I’ve been beating the wife for over ten years – give or take a few months. I think the first couple of months after we first met were what you’d call happy, but I couldn’t swear to it.
Why? I hear you ask – and I don’t blame you for asking, I used to ask myself the same question in the beginning. Till we both got used to it. I really don’t know – lots of reasons - I guess she’s got one of those ‘hit me faces’. She’s placid, dumb, care free – it fucks me off to look at her submissive mug. Think of Shelley Duvall playing Jack Nicholson’s wife in The Shining and you’ll get the picture.
Anyhoo’s, I’m in the car, it’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m driving to Lil’s Bar ‘N’ Grill to meet my girlfriend. She’s my regular girlfriend mind– it’s not as if I play the field or anything, no sir.
The sun’s shining and I’ve got that ‘just finished my Sunday lunch’ buzz happening. I’ve got about 20 miles of motorway to eat up – don’t shit on the doorstep, I always say – and I fancy some music. Now don’t get me wrong, I like most music, but I like my own music better – been thrashing around on the old guitar box for a while – so I reach into the glove compartment to get out one of my tapes. I made the tapes a good while gone on one of those huge deck machines that were popular in the seventies – you know, the ones whose buttons were as large as the fucking Mekong Delta and you needed to have done the Charles Atlas body building course just to lock those suckers onto ‘record’.
I’m leaning over to the left, reaching, my moobs painful on the steering wheel, my head struggling to look out the windscreen and I’m raking my fingers around the depths of the glove box when I feel something velvety and soft in the corner. Just then, a sharp, needle like pain shoots up my fingers and when I pull my hand out – super fucking fast – there’s what can only be described as the MOTHER of all spiders hanging off my pinkies. ‘JESUS FUCKING CHRIST IN A SIDECAR!’ I scream at my hand and its nightmare appendage, spittle flying onto the glass in a weird kind of ‘fly hitting the windscreen’ reversal. My eyes are bugging out, as if someone’s just knocked on my door and pissed on my shoes when I answer it. I start flapping my hand around like some camp guy on speed and the thing falls with a soft ‘plop’ into my groin. Now, if you’ve ever had a spider big as a plate, scuttling and skittering about on your bits, you’ll understand why I was screaming like a lady. I manage to heave it off me and into the passenger foot well by making out I was trying to dry hump the steering wheel.
As I pull the car over to the hard shoulder, I catch a glimpse of the thing scurrying under the passenger seat and I try to catch my breath. I see my face in the rear-view mirror – pale and sweaty, with two angry looking red blotches on my cheeks. I look rather like Mr Pennywise, the mad, deranged killer klown from Stephen King’s ‘It’. And let me tell you – once the sheer terror and panic had started to recede – albeit slowly – I felt mighty mad and deranged too. Man, someone was going to fucking pay and I won’t insult you by asking you who that someone was. No, sirree.
When the car stopped, I was out the door in a flash – fuck the danger of being sucked under a lorry – I needed distance between me and spidey. I moved around the car to the grass verge and took stock. My fingers throbbed like a bastard and on closer inspection; thin red lines traced their way from nail to first knuckle. I squinted right up near and could make out tiny hairs, which looked for all the world like they had sprouted from my finger tips. I judged if I was still alive and feeling more angry than dead – and bringing the hairs into the equation, I was not in any immediate danger. I had read somewhere that the less poisonous of the tarantula family shed their hair as a defensive gesture when threatened. There was no obvious sign of a bite, either. It seems the biggest danger I had was losing control of the car and Christ knows how I hadn’t driven it into or under something.
First things first, I had to get rid of Mr Spider, then I am already seeing myself tearing into my drive, leaping out of the car and straight onto Mrs Smarty ‘I’ll scare him shitless and teach him a lesson’ Pants.