While I contemplated this impossibility, the spider took a couple of exploratory steps across the mat.
My teenage son screamed at a pitch that would have been unreachable if his voice wasn’t currently breaking, and before I could react, the spider was pinned to the mat beneath two fork prongs.
We stared in awed silence for a few seconds. The spider waved one leg, like a feeble farewell.
‘Joey, I can’t believe you hit it from that distance. You are one impressive athlete.’
‘I didn’t mean to hurt it.’ He grabbed my arm, distraught. ‘It was, like, an automatic reflex thing.’
‘It’s pretty cool, though. Maybe you’re actually a superhero and now you’re thirteen your powers are starting to manifest.’
‘A superhero wouldn’t murder an innocent life with a fork.’
‘They might kill a bug by accident while still learning to control their new capabilities.’ I put one weak arm around him, as the bug in question assumed the classic death curl, as best it could while stabbed in two places.
‘You’re still going to put it outside, aren’t you?’
‘It’s dead. Can’t it go in the bin?’
‘No!’ Joey bumped against me, beseechingly. ‘I’ll know it’s there. What if it’s not really dead, and it recovers enough to crawl back out and drag itself up the stairs while I’m asleep, looking for revenge.’
‘What revenge? Poking you with it’s one remaining leg?’
‘Mu-uu-uum!’
‘I could post it out the letter box?’ I didn’t normally indulge my son like this. But I had my irrational fear, he had his (‘Really, Amy, is it really irrational to be nervous about going into a world where people get run over, mugged, mocked, detained by security when they accidentally steal a packet of tampons?’ my anxiety leered). When it came to patience and understanding, I owed Joey a lifetime debt.
He took one look at my face, then slumped away from me. ‘It’s fine. I’ll call Cee-Cee.’
‘No!’ I fought to wrestle back the returning panic at the mere thought of opening the door again and reminded myself that feeling like I couldn’t suck in enough oxygen to survive didn’t make it true. ‘Give me a minute, and I’ll put a cup over it. Then I’ll throw it out later.’
What?My anxiety snickered in disbelief.Open the door twice in one day? Are you kidding me? You’d better call Cee-Cee…
‘I’ll do it before dinner, and I’ll be in here working until then, so I can promise you it won’t escape. If it tries, I’ll grind it into dust with my bare hands.’
Joey waited until the crumpled remains of the spider were under a large mug, with a dictionary,Mary Berry’s Complete Cookbookand a box of washing-up powder balanced on the top. He backed out of the room, snatching a cereal bar and a banana on his way.
‘This whole family is completely unhinged,’ he pronounced, flipping from frightened child to all-knowing, melodramatic teenager the instant the danger was over, before thumping up the stairs.
I sighed, took another glance at the towering tomb and got back to converting a jumble of notes into something vaguely readable.
Once upon a time, a good day meant being the best in the world, appearing on television in front of millions of people, celebrating late into the night before catching a plane home to be met by cheering fans.
A bad day meant coming second.
Nowadays, a good day meant keeping both eyes open while I chucked a spider out the back door.
And as for a bad day? A bad day meant that when my son’s greatest fear intruded into his home, the one place on earth where he’s entitled to feel safe, he was confronted with the truth that his own mother could not – or would not – protect him.
Sometimes it takes just one terrible thing to finally force change after years of enduring the intolerable. For me, that day, it was an invitation, written on official notepaper. Even thinking about it made me feel as though I’d swallowed shards of broken glass.
I saved the document I was working on and opened up the internet.
It was time.
* * *
An hour and a half later, I reluctantly shut my laptop and tried to refocus on getting dinner ready. Dropping a handful of broccoli into the steamer, I stuck the lid on and glanced back at the cup. The thought of leaning outside to dispose of a spider corpse made my brain spin inside my skull. Moving the books, I wrapped the spider in a tissue and buried it under some carrot peelings in the kitchen bin. Yes, it was supposed to be ‘time’, but making the decision to research agoraphobia felt like more than enough bravery for one evening. Just reading about it on the internet had mentally exhausted me.
