The Spider Truces

by Tim Connolly

  Ellis could only wonder how a man with such a slavish devotion to mind-enhancing drugs had been left so cruelly unenhanced.

  Mick put Ellis into the care of Jed, his foreman on a house renovation at Joy Lane Beach. Jed was softly spoken and quick-witted, handsome and strong, with small, piercing eyes. He was twenty-four and already tanned and marked by eight years’ labouring. Ellis stuck close to Jed, did what Jed told him and spoke hardly a word, using the first two weeks to weigh up the new sort of people around him. His first pay packet consisted of ten five pound notes, a carton of French cigarettes and a block of hash. He bought jeans, a T-shirt, underwear and a toothbrush.

  High above the town, from the rooftop at Joy Lane, they watched students hitching to summer jobs in Canterbury and Margate, dressed in dungarees and torn jeans.

  “It’s like a Dexy’s Midnight Runners convention,” Jed said.

  Dark clouds brewed out to sea and the downpour came in heavy sheets. The crew took cover inside the house and smoked spliffs and turned up the radio, above the sound of rain peppering the tarpaulins. One guy cursed a Madonna song and said she was “shit” but added, after further contemplation, that “he’d give her one, though, if she begged”. Another man announced that he was “too fucked to raise a finger, let alone walk home”.

  “You should go for a swim,” Ellis said. “It’ll freshen you up.”

  The crew turned and stared.

  “It talks,” one of them muttered.

  They carried Ellis’s wriggling body across the beach and threw him into the sea. He floated away on his back, a sodden spliff between his grinning lips. The men laughed and splashed in the water. In time, they dispersed. Slithers of lightning shot from the underbelly of black clouds out to sea. The storm moved eastwards, parallel to the coast. The lightning was silent, the waves gentle and unperturbed, but black, jet black. Ellis laid his wet five pound notes on the sea wall, pinning them flat with pebbles. He lay on his back in his soaking clothes. It felt good to have a little money.

  He learned how to re-bed ridge tiles, use a slater’s ripper, lay bricks, bake hash, spike a B-bomb and brew home-made honey oil. And, seven weeks after leaving home, he lost his virginity to Sapphire, the barmaid from the Harbour Lights, real name not known, and an event which he had expected to transform his life and propel him into a state of supreme wisdom passed without ceremony or pleasure, leaving him crushed by the disappointment of their loveless encounter on the beach.

  “You could do with a proper girlfriend,” she told him, as she stepped back into her knickers, snagging them on the soles of her Dr Martens. “Someone you really like. I’m not going to do any more fucking until I meet someone I actually fancy.”

  He nodded purposefully, to paper over her comment.

  “Can I say something blunt?” she asked.

  “Blunter than what you just said?” he asked back.

  “You have it all to learn in the sex department. Get an actual girlfriend and you’ll improve your technique.”

  Ellis thought about this. Just getting to do it in a bed might help him, he thought.

  “You’ll crack it,” she added. “Pardon the pun.”

  He smiled bravely, and wondered what the pun had been.

  Next day, hungover and grieving for his stillborn romantic dream, Ellis was in no mood to go to work and knowing that Jed had a day off he wandered around the bay to the foreman’s mobile home.

  “I’m not working today, I’m too depressed,” Ellis announced, at the doorstep.

  “Depressed? How exotic. Have you told Mick you’re not turning up?”

  “No, I’m just taking the day off.”

  “That’s a stunningly bad idea.”

  They walked across Graveney Marshes as far as Horse Hill, to pick mushrooms.

  “I used to pick mushrooms at Reardon’s,” Ellis said. “For breakfast.”

  “Not mushrooms like these you didn’t,” Jed said.

  No, not mushrooms like these.

  “I’ve never had anything like these before …”

  “Yeah,” Jed said, watching Ellis vomit at the foot of one of his bird tables. “They do taste a bit cheeky. We might be a tad premature eating these. Probably need some Daddy’s sauce.”

  “Sweet Jesus!” Ellis groaned, as the garden folded in on him. “I’m gonna go to work.”

  “Another remarkably bad idea.”

  Ellis wandered away and was sick again on the beach. He waited for the spiralling to go. He felt lonely. He slept and he was cold when he woke so he walked at a pace. He crossed the footbridge over the rail line and climbed through the allotments to the Rose In Bloom pub. Specks of rain dappled his face and made him smile. He looked at the greying sky and saw that the droplets of rainwater had begun their journey in another sphere, somewhere between the skies and outer space, in a world not detectable to the human eye. It was a world of flat water, moving horizontally in sheets between beams of starlight, a world of iridescent blue, more mysterious than the base of the ocean. The rain came from this world and he welcomed the droplets on to his face. They fell in slow motion towards him, each one distinct and crystal clear, and as they permeated his skin and entered his body he felt that he belonged to that other world.

  He looked across the road to the bungalows stacked neatly on the hillside. A man and a woman emerged from either side of every bungalow. They held their palms up to the sky to check for rain, blew kisses to each other and returned inside, hovering a few inches above the ground. The women wore clogs. There were goats grazing all around. Everything was vivid on the surface and uncertain beneath.

  At the disused brewery, Ellis found Mick and smiled at him innocently, with bright, trippy eyes.

  “You’re five hours late.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Fuckwit! Go up to the top floor and hose it down and do it quickly so I can get these boys back to work underneath you. Then make me a fucking cup of tea.”

  Ellis trudged up five flights of stairs inside the gutted building, immediately losing his grasp on what Mick had asked him to do. The floors had been ripped out and Ellis could look down through a skeletal run of scaffolding planks on each level to the ground. At the top of the building, white paintwork had peeled from the walls, taking chunks of plaster with it. Ellis rested and looked at his surroundings. He thought he saw his father out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned there was no one there.

  “Sorry,” he called out, just in case.

  He was shaking and his throat was dry but his physical weakness worried him less than a dawning sense of crisis. He looked at his feet and found himself unable, or unwilling, to look up again. A flurry of panic came towards him. He tried to recognise it but was distracted by Mick’s voice, screaming at him from outside.

  “ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF OR WHAT?”

  Ellis peered out of a glassless window. Five floors below stood Mick, nostrils flaring, eyes bulging.

  “Eh?” Ellis thought he was going to faint.

  “I’ve been shouting to you for fucking ages, you wanker!”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes! Take the fucking hose!” Mick jabbed his hand angrily towards the wide open loading doors. Ellis stepped out on to the hoisting platform and took hold of the pulley rope and the hose that had been tied to it. He pulled the hose into the room, stood motionless and tried again to place this feeling of impending trouble.

  “ELLIS!” Mick shrieked.

  Ellis tiptoed over to the platform and felt a fit of giggles imminent. Down below, Mick was turning purple with rage. “What the fuck are you doing now?” he yelled.

  “Nothing!” Ellis chose, unwisely, to answer.

  “Ellis, are you taking the piss because I’m in the mood to smack the shit out of you if you are?”

  “Whaaaat?” Ellis whined, confused.

  Mick composed himself and faked a smile. “Please, old chap, hose down the ceiling and walls, like I asked you to twenty minutes ago, so that all these boys can g
et back to work underneath you. Please, pleasey-weasey.”

  “I need chocolate,” Ellis said.

  Mick exploded. “YOU DON’T NEED FUCKING CHOCOLATE, YOU CUNT! YOU NEED A HOSE AND YOU’RE FUCKING HOLDING ONE!”

  “All riiiiight!” Ellis started to giggle. He stepped back inside and picked up the hose, studied it, laid it down again and fell to his knees. Then he saw them, all around him, cobwebs stepping forward into his line of sight one by one, the way stars appear in the sky at the margins of darkness, coming from nowhere to dominate the view. They were in the apex of the roof, under the sills, across the shattered windows. And hiding somewhere inside them were millions of spiders. Spiders Ellis couldn’t see but that his weary, confused, tripping mind insisted were there.

  “Oh bollocks,” he moaned, and hid his face in his hands. “I’m too grown up for this rubbish. Please just go. I’ve got to hose down the place so you have to go. Not that you’re here. You need to get organised and evacuate.”

  They responded sympathetically in the same voice as in the old days. “We’re not here, Ellis. We haven’t been here for a long time, not since they started all the work. You need some sleep, Ellie-boy.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Ellis replied wearily. “This is a pain in the arse.”

  He stood up as resolutely as his jelly legs would allow, grappled for the hose and set to work. “You’re not here. They’re not here. It’s ridiculous.”

  Jed marked the arrival of his first video player by renting Badlands and A Nightmare on Elm Street and inviting a few people over. Ellis slept in the spare room and the next morning, whilst cooking breakfast, Jed said, “The room’s yours for forty quid a month, if you like.”

  Jed’s mobile home was on the edge of a caravan park at the far end of Joy Lane Beach. He had surrounded it with home-made bird tables and feeders, which he filled every morning before work. Joy Lane was on a plateau running out of the town, parallel to the sea. To the south of it, modern bungalows were stacked in neat rows of Lego on the hill, gazing permanently at the tides. To the north was the London to Ramsgate line and then the golf course and then an arc of beach huts and then the sea. A railway bridge connected the lane to the short no through road which was Joy Lane Beach. Nine sets of steep steps led down to nine white-painted dwellings on the water’s edge and beyond them was the caravan park. The beach was quiet and empty. It yawned wide open at low tide, a vast mud expanse dotted with mussel beds and small wrecks.

  Ellis accepted Jed’s offer and couldn’t believe his luck.

  There was masking tape in Jed’s shed and Ellis used it to seal the gaps in the walls and window frames of his new bedroom. He knew, better than most, the wealth of spider-life on a beach and it was cold enough for them to be driven inside. He didn’t want to dwell on the fact that he was beginning to worry about them again.

  A photograph of a six-year-old boy smiled from the kitchen wall. Jed told Ellis that the boy was his baby brother and offered no more detail. Near to the boy, suspended from the ceiling, was a rusty Victorian saucepan rack with a row of fishing hooks from which hung large, dome-shaped mushrooms. The mushrooms were amber-brown and each stem had a black line around it near the dome. The domes were tainted by grey warts.

  Nothing seemed to ruffle Jed. He had an on-off love affair with the landlady of the pub that jutted out into the sea. She was eleven years older than him. People viewed him with respect and began to notice his young sidekick too, struck that a near mute should have such bright blue eyes as Ellis O’Rourke had.

  Ellis wrote to Chrissie to give her his address. He described the view of the coastline from his bedroom window. He asked her to send his love to Mafi and his dad. The day was crisp. Out to sea, the decaying army forts on the Shivering Sands were clearly visible. Men working the mussel beds were a silent film but for the thin calls of wading birds. Joy Lane Beach was living another day in its own separate world. Ellis wished his dad could see him.

  What shocked Ellis about the Buckingham green Triumph Herald 1200 for sale on Cromwell Road was not the surprisingly low mileage of a twenty-year-old car – which the owner put down to having used it “just for nipping to the shops”, hearing which his brother suffered an attack of the giggles – nor was it the strange bubbly effect of the paintwork, or the liberal use of electrical tape to hold together the pvc seats, or the absence of a rear bumper. No, what struck him most of all was that this splendid vision of mechanical beauty cost a mere one hundred and fifty pounds. When he considered the hundred pounds sitting in his Post Office account and the fact that he was earning decent cash, it dawned on him that it was now entirely plausible that he could own a motor car. If moving from Mick’s sofa to Jed’s place felt good, just imagine how fantastic life was going to feel if he owned a car. He would be mobile and grown up and unbelievably cool. His social life and sex life would quickly move on to a par with Bruce Springsteen and that bloke in Dynasty with the quiffy hair. He simply had to own this D reg Triumph Herald. All he needed now was his driving licence and his blue Post Office Savings Account book, and they were back home.

  It was a Thursday morning. He had an hour. His dad was at work, of course, and Mafi would be having her hair done at Carrie Combe’s and then having a drink in the Windmill, as she did every Thursday. The cottage was cold and hollow. He listened to it creak and groan, surprised to discover that in the middle of the day it sounded like the dead of night. He went to his room and got what he needed. He took his matchbox as well, the one with his mum in it.

  He looked out at the front garden and recalled his dad buying a Mountfield lawn mower the first summer here. The noise of the engine had startled Ellis. He remembered burning his forearm just above his wrist on the mower that same summer. He thought of the first time he cut the grass for his dad, when he was twelve. He could feel the weight of the machine as his undeveloped body struggled to heave it around. He saw his dad in a ragged gardening sweater, stooping beneath low-hanging branches as he cut the grass. You always started in the orchard, mowing crossways from the fence by the working men’s club downhill towards the cottage. Then you cut the small patches of lawn around the quince bushes and Mafi’s garage and round the back of the cottage beneath Mafi’s living room window. Then, up on to the side lawn, raising the height of the blade a notch so as to keep the grass lush and soft. You mowed the side lawn lengthways, up and down the slope. Then, to finish, the front garden, starting at the bottom, in the wet areas around the weeping willow, and finishing on the neatest part in front of the house. In the summer, Ellis liked to time it so that he was finishing the last lines of the front lawn as his dad returned from work. His dad’s face would break into a smile from behind the wheel.

  “Wonderful, dear boy,” he’d exclaim, getting out of his car. “Thank you very much.”

  One summer, they returned from a summer holiday and the grass was so long that Ellis had to march up and down a few yards in front of his dad, stomping down the grass for Denny to mow. Another time, it started to rain and Mafi came out with a bright red umbrella and held it over Denny as he mowed. Ellis took a picture. His dad is laughing.

  He drank hot chocolate on the train because he felt weak. He felt weak because he had lingered too long in the cottage and, suddenly fearful that Mafi would walk in on him, had left in a hurry, agitated by the sensation of being chased. He had felt she was watching him for the three miles he walked across the fields to Hildenborough station.

  The train window played a movie of hop fields and pasture. Ellis wondered whether the cottage had always been that desolate when everyone was out, or whether his leaving had created the void. Was it his fault, the hollowness that now prevailed in the rooms, the sense of something lost?

  Nothing is ever motionless, he told himself. The day you arrive somewhere new is the day you start towards leaving that place. Time never stood still in the cottage for us to just be, to just exist. It was running out from the moment it began. Every day of your life is lying in wait for you.
>
  I thought I would cut the grass for him for ever.

  Jed left Mick’s employment and took Ellis with him. The green Triumph Herald with its home-made wooden roof rack laden with paint pots and ladders became a recognised sight in the town. By day, Ellis felt warmed by the adoring company of the old ladies whose houses Jed sent him to paint. By night, he haphazardly sought the company of young women, but when he found it there was rarely the affection he dreamed of. He escaped from these regrettable encounters to the beach where the winter winds were scorched by Scandinavian ice and the rains were horizontal.

  As the year grew old, there were few days when the ibotenic acid of the fly agaric mushroom was not canoeing leisurely around Ellis’s system. The after-effects of alcohol, cannabis and amphetamine sulphate could all be diluted by retreating to the beach, unless the binge had been extreme enough to render Ellis unconscious or sick. His body always recovered, with a little time. Harder to treat was the self-loathing that overcame his psyche whilst his body bore the brunt of his prodigality. Even that, though, he’d forgive and forget when the high of recovery embraced him. This was usually on the second morning, when he would wake to find the sickness replaced by the head pains of dehydration. He would eat well, drink sweet tea and be filled by a feeling of profound love for everything and everyone around him, unaware that this feeling was there simply because yesterday he had felt so ill and today he did not.

  On the evening he had a date with Shelley Neame, he got home from work sweaty and caked in dust, and went immediately to run a bath. The large house spider waiting beside the hot tap ruined his plans. He knew instantly from the once familiar ripples inside his stomach that he would not be able to reach towards the bath tap.