The Spider Truces (24 page)

“Fair enough,” Ellis whispered, “fair enough.”

The snow was dense, even though the flakes looked as light as dandelion clocks. It settled in sheets again on the windscreen, entombing Ellis in a white cubicle where he sat motionless and blank, increasingly oblivious of the blizzard as he prepared to harden his heart, for the sake of his
self-preservation
, before returning to his father. He sat for almost an hour, alone in the void, coming to terms with the arrival of transience in his world that Christmas. To find himself alone was not something that concerned him, but to feel so lonely came as a shock.

Then the white screen in front of him began to disintegrate. A hand broke through the snow, clearing the windscreen. Behind it appeared Denny, wrapped up against the cold. With large gardening gauntlets on his hands he brushed the snow aside. He didn’t look his son in the eye, not even when he opened the driver’s door and pulled out the ignition key.

“Not today,” Denny said, ushering Ellis out of the car. “You’re not leaving today.”

They walked in silence down the hill, watching their step through the blinding flurries and dodging the sheet ice. They passed beneath the church tower and stopped to survey the village below. Neither of them looked left towards the new graveyard.

Then Denny spoke with his old voice, the voice that had raised Ellis and made him feel the most loved boy in the world.

“You didn’t have to leave the church last night, Ellis. You should have stayed with me. We could have walked home together.”

Denny wandered on, taking care on the icy slope. Ellis didn’t move for some time. He sucked the cold air into his lungs and allowed his eyes to fall out of focus in the snow. He was suspended by the purest feeling of happiness and love, and a sense, suddenly, that anything was going to be possible in the future.

The future began with a job interview at the Bullet Photographic Agency and, an hour beforehand, a rendezvous with Chrissie at her office where Ellis was introduced to Milek, professional photographer and broker of this life-changing career opportunity. Ellis allowed Chrissie’s pre-interview lecture in how to behave in front of grown-ups to pass without protest, but when she came at him with a hair brush he drew the line.

There were two women and one man at the interview. Ellis tried to describe them to Jed that evening but it was difficult because they didn’t talk the way he was used to people talking. When they asked him a question they seemed to answer it for him and then invite him to agree.

“How long have you been passionate about photography?” asked the man, a Spandau Ballet lookalike. “For ever, or for ever and a day?”

Ellis looked to the women for help but they seemed to think this a reasonable question too, judging by their expectant faces.

“Well,” Ellis ventured, “I’m not ‘pash …’”

He discovered that “passionate” was not a word he could finish. It just sounded so wet.

“I’m not pash … about it yet. Really. Not yet. I’ve only just got my first camera …”

“What you got?” interrupted the man.

“Pentax K1000,” Ellis smiled.

“Amateur hour, my friend. Don’t show your face in public without a Nikon.”

Ellis smiled submissively and kept his opinions to himself. “I’m keen on photography,” he continued, deciding that “keen”’ was a perfectly good substitute for the p-word. “Anyway, you only want someone to make tea and catalogue slides, don’t you?”

The two women smiled in unison. The junior one muttered, “Priceless …”

“We call them trannies, not slides, but it doesn’t really matter,” the man said.

Then why say it? Ellis refrained from asking.

“You would also, in time, be going out with our staff photographers as their assistant. You need to at least
like
photography to be good at that,” the boss woman said.

Ellis sensed that he had strayed from Chrissie’s directive that he portray himself as “highly motivated”.

“I do,” he said, injecting some enthusiasm. “I really like it a lot.”

“What, in your view,” asked the younger woman, “is the hallmark of an iconic image?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what the question means. I understand depth of field though. Milek took me through it, if that’s any help.”

The man jumped back in. “Look. Point is, my friend, you have to get your head around the diversity factor. Follow? One moment you might be holding a negative crafted by one of the finest photographers in the world, the next you’ll be making the tea or taking my laundry to the dry cleaners.”

The room fell silent.

“Do you follow?” the man asked, expectantly.

Ellis smiled politely. “Um … I don’t want to seem rude but I can tell you for free that I will not be taking anyone’s laundry anywhere.”

Again, there was silence. The three Bullets fixed their attentions on separate fictitious objects in the middle distance over Ellis’s shoulder and did a passable impression of being lost in thought.

“I do feel passionate about photography, by the way,” Ellis said, meekly. “I don’t know why I said I didn’t earlier.”

“Good lad,” Spandau-man said, pressing his blue-rimmed specs up on to the bridge of his nose. “Good lad.”

Cunt, Ellis thought.

Ellis rang his sister from the call box on Joy Lane.

“They’ve given me a form to fill in and it says I have to write a letter of intent.”

“They’re bastards to get right, those sorts of letters,” Chrissie said. “Just tell them it’s exactly the job you’re looking for and that you’ve a passion for visual media.”

“OK, I’ll do my best.”

“Keep it short. Half a page.”

“OK.”

“Ellis, there’s something else.”

“What?”

“He read your letter.”

There was a little silence.

“I found him sitting on the bed folding it up. He cried on my shoulder.”

“Oh.”

“Ellis?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

“What for?”

“Letting me see Dad cry. I’ve never seen him cry. I wish you could have seen it too.”

The image of his father at the altar came to him. He suspected Chrissie would resent Ellis for that moment, if she knew.

“I’m glad you saw,” he said.

He sat on the beach and pictured his dad reading the letter. Ellis had left it by Denny’s bed, propped against the photograph of the lighthouse shore. He imagined the words entering his dad’s eyes and mind and heart. “
Dear Dad
,” he whispered to the white horses crossing the estuary, “
I will always be grateful that you brought Mafi into our home. I have loved growing up with Mafi there. You are a private person for your own reasons and you have made me into one too. But that doesn’t mean that I do not feel the need to tell you how much I love you. I will be thinking of you there without Mafi and I will never forget her. I love you, Dad
.”

He smiled to himself and nodded with satisfaction.

Awaiting him on the doormat were the first photographs from his new camera and, amongst them, a picture of himself and Denny, side by side in the snow, wearing identical clothes and expressions of disbelief. He heard Mafi’s voice call out. “Yoo-hoo …”

It surprised and pleased him how similar he and his dad looked. They had the same set of lines arching across their faces towards high cheekbones and large, bright eyes. They stood shoulder to shoulder these days, the greying hair and deeper lines on Denny’s face the only notable differences between them. Mafi’s camerawork had almost left Ellis with a picture of snow and nothing else. She had cut Ellis and his dad off at the chest and placed them in the bottom corner of the frame, devoting the majority of the photo to the whiteness. Her frail, shaky hands had also conferred a slight blur on the image. Ellis placed the photograph beside his bed and decided he would post a copy of it to his dad. He laid the job application form on the table beneath his bedroom window. Beside it, he placed blank sheets of paper, ready for the moment he felt inspired to write his letter of intent. Outside, a posse of Jed’s friends were dragging timbers across the beach to a huge bonfire stack. A barge bringing timber from Malaysia for the rebuilding of the sea defences had shed its load in a storm. Timber had been washed up along the shoreline between Margate and the estuary for days on end. It was going to be a big fire. It was going to be a big night.

Ellis never read in a book that sandwiching sixty micrograms of acid between skunk blowbacks was a bad idea, but he probably should have worked it out for himself before finding himself face down in the shingle struggling to breathe. Someone had placed his head in setting concrete but he dared not move in case whoever had done it was still in the room. On the point of suffocation, he panicked and flipped over on to his back where he was met not by the face of his fictitious attacker but by plumes of his own manic breath rising into a starry sky. The crackle of the bonfire and the buzz of conversation and laughter were nearby. He knew he had to sit this one out and wait for his organs to return to his jurisdiction. His vision was shooting all over the place and he felt sick as well as paranoid. When he regained the use of his legs, he returned to the bonfire and sat on a railway sleeper watching the flames. His mind settled and he saw, hovering in the sky across the bay, a great waterfall, a mile wide, with crystal-blue water cascading down it. At the foot of the falls, a gathering of strange green creatures sat on the water’s surface fishing with brass curtain poles. Ellis recognised the creatures from previous Dr Seuss dreams. He smiled gormlessly at them and didn’t care that they probably weren’t there at all. It was just good to see them again.

A friend of Jed’s, called Marianne, stood over Ellis and asked him if he’d like a cup of hot chocolate. She took a mug from the tray her girlfriend was carrying and placed it in Ellis’s hands, securing his fingers around it. Ellis watched her hands on his and felt happy and vivid. He sipped the sweet hot drink and decided that now would be a perfect time to write his letter of intent.

He knelt at the table in his bedroom and placed a blank sheet of paper in front of him. He felt inspired and clear about what he was going to write but struggled at first, until he realised he was writing with his left hand. When he started again, using his right hand, the words poured forth and a letter which had threatened to be difficult to compose was suddenly the easiest thing in the world. His only reservation when he knelt back and surveyed the six pages he had produced was that his black biro had run out after four and a half and he had found only a blue pen to replace it. Taking into account the red pen he had used for the illustrations, there were three different colours on the page. He worried it might look messy or indecisive. Conversely, it might look passionate, which was a good thing. That presentational issue aside, it was a job well done. He put the letter and the application form in the envelope provided.

It was the start of a beautiful morning beneath a bright winter moon. Ellis guessed at six o’clock. He stopped at the post box on Joy Lane, kissed the envelope once for good luck and despatched it. He walked up the hill, past Hedley Wilkinson’s frogs, across the fields above Medina Avenue, and on to the Thanet Way, where he jogged through the gaps between fast-moving lorries on the dual carriageway. When he reached Mac’s Café, the truck stop on the London-bound side, he looked back and wondered why the lorries had sounded so angry with him.

Ellis had placed his order. The lady behind the counter was staring back at him, trying not to laugh, and Ellis was confused. He looked at the lorry drivers at their tables. Each one was looking at him with amused curiosity.

“That didn’t make a word of sense, my love. Do you want to try again?” the lady said.

Ellis took a deep breath and repeated himself. “All the … ’n’ thing talkie ’bout, foodum you know, like freedom.”

He smiled, secure in the knowledge he had asked for the set breakfast for a second time.

“Like before, darling, I’m not getting you.”

“And a hottie,” Ellis added, “like Marianne did.”

The lady smiled kindly and the giggle she was trying to suppress crept out. Ellis smiled back wide-eyed. He looked like a child. He turned to the men in the café, his big blue eyes dilating merrily.

“Shame Marianne herenay, ain’t she?”

One of the men stood up and approached him. He was fat and hairless and gummy. He put his flabby arm round Ellis.

“You – want – to – eat?”

Ellis nodded and pointed to the lady behind the counter with an expression of despair.

“No, it’s not her fault, you were talking gobbledygook. You aren’t making sense,” the big man explained.

Ellis smiled. “Oh …” He nodded thoughtfully.

He walked across to a table where four men in boiler suits were eating and pointed to a mound of baked beans.

“You want beans?” the big man asked.

Ellis nodded, like Harpo Marx.

“He wants beans,” the man said to the lady.

Ellis pointed to the fried eggs.

“A fried egg? How many?”

Ellis lifted his index finger.

“One fried egg.”

Ellis withdrew his finger then stabbed it into the air again.

“Two fried eggs?”

The lady behind the counter took down the order. As the set breakfast came together item by item, the other men around the café willed Ellis on, nodding their heads without realising they were doing so, and when Ellis drew a line through the air to signal that his order was complete a round of applause rang out from the tables.

Strange bunch, Ellis thought to himself.

He took a seat in the corner and tucked a white paper napkin into his shirt. The lady brought him a mug of tea.

“Will Mac be cooking my foody?”

“Who, darling?” she asked.

Ellis looked at her in amazement and then pointed to the neon sign outside.

“Oh!” the lady said. “Mac! Yesss! He’s cooking it right now, sweetness …”

Ellis nodded his approval. There seemed little point going to a café called Mac’s if Mac wasn’t going to cook your breakfast. When his food arrived seeing the baked beans seemed to spark an idea.

“You know what I find not-ly good about the Buddhists?” he called out.

The café fell quiet. By the looks on their faces, none of the men there did know what Ellis’s objection to the Buddhists was.

“Are they the ones who believe in reincarnation?” he checked. “Well, whoever it is that do, they’re just as bad as the rest of everyone else. See, everyone slags off Christians for being all clever about everything and, you know, like you tell them how stupid all their stuff is and doesn’t add up to two plus two and they say ‘But we’ve got faith so we know anyway even if no prove’ and so there’s not a lot you can say to that really. Is there?”

There was no reply.

“Is there?”

Silence reigned. A number of plentifully loaded forks hovered just outside the mouths they were aimed for.

“Like picking a fight with fresh air. Religion. Same with recarnation milk. We believe you borny gain as another shrub and don’t remember the last time. Bingo and don’t forget the custard! You can’t argue with it ’cos you don’t remember the before. I was Horatio Nelson and you can’t prove I was not. Don’t mind the shaved-headed vibe and the robes though. It’s all bollocks. Who’s with me?”

This was a tough audience to warm up.

“Anyone else feel the same way?”

He awoke in a tight, windowless box-bedroom, on a narrow bed surrounded by blue-grey walls. In one corner, within reach, was a wash basin and a single towel hanging from a rail beneath it. In the other corner was a small wooden chest painted thick with white gloss. A drawer was missing. On top of the chest was a small red book. The words “Holy Bible” were in gold on the front and side and a purple silk page-marker extended from the bottom of the red gilded page edges. There was a sound of ticking, but Ellis could see no clock. The blue-grey paintwork was so thick and featureless that he couldn’t see the join between the walls and the ceiling. A lady entered. She was middle-aged and wearing the same sort of pink and white apron as the lady in Mac’s Café. She placed a mug of tea beside the Bible and sat on the edge of the bed. Her skin was shiny and there were greasy spots on her cheeks which led to her dimples. She smiled and her top front teeth protruded slightly and rested on her lower lip.