The telly was on, Leeds United. Ed was serious about football. Spider (she wasn’t called that yet) hated that he had the sound so loud. The flat, one of a series of flats with Ed, was tiny. Spider would sleep in her mom and Ed’s bed until either her mom got home, or Ed went to bed. Then she’d sleep on the couch. Except she couldn’t sleep very much. She watched the telly with no sound when Ed and her mom were asleep. Then she slept at school in the girl’s lav. It was easier to sleep when it was light. Ed was a loud guy. Spider thought about things to do to Ed. She wanted to tie him on an anthill and cover him with honey and then the ants would eat all the honey and then eat him and he’d scream and scream until he died. She’d seen that in a movie. She knew that ants didn’t really do that, but it was satisfying to think about at night. She also thought about cracking his head open with one of those clamps where you screw. In another movie, she’d seen a skull crack open and it wasn’t like it broke, rather that it splintered. In the movie, it was an old skull and it had been full of bugs but Ed’s head would be full of brains. Spider was nine, but because she watched all those movies and knew odd stuff, people thought she was older. And because she was tall for her age. She heard her mom opening the door and closed her eyes to pretend to be asleep. Ed said, “Lena, you’re back early—what the bloody hell have you done now?” Spider could hear her mother crying. Her mum was German, which was sometimes a problem because she had an accent like Hitler. More of a problem was that her mum was a tart. Davey Whitfield had said it outside school, Your mum’s a tart. Davey was two years older than Spider, but Davey’s sister, Brenda, was Spider’s age. Brenda was beautiful. She had red hair. And she was nice to Spider. A lot of the girls weren’t. But Brenda was effortlessly nice because she didn’t have to be mean because everyone liked her. Spider was afraid that Davey calling Spider’s mum a tart would somehow contaminate Brenda’s understanding of her. Lena came into the dim little bedroom and her face was covered in a black veil which so scared Spider that she couldn’t move. A black lace veil, which had become part of her face. It was like something out of a movie. A sign. A curse. Supernatural and real all at the same time. Lena was crying. Don’t touch me, Spider thought. If her mother touched her, the veil would crawl off her face and onto Spider’s. When Spider realized that it was blood, she felt a lot less frightened. Blood was bad, but for a moment, the world had cracked open and the movies had become real. Evil was loose in the world. Compared to the black veil, blood was nothing. Some guy had slapped her mum’s face against a wall and broken her nose and cut her forehead. He’d taken all her money. Ed was mad and threatened to go find the guy and told Lena she was stupid. Spider couldn’t remember if her mom had gone back out the next evening, but figured she probably had. Lena sobbed and held Spider. You’re my baby, she said to Spider. When Spider was fourteen, she started to look pretty and grown-up and she and her mum left Ed in the middle of the night and moved to Sheffield. Her mum said it was because Ed had eyes for Spider. Spider was nineteen and in the U.S. before she realized that Lena might have been unwilling to share Ed. But by that point, her mom had been dead from hep C for two years.
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