The Spider Truces (29 page)

“You don’t calculate your overtime at the normal rate,” he explained. “Welcome to the joys of time-and-a-half and double-bubble.”

“I’ve earned six hundred quid,” Ellis muttered in disbelief.

“Doing something you enjoy … sick, isn’t it!” Milek said.

That night, exuberantly happy and with an audience of strangers, Ellis announced that he was spending his first pay packet on taking his dad to Paris. It was an idea born of champagne and Japanese lager but as soon as he’d said it he knew he was going to do it. When most places were closed, Milek and his friends led Ellis to a basement bar with black leather sofas and neon floors and, here, Milek took Ellis aside.

“Ellis … are you sober enough to listen and take heed?”

“Yes …” and Ellis tried very hard to be.

“The following is non-negotiable, so listen well. You are working for me and when you are out enjoying yourself you are doing it on the money I pay you. You can party, you can drink, you can get high, you can enjoy. But no cocaine. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, you are banned from cocaine and if you break that I’ll kick you out. I’ve been in your father’s house and I’ve been close to his daughter. I will not allow you to do that drug. No second chances.”

“Are you banned, too?”

Milek nodded. “These days.”

Ellis paid his dad the five hundred pounds he had borrowed since moving back home. He gave it to him in cash, placed within the pages of Fodor’s guidebook to Paris.

In the September sunshine, they walked in the Jardin de Luxembourg, stopping every quarter of an hour for Denny to catch his breath, on a bench within the chestnut groves, or on the low wall around the fountains, beside the lake where Denny stared at the toy sailboats. His hair had turned a little greyer in his illness and in the bright sunlight it was silvery and handsome.

“I’ve wanted to come to this city all my life,” Denny sighed. “And now I’m here. Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

“Easy, isn’t it?” Ellis replied.

Every hour or so, Ellis would ask his dad how he was feeling or if he was tired. “I feel good,” Denny would reply. Only on the second afternoon, when they had walked through the Marais after lunch, did he need to rest. He caught a taxi back to the tiny Hotel de Maison on rue Monge and fell asleep to daydreams of buying a garret in the Place des Vosges. As Denny slept, Ellis walked the halls of the Musée d’Orsay and bought a print of Redon’s
Les Yeux Clos
because it made him think of his mother. He crossed from the museum to the river and reflected on the day.

It’s similar, he told himself, to when you glance up at the sky and the clouds are the shape of a face or a mandolin. You look away and glance up again but either the shape has gone or it’s there but without the magic of first seeing it. That’s what it’s like to walk into the Sainte Chapelle for the first time, if you’ve not been told what to expect. That’s what it’s like when the towering columns of thirteenth-century stained glass first flood into your vision, causing a sensory double-take at the volume of beauty in front of you as you arch backwards to take it all in. At least, that’s what it was like when I took my dad there today.

“My God, Ellis,” Denny whispered, putting his arm round his son. “We’re in heaven. Thank you, dear boy, thank you.”

My pleasure, Ellis whispered, to the fast-flowing river.

Denny telephoned Chrissie from a payphone on the street. When he stepped out of the booth, he wandered away thoughtfully and Ellis followed.

“Oh dear,” Denny muttered, “I think your big sister is jealous of our trip.”

They wandered towards the dome of the Panthéon and sat in the Place de la Contrescarpe. “I feel inspired to plan my travels when the evenings set in,” Denny declared.

“And I feel inspired to rent myself a little pad in London,” his son replied.

“I’m glad to hear it. Good for you. Good old Milek.”

They talked about the countries they would visit together and they drank cognac and watched French women.

“Wonderful …” Denny O’Rourke muttered.

They fell silent for an hour, lost in daydreams and a cool air that promised the autumn.

When he lost his dad, Ellis lost the one person who knew truly how to be silent. The silences they shared in Paris were their masterpieces, at the end of a lifetime’s work. In that city, Ellis O’Rourke took care of Denny O’Rourke for the first time and it made him feel that he and his dad had known each other for ever and that they were each other’s father and each other’s son.

On a Thursday morning in mid-October, Denny O’Rourke rang his daughter and then his son and told them to come home that evening for dinner.

“The spot on my lungs has halved in size, more than halved in fact. We’re looking good!”

“Let’s get pissed!” Ellis said.

“You said it was only a shadow,” Chrissie replied.

They got drunk on champagne and Denny went to bed undecided as to whether he should take his chemo pills after so much alcohol. Ellis and Chrissie settled down in their beds soon after midnight, as the long graceful sweeps of wind which had buffeted the evening became more forceful.

Panic-stricken, Chrissie woke Ellis at five in the morning. “There’s the most peculiar noise coming from Dad’s bedroom!”

“Go back to bed!” Ellis grunted.

“How can you sleep! There’s a hell of a racket in the garden. I don’t know what it is.”

Ellis sat bolt upright. “You don’t know what it is?” He cupped his hands round his ears and listened theatrically. “It’s wind, a natural occurrence. It won’t bite.”

“Come and sleep next to me, Ellie.”

“No. Chrissie, you treat me like a right dork when it suits you. You can’t have it both ways. Now let me sleep.”

She returned at a quarter to six and this time she switched the light on and tore the blankets away.

“I’m not fucking around, Ellis! This house sounds like it’s going to collapse! There is the most terrible noise coming from Dad’s bedroom window and I cannot wake him.”

Ellis didn’t argue this time. He went to the window and looked out. “Fucking hell!”

In Denny’s room, the window frame was groaning. The glass heaved as if it were trying to draw breath. The wind howled around the house and outside, silhouetted against an angry, early morning sky, were the walnut trees, bent by the gale.

“Never seen anything like it,” Ellis muttered.

They pushed and prodded Denny but he didn’t stir. Chrissie resorted to shouting in his ear.

“Dad! You’ve got to wake up!”

Denny opened his eyes, touched Chrissie’s face and said, “By all means ask the captain but he won’t be able to come about in snowfall. We’re not even at Mauritius, you know.” He turned over and went back to sleep.

“I’d stick my neck out and say Dad opted for taking his medication last night, on top of the booze,” Ellis said.

At that moment, the bedroom wall let out a groan. The glass cracked and the entire window casement was sucked out of the wall and hurled across the garden. The storm poured in through the gaping hole. Ellis and Chrissie stared
open-mouthed
whilst their father slept on.

The shed had been picked up and deposited in a shattered heap on the other side of the garden. As Ellis dragged a section of it towards the house he was thrown backwards and sideways by the gusts.

“It’s amazing out there! Amazing!” he spluttered exuberantly, as Chrissie held the front door open for him.

They had to fall against the door to close it. She helped him upstairs with the shed panel and they found their dad standing by the bed, looking as if he’d been electrocuted.

“There’s a hole in the house,” he said to them, with pupils the size of pinholes. “It’s like going round the Cape. Fantastic! Let’s go outside!”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Chrissie said.

Chrissie took Denny downstairs. Ellis slid the panel across the floor. As soon as he held it up, it was sucked out of his hands and flew at the wall, covering the hole where the window had been. The room fell silent.

“Like slaying a dragon …” Ellis gasped.

When he’d caught his breath, he nailed the panel to the wall and then he went downstairs where his sister was making tea and his dad was buttering a piece of toast.

“Dad’s got the munchies,” Chrissie said knowingly.

“This toast couldn’t taste any better if it was served up on Selina Scott’s thighs!” Denny O’Rourke announced.

“You’re off your tits, Dad,” Ellis said.

“Ellis! You can’t say that!” Chrissie protested.

Denny nodded his agreement with a mouth full of toast.

“He’s right, dear girl, I think I am.”

Ellis had not slayed the dragon that night. No one had. The dragon slayed the town and the park. It slayed the wooded plateau leading to Ide Hill. It slayed millions. Oak, beech, yew, chestnut. Denny said that Jim Croucher up at Emmetts wept when he saw the devastation. On the television news, people in Jerusalem were praying for England’s trees.

“At least it was natural,” Denny said. “At least it wasn’t us.”

A month after the storm, the phone rang at midnight, waking Denny.

“Hello, Dad!” Ellis was in a call box.

“Are you all right?” Denny asked.

“Yup.”

“Sober?”

“Just about. Wasn’t earlier. But are you, more importantly?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?” A smile broke across Denny’s face, one of the many that no one would ever see.

“’Cos I need picking up.”

“Why so late and why the surprise visit, not that I mind either?”

“Well … long story really, but it would be particularly nice to see you. That OK?”

“Course it’s OK. You at the station?”

“Well … I’m at a station.”

“Which one?”

“Yeah, that would be my next question too. Battle station, near Hastings.”

“That’s an hour away!”

“This is true.”

“Why are you there?”

“Because I met this girl in a bar and we went out and I said I’d see her home and first of all I presumed she lived in London and even when I found out she didn’t I still thought she was going to invite me in for the night but when we got to her door she said ‘Thanks, see you’ and shut the door and by the time I’d walked back to the station the last train had gone.”

“You saw her home from London to Battle?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I think you know why.”

“And she didn’t invite you in?”

“Like I said.”

“And she shut the door on you?”

“Your hearing’s not impaired by the chemo, then.”

“She didn’t even invite you in for a coffee?”

“Not even a Jimmy Riddle.”

“You caught the train with her for an hour and a half and walked her home and she shut the door on you?”

“After saying goodnight, yes.”

Denny roared with laughter and called his son an idiot. Driving through the darkness, he felt propelled forward by the happiness of being a father, and grateful to be included in his son’s nonsense. Next morning, he cooked a fried breakfast and wanted to know more.

“So how does it work in this day and age, Ellis? Meeting a girl, getting to know her, courting her.”

“It doesn’t work,” Ellis said.

Denny broke open his fried egg and spread the yolk across his toast. He dipped his mushrooms in a pool of melted butter and ate them one by one.

“Your mother’s laugh reduced me to jelly. She made me feel wonderful. I know things are different today and there’s no harm in … whatever the correct term is …”

“Putting it about a bit?” Ellis offered.

“Beautifully put. But I don’t think the journey all the way to Battle is worth it unless it’s for someone who makes you feel …”

Denny shook his head, unable to find the words. He smiled at his son, with a look of openness and pleasure that Ellis was unfamiliar with.

“… someone who makes you feel like jelly inside. You’ll meet someone special. And when you do, put her first in all things and love her unconditionally.”

Denny set about his bacon. Ellis watched his father and wondered where the hint of exuberance had sprung from.

“It was fun last night,” Ellis said.

Denny nodded. “Not the fun you were hoping for.”

“Better,” Ellis said.

They ate then in silence. Ellis cleared the plates away. Denny made fresh tea and set the pot down on the table.

“One can afford to just go with the flow a bit and not worry about everything,” Ellis said, using the term “one” for the first and, he suspected, last time in his life.

“One can,” Denny said, stirring the pot.

Then, Ellis said, “When I think of my mum … when I think of being born … there’s just this empty space. I don’t know how to be close to a woman. I don’t mean physically close, I mean really close. I don’t want some other woman to show me love until my mum has. But she isn’t ever going to do that.”

“But she did,” Denny said.

Ellis continued. “At five o’clock on a winter’s morning, in the darkness, Chloe Purcell feels the way I imagine good love feels.”

Denny nodded his understanding. “You know,” he whispered, tapping his son’s hand with his finger, “you need to avoid sleeping with other men’s wives in the future.”

They both breathed a faint laugh and Ellis felt a familiar sense of bewilderment come upon him, a bewilderment particular to the memory of Chloe.

“Dad, I’m not trying to make excuses, but …”

“What? It’s all right, you can say it.”

“She kind of … seduced me.”

Denny grinned. “You poor thing. How terrifying. How lovely.”

And he loved the reluctance in his son to say anything that might sound ungallant.

“Ellis,” Denny said. “Your mother loved you. She went away because she felt the world was happening without her.”

“I can understand that feeling,” Ellis said.

“I know you can and that’s why I get scared by you.”

Then there was silence and Ellis thought of the bundle of letters in his dad’s locked drawer. This was the moment to ask if he could read them.