The Spider Truces (8 page)

Denny returned, holding the spider book. “Have you heard of denier?” he asked, pushing the drawer shut with his foot.

“What?” Ellis muttered, watching the stockings, the diary and his mother’s letters disappear from view.

“The denier of a silk stocking is how they measure how fine it is,” Denny said, locking the drawer and putting the key in his pocket. “Listen to this …”

He began to read from the spider book: “‘The denier of a thread is the weight in grams of a nine-kilometre length. Human hair averages about fifty denier. Silkworm silk is about one denier, meaning that a nine-kilometre length weighs just one gram. But the dragline silk of the garden spider is 0.07 denier. A strand of silk long enough to encircle the earth – about twenty-five thousand miles – would weigh twelve ounces. Yet spider silk is the strongest of all natural fibres.’”

Ellis offered no reaction.

“I think that’s pretty incredible, Ellis, don’t you?”

“S’pose so …”

And although he did think it was amazing that a strand of silk that long could weigh so little, he didn’t want to encourage the spider book any more. It didn’t really help. He didn’t need convincing that they were interesting creatures. He knew he shouldn’t kill them and it was rare he ever did so knowingly. But knowing more and more about them was not helping. He was still repulsed by them, occasionally to the point of being physically ill. He wanted to fill his mind with other things. That, it seemed to Ellis, was the direction he should take.

“What happens at the top of them?” Ellis asked.

“At the top of what?”

“At the top of the legs. Where do the stockings stop?”

“They just stop. They’re just held up by … another bit of clothing,” Denny offered.

Ellis persisted. “But what’s there, what is actually there?”

“Well, just underwear really, Ellis. Basically, they attach to the underwear with buttons.”

“No, Dad.” Ellis smiled patiently. “I mean what is actually there? The lady …at the top of the stockings, what would you find there … on the lady?”

Denny thought how best to answer. How far to answer. He went again to the landing bookcase and returned with a volume of the encyclopaedia.

“Not another book! Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Hold your horses …” Denny searched the index and, when he found the page, he looked at his son decisively. “You mean, what does a woman’s body look like?”

“I suppose so.”

“Here.”

Ellis looked. On the page in front of him were two black and white photographs and some very small print. One photograph had five naked men standing in a line. They looked ridiculous, especially the two with beards, who also had hairy chests. The other photograph was of five naked women. The youngest woman was in fact a girl, probably Ellis’s age. The oldest was very old. But the three in between were great, Ellis thought, staring at their breasts and at the patch of hair where their stockings would end.

I take it back, he told himself, this encyclopaedia is great. My dad is brilliant. This is the book we should be looking at. This book, not the spider book!

He made a mental note of the page number. Two hundred and fifty-two. The naked women were already making him feel a little different. All in all, different felt good.

Denny O’Rourke took a cigarette from the packet in his breast pocket and lit it with practised ease.

“Do you drive an automatic so it’s easy to smoke?” Ellis asked.

Denny smiled. Only his son asked him questions like that. “No.”

It was the last day of the summer term. Denny told Ellis to empty his desk and make sure he brought all his possessions home for the holiday.

“Don’t leave anything behind,” he emphasised.

Ellis wasn’t listening. He was thinking about the startling discovery he’d made, whilst watching the previous evening’s news, that the Olympic games were to be held in Moscow. He couldn’t understand how the Olympics could take place in such a dangerous country full of bad people.

“Won’t they try to kill everyone who goes there?”

“I mean everything, Ellis. All your art stuff and everything.”

“Won’t they though?”

“Ellis! Are you listening to me?”

“Yes! I said yes about five hours ago. Won’t the Russians try and kill everyone at the Olympics?”

“It’s not quite like that.”

Ellis floated into class. Nothing could better the end of the school year. Two months of summer in the village beckoned and, after it, the deal he and his dad had struck would finally come of age, meaning that the next time he came to school he would do so independently, cycling to Hildenborough station on his own and taking the train to Orpington and arriving at school under his own steam. By then, he’d be two months from turning thirteen. He’d be grown up and free. On the way home each day, he’d freewheel down Philpotts Lane with his hands outstretched and his head thrown back and his eyes showered by sunlight breaking through the trees, the way people cycled in films.

Ellis and two of his friends had decided that they would try alcohol for the first time. When they met in the park under the appointed tree at the start of lunch break, Ellis and Andre Heart immediately suspected that their commitment to alcoholic experimentation did not match Justin Dearly’s. For, whilst they came bearing two cans each of Top Deck shandy and ten B&H between them, Justin arrived armed with a Benylin bottle into which he had mixed cognac, Scotch, port and vodka from his dad’s drinks cabinet. Although the cocktail was given a comforting aftertaste by the residue cough mixture, one sip was more than enough for Ellis and Andre, who returned to supping their shandy with manful intent.

In the slow, forward-shuffling line that entered the school hall that afternoon, Ellis and Andre Heart became aware that Justin Dearly could no longer support his own bodyweight. The obese and unpopular Reverend Mr Fullah wheezed his way through an opening prayer and then the headmaster motioned for his pupils and staff to sit. As Justin Dearly lowered himself unsteadily towards the moving target that seemed to be his chair, he took the chewing gum from his mouth and placed it carefully on the seat in front of him, moments before Roddy Stockton placed his backside on it. As the headmaster spoke, Justin leant forward in his seat and whispered repeatedly into Roddy Stockton’s ear, “It was me, it was me, it was me …”

Irritation got the better of Roddy. “What was you?” he hissed.

“It was me.”

“What was?”

“If you ask yourself later ‘Who did that?’, it was me.”

“Prick!”

Speeches dragged on and the need to rid himself of the shandy in his bladder was almost more than Ellis could bear. Just as he dared to hope that the service was ending, Mr Fullah hauled himself back up to the microphone.

Ellis cursed Fullah and thought to himself, I don’t believe in fat vicars, not when there’s people starving in the world.

“It is with great sadness,” Fullah said, “that I must inform you all of the unexpected death of one of the most
long-serving
figures in our school. Mr Marshall, who has been caretaker here for thirty-five years, died suddenly the night before last after a massive stroke.”

The hall fell into polite silence.

“Mr Marshall will be buried on Friday,” the chaplain added gravely.

“GOOD! THE MISERABLE OLD BASTARD!”

It was Justin’s voice that had reverberated across the hall, bearing a telltale slur. The standing masses turned and found Ellis O’Rourke bent double holding his crotch and Andre Heart urinating into Dylan Foster’s packed-lunch box. In between them, Justin Dearly slumped back on to his chair. Two members of staff wove their way towards the culprits. Then, as six hundred boys and girls sat down, Justin Dearly stood up. And moments after he stood up, he threw up, on Roddy Stockton. And as he was dragged away he smiled at Roddy Stockton and said, “That was me too.”

“Sit down, Ellis,” Mr Teague said.

He was a good headmaster. Everyone thought so, including Ellis. He limped a little and carried a large bundle of keys in his front trouser pocket and the net result was that you knew when he was approaching from quite a way off. When Ellis had been reported to him for singing “Friggin’ in the riggin’” at the top of his voice whilst walking to class, Mr Teague had quickly recognised that Ellis had no idea what the words meant and dealt with him kindly. That was two years ago and Ellis still didn’t know what the words meant.

Mr Teague pulled up a chair next to Ellis.

“Are you going to expel me?” Ellis asked.

Mr Teague shook his head ruefully. “Quite the opposite,” he said. He delivered a mild warning on the perils of alcohol, then patted Ellis’s shoulder and told him to enjoy his summer holiday.

“Do I have to do lines?”

“No, you don’t. You just have to have a good summer.”

“Oh. Ace! See you in September, sir. I’ll be coming by train, on my own. How great is that!” Ellis beamed, smelling freedom.

And then, without a shadow of a doubt, Ellis saw the headmaster’s bottom lip tremble, as if he was going to cry.

“I want you to take care of yourself, young man,” Mr Teague said, and ushered Ellis out hurriedly.

Ellis wandered off to find Andre Heart, confused by the leniency shown him and trying to figure out what would be the opposite of being expelled.