The Spider Truces (15 page)

They wandered back to the car holding hands. At sixteen years of age, nothing made Ellis feel better than a conversation like this one, where he actually got told something. A few of those conversations with his dad, he suspected, and he might not feel so out of the loop.

“What letters?” Tim asked.

Ellis watched Dino’s car take his sister away, and remained looking at the empty lane long after the car had disappeared.

Tim asked again, “What letters?”

Ellis dug his heel into the driveway gravel and avoided looking Tim in the eye. “Eh?”

“Upstairs, in the drawer …”

Ellis sighed. “From my mum. Old letters.”

“Why’s your dad taken them?”

“They’re to him, from my mum.”

“To him?”

Ellis nodded and smiled over-confidently at Tim.

“They’re not to you?”

“No,” Ellis said. “Please, let’s get on with it. I just want to read the letters. It’s OK. It’s fine. He wants me to read them.”

“Then why has he locked them up? They must be private.”

“He lost the key ages ago.”

“Sure,” Tim muttered unconvincingly. Now it was his turn to bow his head and study his feet.

“Come on!” Ellis urged him.

“But they’re not yours.”

They stood in silence. Tim looked at his watch and wore the pained expression of a friend who didn’t want to pass judgement.

“It’s getting late. I’ll be late for her.”

He started off down the driveway.

“It can’t be half past eight already!” Ellis pleaded.

But Tim was gone, walking at speed on to the lane without looking back, the leather tool pouch wedged into his back pocket.

Ellis sat on the front lawn. His mother’s handwriting turned to ribbons of ink and snaked away from him into the evening, leaving his world poorer and prompting him to see things anew. He saw the garden for what it was, a series of impenetrable borders camouflaged by wild flowers and birdsong. He pictured the lady living here with them and realised she was a generation too old. Mafi was the sort of relative Ellis should be visiting from time to time, not living with. The only woman in the world he could be held by and laugh with, and love one minute and hate the next, had left him for London and was dragging home bores who wouldn’t know how to talk to him. And his father continued to torture him by being the loveliest, loneliest, least penetrable of men.

Ellis dragged himself inside and told Mafi that he was going out with friends and would be back at eleven o’clock. He left the room before she could answer. He didn’t know where to go. All that mattered to him was that he was not in the cottage when his dad got home and that he arrived back no earlier than eleven.

He wandered towards Sedgewick’s land at Dale Farm from the back fields above Wickhurst lane, avoiding the roads in case his dad was driving back into the village. Sedgewick, who was high up in the council, had sold a meadow to a developer who started to build a small, highly unpopular cul-de-sac of commuter houses there. There was a rumour in the village that every time the builders started to work there the site was vandalised, but Ellis and Tim hadn’t been to investigate. Now, Ellis climbed the site fence and found the burnt-out shell of an excavator and footings that had been set about with a sledgehammer. Some weeds and crops were coming up through the concrete.

He walked slowly out of the valley to the bridge at Hubbards Hill. He sat beneath it, watching the traffic on the bypass. When Harry Lyle, the son of the people who owned the post office, ran away from home, this is where they found him, huddled up beneath the concrete buttresses. Most children in the village ended up here at some point in their life, watching the traffic, having their first grope, avoiding PC Bachelor, running away from home or just feeling bored. Ellis had spent some time hiding here after he shot Des Payne, and now he was back again. He watched the cars and guessed at the time. He tried to calculate how long he’d been gone, how long it had taken him to cross Dale Farm and how long he had been sitting here. Another half-hour here would probably do it, he decided, and then a slow walk home. That should make it eleven o’clock.

In a rare lull in the traffic he heard a whimpering from nearby. He looked around but could see nothing. He heard it again, this time stronger and, he realised, from further away than he had thought. He looked across the road and as a fresh wave of traffic stole the silence back he saw, tucked under the bridge, Tim Wickham and Chloe Purcell, their arms and legs wrapped round each other. They shared kisses, more tender than the ones Chrissie and James had shared. Her eyes were closed and her face wore a depth of passion Ellis could never have imagined her capable of. He felt his legs buckling as he got to his feet and hurried away without being seen.

He was disgusted at himself. He cursed his naivety. He was sick of being the viewer. Sick of watching. Sick of wondering. Angry at never knowing.

He had always felt that of all the girls he knew, Chloe Purcell was the plainest and most quiet. He had presumed he would end up with her because she was so plain and he was so useless. And, despite himself, he’d always thought she liked him. She had once said she wanted to fly away with him, after all. Now, presumably, Chloe and Tim would laugh at how Ellis had gone to a barn dance with her and not spoken a word or made a move.

No one, he told himself, ever tells you what’s really going on. I have to do my own thing and have my own secrets, otherwise I’m just a baby. One day I’ll show them. I’ll be gone. I’ll meet people who don’t know me and I’ll be different with them. I’ll have lots of friends and I’ll get letters and phone calls. My girlfriend will be a prettier version of Chloe and she’ll get up out of bed in the mornings and walk naked to the kitchen and make us tea and bring it back to bed.

But as he marched furiously back into the village, another part of him said, “That won’t ever happen to you.”

He found Mafi in her kitchen. She asked him if wanted a cup of tea.

“Are you having one?” Ellis asked resentfully.

“Yes.”

“Yes, please, then.”

He moped into Mafi’s living room and threw himself down on to the armchair his dad usually sat in. He looked at the ship’s clock that a great-uncle he had never known brought back from his voyages. It was only half past nine.

“Bollocks,” he muttered. “Fucking virginal tatty bollocks.”

He sighed dramatically and listened to the ticking of the ship’s clock take over the room.

“Can’t be that bad …” Denny’s voice came from behind Ellis’s head.

Surprised, Ellis looked round and saw his dad standing at the window, smoking a cigarette and watching the night sky.

“I didn’t see you.”

“I guessed that.” Denny laughed under his breath and laid his hand on Ellis’s shoulder as he passed him and took a seat in the corner of the room. Between his thumb and forefinger, he played with the length of wire Tim had left protruding from the lock of Denny’s drawer.

“Oh …” Ellis sighed, involuntarily, when he saw it.

They sat in silence for a while until Denny said, “I’m not angry with you, Ellis,” and smiled cautiously.

“Well, I sort of wish you were.”

“Why?”

“Then I could get angry too.”

“I don’t want either of us to be angry. There’s no need, no need at all. But some things of mine are not for sharing. It’s private, Ellis. It’s very private.”

Ellis stared at the floor. “Now I am angry,” he said. “Private …” He muttered the word bitterly. “There’s nothing I hate more than bloody private. Everything is private. I’m not allowed to know anything.”

“We have a good life, Ellis, everything we need.”

Ellis felt unable to breathe and rose to his feet.

“That’s a stupid thing to say to me,” he said, and walked out.

Tim left school without finishing and went to work full time for Reardon. Chloe spent every weekend at Longspring. She remained quiet and plain and incapable of laughter, but the smile she smiled where others would laugh still overwhelmed Ellis.

Ellis kept himself to himself. He stayed in the cottage and returned to Treasure Island, surprised that no younger boys had made it their own. Once, he set out for the goat-lady’s house but turned back halfway.

He read
National Geographic
and imagined a score of different lives for himself, his favourite being the one in which he was a world renowned, hugely respected and sexually sought-after roving farmer, an international agricultural trouble-shooter, a genius with instincts for farming in any country and climate and an ability to read the landscape that inspired the awe of those who witnessed it. He slept out under the stars, on hillsides, by riverbanks and on beaches and saw things that no one in Kent had ever seen. When he imagined this life the technical details of his genius were omitted, as was the training and experience which would be required of him to attain it. He thought purely in terms of sensory pleasures; fresh air, travel, Eden-like views, excitement, being admired, looking rugged and, of course, indulgent women.

He tried to tell Denny little, to curb his lifelong instinct to share all his unedited thoughts and ideas with his father, in the hope that this would be the start of his being a
grown-up
. He attempted to create an illusion of there being much that Denny didn’t know about in Ellis’s life, even though this wasn’t true. He tried to smile and laugh less with his dad too, but repeatedly found himself looking back on the day and realising he had forgotten to do so.

It’s hard, he had to admit to himself, pretending you’ve some interesting secrets when you haven’t.

In the February of 1985, winter tightened its grip on the landscape for a few more weeks and Ellis heard from Michael Finsey that Chloe Purcell was going to run a livery yard for Reardon when she left school, and that her parents were furious she wasn’t going to college. The hurt poured into Ellis. He hadn’t been to the farm since Christmas, nor had he seen Tim, a feat that Mafi rated as “quite an achievement” in a village so small. At Easter, Tim phoned and persuaded Ellis to go for a drink.

“Just the two of us,” he assured him.

In the twilight of half-drunkenness, Ellis told his friend a half-truth. “I suppose I felt a bit annoyed ’cos you were always with your girlfriend, so I decided I’d come over a bit less.”

Tim laughed. “You disappeared!” His eyes sparkled and laughter-lines cradled them in optimism.

“You didn’t come looking for me,” Ellis said.

“I was in love. Girls do that. I’m sorry.”

“Anyway,” Ellis said, “that’s that sorted out.”

They left the pub with their arms round each other and drove when they shouldn’t have, through the back lanes into the Rother valley. From the top of Catt’s Hill they saw an electrical storm heading inland off the Channel. At Fairfield, they ran in great circles as curtains of rain swept across the Marsh and soaked them through. When the lightning came it lit up the flatlands, silhouetting the lonely church and the wind-bent thorn bushes. They chased after lightning bolts and goaded the thunder. And when the storm had become a silent slither of white light above the ridge, they wandered aimlessly in the darkness, catching their breath and feeling the blood race around their bodies. They drove up the lane to the turkey farm at Becket’s Bridge and parked in the Dutch barn. They slept in the car until Ellis was woken by his own shivering, shortly after five.

They were at Reardon’s by seven. Ellis stood at the highest point on the farm and surveyed his village. It felt good to be back at Longspring, but it felt different too. A few months’ absence made him feel like a visitor now. He liked the idea of being a prodigal son, to his family, but most of all to Tim, and through him to Chloe. He wanted to be missed. He wanted to be a mystery. This morning, his ambition took no more form than that. He didn’t know what to do or where to go. But he knew now that he wanted to leave and go to that fictitious place where his daily struggle to communicate and to concentrate was cured. He would return regularly to see his dad and they would meet on the Marsh often. His dad would be proud of him.

Shivering and tired, he went home, resolved to force his way out of a life that threatened to consume him with disappointment, now that Chloe loved Tim. As he waited for the bath to fill, he looked at the framed poster on Mafi’s wall of a painting called
Nuit d’Eté
by Winslow Homer. In it, two women dance happily together on a moonlit beach. Silhouetted against a rough, silvery sea is a cluster of onlookers. A pale blue trail of moonshine beckons the dancers towards the horizon.

Denny appeared at his son’s side, just when Ellis wanted to be alone. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much. I’m just bored.” He pressed his index finger against the picture and said, “I want evenings like this. I want to go places and see things.”

Denny sighed heavily. “It’ll happen, dear boy. But there’s no hurry. You’ve plenty of time. Please, dear boy. Please.”

Later, after Ellis had bathed and eaten porridge with golden syrup, he saw from his bedroom window that Denny was in the far corner of the orchard, sitting against an apple tree, staring at the sky. He looked scared, as unlike Denny O’Rourke as Ellis had ever seen him look. And Ellis could hear his father’s voice in his ear: “Please, dear boy. Please.”