The Spider Truces (3 page)

And the problem, Ellis thought to himself, is that the house my dad has moved us into is a really, really old house. But I’ve got to remember they’re only here because they think it’s a cave. It’s nothing personal.

“I’m going to let you off,” he called out. “But don’t think I’ll be so lenient next time.”

He made himself an air hole and slept beneath the sheets.

When they lit the first fire of winter, the flames reflected in a glass-fronted cabinet which held trinkets, glasses, and china that Denny O’Rourke’s father had collected from all over the world.

“Now it’s home …” Denny purred.

An oil tank was installed at the back of the cottage and a new boiler in the walk-in cupboard in the kitchen. When the boiler men drove away, Mafi wedged the driveway gate open.

“I think it’s more friendly to leave that gate open seeing as we’ve just moved in,” she told Denny.

He shovelled a heap of left-over coal into potato sacks, which Ellis held open. They hosed the coal shed down and, it being Ellis’s bath time anyway, his dad soaked him through until Ellis nearly laughed himself sick. Mafi and Chrissie whitewashed the walls and the coal shed became the bike shed and the place for stacking up anything to be burnt. Sunday evenings was the time for bonfires and a charred pile established itself in the far corner of the orchard, next to the compost heap. A path to it was worn in the grass. Mafi kept her distance as glow-worms and grass snakes and toads lived around the compost and she welcomed them as readily as Ellis welcomed spiders.

Chrissie would stray from the bonfire and look through the back hedge to the working men’s club. It was an old wooden pavilion, patched with corrugated iron. There was a skittles alley out the back which had a tin roof but was open at the sides. From a vantage point beneath the hedge, where they lay on their bellies, Chrissie and Ellis watched the skittles matches and other less clear transactions between the men, in which money and goods and whispers were exchanged. Saturday and Sunday evenings, when women were allowed, were occasionally rowdy and Ellis heard noises which he could not account for and his sister declined to explain.

She often spent time alone there, hidden within the gnarled old hedge, hugging her knees to her chin, watching the inanimate wooden building. When she caught herself thinking of the change that had entered their lives with their mother’s leaving, she would scold herself and some force would rear up in her, a defiance in a girl with no previous inclination to defy, an instinct to push blindly towards wherever the new boundaries might be. The tools with which she pushed were not unique to her. Cigarettes and attitude. Harmless boys and dangerous girlfriends. Things that did not truly interest her but appeared to be what she ought to show interest in, because the previous things were those of a girl’s life and she couldn’t pretend to herself that she was a girl any more.

With Ellis she was sometimes censorious and other times tender as she responded unsurely to the instinct to protect him and the temptation to stifle him and preserve the adoring little brother that suited her well.

She liked to make a mug of tea for her dad when he returned from work and then leave him alone. Denny drank his tea at the kitchen table, sitting in his shirt and braces, with his suit jacket hanging on the kitchen door. Sometimes he would stare into space, his top lip resting on the rim of the mug. Other times, he drew sketches of the renovations he had in mind and wrote lists, in unintelligibly small handwriting, of jobs to do on the cottage.

Ellis would follow his dad upstairs and sit on the bed whilst Denny changed into his “messy clothes”. More often than not, Ellis would examine the framed photograph on Denny O’Rourke’s bedside table. It had always been there, in the old house too. It was a black and white image of a lighthouse on a shingle shoreline. In the foreground was a length of railing from a ship’s deck and between the railing and the shore, surrounded by a choppy sea, was a sandbank upon which a fishing boat had run aground.

“What was the name of your ship?”

“You know. You’ve asked me a million times.”

“Don’t exaggerate. The
Hororata
. And you drank a lot of rum all the time.”

“Only the once.”

“How old were you, again?”

Denny stamped his feet into his work boots and beamed his son a smile. “Seventeen, when I drank the rum.”

“Seventeen is only four more than Chrissie,” Ellis said.

Denny’s face altered a little, the way it did before he changed the direction of a conversation.

“The great thing about having no carpets in this house yet, Ellis, is that I can wear my boots indoors and not get told off.” He grinned and headed out of the room.

“Who’s going to tell you off?” Ellis asked.

Denny faltered but kept on walking. Ellis followed him down to the utility room where antique ledge and brace doors were stacked up on Denny’s workbench, ready for planing. Ellis watched his dad measure up the doorframes in the hallway and repeat the measurements under his breath, “74 by 38, 74 by 38, 74 by 38 …”

“34, 78, 44, 68, 78, 34 …” Ellis whispered.

“You little sod!” Denny said, and chased Ellis into the orchard where he tickled him purple and left him for dead in the old goose bath.

Returning inside, Denny noticed that damp stains had appeared on the hallway ceiling.

“Bugger!” he muttered. He rolled up his sleeves and sat on the bottom stair to think. Ellis joined him, breathless from laughing. He stroked the hairs on his dad’s arm, his fingers dwarfed by the contours of muscles and veins.

“Change of plan, dear boy,” Denny said. “I’m going to need your help. We’re going into the attic.”

There were three attics in the cottage. The one immediately above the top of the stairs was the least interesting, in Ellis’s opinion. The water tank was in it but the rafters were bare so nothing was stored up there. The second attic was known as “the hatch” and Ellis was the only one small enough to do anything useful inside it. Entry to it was through a hatch in a cupboard used to store suitcases. Inside the hatch, the roof was vast and slanting but claustrophobically low. Even Ellis could only fit in on his hands and knees. Denny directed his son across the rafters until he was kneeling directly above the hallway ceiling, but Ellis found no sign of dripping water.

“You sure?” his dad asked.

“Yup!” Ellis confirmed proudly.

He sat next to his dad in the suitcase cupboard whilst Denny deliberated what to do. It was like being in a tent together, where everything was gentle and close-up, especially the faint growling noises Denny made when he was thinking long and hard.

The following Saturday, Denny removed the Kent peg tiles from the dilapidated garage in which Mafi kept her Morris Minor and used them to replace the damaged ones on the roof of the cottage.

“But there weren’t any leaks in the hatch attic,” Ellis protested, from the bottom of the ladder.

He got no reply. His dad was preoccupied. Chrissie had been gone for a few hours and he didn’t know where. When she showed up for lunch, Denny was subdued and attempted to find out where she’d been without asking her directly, a process that amused Mafi.

“You’ll always be very careful, won’t you?” he said to Chrissie, out of nowhere. “When we’re not all together. Don’t do anything silly or unusual, will you?”

His voice was grave but not unkind. He said it as if the thought was a new one but Chrissie had heard it from him often in the last five years. She smiled at him reassuringly.

“No sweat, Dad.”

“I’m allowed to do silly things though, aren’t I, because I’m only nine?” Ellis asked.

“We can do silly things when we’re all together, at home, safe and sound,” his dad answered.

“But I still don’t get why you are putting tiles up there when there wasn’t any drips,” Ellis said, faithful to his own unique train of thought.

“I know, Ellis, but somewhere that roof is damaged and hopefully this’ll do the trick.”

“But what if it doesn’t?”

“I’ll have to sell you to the slave trade to raise money to employ a roofer.”

Chrissie laughed, whilst Ellis weighed up whether or not he liked the sound of this.

“I wouldn’t mind being a slave if it was in some interesting country.”

“You’re my slave,” Denny reminded him.

“Then you ought to pay me!”

“You don’t pay slaves, you spaz,” Chrissie said.

“Charmingly put,” Mafi said. “What have you been up to, Chrissie? I haven’t seen you all morning.”

“I’ve cured the common cold, cut a hit LP, written to Idi Amin about his diet and concocted a formula to rid the world of Communism which I’ll unveil after lunch.”

“Chrissie?” Denny said.

“Yes, Daddio?”

“Remember late 1973?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“That was the last time you gave a straight answer to a question.”

Chrissie opened her mouth to rattle off a response but couldn’t come up with anything. Her dad smiled, victorious, and she buried her head in his chest with a stupid smile. Mafi reached for her handkerchief. Her watery eyes spoke only of how she loved being part of this nonsense.

“In 1973 I was six,” said Ellis, counting his fingers. “But now I’m nine.”

Chrissie stared at him bug-eyed. “Reeeeally, Ellis? Do keep us informed!”

His children were still wrestling on the front lawn as Denny O’Rourke surveyed the roof from the foot of the driveway. Their screaming and laughter filled the air. He smiled to himself and leant back against the gatepost and as he did so he felt the breath of a woman on his neck.

“You must be the widower.”

Denny turned. The middle-aged woman standing far too close to him was handsome, a rural version of elegant, with shining eyes that swallowed him whole. Her voice was throaty and coarse and she stared into him as she spoke.

“Yes. Very nice indeed. I see what they mean.”

An impulse Denny had not hosted for half a decade was upon him. He introduced himself and learned that she was Bridget and she ran the village shop that formed a triangle at the foot of the green with the post office and the pub.

“Come in and set up your account. If the shop’s empty, just come straight upstairs.”

She pressed her hands against her rib cage and filled her lungs, in a gesture of her appreciation of this crisp winter’s day that left Denny helpless but to imagine the strong, full, impressive physique beneath her clothing. For a moment, as Bridget watched the children, Denny let himself fall deep into her body.

“Yes. Very nice …” she repeated, and left.

Denny found his son and daughter staring at him. Ellis burst into laughter that made his face vibrate. Chrissie stared angrily at him and said, “NO!”

Denny shook his head dismissively and smiled, swatting away her fears and his own lust. He kicked the wedge from beneath the driveway gate and let it swing shut behind him as he returned to work. Ellis followed him inside.

The third attic in the cottage was above Ellis’s bedroom, the door to it directly over his pillows, and it was where family heirlooms, Christmas decorations and dressing-up rags and costumes were stored. Ellis found his bed pushed aside and the ladders propped against the open attic door.

He called out, “Can I come up?”

“If you’re careful.”

The attic was long and narrow and low enough to force Denny on to his hands and knees. There was a bare light bulb hanging from the rafters, which blinded Ellis as he climbed in. He found his dad peering over the end wall. It was a strange wall, Ellis noticed, in that it didn’t reach the roof.

“What’s the other side of this wall?” Ellis whispered.

“I think this must be the join in the roof where they extended the cottage. The bit we’re in was added two hundred years ago but the other side of this wall is what was the original little house.”

Denny leant further over the wall and strained. “I think … that what I’m looking at, Ellis, is the slope of the original roof. It used to be on the outside of the cottage. It’s four hundred years old, Ellis. Think of that.”

“Older than Mafi.”

“Yes …”

“Has it got tiles on?” Ellis asked.

“They’d have taken them off and used them on the new roof. It’s just the timbers.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll tell you, Ellis,” Denny said, “there’s a helluva lot of roof on this old cottage. I hope there’re no nasty surprises.”

Ellis liked his dad saying things like “helluva” because he didn’t use words like that very often.

“It’s a really big house,” Ellis agreed. “Lots of nooks and crannies.”

Denny smiled to himself. There was something he liked about his nine-year-old son saying things like “nooks and crannies”.

“So, what room is under that old roof?” Ellis asked.

“My bedroom,” Denny said.

“Oh, yeah. Can I look?”

Denny lifted his son up to see over the wall. The bulb threw enough light to see the faint outline of the old, sloping roof. As Ellis’s eyes adjusted, a skeleton of rafters and beams materialised in front of him. The timbers disappeared into a well of blackness. He wondered what could be down there. It was the darkest, most unreachable place he could imagine a house to have. A place not originally intended to exist, brought about by change. If there are places one never goes, places that one would never ever have reason to find oneself in, if such places exist, then this well was one of them.

In his dreams, Ellis walked through the cottage and found secret doorways to hidden rooms and stairways. For a few moments, upon waking, he’d believe they were real.

Behind Denny’s bed, set into a low wall beneath the slope of the old roof, there was a wooden door, three feet high, covered in syrupy black paint. And although it was just like the doors in his dreams, Ellis was scared of it. He saw it as a mouth that could eat him alive.

Pholcus phalangioides
lived amongst the ceiling beams in the downstairs of the cottage. Back then, Ellis knew them simply as daddy-long-legs. He wasn’t too bothered by them as they showed no tendency to descend into his air space. Two
Nuctenea umbratica
took up residence over the front door. When winter came they ceased replenishing their webs but, by then, Ellis had taken to using the kitchen door instead.

The downstairs toilet had no door, just a temporary curtain destined to remain there for many years. Hanging from a nail in the wall was a paint-splattered cassette player with a tape of Strauss’s
Four Last Songs
in it. A drawn curtain and the sound of Strauss meant that the toilet was in use. This room was heavily inhabited by various orb-web spiders. Most of them were too small to see but their webs were in the angles of the doorframe, window and pipework. Ellis couldn’t go in there.

The garden shed was also a complete no-go area. It was jammed full with spiders and webs. The first, and only, time Ellis stepped inside it, he fainted. Mafi found him lying half in and half out of the shed and he was rushed to hospital, for fear of meningitis.

It angered Ellis that the shed was held by the spiders because it meant he couldn’t get his hands on all the things inside it, his outdoor toys and Denny’s tools, without asking either Mafi, Chrissie or his dad to go in there for him. He believed that the shed was where all the bad and deformed spiders lived. It was the home of the lawless. The spiders there were freakishly large and jet black in colour; they sat around playing Russian roulette. They ate each other without a care and were weighed down by weird growths. The shed was the wild west of the spider world. Ellis couldn’t even walk past it. He had to run at full speed and as he did so he’d shout bitterly, “You are leper spiders, so rubbish they won’t even let you live in the cottage. Everyone hates you! I’m not scared of you!”

At night, he heard sounds of movement which had no explanation. Asking about the creaks and groans in the cottage caused his dad to tense up or change the subject, the same way as asking about his mum, and in the absence of an explanation Ellis suspected that the noises were spiders turning in their sleep. The creaks grew noisier in the second winter as a freezing cold January was met by an unusually mild February. April showers arrived a month early and set in for three weeks, by the end of which the hallway ceiling was turning brown again with water marks. Denny O’Rourke cursed the stains and Ellis knew not to bother him.

Ellis went to his sister’s room but the door was locked.

“Let me in.”

“No thanks,” Chrissie said, from the other side of the door.

“Please.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“Dad’s got us a puppy!”

Ellis listened to a crashing sound as Chrissie fell off her chair, thundered across the room, grappled with the lock and flung the door open.

“Where?” she said breathlessly.

Ellis stepped into her room and threw himself down on the bed.

“Let’s do something,” he said, lazily.

She glared at him. “Have we got a puppy?”

“No. I’m bored. Do you wanna do something together?”

Chrissie skulked back to her desk.

“Yeah. I’d like to play with our puppy, you horrible little pile of dogshit. Go and bother Dad.”

“He’s fixing the roof. It’s falling down, apparently.”

“Fascinating,” she said, and returned to her work.

“Why are you always in your room doing homework nowadays?” he asked.

“They’re called O levels and they’re the devil’s work,” she replied. “But they’ll be over in June and then I’ll never work again.”

“Until your A levels.”

“Not for me, buster.”

“Dad won’t like that.”

“He’ll get over it. You can be his golden boy.”

“You know I’m rubbish at school. I’m having an allotment.”

“That’s not a job, Ellis. That’s a hobby, like chess or riding or peeking at my friends through the curtain when they’re taking a pee.”

“I don’t!”

“Never said you did, derr-brain. Is lunch ready? Is that why you’re up here?”

“No. I wanted to ask Dad something but he’s busy, so I came to ask you instead.”

“Do I want you to go to boarding school in China? Yes please.” She beamed him a psychotic smile.

“Have spiders got eyes? Can they see us?”

Chrissie slumped and pulled a face. “That’s worth failing an O level for? What sort of a question is that, Ellie-belly?”

And as he started to protest at being called that, she jumped off her chair and tickled him until he begged for mercy and agreed to be her slave for the rest of the day.

The spare room at the top of the stairs was bare and
sun-filled
. It sucked in warm rays of light even in winter, as if awaiting the arrival of someone wise. The vast cherry tree laid its fingertips on the window sill. Denny decided this room should be Mafi’s bedroom and her bedsit downstairs a proper living room.

“We don’t need a spare bedroom because we don’t have any visitors,” Chrissie muttered, as she and Ellis helped Denny carry Mafi’s bed into the room. Chrissie slipped and the bed fell against the wall, tearing a hole in the wallpaper. Behind the tear was a black-painted beam. It was set back into the wall and the wallpaper had been pasted over it, shoddily, leaving a gap between the two. As Denny peeled the wallpaper away, Ellis watched the beam emerge. It was colossal. Near the corner of the room, it disappeared behind plasterwork into the centre of the cottage.

“How could anyone slap wallpaper over a beam like this?” Denny sighed. “We’ll sort this out next weekend. Can’t leave it like this.”

“Then Mafi will have a lovely beam in her bedroom and we can paint it shiny black and hang stuff on it.”

“That’s right,” Denny said. “These things matter.”

But they didn’t matter to Mafi. She decided that the best place for her wardrobe was against that wall. It would cover the beam anyway and there was more pressing work for Denny to do on the cottage. When she made decisions they tended to be final, owing not so much to a profound strength of opinion on her part as to her preference for keeping debate on trivial issues brief. Chrissie pinned a paper horseshoe to the beam for good luck and then the beam disappeared behind the wardrobe, to remain out of sight for as long as Mafi lived.

At six o’clock every morning, Mafi took a cup of tea back to bed and watched the cherry tree. She called it her special time, when she felt lucky to be alive, and she called the years since she left the pub her “borrowed life”, the life after hers was meant to have finished. Ellis encouraged her stories of being landlady at the Gate Inn. His favourites were of Mr Prag getting stuck inside the grandfather clock, the piglets falling into the beer cellar, and the war: of Nissen huts going up along the canal, doodlebugs and Mafi refusing evacuation to Hampshire. She taught him and Chrissie how to clean a glass properly and how to shuffle a pack.

In spring, the garden looked dewy and luscious from Mafi’s bedroom window. Ellis studied her face. She was lost in thought and had barely noticed him come in. From beneath them, in the dining room, came the sound of Denny’s electric shaver. Ellis wondered what part of her life Mafi was revisiting. She had never married. Chrissie claimed she had been engaged to a man in the war and he died of TB. Ellis didn’t know if this was true. He liked Mafi as she was, old and unmarried and inclined towards throaty laughter.

“Ellis, old thing,” she said, “I’m afraid to say that cherry tree is not well.”

The woodsmen came on the same day Ellis found spotted jelly bubbles in the pond on Eggpie Lane. They said the tree had to come down. Before they returned, Ellis visited the pond four more times. The black spots grew into semicircles and by late March the jelly had fallen apart and a sprawl of wriggling tadpoles appeared. When he took his dad to see them they found a mass of froth on the water’s surface.

“They’ve disappeared,” Ellis said.

“They do,” his dad replied.

In April, Mafi showed Ellis how to tap a bird’s nest and set off the calls of baby blackbirds inside. Sometimes, the young poked their heads out and Ellis caught a glimpse of their open beaks clamouring for food. By the time the woodsmen came, the nests in the garden were empty and the shrubs nearby filled with birdsong. Cats prowled beneath the bushes. Chrissie tried to adopt them and Mafi shooed them away.

Denny O’Rourke took photos of the cherry tree and Mafi unravelled the roses from its trunk and laid them out across the lawn.

“We’ll plant a new one,” Denny said.

“How long will it take?” Ellis asked.

“When you’re as old as Mafi, the new tree will be half the size of that one,” Chrissie said.

Ellis sighed. That was far too slow.

“You plant trees for the next generations,” Denny explained.

Chrissie joined her hands together and chanted “
Aaaaa-men
.” Ellis copied her. Their dad marched them away in a head lock, one under each arm.

“I’ve a pair of idiots for children,” he told the woodsmen.

Ellis watched from Mafi’s bedroom window. The woodsman with a thick orange beard dangled from a rope within touching distance. A chainsaw hung from his waist and a cigarette was wedged behind his ear. Ellis felt Mafi’s breathing on his neck as they watched. After lunch, a young apprentice woodsman turned up on foot and was bullied by the two men for being late. They barked orders at him all afternoon. Later, the apprentice was caught sharing his cigarettes and hip flask with Chrissie. The bearded man dragged him away and struck him.

After nightfall, from his pillow, Ellis heard shouting and doors slamming. Chrissie ran past Ellis’s bedroom to her own and his dad thundered after her. Later, Ellis found Chrissie lying under her blanket, still dressed. She had been crying and now she was staring at nothing and twisting the ends of her long hair round her fingers.

“What happened?” Ellis whispered.

She pulled him close. “Dad caught me crawling back through the hedge,” she whispered.

“Where had you been?”

“Drinking beer in the skittle alley with that lad.”

“The man with the drink in his pocket?”

“It’s called a hip flask.”

She held Ellis’s face in her hands. Her eyes twinkled.

“Ellis …”

“What?”

“I saw a man and a woman doing it, in the toilets. I saw them actually doing it.”

Ellis stared at her wide-eyed and she saw the need for clarification. “Having sex, Ellis. They made these ridiculous noises. Don’t mention it to Dad or Mafi or anyone.”

Ellis nodded his head earnestly. He didn’t know what she was talking about. But, feeling that he should respond to what she clearly considered momentous news, he said with equal seriousness: “Another interesting thing is that the man with the chainsaw never smokes the cigarette behind his ear. It just stays there all day.”

The Formula 1 racetrack in the hallway was renowned on the F1 circuit for its challenging combination of breakneck quarry tiling and slow rug. Because the ceiling beams were lushly decorated with berried holly from Dibden Lane, the pre-Christmas Grand Prix was coming from the jungle, somewhere in South America – Ellis’s commentary didn’t specify where. Or it was, until the appearance of a house spider straddling the chicane caused a cancellation. The spider was huge and made Ellis’s stomach churn and his feet tingle, as if he were standing on a cliff edge.

“Right!” he hissed. “That’s it! I want a meeting with the most highest-up of spiders. It’s not fair!”

There was no reply and the sound of his own voice embarrassed him. He wondered if Ivy had heard him. She was the only other person in the cottage. Ivy, who was unfeasibly old in Ellis’s opinion, lived on the lane and babysat for Denny O’Rourke on the rare occasions when Mafi couldn’t do it. She was reading the local paper in the kitchen. Ellis had shut her in there so that he could commentate on his F1 race without feeling self-conscious. Ivy did not remove spiders. She had made that clear from the start.

Ellis grabbed his toy cars and made a run for the kitchen, leaping over the spider and slamming the door behind him.

“Impersonating a stampede, Ellis?” Ivy muttered, without looking up.

“When are Dad and Mafi getting back?” Ellis asked.

“Don’t know,” she murmured.

Ellis walked on the spot to relieve himself of the last shivers of repulsion.

“Do you need to go to the toilet, Ellis?”

“No, thanks. Do you?”

“Don’t be cheeky.” She put down the paper and lit a cigarette.

“Don’t suppose you want to come outside and play in the garden?”

She shook her head.

“Are they my dad’s cigarettes?”

“No, they’re mine, thank you for checking.”

“Wasn’t checking. He wouldn’t mind.” Ellis put his boots on. “You’re not like a real babysitter.”

“Aren’t I? How’s that?”

“Not out. Well, you don’t seem to like being with children very much and you’re not very chatty and you don’t like playing.”

“If I wasn’t here they wouldn’t be out buying you Christmas presents and you’d get nothing.”

Ellis thought this through. She had a point. He stamped his boots on and threw on his coat. He felt braver with boots on.

“You don’t like doing stuff with me,” he concluded. “That’s what I’m getting at. I like you but you’re not much fun.”

On the bookshelves in the dining room Ellis found a large hardback volume of
Jane’s Fighting Ships
. An idea had come to him as he was putting on his boots. He hadn’t decided on the idea exactly, nor advanced it once it had appeared in his head. He simply realised that he was going to do this certain thing and that it was better for him not to stop and think about it.