The Spider Truces

by Tim Connolly

  “Me, too.” Ellis smiled, placing his hands under his legs and sitting forward on the chair.

  Denny bowed his head and took a deep breath. “You have eaten, haven’t you?” His voice was stern.

  Ellis shook his head.

  “Your sister has done the shopping, hasn’t she?”

  Ellis nodded and smiled.

  “Well, where is it?”

  “She’s not back yet.”

  “What do you mean, she’s not back yet? It’s nine o’clock.”

  “She rang me from the town to ask me if I minded her going back to James’s for a bit. She’ll be back about ten … with the shopping.”

  His dad filled the kettle again and slammed it down on the stove. He threw a tea bag into his mug and sat down opposite Ellis. “And you said you didn’t mind?”

  Ellis shrugged and nodded. Denny repositioned his chair so that he was sideways to the table, the same way he did after a meal. He crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. His jaw muscles clenched and he looked out of the window.

  “Ellis …”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “You’re fifteen years old tomorrow. You are old enough to say no to your sister. You are old enough to walk over the green and buy some food and cook it. You are old enough to think of what I’ll need when I get in from a day like today.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  They sat in silence. Then Ellis said, “But you kept telling me everything was fine so I didn’t really know today was a day like today.”

  Ellis couldn’t sleep, not after the shouting between Chrissie and his dad. The atmosphere was strange. The cottage was not accustomed to raised voices. He went downstairs, lifted away the tablecloth that covered the television and switched it on. He imagined his dad and his sister, also unable to sleep, joining him and the ill feeling drifting away amid the magic of being up so late, the same magic that came to this room on Christmas Eve or during a power cut or on election night. And, sure enough, pretty soon, the floorboards above creaked and Ellis smiled to himself in anticipation. But the footsteps on the stairs were brisk and heavy. The living room door burst open and Denny bore down on his son, his face gripped by anger he did not want to feel. He shoved Ellis towards the door and Ellis ran upstairs. He buried himself under the sheets and fought to silence his whimpering. Denny marched in.

  “I was sleeping, you selfish little bugger!” he hissed. Then he punched Ellis’s arm through the bedclothes and slammed the door behind him.

  From the door to the ward, Ellis and Chrissie heard their great-aunt screaming.

  “They were killing him, they were killing him! They were cutting up our boy, Denny!”

  Ellis peered in and saw his dad holding Mafi. She looked like a ghost. Tears streamed from her eyes.

  “They were cutting up our little Ellis! Get them away from him, Denny!”

  Denny rocked her.

  “Just a bad dream,” he said. “Just a bad dream.”

  A nurse pulled the curtain round and left Ellis doubting that Mafi would ever seem the same to him now that he had seen her like that.

  “Are you having a nice birthday?” Mafi asked Ellis.

  They had washed her face and brushed her hair and wrapped a woollen shawl round her bony shoulders. She almost looked like Mafi again. Ellis couldn’t think of anything to say to her. His fingers played with the stiff hospital sheets and he wondered what Mafi’s dream had been. Chrissie answered for him.

  “We all had a big bust-up last night. Dad’s in a foul mood.”

  “She’s exaggerating,” Denny said. “I’m going to find some tea for us.” He got up and wandered out of the ward.

  “He’s ruined Ellis’s birthday,” Chrissie said.

  “I don’t mind,” Ellis protested.

  Mafi looked Chrissie in the eye in such a way that Chrissie could not look away.

  “What?” She laughed nervously.

  “He’s worried sick,” Mafi said. “You should be thinking of him. He’s only human.”

  Chrissie went quiet and soon she left the room. When she returned, she was holding Denny’s hand and she had been crying. They drank tea. Silence took hold again but now the silence wasn’t so bad. Denny O’Rourke looked at the sky. He wondered how many times the four of them would be in a room together again. Just them, no boyfriends, no girlfriends … and Mafi.

  “I think you should all go out and enjoy the sunshine,” Mafi said.

  “It’s freezing out,” Chrissie protested.

  “It’s an order. Go away and get some air. I do not want Ellis O’Rourke spending his fifteenth birthday in a hospital ward full of old biddies.”

  As Ellis stopped in the doorway to look back at his great-aunt, his dad rested a hand on his shoulder, and as they walked along the corridor Denny left his hand there, and as they stepped into the lift and waited for the door to close he rubbed Ellis’s arm where the bruise had risen. Ellis looked up at his dad and smiled. Denny leant over and kissed Ellis on the head and Ellis wrapped his arms round his dad’s waist and pressed his head against him. Denny felt his heart ache with love. And he decided he would take his son to the Marsh.

  They glided through a line of empty villages. As a child, when visiting Aunt Mafi on the coast, Denny had learned to recite their names in order: Woodchurch, Kenardington, Warehorne, Hamstreet, Ruckinge – where the old farm implements were laid out in a field above the road – Bilsington, Bonnington and Lympne. A dog chased the car up Lympne Hill. Ellis watched it through the back window. It barked and leapt and then it gave up and returned home. When Ellis turned round they were on the Aldington plateau and, to his right, the English Channel was a sheet of winter grey. They parked outside the castle and walked through woodland. Where the woods ended the footpath continued along a ridge, and in the field above them two wildebeest were grazing. Chrissie stopped in her tracks.

  “Fuck me!”

  Denny glared and winked at her in the same moment.

  “Sorry,” she said. “But that’s a wildebeest, isn’t it?”

  They were at the bottom corner of the wildlife park.

  “See the wildebeest, Ellis?” Denny said.

  But Ellis didn’t hear him. He had climbed on to a gate and was looking in the opposite direction. Beneath him was a vast, graceful sweep of perfectly flat land, offered to him like an open hand. The land was dissected by intricate veins of reflective blue water, some twisting randomly, others deliberately straight. In between these dykes were patchworks of deep green pasture. Rare amongst the pasture were fields of brown earth where shadows slept along the plough lines. The sound of sheep rose from the green carpet, joined the chack-chacking of the fieldfares and hung in the air parallel to the plateau where they stood. There was no perspective or direction to the sound here. It was gentle and yet it travelled effortlessly across great distances to them, on board a chill November breeze. For all the indescribable places Ellis had seen in the pages of National Geographic, the land in front of him now, framed by sea and sky and stretching out of sight, seemed the most extraordinary. It was neither beautiful nor dramatic but, as he gazed upon it for the first time, it immediately felt to Ellis like home.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “That is the Marsh,” his dad said proudly.

  “I love it,” Ellis said. And he meant it, because fifty miles from his own village he had found a place so different it made the world feel wonderfully colossal.

  “It’s flat as a pancake, Ellis,” Chrissie said. “Your taste gets more surreal by the day.”

  “What’s surreal?” Ellis asked.

  “You are, smelly-Ellie, you’re surreal. That you, of all people, don’t know what it means is deeply ironic.”

  “What’s ironic?”

  Chrissie turned in despair to her dad. “Don’t worry, you’ve got one normal child.”

  “Not that I can see,” Denny said.

  She gave him a dirty look. “Don’t tell me you intend us to go for a walk?”r />
  “I do intend.”

  “On foot?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Do we get to sit in a pub at some point?” she asked.

  “We do,” he said.

  A barmaid in the Walnut Tree Inn told Ellis about the smuggling gangs on the Marsh and said she was a descendant of Cephas Quested, second in command of the Ransley gang in the 1820s. She walked him along a smuggler’s tunnel and when they emerged from it the sun was out and Ellis knew that Mafi was going to be all right. The November afternoon sky slanted across the Marsh, huge and magnificently blue, the biggest sky Ellis had ever seen. They headed for the sea and arrived at a peninsula where a lighthouse stood on a shingle point. Chrissie watched from the car as her father and brother ran and wrestled together amongst the fishing boats. They tumbled down the steep pebble ridge towards the sea and fell out of sight. Chrissie opened the window a little and heard their laughter buffeted by the wind. She heard a shout and then they re-emerged, hurrying towards the car, with Ellis soaked to the skin and already shaking uncontrollably. Denny sped away. Ellis lay across the back seat and felt his body go numb and his brain slow down. A smile appeared across his face so angelic that Chrissie thought he was dying.

  “Hurry up!” she urged her dad. “That sea must be bloody freezing!”

  “You don’t say,” Denny muttered.

  Ellis was cocooned from their voices, wrapped in a cold numbing perfection. He felt amazing, and it was almost a disappointment to him when the owner of the sports shop in New Romney took them in and offered towels and an electric fire.

  In the months that followed, Ellis took to immersing himself in cold baths. He failed to recreate that state of grace that falling into the sea in winter had gifted him but he enjoyed the baths nevertheless as a miniaturised form of transportation to another place, and he welcomed the arrival of his first chest-hairs, which appeared to be the baths’ doing. As unexpected and welcome as the chest-hairs was the A star he received for an English writing project, the first time he had ever done better than a C plus in five years of secondary school. The brief the class had been given by Mr Pulman was “My Weekend”.

  “It can be fact or fiction,” Pulman had said. “Two pages long.”

  The handing back of marked homework was traditionally a tepid or embarassing experience for Ellis. But on this occasion, his disbelieving eyes settled on red ink words which read, A* Excellent. Your spelling remains atrocious, almost a foreign language, and your boycott of grammar watertight, but this is a fine piece of writing, Ellis. I enjoyed it enormously. Thank you!

  It didn’t stop there. Mr Pulman announced that he was going to read an extract from the two best assignments, starting with Ellis O’Rourke’s.

  “Ellis’s ‘My Weekend’ is about a boy who spends a day on a marsh-like place with his father. The description of the landscape is well written and then there’s some really rather original writing at the climax, and here’s a bit of that. This is the place where the world begun. This is the land which woked up and found that it was the starting place of everything. This Marsh is a never-ending carpet. I love it most of all at dusk time when the black shapes of wind-blown bushes stand against a giant dusk sky like smugglers turned to stone by the customs men. Every single dusk on the Marsh is magical, every dawn brand new. When I am there with my dad I know that he and I have been together for a thousand years and will never die. The end.”

  The class sniggered. One girl whined, “It’s a never-ending carpet where I can play with my teddy bear because I’m Ellis and I’m a baby!” This caused a ripple of laughter which Mr Pulman talked down.

  “That was by far the best piece of writing in the fiction category, whilst of the factual ones I want to read you an extract from …”

  Ellis let Mr Pulman’s voice recede and looked at Tim. Tim slapped his shoulder.

  “That was brilliant, Ellis. Brilliant,” he whispered. “Don’t listen to these idiots. They’re jealous of you.”

  Ellis was wearing his confused face and muttered helplessly back, “But it wasn’t fiction.”

  Ellis and Denny would leave early for the Marsh, setting out when the village was a dark procession of cadaver houses and hollow-eyed windows. At shearing time, they heard the cries of ewes separated from their lambs reverberate across the flatlands and rise to them on the escarpment at Bilsington Monument. In midsummer, they listened to the hum of a light aircraft looping the loop over the Midley ruin. At dusk, Ellis saw smugglers out of the corner of his eye. They sought the eeriness of winter. The beauty of summer. The holiness of it all. At the ruins of Hope All Saints, they lay together on the grass and watched the domed sky.

  “All churches should have their roofs removed,” the younger O’Rourke said. “Then I’d go.”

  “Why bother, when you can come here?” his dad replied.

  “But you go sometimes?”

  “Very occasionally … just in case.”

  And being of the age when threads of desire were beginning to unravel in his imagination and the romantic poets were being forced upon him by Mr Pulman, Ellis decided that the Marsh had been the birthplace of his soul, somewhere in the past.

  From beneath the pall of apprehension that was the legacy of being left responsible for this boy and his sister, Denny O’Rourke glimpsed a different future when he and his son were on the Marsh. He had first seen the Marsh from on board ship, in wartime. Then, in the first warless summer of his adulthood, he had borrowed a car and gone to visit his Aunt Mafi on the coast. The two of them had driven out on to the Marsh on a gleaming bright summer’s day and every colour and detail and field and dyke and bullrush and poppy and bugloss had reflected in the mirrors and panels of the car, a Technicolor peacetime. During a picnic on the shingle point, beneath the lighthouse, Denny had dwelled deeply on the vision of a boy he had had when looking at this peninsula from his ship. He had toyed with the idea of telling Mafi about the boy but had thought better of it. And by the time he was married and his son was finally born, he had locked that vision away, out of reach. Now that he and his son were regularly visiting this same place, the future took on a new appearance in Denny’s eyes. It was less solitary, with fewer battles. It was shinier, like a polished car crossing the Marsh in summer. It was beautiful.

  Denny and Ellis marked the longest day of 1984 by watching the sun rise and set over the Marsh. They started at Fairfield, beneath a deep ocean sky that waited patiently for dawn. They sheltered in the shadow of the bellcote and drank tea from a flask.

  “You want a bench here, really,” Denny said. “Right here, tucked against the wall. Port in a storm, dear boy. Someone should do that, put a bench right here.”

  The first warm tones of gold and orange entered the sky and reflected in the still water of the drainage ditches. The sun appeared, showing up the lichen on the church bricks and on the tiles.

  They ran with stooped backs to the Listening Posts at Greatstone, hiding from the crane operators excavating the gravel lakes. Ellis threw a pebble into an immense concrete dish expecting it to echo, but it didn’t.

  “They used these to detect enemy aircraft,” Denny said. “Don’t ask me how.”

  “How?” Ellis asked.

  His dad lobbed a pebble at him. “Fool!” he laughed.

  They stopped at the bikers’ café on the main Marsh road at Old Romney and had breakfast. They were the only customers. Ellis’s mug had lipstick on it and, out of nowhere, he announced, “You don’t have to worry about me sitting you down and asking for sex education or stuff like that. I’m pretty well clued up on that … from a visual angle, if you know what I mean.”

  Denny didn’t flinch. “Good, ’cos I’m a bit rusty.”

  They parked at the lifeboat station beneath a fluttering ensign. Denny O’Rourke followed the caterpillar tracks across the beach to the launch. Ellis walked amongst the fishing boats. In the windows of a winch-shed he was confronted by a reflection of his dad looking out to sea. Denny’s hands
were clasped behind his back and from his stance Ellis knew that his dad was whistling to himself, through his teeth, the way he did when he was happy. When he was Ellis’s age, the man whistling at the water’s edge had presumed he would spend his whole life at sea. When he was told that he couldn’t, Denny O’Rourke thought he would never get over it. But he learned to live on land and life was bearable and then he met the butterfly-lady and life was wonderful again, as wonderful as the oceans for being loved by her.

  Ellis did not wish to cross the seas as his father had, but their trips together to the Marsh, though only an hour and a half away, were planting in him a desire to see those seas from all the different continents that rose up out of them, and to then, one day, live back here at the water’s edge. Mafi once said to him that his mother had died of adventure. He wondered if it were possible to die of the lack of it.

  They sat at the Point and Ellis noticed the wreck of a small fishing boat half buried in the sandbanks out to sea.

  “This is the photograph next to your bed.”

  “It is,” Denny said.

  “I never noticed the wreck before.”

  “No? Maybe the tide’s always been in.”

  “Maybe … Did you take that photograph?” Ellis asked.

  “Yes, from on board ship. On my last ever day at sea.”

  “Is that why you kept it all this time?”

  Denny didn’t answer for some time. He was distant for a while, as he toyed with the idea of telling a certain story. Then he smiled at his son.

  “Sort of,” he said. “Partly.”

  Streaks of pale pink cloud dissected the lowest horizontals of the sky and measured the sun’s descent. It offered up a glow of warm, pastel colours to the shingle peninsula and a small, white, timber-clad house accepted them, becoming saturated by the evening’s delicate hues. The house sat alone on the shingle, removed from the other houses there but constructed, like many of them, round the shell of an old railway carriage. It was surrounded by a wind-blown wooden fence which flapped in the wind.