The Spider Truces (6 page)

“Are you all right, son?”

“Yes, thanks,” Ellis said, bewildered. “I’m fine.”

He wasn’t called on again.

When they weren’t at the allotment, Ellis and Gary played football on the side lawn or cricket on the driveway, using the green metal grass box from the mower as stumps, or they played in the oak tree, which bordered the bottom corner of the garden. It was one of the oldest trees in Britain. A man from a magazine once came to photograph it. The roots were exposed above the ground and Ellis could squeeze between them on his belly and climb up the inside of the hollow trunk to the first or second boughs, which were huge and cast shadows over the footpath to the village green. The boughs were split open and hollow, like canoes, and Ellis lay on his back inside them and enjoyed being invisible. He looked at the branches above him and patches of sky in between and then he rested his head against the bough and his eyes looked across the landscape of fissured bark canyons and mountains, and his heartbeat thumped in his ear like approaching foot soldiers.

Chrissie was too big to crawl inside the tree but strong enough to climb it. From the front door of the cottage, Ellis watched her sit in the high bough on the evening that Vincent split up with her, which was a week after he slept with her.

“When you cry,” he whispered, “your face goes red and the freckles round your eyes come out and you look like my baby sister not my big sister.”

And when you lie curled up on your bed crying, he thought to himself, I want to rub your tummy and accidentally touch your boobs with my thumb, just to find out what they feel like.

An invitation from Chrissie in early August led Denny and Ellis to visit the reservoir at Bough Beach for the first time. The still water turned purple in the early evening and Ellis lost himself in thoughts of vast oceans and far-away places and a girl of no vivid description holding his hand.

“It must be so good to go places,” he sighed.

Denny’s stomach turned. “Don’t go disappearing on me.” He tried to say it lightly.

“Don’t go disappearing on
me
,” Ellis countered.

They crossed a meadow towards the nature reserve. Chrissie was waiting for them in the office. She introduced her dad to James, the assistant warden. She was nervous, and as a result she was polite, which Ellis found hilarious. They walked up the lane to the Frog and Bucket, where Chrissie and James had met three weeks earlier, watching a band called the Messerschmitts.

When Denny asked James how old he was, Chrissie tensed up.

“Twenty-three,” James replied confidently. “Six years older than Chrissie.”

Ellis stared open-mouthed at the scandalous age difference and waited for the shit to hit the fan.

“My maths could have coped with that one,” Denny O’Rourke responded, with the hint of a smile.

“My dad is capable of twenty-three minus seventeen, you know,” Ellis said assertively.

“Right,” said James.

“So am I, in fact,” Ellis added.

Chrissie fled to the bar.

Denny offered her daughter’s new boyfriend a cigarette and lit it for him. “Seventeen is very young,” he purred. “Do not get her up the duff.”

James didn’t flinch. Denny settled back in his seat and put an arm round Ellis, who felt confident he knew what “up the duff” must mean and decided it would be more grown up not to seek confirmation.

The house spider waiting for him in the bath when they got home was the biggest yet. Something inside Ellis buckled and, as the shivers of repulsion shot up his body from the soles of his feet, he became angry. He lunged for the taps and sent two jets of water plunging into the bath. He turned his back and counted to one hundred, then turned the taps off. When the water had run away, he glanced to check the bath was empty and saw a waterlogged spider-carcass lying a few inches from the plughole.

From the living room window, Ellis picked out the shapes of the cattle in Scabharbour Meadow in the balmy half-dark. The accusing stares of the drowned spider’s family weighed heavily on him.

“Ellis! You haven’t bathed!” Mafi turned him round to face her. “Upstairs now and get in that bath.”

“I bathed!”

“You’re filthy!”

Denny followed Ellis up to his bedroom.

“Where is it, dear boy?” he asked.

“In the bath. I killed it. They’re going to get their own back on me.”

From the bathroom, his dad called out, “Ellis, you didn’t kill it. Come and look.”

“I don’t want to look. And I did kill it.”

“How can I show that you didn’t kill it, if you won’t look?”

Ellis hadn’t killed it and in the pages of the spider book Denny found out why. “‘Spiders in the bath are usually male house spiders that have fallen in while searching for females. By closing their book lungs and tracheae, they can survive in water for half an hour or more. Even spiders that appear quite dead can suddenly get up and walk when they dry out and open up their breathing systems again.’” He jabbed the page with his finger.

“You’re making that up,” Ellis said.

“I’m not!”

“You must be.”

“I’m not!”

“Is there a picture?” Ellis asked.

“No, I promise.”

Ellis read it for himself. Denny wasn’t making it up. Whilst Ellis bathed, Denny sat on the toilet seat and read more to him.

“Oh my Lord, Ellis!”

“What?”

“There’s a spider here they talk about and it’s absolutely covered in hairs and it spits a poisonous juice on to its prey and eats them.”

“Don’t, Dad!”

“And, ugh! Sometimes it injects its prey with venom first to paralyse them and then eats them. When it isn’t killing other creatures it kills its own.”

“Don’t!”

“Imagine that, Ellis, a hairy, killing, cannibalistic monster with eight eyes.”

Ellis scrunched his face up. “I feel sick.”

Denny growled. “Guess how big it is?”

Ellis shook his head. “Don’t want to.”

“The body of this savage, savage beast is … a quarter of an inch long.”

“Oh,” said Ellis. “That’s tiny.”

“Isn’t it just?”

Ellis thought on. “Really small …” he murmured, holding his thumb and finger a quarter of an inch apart and examining the gap.

Denny put the spider book down. “Imagine how we look to a creature that tiny. Our horrible smelly flesh, our body sounding like an old boiler.”

Ellis didn’t intend to, but he found himself picturing Ted Heath sitting in a cellar eating chips and smoking cigarettes and drinking Tizer and burping and farting and scratching himself.

“Ellis …”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Do you know what ‘infinite’ means?”

“Sort of, not really though. I get the gist.”

Ellis climbed out of the bath. Denny knelt and wrapped the towel around him and held him.

“Infinity means never-ending,” Denny told him, “as big as for ever. This world is infinite and we are a tiny part of it. From space, you, Ellis O’Rourke, don’t even register as a speck, but down here you and your sister are the biggest thing in the world to me. You are infinite to me: there is no part of my world that you don’t touch. And yet, in the infinity of space, you and I are invisible. That’s what makes the world so amazing. Do you see?”

Ellis didn’t see, but it reiterated two things to him. First, that a quarter-inch-long spider really shouldn’t be worth getting into a tizz over and, second, that he loved his dad more than anything in the world. More than Mafi and Chrissie put together. So he looked at his dad and said, “Yeah, I see,” and dished out one of his wide-eyed smiles, the sort that makes adults feel useful.

That summer, Ellis took to standing on the compost heap until he was bitten by midges and horseflies, so that Mafi would rub cream on to his bites. When the holidays arrived, he usually chose a walk to the Rumpumps as his first excursion of the day. He tended to go alone because the Rumpumps, though it was about many things, was mainly about the train track and Ellis liked to look at trains alone and not have talking, the same way he prefers to go to the cinema alone nowadays and not discuss the film afterwards.

He had to cross the bull field on Elsa’s farm to reach the Rumpumps and if the bull was on the near side of the two beech trees he didn’t dare go in and the trip was aborted. He struck various deals with the gods on his approach to the field. “I promise not to think about Virginia Wade’s knickers for a week if the bull can not be on the near side today …” And, more often than not, the gods would go along with it.

In the next meadow, a cattle tunnel passed beneath the railway embankment. In the shadow of the embankment, a small stone bridge crossed a stream. This bridge, the stream, the cattle tunnel, the railway line and the surrounding copse was known by all the children in the village as the Rumpumps. Ellis didn’t know why then and he doesn’t now.

The harbour train between Folkestone and London passed every fifteen minutes. The tracks chimed and vibrated and Ellis stood in the cattle tunnel to listen to the carriages pass overhead before scrambling up the embankment on to the tracks to watch the train recede.

When he took his dad to see the Rumpumps for the first time, he assured him that he never went near the line. They hung by their knees from the iron railing on the stone bridge, with the sun glistening on the upside-down stream.

“Your face is going red,” Ellis said.

“Yours is purple.”

Crack willow swayed in the warm August breeze and the sound of flowing water filled Ellis’s head. His dad’s hair was nearly in the stream and his glasses hung precariously off the bridge of his nose.

“Give in?” Ellis asked.

“Not on your nelly,” said his dad.

Ellis reached for the water but his fingertips fell a few inches short.

“Dad?”

“Yup.”

“Why do you go all quiet on Sunday evenings sometimes?”

“The weekends go too fast for my liking.” Denny let his arms hang down too, plunging his hands and forearms into the cool water.

“Dad?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why don’t you marry your secretary?”

“Her husband wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh,” Ellis said. “I didn’t know she was married.”

“I didn’t know you wanted me to get married.”

“I don’t. Don’t know why I said it. I’d hate it if you got married.”

“Then I promise I won’t.”

“You know the photograph beside your bed, of the lighthouse and the shipwreck?”

“Yes, dear boy.”

“The water in that photograph, from all those years ago, that water could be in this stream right now. It could be the same water, couldn’t it?”

His dad thought about it. “In a roundabout way, yes.”

“Don’t you think that’s amazing?” Ellis exclaimed.

“Yes, you’re right, Ellis. It is rather amazing.”

“In the time it took you to grow up and leave the merchant navy and meet Mum and have Chrissie and me, in all that time …” Ellis stretched out his arms, “for all those years, the water in the photo was slooooowly coming and going in all the seas and rivers and today it ended up here. That is absolutely amazing!”

Denny’s upside-down smile looked like a grimace. He felt the blood rush in his head.

“But …” Ellis went on, “why don’t you have a photograph of Mum next to your bed instead?”

Denny took his glasses off and threw water on to his face. He splashed his son and challenged him again to give up. Ellis refused.

“Then you win.”

Denny heaved himself up on to the bridge. The railway lines began to chime and Ellis leapt instinctively to his feet and moved towards the tracks. Then, remembering he had a visitor, he smiled innocently at Denny and sat down again before the train roared past.

They dragged their feet through long field grass. Ellis’s flares threshed against the stalks. From her bedroom window, Mafi saw in their walking a reluctance to return home, and it made them look like brothers, not father and son. They helped each other over the fence and on to the lane as a tractor passed. Denny waved to the driver.

“Who was that?” Ellis asked.

“Reardon,” his dad replied.

“Reardon the farmer?”

“No, Reardon the ballet dancer who drives to the theatre on a tractor.”

Ellis laughed so much he squirmed and Denny chased him home, calling him a fool.

Ellis went straight to his room and because he felt so happy he knew it would be safe to go to his shoebox, to see his mum. Inside the box were war-torn ping-pong balls, Plasticraft paperweights, used Instamatic flashbulbs and Top Trump cards held together by elastic bands. From beneath these objects he took a matchbox. He slid it open and took from it a solitary slide, which he held up to the window. He held one eyelid closed and moved his open eye up close to the photograph. This slight head movement took him into an Ektachrome world, where he stands as a four year old in the back garden in Orpington. He is wearing wellington boots that reach his shorts and a mac and a thick mustard-coloured sweater. The garden is wintry and a little overgrown. The shadows of the trees are long. The grass is tingling with dew. Standing at the garden gate is Ellis’s mother. She is holding her hand out to Ellis and saying something to him. She has a smile on her face. She looks happy and her expression is the embodiment of what Ellis perceives, to this day, to be beauty.

The next thing she will do is place her hand in Ellis’s hand and lead him out of the garden. Whenever he returns to this scene she is waiting for him, offering to take him by the hand.

He knew from Chrissie that she had called him “Ellie”. Sometimes, when he dreamed about her, it was of her voice calling “Ellie-boy … Ellie-boy …” But it was only her voice. He could never see her for all the sunlight glaring into his eyes. Chrissie remembered her vividly but not her death. She knew that her mum was going on holiday and then that she was very ill and that they couldn’t visit her. Not even their dad could go. Then she died. Once, she asked if their mum had died of cancer and her dad nodded and said yes. Another time, when Ellis was alone with Mafi, the old lady said she had “died of adventure”.