Spider, birth name Dennis Cleg, is a recent arrival from a psychiatric hospital to a halfway house in the East End of London—just a few streets away from the very house where he grew up, which was the scene of some barely visible but tremendous trauma which peeps out at the reader gradually from the fog of Spider's reminiscences.
As the story opens, Spider has just taken up residence in the halfway house, under the stern eye of Mrs. Wilkinson, along with a handful of others he calls "dead souls". He takes daily walks to the River Thames, following the old canals and towpaths that run along the edge of his memories, under the shadow of the immense oil and gas tanks that dominate the industrial landscape. As he sits on a bench, rolling his own cigarettes, he begins to tell the tale of his childhood, of his remote, emotionally brutal father and slight, quiet, protective mother.
He is, or so he states, writing all this down in a notebook which he keeps hidden, variously, under a newspaper drawer-liner, under the damaged linoleum floor of his room, or up the chimney of a disused gas fire.
