Above me where I sit propped up in bed I can see two large spiders on the ceiling, their limbs entwined. I am careful not to vacuum or disturb the spiders when I clean. I have already severely diminished their habitat merely by moving here. For four years before that, they had the whole run of the place. Back then, I would sometimes drive past this house, with not the remotest suspicion that I would ever move to it, and wonder what kind of ghosts lived in it. It is red now but back then it was white, or rather you could still just about see the memory of the white it had once been. The dirt and damp and peeling paint looked like the place was enfolded in six or seven layers of giant cobweb. Spiders must have loved it even more than they do now. It is still damp, and time is revealing that – in the refurbishment works undertaken by my landlady before I took up the tenancy – some problems were merely painted over, rather than properly attended to. A few feet left of where the two romantic spiders are embracing, there’s a deepening damp patch, on the side of the building past which the stream runs. The damp is slightly worse in Reka’s bedroom, next door, and I am keeping an eye on that. She has more spiders in her room. They do not scare her and, through the wall, I sometimes hear her talking to them. It is one of the many times I am glad that she, and not a more squeamish and precious kind of twentysomething, ended up answering my ad. Looking up at these two spiders above me now puts me in mind of one time many years ago when Mike and I had been arguing for so long, and so exhaustingly, that finally I kind of flopped on him in defeat, and we awoke seven and a half hours later in the same embrace, embarrassed and surprised. It is the only time I can ever remember waking up in his arms, in our two decades together. Which seems sad, but if you’re honest about it, how often do couples wake up in each other’s arms? Besides, there are far sadder things to be sad about in that relationship.

Actually, now I look at them again, I think the spiders might be dead.

AUGUST