The Spider Truces (26 page)

Jed saw Ellis up ahead on the beach, sitting against a breakwater. For Ellis, recovering from an hour of intense reflection in which he arrived at a degree of self-realisation was a radical departure from cohabiting with whatever random visual ideas entered his head, and the experience had left him mentally exhausted. In an effort to freshen himself up, he rolled over and attempted a headstand and made a pretty good fist of it.

“Good afternoon, my most peculiar friend,” Jed said as he crunched his way across the pebbles.

“Hello there,” Ellis replied, in a squashed upside-down voice.

“Weird but kind of impressive, that,” Jed said, inspecting the headstand.

“Hurts my head,” Ellis moaned, the words squeezed out of his brain as his face turned red. He collapsed on to the pebbles. “How was Ben?”

“Fine,” Jed said. “Slaughtered him at snooker.”

“Some would argue you should let your six-year-old brother beat you at snooker,” Ellis said, brushing himself down.

“Maybe,” Jed shrugged. “But we wouldn’t want to knock about with them.”

“I’ve decided to quit,” Ellis said.

“Glad to hear it,” Jed said. “Quit what?”

“Weed, for a start.”

“Well, you’re not exactly Keith Richards.”

“And the drinking to oblivion and the drinking on weekday lunchtimes. My weeks are getting hazy.”

“I’ll stop too,” Jed said.

“Serious?” Ellis asked.

“I’ve a lump in my pocket and that’s all I’ve got. We’ll smoke it now and then that’s it. No more. Tomorrow’s a new day. You’re only saying what I’ve been thinking. It’s all become a little boring.”

“We could just chuck the lump in the sea and stop immediately.”

“That’s not going to happen, is it?”

They worked their way through the last of the stash and through Jed’s hip flask of brandy. Ellis wondered if the two little pebbles would be freezing back into an embrace for the night. At one point Jed hugged Ellis and Ellis slapped Jed on the back.

“You’re not very physical,” Jed commented.

Ellis dismissed this as rubbish.

“No, it’s true. You laugh a lot, you’ve got a Cheshire cat smile, you listen to your friends and you sleep with women, but you never embrace your friends or hold hands with the women you’ve brought home and slept with.”

Jed reached into his jacket pocket and took out his wallet. With practised ease, he slid out a small photograph of his kid brother.

“He’s my son,” he said.

“I guessed,” Ellis replied. “Is there a story?”

“Not an original one. His mother doesn’t like me and I’d be lying if I said I wanted to be with her. That’s it. I’m doing my best.”

The first stars were appearing in a fathomless, dark blue sky. A line of fire laced the horizon to the west. The sea looked magnificent, a calm, tender, shimmering grey. The flask was empty and the weed was gone. They hauled themselves up unsteadily and walked on past the silhouettes of houses with names they would never forget: “Breakwater”, “The Reef”, “Bellbottoms”, “Captain’s House”. Jed staggered up the embankment and stopped to admire his mobile home. Ellis remained on the beach, watching a London-bound train clatter past. His thoughts chased after the train and an idea came to him. He would catch a train right now and follow his sister up to London and make his peace with her.

“You coming?” Jed called out.

“No,” Ellis said, and wandered away, deep in thought.

Jed picked up a couple of pebbles to lob at Ellis, but seeing that his friend had made one of his rapid trips into his own private world he let the pebbles fall out of his hand and watched Ellis disappear across the shadow line where the house lights of Joy Lane Beach ended.

As his train moved off, Ellis changed his mind, after a premonition in which Chrissie dismissed him as a fool for making the trip. He saw the estuary and Joy Lane Beach from the train, his hands cupped round his face at the window. An hour later, he watched the street-lit climbing frames, goalposts, potting sheds and glowing TV screens of suburbia from the same place and then the hospital where he was born. Something desperate reared up in his heart without revealing itself. The train pulled into the station and, unsurely, confusedly, Ellis found himself stepping down on to the platform. Crowds of returning commuters and shoppers brushed past him in the entrance to Orpington station. He stood deliberately amongst them, amongst each wave of them that came with each train, and waited patiently for someone to tap him on the shoulder and exclaim, “Why! You’re the little boy who used to live here! Oh, I so liked your mother. I knew her well. I have the most vivid memories of her. I can tell you all about her, her voice, her expressions, her smell …”

The house looked the same. Or a little smaller perhaps. The side alley was less overgrown than Ellis remembered it but the back garden looked exactly as it did in the slide. The low brick wall was still there and so was the garden gate his mum had beckoned him through. But, once inside the garden, breathless from climbing the fence, he felt immediately confused and kept glimpsing the mustard brown of the sweater he wore in the slide. Turning to catch sight of himself once too often, he became dizzy. He tried to reach the wall, knowing that his mother would have sat there many times, but his legs gave way beneath him and he slumped on to the grass.

He remembers the white room but nothing else. He has never dredged up a memory of what happened before the room. In the white room, there was only a table and chair and a phone. The receiver was lying to the side of the telephone when Ellis was escorted to it. He sat at the table and stared at the phone for some considerable length of time.

Denny had taken the call on the same evening that the nagging ache in his stomach first turned to stabbing pain.

The owners of the house had seen the man sitting on the grass in their back garden. They didn’t risk approaching him, and as they watched him the stranger grew agitated. They could not see his face but his shoulders heaved up and down. Then they heard him sobbing and then wailing and they called the police. The police tried to talk to him but the stranger seemed unable to speak for grief. They took him away. The owners of the house saw him pull a bunch of grass stalks up from the lawn and put them in his pocket as he was hauled to his feet. The man didn’t seem drunk or mad or angry. Just inconsolable.

Ellis was exhausted. A policeman led him to a cell where they allowed him to sleep on a bed. In his coat pocket they found a roll of masking tape and a diary. In the address book of the diary, under the letter U, they found a phone number against the entry “Us”. When Ellis woke, he had no idea where he was. A policewoman led him into the white room with the table and the chair and the phone. He stared at the receiver but didn’t think to pick it up. He looked at the blank walls and wondered if he’d died and, having wondered it, believed it. He had died and was being processed. He couldn’t remember what age he had reached prior to dying. He heard a noise down the phone. It was his mum on the line. She was going to tell him where to go after he’d been admitted so they could meet. He hoped the rooms would get nicer than this one. He didn’t want their reunion to take place in a room like this. He’d rather they met outside, in the fresh air. He picked up the receiver and listened. He could hear breathing but it wasn’t as he’d imagined her breathing to be.

“Hello?” he ventured.

“Ellis?” came Denny’s voice.

“Am I dead?”

“No, dear boy.”

Ellis smiled at the sound of his dad’s voice.

“Ellis?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Was it the spiders?”

Ellis fell silent. Then he remembered splintered pieces of the evening.

“No. It was my mother.”

There was silence again and it lasted a long time.

Then Denny said, “Why don’t you come home for a while, to live?”

“OK,” Ellis said.

The working men’s club had been demolished and burnt. There was a bonfire scar where the skittles alley had been. Clouds of ink approached from the north-west and hard, steady rain reached the village. Mist rose from leaf mulch on the ground, lending the garden a primeval air. The weeping willow became a woolly mammoth in Ellis’s mind’s eye. Chrissie stood beside him at the open front door and watched the storm.

Summoned to the attic by the rain, Denny O’Rourke stopped on the stairs and watched his children lean against each other in the doorway. He smiled to himself and retreated silently back into the dining room, deciding that the buckets in the attic could move themselves tonight. He didn’t care. His children were united under his roof and, tomorrow, his daughter was taking him on holiday. Nothing else mattered to him.

Ellis waved them off and as he returned inside he decided to decorate Mafi’s bedroom, as a surprise for his dad. He worked to the rhythm of continuous rain, distracted occasionally by the thought that he should visit Tim Wickham.

Mafi’s wardrobe was plain and worthless and too big for the room. Ellis took a crowbar to it, and as the wardrobe disintegrated the mighty black beam which ran through the middle of the bedroom wall reappeared. He had forgotten it was there. On the floor was a paper horseshoe, curled and yellowed by age. The wall around the far end of the beam was crumbling. He picked at it with a knife, dislodging as little masonry as possible so that a quick painting job didn’t turn into a big plastering job. He filled the hole and delicately swept the paintbrush over it so as not to dislodge the spongy, patched-up surface.

There were never mornings like these on the coast. A freezing mist rose from the fields at Longspring. Ellis bent down to open the gate to the herdsman’s cottage, and by the time he had closed it Tim Wickham was standing on the garden path and Chloe was in the doorway, her stony face half covered by her fingers, which played piano on her cheekbones. Ellis didn’t know she had returned to Tim and now he didn’t know what to say to him.

“I’m sorry …” was what came out.

When Ellis stepped forward, Tim pushed out the palm of his hand in a “keep out” gesture.

“I said I’m sorry …” Ellis reasoned.

“Your trouble,” Tim said flatly, “is that you’ve never been in love.”

“We’re only eighteen …” Ellis’s reply was half-hearted. He hadn’t come here to make a case for himself. He shrugged his shoulders, apologised one more time and walked away. Tim called after him.

“You know when we tried to take your dad’s letters?”

Ellis turned and nodded.

“I could have unlocked that drawer. You know why I didn’t? Because they’re none of your fucking business, that’s why. You think the world is your private playground because you’ve got no mummy. She’s my wife! Not everything is here for your amusement. You were my mate and you just fucked off. You didn’t even ask me to come with you.”

“Are you bollocking me for leaving the village or for sleeping with your wife?” Ellis asked defiantly.

“For being you,” Tim answered.

Treasure Island seemed barely large enough to perch on. Ellis hated being a giant in a place that use to fit him so well. He emerged from the woods on to the bridleway that led to the lane and stopped to admire the chimney tops and cat-slide roof of the cottage. A stick rattled across the frozen hoof marks and landed at his feet. He turned and saw Tim sitting on the stump of a tree, breathless from running. Tim walked towards Ellis and smiled. For a moment, it was the smile of the boy at the milk vat on a summer morning. Then, for the third time in his life, and the second with Tim, Ellis felt the sensation of his legs buckling, the sky flooding into his line of sight and a sharp pain stinging his skull. The ground was hard and cold. The ridges of the hoof marks dug into the back of his head. Tim stood over him, his right fist still clenched tight.

“That was original of you,” Ellis muttered. “Do it a third time and you get to keep my nose.”

“You didn’t even ask me to come with you,” Tim spat.

“You’d have said no,” Ellis yelled. “You were in love!”

It might have been the ringing in his ears, but the cottage seemed lifeless. It was the half-hour after sunset, when a little daylight remained trapped in the rooms, light which illuminates but doesn’t shine. Ellis walked from room to room and the air was leaden with Denny’s absence. Without his dad there, the cottage had no meaning. In Mafi’s bedroom, Ellis stared at the great beam. In comparison to his father’s perfectionism, the faint-hearted repair Ellis had made to the crumbling wall was intolerable. He stared at the wall, seemingly unblemished but deeply flawed, and it stared back at him. He grabbed a chisel from the tool box and began to chip through his own paintwork into the crumbling masonry, which fell apart so readily it seemed that the rot had been supporting itself. An hour later, there was a hole in the wall four feet long and two feet high.

The beam was damp and rotten, in defiance of its enormous mass. Ellis poked his head in and looked along the beam into the guts of the building, where it was too dark to see. The muted sound of water sitting in pipes and the cold, still atmosphere told him that he was looking into an open space similar to the attics. Then came the sound of a single, faint, high-pitched drip.

He began to walk, mentally tracing the beam’s path through the insides of the cottage, behind the walls of the stairwell, under the steps on the landing corridor and into his dad’s bedroom where he pulled the bed away and found himself looking at the small black door to the spider well.

“Had to be …” The words trickled out of him.

In a swift but controlled movement, he lunged forward, opened the door, flicked the light switch and retreated to the centre of the room. The light hadn’t worked and he found himself staring at a square of blackness inside the well. He got the torch from downstairs. He lined himself up with the black doorway and attempted to step forward but merely flinched. He cursed himself, held his breath, crouched down and forced himself through the doorway. Inside, he remained on his haunches and stared at the darkness. His heartbeat quickened and his arms began to tremble.

“This is ridiculous, Ellis,” he muttered.

He turned on the torch. Layers of triangular webs, worn like grey cloaks, adorned the well. In the centre of the well was an impressive crown post and the beam from Mafi’s bedroom formed the horizontal section of it, jointed to a vertical post-beam as great and impressive as itself. Ellis shone the light on the mortised timber plate at the centre of the crown post. This was where the moisture was greatest, as if the pressure of the conjoining timbers was squeezing water from the wood, flakes of which came away easily in his hand.

Then came the same single, delicate, high-pitched drip he had heard earlier. Through the cobweb curtain, on the floor, he could make out what seemed to be a small piece of rusty metal. He directed the torch at the object but the torch-beam was smothered by the webs, and so was his path into the well. Many times since he had left home he had wanted to slow time down but now he wanted to reverse it. He wanted to go back to the start again, to the day they moved into the cottage, to the first time they opened this miniature black door. He wanted to step inside it and greet the spiders. He wanted to live happily with them.

Did I choose to be scared? he asked himself. Did I allow myself to be? Could I just as easily have chosen not to be afraid?

If he could go back in time now, he would not be scared. He would go to his dad when he was still young and ask all about the past and not allow the silence to build, layer upon layer, year after year.

Another drip. Ellis went down on to his knees and, for the first time in his life, willingly touched the webs. He let the revulsion sweep through him and it immediately seeped out of him and there was no fear or revulsion left. He parted the layers of silk with one hand and with the other he aimed the torch at where the sound had come from and saw the tin mouse Chrissie gave him on his ninth birthday, the grey tin mouse with red plastic wheels and a shiny black tail that he had let fall to the floor, like a spoilt little boy. He waited for another droplet of rainwater to fall and saw it bounce off the rusty mouse and make its brittle sliver of sound. He crawled through the silk curtain and the webs fell shut behind him. He picked the mouse up and held it.

All the while, you’ve been sitting here watching the rain come in, trying to tell us.

He was in the corner of the spider well now, tucked into the pit which, as a child, he had stared into from the attic above. Ellis put the tin mouse in his pocket and switched off the torch. Light from Mafi’s bedroom seeped into the well through the hole that Ellis had chiselled. As it did so, the hulking black shape of the beam revealed itself again in the feeble light. Ellis watched it process in front of his eyes, a submarine in the depths, a shadow amongst shadows. Had his father perhaps pulled his bed away every night and opened the little black door and placed his sadness in this well? Was the indistinct shadow in front of him the tumour of set-aside grief that had gathered here?

Denny called Ellis his “hero”. His act of heroism had been to discover the rotten beam and its minuscule, inexorable slipping movement that had created tears in the roof for years, silently and relentlessly. And, as if uncomfortable with keeping the truth from a hero, Denny decided to show his son a photograph. In it, Denny was young and wore a suit at an official dinner of some kind.

“You handsome devil,” Ellis muttered, as he studied the other man in the photograph. Denny and the man were shaking hands. The man was extremely tall. Ellis had never seen a man tower over his dad. Around them, people were applauding and smiling. The tall man was old-fashioned and immaculate in appearance, with distinct, tight waves of greying hair. Ellis stared at the man for some time, even though he had recognised Hedley instantly.

“The frog-man …” he whispered.

“I’m not proud of deceit, dear boy. I’m sorry.”

Ellis handed the photo back. “I wouldn’t sweat. There’s deceit and there’s deceit. I’m really touched.”

And for a moment that was wonderful and unbearable to Denny O’Rourke, his son looked him in the eye.

“And very hungry,” Ellis added, to break the spell.

He made a sandwich. And as he did so, his heart basked in the warmth of knowing that his dad had been watching over him all the time.

“Hedley was the senior partner before me. I took over from him when he retired,” Denny said.

“When was that?”

“Fifteen years ago. Hedley retired to the coast. You happened to land on his doorstep.”

“I thought he was after my gonads,” Ellis said.

Standing at the kitchen door, Denny caught sight of a tawny owl and followed it out of the garden and into the woods, forgetting that he had a glass of Scotch in his hand. The moonlight was strong and blue and willing to share secrets. The owl was gone. Denny watched the silvern light skitter on the streams surrounding Treasure Island. He stepped across the water on to the island. He lit a cigarette and sat on the ground. All around him the water trickled and glistened. Medway, Rother, Panama and Mississippi. Children give names to places and then grow out of them, but all the different names remain, piled one on another like layers of paint on the walls of an old house that people have loved.

Denny sipped his Scotch. It tasted good against the outside air. It was time to set sail again. If he didn’t, he would fade. He would grow old in an empty house, waiting for his children to fill the cottage with grandchildren, only to discover that they fill it merely a few times each year and leave it emptier in comparison. The notion that he might leave the cottage felt surprisingly real to him, possibly because an insurance company and a builder had, with apparent ease and relative speed, put an end to a problem that had agitated him for a decade. He would have found it difficult to leave with the roof still confounding him.

If he could bring himself to move on, there were great treasures awaiting him. He sensed this. He would buy a small house with a small cottage garden, and free up money for travel. He would revisit the places he saw as a young seaman and he would go to new countries too. And to many of these places, if life could be exactly as he wanted it to be, he would take his son.

When Denny went to view houses, Ellis stayed behind and took photographs of the village. With the onset of winter the quality of light at the beginning and end of the day grew more and more beautiful to him and he began to recognise its behaviour. From the woods on the hill, the four hundred acres of Longspring Farm looked small and vulnerable amidst the vast and ever-increasing acreage of Dale Farm and Westfield Farm. Ellis composed a photograph of the village cradled in the valley, carefully excluding the widening main road beneath him. He placed dead centre of picture the twin silos at Westfield that rose above the horizon. Then, he waited for the light to change. He had a smoke and daydreamed of being a photographer and wished he hadn’t screwed things up with Milek. He looked through the viewfinder again and stepped away in confusion. He double-checked to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, but he wasn’t. The silos at Westfield Farm had disappeared.

The concrete track to Haynes’s farm at Westfield was a long, laborious walk. It felt like prairie land to Ellis and he didn’t like it. He and Tim had watched enormous mounds of uprooted hedgerow being burnt all over Haynes’s land when they were boys.

The silos lay dismantled in sections, in the shadow of a newly constructed grain store. The store was a massive
portal-framed
building, clad in reinforced steel with ventilation ducts like a shark’s gills and docking bays for the huge tractors that would ship in the grain. Ellis stepped inside and tested the echo. He looked out through the colossal steel doors at the fallen silos and could hardly accept they were no longer a part of the sky.