Story - Teddy Bear

“Dad, can a spider still bite you if it’s dead?”

He remembered how cute she had looked when she asked. Her beautiful blue eyes filled with innocence, waiting for the answer she would trust solely because it came from him.

“I don’t think so, kiddo,” he said. He didn’t know it then, but he was right. They would still have their little toxic cocktails brewing in their venom sacks. But unless it was poured into an open wound or stupidly ingested, dead spiders were as benign as a brick of Lego.

“Come here, Dad, and look at this,” her high-pitched tones still fresh in his memory. Her heartbreakingly innocent voice beckoned him to come and look at the two dead spiders by her feet.

He couldn’t deny her. He should have said no. He didn’t like bugs, dead or alive, and didn’t want his little princess looking at them either. Said that he was not happy with using her new bug-collecting set on anything more significant than an ant. He especially didn’t like spiders. Felt a cold, tingling wave of revulsion whenever he saw one. Especially here in Australia, where spiders grow to the size of rodents. But everything she said had an infectious undercurrent of enthusiasm, so he got down on one knee by her side, put his arm around her shoulders and looked.

In the dusty, dry earth, loosely covered with twigs, were two dead spiders. One was a wolf spider. He knew them thanks to his workmates pointing them out as ones to avoid when he first arrived here, as they could often be found in the public toilets at work. The second was one he didn’t recognise and didn’t want to. Huge, grey, hairy legs that could probably span his entire hand if uncurled out. Even dead, their strange appearance made his skin crawl.

One thing he had learnt since moving out here was that animals were dangerous. Not in the nasty bite or sting kind of way you would get back in Blighty. The wildlife here could be fatal. Bull sharks swimming in the rivers. Birds in the outback capable of ripping a man’s stomach out and what seemed like hundreds of snakes and spiders that could kill you with a single bite. A bitter sense of irony tinged the memory of his concern about them being alive.

He picked up a stick and flicked some twigs away for a better look, prodding each of them to make sure they weren’t just playing possum, waiting for him and Tilly to let their guard down before righting themselves and lunging, legs splayed wide like an outstretched hand.

They didn’t move. He flicked one over onto its back; it looked like an alien hand in rigour mortis. Still no movement. They looked dead. They looked like no threat at all.

“I don’t think these two could bite you, kiddo.”

He felt her small hand rest on his shoulder and heard a sharp intake of breath as an idea flew to the front of her mind.

“Maybe they had a fight with each other?” It was heart-breakingly cute how her mind worked.

“Yeah, could be.”

“Dad. Can I take these?” Tilly had asked, opening and closing plastic tongs in anticipation. “Pleeease?”

He knew it was coming. Knew how his daughter’s mind worked. The tomboy who preferred to play rugby than ballet. Who would rather watch superhero movies than a Disney film. The sort of little girl that wanted to have two dead spiders in her room instead of a teddy bear.

All he had to do was say no. Tilly would have pouted, sulked, and tried to heap as much guilt as possible on him. But that would have been it. Tilly would still be alive if he had said no. That her mother and he were both a little freaked out by spiders, and the bug-collecting set Auntie Stacy had given her for her birthday was meant for ants and ladybirds, not huge spiders.

But dead spiders couldn’t do any harm. He had thought. Living insects could escape. Lay eggs in their carpets and bed covers. Crawl over the food in their cupboards with their alien legs. Creep over their sleeping faces. No matter how big it was, having a dead spider would be as safe as having a pet rock. These were his justifications, but they made as much difference to his guilt as a raindrop falling into an ocean.

When he saw Tilly open the airmail package from his sister, he knew nothing good would be inside. A vague sense of dread snowballed as she ripped the brown packaging paper off to reveal the happy faces of children staring into a jar containing a grasshopper. Study insects from your own back garden, the box proclaimed in a giant balloon font. Keep them as pets, and show your friends.

Thanks, sis. Thanks, a fucking bunch. It was her idea of a joke, a way to buy her niece a present and needle her older brother at the same time. When Tilly was three, it was the noisiest present she could find: a toy drum set. ‘Make sure you practise lots’ was written on the gift tag with a winking smiley face.

When she was four, it was a sand art set. This time, the gift tag advised Tilly to use every shade with the same winking face drawn underneath. Coloured sand had found its way into every room in the house, every carpet and rug. And now she sent a bug collecting kit, knowing his aversion to insects since childhood. Find something huge, love Aunt Stacy. That same winking face was crudely drawn under her name instead of a kiss.

“Suppose there is no chance of their escape,” he had said, which injected a fresh dose of enthusiasm into Tilly. She did little jumps with her hands clasped together, unable to contain her happiness. The memory of her smile was a scar on his memory. It was branded the moment he had agreed to his daughter’s death. The dull throb of guilt in his stomach twitched as he pictured her smile.

“I left the jars on the blanket, kiddo,” he said and watched her skip across to where they had eaten their picnic. He turned back to the spiders and inspected them closer. He could make out the fangs on the light grey. He could picture Tilly at her little desk, looking through the magnifying glass that came with the set. Using the cheap plastic tongs to turn it this way and that to see it from every angle.

“Where is it, Dad?” He heard her shout from behind. He turned, and she added, “No, wait. I see it.”

As he turned back to the spiders, a gigantic insect that looked like a wasp crawled over one. In shock, he lost his balance and put an arm on the ground to steady himself. The insect was about five inches long, with coppery orange wings folded against a sleek black body. Its head was a light, fiery orange to match its legs.

Another species of insect he had not yet come across in Australia. He used to think ignorance was bliss. Nature had a range of creatures in its catalogue that looked inspired by a horror film; it was better to be clueless. Otherwise, knowing what crawled through your backyard would lead to them creeping into your dreams, turning them into nightmares.

He remembered it flicking its wings as it perched on one of the dead spiders like a warrior standing atop a fallen enemy. He went to flick it away with the stick he held, and it hopped to the side. He remembered thinking how weird it was for a wasp to skip and not take flight.

Seeing it move that way reminded him of boxers sizing each other up before lunging in with their fists swinging. It crawled to the left, then to the right a little. It darted forward a little too close for comfort, and he swore.

He was glad Tilly was unboxing the bug kit a few feet away and didn’t hear him. In Australia, men were men. Not shouting out swear words when a bug got too close. If any of his friends at work got word of this, he knew they would use it as a source of amusement for a long time.

The shame of screaming when a grass snake cut through the car park one day would never leave him. His mates laughed and imitated his scream and called him ‘Sheila’. Marty had caught the snake and held it out to him to show it was nothing, and he was overreacting and telling him to hold it. Marty bit down on it when he refused and stood there smiling as it writhed between his teeth. He smiled around and said what sounded like, “Mate, don’t be a Sheila”.

From that point on, he had resolved to find the courage needed. Not pick snakes up and run around with them in his mouth like a dog. Try to turn off that part of his brain that dealt with revulsion and fear of bugs. He was in Australia now, so they would cross his path regularly.

“Got it, Dad,” he heard Till say.

The wasp was back on top of the biggest of the two spiders. Tilly would be here any second and want to scoop these two dead spiders into her little plastic jars. This orange wasp looked dangerous, and he didn’t want his daughter near it.

It darted forward again and shocked him to stand on, bringing his boot down. He was wearing thick-soled walking boots, but he could remember feeling the wasp through the sole. It made a crunching sound, like stones grinding against each other, as he twisted his foot and ground it into the dirt.

He felt disgusted and slightly pleased with what he had done. Felt a perverse sense of achievement in beating it. Now, he wanted to find and crush every spider wasp in the country. Grind the life out of every single one of them. He knew he couldn’t stalk through the bush and stamp on them all individually. But, he could burn them out.

“That was a spider wasp, mate. Lucky escape for you and Tilly. They can be aggressive,” Billy had told him. He was one of the more level-headed people he worked with. Less likely to joke about and tell him a load of bullshit to wind him up. He removed his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned the lenses with his untucked shirt. “Those things have one of the highest stings on the pain index.”

He was right. Old Billy usually was right on such things. He correctly identified the spiders from their descriptions as a wolf spider and a huntsman spider. He was never told that Tilly had scooped them up and put them in plastic jars she kept in her room. Just that he had seen two dead spiders on a picnic with Tilly, and a spider wasp had crawled over them.

When the autopsy was released and the cause of death explained, he punched Billy so hard he broke his wire-rimmed glasses across his nose. The anger and frustration needed a direction to be vented. Billy, who had called around to see how he was doing, was the only target.

Billy, the insect expert. The man who knew what spider wasps were said nothing. Only that his daughter had experienced the most significant pain an animal can inflict before she died.

Billy took the punches like a child was hitting him. He screamed into Billy’s face until his throat became sore. Told him he should have explained why it was called a spider wasp. That they used spiders as hosts for their lava and there was a chance that Tilly’s pets were living nurseries, being eaten from inside by its offspring. That, at any point, could metamorphose into a poisonous wasp capable of causing more pain than a human could take.

He just stood with his hands over his bleeding nose and nodded. They both knew it wasn’t Billy’s fault. He was letting him vent his anger. Deep down inside, he knew, as did his wife, that the only person to blame was himself.

He had knelt with Tilly in the dirt to help her collect the Trojan spiders. He had held the plastic jars as she gently picked up her gruesome trophies for study. He had calmed Tina down when Till proudly showed them off at home.

He was even a little proud when she told him what she had named them. “That one is Teddy,” she said, pointing to the jar with the wolf spider curled up in the bottom. She moved her hand along the books she kept between the jars to the other one, “And that one is Bear.”

Smart enough at five years old to appreciate the irony of the names. “Well, you’re always telling me little girls should play with teddy bears, Dad.” He remembered laughing at her creativity and patting her on the head. Her soft, auburn hair.

The grief was now uncontrollable. His vision blurred as the pain resurfaced. The jerrycan he was filling became a smudged red smear through his tears.

With his hands occupied, he had to wipe his eyes with his shoulders, leaving dark patches on his shirt. He heard the splashes as the petrol he was pumping overflowed and puddled on the floor by his feet. Someone called out, asking if he was OK. He ignored the voice.

For a week, Tilly took the spiders out and looked at them through the cheap magnifying glass. Tina would grab him and whisper into his ear. She has been bending the legs out to see how big they were again or tell him she had caught her holding one in her bare hands.

“They have to go,” she ordered. She would demand this with crossed arms and a scowl on her pretty face. Even upset or angry, Tina couldn’t convey any negative emotion on her face. She was just too cute to be angry. She always looked like a sulking child.

He repeated the line that Billy had told him at work, trying to sound as confident and unafraid as he did. “Just two dead spiders. Nothing to worry about, babe.”

Twisting the cap back on the jerrycan, he could remember Tina shouting that line back at him over and over as she flailed with her fists. The shrill scream from her mix of anger and grief was almost unintelligible. He had never seen his wife like this, with such raw emotion coursing through her.

He stood there like Billy did and took punch after punch to the face and throat until she collapsed to the floor. He could still clearly see her where he had left her, shaking on Tilly’s bedroom floor and could still taste blood in his mouth from the beating.

He went into the station to pay for the fuel, carrying the can. Someone asked what he was doing and told him he couldn’t take the jerrycan inside. Meaningless words he dismissed like flies. There was no queue, so he slapped his money on the counter. All he wanted to do was walk out and burn down as much of Australia as he could.

The counter girl was a little shaken. Her eyes widened as he walked in. He couldn’t blame her. He must have looked like a mess. His face still stung from the scratches Tina had clawed into his face. He also felt the throbbing of the bruises waiting to discolour his skin. His daughter was dead, and it was his fault. The grief and guilt were as evident as his cuts and bruises. But, through her uncertainty, she completed the sale.

As he turned and walked towards the exit, he heard her ask if he was OK. Such empathy for someone so young. The kind of girl he knew Matilda would have been if she had the chance to be a teenager.

He stopped on the threshold and answered, “My daughter died two days ago.” He paused, trying to find the words to help him articulate his feelings. “She was stung in the throat by a spider wasp as she lay in bed. The sting swelled and cut off her air supply. She suffocated in pain.”

The counter girl gasped and said she was sorry. Her pity felt like more meaningless flies. More false platitudes that meant nothing. Part of him had died when he watched Tilly take her last, desperate breath in his arms.

“It shouldn’t have happened.” He looked down at the jerrycan and tightened his fingers around the handle. He looked out the doorway and squinted into the sun. The dry tinderbox of the outback waited beyond the shimmering forecourt.

“I’ll make sure it won’t happen again.”