Kirsty walked into the hall and peered into the bathroom without actually daring to go in there. Spiders terrified her and she hated herself for it: she didn’t want to be a pathetic female stereotype; but then, surely everyone was entitled to have at least one irrational weakness? Arachnophobia ran in her family. Her mum, her grandmother, her dad: they were all hopeless when it came to small, eight-legged creatures. It was the way they moved…oh God it made her go all cold and shivery inside. And in her imagination, the spiders were always much bigger than they really were. Multiply their size by five, or ten, or more. An average household spider turned into a tarantula. A common or garden British spider became a bird-eating monstrosity; a funnel-web beast that lay in wait for her behind the toilet, all eyes and teeth and long furry legs.

‘What did you mean when you said it was a fuck-off spider?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Was it really big?’ she called out. ‘Come on, you’ve got to tell me.’

Jamie was really regretting saying anything. ‘No, not that big. It was barely bigger than a five pence piece.’

‘You’re just trying to make me feel better.’ She went back into the bedroom and climbed on the bed. ‘You’ll have to catch it.’

‘But it ran behind the toilet. It’s probably disappeared beneath the floorboards by now. Kirsty, it was only a spider.’

She glared at him. ‘You know how I feel about spiders. And I shouldn’t be exposed to any stress in my condition.’ She touched her stomach.

Jamie realised she had found a way of making him do anything she asked over the coming months. He sighed. He loved her but sometimes she drove him mad. Her terror of spiders was so irrational. She was about a thousand times bigger than a spider. If this was Australia and the spiders were poisonous he’d understand it. But these were British spiders. They were pathetic little things. Completely harmless.

He went back into the bathroom and got down on his hands and knees. He peered behind the toilet. There were some dust-smothered cobwebs, but no sign of the spider. It had been quite big – one of those brown spiders with furry legs that they sometimes found in the bath (with Kirsty having to disinfect it after Jamie had scooped the creature up and thrown it out the window) – but Jamie wished he hadn’t described it as a ‘fuck-off’ spider. What with all the excitement and too much sleep, he hadn’t been thinking straight. He wondered if he should pretend that he had found the spider and act out throwing it out the window. No, she would know he was lying, and that would only make things worse – especially if it reappeared later.

He went back into the bedroom and she looked up at him hopefully.