Halfwit and the Spider

 

The other night while watch my favourite TV programme (Big Brother) I heard some tapping sounds on my bedroom wall. Thinking that The Teenager was trying to entertain me in a new, novel teenagery sort of way I happily start tapping back.

There was more tapping, a little more insistent than before.

I merrily tapped back.

Then there was even more tapping, followed by a faint call for help.

I dash to his bedroom.

‘Don’t come in,’ a near hysterical voice pleads. ‘Don’t come in. You can’t come in.’

Now I’m in a panic.

The Teenager’s knees dislocate easily and I’ve got visions of him lying on the floor in agony just by his bedroom door.

‘What’s happened?’ I ask through the closed door.

‘There’s a spider,’ he wails. ‘It’s just by the door. If you open the door it will move. It’s huge.’

‘Okay,’ I reply. ‘I’ll get a glass.’

‘Come back quick,’ he pleads.

I get the glass and return to the door. Where’s the spider?’ I ask.

‘Same place.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m on the bed.’

‘Okay, well… I’ll have to open the door in order to catch it. ‘I’m coming in,’ I announce.

I open the door SWAT style and see the spider which is already on the run…it’s a monster. It’s huge, ugly and fast, and it’s running towards the bed. A white faced-teenager is now screaming.

‘Okay’, I say, ‘you go into my room and I’ll catch the wee beastie for you.’

The teenager bolts for safety, slamming shut the door behind him, and I’m left all alone in the room, alone that is except for the spider!

I now have to crawl under The Teenager’s bed in search of the beast.

And that’s when I discover the dust…a decade of dust lies under the bed. It lies over books and over bits of a computer that we were going to build but never got around to building in the end… and somewhere in amongst this grey, soft, dusty land is the arachnid.

I shine the bedside light into the gloom but there’s no sign of it.

Eventually (cutting a long story short) I do catch it, and it is a monster. It is quick moving and angry and it waves hideous long legs at me through the glass. It has a fat, swaying bloated body suspended on legs that are anything but spindly. It’s one of the meanest looking spiders I’ve ever seen; and I can hardly bare to look at it.

I realise though, that I will have to show the beastie to The Teenager otherwise he’d never believe that I’d actually caught it, and that his room was now free of it.

I want to set his mind at rest.

So I go back to my bed room hoping to set his mind at rest by showing him a glimpse of the spider trapped at the bottom of a Guinness beer glass.

All I wanted to say was…‘I just want to show you that I’ve caught it before I put it outside.’

But I only get as far as ‘I....’ because The Teenager has caught the merest glimpse of it, and he’s already started screaming and he’s backing up onto the bed and pressing himself against the wall.

I try again to explain my good intentions over The Teenager’s alarm. I’m not taunting him at all…The Teenager though is doing a passable arachnid act of his own, he’s now all scurrying arms and legs, and he seems to be scrambling up the wall in a whirlwind of white-faced activity that’s defying gravity. He’s now screaming and he’s completely hysterical; his voice has gone up several octaves, and multiple decibels. And he’s incoherent and shouting something incomprehensible… but I catch the drift. I know what he’s trying to say: GET RID OF IT!

I take the spider outside, and release it.

Then I go back upstairs to calm The Teenager down.

Spiders, it seems, are definitely not his thing!

‘Why did you do that?’ he complains bitterly.

I try to explain my reasoning for showing him the spider trapped in the glass, but his terror has cut off any link to any part of his brain that I can reason with. Elemental fears have shut down his higher cognitive reasoning skills. He thinks I’m a fool an idiot.

I give up trying to explain and go off to watch Big Brother instead.

There’s a spider in the Big Brother kitchen and Siavash is trembling and has climbed onto one of the kitchen units. Halfwit comes to his rescue. (It all sounds familiar)

It’s hard to say but there’s a moment, just before Halfwit squishes the spider in the kitchen sink, when I catch a glimpse.

No!

It couldn’t be…could it?