘Oh, she loves to draw, she’s amazing. Not just drawing, she does these weird little cartoon stories. Every time she shows me one I can’t stop thinking about it. I even dream those pictures, like I’m in her dream. But she can’t do that for a career, can she, it’s not a proper thing.’
‘Except for all the people who do actually do it as a job.’ Laura slapped the branch and growled. ‘Sometimes I forget I’m looking through a net made by other people – it’s such a fine mesh I can convince myself it doesn’t exist. But it does.’
Like Isobel and the stretched knit of her hat, Nic thought. ‘Go on.’
‘Then at other times I see the threads of ‘should’ and ‘could’ and how they’re knotted together, obscuring what’s beyond.’
‘And what’s that?’ Nic whispered.
Laura sat up on the branch. ‘Did you see the spider webs this morning?’
‘Yes!’
‘My stomach flipped when I saw all those tiny droplets, and I thought, Have I been looking at it all wrong by thinking of threads and knots?’
‘Oh.’ Nic was disappointed. ‘I thought the webs were about hidden individuals.’
‘Yes, you’re right, I hadn’t thought of that. And here we are in our trees! But there was something about the droplets in particular, like beads on a string… I don’t know. Maybe it was about breaking apart this idea of a thread, of a neat line that seems to stretch in front of you like there’s a path and all you have to is walk along it, beside everyone else on their neat paths.’ She put her hands over her eyes and tilted her head up towards the watery sun divided into segments by the branches. ‘When I saw the webs I felt like I do when I’m in the shower and the sun through the window makes the water vapour glitter. It swirls when I rake my hands through it, and suddenly I don’t know where I am, I’m in another world. Something happens that I can’t describe, but it’s like I see the individual particles that everything’s built from and…it makes my atoms fizz too.’
Nic was quiet. Laura was quiet. A magpie cackled, a crow cawed and pigeon flew by saying ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh.
What did it mean – make your atoms fizz? He couldn’t explain but he knew it in his body. He didn’t know what to do with his life but he knew what made his atoms fizz. Didn’t even have to think about it. It was before thought: when his body tingled in response to spider webs picked out by the mist. Sometimes it did happen at school. Just small bursts during chemistry, P.E., English, geography. He didn’t know how to put these small fizzing moments together, nobody was teaching that, but he was sure this was the way to begin. Tiny moments he barely noticed, but maybe it was a fine-grained feeling – capillary action – so fine it was easy to miss under the mountains of homework and exam prep. Ah, but the thought of mountains did it. Climbing them, climbing trees.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said and dropped from the tree. ‘I’ve got to tell Isobel before I forget. Thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘The fizzing atoms thing.’
‘You came up with that,’ Laura said.
‘Did I? How?’
‘When you were banging on about your frayed edges and electrons bumping around in the air.’
‘I don’t know if that is actually a fact.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Laura, ‘it’s true.’
It was true, he felt it. He gave the rope swing a parting tap and said goodbye to Laura but she didn’t hear. She was talking to a magpie in its own language.
Nic walked through the woods, and the last yellow leaves on the hornbeams waved to him in the wind. Waving while dying. The spiders were invisible again but their hidden structures lived on in his mind. Every thread was composed of energetic atoms. He reached the road by a different route, darting off the paths through the undergrowth, startling squirrels and robins, and found a new gap in the wire fence. 

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