Read Spider for Free Online

window, which was curtained with a piece of dingy lace, and through which he glimpsed the vast looming bulk of the gasworks; and upon the dressing table a chaotic litter of cosmetics and hairbrushes and pins and grips and bits of colored elastic. Between bed and wall on one side was a small table, also littered with female stuff, and from the depths of that litter rose a half-empty bottle of port and a pair of unwashed glasses. On the other side of the bed was a chair, so heavily draped with skirts and blouses and stockings and underwear that it was more a hump of fabrics, a hillock of silk and cotton, than anything else. Then the banging started: suddenly, a series of harsh metallic clangs in the pipes. “Hear that?” said Hilda. “We get that three times an hour.”
    “Water-hammer,” said my father in his short gruff way.
    Hilda shifted slightly on her doorframe and blew smoke at the ceiling. “That what you call it?” she said.
    My father nodded. “Blockage in the vent stack, I shouldn’t wonder.”
    She gazed at him frankly. “It’s driving me mad,” she said. “Can you fix it, plumber?”
    My father sniffed, adopted his cagey artisan manner, as if to suggest that this was a matter of delicacy and tact. “I’ll have to test the system,” he said.
    “Live round here, do you?” said Hilda.
    “Kitchener Street.”
    “I thought so.” She was examining her fingernails. “I thought I seen you down the Dog.” Suddenly she yawned, stretched her arms above her head and then, with a lazy smile, folded them back across her chest. “You going to stand there all day, then?” she said. “I thought you was here to do my pipes.”
    Her skin, my father noticed, was a much paler pink than he’d first thought, white, almost, and her dressing gown left exposed all the top part of her bosom. He also realized for the first time that her chin was really quite abnormally prominent, but her skin was so clear, and her hair so gloriously wheaty (though black at the roots), that after a moment or two you simply didn’t notice the square, puggy jut of the thing, and the bad bite of her ill-occluding lower teeth. “Some sort of clogging,” said my father, still standing in the doorway, still with his cap in one hand and his toolbag in the other. Then, as Hilda bent down to scoop up the cat purring at her ankles, he saw them: a glimpse, a clear view, for just an instant, as the dressing gown fell forward, of her breasts: perfectly framed within the silky material, a pair of white, bell-shaped breasts with little rose-colored nipples. He tore his eyes away. “Air in the pipes,” he said—and at that moment, as suddenly as it had begun, the banging stopped.
    “Bad air,” said Hilda, absently stroking the cat. “Can’t you smell it?”
    “It’s coming from your lavatory,” said my father.
    Hilda smiled. Because of her jaw it was a queer little smile, more of a short slit with slight openings at either end, and my father was oddly touched. “I sincerely hope so,” she said. “Shocking, the state of the plumbing in this place.” Still smiling, she permitted her eyes to drift languidly up and down the dour man rigid in her bedroom doorway. “Well, you going to stand there all day?” she repeated. “You going to do my pipes or what?”
    My father found, as he’d thought he would, that there was no water in the toilet bowl and hence no seal, or trap, to impede the passage of sewer gases. Back-siphonage had occurred as a result of a pressure differential caused, like the water-hammer, by blockage or clogging in one of the vent stacks. It was his task to locate the blockage and eliminate it, and his first thought was of nesting mice: they often got into the plumbing of these old buildings. He would test the system by closing all the pipes then turning on the water; an inspection of the various valves and faucets should then lead him to the source of the dysfunction.

    I put down my pencil. I was deep in unknown