The Spider Truces

by Tim Connolly

  Suddenly, he was over the garden fence and scrambling through the conifers, the harsh branches scraping his skin until he stumbled out on to the side lawn where Denny was carrying rotten lath to the bonfire heap. Ellis bent over to catch his breath and work out what to tell his dad. When he looked up, his dad wasn’t there. Ellis waved innocently to Mafi as she stared from her living room window. Denny was at the washing line, unpegging a towel. He wrapped it around his son.

  “You’re bleeding …” he said, unable to mask the tenderness.

  “Just a stupid dare with Tim, Dad. Just stupid, got a bit out of hand. I’m really sorry.”

  Denny picked off the stones embedded in his son’s arm.

  “Dad, I’m sorry,” Ellis repeated.

  “Make sure you get your clothes back,” Denny said, sidestepping the infinity of his son’s apology.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Ellis said and thanked God his dad was talking to him again. “I’m such an idiot,” he added innocently.

  Denny nodded in agreement and although his head was bowed as he attended to his son’s cuts, Ellis saw him smile.

  Ellis slept and bathed and dressed and put what cash he had in his pocket. He was going to find Tim Wickham wherever he was and take him for a pint. It had been an incredible day and he didn’t want it to end in a hurry. He wanted to go out. He wanted to sit in a pub and smoke and nurse a pint and, hopefully, look as good as he felt. If Chloe was with Tim then fine, he didn’t mind at all. He had his own private life now and they were welcome to theirs.

  The phone rang. Ellis looked for a pair of shoes that weren’t sprayed with dried mud, and the phone kept ringing. Ellis never answered the phone, neither did Mafi, unless they were walking past it as it rang. It was unusual for Denny to let it ring. Ellis stamped his feet into his shoes and went down the landing to his dad’s room and picked up the phone by the bed.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Ellis?”

  “Katie?”

  “Yeah. Christ that wasn’t funny!” She laughed. “They’ve freaked out. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

  “Who?”

  “My parents, who else? They’re not at yours, are they?”

  “No. Your mum’s pretty strong.”

  “I’m so sorry for what happened.”

  “I don’t mind. It was worth it.”

  “You wanna meet?”

  “OK.”

  “Don’t sound too enthusiastic. Meet me up by the bypass, in Morley’s café, in an hour.”

  “OK.”

  On his way downstairs, from the small window on the half-landing, Ellis saw Katie Morton’s parents walking down the driveway to their car. He found his dad sitting at the dining table. The two chairs opposite him had been pushed away and come to rest like a car crash beside the wall that Denny was gutting.

  Ellis’s tendency to make the wrong observation at the wrong time kicked in. “Can you believe they drove here when it’s a five-minute walk?”

  Denny’s face was set angrily in thought. Ellis fought the urge to continue out of the cottage and took a seat.

  “I’ll go if you don’t want to talk,” he offered.

  “You’ll do what pleases you,” Denny muttered bitterly.

  “Whatever that’s meant to mean,” Ellis added.

  There was a long silence. Then Ellis started to get up.

  “It means,” his dad hissed, sending Ellis back on to his chair, “that if you stopped and thought about me let alone bothered to think for one second about your mother even, then maybe you’d just …”

  His voice faltered into silence.

  “Maybe I’d just what?” Ellis asked. “Think what about my mother?”

  Denny O’Rourke fixed his angry gaze at nothing.

  “Think what about my mother?” Ellis repeated accusingly. “I know diddly-squit about her. Except that she’s dead.”

  “Exactly,” his dad whispered.

  Ellis leapt to his feet. “WELL, WHAT THE JESUS IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?”

  “Don’t shout at me, boy!”

  “What is it supposed to mean, I said! Now fucking well answer me!”

  “Ellis!”

  “Because just what the fucking hell I am supposed to think about my mother beats me. I know nothing about her, do I? How dare you tell me to think about someone you’ve spent my whole life pretending never existed!”

  “SHUT UP, ELLIS!” Denny bellowed.

  But Ellis ploughed on. “You’ve kept her from me all my life and now you want to use her as an example! Of what? I don’t know anything about her! You’re useless, you’ve always been useless and bringing her up now is just about the most useless you’ve ever been!”

  Denny O’Rourke fell back on to his chair. His hearing and vision became distant and unfocused. When he managed to raise his head again, he was alone.

  Morley’s café and truck stop was spread out on a plateau above the main road. From here, Ellis watched the toy houses of a miniature village in the soft, low, late afternoon light and scoured the lanes and fields for a sight of Katie Morton. He wandered across to the café entrance. Steam had obscured the warm orange windows, making indistinct silhouettes of the few people within. Ellis peered through them as best he could. Katie was not inside and Ellis was too intimidated to go in alone. In the car park, he noticed the driver’s door of a large decrepit Mercedes open. The interior light came on and illuminated a small, rounded, curly-haired man as he took a last drag on a joint and threw the roach away. As he passed Ellis and pushed open the café door, he smiled vacantly. “Going in?”

  “Nah,” Ellis said casually. “Waiting for my girlfriend.”

  He walked away and sat on the fence at the far end of the car park. He listened to the metallic flashes of sound as cars sped by on the main road.

  He was used to being in the dark about the transactions that occurred between people. This evening it was different. Only he and Katie Morton knew what they had done. The others thought they knew. They presumed the obvious, and Ellis saw his dad diminished in some small way by his ignorance.

  “We began with a lie, you and me,” Katie had said to Ellis, as she led him upstairs six hours earlier. Ellis didn’t understand what she meant. “Oh Lord! They’ve sent us the wrong tickets!” she mocked.

  In the bathroom, she asked him to remove a medium-sized Tegenaria saeva from the bath and run the taps. She took a pee in the toilet next door whilst Ellis’s resolve to cup the spider in his hands and place it on the window ledge failed him and he ushered it, with a loofah, down the plughole, convincing himself that it would have plenty of time to escape through the pipes before the bath was emptied. There were protests, but he turned a deaf ear.

  Katie added bubble bath to the running water. “But we’ll not tell any lies today. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know and I’ll be truthful.”

  “So will I,” Ellis said, not knowing what the hell she was talking about.

  She told him to sit down on the chair beside the bath and then she undressed.

  “We aren’t going to have sex. I don’t want to go out with you or to cop off with you. I don’t find you especially good-looking or fascinating. But I like you more than other boys I can think of, three of whom I have slept with I might as well tell you. I’m not planning on adding to that number in a hurry.”

  Ellis listened obediently and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t particularly want to ‘cop off’ with her either. He just wanted to be exactly where he was, listening and watching. He was happy not to be expected to do anything. She was naked now and he was aware of the sound of his own breathing and swallowing in a way he had never been before. She turned off the taps and felt the water. Her body could not have been more different from the woman from New Zealand’s.

  “Don’t you tan?” Ellis asked.

  “Don’t I what?”

  “Tan? In the sun.”

  “Not spectacularly,” she said. “But it’s not for the lack of tryi
ng.”

  She climbed into the bath and told Ellis to kneel alongside. “You can look at me and you can ask anything, but you can’t touch. I’ll place your hands where I don’t mind them going.”

  “OK, thanks,” Ellis said, as if being given road directions.

  She cleared the bubbles away from her breasts and placed his right hand on them.

  “Mine are rather small, Ellis,” she said. “You’ll decide what you like as you find out.”

  “I’m going to like big ones,” he said immediately, without thinking.

  She burst into laughter. “Honest Ellie, that’s you.”

  Ellis withdrew his hand, though not abruptly. “Please don’t call me Ellie,” he said gravely. “Only my mum called me Ellie.”

  She was taken aback. “You’re an odd fish,” she said.

  “And you’re not?” he replied, stretching out his arms to remind her where she was and what she was doing.

  The affection in her face gave him confidence enough to say, “I can’t see your body for all the bubbles.”

  “Soap gets rid of bubbles,” she replied.

  He took a bar of Mr and Mrs Morton’s not inexpensive soap, dunked it in the water and rubbed it between his hands, allowing the lather to drip from the bar and fall on the bubbles. The bubbles fizzed as they dissolved. Katie Morton raised one leg out of the water and presented it to Ellis. He washed her legs and her tummy and her breasts. The bubbles crackled all the while and soon he could see her, through the milky water.

  After that, she led him to her bedroom and she removed his clothes and told him not to worry about his erection. They lay on the bed together and hugged. She took his right hand and placed it on her tummy and then she slid his hand down until it rested on her pubic hair. He stared peacefully at her body and never thought to explore or probe further. He had no urge to lie on top of her, or to fondle her or to penetrate her. He did not burn with the stabbing, restless desire he felt when he and Tim used to go to the goat-lady’s place. What Katie and he were doing was just right. It was peaceful and tender and it placed no pressure on him to know more than he knew.

  And all the while he kept telling himself, What a summer! What a summer!

  An ivory glare emanated from the cloud cover and flooded the room with smooth light. Ellis smiled inwardly at the bright new world appearing before him.

  “It’s like watching underwater films,” he said, blissfully unaware of speaking.

  “What is?”

  “A woman’s body.”

  “Like I said,” Katie stroked his arm, “an odd fish.”

  And then they fell asleep.

  The village had sunk into dusk. In that gloom, beyond the charcoal fields of Elsa’s farm, Ellis could no longer place the once infinite joys of village life: the avenue of lime trees at Longspring, the view of the Downs glowing crisp and blue in the frost of winter, a peek at Kerry Moscow’s knickers as she climbed the gate to the Rumpumps when they were both nine years old, a meringue handed to him by Mrs Brown at Forge Cottages as he waited with his sister for the 454 bus, helping his father cut the grass in the orchard, handing a cigarette to Tim Wickham as he handed one back with the greater part of the day still ahead, the field at Long Barn a ripple of tall, swaying wheat. All these and a thousand other delights lay discarded in the corner of Ellis’s restless mind, like neglected toys in a bedroom cupboard. The smallness of the place was what he saw now, and the lights of the bypass and distant towns which rose out of the settling darkness and glimmered and twinkled with their own imprecise promises.

  Sometimes, as a very small boy, Ellis looked close up at his hands, at his fingerprints, at the faint pathway of a vein beneath his skin, and he had the sensation of being newly born, immediately out of the womb, a few hours old, the process of his cells dividing and his body forming still ongoing, but with no one watching, no one gathering him up to wrap layers of clothing around him. The feeling of living inside a space suit and instead of the sound of your own breathing all you can hear is your own voice wondering aloud what happens next.

  “Still waiting?” The man with the Mercedes stood nearby beneath a street light. He was short and unshaven, in his early forties, with a beer gut and Marty Feldman eyes. By the looks of him, Ellis thought, possibly a Whitesnake roadie. Behind him, the café was in darkness.

  “Women!” The man had a lazy East End accent. “Need a lift?”

  Ellis looked away. He watched the sodium lights that snaked around the valley and out into the world. He felt the breeze that followed the cut of the main road blow against his face. This moment was open-ended and it was his own. His own adventure, his own story, his own mistake.

  “OK,” he said.

  They travelled in silence at first and Ellis stole glimpses of the man’s head rolling back and forth as he drove.

  “Do you toke?” the man slurred, bringing himself back from the edge of sleep.

  “Do I what?”

  “Toke,” the man repeated. He leant across Ellis and opened the glove compartment. Ellis looked at the cigarette papers, small blocks of hash and ready-rolled joints. He said nothing. He had been contemplating trying pot for some months now but had done nothing about it. Now, he suspected, was not the time.

  “I’m a roofer,” the man said, reaching for one of the joints and lighting it. “Roofer and builder. Build roofs.”

  He took a few tokes and then handed it to Ellis, who accepted it, vowing to embrace a non-inhalation method. The smoke tasted sweet and beguiling and he broke his vow on the third toke.

  “That’s nice and mild,” the driver said, “you’ll be OK with that. I never smoke anything major when I’m driving. I don’t like people who do.”

  Ellis took another drag and handed it back. “It’s very nice,” he whispered, although he had intended to say it aloud.

  “Never smoke anything that mashes your brain when I’m behind the wheel,” the man repeated. “Just a little toke on something mellow.”

  “Probably wouldn’t pass as a road safety campaign, that,” Ellis said.

  The man looked confused, then changed the subject.

  “Employ loads of people, I do. Good money in roofing.”

  Ellis felt a ripple of nausea. He rested his head back and closed his eyes.

  “Know anything about roofing?” the driver asked.

  “No,” Ellis said.

  “You can start tomorrow then!” The driver wheezed a laugh to himself and handed the spliff back to Ellis. Ellis defied his own instincts and smoked the rest of it.

  “Road safety campaign … yeah …” the driver slurred to himself, confused. “Yeah … nice one.”

  Ellis was woken by the seagulls. It was morning and he was in the Mercedes. It was parked in a dead-end street beside a large, bleak-looking pub called the Harbour Lights. A blanket was wrapped around him. Opposite the pub was a sea wall and the tide was high the other side of it. The beach was shingle and to the left was a harbour with a tall, blue-grey tower. Mist was burning off the water and a large cargo ship manoeuvred through the harbour entrance. Somewhere out to sea, an invisible vessel boomed a low signal that made the windows of the pub vibrate.

  Ellis hauled his shivering body on to the sea wall. A young man appeared, tall and lanky with long dyed-black hair. He looked as though he got no daylight.

  “There you go.” He handed Ellis a mug of tea.

  “Thanks,” Ellis said.

  “Mick says you can start today or leave it till tomorrow if you’re knackered.”

  Ellis watched the young man go back inside the lifeless pub. He sipped the strong, sweet, piping hot tea and looked out across the water. Contentment swept through him. He wondered where he was. He looked around. From the top of Coastguards Alley, a phone box stared accusingly at him. The red paint had faded to matt pink. One pane of glass was broken, low down, an impromptu cat flap. He rang Chrissie and told her that he was on the coast and that he had work. He asked her to tell their dad. She refused and to
ld him to go home, but he knew that she would call Denny immediately. She loved to break news.

  He returned to the sea wall and rolled himself a cigarette and vowed not to go back home for one whole year. That would be amazing, he told himself. That would make him mysterious and desirable. That would mean he had his own life. OK, this place was not like the photographs he had pored over in the pages of National Geographic, but it was something new and that felt good. The phone box in the alley glared at him again. He rehearsed a phone call to Denny but even in his imagination the conversation strayed into argument.

  It’s private, Dad, Ellis imagined saying. See how you like it.

  12

  The flat above the Harbour Lights pub had four bedrooms. One was used by Sapphire, the barmaid. Mick and his crew slept in the others. Ellis had to wait until the men finished watching videos in the early hours of the morning before he could brush the food and roaches off the sofa and use it as his bed.

  “See these stairs here?” Mick said, giving Ellis a tour.

  “These two steps?”

  “Yeah.” Mick stood over them, the way TV detectives stand over a corpse. “These two steps down to the kitchen and living area mean that the flat is split-level. Right?”

  “With you so far,” Ellis said.

  “And you know what that means, don’t you?”

  Ellis shook his head.

  “That it’s a maisonette, not a flat.”

  “Right.” Ellis nodded.

  “That is to say, it’s a maisonette as opposed to being a flat, if you get me.”