The Spider Truces (34 page)

“Just listen,” Gerd had advised him, after his failure to stick it out in the Anvil Bar and Grill. “And when you’ve listened, listen some more and then you can photograph … maybe.”

Cynthia seemed set on calling Ellis “Eli”. He decided to let it go. A comfortable opportunity to correct her hadn’t materialised and suddenly it was too late. She got distracted by a ninetieth birthday party and Ellis escaped outside where the air tasted crystal clear. Ellis sucked it in and thought of the meadow above Innsbruck where he had slept in the long grass. He found Michalis Eugenikos sitting on the railroad track reading a paper.

“Don’t get run over,” Ellis said.

“One train a day,” Michalis replied, “and that comes at night.”

“Every night?”

“Every night.”

“Gerd will be pleased.”

Michalis folded up his paper and slapped it down on the dust track.

“I don’t want to disturb your paper,” Ellis said.

“You’re not.” Michalis stood up and wedged his hands into his pockets. He was barely five feet tall, a foot shorter than his wife. He wore a bow tie and his shirt-sleeves were rolled to below his elbows. He had thin straight hair, more of it than he might have had at eighty-four years of age. It was combed back and he occasionally ran the palm of his hand over it.

“I’m not really a newspapers man,” Michalis sighed. “Just like to get out of earshot of my wife now and then.”

Ellis watched fast-moving clouds reflected on the silver silos. Michalis yawned. The railroad tracks stretched infinitely into the flat open plain.

“How long you been on the road?”

“A month.”

“I’ll tell you something for free,” Michalis said. “Where you are standing is just about as far as it’s possible to be in this great country from the ocean shore.”

“How far are we talking?” Ellis asked.

Michalis pointed due east along the tracks, then due west. “Either way you go, more than a thousand miles.”

Ellis grimaced at the thought. “But what about going to the seaside?”

Michalis shrugged. “I’ve raised three children, seven grandchildren, two great-grandchildren so far. Love my wife, though by Christ she can talk. Love my home town, though by Christ that can talk too. But I’ve never seen the ocean.”

“Never?” Ellis was incredulous.

The old man looked at him inquisitively. “So, what’s bugging you?” Michalis asked.

“Me?” Ellis was taken aback. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

Michalis dismissed Ellis’s answer, swatting it away with one hand.

“Something’s on your mind,” he said, wandering away, back towards the Candy Kitchen. “I still drive at my age,” he called out. “If you ever need a ride.”

Ellis looked west, where the clouds marched towards the horizon, slipping through an invisible slit between the domed sky and the land. The sky hummed a monotone drone, as if the clouds were scraping against it as they hurried through. He shut his eyes. For all the open space around him, Ellis felt he could scarcely find enough air to fill his lungs. A panic swept through him, a fear that he would not breathe in again after he next exhaled. When he opened his eyes, the strength of the sunlight made him blink and in the highest part of the sky, where the clouds were still, he saw the shape of his dad’s face amongst the white wisps.

“Found me,” he whispered.

Ellis couldn’t sleep. He felt a thousand miles of America press against each wall of the motel room. Then he heard the train. He watched Gerd begin to stir. The rumble strengthened, the railroad crossing bells sounded and, on cue, Gerd’s eyes opened. The German stared at the ceiling, his body motionless, then rolled his eyes to the side and saw Ellis watching him. Ellis winked at him and whispered, “
Tray-ayyyy
-n!”

Gerd sat up and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I’m gonna count the bastards!” he said, lighting a cigarette.

The train was 134 carriages long. Gerd was wide awake and wore the haunted look of the sleep-deprived. He switched on his bedside light, dragged himself into the bathroom and, without bothering to shut the door, took a pee. As the toilet flushed, he screamed and locked himself inside the bathroom.

“What the hell’s wrong?” Ellis asked.

“Fuck me!” Gerd said, trying to be calm.

Ellis went to the door. “What is it?”

“Spider … the size of a train!” Gerd shouted.

The spider was on the bedroom floor, tucked against the wall by the bathroom door. It was huge. Ellis gazed at it as if it were the first familiar face he’d seen in America.

“Hello, old friend,” he whispered.

Gerd shuffled nervously on the other side of the door.

“Ellis …?” he said. His voice was meek and it made Ellis laugh. “What are you laughing about?”

“Nothing.”

“You little shit!”

Ellis knelt by the spider and placed his index finger near to it. It flinched and withdrew its legs fractionally, lifting its body. Ellis stared at the spider and felt a calm overcome him. The calm went deep and filled him with a sensation of understanding, although there was no detail to the understanding quite yet.

“Has it gone?” Gerd whispered, through the keyhole.

“Not yet. We’re still discussing it.”

“Ellis!” Gerd hissed. “Get on with it!”

“It’s a lynx spider,” Ellis said affectionately. “Don’t get them in England.”

He cupped his hand and placed it over the spider. He slid his other hand underneath until he felt the faint tickle of its legs on his palm. He felt a wave of love sweep through him. Love for the spider. Love for its weight resting on his skin. Love for its impending safety. He opened his hands a touch and peered in. The spider looked back at him.

“Are you going to kill me?” the spider asked, in an American accent. It sounded more pissed off than scared.

“Uh-uh.” Ellis shook his head. “Put you outside.”

“What you say?” Gerd asked.

“Nothing,” Ellis said.

“Can I come out now?”

“Not just yet. He’s a tricky bugger.”

The spider winked at Ellis.

“Just stamp on it!” Gerd pleaded.

Ellis winked back reassuringly. He went to the door and let the spider out and sat on the doorstep. He checked that the calm was still in him. It was. A mighty calm. A momentous, all-embracing peace with a hint of enlightenment and a sense of direction.

“Safe!” Ellis called out.

Gerd opened the door tentatively. “Definitely gone?”

“Promise,” Ellis assured him.

“OK, thanks,” Gerd said, and joined Ellis on the doorstep.

Ellis drew in a lungful of air, then let it go with a sigh. He wandered out on to the moonlit forecourt, leant backwards and gazed up at the stars. Gerd wondered if aliens might beam his assistant away. The night had that sort of feel to it.

“The old man told me that they don’t have autumn out here,” Gerd said. “He said that in October one day it’s hot, like today was, and then the winter comes across the plains overnight and the next day the temperature has dropped twenty degrees. That’s it. Summer’s over. Winter’s here. Nothing in between.”

“Gerd … I’m going home.”

Gerd waited for Ellis to say more.

“Tomorrow.”

“Tell me why,” Gerd said.

“My dad’s dying. Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.”

They had breakfast in the Candy Kitchen. They ate well and they didn’t talk and they felt good. Michalis Eugenikos arrived with the newspapers.

“Michalis?” Ellis said. “Could you drive me to Chicago?”

“Sure. When?”

“This morning.”

“Sure thing. I’ll go tell Cynthia.”

Michalis entered the kitchen with a spring in his step.

“That’s a three-hour drive,” Gerd said, in protest. “I’ll take you.”

Ellis shrugged. “He wants to take me.”

They joined the highway at Rock Island and when they saw Chicago signposted Ellis panicked, momentarily, that he would never leave America, that he and Michalis Eugenikos would drive on the interstate for eternity. Amongst the cornfields of Lockport county, he thought of Fanny Robin running from All Souls to All Saints. It had taken him five months to read
Far From The Madding Crowd
when he was thirteen and Mr Pulman had said to Ellis’s dad that “the boy may be slow in some way, perhaps dyslexic”. In response to this, Denny O’Rourke had asked his son if he was enjoying reading his current book.

“I love it. I’d like to live there if I could.”

“Where?”

“1874.”

“You’ve been reading that book a long while.”

“It’s a long book.”

“But you’re enjoying it?”

“Oh, yes. I like it so much I read passages of it again and again until I can taste the words. I read descriptions of Fanny and Bathsheba until I know them off by heart and I whisper their names aloud at night until I feel one of them in the room with me, lying next to me, stroking me.”

Denny and Mafi had looked at each other, taken aback, whilst Ellis returned happily to his food, adding, “I’m not the runt my teachers think I am … so don’t sweat.”

Ellis delved into the grocery bag Cynthia had packed him for the journey. It was not small.

“What in Christ’s name has she given you?” Michalis sighed.

“Let’s see … extra large Chocolate Malt, two spare straws, chocolate brownies, one … two … four of them, two iced doughnuts, packet of cookies, packet of marshmallows, two packets of Reese’s peanut butter cups and an apple.”

“Good Lord,” Michalis said, “where the hell did she find an apple from?”

Ellis stood at the doorway to Denny’s bedroom, with his body aching from aeroplane sleep, his gums tingling from the sugar of Cynthia’s goody-bag and his eyes deceiving him, surely, as to the extent of his father’s deterioration.

“Tell me about America.” The voice was too weak to belong to Denny.

“No, Dad. I shouldn’t have been there. Pretend I never went.”

When Chrissie found Ellis, he was staring into space.

“He looks awful,” he muttered.

“Yes!” she said, impatiently, as if it were Ellis’s fault. “I had to take him back for more tests.”

“What did they say.”

“We were in there all day!” This also appeared to be Ellis’s fault.

“What did the tests say?”

“We go back tomorrow to get the results. Hopefully you’ll start sharing the duties.”

Ellis walked away. She pursued him into the kitchen.

“We were having a conversation, Ellis!”

“It didn’t feel like it.”

“Well, we were,” she corrected him.

“Look,” Ellis said, “it’s not that I haven’t and won’t do all those things. It’s just that I’d never describe them as duties.”

She grabbed the kettle and filled it. Ellis saw that she was close to breaking down.

“He can’t be this bad,” he said helplessly. “The whole year can’t be like this.”

She turned on him. “Ellis! There is not going to be a year!”

Ellis stripped to the waist and felt the sun on his back. Occasionally, he stopped working and stood beneath the walnut trees, close enough to the rippling leaves for them to eclipse the sound of the motorway. At dusk he went inside and loitered in the kitchen.

“That smells nice.”

“Thank you. I think you’ll like it.”

“I always love your cooking.”

“Yeah, well it won’t be ready for a bit so get yourself a beer and go and sit with Dad.”

“Isn’t he asleep?”

“It doesn’t matter if he is.”

“I’ll lay the table first.”

Chrissie took hold of her brother’s hand.

“Ellis,” she said, being firm but not unkind, “you know full well we’re not going to eat at the table. We’ll do exactly what we always do if it’s just us, which is sit on our arses in front of the TV. There is no table to lay. You’ve cut the grass and you’ve weeded the beds that don’t belong to us, you’ve washed Dad’s car even though it isn’t going anywhere, you’ve unpacked the shopping for me, you’ve filled that horrible enamel tea-bag tin with tea bags. There is nothing left to do but go upstairs and take a good look at him. Ellis, I can just about live with the fact that you are so much closer to him than I am, but not if you’re going to screw it up at the last.”

Denny was sitting on the side of the bed taking deep breaths in preparation for the effort of coming downstairs. Ellis sat beside his father and their shoulders touched. For the first time in his life, Ellis was larger than his dad. They embraced and buried their heads against each other.

“We’ll have a few trips out …” Denny whispered.

When he had composed himself, he looked out across the houses. “If you’d move me into the spare room I’d be able to look at those walnut trees. You can use this room when you stay.”

Ellis smiled sympathetically. “Sod off. Your view’s rubbish.”

His dad laughed and it hurt him. His face grew rosy. They settled into silence. Denny abandoned his attempt to come downstairs and got back into bed. Ellis sat beside him.

“I want you to make sure you have a strong image of us together, one that won’t fade.”

“A photograph?” Ellis asked.

“Not a photograph. A memory … a moment … it’s important. They say that you can find yourself forgetting someone’s face or voice after they’ve gone …”

“That will not happen,” Ellis said firmly. “I’ve got hundreds of memories. Not all bad.”

Denny laughed again. “You want to be able to tell your children what a handsome devil I was.”

“I’d rather you told them.”

It was night-time and Ellis thought his dad was asleep but Denny’s feeble voice broke the silence.

“I’m sorry I hit you.”

“You’re sorry you what?”

“That birthday.”

“Oh, that …” Ellis shrugged it away.

“I’d redo that night if I could. I’d admit I was worried about Mafi. I’d give you a hug and tuck you in.”

Ellis said, “I’d watch you leave my room and then the door would open again and you’d creep back in and sit on the side of the bed and say to me, ‘Whilst we’re talking about things, Ellis, it’s also that at times like this I really miss your mum.’ You’d tell me all about her and I’d know that even though she went away she did love me.”

Denny reached out to his son and Ellis took his hand.

“She loved you so much,” Denny said.

Ellis woke in the far reaches of night-time, with the morning close by and the world still quiet. He straightened up in the chair, rubbed his aching neck and realised that his dad was watching him.

“I’m an idiot for not telling you. I was missing her and I was angry at her but that’s no excuse.”

“Yes, it is,” Ellis said. He drew closer. “Dad, I know what my image is. The New Year’s Day you and I went to the top of Catt’s Hill, to watch the sun come up over the Marsh on the first day of the year.”

Denny shut his eyes and joined his son on the hill.

“We sat on the field gate on the upper lane. The pasture was crunchy with frost and there was just enough light to see. There was a single bright star left in the sky and it hovered above Fairfield. You commented on it. As the sun rose, the wind stirred. Slowly, the fields became green and the sky was purple-grey and fast. We heard the sound of a shepherd whistling to his dog, coming from somewhere on Becket’s Farm. In the silence that followed it, we both listened at the same moment to the same single faint sound, as if the whole landscape had just heaved a sigh of contentment. A breath that had nowhere to have come from. The morning seemed like the past even as it was happening. It was as if we were walking through someone else’s memory.”

Ellis fell silent at his own words.

“As if,” he realised, “this was my lasting image already, even before I knew it, before I got there. It was waiting for me.”

Denny whispered, “Life is just a dream, soon we shall awaken.”

“Where’s that from?”

“Can’t remember. Find out and put it on my headstone.”

Denny changed bedrooms and had a view of the walnut trees. Ellis carried the tape deck, amp and speakers up to Denny’s room. Denny asked Ellis to put on the
Four Last Songs
and muttered unintelligibly along to the last of them. When the music ended Ellis asked him what he had been saying.

“
Dass wir uns nicht verirren in dieser Einsamkeit
,” Denny replied.

“What does that mean?”

“We must not go astray in this loneliness.”

“Is it German?”

“Yes.”

“You speak German?”

“My father urged me to learn, after the war. So that … his hope was that if people understood each other better, it would never happen again.”

Ellis didn’t try to hide his surprise. “I can’t believe you speak German! You never mentioned it.”

“It never came up.”

Denny smiled and beckoned. “Come closer, I’ll tell you what the song says.”

Ellis edged nearer. His dad’s voice was weak and he spoke slowly, drawing a new, hard-earned breath at the end of each line.

It was not a procession of visitors – they came a few hours apart – but it gave the impression of one. First, the GP, who told Ellis that his father was becoming more ill faster than he’d expected. Then, whilst Denny slept, and to Ellis’s surprise, Bridget appeared, closing the village shop on a weekday for the first time in thirty years.

It had never occurred to Ellis that the village would miss the O’Rourkes, only that they would miss the village. But not only was the village fearing for Denny and his children now, they always had been. As Bridget spoke, it became clear to Ellis that Denny had always been perceived as a widower and a lone parent, and Chrissie and Ellis as motherless children, whereas Ellis, however much he thought of his mum and dreamt of meeting her, did not define himself in terms of being without her. The yearning he felt for her was deep but not constant. As a child, it could usually be diluted by his dad’s affection or play-acting. Ellis liked being the son of a single father. It was distinctive and to be able to give all his love to one parent made that love so potent that he didn’t always wish that things had been different.

“I miss your father so much,” Bridget said.

Ellis made a note to himself: I must get out of the habit of presuming that women with enormous bosoms don’t have deep feelings.

He led her upstairs. She stood in the doorway and gazed at Denny O’Rourke as he slept, then nodded to herself, as if concluding what she had come to say.

After Bridget came Reardon. He sat at Denny’s bedside and read him short stories by Ronald Blythe. The sight of the Land Rover parked outside nudged Ellis with a nostalgia for the rides in the back he and Tim had taken and, suddenly, the prospect of photo shoots with pampered models and neurotic stylists and others perched on fold-up chairs in various poses of self-appreciation left him with a sickly taste.

Reardon’s face burned with sincerity. “Is there anything you want or need, Ellis?”

“Do you know what I did to Tim?”

“Yes, Ellis. I know.”

“Do you hate me?”

Reardon grabbed hold of him. It wasn’t an embrace, his fingers dug in too deeply for that.

“Oh, Ellis! Ellis!” His eyes were kind and fierce. “You were just a child! You still are! You come to me for anything, you hear? Anything at all. For as long as I’m alive, you turn to me. Do you hear me, Ellis O’Rourke?”

The district nurse installed oxygen cylinders at the bedside. She washed Denny and his face settled with contentment. Ellis wondered how often since his mother’s death his father had been held or caressed. Maybe never. Certainly not often enough. Denny needed the oxygen more and more. And he suffered fevers in which he was curled up in pain. The nurse left morphine tablets. The morphine made Denny talkative. He spoke of his father and characters in Ilford when he was a boy. He also sang, very softly. “I Dream of Jeannie” was his favourite. It made Ellis laugh. One morning, after a bad night, Denny sang “For Those In Peril On The Sea” again and again and became distressed. His temperature rose to 39 degrees and as Ellis struggled to cool him with iced drinking water and cool towels, it occurred to Ellis that there was now probably a number on the conversations remaining for them. Not a stellar number but an everyday one. Thirty-eight more conversations perhaps, or maybe only fifteen. Sixty at the most. Whatever the number, it was trickling away into a stream of morphine.

“Sweetie …” Denny muttered, as he strayed into unconsciousness. Then his eyes shot open and he smiled at Ellis. “No … you’re not sweetie, you’re my dear boy. Chrissie is sweetie and your mother is the love of my life.”

Ellis rang Chrissie and told her that their dad had said she was his sweetie and that he loved her dearly.

“Thank you for telling me. That’s lovely.” She was tired and had just arrived home from the airport.

“Where have you been?” Ellis asked.

“Frankfurt. Thank you for calling, Ellis, you are thoughtful.”

“Chrissie, I think it’s time for you to be here all the time.”

“I don’t need to be told that by you, Ellis. I already know that.”

“Then why aren’t you here?” he asked, quite innocently.

She told him that it was called “real life”.

Ellis felt low. He wondered if he and his sister would grow closer or drift apart after the end. He told himself he loved her but knew how little he enjoyed being with her now. He concluded, with regret, that, without Denny there, they would drift apart.

He watched a little TV that evening. Soon he was staring at the screen but watching nothing. A fear came to him, the idea that after his dad died Ellis would remain where he was, sitting in front of this television, in a house full of other people’s furniture, unable to switch off the set and leave. He unplugged the TV, pulled the aerial out of the socket and ripped the power cable out of the back of the set. He sat down again. Later, he heard Denny’s voice from the doorway. “Good night, dear boy. I’m going up now.” He knew before he turned to look that his dad wasn’t there, but he looked anyway and saw the old beamed stairwell of the cottage and heard the creak of the cottage floorboards as his dad went up to bed. He stared at the blacked-out television screen and began to cry. He said Tammy’s name and immediately hid his face in embarrassment. He went outside and crouched down beneath one of the walnut trees in a half-hearted attempt at kneeling. And he was tentative, because he had never prayed.