by Tim Connolly
Ellis sits motionless at the table. Hours later, the stirring of sunrise distracts him. He opens the back door and goes to the shed. He takes out the shrimping frame and buckets and his shrimping belt and loads them into the car. He runs a bath. Steam fills the tiny bathroom. He opens the window and the steam snakes towards the cool air outside. He pours blue bath foam into the water. The label has been peeled off and in its place, in black marker pen, are the words Spider Blood! He wrote that when he was drunk. He lies in the bath and the water is too hot. He feels his body temperature rise and he reads the Spider Blood label over and over again. He decides that it is time to call a truce with himself. A truce with his yearning. A truce with the mute world of accepted forfeiture he has made his domain. He considers the lengths his father went to to avoid being hurt again, and it occurs to him that he does not want to emulate his father; that he does not want to be like him in every way. He toys with this idea as if it were blasphemy. He allows it to settle. It does so without kicking up a fuss.
I do not want to wait until the end to say what I am feeling.
He makes the phone call, again.
“Hello?” Tammy’s voice is dense with sleep.
“Hello,” Ellis whispers, as if not wanting to wake her.
“Is that you, Ellis?”
“Yes.”
She isn’t annoyed but she tells him it’s five-thirty in the morning.
“Sorry.”
She breathes heavily and it is almost a laugh. He knows she is smiling right now. Smiling at him.
“Did I tell you that my dad died?”
“No.”
“Well, he did. And I’d like to tell you about him, so I was wrong when I said about not talking much because I could end up talking for a week.”
There is a long pause before she says, “I’ll listen for a week.”
“What if you break my heart?”
“Or you mine.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that.”
“You don’t know that. Ellis, given how young we are, there is a good chance we won’t last for ever and that one day one of us will hurt the other. But that might not happen. Even if we stay in love for ever, we are going to get hurt from time to time. You do realise that?”
“That’s one of the few things I do know.”
“But are you up for that? There’s no place to hide, you know?”
“I enjoyed being with you more than I enjoyed anything.”
“You never told me that.”
“I know. I’m telling you now.”
He hears her smile to herself. “Yeah … you are,” she mutters, then adds, “You’re an orphan, Ellie.”
“No … not really.”
“Well, you are.”
“I’m too old to be an orphan. I just lost my mum and dad, that’s all.”
“Sounds awfully like being an orphan to me.”
They fall silent, as if their foreheads are touching.
“Ellie …”
“Yeah …”
“I want to be loved to bits.”
“OK.”
“I’m glad you rang.”
“Me too.”
“Don’t go yet. Tell me something, Ellie … any old thing, just talk a while.”
There is silence. Ellis looks at the very first traces of colour bleed into the sky from the east. Then he says, “There’s a ticklish spot on the hind legs of a tarantula and if you can get your little finger in there to caress it, then that hairy old tarantula is putty in your hands and if you’re very quiet you can hear it chuckle. My dad told me that and he never lied when it came to spiders.”
He walks to the lighthouse, thinking all the while how he loves her calling him Ellie. At the foot of the lighthouse, with his back pressed against the concrete, he looks up and watches the sway of the tower. It is always moving, even in this stillness before dawn.
The tide pulls on the shingle. Relentless. Unstoppable. Each shore break could be a passing soul. Denny once said that Ellis was both infinite and minuscule in the same breath. It is the same with deaths, each one unique yet commonplace, shocking and predictable.
Ellis asks of the morning: Do I have what I came for? Have I captured it, retrieved what I needed? And so, if I have, can I go now please? May I leave the table? Because I’ve been here at the water’s edge long enough.
Time is finite and Ellis intends to waste no more of it debating the likelihood or absurdity of a life beyond. The soul may be a fanciful luxury. The afterlife mere solace. Faith, a spiller of blood. Church, a house of fear. But something has passed and even if the true dimensions of eternal life are no more than the volume of Ellis’s imagination, something resides there. Even imaginary, it is real. To doubt it is to glimpse it.
The morning stirs and the wind picks up across the beach. A series of clouds are draped across a world which, becoming lighter, reveals a familiar crimson sky. Until now, his mother has always appeared at dusk, but today she is in the sunrise, first to arrive. The strengthening wind sweeps across the peninsula like a shadow and Ellis finds himself crossing the shingle as if pursuing it. At the water’s edge he sees the waves being stirred by the wind, each one lifted a little higher than the last and becoming the colour of storm. He takes deep breaths and realises, with surprise but without doubt, what it is he is on the brink of doing. It is no longer a challenge in words, it is no longer a fear that crushes him, it is an image, an image of cold blue, an image that makes perfect sense to his mind’s eye, an image he can lose himself in. He is already stripped to his pants and, for a fraction of time, airborne above the water. And he is swimming and immediately he feels the brutal strength of the currents. He remembers to swim towards the steeple on the Marsh and yes! the currents are taking him to the Bessie Swan and oh! it feels wonderful and Christ! the water is so cold, it’s so extraordinarily cold that only panic and exhilaration prevent his blood from freezing as he is yanked towards the silt ridge by the will of the sea and deposited there on his knees, left with the strength only to hold on to the world as if it were a passing raft.
Out by the wreck, the wind is even stronger. Sucked through the bottleneck of the Channel, it rages at Ellis. He gets to his feet and digs his heels in, to anchor himself. Inside the furious gale comes Denny, roaring across the face of the earth. He is as forceful and pure as a child again. Instantly, Ellis sees that his father has better things to do now than remain with his son. The wind howls around him and rocks his body. His father circles him once, twice, then soars into the sky and heads across the water towards Ellis’s mother in crimson. Ellis watches Denny’s final moments as a lost soul and sees him reach his mother. They are reunited on the horizon at the vanishing point and then they disappear out of sight.
Ellis’s body shivers to the point of spasm. His heart is at the brink of transparent joy. He could not have dreamt that it would feel so good to let go. He would not have imagined that the words he uttered a thousand times through his school days, which tormented him and riled his teachers, would be waiting for him here to offer him such peace, such self-knowledge.
“I don’t know …”
“I don’t know …”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer …”
I don’t know the answer, God.
I know you don’t, comes his reply. And that’s fine. Neither did I, my dear boy. Neither did I.
The sky is left dishevelled, like bed sheets in the morning. The wind has calmed and the world seems quiet. Ellis is alone with the Bessie Swan and he sees her for what she is, a vessel abandoned, having done the best she could. Now comes the sound of an outboard motor and the sight of Towzer Temple’s small clinker-built boat cutting through the water. Instead of sitting, as he normally would, Towzer is standing, his body contorted so as to reach down to the tiller whilst straining upwards to look across the water at the sodden figure standing out by the wreck. Towzer grabs the black woolly hat off his head and throws it down at his feet.
“You mad bugger!” he
yells, and begins to laugh and cough and splutter. “You mad fucking bugger!”
And the sight of this hysterical man, held together by whisky and weather-bitten skin, makes Ellis laugh as he shivers. He waves his arms exuberantly and shouts back, “I did it! I did it! Now I’ve done it too!”
Towzer leaps up and down, unable to contain himself, and the boat rolls from side to side.
“Too! Too! You’re the fucking first, you mad bugger!”
And he falls into his boat and screams with laughter. The boat shoots off at an angle until Towzer regains control of himself and the tiller. He comes alongside the silt ridge. Ellis clambers aboard. Towzer removes his coat and throws it to Ellis. The coat smells of cigarettes, of drinking and of fish. Ellis puts it on. They head back to the shore, to the lighthouse shore. To the beautiful, bleak, spent shore. Ellis looks across the surface of the water to the lights of the café next to the lifeboat station, as they flicker on. The café is the sort of place where being lonely felt warm and familiar and solid to him in yesterday’s world, when lonely was something he thought he was meant to be. But, this morning, he has no desire to go to the café or do anything else familiar. And there’s no need to keep watch here any longer. His father will not be returning. It will take him only a few minutes to pack his belongings and lock up the house and put the keys in an envelope for the agent, but even that will seem too slow because, for the first time in a long time, he cannot wait to get going.
AFTERWORD:
About Tom Connolly
About The Spider Truces
About Writing
ABOUT TOM CONNOLLY:
Where were you born and where did you grow up?
I was born in Farnborough, where South London and Kent merge, and I grew up in a village in the Weald of Kent.
Were you encouraged to read widely as a child?
If I was I probably turned a deaf ear as sport was all I was interested in. Hugh Pullen, an influential English teacher, made us read The Catcher in the Rye at exactly the right moment in my, at the time, dubious academic life (when I was fourteen), and that was the start.
What was your favourite subject at school?
Football, basketball, cricket. When I finally and belatedly began to study, I grew to love English literature.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Married to the girl next door. Then she moved to Belgium, when we were both seven. That was a kick in the teeth. Belgium … you don’t bounce back from that in a hurry.
Did you write compulsively as a child?
I started writing when I was fifteen. I have written ever since.
What book did you love as a child and why?
I can’t remember any as a young child, but early on at “big school” Hemingway’s Indian Camp was the first story I loved and found thought-provoking. I was a very childish seventeen year old, if that counts, when a girlfriend gave me Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. It was the first time I read and re-read a novel. I loved that book, still do.
Did writing the book change you?
No.
What do you do when you are not writing?
Earn a living. Coppice woodland. Windsurf badly. Swim. Walk for miles in East Sussex and Kent. Watch Arsenal and moan about us leaving Highbury.
What would you be if you weren’t a writer?
When I was a boy I wanted to be a shepherd on Romney Marsh. So, maybe that. I don’t know. I’d be a completely different person, so who knows?
What is the best job you have had?
I once got paid to spend two months making mini-documentary films about football for a beer company. That was a pretty good combination.
Which authors do you most admire?
William Maxwell, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Ford, Marilynne Robinson, Harper Lee, Ernest Hemingway. And Raymond Carver for his poems. I’ve just started reading Bukowski and that is a fantastic experience. Then there’s individual books that I have admired greatly, like Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor, Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah, A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker. Where do you start? Where do you end? I should say, to try to boil it down, that William Maxwell’s work is incredibly important to me.
Which book do you wish you had written?
Gilead is the most perfectly written book I know about, or Middlesex for its invention. Or Barbara Cartland, for the dosh.
Do you have a favourite book?
So Long, See You Tomorrow… by William Maxwell.
What do you look for in a novel?
I don’t look for anything. It either works for the reader or it doesn’t.
Do you have a favourite literary character?
There is something acutely beguiling and hypnotic about Frank Bascombe (Richard Ford’s novelist–sportswriter–realtor) which means that I find myself identifying closely with someone whose life is, on the surface, so foreign to mine. I feel bereft at the end of a Frank Bascombe novel, at the prospect of being parted from him. An awe-inspiring writer, Ford.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
As Ellis would say, not being asked questions like that. But if I were forced at gunpoint to answer, it would involve regular contact with the people I love – but not too regular.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I give myself a very hard time when it comes to my work. Some would say, with good reason.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“By definition.” And I swear, which I hate.
What is your greatest extravagance?
I don’t have any. Oh, yeah, going on trips abroad when I am broke – I remember now. When being hassled by utility companies and the council tax people for payment, I tend to sit down with a calculator and put my serious head on, with the intention of working out a budget and a master-plan for cutting costs and surviving a few more months, and ten minutes later I find that I have gone online and booked a fortnight’s windsurfing somewhere hot and real nice, trusting that things will have sorted themselves out by the time I’m back.
What would your superpower be?
A moderate command of English grammar.
What is your view on spiders?
They are good for old houses so I have a vested interest. The more I learned about them, the more awe-inspiring they became. Often, at sunrise and sunset in my garden and in the fields around, I see thousands of silk threads caught in the low light and it reminds me that they are everywhere, creating these extraordinary feats of engineering called webs. I’m a fan.
ABOUT THE SPIDER TRUCES:
How did you start the book?
At a certain point in my life, I had a period of having very vivid recollections of the village I grew up in and of particular incidents. These were not dramatic or unusual but they were “mine” and I felt the need to record them. Somewhere in that time, what I was writing down changed from recording memories to creating wholly fictional stories and characters and setting them in various places I have lived. By 2003 I had decided these notes would be a novel, my first novel. Very few of those early notes and real memories survived the cull from a 700-page first draft to a 300-page book. In all, it took five years to write.
What encouraged you along the way?
My brother Pip, my best mate, Jim. And the fact that I was very focused on doing this, whatever the outcome and however long it took.
Did you visit the locations you were writing about?
I set the book in three places I have lived. Everything else about the process of writing a novel was foreign to me, including the story itself, so I decided that the locations would be the elements that I really knew and was expert on. My memory of these places is profoundly vivid and detailed, so I did not return to them for the purposes of the writing, and, in the case of my village, the changes that have occurred naturally over time would have hindered me. It is also the case that in writing t
he book I have manipulated the layout and reality of those settings to suit my story.
Did you know how the novel would end when you began it?
I knew, but it had other ideas. It won. My ending was terrible.
How did you want the reader to feel on finishing the book?
It would be immensely pleasing for me if the reader loved and cared for the characters, would miss them a little, and had their own vivid picture of the landscapes. But I’d settle for them not demanding their money back.
Are any of the characters based on people you have known?