The Spider Truces (18 page)

The village looked small and altered. It would take a day or two for it all to look familiar again. William Rutton the butcher waved. Denny’s bedroom curtains were drawn against the sunlight. Ellis saw him peer out and withdraw again. Mafi rained kisses on him. The stairs seemed shallower and the cottage smaller.

Ellis sat beside his dad on the bed and touched his arm. Denny feigned waking and put on his glasses. His breathing was loud and slow, through his nose. He raised Ellis’s hand into the air and let it drop limply on to the bed. He got up and walked out of the room, shutting the door gently behind him. Ellis listened to him descend the stairs and his eyes settled on the imprint of his father’s body on the sheets.

Chrissie came home for the weekend. “You look like George Michael with that tan.”

“Why thank you,” Ellis said courteously.

“Wasn’t a compliment,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“He’s not talking to me.”

“What? Not much? Not at all?”

“Not a word,” Ellis said.

She found out for herself at dinner. “This is ridiculous,” she told her dad. “You can’t just not talk to someone.”

“What would you like me to talk about?” Denny asked.

“Anything,” Ellis said.

“Shall we talk about trust?”

Ellis looked away. “No.”

“Lying to my face. Shall we talk about that?”

He got no answer.

“OK then, Ellis. Shall we talk about what it feels like to lie awake for twenty-nine nights waiting for the phone to ring with a foreign voice on a distant line telling me where I can come and identify my son’s body? Let’s talk about worrying myself sick about you, and losing the ability to eat or think straight. Let’s talk about my happiness being at the mercy of whether or not you’ve managed to spare five minutes of your precious time to call Mafi to let her know how you are.”

“You didn’t want me to call you!”

“Which of those things do you want to talk about, Ellis?”

Ellis shook his head.

“WHICH OF THOSE?” his dad raged.

“I don’t want to talk about any of them,” Ellis whispered.

“Well, there’s nothing else I’m interested in talking about with you.”

Ellis went to his room and emptied his rucksack, in the hope that his perfect friend had broken her own rules and left him a note with her number in New Zealand, amongst his belongings. But she had not.

Denny began renovating the dining room walls. It gave him reason to shut himself away. He cut out areas of rotten lath and plaster and pinned in new strips of chestnut which Terry Jay had split for him. Two post-beams were rotten. Dark slithers of wood crumbled between Denny’s fingers.

“Can’t make that out …” he muttered.

The wheat at Longspring Farm had been harvested. Ellis sat in the east field and admired the farmhouse. In the half-light, further down the track, he thought he saw Chloe Purcell step out of the herdsman’s house into the shadows of the lime trees. He told himself it couldn’t be her. Whoever it was standing in the shade, she rubbed her neck wearily and returned inside, leaving the door open for Michael Finsey’s return.

Ellis wandered aimlessly away. Back on the village green, he sat on a bench in front of the primary school. He ate an ice cream then drank a can of lager and contemplated how poorly the two mixed in the palate. Katie Morton appeared from the top of Wickhurst Lane and joined him.

“Look!” she said, flashing him a toothy, white smile. “Braces off!”

Ellis nodded his approval.

She looked impatiently at the darkening sky and asked, matter-of-factly, “So, did you lose your cherry on your travels?”

“No,” said Ellis.

“Isn’t that what these trips are for?” she asked.

“Why aren’t you at work?” he retaliated.

She pulled a face at the clouds. “Came home early to sunbathe but that’s buggered.” She settled down next to him. “At a loss what to do now,” she said. “Might go for a dip.”

“Where do you go?” Ellis asked.

“The pond at that farm on the hill, whatever it’s called.”

“Dale Farm. I wouldn’t.”

“I’ve swum there before.”

“I hope not. There’s an open pipe goes into that pond, full of you know what.”

“Is there?” Katie pulled a face. “Bloody hell …”

Ellis looked blankly across the village green. Katie Morton studied the sky and watched her hopes of a tan evaporate.

“I wouldn’t know how to lose my virginity,” Ellis murmured.

She didn’t respond and Ellis became more self-conscious the longer they sat in silence.

“Well …” Katie Morton said, eventually, with the pragmatic air of someone who didn’t want to waste an afternoon, “you’re not going to lose your virginity to me, Ellis, but if you like I’ll give you a guided tour.”

Ellis kept his eyes fixed on the grass and wondered what she meant. Katie Morton stood up and offered him her hand. “I’m taking you home …” she said.

She stirred because Ellis had moved in his sleep, muttering someone’s name.

“Who’s Jo?” she whispered. “Not that I’m bothered.”

“Uh?” Ellis moaned sleepily. His head swam in a syrupy daylight. Semi-conscious, he dragged the sheet up to cover their naked bodies. Beneath that sheet, his body felt the indelible touch of another naked human being lying warm beside him for the very first time. Katie Morton pulled the sheet away again and placed Ellis’s hand on her tummy. He breathed the strange and subtle aroma of her unperfumed skin and he drank in the sight of her pale stomach and the wiry hair, unable to fully take in how wonderful life was becoming this summer.

“You said ‘Jo’ in your sleep,” she said.

“She was from New Zealand,” he said. “Rotorua.”

“The woman you didn’t lose your virginity to?” she teased.

He shut his eyes. “I think you know full well by now that I’ve never made love to a woman.”

This made her smile. “Yes,” she said.

He breathed in lazily and she moved her head across to his chest. She pressed her feet against his and they flexed their toes against each other’s. Then the bedroom door opened. Ellis was not aware of the door but of Katie’s body becoming rigid against his. She sat bolt upright. The
middle-aged
woman standing at the foot of the bed was shaking and her shoulders started to heave. She was a strong woman, Ellis soon learned, with her daughter’s height and the added bulk of middle age.

Ellis’s passage out of the house bore the sensation of being propelled without touching the floor. It happened too fast for him to become concerned. He was aware only of the strength of Mrs Morton’s hands as they somehow made a handle out of the flesh on his shoulders with which she threw him out.

He found himself standing on the Mortons’ lawn. The front door slammed shut with a thick, substantial thud. On a day of new experiences, the latest was that of being naked outdoors. In itself, it was possibly a lovely sensation, he thought, but weighed against it right now were some powerful negatives; chiefly, that the most populated part of the village lay between his naked body and home. He heard footsteps on Wickhurst Lane. Miss Spinazi, the primary school infants teacher, was walking home. The wiry spinster stopped and stared.

This, Ellis told himself, is probably the only adult in Kent less sexually experienced than me. It had to be her who came along.

“I got kicked out,” he explained weakly, thumbing towards the Mortons’ house behind him.

Miss Spinazi’s mouth dropped open.

“It was like going through a wormhole,” Ellis added. “Are you on your way home, Miss?”

She nodded and swallowed fearfully. Ellis pointed in the direction of her small, terraced cottage and nodded encouragingly.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance that I could …”

And at this she scurried away. Ellis returned to the Mortons’ front door and called through the letter box.

“Please could I have my things?”

He could hear nothing from inside. He stepped away and looked for a place to hide in the garden until he was reunited with his clothing. The front door burst open. Mrs Morton marched towards him and sent him down the driveway with a series of rough pushes to the chest.

“You are not getting any clothes back, you beast! If you don’t leave immediately I shall get the PC.”

The last shove sent Ellis sprawling on to the loose gravel of the lane Katie had led him along a few hours earlier. He landed badly, cutting the palms of his hands and grazing his knees. He stood up, dusted the clinging stones off his skin and watched Mrs Morton march back into the house. Now he was shaken up, not so much by the playground cuts and grazes as by the realisation that he was going home naked. He was also alarmed by how small his penis suddenly seemed to be. He had two choices. To hack across the fields to Longspring Farm or to cross the village green to the cottage. The latter option was infinitely quicker. In fact, if he put his head down and ran, he could do it in two minutes. But it meant going through the centre of the village. The route to Reardon’s was comparatively long but it was possible that Ellis could get there without being seen by another human being. Better still, he realised, and closer, would be to cut across the fields to Tim Wickham’s house. Then his heart sank as he realised that neither Reardon’s nor Tim Wickham’s was an option. If Ellis had to list the three people he could least afford to be seen naked by, they would be, first, Tim’s mum – due to an adolescence filled by fantasies of her which still had the potential to stir an ill-appreciated erection. Second, Chloe, who could well be at the Wickhams’ house or Reardon’s and would probably have the opposite effect on Ellis’s penis precisely because he wouldn’t want her to; and, third, the goat-lady, whose cottage Ellis would have to pass by. It was just too scary to contemplate being seen by her. She might ask him inside, offering to help. He’d be scared of entering her house with armour on. Naked didn’t bear thinking about.

“Shit!”

Another sub-dilemma presented itself. Did he run freely and go for speed, thereby allowing his genitals to move however genitals moved when unsupported by underwear, or did he hold on to them with one hand? Freestyle, he decided. Because speed was paramount. And realising that his situation was not going to improve whilst he stood there, he started to run. And the faster he ran the more free he felt, and he understood that if he chose not to care then he didn’t care; if he chose not to be embarrassed then he wasn’t; if he chose not to feel the pain on the soles of his feet then he didn’t feel it. He stuck two fingers up to his own instincts and ran, leaving Wickhurst Lane behind and fixing his sights on the far side of the village green as he stormed across it, oblivious of everything and everyone outside his tunnel vision. He ran faster than he had ever run. To do so in bare feet felt wonderful. Natural. Easy. To do so naked changed him, in the course of a few hundred yards, from a circumspect boy to a young man. For the first time in his life, that part of his brain that had often whispered, “You’d better not, Ellis,” now murmured, “Fuck it, Ellis, why not?”

Suddenly, he was over the garden fence and scrambling through the conifers, the harsh branches scraping his skin until he stumbled out on to the side lawn where Denny was carrying rotten lath to the bonfire heap. Ellis bent over to catch his breath and work out what to tell his dad. When he looked up, his dad wasn’t there. Ellis waved innocently to Mafi as she stared from her living room window. Denny was at the washing line, unpegging a towel. He wrapped it around his son.

“You’re bleeding …” he said, unable to mask the tenderness.

“Just a stupid dare with Tim, Dad. Just stupid, got a bit out of hand. I’m really sorry.”

Denny picked off the stones embedded in his son’s arm.

“Dad, I’m sorry,” Ellis repeated.

“Make sure you get your clothes back,” Denny said, sidestepping the infinity of his son’s apology.

“I’ll take care of it,” Ellis said and thanked God his dad was talking to him again. “I’m such an idiot,” he added innocently.

Denny nodded in agreement and although his head was bowed as he attended to his son’s cuts, Ellis saw him smile.

Ellis slept and bathed and dressed and put what cash he had in his pocket. He was going to find Tim Wickham wherever he was and take him for a pint. It had been an incredible day and he didn’t want it to end in a hurry. He wanted to go out. He wanted to sit in a pub and smoke and nurse a pint and, hopefully, look as good as he felt. If Chloe was with Tim then fine, he didn’t mind at all. He had his own private life now and they were welcome to theirs.

The phone rang. Ellis looked for a pair of shoes that weren’t sprayed with dried mud, and the phone kept ringing. Ellis never answered the phone, neither did Mafi, unless they were walking past it as it rang. It was unusual for Denny to let it ring. Ellis stamped his feet into his shoes and went down the landing to his dad’s room and picked up the phone by the bed.

“Hello,” he said.

“Ellis?”

“Katie?”

“Yeah. Christ that wasn’t funny!” She laughed. “They’ve freaked out. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

“Who?”

“My parents, who else? They’re not at yours, are they?”

“No. Your mum’s pretty strong.”

“I’m so sorry for what happened.”

“I don’t mind. It was worth it.”

“You wanna meet?”

“OK.”

“Don’t sound too enthusiastic. Meet me up by the bypass, in Morley’s café, in an hour.”

“OK.”

On his way downstairs, from the small window on the half-landing, Ellis saw Katie Morton’s parents walking down the driveway to their car. He found his dad sitting at the dining table. The two chairs opposite him had been pushed away and come to rest like a car crash beside the wall that Denny was gutting.

Ellis’s tendency to make the wrong observation at the wrong time kicked in. “Can you believe they drove here when it’s a five-minute walk?”

Denny’s face was set angrily in thought. Ellis fought the urge to continue out of the cottage and took a seat.