Dr Clive Mann

The Spider Man of Gulu

You probably won’t know what to make of this story. It is, I admit, odd. Does it have a moral? I think it does but I’ll leave it to you to work out.

She was a strange girl. Her father had a flourmill on the side of the Thames to the east of London. He also owned a major UK newspaper.

I met her in Africa. She didn’t seem to like ‘Europeans’, even though she was one herself. I couldn’t get to the bottom of it. She surrounded herself mainly with African politicians and academics.

She even had an unofficial ‘bodyguard’, an African- American poet, who took it upon himself to be the gatekeeper at her parties. If your face didn’t fit, he would literally put out his arm to stop you going in. He did this with a smile that was friendly but also sinister. This was galling because she was a neighbour and a close friend of a close African friend of mine but that’s by the by.

I couldn’t work it out. Anyway, I came to terms with it. It takes all types. Rumour had it that she was up to her neck in something. I didn’t believe it.

I knew that she had a problem: she was an acute arachnophobe.

Her parents had a small mansion that they used as a weekend retreat in St Albans. It was situated next to a former silk mill down by the river in the park. The factory went bust some time after the war. That’s when they bought the house.

Now, St Albans has the reputation of being the ‘City of Spiders’. They are everywhere, especially down by the Ver. Goodness knows when they came in. Some blame the Romans, others the Normans. Some say they are left over from the silk mill days. They say that certain spiders produced a silky thread that was used by the mill owner. I don’t know. All I know is that Kate, Kate Lyle, kept her bedroom windows tightly shut to prevent ‘unwelcome guests’ from getting in.

She was literally terrified of the critters. Things came to a head when she was sanding the floor of the loft in the huge barn that she was converting into a studio for her art work. The barn had originally been the stables. A spider with a body the size of a mouse ran across in front of her. Her screams could be heard in the garden of The Fighting Cocks pub on nearby Abbey Mill Lane.

Kate’s parents realised that something had to be done. A doctor had told them that it may have had something to do with her mother’s extreme possessiveness. Another said that a fear of spiders could be linked to an anxiety about getting pregnant.

Both of her parents were neurotic about Kate’s boyfriends, suspecting all of them of being gold-diggers. She was simply not allowed to develop a normal relationship with boys of her own or of any other background. Her father was behind this overprotectiveness – he had nieces who had been bitten badly by fortune hunters – but he left it to his wife to quiz Kate on whom she was seeing. This she did constantly.

Over dinner one day, a guest was telling the family that he had spent years in Uganda and had not seen a single spider. He had a theory that they must have been heavily predated. Mr Lyle wondered if the spiders of St Albans were under-predated. There are simply no predators in St Albans – no geckos, no chameleons, no snakes to hoover them up. Only a few bats.

On the spur of the moment, Kate sat up and said, “That’s it. I want to go and live in that country, a place where there are no spiders!”

Reluctantly her parents agreed, her father pulled a few strings and, lo and behold, Kate received a letter asking her to join the Art Department at Bat Valley. Behind the scenes her father had oiled the wheels by secretly donating a huge sum of money to the university.

It had been decided that Kate had to face down her demons. Her father had rang the head of Art saying that he felt it could be good for Kate if she tackled her phobia head on. Could she be encouraged to create giant spiders out of papier maché or something like that? The department went one better. With their coffers overflowing, they approached the department of Artificial Intelligence with an idea for a joint project. The head of AI agreed.

Kate took up her post. It involved almost no contact with students. She was classed as a researcher. Under Dr Opio’s supervision she set about creating robotic spiders. She called them ‘spibots’.

She studied photographs of coconut spiders. Some were as big as a dog. Her first creation had a battery in it that was operated by a hand-held remote. She got the idea from her younger brother’s remote control beach buggy. She herself had loved playing with it in the car park on the seafront in Port Eynon where her family owned a huge seaside house.

She would often be seen taking her ‘coco-spibot’ for walks around the roads of the university. As you can imagine, it caused a sensation. Kate enjoyed the attention.

She went on to bigger things. She found out that gigantic spiders had once, in the nineteenth century, been reported as living on the edge of Lake Victoria. There were astonishing tales about their vast nets.

She had heard rumours that much bigger spiders could be found in the Congo. She studied everything she could lay her hands on about them. She absorbed as much data as she could, including arguments against the possibility of such creatures having ever existed: the larger a spider gets, the heavier its exoskeleton becomes, rendering the animal incapable of movement. Nevertheless, she found the reports convincing. They hadn’t been seen recently, she said, because they had retreated further into the forest, escaping from Man.

Her inventions became bigger and bigger. Eventually, after an awkward incident with a soldier in the city centre, she was asked by Dr Opio to take her ‘spigots’ for walks in the university’s football stadium when it wasn’t being used. This she did.

Kate was beginning to feel more positive towards spiders. She felt she was overcoming her phobia at last. The ‘treatment’, she believed, was working.

She told the pro-vice chancellor. He beamed. She asked if she could create huge spider statues, in the style of Louise Bourgeois, and display them around the grounds. He agreed. After all, she represented an income stream. Her creations were becoming famous and, on balance, as talking points they enhanced the university’s profile. Bat Valley joined the Tourist Trail.

Fired by this success, Kate went one step further. She wanted to make a spider that would climb over a building. It was agreed. The day of the launch arrived. Guests were seated in rows in front of the main building. Kate pressed the button. An enormous spider appeared on the roof. It began to climb down the facade of the building. There were screams. Chairs were overturned. People scattered in every direction at the fearful sight. Kate was called in.

She was told that she had ‘cool it’ for a while. She didn’t mind. The therapy had apparently worked. She felt that she had overcome her arachnophobia, despite the fact that she had not confronted a real spider once during her time in Kampala, either on campus or in and around her flat on Nakasero Hill. She emailed her parents to tell them she thought she was better and that she was going to take a holiday.

Now, her brother had worked on an aid programme in Uganda and had formed a network of friends dotted around the country. The custom was that you could just turn up, out of the blue, at anybody’s house and expect to be put up and wined and dined. He told her he thought it was good that she was going to take a break.

He suggested that she visit a friend of his in Gulu. It was a long way from Kampala. Privately he felt it would be a good test for his sister. He had stayed with Peter himself and had had quite an experience.

Kate set off in her Saab. The car ate up the miles. It was getting dark when she arrived at Peter’s house in a remote area outside Gulu. Owls were hooting. Crickets were chattering. He politely asked her in. Jokingly he recited some words from Mary Howitt’s poem ‘The Spider and the Fly’:

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly, ‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I’ve a many curious things to whew when you are there.”

Kate knew the poem well. She replied with a laugh:
“Oh no, no,” said the little Fly, “to ask me is in vain,
For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”

Peter, Peter Southwood, had lived in Uganda for years. He was single. He had prepared a meal for her, a curry with delicious fruit side dishes. She was very grateful but began to have odd feelings about Peter. He wore thick-lensed glasses that exaggerated the size of his eyes. It gave the impression he was staring at her, without blinking. For a fleeting moment, they reminded Kate of the two prominent, glistening beady eyes of the six-eyed Jumping Spider. She dismissed the thought as a throw-back to the condition she had overcome.

“I’ll show you to your room now,” Peter said. He led Kate across to the other side of his bungalow.

“I’ll leave you to it,” he said, opening the door but not going in.

Kate went in. She was so tired she simply collapsed on the bed fully clothed. She was too tired to undress. She lay there enjoying the feeling of sleep coming over her. She sat up with a start.

“What was that?” she whispered.

She could hear tiny noises. Slowly she turned her eyes to the area around the bed. Dozens of spiders were leaping up and down all around the bed, some reaching tremendous heights. The shock was so great she passed out.

The following morning, Peter entered the room. He went over to the bed and closed Kate’s eyes. He placed a sheet over her, covering her head.

“Joshua!” he called. Joshua was the ageing gentleman who had prepared the curry. He had worked for Peter for many years.

“Joshua! Fetch the trolley.”