Sinister: g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-go

[Kieran Devaney]

back in year five this was, our proper teacher was off sick or something so 
we had this supply teacher bloke - he came across as a bit odd right from 
the outset, had a grey suit and the name - mr oborsky! was most out of the 
ordinary. this was a catholic primary school man, we weren't used to much 
that was unusual - anyway back then none of us were really the type to 
question what was going on, nor to turn our noses up at anything that broke 
the 'copy this down from the board' routine (if there seems to be a break in 
the flow here it's because i just spilled my glass of coke over the table 
and i had to, er, break the flow of that (see i'm all for these nested 
puns), getting coke on my library copy of john savage's 'england's dreaming' 
book (which is very good incidentally) taking my tally of water damaged 
library books up to two (the other being a rather more battered copy of 'the 
beautiful and damned' - i'm feeling a bit more guilty about this one since 
i'm only the second person to have borrowed this copy, like, ever so i'm 
using the skeez brokered during my tenure as library staff and doing my 
utmost to fix it, i'll let you know how that goes (they should invent paper 
which doesn't crumple, you'd think with today's modern technology etc etc)). 
and mr oborsky was just the man to do that, i remember that instead of the 
usual maths or RE that we'd usually do he started to teach us about the 
staphylococcus aureus (ok, i had to google that for the spelling, fair 
enough) virus - which i think you learn about if you do a-level biology. it 
all seemed a bit odd, but the diagrams he drew on the blackboard (which even 
now remain probably the best and most interesting bits of blackboard art 
that i've ever seen) (didn't you used to hate the teachers who would go: "oh 
i can't draw"? i did) were great, little coloured blobs with hairs coming 
out the sides and big colourful borders. none of it made much sense to me, 
nor i presume to my classmates at the time, we were only nine or ten you 
know - even now i'm not sure quite what the virus is or does, though in the 
process of googling for the spelling i did encounter some quite fearsome 
pictures, so i can't imagine it's anything good. quite why mr oborsky chose 
to use the one day he had teaching our class to tell us about something 
so... obscure is beyond me. though thinking about it it must be great being 
a supply teacher right? staphylococcus aureus one day, perhaps proudhon the 
next, gamelan music for a friday, you could teach whatever you wanted, 
because by the time anyone came to review it you'd be long gone, off in a 
classroom on the other side of the city banging on about herman nitsch to a 
bunch of five year olds. brilliant.

i've been scared of spiders ever since i was really small - in fact i can 
trace back the time to when i remember first being scared to spiders, it may 
in fact have been the occasion which instigated the whole fear in the first 
place. i was in the bathroom at home, having just washed my face i pick up a 
towel (i want you to imagine this all filmic, imagine you're there - in fact 
it could be some sort of kooky pop video man - imagine i'm singing this 
whole paragraph to you) to dry myself, quite naturally. there must've been a 
spider lurking on the towel, and with my face and hair all wet i must've 
just groped towards it without looking properly and dried myself and then 
when i pulled the towel from my face and looked in the mirror there was 
something sort of perched on my ear, a big black apparition. for what seems 
like some seconds but is probably less than one i do nothing i just look and 
then in one swift motion i brush the thing away, watch it fall awkwardly 
onto the tiled floor, and then sprawl out and make for some darker corner 
behind the toilet. there was no danger, i don't think we have poisonous 
spiders in england, but i still felt very deeply afraid. of what i'm not 
entirely sure - whether you could break it down into specifics i dunno. i 
don't really want to. but at the moment they seem to be finding their way 
out, i've seen three or four in the past couple of days. my brother is quite 
cruel with them, he crushes them in crisp packets and stuff, he's not afraid 
so i get him to deal with them usually - though i'm not sure i agree with 
his methods, but what can i say? he gets results. i was quite proud of 
myself when i found one on the curtain up in sheffield, only a titchy one 
mind, and i managed to scoop it up and knock it out of the window. i'm on my 
own up there man, against the odds. the other time i've dealt with one was 
at home, my brother must've been out and my mum and my sister were cleaning 
and they found one on the wall in my sisters bedroom - i haven't actually 
really ever told anyone that i'm scared of spiders, not in my immediate 
circle of family and friends anyway, but my mum and my sister share my fear, 
and aren't so bothered about being vocal about it (i've considered that 
that's where it comes from as well, but it's nicer to romanticize it in the 
incident described above), and so with my brother and my dad not around they 
asked me to deal with it. perhaps it was that responsibility, or the fear of 
looking weak overriding the fear of the spider that day, but i managed to 
bundle it into an empty crisp bag and out of the window with what i would 
describe as consummate ease. but those two times are the only ones i've ever 
gone near the things - only in the direst circumstances would i even 
consider it.

so late that day in year five, i guess we couldn't have been learning about 
the staphylococcus aureus virus all day, but that's how it sticks out in my 
mind, so imagine mr oborsky in his grey suit and, i seem to recall, tinted 
glasses explaining the ins and outs of the virus to us bemused children. but 
there are always some kids who don't want to listen, no matter what the 
subject matter right? well one such kid in our class was called david, he 
had joined the class quite late, in year three i think, and wasn't very 
bright, so he was a bit of an outcast, though his mum and my mum used to get 
on pretty well - his dad even did the wrought iron gates on our drive here, 
i remember him saying to my dad how difficult it was to get them level when 
you're working on a hill. also, they had the spoiler nicked off their car 
once, which i found hilarious at the time, and the family has since migrated 
to ireland, only to come back to england within six months of going, and are 
still living here in birmingham as far as i know. anyway david was messing 
around with this massive rubber spider, you know the sort that you can buy 
in toy shops, that are a bit bigger your hand, one of those - there wasn't 
very long to go that day and i guess he was restless. we'd been playing with 
the spider at playtime, chucking it around and all, i can handle the toy 
ones, i don't mind them (at my secondary school there was a guy who was even 
more afraid of them than i am, he couldn't even abide the toy ones, much to 
the amusement of various people, but i deeply empathized, as i'm sure you 
all do reading this now). he had this massive rubber spider out on his desk 
i suppose, and mr oborsky spotted it, and he asked david to give it to him. 
there wasn't really much david could do, so he handed it over, and mr 
oborsky started scrutinizing it, turning it over as he walked back up to the 
front of the class. once there he held the thing out towards all of us, 
shaking it as though it were a cane or some sort of weapon,
"you know there are spiders in some parts of the world that are as big as 
this?" he looked at it again, "bigger maybe. when i was about your age i was 
living with my family in kenya, there are insects there which are much more 
dangerous than anything you get over here..." he said, and he proceeded to 
tell us all about how whenever you were putting a pair of socks on, or any 
clothes really, you had to turn them inside out and check them thoroughly 
before you put them on in case there was anything dangerous lurking inside. 
and he told us how once he had forgotten to check a pair of gardening 
gloves, and some ingeniously designed insect had burrowed into his skin, and 
its spines were so arranged that it couldn't be pulled or coaxed out - and 
how his uncle had had to burn the thing out with a lighter. he showed us the 
scar on his hand, a big pink mark on his waxy skin, in the fleshy part 
between his thumb and forefinger. "then one day i was reading alone in my 
room" he said "it was the height of summer, so very very hot and i had gone 
inside to get some shade. i happened to glance up from my book and saw this 
gigantic spider sitting on the wall of my room" at this point he held the 
rubber spider up against the classroom wall, so we could imagine what it 
must've been like and described how the spider he saw was different from the 
rubber one, its markings and so forth. "i was petrified" he continued "but i 
quickly ran out to fetch my dad and my uncle, who were working in the 
garden" he then went on to explain that they told him that the spider was 
some very rare and poisonous breed, which i have now unfortunately forgotten 
the name of. the three of them went back into the room, i think he said his 
dad had gone and gotten some sort of net, in the hope of trapping the thing, 
but when they got back into mr oborsky's room the spider was gone, without 
trace. they searched the whole house, because you don't want an extremely 
dangerous thing like that knocking around when there are children around, 
but they couldn't find it. he went back to david's desk and plopped the 
rubber spider down in front of him, "and i've never ever seen one since" he 
said, "not even in a zoo." at that point the bell rang and he let us go, 
which i remember thinking was odd because we hadn't said our prayers.

yours,
- kieran

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