Spiderweb Read Online Free

went there, she thought, and there and there. Once I stood looking at wall-paintings in a church just there – or at least the person I then was did so. And now I am here, and some of those people are not anywhere at all. Possibly, back then, I walked past those very people so horribly seen just now.
    She turned to the British Isles section. The west of England. There am I, she thought, just there alongside the thread of that road, at the foot of that brown range of high ground. And there is the pub where Dan and I stayed long ago.
    When Stella contemplated her own progress through time and space, she saw lines – black lines that zig-zagged this way and that, netting the map of England, netting the globe, an arbitrary progress hither and thither. And sometimes these lines crossed one another. The intersections must surely be points of significance – these places to which she had been twice, three times, many times, but as different incarnations of herself, different Stellas ignorant of the significance of this site – that she would revisitit as someone else. But this progress of hers took place on two different planes. The web was not flat but of three or indeed four dimensions – it had to incorporate both time and space in the way that only physicists can imagine. Stella thought of those spiderwebs that form an airy complex density of minutely connected strands. Her space–time progress was something like that, the whole thing shimmering with these portentous nodes at which the future lay hidden. You walk blindly past the self that is to come, and cannot see her.
    So, Stella, now. Standing in an unfamiliar house, an atlas in her hands – a tall spare woman, dressed in trousers and a sagging sweater, her hair a gingery profusion spiked with grey, perfunctorily twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck and skewed with a plastic clip. Narrow feet, long limbs, thin, elegant fingers that turn the pages of the book. Her face is thin, too – long pointed nose, wide mouth, blue eyes with a fold of skin dipping down now above and a web of wrinkles below. Never a conventionally beautiful face, you would decide, but arresting. You might glance, then look again.

Chapter Three
    Michael said, ‘Did she go to America before we were born? Was she on a ranch in California?’
    Ted Hiscox swung his head round from the innards of a tractor. ‘She said that?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    Their father dived into the engine again. ‘Maybe she did. If that’s what she says. Get me a can of oil.’
    They had not always lived here at the bungalow. The boys knew that because both carried in their heads murky images of an elsewhere, a number of elsewheres. They did not compare these images, perhaps because it did not occur to them and also because it was as though that time had never been. There was a door slammed shut. ‘What d’you mean?’ she’d say. ‘Where were we before we came here? We were somewhere else, weren’t we, stupid? What’s it got to do with you, anyway?’ Their father was much the same. ‘I dunno when we came here. Ten years ago, something like that. What’s it matter?’
    These patchy visions of other places were in any case dominated always by her presence. They were just the blurred background to her hectic action. She was having a row with their father, or bawling them out for something they’d done. Sometimes there were other people involved. Once she had had a dust-up with a man in a car-park who’d taken the space she wanted and when he’d gone she got a screwdriver and scraped lines on the man’s car. Then she’d let them have a go at doing that and it had been brilliant. They’d done it since, several times, and both knew that the other remembered.
    They both carried, too, the time she banged their heads together and then left them crying on a dusty pathway somewhere. Her hands grabbing them and the raging pain in the skull and each other’s red ravaged face and her not there any more, just the dusty