The Spider Lady's Lunch

By Peter McAra

ALONG CAME THE SPIDER
AND SAT DOWN BESIDE HIM ...

His new maths teacher, Miss Ryder was another blow-in.
Living right next door, Hamish often saw her on weekends. He batted away any suggestion he was interested in her comings and goings. One of his mates exclaimed, ‘God, Hamish! How can you live in the same block as the Spider Lady.'
The class had already put her in a box called 'Misfit & Loner ...'
The boys joked about her skinny black-stockinged legs while ogling the tight black skirt. ‘Those big goggly glasses are like insects’ eyes and the stick arms and legs...’
One mimed her quick, darting movements. ‘It’s like she’s catching flies...
Miss Ryder the Spider.’
... wants someone inside her,’ another tacked on. Now I think of it,
some female spiders eats the male after they mate.'

'A lay before lunch!’
ALL ABOUT THE SEXY, SENSUAL TEENAGE URGE TO MATE

• Language: English
• Publisher: CUSTOM BOOK PUBLICATIONS
• Release date: Mar 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301048359

Peter McAra

Born a miner's son in Western Australia, Peter learned about love and life in a string of rural towns across Australia and New Zealand, where he grew up with his mum, dad and three sisters. Over the years, his day jobs ranged from miner and truck-driver to academic positions in Australian and US universities. Along the way, he wrote several academic textbooks. Why the switch to writing romance? The moment eight-year-old Peter read Anne of Green Gables, he was hooked. (He's still in love with Anne, actually, but his understanding wife, a relationship psychologist, handles any conflicts professionally). Now, after a tree-change to green acres in coastal NSW, he farms by day and writes by night - the best time for romance.

Book preview

Prologue

January 1962.

Connors Crossing, pop. 3,933.

Helen Ryder passed the rusting sign, slowed her car, and pulled over. She had arrived. In a fortnight, she would start teaching maths at Connors Crossing High. She fled the city because she needed a place to hide. Pull the blankets over her head, lie still. For a few years, maybe. This place could be just right.

The quiet made her feel warm, still, sleepy, like you feel after a big lunch. She opened a window, took in the jagged silhouette of the escarpment’s crest, stark against the white cloud bank nestling behind it. A lone bull near the roadside fence looked up at her, stared, then returned to munching grass. She would enjoy a cup of tea and a cake if Connors Crossing offered a decent café. Meanwhile she would rest, take in the green countryside, breathe easy, and think.

David Purcell, principal of Eastway High, had treated her badly. He unearthed a little slip here, a bit of circumstantial evidence there, then confronted her. She had been heading for the carpark around five, shouldering a carry bag heavy with exam papers.

‘Got a minute, Helen?’

David’s smile told her that things were not going to be pretty. Not the upgrade she reckoned she had earned, secretly pined for.

‘Some rather off-colour gossip, Helen,’ he said as they walked. ‘Concerning you and one of your students. Wayne Butterfield, wasn’t it?’ Still smiling, he shepherded her to his office, took a seat behind his fortress desk, flicked a hand towards the visitor’s chair.

Half an hour later, he stood, re-applied his smile, and reached across his desk to shake her hand. ‘So I’d suggest a rural placement, Helen. Out of sight. Away from the heat. A few years, perhaps.’ The smile twisted into a plastic grin. ‘I’ll talk to Personnel. I have one or two contacts at Head Office.’

Ten years after that ghastly night, the ghost of Helen Ryder still haunts me. Some nights, I cannot sleep. Memories gnaw away at my brain like termites. I have heard that termites die if they are exposed to light. So I plan to let the light in – write this story.

Sometimes my son Jamie – he turned six the other day – walks into the lounge in the evening as I am reading. The light from the standard lamp catches his face as he stands in profile, and I wonder, yet again, whether his sibling might have looked like Jamie. Then the pain hacks through me again, hurting as it did that horrible, horrible night…

I shall start at the beginning. My name is Hamish Carter. We moved from Sydney to the two-pub town of Connors Crossing when my dad took the chief accountant’s job at the mill. I was sixteen. It was 1961. Elvis was pelvic-thrusting his way to immortality, the Twist was the dance rage, and adventurous girls were getting on the Pill.

In hindsight, I guess the Crossing was not all that bad a place to live. It was a tourist trap, close enough to Sydney to attract the weekend crowd, its hillsides festooned with leafy bed and breakfasts. Back in the 1830s, an escaped convict named Connor spotted some good grass for his stolen cattle on the southern bank of the river, swam them across, and burned his name onto the map.

That bit of history, plus a few old buildings and the forest-covered escarpment, puts the icing on the tourists’ cake. Midweek, Connors Crossing sleeps. Half of its twenty-two shops and eleven cafes stay shut, gestating for another weekend of tourist-fleecing. Then there is the high school – the hub round which my awkward life revolved.

In stark contrast with her only child – me – my mother had handled her transplanting to Connors Crossing well. She learned to cook country-style cakes for the church’s street stall, did the flowers on her rostered days, grabbed the job of secretary, St Mathew’s Ladies Auxiliary.

One Sunday she walked into the lounge after evening service and dropped her handbag onto the table. The thud distracted me from the television. Then she stood so that she blocked out half the screen. I suspected she wanted to talk to me, probably about something painful. More than just another rerun of the old tape she often ran on Sunday nights.

‘I’ve said it before, I know, Hamish,’ the tape would go. ‘But you really should join something. Get to know some of the local kids – the nice ones.’ She just did not get it that in Connors Crossing, it was a case of once a blow-in, always a blow-in. If your people had not lived in the Crossing for three generations at least, you were a blow-in. I learned that on my first day at Connors Crossing High. Those kids had been born into families who really knew each other. A kid from wicked Sydney, with its high rise apartment buildings and upper-crust schools, was never going to fit in.

‘Youth Group,’ my mother would say next. ‘You really should get to know the young folk who go to church, Hamish. There are some very nice girls in the Youth Group.’

‘Sure, Mum,’ I would groan. We both knew I would rather stand naked in Pioneers’ Mall on a Saturday morning and saw my dick off with a blunt knife. I would get around to joining things in my own good time… and the Youth Group would not be one of them.

Meanwhile, I had taken to TV like alcoholics take to booze – to numb the pain for a while. It failed to work well, but there was not much else on offer.

My mother inched herself closer to the centre of the screen. I sensed that this lecture was going to be different. Blocked from watching the television, I looked up.

‘Thank you, Hamish,’ she smiled her come-on smile. ‘And now that I have your undivided attention…’

‘Not Youth Group, Mum? Please, not again.’

No, not Youth Group,’ she said as I tried to peer round her to see the TV screen.

‘Oh, the relief,’ I whispered loudly.

‘Thanks, darling. I want you to do me a favour. Just this once. I won’t ask again.’

‘A favour?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it won’t hurt?’

‘No.’

‘Okay.’

‘Come to church with me next Sunday; the evening service.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to show you something.’

‘What?’

‘A surprise.’

‘Celia Salmond? Again?’

‘Darling. But how did you guess?’

‘Mum!’

‘I’ll tell you why I want you to come,’ she said. ‘Celia’s in the choir, as you know … and tonight, she looked just beautiful. You should see her, Hamish. She really has blossomed lately – the sort of young woman you should get to know.’

‘Mum. I’m too tired to handle being matchmaked at this time of night,’ I said. She ignored me.

‘Too bad Celia doesn’t go to your school.’

Once my mother got started, she was not going to stop for quite a time. ‘She’d be someone you could really get along with. I just know you’d relate very well. She’s doing science, her mother tells me and making brilliant progress. Those private schools really know how to cram their students.’

I had thought about Celia more than once, along much the same lines as my mother was now floating. But the last time I saw her, she was fair in the middle of a major ugly duckling stage. The surge of girlie hormones had given her a raging crop of zits, and made her fatter, but still she had grown no tits to speak of. Maybe my mother could be right. Celia might have got it together lately. I lately noticed this ugly-ducking-becomes-swan thing with a few of the girls in my class.

‘Come on, Mum.’ I decided to stage-manage reluctant acceptance. ‘I told you, I’m getting really fed up with your matchmaking. I mean this isn’t medieval India. Anyway, Celia’s in the choir. They stay back after church to practise. Even if I wanted to talk to her, I couldn’t; not that I’d want to anyway.’

‘Alright,’ she said. ‘But you’ll come. Evening service, next Sunday.’

‘O…………….kay.’

‘Glad you’re so excited. So it’s a date.’

‘Yes, Mum.’

The TV show finished. I headed for my room, tired after two long days of doing nothing. On the staircase, I paused for a second to look across at Miss Ryder’s flat. She was the new maths teacher at CC High, all nerdy and black-stockinged. Ever since she moved in, I hoped that one day I might spot her dashing naked past the window. You never know your luck. But that night, as always, all the lights were out. Okay, I would keep trying.

Our building was Connors Crossing’s only apartment block – a pair of semi-detached brick horrors built for the mill bosses when production rocketed after World War II. Each of the two apartments – ours and Miss Ryder’s - had a tiny front lawn and a letterbox slotted into the brick fence. The building was U-shaped. The base of the U fronted the street, with its two frosted glass front doors that no one ever used. The glass sported an etching of a wild stag looking upwards at nothing in particular. The U enclosed a concreted backyard with a low picket fence running down the middle. Each neighbour could see into the other’s yard from their upstairs rooms. Not that you bothered. All you could see were the Hills hoist, the garbage bin, and the concrete path running down to the garage.

Miss Ryder was another blow-in.

I often saw her on weekends, looking ridiculous in baggy khaki shorts and long black socks, carrying her groceries inside, or washing her car, or making a pathetic effort to grow vegetables in her back yard. The school kids had put her in a box called 'misfit and loner'. The boys joked about her skinny black-stockinged legs, the girls about her fashion sense.

I remember the guys’ post-mortem after her first class.

‘She looks more like an insect,’ Jamie Walters offered. ‘Big goggly glasses like insects’ eyes. Pea stick arms and legs.’ He mimed her quick, darting movements. ‘It’s like she’s catching flies. Miss Ryder the spider.’

‘Wants someone inside her,’ science nerd Mark Smith tacked on. It got a fair laugh.

‘Come to think of it,’ Mark added. ‘With some spiders, after the couple mates, the female eats the male. A lay then a lunch.’

Miss Ryder living next door to us, did not help.

‘God, Hamish!’ one kid said to me. ‘Living in the same block as the Spider Lady. Strange… they put all the weirdos in that block, right? Keep ‘em in quarantine so they won’t infect the rest of town.'

'What does she get up to in the middle of the night, Hamish?' another responded. 'Does she do black magic or something?’

Always, I batted away any suggestion that I or my family were interested in the Spider Lady’s comings and goings.

Sunday evening came round. I decided I might as well check out Celia – go to church with an open mind. She would be sitting in the choir stalls, facing the congregation. It was not often a guy gets to study a woman full frontal for an hour or so. The choir filed in, Celia first … or I assumed it was Celia. She had changed so much, even smiled as she walked to her seat at the end of the front row – a sweet, ethereal smile. There was hardly the trace of a zit on her smooth rosy cheeks. Her brown hair had grown soft and long. I like long hair. All the naked women in Penthouse have long hair. Often, I fantasised about a woman wafting her long hair over my chest as the two of us lay naked on a picnic rug in some leafy glade, just like in the magazine.

Celia wore a touch of lipstick - softest pink, totally right for her powder-blue choir gown. And – yes. yes! Tits, small but definitely there, pushing out her blue chorister’s gown. They hardly designed choristers’ gowns to highlight tits. All the other times I checked her out… nothing. A new uplift bra, perhaps? I took time to study her face. It seemed calm, radiant, spiritual even – suddenly a sweet young woman had replaced the zitty schoolgirl.

‘There’s Celia,’ my mother whispered to me. ‘On the end of the choir stall. Doesn’t she look lovely?’

‘Shut up, Mum,’ I whispered from the side of my mouth.

For the next thirty seconds, I made a point of looking anywhere but at Celia. After that, I lost it. My eyes have always had a mind of their own.

They locked onto Celia and would not shift. When the choir sang the first anthem, it seemed like the music floated out to wrap me in audible silk. It was like Celia was using the song to send me a love message. I did catch her eye once. Was that a smile she flicked to me as the choir surged up to deliver its big finish? In the other songs that followed, I watched as the singers drew breath at the end of each phrase, watched as Celia’s tits heaved in time to the music.

Then my brain took off on a trip of its own. The choir became a row of angels softly fanning their wings as they stood singing on some heavenly mountain top. Celia’s head tilted upward as she sang. Her face sort of glowed. Her eyes had that look women get sometimes. Like they know all the secrets of the universe, and they’re waiting, peacefully, patiently, for their destiny to take them by the hand. It could be neat if Celia’s destiny got around to linking up with mine. The service ended. The spell broke. I followed my mother to the car park.

‘I was talking to Mrs. Salmond after morning service,’ she said as we drove home. She’s invited you over next Saturday afternoon. To help Celia with her science project. You’re both doing science, so …’

‘Mum,’ I said, throttling back my joy until my voice carried just the right hint of boredom. ‘You’re impossible. I just can’t. Like I’ve got this project to finish. Then-’

‘You could finish the project before Saturday. Try staying away from the television for a few nights.’

‘It didn’t cross your mind to actually ask me first, did it?’ I said, with a hint of weariness. ‘It’s like snapping handcuffs on me while I was looking the other way. I just might happen to have an opinion about it, you know.’

‘No, dear, it didn’t cross my mind,’ she said. ‘You seemed to be watching Celia a lot during the service. I thought you might like to.’

‘Mum! If I wanted to talk to Celia, I could do it without you organising everything, thanks very much.’ My mother looked hurt. Oops. My little burst had come over a bit strong. It was just possible she might take me seriously and telephone Mrs. Salmond to call the whole plan off.

‘What science project is it, anyway?’ I asked. ‘She’s probably miles ahead of me in science. The way they cram those St Cuthbert's kids.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s some contest thing. The winning schools get a trophy or something. I told Celia you were doing science subjects and getting pretty good marks, then she said it might be good if the two of you got together. Will I phone the Salmonds? Tell them you don’t want to spend next Saturday afternoon with Celia?’

‘Er – nah. On second thoughts, it might be good for me. There’s a lot of important stuff in the syllabus we don’t get taught. Old Buggsy is about six trillion years out of date with the syllabus.’ A thousand years ago, Buggsy had scored the job of head of Maths and Science at CC High. That meant he was famously out of touch with anything that had happened in science over the last millennium.

‘Good, darling. I’m sure you’ll learn something new.’

Okay, I would just have to quietly count the minutes until Saturday afternoon.

‘Hamish, darling. Can you whip into town and buy me a dozen eggs,’ my mother called up the stairs as I sat in my study after school the following Monday afternoon.

‘Sure Mum.’ Our apartment was on the edge of town, a two-minute bike ride – or a ten minute walk - to the shops. I decided to walk to the shops. It would take up more time. And you