The Spider Truces (5 page)

Ellis and Chrissie sat by the open fire and watched their father gardening in the last vestiges of daylight. Shin-deep in willow leaves that refused to dissolve into the earth, Denny stopped to rest. Steam rose from his head. Momentarily, his broad shoulders slumped and he appeared defeated. Then, catching sight of his children, he slung the rake over his shoulder, stood to attention and saluted them. He smiled and his flushed cheeks rose to transform his face.

His limbs were long and lithe and he laboured relentlessly. He warned himself against becoming obsessive or joyless in renovating the cottage. It remained an act of love. What he did he did well, with care and to the best of his abilities, but he did not confer or seek advice, as if he and his family were living on an island, beyond reach, or as if he wanted them to be.

When Denny worked on the cottage Ellis was beside him, watching, learning, hoping to be asked to help in any way. And even though on this island there was no one to show off to, Ellis bragged nevertheless to imaginary observers of his life. He bragged not about the fact that he was his dad’s right-hand man or that he knew how to mix lime mortar and straighten old floorboard pins and plant bare-root hedging without creating air pockets. He bragged about having a dad whom the spiders respected enough to do business with.

The cottage walls had contours that appeared tidal, but they were dry and the rooms warmed quickly when the fires were lit. The contours hinted at the huge old timbers within the walls. Sections of these brutal beams were exposed here and there and one vertical post stood proudly, two feet thick, in the middle of the dining room. Chrissie snaked gold tinsel around it at Christmas. The brick-floored dining room was a room that prolonged winter. Ellis preferred the living room, where he would sit at dusk and watch the silhouettes of furniture and familiar objects take on a new appearance in the low light as he waited for the sky above Ide Hill to fill with crimson, which it would from time to time, especially in autumn.

The evenings grew longer by a few precious minutes each day and Ellis became impatient for spring. The snowdrops stayed late on the front lawn, exchanging glances with the violets as they departed.

Before it all, Denny O’Rourke would pick the first violets of the year and give them to his wife in a posy tied so delicately it defied the apparent brute strength of his hands. How she had loved violets.

Denny stock-fenced the garden boundaries and hid the fencing within new hedge lines of hornbeam, hazel and spindleberry. At the back of the orchard, he erected a tall panel fence to push the working men’s club out of reach and out of sight. But, to Ellis, the goings-on there became more exotic for being spied on through a knothole.

Ellis watched his dad from the side lawn as the hills around the village turned to silhouette. He noticed that the old
latch-gate
in the fence beneath the conifers had been replaced by a fixed wooden panel. The discarded gate was propped against the trees, out of sight. It was mossy and rotten but Ellis had always liked it and considered it a veiled doorway to the world outside. The garden was enclosed now. There were no nooks and crannies left in the boundary, no loose timbers in rotten fencing, no gaps in the hedges, no hidden gates leading to the village green. The only way out was the driveway gate, in full view of the house, and that was shut.

He peered in through Mafi’s kitchen window. There was a plate of meat cuttings on the table. His taste buds stirred in the knowledge that she would put that meat through the hand-cranked mincer and mix in some hard-boiled eggs and mustard, to make sandwich fillings. He walked along the cottage wall to Mafi’s living room, to knock on the window and ask for a sandwich. But he stopped and watched instead as she smoked a cigarette. She ran the palm of her
non-smoking
hand back and forth across the velveteen tablecloth. A deck of cards was laid out in front of her. She studied them and occasionally moved the cards. He watched the smoke rise in an ivory-white column from the ashtray to the light bulb overhead. The bulb sent back a rim of bright light which caught Mafi in a halo and revealed the shape of her bare head through her thinning white hair. Ellis thought of skulls, skeletons and X-rays from school books, and in a moment of lucidity he grasped the idea that Mafi was an animal with body parts and a shell to protect them and that her shell was growing old and would, one day, break down. He imagined her old naked body and he squirmed. His appetite was gone.

Denny called out to him from beneath the willow tree.

“Look, dear boy!”

“What?” Ellis wandered down to him.

“Watch.” Denny held his thumb across the hose and created a spray of water which revealed a dewy sheet of spider webs in the wire squares of fencing.

Ellis grimaced. “I’ll show you something then,” he said, opening the front gate and stepping on to the lane. Denny followed him to a dense, low beech hedge which lined the track into Treasure Island Woods. Ellis crouched down and peered at the hedge with one eye closed.

“Look from here,” he told his dad.

Denny lowered himself to Ellis’s height where the low, pink dusk light unveiled strands of silk bunting, which fluttered horizontally in the breeze.

“You can only see them first thing and last thing, when the sun’s low,” Ellis said authoritatively.

“Well done,” his dad whispered.

“I’m not saying I like them.”

“Of course …”

“Do you want to see Treasure Island?” Ellis asked.

“It’s getting dark,” his dad said.

“Don’t be scared,” Ellis said encouragingly.

Denny O’Rourke smiled to himself.

“What?” Ellis asked.

“Nothing.”

They followed Ellis’s own footprints into the woods until the footprints disappeared into a stream. They trudged through the stream, and laughed when their wellingtons were breached and their feet squelched. The stream joined another rivulet and twisted beneath steep banks of mossy clay until it reached a pool. Four streams ran out from the far side of the pool. Two headed into the fields and two ran through the woods either side of the track to Reardon’s farm. A small mossy hillock sat in the middle of the pool with a cluster of rotten tree stumps to sit on. This was Treasure Island and to Ellis and Gary Bird it was a place of infinite adventure.

Denny sat there and Ellis explained the names he and Gary had given the four streams: the Medway, the Rother, the Panama and the Mississippi.

“Some rivers feel as wide as the ocean,” Denny said. “I would love to see the Mississippi.”

They went on to the wooden gate at the far end of the wood. The sensation of his son leading him by the hand and the cold water swilling around his boots sent ripples of happiness through Denny O’Rourke.

“This is as far as I go,” Ellis said.

Opposite the five-bar gate, across a narrow lane, was the entrance to Reardon’s farm. Ellis sat there often to look for activity in the yards or to watch Reardon in the fields. The farmer was rugged-looking and strong, despite some sort of injury to his left leg, for which he used a stick. His face was expressive and his cheeks were lean and bronzed. His hair was wavy and thick and silver grey. He remained defiantly handsome in the face of old age. His was the face of a man who has done many interesting things, Ellis had decided. He felt drawn to him and scared of him at the same time.

The yard lights of the dairy lit up the moisture in the dusk air. Ellis longed to be under those lights doing whatever work it was that went on there. It was dark when he and his dad got home. Their faces were flushed and their heads full of the images that only woodland in twilight can conjure up.

In the Wimpy Bar in Orpington high street, Ellis saw Chrissie kissing a boy. The boy’s hand crept up his sister’s skirt. What the hell for, Ellis couldn’t fathom. He wondered if his dad had done this with his mum and concluded that it was highly unlikely.

Ellis found out that the boy was called Vincent and that he was in the final year, a year above Chrissie. He was the first boy she ever brought home. Denny was welcoming but formal. Mafi overfed him. Ellis watched Vincent as if he were a lab rat, which in some ways he was.

“Have you had sex with Vincent?” he asked his sister, having made the trip up to her bedroom especially to use this word he didn’t comprehend.

“No.” She was reading the spider book.

“Are you going to?”

“Yes. Definitely. Someone has to be first and I’ve decided he’s got the gig.”

“What if he doesn’t want to?” Ellis asked.

She laughed disdainfully. “He’s a boy.”

“So am I.”

“He’s a boy of seventeen. Boys of seventeen want to. You’re eleven and a half. I don’t know what boys of your age want to do.”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When are you and Vincent going to have sex?”

“At eight twenty-three on Tuesday week.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know when! When you’re not around.”

She pushed Ellis to the ground and knelt on his chest. This made him laugh, automatically. She held the spider book open above him.

“Don’t show me pictures!” he screamed.

“This’ll make you hurl, spider-boy!”

“No pictures!”

“I’m not going to show you any fucking pictures. I’m here to educate you.”

He loved her to swear.

“Get this, freak-boy … ‘Throughout the whole of their development, spiders may fall victim to other predators. From the egg stage to adulthood they may be eaten by insects, other arachnids (including spiders), birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Perhaps the only thing worse than being eaten alive is being eaten alive slowly. Some parasitic wasps lay their eggs in spiders’ egg sacs or on the spiders themselves. The larvae hatch and either eat the eggs, or feed on the living spider as it moves around.’”

She slammed the book shut triumphantly. “Feel sick?”

Ellis shook his head. “Uh-uh. We’ve got to get loads of wasps next summer.”

Chrissie climbed off Ellis’s chest and stood over him.

“Ellis, I don’t think you’re getting your head round this truce thing at all.”

Gary Bird’s arms and legs were twice the thickness of Ellis’s. The two of them spent most of their time on Gary’s dad’s allotment at Long Barn. Gary told Ellis that when his dad was a teenager he ate a frog, for a dare. Ellis wasn’t sure if this was true but he liked the way Mr Bird lit his cigarettes, leaning down towards his lighter and throwing his head back as he took the first puff.

That’s how I’m going to do it too, Ellis told himself.

Gary played for the village juniors football team. He talked Ellis into going along. The changing rooms at the recreation ground were in an unloved wooden pavilion. It wore thick layers of peeling green paint and Ellis found it strangely enchanting.

“Like
Hector’s House
on TV,” he whispered, to no one other than himself.

The two toilets were in wooden sheds, symmetrically set one each side of the pavilion, up a small set of steps. Inside the gents shed was a large oil drum, which Ellis had to stand on tiptoe to be able to pee into, whilst swatting away the flies and holding his breath.

Soon after he was brought on as a substitute, Ellis lay down on the pitch and rested his head on the turf. From there, as he had begun to suspect, the pavilion looked just like a miniature Swiss weather-house, seen through colossal blades of grass. He waited patiently for a man and woman to glide out of their respective toilets and forecast sun or rain, but before they could, out of nowhere, Mr Souter, the manager, was kneeling beside him with a bucket and sponge.