The Spider Truces (35 page)
“God … cure him. Make him completely well again. You can do this if you choose to. Make my dad completely well again now. I believe you can do this. I know I’m lucky and have a lot but I am only twenty years old and I do not want to live without him. That’s what I’m asking for. Please.”
Denny spoke to his wife a great deal the next day. He told her about Chrissie and Ellis in outpourings of soft, breathy pride. Occasionally, he’d stop and catch sight of Ellis as if his son had only just appeared in the room.
“Your mother was the butterfly-lady …” he’d say, and drift away again.
In the late afternoon, the delirium had passed and Denny was lucid and it was hard to believe he was so unwell.
“When I was your age, I was fearless. Your mum stole that from me when she disappeared. I don’t want to have taken it from you. Be fearless …”
“OK, I’ll try.”
“She was always awake when I woke in the morning … her green eyes looking at me. ‘What’s the capital of such and such a country?’ she’d ask. If I knew the answer she made the tea. If I didn’t know, I had to get out of bed and make the tea. If she really wanted to stay in bed, she made up a country that didn’t exist …”
Ellis listened and before him appeared a boy who played in Valentine’s Park in Ilford, an adolescent who went to war, a young man who saw a woman in a field of butterflies and loved her. From time to time, Denny’s eyes met his son’s and they looked at each other without embarrassment. Once, after morphine, Denny squeezed Ellis’s hand tight and said, “I’ve known you since I was your age.”
A parcel arrived from Gerd. In it, Ellis found a cheque for his full pay, a batch of film stock and a photograph of the Hoover in the Days Inn in Cincinnati. The Hoover stood at the end of the claustrophobic green corridor like a schoolchild outside a headmaster’s office. Ellis tried to reconcile the banality of what he had seen there with the haunting image Gerd had produced, in which every lonely, lost soul inside every motel room in America had been evoked. He pinned the beautiful photograph to his wall. Ellis put Chrissie’s suitcase in his room, changed the sheets and made up the sofa bed downstairs for himself. He offered to cook supper but Chrissie said she wanted to. Whilst she sat with her father, Ellis drank half a bottle of wine beneath the wide, low spread of the walnut trees. He imagined living by the sea with Tammy in their tiny attic flat, with lots of nooks and crannies. Later, he sat with his dad whilst Chrissie cooked. Denny turned his wedding ring on his finger and said, “You’ll wear this, won’t you?” Ellis nodded, then he lay on the bed beside his father.
“She loved you,” Denny whispered. “She thought you were perfect.”
Ellis stroked his dad’s arm. “Don’t let on, when you see her.”
Then Denny cupped his hands round Ellis’s face and Ellis did the same to Denny in response, as if they were peering through a window at each other.
“You’re perfect to me, Ellie-boy …”
“You’re perfect, Daddy.”
Chrissie and Ellis watched from the doorway as the nurse hooked up a morphine drip that would be operated by Denny’s hand squeezing it when he felt pain. Feeling a directionless but urgent anger, Ellis marched away and rang Jed.
“Unlike vets, doctors in this country aren’t allowed to put their patients to sleep so they’ve devised a way for the dying person to do it themselves. Maybe it’s for the best because I’d probably kill the doctor who put my dad to sleep, although that’s really what they’re doing anyway …”
Jed listened and didn’t try to make Ellis feel better, and for that Ellis was grateful.
Chrissie dabbed glycerine water on to Denny’s lips with a cotton bud. Sometimes, she and Ellis stopped breathing because they were listening so intently to their father’s life. Outwardly peaceful, Ellis’s mind raged, even now. Why can’t we just keep him alive, prop him up and piece him together so that he stays here with us? Why can we not do that? I could take care of him.
Chrissie fell asleep in a chair in the corner of the bedroom and Ellis saw the soft edges return to her face.
“You need to go to bed,” he said as he woke her.
She looked nervously at her dad.
Ellis said, “We’ve got to accept that it doesn’t matter, it mustn’t matter, if he goes when one of us isn’t in here.”
“I agree,” she said.
Ellis watched his sister kiss her father goodnight and decided that if his dad were to die with him there and Chrissie absent then he would lie and pretend he had been out of the room or asleep. In the few moments in which she lay on her bed before sleep engulfed her, Chrissie resolved to do the same.
Denny opened his eyes. A child’s eyes, curious, trusting, a little frightened. He squeezed Ellis’s hand and his eyes closed again, very slowly. Ellis held Denny, gently, to camouflage the truth that he was trying to cling on to his father’s life, the same way he held on to special objects and stray dogs in his dreams in the hope of bringing them back with him to the other side of sleep.
“When old or sickly spiders leave home,” Ellis whispered, “they draw a strand of silk out and wait for the silk to catch on the wind. When it catches, the spider is lifted into the air like a balloon on a gossamer line and set free. Charles Darwin found spiders caught in the sails of HMS
Beagle
hundreds of miles from land where the waves are huge and silent. It is your ship now rising out of the deep swell and you can see land ahead where none is charted. You are gliding gracefully towards the land and when you step ashore you know that Mum will be waiting for you and you will never feel pain or loneliness ever again.”
Eyes closed for ever, his breathing almost done, Denny smiled.
Chrissie woke Ellis at five o’clock and for a few moments he listened for the dawn chorus in the village and yearned for the air that rose from the fields there and moved through the cottage. He pulled on his clothes, washed his face and went to his father’s bedside. Chrissie had made a pot of tea with Mafi’s rarely used china and that way, she felt, invited her great-aunt to join them.
There was no talking but as they drank their tea they found themselves sipping and swallowing in harmony. They allowed this to continue for a little while and laughed gently at it.
At seven o’clock, Chrissie said some prayers. Ellis bowed his head and hid his face. Chrissie lay alongside her father a while on the bed. Later, Ellis found himself kneeling beside the bed. Chrissie did the same, opposite him. Ellis rubbed his father’s lips with the glycerine water. Denny gently pushed his tongue forward three or four times and Ellis painted the water gently on to his tongue. Denny’s eyes were closed all the time. His breathing became slower and very calm. Ellis rubbed the water on to his lips again. He put the buds down and he and his sister stroked the soft skin on Denny’s forearms. Then, Denny’s eyes moved beneath his eyelids and he gently expelled the air from his lungs. A serenity fell upon him and the ashenness lifted from his complexion and disappeared, and a breeze swept through the walnut trees.
On a flight back from Lisbon with Milek, Mafi appeared to Ellis. She was a stewardess. She touched him gently on the arm and said, “Any day you see the sea is a good day.”
Ellis hired a car at the airport and drove to the Marsh. On the shingle peninsula, near to the lighthouse, there was a small house to let. It was timber-framed, with a flat roof, and a part of it had once been a meat wagon. He viewed the house as a blizzard consumed the beach. From the dining room window he looked through a veil of snow flurries at the container ships heading south-west on the Channel.
He drove to Fairfield to think things over. He crossed the pasture to the church and hid from the winter wind at the spot where he and Denny had often stood.
“Good place for a bench,” he heard his dad say.
When he had fixed things with the agent he rang the vicar of the Marsh churches and offered to purchase a bench to be situated on the sheltered side of Fairfield church.
“There’s no sheltered side at Fairfield,” the vicar said.
“That’s true,” Ellis agreed. “It was just tradition to say there was. I want to put a dedication on the bench, to my father.”
He drove off the Marsh towards the Downs to the cemetery on the hill. He carried a bottle of champagne and stood over his father’s grave.
“I’m moving to the beach, Dad, like I said I would. Come and find me there, because I can’t find you anywhere.”
A voice called out, “I wondered if we’d bump into each other here.” Katie Morton was kneeling at a freshly dug grave nearby. He went to her.
“Your mother or father?” he asked, immediately fearing it could be her brother.
“My mother.”
The sand and earth on Mrs Morton’s grave was still piled high in a comically human shape, an observation Ellis kept to himself. He raised the bottle a fraction.
“To your mum …”
He swigged and handed the bottle to her.
“To your dad …” she said, and drank.
He held her when she cried. “You’re freezing cold,” he told her.
He wrapped his coat around her. She told him that Denny had visited her parents’ house the day after she and Ellis were caught together.
“Did you know that he came round?”
“No … I had already gone away.”
Katie had watched from the top of the stairs.
“My parents shrank in comparison to him. They often did that with people.”
“What did my dad say?” Ellis asked.
“Yesterday is the last time you ever humiliate my son. No matter what you think he might have done wrong, you need to feel ashamed.”
Ellis said nothing. How many other moments had he never seen? What other things had he not credited his dad with being capable of?
As he watched Katie Morton walk away from the graveside that afternoon it occurred to Ellis how her body, the first he ever truly saw, would venture out across the earth now, covering maybe a few miles of it, or perhaps many thousands. She will forget him, or she will go years and years between remembering him. She will grow up and grow old. They might each become unrecognisable as the people they were. But she will still be there. That person who bared herself, those eyes that smiled and laughed at him, that very young woman who invited him to touch her.
And the aching he felt, he could not be sure whether it was urging him to smile or to sob. We don’t love each other, but we knew each other. We knew each other for a moment. And one day, one of us will take their last breath and the other won’t know of it. Those days of innocent exploration, when life is abundant with potential, will be distant but Ellis O’Rourke, he promised himself, will remember it all. And unlike the jewellery on Mafi’s dresser, which it was impossible to believe had ever been brand new, the Katie Morton who led me by the hand and slept tight against me will always be there. However the shell around her ages, even when it is worn out and dies, she will always be there. And I will never behave as if none of these things happened. I will never hide from my children all that I have ever been.
He stood up and stretched and looked at the sky. In it, he saw Mrs Morton, with wings and a harp, looking very pissed off indeed as she glared from a film-set heaven at him, that wretched boy, standing on her own grave, with a bottle of champagne.
Lovely! Ellis thought to himself, grinning back at her and resisting the urge to dance. You deserve this, you mean old cow.
On the window sill of the kitchen, the champagne bottle stands with a candle in it. Ellis washes his face at the kitchen sink. He feels tired out by a glut of memories. It is early afternoon. He returns to the dining table and draws the metal box to him. A small piece of blue peeks at him from the very bottom of the box. Ellis clears the way to it and sees his father’s diary emerge. He runs his hand across the blue canvas book he thought had burnt in Denny’s final bonfire. As a young boy, Ellis pestered his dad to read episodes from the diary. Mostly, he wanted to hear about entering Auckland Harbour on VE day, crossing the Western approaches and seeing the German wolfpacks attack the North Atlantic convoys. He has never read the diary for himself. It’s possible he’s never even held it before now. On the cover is a faint ink thumbprint, left years ago.
The diary falls open towards the back, where a photograph and an envelope are wedged between the pages. The photograph is of Ellis and his father standing knee-deep together in snow. On the envelope, in his father’s writing, is Ellis’s name. He breaks the seal and pulls out a single piece of folded paper. In the letter, Denny describes a walk he frequently made when he was a boy, growing up in Ilford in the 1930s. It was along a footpath, through a field, in the nearest open country to his home. There were two big old trees in the field. At a certain point on the path, the sun would be hidden behind the first tree, and as young Denny walked it would appear from behind it and then, a few paces later, disappear behind the second tree.
I would imagine that I was watching the sun rise and set, a whole day come and gone in a few moments. My dear boy, when your time is up, it seems to have been just a moment. So don’t waste any of it. There’s a lot for you to cram in.
If Ellis thinks of Denny being born in 1926, if he thinks of the number, 1926, then his father’s life doesn’t appear short because 1926 seems a long time ago. The rising sense of panic Ellis is feeling today is not caused by the brevity of his father’s life but by the relentlessness of all life. He summons up the scant few details he can remember from history lessons and maps out his father’s era. When the Empire State Building was built, my dad was five years old. When war broke out, he was thirteen and he dreamed of going to sea like his father. He was a teenager on the Panama Canal when the
Enola Gay
flew over Japan. He was twenty-eight when Bannister broke the four-minute mile – he would have read about that in the papers with admiration – and he was thirty-four at the time of Sharpeville and by then he was married to Mum. And then Chrissie was born and then there was Aberfan and soon after that there was me and Neil Armstrong and Chrissie’s desperate, heartbreaking crush on Ryan O’Neal that she insisted she would never get over. And then Dad was alone with us and he found the cottage and he had that and he had
us
and he was happy and we were together and then there was our great storm in England and there were floods in Bangladesh and an earthquake in Armenia and a bomb over Lockerbie and cheats at the Olympics and my dad died and I want to halt the earth and ask when does all this stop for a single moment’s breath and when do we get the chance to be still and stop moving forward so quickly through time?