The Spider Truces Read online

  “Did you ever tell him about the pasta spider webs?” Ellis asked.

  “No. We just fucked.”

  “You must have done. There’s no other possible explanation.”

  “I didn’t. I tend not to chat about you and your weirdness when I’m having sex. Maybe he was just writing a shopping list at the same time as the card and got confused.”

  “Write back to him,” Ellis said, “and tell him we were touched by his writing to us after dad had pasta-way.”

  They laughed until their stomachs hurt. Then they sat awhile in silence and thought their own thoughts and felt the taste of grief on their tongues and discovered that in the space of only a few days the taste had grown familiar and now it felt second-hand. Ellis shut his eyes and watched his father emerge from the bike shed at the cottage, carrying a bucket full of water. Denny swung the bucket round in wide circles above his head but none of the water fell out.

  “I thought he was a magician when he did that,” Ellis said. “Did you know how he did it or did you think he was a magician too?”

  “You’re doing that thing again,” Chrissie said.

  “What thing?”

  “That thing of having a conversation in your head and then bringing me in on it late. You’ve always done it. You’re so useless, Ellis. If you were the last man left on earth, you wouldn’t notice it for weeks.”

  She kissed him and left him to the freefall of random memories in his head.

  Another wave breaks. Ellis drops the Colombo Port shore pass back into the box and notices the dark scratched wood of a once familiar picture frame, in which is held a photograph of a lighthouse and a fishing boat run aground. He carries it outside and looks across the water to that same lighthouse and wreck. He watches the fishermen arrive at the huts in their battered trucks. Towzer Temple leans heavily against his boat and coughs himself awake. He takes a banana from his coat pocket and eats it. He delves into the same pocket and pulls out an old crisp packet, which he seems surprised to have found. He makes a chute out of the packet and pours the crisps into his mouth, pulling a sour face as he tastes them. Lazily, he kicks the side of his boat, betraying their stale marriage, and pulls a bottle from the other coat pocket, and starts to drink.

  A few hundred yards away, the tide snakes around the wreck of the Bessie Swan. Ellis watches it curiously, as if he’s arranged to meet someone there but can’t remember who.

  Perhaps, he tells himself, if I swam out there …

  But he knows he will not do it.

  If I walked out of the house and across the beach without stopping and dived in and swam there and back and ran straight home and dried myself in front of the fire, I’d have done something extraordinary. I’d have pushed myself. Kick-started my system. If I did it once, I could do it again the next day, and again, and I’d do it every day, it would become second nature and I’d be a different person, the sort of person who did that every day. My life would have changed.

  But he’s not able to change it. He’s too busy. Too busy playing tunes on his shrimping net, watching his neighbour’s washing loop the loop in the wind, seeking out pebbles with perfect holes, lying beneath the lighthouse and watching it sway. Too busy photographing clouds when the colour of crimson bleeds into them at dusk. Too busy waiting. Too busy keeping watch.

  He takes from the metal box something unfamiliar. It looks like a blue plastic cigarette, and when he picks it up the plastic unravels and Ellis sees that it is the long, thin wrapper of a packet of dried spaghetti, the sort Denny used to buy when Ellis was a child and pasta was as long as your arm. As long as your dad’s arm.

  2

  They made spider webs out of pasta in the drought of 1976, a calm time, before the need for boundaries or truces. Denny O’Rourke would lay a single piece of cooked spaghetti in a circle on an empty dinner plate. On a good day, Ellis manoeuvred it into the hexagonal shapes of the Uloborus as his dad’s deep, treacly voice encouraged him.

  “There’s no building ever built as intricate and brilliant as a spider’s web …”

  That dry summer, Great-aunt Mafi came with them on holiday. On a village green in Dorset they ate ice cream in the shade of a tree. The grass was brown and there were cracks in the earth the size of snakes. They stayed on the water’s edge on the estuary at Exmouth, in a bungalow made from two railway carriages. Three wooden steps led to a sandy beach with a palm tree. Ellis has a photograph of Mafi and Chrissie posing under the palm tree, holding fruit in their hair and laughing.

  Denny drove them to Budleigh Salterton to see Jaws. He had taken them to see it earlier that summer but the queues were too long and they watched Earthquake on the second screen instead. The poster for Earthquake promised Rumble-O-Rama special effects that would make their seats shake, but the rumble never materialised.

  “If I live to be a hundred and fifty years old, I’ll never see a worse actor than Charlton Heston,” Denny O’Rourke said on the way home. Then he laughed to himself, wound the window down and lit a cigarette.

  “Could you?” Ellis asked, more than an hour later, when his dad kissed him goodnight.

  “Could I what?”

  “Live to be a hundred and fifty years old.”

  “I’ll give it my best shot.”

  There were no problems with spiders in Exmouth. Ellis didn’t think about them. He was too concerned about the sharks. On the last evening of the holiday, when Ellis finished saying his goodbyes to the sailboats on the beach and the lights of the Penzance train across the bay, he found Chrissie, Mafi and his dad waiting for him inside. He shook with fear, because they wore the same expectant faces they had worn five years earlier, moments before they told him he would never see his mother again.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Sit down,” his dad said.

  Denny made a joke of squashing his children as he sat on the sofa between them.

  “Take a look at this,” he said.

  He showed them a colour photograph of an old tile-hung cottage with a large cherry tree and a weeping willow in the front garden.

  “Who lives here?” Chrissie asked.

  “An old man and his wife,” said her dad.

  “It’s pretty,” Ellis said.

  “Yes,” Denny said, “it’s very pretty but it’s pretty worn out too. It needs a lot of time spent on it to make it good again. But it’s quite big and there’s a lovely garden and an orchard and lots of space.” Then Denny added softly, “Space to play in.”

  Chrissie flung her arms round her father and they tumbled back on the sofa.

  “What?” Ellis asked. “What’s going on?”

  Denny pulled his son to him and whispered in his ear.

  “Would you like to move out of Orpington and live in a beautiful village surrounded by farmland, in this house?”

  Ellis whispered back, “Yes. Please.” And in an act that left his father speechless, Ellis crossed the room and hid behind his Great-aunt Mafi, burying his head against her back, because his happiness was more than he could bear.

  Denny O’Rourke parked his Rover 110 at the top of Hubbards Hill and took photographs. His daughter and son stood beside him, taking in the view. The Kentish Weald opened out in front of them, wide and majestic, a ruffled quilt of fields watched over by majestic oak and trustworthy beech, their trunks dark in the low autumn sun.

  The lane in front of him descended into the Weald, crossing a new main road built into the seam of the valley. By the bridge, a toll cottage with two chimneys watched begrudgingly over the fast new traffic beneath it. Beyond a church tower, amongst woodland and half hidden by the undulant fields, were the village rooftops. The village was surrounded on all sides by fields and farm buildings. Two giant silos rose side by side above the tree line. Beyond them, ripples of countryside overlapped in shades of green and brown and yellow towards the Crowborough Beacon and beyond that was the faint outline of the South Downs on the horizon.

  Ellis looked into the expanse an
d pictured Great-aunt Mafi threading her way along an invisible network of lanes from the coast.

  “She’s out there, somewhere,” he said. “I am looking at where she is but I can’t see her.”

  Denny smiled. “Ready?” he asked, ushering Chrissie and Ellis back to the car.

  “Yes!” said Chrissie. “Very, very ready!”

  “Ready for what?” Ellis asked.

  His dad shrugged and smiled happily. “Everything,” he said, “everything.”

  When the car drew to a halt again, they were in a narrow lane. To the left of them was a short row of council houses in the shade of a beech tree. Denny leant forward in his seat and sunlight flooded into the back of the car. Ellis put his hand up to shade his eyes and saw, to his right, emerging from the glare, a garden with a weeping willow, a tall cherry tree, and beyond them the cottage in the photograph. Their new home. A home without the ghost.

  The cottage had welcoming eyes and a low fringe of Kent peg tiles. The leaves that had settled around the walls were oak and cherry and cobnut. At the bottom of the garden they were willow and Ellis threw a pile of them above his head into a small, short-lived cloud. If laughter had a colour in October 1976, it was pale yellow, the colour of weeping willow leaves in mid-air.

  “Look, Mafi!” Ellis said, pointing up into the willow tree. “Look at those two big branches. They look like Felix the Cat running fast!”

  Mafi looked up.

  “See it?” he urged her.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Ellis stared happily at his discovery and Mafi looked happily at him.

  “We never ever get to see a tree from the top down, do we?” Ellis said.

  “We don’t. You’re right.”

  “What I would have for my ninth birthday if I could is to be able to fly.”

  “Me too, for my seventy-ninth!”

  “Why can’t we fly?”

  “It’s technical, I think. No wings and all that.”

  “There must be a good, you know, there must be a … why we can’t, a …”

  Ellis looked skywards and scrunched up his face, the way he did when he couldn’t think of a word.

  “A reason why?”

  “Yes! There must be a reason why we’re not allowed to fly. Something we’re not supposed to see.”

  She held her hand out to him.

  “Let’s go for a walk and get our bearings,” she said.

  From the high point of the village green they watched people come and go. Ellis introduced himself to the rolling hills distributed equally to the north, south, east and west of the village.

  “Is this our bearings?” he asked his great-aunt.

  Mafi kissed Ellis on the head. He had no idea why.

  At the lower end of the village, the old forge was a petrol station that had room for one car at a time. Opposite it, by the bus stop, was Ivan’s greengrocers with tiered counter displays covered in rolls of plastic grass. Whilst Mafi set up her account, Ellis ran his fingers through the grass and wondered how plastic was grown. He would feel that grass beneath his hand hundreds of times in the next decade. He would wave to William Rutton the butcher just as many times and Carrie Combe would wink at him from her window in the middle of the village as many times again. Carrie had a hairdressers in her front room. There was space for two blow-dryers, and every other Thursday morning Mafi occupied one of them immediately after collecting her pension. Carrie was round and busty and pretty and was the first person in the village to have an Afro. She had a beauty spot above her lip and it was this that Ellis would stare at when she cut his hair. Sometimes, after a haircut, he would go to the bench on the village green and wonder why Carrie Combe’s beauty spot was called that of all things. Often, when he didn’t notice it growing dark, traces of crimson would paint themselves into the evening sky, and by the time he got home the sky above Ide Hill would be emblazoned with blood-coloured clouds. He pictured himself searching for a seam in the crimson sunset and when he found it he unpicked the stitches and peered through to the other side, and his mum was waiting for him there.

  It was before they moved to the village, during the strange times in Orpington when Ellis was four years old, that Mafi began to visit frequently, to babysit the children and wake Ellis each morning with the words, “Let me see those beautiful big blue eyes.”

  The first time she visited, she sat on the edge of Ellis’s bed reading The Water Babies. Over her shoulder, in the corridor beyond the bedroom door, a policewoman and a man in a suit walked past. The man in the suit supported Denny O’Rourke by the arm and the policewoman held Denny’s hand. When Ellis saw that his dad was crying he looked away to a green-ink illustration of a water-baby kissing the hand of Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. He never wanted to see his dad cry again, and nor would he have to, not for a very long time.

  Mafi was born in 1899 on the day of the relief of Mafe-king. She was the youngest daughter of Henry King of Ilford and he christened his daughter May Ada Florence Enid. For nearly eighty years, M. A. F. E. King had been known as Mafi, pronounced Maffy.

  She had no big toes. They were amputated long before Ellis was born. Whenever he thinks of Mafi he starts with this fact, as if he is telling someone who never knew her.

  “The first thing I should say is that Mafi had no big toes. The next thing I want you to know about her is that she lived on the south Kent coast where she was landlady of the Gate Inn. She taught me how to play cribbage when I was seven and she took me for walks along the Military Canal.”

  Her big toes were amputated because of her circulation but it didn’t do the trick. She left the pub and went to her best friend’s house on the hill, looking across the Channel to France. She was told she would die within a year. That was twenty years before the holiday in Exmouth. Now her best friend had died and Mafi was moving on, with the slow, stiff walk she had, and a handkerchief up her sleeve to wipe away her tears when she laughed. Moving on to live with her nephew and his two children in a creaky old cottage in the Kentish Weald where she had her own bedsit and kitchen in one corner of the downstairs. Chrissie named it “MafiKingdom”.

  “If you try to move me to a new school I’ll tell everyone you’re on LED,” Chrissie warned, even though the subject of school hadn’t been mentioned.

  “LSD,” Denny corrected her, politely.

  “I’m thirteen and I have my friends! This is 1976, not 1876, children have rights.”

  “I’ve no intention of moving you from your school.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  Denny O’Rourke turned to his son. “Nor you.”

  Ellis shrugged. He had no strong opinion on the subject. His school in Orpington was acceptable because there was swimming once a week and his enormous capacity for daydreaming was tolerated. His teacher had a habit of reminding him he wasn’t particularly good at anything, a view that Chrissie reinforced from time to time, but he didn’t seem to get in trouble for being ungifted so he didn’t care. More important, there was the deal which he and his dad had struck. When Ellis reached the age of thirteen, they had agreed, he would be allowed to cycle from the cottage to Hildenborough station and catch the train to Orpington each day. Alone. This was the sort of freedom and adventure Ellis dreamed of. He would go to the Wimpy bar with his friends after school and they would look on in admiration as he headed off to the train station for his epic journey home. Alone. A girlfriend would soon result, surely, and she’d have a mum who would smell the way a mum smells and she’d stroke the fringe up off Ellis’s forehead, as a matter of habit, from time to time.

  Life was getting good again at nearly nine, Ellis thought, but at thirteen it was going to be simply fantastic.

  Denny gave his son a Brazilian football kit on his ninth birthday. Ellis tore off his clothes and put it on and ran down the corridor to show Mafi. As he did so, he dropped the tin mouse Chrissie had given him. The mouse was grey with red plastic wheels, a shiny black tail and painted-on whiskers, and it was small enough to bury in the grip
of your hand. It was still lying on the floor when Chrissie got back from school. That night, she slumped down heavily on Ellis’s bed and grimaced at him.

  “Goodnight, Smelly-Ellie. Happy birthday,” she said abruptly.

  “Night-night …” he ventured, unsure of her tone.

  “I threw your tin mouse somewhere you’ll never find it and if you tell Dad I’ll just deny it and insist that you’re making the whole thing up and who do you think he’s going to believe?”

  “Me?”

  “No, stupid. Me. Because I’m thirteen and you’re only nine and five hours.”

  “Where did you put it?”

  “I didn’t put it anywhere. I threw it away and you’ll never find it, so forget it.”

  “Why did you take my tin mouse back?”

  “I didn’t take it back, you left it on the floor and I heard you tell Mafi it was a boring present.”

  “I didn’t mean it. Can I have it back please?”

  “Too late. You should learn to be more grateful.”

  Chrissie went to her room, and as Ellis listened to the floorboards creak beneath her feet his eyes strayed to the attic hatch above his bed. Not for the first time, he thought he saw the hatch door open and spiders emerge. He buried himself under the bedclothes and called out, “I’m not scared of you but you ought to be scared of me. Look at the size of me.”

  “Stop hiding and we’ll see the size of you,” they replied.

  Ellis couldn’t think of a response to that. He listened to his own thudding heart and reminded himself what his Great-aunt Mafi had told him. Before houses existed, spiders in England lived in caves. Nowadays, old houses are the same as caves from a spider’s point of view.