I live with a spider.

He sits next to the wood-burning stove in the living room. In my favourite vintage armchair. On a patchwork quilt that took me one winter and six old tea-dresses to make. He crams as many legs as he can upon the coffee table, scratching himself between the spinnerets while he watches television.

‘Your legs get everywhere,’ I said last night, shearing circles of gingham for jam jar covers.

He turned to me, chopping his chelicerae cheekily, waving his palps defensively, but also pointing at me with one, sharp tarsal claw.

‘You’re lucky to have me and my legs,’ he said. ‘You were picking up pennies for years before I came along. Some women live on their own, with no luck at all.’

I laughed – because theoretically he is still venomous – as I trimmed slim red ribbons to exactly the right length for a bow around a jar. Thinking of how there isn’t a single one of my decoupaged lampshades he hasn’t commented on, or laughed at then said I was too sensitive when I went quiet.

Yes, I imagined explaining to my sister, I looked for love in the wrong places, including the darkest corners of my own home, but isn’t life hard enough without deliberately bringing bad luck upon yourself? Bad luck doesn’t sound very nice, does it?

The cottage was the sort of place someone like me – that is, single and perimenopausal – could afford. It had holes and snags. Cracks in the paintwork. Draughts in the floorboards. Not old enough to be valuable and antique, not young enough to be smooth and functional. The house was a litany of renovations I couldn’t afford, but when I had visitors I waxed and polished and plucked in preparation. I used DIY manuals and asked for materials for Christmas. If it was on Wikihow, I had a go at it, because a cozy cottage of my very own! Lucky, lucky me!

But last autumn, I was out in my little moorland garden collecting fallen leaves – acer, oak, beach, a seasonal wreath for the porch, lovely! – when the spider scuttled in, uninvited, under the door I had just shut, straight into a dusty, dark corner. I had always dreamed of befriending animals, but when I imagined it, they were always birds, or squirrels. Dancing ones, maybe. A garland of flowers between tiny paws. A fluffy little tail stroking my cheek.

‘Excuse me.’

I looked down at him, too aware of my berry-stained apron. My headscarf smelling of scalp grease and clotted shampoo. My muddied wellington boots. When I’m not expecting visitors I don’t bother with contact lenses, and you know the old adage, ‘No one makes passes, at women in glasses.’ When exactly had I last plucked my chin? He was only a spider, but we all have our pride. ‘Have we met?’ I said. ‘What – are you doing?’

‘What are any of us doing?’ he said. ‘But looking for love.’

I would never have killed a spider, back then. I knew my rhyming superstitions too well. I had a frivolous little book of them, occasionally illustrated silly ones for miniature cards to my sister – ‘No feet on the table, or death you will enable.’ Ordinarily, I would have trapped him politely under a glass and slipped him out of a window where I believed he would be happier. But this spider seemed, somehow, different. So grateful to be inside.

‘Interesting place,’ he said. He saw past the grey hairs balling at the skirting boards, I thought. He saw the floorboards I had sanded myself, the wildflower posies drying above the stove, perhaps smelled the scones in the oven.

‘You have so many mushroom cushions.’ He nodded from one vintage standard lamp to another, and another. ‘It’s like a thicket in here.’

‘Thank you.’ I was delighted someone had noticed my ‘glade’ furnishing theme.

‘May I have a kiss?’ he asked.

To my shame, I splayed my hand before him, like I’d never found a spider before. Like I couldn’t have taken my pick from any plughole, curtain rail, or door frame in my home. But who was I to be picky, given the state he’d found me in?

He climbed on to me gently and I lifted him to my face. He was so small. What harm can it do? I thought, eyes bossing to find a space on his fused head and thorax to kiss. I closed my eyes and aimed at his left legs instead.

His legs buckled at the touch of my lips – or so it seemed.

He tipped his head and looked at me with eight eyes. ‘That was magical,’ he said.

I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t ask him to leave. I wanted to redeem myself from such the kiss – even though it had been his idea. I wanted him to see the house cleaned and tidied. Mushroom cushions plumped. Copse of lamps warmly lit. I wanted him to see me with my contacts in. I wanted to see my sweet world through his four pairs of shiny pin-heads. I didn’t realise, then, what blurry eyesight spiders had.

I let him stay the night. His legs really did get everywhere.

The next morning, I found a shedding on the bedroom floor balled up like an incy-wincy black fist, between my window-seat reading nook and my old teapot full of fluffy grasses. I could make something with this, I thought, bringing the lucky shedding close to my face on the tip of my finger. I could make myself a folksy talisman.

I looked at him asleep on my pillow. He had inflated himself, then dried into a bigger, harder exoskeleton.

The day after that, he shed again.

I had a table booked at a craft fair in the village hall. My homely wares were organised into brown paper bags – crocheted bunting, crocheted baby socks, crocheted pincushions in the shape of cupcakes – tied with brown string and cardboard labels in pretty cursive.

‘I’m not saying the stuff’s no good,’ he said, courteously, because we’d only recently met. ‘I’m saying, you’d have to sell at least a hundred pin cushions to cover your costs what with the wool, the tools, the brown bags, the table, the petrol, the car maintenance, the mortgage, the food you eat, the clothes you wear –’

‘But what would I do with metres of bunting, now?’ I said, disheartened by my line of brown bags.

‘Exactly,’ he said, kindly. ‘Why bother?’

‘Because crocheting is comforting and mindful.’ I used the exact words breathed delicately by my sister when she had taught me to crochet, coiling yarn around my jittery, anxious fingers like she was trying to secure them.

‘Lol,’ he said. ‘Mindfulness? What exactly are you avoiding when you knit?’

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I crochet.’

Then, he did it in front of me, slipping four claws daintily into his epigastric furrow and shucking his body like it was a smart jacket. He puffed out his new, bigger body, and spun his old one on a claw above his head.

‘He shoots, he scores.’ He threw it at me.

I snatched the bouquet of legs out of the air and ran to flush it away – forgetting how I’d excitedly pressed the last one for a lucky resin pendant.

‘I’m going anyway.’ I pulled on umber cardigan after umber cardigan with trembling hands.

‘Now I’ve fallen for you, it’ll hurt me more than it hurts you when you’re all sad you haven’t sold anything. Please be considerate of my feelings.’

He strutted, that bit bigger, into the living room. ‘I suppose I’ll wait here and watch TV.’

I unravelled metres of crocheting in my freezing car in the village hall car park, for eight hours. Wondering what to do with so many new balls of ruffle yarn, while the wind joggled the vehicle. Trying, and failing, to summon the courage to get over what I was avoiding.

Trying to remember it was nice to think of someone waiting for me at home. That it was better to have someone around if anyone tried to break in at night. That everyone wanted someone to share funny moments with. It was reassuring to know bad luck could never unexpectedly befall me as long as I lived with a spider, of any sort.

Every time I kissed him I closed my eyes, so I didn’t have to look.

Every time I kissed him, he grew a little bigger, a little harder.

‘What do you think, eh?’ he said, when he fitted perfectly upon my lap like an eight-legged, anorexic turtle. ‘Not too shabby.’ He brushed off one patella and straightened out from each coxa. ‘I’m growing with love.’

I stood suddenly, panicked by his size and appalled by his shape, not knowing when my time with him would end. Trying to remember how a spider fitted into my self-sufficient, quiet, cosy life. Wanting the luck, but not the endless posturing and proselytising.

He fell, his claws failing to grip the smooth canvas of my smock. He managed to twist and land on all eight legs but then collapsed into a death fist – ‘Ouchy!’

I felt guilty for wanting the pathetic, desperate creature to leave.

‘I think I need to rest,’ he said in a small voice. I placed him on my beloved armchair in the living room, tucked my quilt around him. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘I’m freakish and hairy and can’t see brilliantly. How can you stand me?’

‘No!’ I said, alarmed. ‘I’m lucky to have you. You’re the most voracious predator at your end of the food chain.’

‘I have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years,’ he sniffed.

‘It’s very impressive.’ I was responsible for inviting him in. For not saying no at the outset. ‘Can I get you anything?’

‘A cup of tea,’ he said, reaching out his legs to the coffee table, ‘would be ever so nice.’

I have since learned that spiders entrap in one of four ways: sticky web, sticky lasso, running and jumping – or imitating prey.

He left moultings lying around for me to trip on, puddles of stinging poison to tread in.

‘You can’t take a joke,’ he said, if I complained. ‘Ask your friends. I wish you could. It’s a shame you have no one to tell you how good you have it. Why do you find it so hard to get on with people?’

It was easier to let him think I didn’t have friends. I couldn’t tell him I’d stopped seeing them, speaking to them – that I didn’t want anyone to know about us. When the postman knocked on the door, I’d open it only as wide as the package.

The spider would have been hurt to know I was embarrassed of him, whether or not he was the size of a goat. He would have forced me to invite someone over, then laughed and told me I wouldn’t win affection by baking scones. I didn’t want him pointing at my tea-stained sink, asking my friends, ‘Cottagecore, or unhygienic?’ Then braying, ‘I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I wouldn’t have her any other way.’

I missed the soft, mossy walls of the village. The white vault of sky above the moor. Bird-spotting. Flower-picking. Mushroom-counting. When my sister worried about me ignoring her calls, giving up on craft fairs, being lonely, agoraphobic, I showed her the unsolicited pictures from my dating app. ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘That isn’t very nice.’ It was easier to protect her, to keep playing the resigned old maid.

Now he is so huge, he moves from room to room by dovetailing his legs and slipping them ahead of him through the door. He feels around blindly, sinks his claws into the furniture, then drags his body in.

Last week he scurried down the landing at me, legs gripping both sides of the walls. His claws speared my careful plasterwork, peppering it with tiny holes, white dust smogging the air around him.

‘I’m running towards you! I’m running towards you!’

Moving fast, rearing high, he teased me with my own superstitions. Teasing me with my own irrational belief that if I don’t adhere to a vast, mysterious selection of esoteric and whimsical rules, it would be to my detriment.

I cringed into a ball, but he caught me around the waist with his silk.

‘Misfortune! Misfortune!’ He shouted, tugging me along the floor towards him.

I made myself as small as possible. He rotated me in his second legs before leaning in to whisper. ‘You’re going to have misfortune.’

You shouldn’t hate someone because of their sense of humour, but even so.

‘The only misfortune I have is you,’ I said, quietly.

He dropped me.

I hit the floor hard. My crafting was now a misery and, slowly but surely, his great armoured heft was destroying my sweet home. In what way was I lucky, I wondered, staring up at him. Was this in any way nice?

He stared down at me, cocking a claw out of the way and rubbing one of his eyes like a child, with a tarsus.

‘I protect you,’ my spider said, indignant.

‘From what?’ I said, ‘ – the common housefly?’

Their gleaming remains crust the toilet bowl, varnish dishes in the sink and crumble in the washing basket. My sheets bristle with chitin and I feel his subtle grit beneath every step I take.

‘You’re so grumpy,’ he said. ‘No wonder you don’t have friends. Be more like me, just march into houses and get chatting.’

– but yesterday morning I tripped over a new shedding in the hallway.

I became tangled in it, knocking a mirror off the wall behind me. Hollow, furry limbs between my legs, around my neck, across my mouth. A limp fang hanging over each shoulder.

I knitted my fingers into his coarse black hair to pull it off. I heaved it down the stairs and out into the garden. Threw it deep into a weave of rhododendrons.

At breakfast, his thorax was shinier than ever before. His claws sharp enough to gut a belly.

‘You know,’ he said, as I stabbed a needle into a ball of carded felting wool, over and over again, ‘it’s not normal to make two hundred fluffy Father Christmas ornaments while it’s still July. Some women don’t spend every spare second obsessively producing shit no one wants.’

I pulled my shawl tighter around me. I wondered where he’d been until so late last night – and with whom he had been chatting.

There is a saying:

‘Who kills a spider,

Bad luck betide her.’

Her who reluctantly pulls out the sofa to hoover behind it. Her who inspects the corners of her rooms so critically. Her scratching her face in shock when webbing catches her like a net.

Once, when I was stacking new jars of homemade jams in the larder – wondering what was nicer: crafting, organising things I’d crafted, or organising the tools and materials for the crafting – he loomed up behind me, blocking out the light.

‘Sugar’s more addictive than coke. Jam’s not better than a packet of M&Ms just because you rotted a damson in it. Stop fetishing food.’

Of course, after that, I threw it all away.

What I’m saying is, we don’t necessarily intend to kill a spider. They should be more careful because, like I say, their legs get absolutely everywhere.

The spider and I have nothing in common. He likes crime dramas, thinks books are boring, but believes comments sections are a blank canvas.

‘Read a book. You might learn something,’ I said last night, skimming a page of Fisherman’s Knots and Nets For Beginners for the second time.

‘I wouldn’t do that.’ He sighed, watching detectives crowd a body.

I froze, wondering if he was talking about reading a book, the investigation, or the murder –  

‘You could build a web, if you wanted to,’ I said.

‘I’ve got an old family web,’ he said. ‘But I prefer this chair.’

My best chair.

‘You set me a beautiful trap when we first met,’ I said.

‘That old thing.’ He leaned back, putting his first two legs behind his head.

‘It was so sticky.’ My voice guttered remembering how he’d coiled me up, tying my arms against my body. ‘Your silk was so shiny.’

He had leaned over me – we were roughly the same size then – and run a claw, slowly, through thread after taut thread, from the crook of my neck down past my navel. Each strand had popped silently then fallen away, relaxing into liquid trails across my skin as I was released. I was hardly aware of it because the whole time he leaned on one tibia, wedged hard into my throat. Although, admittedly, there is more than one way to choke a person.

‘Was it?’ He rubbed a tarsus between his spinnerets, then smelt it. ‘I hope I didn’t make you feel shit about your sewing.’

I slammed my book shut.

When he left this morning, I started work above the armchair.

I used high-performance adhesive and bags and bags of silk fibres. I moved in circles all day, crafting tirelessly. Glue filling the whorls of my fingertips until I had no identity left.

When I finished, I tested it with one hand, checking it could hold something the size of a horse. One thing I learned from my reading, is that strength is not toughness. The elasticity of a spider’s silk allows it to increase its length, to absorb the shock of objects hitting it – struggling in it.

The web caught the light like a chandelier.

Wow, I thought, I did that.

I was surprised because my spider always made such a fuss about how tricky it is.

He came straight into the living room when he got home, and folded his first six legs: I’d made an impression.

‘Who do you think you are?’ he said. ‘Shelob?’ He plucked the web with one claw. ‘It’s too visible even to me. No one with eyes is getting caught in that.’

‘That’s what I thought you’d say.’ I spoke too quickly. ‘I thought you’d say that.’

He crawled into the middle of it nonetheless, for a better view of the television.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Then I can sit in my favourite chair.’

‘That chair,’ he said, without looking at me, ‘is a granny’s chair. I keep telling you, romanticising elderly women is offensive. Osteoarthritis is not an aesthetic.’ He tapped my remote control with one claw, scrolled through the channels. ‘Being cosy is no substitute for self-esteem.’

At some point, exactly what I was avoiding became less important than how far I would go to avoid it.

The spider came to bed tonight, and lay back into my trap. ‘You think you’re so rustic,’ he said, realising what had happened, ‘but I bet all this stuff was drop-shipped from China.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, and he barely struggled as I wrapped him up.

‘Drying things on a washing line doesn’t show eco-integrity, it shows you have too much time on your hands.’

‘Probably,’ I said.

‘Life isn’t a Pinterest board.’

‘Nope.’

‘I hope you’re ready for all the bad luck about to come your way.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘A spider’s too good for you.’

He was right. He was was too rich – too filling – but I was too superstitious to just suck the juices. You can’t leave the shell if you want to grow a bigger, harder exoskeleton. He also preserved well with plenty of sugar. In jars with handwritten labels, lids covered in sheared gingham and the sweetest piece of red ribbon. I’ll share the recipe for you all on Instagram.

It’s very nice, and the gruff days of autumn are always on their way.