Short story: Final Notice, by Anna Scaife

Years ago, when her son was a baby, Virginia converted her lounge into a showroom, adding a shop counter in the back corner, and brightly lit display windows on the street front. David slept in his quilted carry cot next to the radiator while she painted the walls watermelon pink. They lived in the back in two bedrooms, a dark little lounge, and a dining room with a tiny kitchen that opened onto a brick patio.The ceilings were low, and the sunlight only ducked under the eaves for a short time each morning.
There were more people around when she opened the store, before the supermarket closed and the mall sucked the crowds off the streets. Virginia filled the showroom with teak furniture from India, and mounted wooden clocks imported from Bali across the walls. The clocks were copies, designed to look like British antiques. She’d visited the supplier once on a sweaty day thirty years ago, and the cardboard cartons had arrived every year since. 
Virginia would remove the mechanism from the clocks, cleaning each part with a set of tiny brushes she kept in a case meant for a chess set. Most of the clocks were so badly rusted or broken she would have to pull out all the pieces and replace them one by one. 
The box arrived on what her wall calendar told her was Shrove Tuesday. Virginia ate her breakfast alone at the table and wondered what she might give up for lent. She was reminded of her son spending a weekend sleeping outside and eating only barley sugars. The idea had been to raise money for charity, though she didn’t recall making a donation. 
Virginia’s phone rang. Her first thought, as always, was that it might be David. It surprised her how often her phone rang when she was thinking of him. She shook her head. Of course, it wouldn’t be. 
He told her when he left, “I don’t want to hear from you.” He added, she remembered, “Unless it’s an emergency.” She’d felt something like pride then. Despite what had happened, she had raised a child with a sense of responsibility. She listened to the pips of the ringtone for a moment and then turned her phone over and looked at the screen. The number was familiar. A call from the local branch of her bank. She pushed the decline button, slid back her chair, and got to her feet.
The stray tabby who often visited her garden tiptoed along the path outside the French doors. He kept his eyes down. His tail had thinned and his coat was ragged in places. He  moved cautiously as if his angled joints ached. He raised his nose and sniffed the air then settled into a patch of sun on the uneven bricks.
Rows of patterned sheets and towels danced on their washing line carousel, accompanied by a single-note song from the rusted joints. Virginia remembered her son’s shrieks of joy when he played at swinging around the pole, the tang of the metal that lingered on his hands. The cat fixed his yellow eyes on the open doors. “Tsk, no way,” she hissed at him. He flinched but stayed put, lowering his gaze against the morning sun. 
The cardboard carton that held the clocks was stuffed with sheets of grubby newspaper, the pages scrunched and crammed into the gaps. Virginia carried each of the clocks to the table and removed their paper wrappings. She opened the little doors in the back to check on the mechanisms inside. She unfurled the sheets of newspaper, glancing at the ornate lettering and grainy photographs, her eyes flicking to words and names she recognised among the foreign text. 
Each of the clock shipments spent a month at the dock with customs. They were held in quarantine, inspected and sprayed for pests. At times, over the years, she’d been surprised by a lifeless exotic moth or a beetle carcass rattling inside, long dead and crisp. 
Virginia had meant to cancel the latest order, but when the letter came to confirm, she’d slid it behind the fruit bowl with the other unopened envelopes. Last year’s clocks still hung in the shop, their white faces watching her from the walls. 
The last of the parcels contained a clock designed to sit on a mantel. It had gold-plated hands, decorated with a tiny sun and a crescent moon. She tugged at the brass latch on the back. The door creaked open, spilling fine dust onto the scratched tabletop. She peered inside. In amongst the rusting, layered gears, was a dark object. She couldn’t quite see what. She reached for her torch and shone the narrow beam into the corner, standing up to shuffle closer to the sunlight that danced through the leaves of the maple and scattered across the cushions on the window seat. 
She dipped her hand into her tool case and slid out a pencil. Poking it inside the clock, she nudged at the rounded blob with the sharpened point. It moved. Virginia snatched her hand away. A spider, its hunched liquorice legs pulled in close around a thick abdomen. Virginia’s pulse hammered in her throat. She dropped the torch onto the table with a clang, startling the basking cat who lifted his head, stretched out onto his side, and closed his eyes again.
Virginia put the clock on the floor and hurried to the kitchen, searching in the cupboard under the sink for the bug spray. She sifted through the bottles of cleaning products and rattled through the junk in the high cupboards above the stovetop. Glancing sideways at the clock, she marched down the hallway to look under the concrete tub next to the washing machine. 
Returning with the spray, she poked her torch once more into the belly of the clock. She could not see the spider. She thought surely it must have slid into a crack or perhaps it was hidden, crouching behind the metal plates that drove the hands. She held the clock at arm’s length and shook it. Then she peered in again, but there was no sign of the stowaway. 
Virginia looked around, running her eyes along the gathered curtains and into the corners of the room. It must be inside the clock, she decided. Where else would it go? She emptied the remainder of the bug spray directly into the clock’s guts before dumping it into the burn bin. Neutralised, she thought. Now it was no different from the insect husks rattling inside the clocks when they arrived. 
Virginia spotted the first of the black specks on the ceiling three weeks later. The yellowing paint in the bedroom was patterned with cracks and the pendant light hung from a damaged plaster rose. She noticed three dark spots above the door. Reaching for her glasses she saw each had eight tiny legs.
She swung her legs out of bed and stepped into her slippers, keeping her eyes on the ceiling while she walked to the door. There were only three. No need to panic. She would make coffee. She shrugged on her dressing gown, pulled open the bedroom door, and walked into a soft veil of silken threads, woven together into a hanging net that stretched the length of her hallway. Tethers were attached to each of the cast iron hooks on the coat rack, and to the fluted glass light shades, and the plaster fleur de lys that adorned the cornice on the ceiling. Suspended in the net they’d cast in the night, were hundreds of tiny spiders clustered in groups from one end to the other. 
Virginia ducked, swiping at the sticky web that clung to her face and neck. Not sure she’d shaken them loose, she hung her head upside down and batted at her hair. She would have to crawl, she decided, crouching and lowering herself onto her knees, she made her way to the kitchen, collecting dust on her pyjama legs.
The door through to the lounge had been closed overnight. There were no billowing curtains of web in the other rooms, and no spiders that she could see. The problem was contained, she thought, and went to pull the vacuum cleaner from under the hallway cupboard.
Virginia covered up in a raincoat with a hood and a pair of gardening gloves. She held her breath while she stuck the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner into the corners, hoovering up the clouded sheets of web and clusters of tiny spiders with it. Behind an umbrella stand in the hallway, she found the crumpled carcass of the mother. The shrunken spider lay still on the floorboards next to the remains of a woven nest, gaping and empty. 
It was a warm day, but Virginia collected sticks from the garden and lit a small fire in the potbelly stove to dispose of the vacuum cleaner bag. She sat and watched the flames nibble at the paper, distorting the plastic seal and deflating its rounded shape.
Virginia found more baby spiders every day for the next week. She swept away strips of delicate web hanging between her bedroom chair and the wardrobe doors, and vacuumed a small cluster from the base of the pedestal sink in the bathroom. She scoured the walls for more black dots.
The webs began appearing in the shop, strung between the clocks. She swallowed them with the dustbuster. She drank tea at the dining table and watched the stray cat sleep, burning the spiders as she cleared them away, sliding the unopened statements and invoices into the flames behind them.
 She poured a glass of wine, sat down at the table and tore at the seal on the envelope of a letter from the bank as if it were a Bandaid on a child’s knee. She read the words Final Notice and Urgent before turning the paper face down and picking up her glass. 
She ate her dinner at the oak table and wondered again if she should call her son. This was the table where they’d eaten together for eighteen years; where they had celebrated. She had served their last meal together at that table. 
When he dragged his bags to the front door, she’d said, “You’re overreacting.”
He’d said, “That money was left to me, mother. Enough.”
She’d called after him that she would pay back what was owed, but the door had already swung shut behind him.
Virginia woke groggy, her chest tight. She put on her robe and walked to the kitchen, glancing out through the French doors into the garden. The cat lay curled into a tight ball in the flower bed. Virginia opened the top cupboard to reach for her coffee cup. Inside webs stretched from all four corners, touching down on the mug handles and stacks of saucers. The spiders were bigger, tucked into the dark gaps between the shelves; front legs extended. She opened the next cupboard, and then the next. Each was dressed in white gauze, the spiders still and waiting. She closed the doors tight, swiped at her shoulders, and let herself outside. 
The cat didn’t move. He had grown used to her, but he was always wary. Today he didn’t flinch, didn’t crouch ready to disappear over the fence. Virginia crept closer. She waited for him to startle, but he was still, his mouth frozen open. Crouching on the patio bricks she observed his quiet body. She stayed beside him until, having made a decision, she went inside to get dressed. 
Her first job was to flick through the concertina file she kept under her bed and find the house insurance documents. She checked the dates, then tucked it away again. Next, she visited the library to use the internet. She wanted to find out how the electrics worked. After that she visited a hardware store. Not Wilson’s where she usually went, but one further away, a shop she hadn’t been to before. She paid cash and discarded the packaging and receipts in a bin further down the street.  
Virginia laid out the tools she’d bought on the table in the late afternoon. She worked on the lamp. It had sat on her desk since she opened the shop. The wiring was old, it was surprising it hadn’t burnt itself out already, she thought. She locked the doors and pulled down the blinds as darkness arrived.
Later she washed the few dishes she’d used during the day and stacked them to dry. She changed into her pyjamas, slid into her bed and pressed her head firmly into the pillow. Then she got up and threw back the covers so the bedspread slid onto the floor.
She crept out through the French doors, and without turning on any of the lights, wrapped the body of the cat in a towel and brought him inside. She carried him to the spare bedroom, David’s room, and laid him down on the bed.
Virginia waited until she could feel heat through the wall, and the smoke alarm was screaming, before she rushed out through the patio doors, across the pavers and through the gate into the carpark. Smoke poured out through the open doors into the still night. The flames hissed and cracked.
She took out her phone and called the emergency number.
“My house is burning,” she said. “Beaumont Street. Please can you hurry? My cat is still inside,” she told the operator.
It was some minutes before the engine’s wail sounded in the distance. Virginia watched the little house burn, and she knew when help arrived it would be too late. A crowd gathered on the street, and she took herself away, her hands covering her face. She overheard a woman say, “Isn’t it awful. The cat was trapped inside.”
Virginia slipped into a dark corner and took out her phone. She sucked in her breath, and dialled David’s number. 

Asked what was on her mind when she wrote this story, the author replied, “Well there were two things on my mind. The first was a job I had when I was a teenager where I literally had to unwrap imported clocks and I was so terrified that a spider would emerge.  The other was musing on parents who have become estranged from grown up children and that odd time when you realise your parents are fallible, flawed etc. Virginia is a woman not dealing with her problems, not facing her reality or dealing with conflict – and it has cost her dearly. The spiders mirror that I guess.  Also (perhaps there were three things on my mind) I like stories where encounters with animals randomly change the course of a life.”