Chapter Four

Olivia Spider and the Purpose of Red Socks


“This is most distressing,” muttered Owld Misther Bucket to no one in particular, but especially to Olivia Spider. “I really cannot imagine how this happened.”

“Look lovey,” she replied between spurts of blinding tears, “it wasn’t your fault, not really. It wasn’t as if you meant to do it, was it? And besides, who would have thought my silly Libbedy would chose that precise moment to prance about like dandruff on a magic sunbeam?”

“She was ever so pretty, wasn’t she?” The ancient Bucket was, by now, quite beside himself with guilt and misery. “Would you be a dear and daub my eyes?” he asked. “I quite regret not having hands at a moment like this. Oh, dearie me, oh dearie me, I feel such a helpless old fool.”

“Now, now, let’s not have any more of that,” she purred. And with that (not talking at the same time because she wasn’t that clever), Olivia took a ball of silk thread from her knitting bag, tied one end securely to her wrist, and whipped the other round her head like one of those exotic Argentinean bolas, whizzing it round and round until it soared up toward the bucket’s rim, where it adhered to a projecting knob of zinc and lost no time in tying itself into a stout knot. “We learned that at sea, we did,” she boasted. “Spiders were always dab hands at rigging. It was just one of our many talents. I won’t be a minute…” and with that she scooted up the thread, extracted an enormous pink handkerchief from her pocket (“you remember that old pair of red socks I found behind the library? Made such a lovely dye, they did”) and blotted the tears from Owld Misther Bucket’s eyes.

Once she had rung the moisture from the hanky and stuffed it up her left sleeve, Olivia Spider sat down on the old bucket’s rim, sighed a great sigh and patted him affectionately on the forehead.

“It really is her own fault,” she continued, her head bobbling thoughtfully to one side. “Libbedy had no business at all being out there in the middle of the bohereen, not with there being all those hungry mouths lurking in the shrubbery with nothing better to do than wait for a tasty morsel to pass by their mandibles. Libbedy knows better. She was born in the bog…” With that her voice broke momentarily, and she blew her nose on a passing leaf. “It’s all those magazines and television programmes about rock stars! She wants to be like them! Them and their stupid, stupid air guitars and those idiotic instant rock star competitions!” Olivia’s voice died down for a moment and she breathed a gigantic sigh. “The silly, stupid idiot. She’s not a rock star. She’s a spider. A tiny little spider. A tiny little…” her voice broke again and, in spite of herself, she heaved another gigantic sob …”WAS a tiny little…”

“There, there,” interjected Owld Misther Bucket, his voice strangely low and husky, trying to be reassuring but failing miserably. “You said yourself (or if you didn’t come right out with it, you wished it, which is the important thing) that nothing bad would ever happen to her.”

Olivia Spider suddenly busied herself performing a dozen tasks at once, though really all she was really doing was flailing about in every possible direction at the same time. Eventually, however, having distracted herself sufficiently, she coaxed her many legs into a semblance of order, fluffed her gigantic pink handkerchief, and set about polishing a spot on Owld Misther Bucket’s nose. “You really oughtn’t let yourself go like this,” she scolded in a motherly fashion. And now it was his turn to blub, only this time for more personal reasons, reasons he could never bring himself to never talk about.