Suzanne Harrington: Terrifying spiders don't just happen to Australians 

'It’s a whopper. Not Aussie-big, but far bigger than should be legal in this part of the world.' Picture: iStock

There's a spider in the kitchen. My brain feels like those Dubai influencers in their dawning realisation that terrifying stuff doesn’t just happen to other people. 

In my case, that terrifying spiders don’t just happen to Australians.

It’s a whopper. Not Aussie-big, but far bigger than should be legal in this part of the world. 

My fight/flight/freeze thing has stuck at freeze, yet I have only seconds to react before it runs under the fridge. Knowing that it’s under the fridge would mean that I’d have to move house. Today.

It’s on the floor, so I have the slight advantage of gravity. 

Stretching my hand as far away from my body as I can without dislocating my shoulder, I pop a pint glass over it. It runs furiously around the perimeter of its new see-through prison, headbutting the glass in rage. 

I run into the garden, screaming, convulsing in horror. (It’s just spiders. I’m fine with snakes, rats, cockroaches, lizards, pterodactyls, werewolves, men, everything).

Nature v nurture

I WhatsApp my son at work with a photo of the spider in the pint glass, taken by leaning in at an angle from the back door, and tell him I am moving into a hotel unless he can come home and do something. 

This is on you, he messages back immediately. This is a ‘you’ problem. (I should point out that my son’s full-time job involves training other adults to kick and punch each other in a Muay Thai cage — he could knock you unconscious with his elbow — but, like me, he has an aversion to spiders).

There follows a lengthy WhatsApp, back and forth on whether phobias are nature or nurture. 

I insist that they are an innate, evolutionary hangover to keep us safe from dangerous creatures (which is why horses freak out at hosepipes: Their ancient fear of snakes extends to snake-shaped garden stuff on the ground).

He says that having a maternal figure who lost her shit at even a spider GIF during his formative years has resulted in his inherited arachnophobia. 

This conversation is all by text, as I stand in the garden, afraid to go back in the house. The spider is between me and the coffee machine. 

My daughter, who also has inherited the fear, joins the WhatsApp chat from 17,000km away in Sydney, with an unexpected photo of a proper, Aussie-sized spider on her garage wall. 

No trigger warning was given. I hurl my phone away without meaning to, before retrieving it from the grass and deleting the image.

Bad karma

Whoever finds the spider has to deal with it, she types. That’s the rule. My son suggests I man up. 

Great. I’m being spider-shamed by my own children.

My partner, who could gaily pick up a tarantula by the leg and pop it over the neighbour’s wall, won’t be here for days to assist with eviction. 

Meanwhile, I’m desperate for a coffee. I’m not in the business of harming things, never mind killing them. But I can’t stand in the garden for the next three days. 

I do some deep breathing. The murder happens in a horrible blur: Pint glass lifted, magazine smashed floorward, scuttling, three-dimensional horror flattened to one-dimensional.

Even dead, I can’t look at it, which makes scraping it off the floor difficult. 

It takes hours for the adrenaline to subside, but I remember a long, long night in India, sleeping outside on a stone porch because there was a spider in my room. 

This is progress. Bad karma, but progress.