I was sitting at home the other night playing Fallout 4, the latest instalment in the post-apocalyptic wasteland computer game. My wife was at work so I was free to waste some time and immerse myself in the building of a settlement or freeing a farm from the clutches of gangs of raiders or super mutants.
The last thing I remember doing was making sure that the two pink plastic flamingos adorning the grass outside my ramshackle house were just right because immediately afterwards and out of the corner of my eye I saw movement on the carpet and watched as a relatively large spider scuttled across the floor and cunningly attempted to camouflage itself against the floor to ceiling wall unit we have. Spiders don’t have the ability to camouflage themselves against floor to ceiling wall units or any other types of units to the best of my knowledge (which I hope remains that way because the alternative is a terrifying prospect) so perhaps it had momentarily stunned itself or was admiring my pink flamingos.
Either way, now that I had the spider in my sights I began plotting to catch it and free it into the wild via the window but given the sheer size of the arachnid and the fact that I’d recently read that the changing seasons meant spiders were moving indoors and were horny, I didn’t want it to know that I knew it was there, so I pretended to continue playing the game while I kept one eye on the spider’s movements and another on trying to find things in the living room that I could use to catch it, lest it suddenly find me attractive and try to mount me.
With the glass that was next to me in one hand and a bit of cardboard from the back of a Deadpool comic in the other, just as I stood up the spider seemed to recover its senses and made a move for the relative safety of the darkened corner of the room. Maybe it’s because I’m 6ft 5”, walk on two legs instead of eight and weigh about 17 stone depending on which way the wind is blowing but my lunge with the glass was too slow and I succeeded only in trapping one of the spiders eight legs. I didn’t know what to do next as I was no further forward than when I started. There was nothing I could use to capture the remaining 90% of the spiders body and legs against the curvature of the glass and I know I wouldn’t like it if someone had pinned one of my legs so I let him go and watched him scuttle into the corner he’d been trying to reach all along. I pretended to go back to playing Fallout 4 but I kept my wits about me because I knew this wouldn’t be the last I saw or heard of my 7-and-a-bit legged friend.
It seemed a reasonable assumption that if the spider was going to come out of the corner and lie in wait before trying to catch one of us unawares, the most obvious place would be in the shadow of the blanket that was draped over a chair in our living room, so the last thing I did before leaving for work the next morning was fold the blanket thereby removing the shadow and denying the spider a hiding place. As I hadn’t actually told my wife about the large, horny spider in our flat I thought that if it was going to come out of its hiding place and make itself comfortable (the spider that is, not my wife) then at least she’d maybe get a head start if she had to run away from it.
We exchanged these messages on WhatsApp the following day
"By the way" she said "I killed a massive spider in the flat today, I moved the game chair and it got crumpled underneath it. Like, HUGE".
"YASSS!" I said "I tried to catch that fucker earlier in the week but it got away. I did injure it though which might have helped you catch it and I've been keeping an eye out to go round two with it ever since".
"Are you fucking joking? she asked "It could've got me!".
This isn’t the first time I’ve ran into a spider who didn’t miss leg day at the gym. A few years ago now I stayed in a flat on Slateford Road in Edinburgh and one morning I woke up in a daze (to be fair, I wake up in a daze most mornings, who doesn’t?), went into the bathroom for a wee and out of the corner of my eye saw a large, unfamiliar presence in the bath. I did the only thing I could; pretended I hadn’t saw it, finished my wee and tucked myself back into my boxers before turning on the shower, hoping to flush the spider down the drain.
Imagine my horror as I watched the spider spread its enormous legs over the plug hole, brace itself and then start power scuttling towards the opposite end of the bath. “I’ve just tried to drown my spider flatmate” I thought. “If he makes it to the shower and turns it off he’s going to ask me to leave. I’ll be out on the street at 8am in my boxers because there’s no danger I’m hanging about for that conversation. There’s only one thing for it, I'll need to fight him to the death”.
In an effort to cheer myself up and fill the long, lonely hours at home after breaking up with my girlfriend, I’d been watching a lot of war films that I’d picked up on DVD out of ASDA; Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, We Were Soldiers, Kelly’s Heroes and Where Eagles Dare to name but a few. None of these helped in actually defeating the spider since most of them were about defeating Ze Germans or the Vietcong but I did have Richard Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from Apocalypse Now in mind as I turned the shower up, closed the plug and started water bombing the spider into submission with cups of water that I filled from the sink. “You can run from some water” I said, chillingly “but can you run from ALL the water?”.
Daa-da-da-da-DAA (SPLASH!)
Da,da-da-da-DAA (SPLASH!)
Da, da-da-da-DAAA (SPLASH!)
Da, da-da-da-daaaaaaa (SPLASH!)
Instead of standing outside in my boxers looking every inch the embarrassment to the top of the food chain I was, I danced around the flat paraphrasing Robert Duvall’s character from the same film. “SPIDERS DON’T SURF!” I shouted “I LOVE THE SMELL OF TOILET DUCK IN THE MORNING, IT SMELLS LIKE LEMON FRESH!”
After a while the spider stopped moving but I continued to watch it intently just in case it had been watching over my shoulder when Owen Wilson’s character from Behind Enemy Lines plays dead under a pile of bodies in a mass grave. Satisfied that I’d won (and if you wanted to get really philosophical, are there ever any winners in war?) I opened the plug and watched the spider make its final journey.
And then swiftly closed it and every other plug in the flat for the next three weeks.
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