The Spider Truces

by Tim Connolly

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Is it completely empty?”

  “Yes, except for the shed. The shed’s still in the shed. Why do you want it empty?”

  “I’m going to paint it.”

  “So, why didn’t you empty it yourself?”

  “I’m saving my energy for the painting. See you later.”

  “I’ll help you paint.”

  “No, I’d better do it on my own. You go to Bridget’s and start spending that money.”

  Gary Bird knew when he was being got rid of. He waved goodbye to Ellis, walked down the rutted driveway, as if returning to his house across the lane, and then double-backed up the alleyway alongside the cottage and watched from there. Ellis appeared from Mafi’s garage with a cardboard box full of newspaper. He dropped a yellow can of cigarette-lighter fuel into the cardboard box, set fire to the newspaper and threw the box into the shed. At this point, Gary ran, as fast as the twenty-five coins in his front pocket allowed him.

  The simplest ideas are sometimes the best. But sometimes they’re just the simplest.

  “What do you mean you just found it on fire?” Denny stood with the contents of his shed at his feet and a smoking black scar, where the shed had been, nearby.

  “Someone must have, you know …” Ellis said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “So, what we have here is a vandal who burns down people’s sheds but he likes to empty them first so as not to damage the contents.”

  “Or a she …” Ellis said, “it could be a woman.”

  Ellis smiled, satisfied that he had distanced Gary from the crime scene by raising the spectre of a female arsonist. He was blissfully unaware that Gary was not in the frame and that there was one suspect and one suspect only. Denny smiled and discovered that he could not feel angry about this. Ellis motioned towards the cottage, a little unnerved by the peaceful expression on his dad’s face, and said, “Well, I’ve got a busy day so I’ll be in my room if you want me.”

  Denny and Mafi watched Ellis wander inside.

  “Denny,” the old lady said. “Might I suggest you embarrass yourself with that truce idea before Ellis burns down the cottage.”

  Ellis was confused. Any ten year old would be. He’d been told to sit up for Sunday lunch but there was no food on the table.

  “Is lunch ready?” he asked tentatively.

  “In a moment or two,” Mafi said.

  Denny laid a sheet of paper down in front of him, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat.

  “Right then …” he murmured, laughing nervously under his breath and blushing. “Ellis, I’ve been in discussions with the spiders, on your behalf.”

  This didn’t shock Ellis. He had, after all, been talking to them for over a year.

  “They’re as upset as you that you don’t get along.”

  “Did they say that?”

  Denny nodded. “They’ve proposed an agreement and I think it’s a sensible one. Do you want to hear it?”

  Ellis nodded.

  “During the winter, when you tend to spend more time indoors, they’ve agreed to mostly withdraw from the cottage and leave you alone. What they said was that because there aren’t many insects about in winter anyway to be caught in their webs …”

  Ellis swallowed sickly at the thought.

  “… they will pretty well stop spinning their webs in the cottage in winter, and if any did accidentally appear then, during the winter, it’s permitted for us to take them down.”

  “Where are they going to live?”

  “They will be allowed run of the downstairs toilet, which you never use anyway. But, mostly, they’ve agreed to hibernate outdoors, in the soil or under the leaves.”

  “Ace!” Ellis said.

  His dad continued, “But, Ellis, this is a two-way street. One of the conditions is that you will learn about them. I’ll teach you; we all will. You learn what an incredible species they are, just like humans. This is important. I’ve bought a book we can learn from.”

  “I cannot look at pictures of them!”

  “OK, but you’ll have to listen. This is a condition of the agreement, Ellis.”

  Denny looked down at his notes and read from them, his voice more formal than he had wanted it to be.

  “Spiders are incredible creatures, Ellis, and everyone concerned wants you to understand that. For instance, the hunting spiders that have agreed to spend the winter in the garden, they have a thing called glycerol in them and it’s an antifreeze, like we put in the car radiator. It’s so clever, they have antifreeze in their bodies and in their eggs too, so that’s how they can survive the winter out there. Some of the others will build themselves nice warm sleeping bags with their own silk.”

  “That’s clever,” Ellis conceded.

  “Very clever,” agreed Mafi.

  Denny continued, “I have told the spiders how nervous you are of them. As I said, they were very sorry to hear it.”

  “They really said that?”

  “They did,” Chrissie said.

  “Part of the agreement, though, is that you think about all the dangers they face and all the creatures they are frightened of. As you learn about this, I’m sure that the last thing you will want to be is another one of the animals harming them every day, don’t you think?”

  Ellis didn’t respond. He didn’t want to give any ground without being sure what he was agreeing to.

  “Did you know that spiders stroke each other, Ellis?” Mafi asked encouragingly.

  “They eat each other too,” he responded.

  Denny intervened. “Well, that’s true, yes, but not often. Not most of them. It’s a complicated business, but … where was I?” He returned to his notes. “Yes, that’s it … I’m sure you don’t want to join the long list of things that harm spiders, do you, Ellis? Starlings and robins like to eat spiders, so do the blue tits we encourage with the monkey-nut strings. Frogs and toads eat thousands of spiders. Spiders are under attack from all these things all the time, Ellis, and they have to live somewhere.”

  Ellis’s face lit up. “We could dig a pond in the garden and have frogs and toads in it, loads of them.”

  “No fear!” Mafi said.

  “That would just drive the spiders into the house,” Chrissie said.

  “Then have the frogs in the house.”

  “Mafi hates frogs,” Chrissie countered.

  “Even if Mafi loved frogs, we’re not having them inside our house,” Denny said.

  “But Dad,” Ellis said.

  “Yes, Ellis?”

  “Wait a minute.” Ellis didn’t know what he wanted to say, but he didn’t want to lose the initiative here. “Oh, yeah, what about putting toy frogs all around the house, like scarecrows, to scare the spiders back to the garden?”

  Chrissie shook her head. “Ellis! Spiders don’t see frogs and think, ‘Oh shit! A frog.’ They sense them by smell and sound. A toy frog isn’t a frog to a spider.”

  Ellis turned to his dad. “Is it OK to say shit?”

  “No, it isn’t. You’re getting confused, Ellis. There’s no point having frogs inside the house to scare off spiders that have only flocked inside because they’re scared of the real frogs you’ve put in the garden pond. Especially when we have a better solution here in front of us.”

  “I don’t think spiders ‘flock’, Dad,” Chrissie said. “Sheep flock. I can’t believe spiders and sheep share the same word for group-movement.”

  Ellis was confused now. He had no clear image in his head of this truce thing so it wasn’t real to him.

  Denny leant across the table, closer to his son.

  “Ellis, this agreement isn’t foolproof. By that I mean that there are bound to be moments when you come into contact with spiders. When that happens, you come to one of us and you accept that it was just an accident, that they weren’t intentionally trying to make you nervous. You just stay calm and in time you’ll be fine with them. On the occasions when you accidentally kill a s
pider without even being aware you’ve done it – which happens a lot, by the way – they have agreed to accept that this is an innocent accident and not to retaliate.”

  “They’d better not,” Ellis said.

  His dad looked him in the eye. “It’s a generous, helpful offer on their part. Can I go back to them with your agreement?”

  Ellis thought about it, looking as serious and thoughtful as he could. Then he nodded, gravely.

  “Good.” Denny put his notes into his breast pocket and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  Ellis felt exhausted and very grown up. He climbed on to his dad’s lap. They hugged and rocked back and forth.

  “There’s nothing for you to be worried about,” Denny whispered, in a way that sent a rich, warm chocolatey feeling through Ellis’s heart.

  “OK,” Ellis whispered back.

  “Can I tell you one more thing?”

  “My brain’s full.”

  “One more.”

  “All right, then.”

  “See those beams?” He pointed to the ceiling beams.

  “Yeah.”

  “If it weren’t for them, you know our house would fall down?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, guess who it is that protects those beams from the woodworm that would eat the beams up, given half a chance?”

  “Spiders?”

  “You said it.”

  4

  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 b
y 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.”