The Spider Truces E-Book

Tom Connolly

• Herausgeber: Myriad Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Ellis is obsessed by the spiders that inhabit the crumbling house where he lives with his dad, his older sister and Great-aunt Mafi -- and also by a need to find out more about his mother, whose death overshadows the family's otherwise happy existence. He is a sensitive soul; awkward and out of place most of the time but funny, too, and with an embarrassing habit of speaking his thoughts aloud, whatever the company.From early attempts at relationships, to unskilled jobs, flatshares and drug-addled nights on the beach, Ellis muddles his way towards adulthood. What endures is the strength of his bond with his dad, Denny, and his affectionate relationship with his intrepid sister, who turns up whenever he needs her -- a new boyfriend in tow every time. The family banter is Ellis's lifeline and a counterpoint to the constant heartache of his desire to know something -- anything -- about his mother. Meanwhile Denny, an ex-Merchant Navy man, bottles up his grief at the loss of his wife, refusing to talk about her.

Leseprobe

In memory of Mark Bullock, who would have been a great writer.

Contents

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1

It was Great-aunt Mafi who told him that spider blood is blue. When that revelation made him feel queasy, she said that spider blood is blue the way the sea is blue when the sun shines. He liked that.

“That’s nice,” Ellis said. “That doesn’t give me the willies.”

And Mafi told him that when a spider dies its blood flows out of its body into the seas and rivers and lakes and that’s how the earth gets its water, but this only happens if a spider is allowed to die naturally, of old age.

Ellis’s dad told him he was more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider, but this didn’t have the desired effect.

“That’s no good! That’s just another thing for me to worry about! Champagne corks as well as spiders! You have to tell me something nicer, not something badder!”

His sister helped out too, reading from the encyclopaedia that spiders don’t get caught in their own webs because they have oil on their legs, so Ellis took to rubbing oil over his body in secret, every morning. At primary school he was known as Mr Sheen, due to the shiny appearance of his arms and face, and at home the diminishing stocks of cooking oil in the larder baffled Ellis’s dad as much as the discovery that soap could no longer form a lather on Ellis’s skin.

But of all the many discoveries Ellis O’Rourke made during the truces, his favourite was the first, that spiders give us the seas and rivers and lakes as their dying gift. He still thinks of the sea that way.

And it was Great-aunt Mafi who said to him, “Any day you see the sea is a good day.” This she said on the day she told him how his mum had died.

He sees the sea every day now. And he waits with a patience a young man should not yet possess.

Even here where it can be so bleak, the sea is often blood-blue, the sort of blue Ellis can fall into. From his rented house, he looks at the water. He loses focus and the water floods in; the image of blue fills his head and for a time that could be moments or hours he is nowhere. Free of thought. He barely exists. It is bliss. Like the mid-air moment of diving in.

The beach is a shingle peninsula. It heads to a point on the south-east corner. Ellis’s house faces due south across the Channel. It is the last building before the lighthouse and after that there’s the Point. Three hundred yards out to sea, on a sandbank, is the wreck of the Bessie Swan, a trawler that ran aground in June 1940, returning from Dunkirk with fifty men who waded to shore through waist-high water. You can’t wade out to the Bessie Swan nowadays. The Channel currents have gouged out ravines in the silt that are deep and treacherous.

On his first night on the beach, in the pub close by the lifeboat station, the old men had looked on without mercy as the young seasonal fishermen challenged Ellis to swim to the Bessie Swan and back. They marched him across the shingle, led by a callous and bloated-looking man in a black woolly hat, called Towzer Temple.

“You swim towards the steeple on the Marsh. The currents take you to the Bessie Swan.”

“If you swim straight for her, you’ll be in France tomorrow.”

“In a body bag …”

“Do it now and by closing time you’ll be back in the pub, a legend.”

“We’ve all done it,” said Towzer.

“It’s tradition.”

At the water’s edge, Ellis stared into the blackness and somewhere amongst the fishermen’s drunken voices, in which there was humour that Ellis was deaf to, he heard himself say, “But I’m only renting here …”

These limp words returned the men indoors, where the evening seemed impoverished and Ellis felt out of place. He began to wonder if they had been telling the truth, that they had all swum the ravines at one time or another, and they really did know best when they said he would be the greater for doing it.

The unfamiliar ceiling above his unfamiliar bed spun a little that first night and every single sound on the beach was new. As he waited patiently for sleep, Ellis noticed the glow of a cigarette at the open window and behind it the face of Towzer Temple, reddened by a map of fissured blood vessels. The fisherman leant easily against the sill, his elbows annexing a portion of the cabin-like bedroom, and as a wide grin disfigured his looks still further, he said, “It’ll bug you. You didn’t do it because you’re scared. And it’s going to bug you and bug you. Goodnight, Mr Only Renting. Sweet dreams.”

Money spiders populate the shingle and leave their egg sacs on the shore. Fishing boats line the beach and there’s a lifeboat station beyond them. Ellis likes to go shrimping north of the lifeboat, in shallow tides which scuttle in and out across the wide mud flats of the bay. He made a frame up last year, four foot by two. He wades out against the incoming tide, sweeping his net, and the frame makes a noise like distant music on a small box radio as it cuts through the water. He catches plenty, but could probably catch more if he knew more about it and didn’t get distracted by the far-away music.

Near the lifeboat station, the strip lights of the workers’ café pulse cold blue through the windows. Ellis usually goes there three or four times a week. People greet him but still don’t know his name.

At dusk, when the sky is angry, he heads out along the beach to the army ranges, then inland across the Backs where the shingle is carpeted with moss, and gorse surrounds the scattered lakes. A line of wooden posts betrays the route of a disused railway and beneath his feet he hears the thud of a sleeper encrusted in the ground like a dead bird. He imagines that he’s in Montana or the Australian outback or some other place he’s never been. He walks until his leg muscles burn. When darkness comes, a line of silver remains on the horizon and silhouettes the container ships, which turn to black. The winds rise up off the waves and tear across the peninsula and Ellis digs his feet into the shingle and allows the furious, thrilling gusts to pound against him like the souls of every man lost at sea. Furious souls or ecstatic souls, he is not sure which. Sometimes, he waits for hours. Patient. Devoted.

There is a line from a song his father once whispered to him and it plays in Ellis’s head as he returns across the flatlands to his unlit home. We must not go astray in this loneliness.

He moved here on Good Friday, 1989. A mist settled over the Point for a fortnight and the fog signal on the lighthouse boomed across the bay. He opened every door and window in the house and gave the spiders a few hours to move on without being harmed. The rooms gave up their mustiness to the salt air and Ellis felt the same excitement he had felt when he was a child.

So this is where that feeling has been hiding, he thought to himself.

At first he kept up his job, assisting a photographer called Milek, driving two hours to London. Then he worked a little less. Then he asked for a couple of months off.

“To clear my head, Milek.”

And that was a nearly a year ago.

This is another of those slow-motion mornings, Ellis tells himself. He wonders what time it is. He doesn’t wear a watch. Any that have been given to him over the years are gathering dust and he couldn’t tell you where. He thinks it through. He went out shrimping first thing and then he came back and the metal box was here on the dining table and then he’s been daydreaming. So it is probably late morning. He’s not idle and he’s not simple. It’s just a blissfully slow start to the day and he doesn’t use a watch. But, yes, he was shrimping first thing, he remembers clearly.

He can always tell if his sister has visited, and even though they are no longer good friends he likes the sensation of knowing she has been in. It means that Chrissie either saw her brother out on the flats and decided to leave him be or forgot to look for his silhouette in the silver bay. Either way, he likes the thought of her leaving him be or forgetting to look.

It is Chrissie who has left the metal box on the dining table. The box was once black but the paintwork is faded now and speckled by a slow rust. Ellis leans closer and looks down on the rust until it looks to him like a landscape photographed from a plane.

He’s in no hurry to open the box. He knows the contents exactly – he watched it being filled – and there’s nothing there of great significance. But for Ellis, having the box is almost like having his father back in the room and to feel his father nearby is the reason he moved here. Chrissie’s world doesn’t work that way. Dead means dead, and the inconsequential objects inside the metal box are the sorts of things that cannot combine to mean much to her. She wishes they could and that’s why it’s taken her a year to give Ellis the box. That’s why she has occasionally intimated that she might have lost it, an idea that gives Ellis butterflies because, although there is nothing particular in the box, all the pieces of nothing in particular belonged to Denny O’Rourke, and Denny O’Rourke was his dad.

If you rest your head against the metal box as if it is a pillow, and you close your eyes, and if your name is Ellis O’Rourke, then the crunching of shingle underfoot on the beach outside could be the sound of a spider perched on your shoulder eating a packet of crisps.

He opens his eyes and sees a woman walking. She puts down her bag, unfolds a stool and begins to sketch. A sparrowhawk hovers above the bushes where starlings and rabbits hide. Ellis listens to the wind piping around the lighthouse and watches as the woman with the sketch pad takes off her jacket. She is older than Ellis. Maybe twenty years older. He wants her to get into conversation with him, accept a cup of tea and sleep with him. He wants her to leave later that afternoon and there to be no talking. Only mute understanding. He would never tell anyone about her and would be able to get on with his life without the need for intimacy cropping up again for some weeks. He knows this is all wrong, but such thoughts are risk-free and a habit he’s fallen into.

The phone rings, startling Ellis. It’s Jed, his best friend.

“I have to tell you what I dreamt last night,” Ellis says immediately.

“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Jed replies.

“Bear in mind,” Ellis says, “that I was two years old when man landed on the moon.”

“What?”

“And that I am not a particularly complicated person.”

“You are joking.”

“So how is it that last night I dreamt I was in the living room of the house in Orpington where I was born and my dad is there and my mum, but I can’t see her face, and we’re all gathered round the TV even though I’m pretty sure they didn’t have one, and my sister is just a pair of legs standing on the window sill holding the aerial up into the sky—”

“Wait! You’re getting detailed and weird. Let me get comfortable.”

Ellis waits as Jed lights a cigarette.

“I recognise some of the people in the room. There’s a few of the guys you and me knew on the building sites, and my Great-aunt Mafi is there pouring gin for everyone. Neat gin. The only historical inaccuracy is that it’s not Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface with Neil Armstrong but Simon Le Bon. And the whole dream is in black and white, not just the TV screen. I look and see that to the left of me on the sofa is a young, unshaven, dark-haired man sitting with his girlfriend. And I realise as I look at this bloke that it’s that actor guy from Man About the House and Robin’s Nest—”

“Richard O’Sullivan.”

“Thank you. And I watch him in his studenty donkey jacket, smoking his cigarette and turning excitedly to his girlfriend, and I realise, My God! He doesn’t know he’s about to become the star of Man About the House and to be associated for ever with the greatest thing that ever ever happened on telly when we were kids, namely George and Mildred. He will be a part of that, and I know it and he doesn’t. Look at him! He’s just an aspiring actor watching the 1969 moon landing with his girlfriend and I know what’s going to happen to him in life and he doesn’t! I know he’ll never do Shakespeare or really crack that big screen role and that he will in fact be a sort of good-looking, understated Sid James. And do you know what it made me think?”

“I pride myself on not knowing what or how you think.”

“What else is there to dream? Being with my mum until I was four years old? How my dad was when she had gone? All the things that are somewhere in my head because I was actually there even though I was far too young to know it? It could crucify you! All this stuff locked away inside your head ready to appear in your sleep, it could bring your life to a standstill.”

There’s a long silence until Jed drags on his cigarette and says, “Your life is at a standstill.”

They go quiet. Jed is the one person who isn’t freaked out by Ellis going silent on the phone for minutes at a time. In fact, he considers such pauses a respite. Ellis lies back on the floor and wedges the telephone against his ear.

“You know why it’s at a standstill?”

“I’ve one or two ideas. What’s your version?”

“When I’m alone I dream of being with someone and when I’m with someone I wish I was anywhere else.”

“Ah, well, I’m glad you’ve brought that up because I have some answers for you,” Jed says kindly. “It’s because you are what we, in the outside world, technically term ‘an arsehole’. Private. Evasive. You’re a daydreamer and you keep all your best thoughts to yourself. People like me and the women you occasionally sleep with get the fag ends of your thoughts. If you didn’t make me feel so good about myself just by being you, there’d be nothing in this friendship for me. I am also willing to bet good money that when you are busy fucking the wrong people and wishing you were somewhere else, that somewhere else is wherever Tammy might be these days.”

“Out of bounds.”

“Why? What do you care if we talk about her?”

“I just don’t want to … except to say I was more committed to her than she was to me, before you slag me off.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. I remember the evening you went away to America without telling her you were going. I remember that night thinking how ‘committed’ to her you were. Yeah, I reckon your decision not to even call her and say goodbye before fucking off to Iowa could easily have been misinterpreted as a proposal of marriage.”

This is why Jed is Ellis’s best friend.

“Fuck off.”

“Up yours.”

They each place the receiver down, gently.

Jed is right. When Ellis lies awake at night – in bed, or on the grass, or on the beach – he imagines that Tammy is lying beside him. He whispers sounds to her which are not quite words but are perfect for an imaginary love affair. He didn’t call her before he went away because it might have mattered to her that he was going but it might not and he didn’t want to risk finding out. And now two years have passed and he has left it too long.

He can’t understand why he feels so lost today. Or why he feels as if time is short when he has the whole of his adult life before him. He opens the metal box and it releases the smell of cherrywood fires in the cottage he grew up in. He sifts through a pile of photographs taken in the fifties and sixties of elderly relations he never knew, moves to one side a prayer card from his mum’s funeral in 1971, and picks up a passport-sized document which he remembers his dad showing him years ago. Denny’s name is written in ink on the faded cover and beneath it are the words: Continuous Certificate of Discharge – Ministry of War Transport /Merchant Navy. Inside are five entries which map Denny O’Rourke’s career in the merchant navy, beginning in 1943, age sixteen, aboard the SS Papanui and ending in 1946 when his eyesight fell below acceptable standards for service. There’s a loose page inside, a temporary shore pass for Colombo Port, dated 15 November 1946.

My dad was twenty then, Ellis thinks. Two years younger than me.

He half closes his eyes and imagines being propelled across the sea, hugging the curvature of the earth, and arriving at Colombo Port. He sits there a while, in the heat, his image of the place indistinct and blinded by the sun. A wave breaks and he finds himself back home, listening to the shingle being dragged by its fingertips into the sea. It is a sound softened by its journey across the beach to Ellis’s house and it reminds him of the breeze that swept through the walnut trees on the morning his dad died. Joseph Reardon the farmer, who had been praying for Denny O’Rourke, told Ellis that the back door of the church flew open and a wind swept in at the exact time of Denny’s passing. Ellis doesn’t know what he thinks about that sort of thing but he does know that in the days and weeks that followed he and Chrissie received many letters and they sat shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, silently passing them back and forth until their bodies came to rest against each other and he felt a surge of love for his sister which found no expression and would inevitably dissolve as the day wore on. Jed, whom Ellis had never seen hold a pen, wrote a letter; Ellis, your dad was one of life’s good blokes. Not all of us can say that. Be happy. Jed. Ellis showed Jed’s letter to Chrissie and she handed an envelope to him in return.

“Make sense of this,” she said. “Got it yesterday.”

It was a card from Dino, a Maltese guy Chrissie slept with on and off for six months when she was doing a journalism course in London. Dino had written: Dearest Spaghetti and Ellis, my condolences at your sad loss. Love Dino. And try as they might, Ellis and Chrissie could not begin to recall what cryptic, spaghetti-related episode or in-joke had occurred between them back then that Dino had clearly never forgotten.

“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 and 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.

And the problem, Ellis thought to himself, is that the house my dad has moved us into is a really, really old house. But I’ve got to remember they’re only here because they think it’s a cave. It’s nothing personal.

“I’m going to let you off,” he called out. “But don’t think I’ll be so lenient next time.”

He made himself an air hole and slept beneath the sheets.

When they lit the first fire of winter, the flames reflected in a glass-fronted cabinet which held trinkets, glasses, and china that Denny O’Rourke’s father had collected from all over the world.

“Now it’s home …” Denny purred.

An oil tank was installed at the back of the cottage and a new boiler in the walk-in cupboard in the kitchen. When the boiler men drove away, Mafi wedged the driveway gate open.

“I think it’s more friendly to leave that gate open seeing as we’ve just moved in,” she told Denny.

He shovelled a heap of left-over coal into potato sacks, which Ellis held open. They hosed the coal shed down and, it being Ellis’s bath time anyway, his dad soaked him through until Ellis nearly laughed himself sick. Mafi and Chrissie whitewashed the walls and the coal shed became the bike shed and the place for stacking up anything to be burnt. Sunday evenings was the time for bonfires and a charred pile established itself in the far corner of the orchard, next to the compost heap. A path to it was worn in the grass. Mafi kept her distance as glow-worms and grass snakes and toads lived around the compost and she welcomed them as readily as Ellis welcomed spiders.

Chrissie would stray from the bonfire and look through the back hedge to the working men’s club. It was an old wooden pavilion, patched with corrugated iron. There was a skittles alley out the back which had a tin roof but was open at the sides. From a vantage point beneath the hedge, where they lay on their bellies, Chrissie and Ellis watched the skittles matches and other less clear transactions between the men, in which money and goods and whispers were exchanged. Saturday and Sunday evenings, when women were allowed, were occasionally rowdy and Ellis heard noises which he could not account for and his sister declined to explain.

She often spent time alone there, hidden within the gnarled old hedge, hugging her knees to her chin, watching the inanimate wooden building. When she caught herself thinking of the change that had entered their lives with their mother’s leaving, she would scold herself and some force would rear up in her, a defiance in a girl with no previous inclination to defy, an instinct to push blindly towards wherever the new boundaries might be. The tools with which she pushed were not unique to her. Cigarettes and attitude. Harmless boys and dangerous girlfriends. Things that did not truly interest her but appeared to be what she ought to show interest in, because the previous things were those of a girl’s life and she couldn’t pretend to herself that she was a girl any more.

With Ellis she was sometimes censorious and other times tender as she responded unsurely to the instinct to protect him and the temptation to stifle him and preserve the adoring little brother that suited her well.

She liked to make a mug of tea for her dad when he returned from work and then leave him alone. Denny drank his tea at the kitchen table, sitting in his shirt and braces, with his suit jacket hanging on the kitchen door. Sometimes he would stare into space, his top lip resting on the rim of the mug. Other times, he drew sketches of the renovations he had in mind and wrote lists, in unintelligibly small handwriting, of jobs to do on the cottage.

Ellis would follow his dad upstairs and sit on the bed whilst Denny changed into his “messy clothes”. More often than not, Ellis would examine the framed photograph on Denny O’Rourke’s bedside table. It had always been there, in the old house too. It was a black and white image of a lighthouse on a shingle shoreline. In the foreground was a length of railing from a ship’s deck and between the railing and the shore, surrounded by a choppy sea, was a sandbank upon which a fishing boat had run aground.

“What was the name of your ship?”

“You know. You’ve asked me a million times.”

“Don’t exaggerate. The Hororata. And you drank a lot of rum all the time.”

“Only the once.”

“How old were you, again?”

Denny stamped his feet into his work boots and beamed his son a smile. “Seventeen, when I drank the rum.”

“Seventeen is only four more than Chrissie,” Ellis said.

Denny’s face altered a little, the way it did before he changed the direction of a conversation.

“The great thing about having no carpets in this house yet, Ellis, is that I can wear my boots indoors and not get told off.” He grinned and headed out of the room.

“Who’s going to tell you off?” Ellis asked.

Denny faltered but kept on walking. Ellis followed him down to the utility room where antique ledge and brace doors were stacked up on Denny’s workbench, ready for planing. Ellis watched his dad measure up the doorframes in the hallway and repeat the measurements under his breath, “74 by 38, 74 by 38, 74 by 38 …”

“34, 78, 44, 68, 78, 34 …” Ellis whispered.

“You little sod!” Denny said, and chased Ellis into the orchard where he tickled him purple and left him for dead in the old goose bath.

Returning inside, Denny noticed that damp stains had appeared on the hallway ceiling.

“Bugger!” he muttered. He rolled up his sleeves and sat on the bottom stair to think. Ellis joined him, breathless from laughing. He stroked the hairs on his dad’s arm, his fingers dwarfed by the contours of muscles and veins.

“Change of plan, dear boy,” Denny said. “I’m going to need your help. We’re going into the attic.”

There were three attics in the cottage. The one immediately above the top of the stairs was the least interesting, in Ellis’s opinion. The water tank was in it but the rafters were bare so nothing was stored up there. The second attic was known as “the hatch” and Ellis was the only one small enough to do anything useful inside it. Entry to it was through a hatch in a cupboard used to store suitcases. Inside the hatch, the roof was vast and slanting but claustrophobically low. Even Ellis could only fit in on his hands and knees. Denny directed his son across the rafters until he was kneeling directly above the hallway ceiling, but Ellis found no sign of dripping water.

“You sure?” his dad asked.

“Yup!” Ellis confirmed proudly.

He sat next to his dad in the suitcase cupboard whilst Denny deliberated what to do. It was like being in a tent together, where everything was gentle and close-up, especially the faint growling noises Denny made when he was thinking long and hard.

The following Saturday, Denny removed the Kent peg tiles from the dilapidated garage in which Mafi kept her Morris Minor and used them to replace the damaged ones on the roof of the cottage.

“But there weren’t any leaks in the hatch attic,” Ellis protested, from the bottom of the ladder.

He got no reply. His dad was preoccupied. Chrissie had been gone for a few hours and he didn’t know where. When she showed up for lunch, Denny was subdued and attempted to find out where she’d been without asking her directly, a process that amused Mafi.

“You’ll always be very careful, won’t you?” he said to Chrissie, out of nowhere. “When we’re not all together. Don’t do anything silly or unusual, will you?”

His voice was grave but not unkind. He said it as if the thought was a new one but Chrissie had heard it from him often in the last five years. She smiled at him reassuringly.

“No sweat, Dad.”

“I’m allowed to do silly things though, aren’t I, because I’m only nine?” Ellis asked.

“We can do silly things when we’re all together, at home, safe and sound,” his dad answered.

“But I still don’t get why you are putting tiles up there when there wasn’t any drips,” Ellis said, faithful to his own unique train of thought.

“I know, Ellis, but somewhere that roof is damaged and hopefully this’ll do the trick.”

“But what if it doesn’t?”

“I’ll have to sell you to the slave trade to raise money to employ a roofer.”

Chrissie laughed, whilst Ellis weighed up whether or not he liked the sound of this.

“I wouldn’t mind being a slave if it was in some interesting country.”

“You’re my slave,” Denny reminded him.

“Then you ought to pay me!”

“You don’t pay slaves, you spaz,” Chrissie said.

“Charmingly put,” Mafi said. “What have you been up to, Chrissie? I haven’t seen you all morning.”

“I’ve cured the common cold, cut a hit LP, written to Idi Amin about his diet and concocted a formula to rid the world of Communism which I’ll unveil after lunch.”

“Chrissie?” Denny said.

“Yes, Daddio?”

“Remember late 1973?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“That was the last time you gave a straight answer to a question.”

Chrissie opened her mouth to rattle off a response but couldn’t come up with anything. Her dad smiled, victorious, and she buried her head in his chest with a stupid smile. Mafi reached for her handkerchief. Her watery eyes spoke only of how she loved being part of this nonsense.

“In 1973 I was six,” said Ellis, counting his fingers. “But now I’m nine.”

Chrissie stared at him bug-eyed. “Reeeeally, Ellis? Do keep us informed!”

His children were still wrestling on the front lawn as Denny O’Rourke surveyed the roof from the foot of the driveway. Their screaming and laughter filled the air. He smiled to himself and leant back against the gatepost and as he did so he felt the breath of a woman on his neck.

“You must be the widower.”

Denny turned. The middle-aged woman standing far too close to him was handsome, a rural version of elegant, with shining eyes that swallowed him whole. Her voice was throaty and coarse and she stared into him as she spoke.

“Yes. Very nice indeed. I see what they mean.”

An impulse Denny had not hosted for half a decade was upon him. He introduced himself and learned that she was Bridget and she ran the village shop that formed a triangle at the foot of the green with the post office and the pub.

“Come in and set up your account. If the shop’s empty, just come straight upstairs.”

She pressed her hands against her rib cage and filled her lungs, in a gesture of her appreciation of this crisp winter’s day that left Denny helpless but to imagine the strong, full, impressive physique beneath her clothing. For a moment, as Bridget watched the children, Denny let himself fall deep into her body.

“Yes. Very nice …” she repeated, and left.

Denny found his son and daughter staring at him. Ellis burst into laughter that made his face vibrate. Chrissie stared angrily at him and said, “NO!”

Denny shook his head dismissively and smiled, swatting away her fears and his own lust. He kicked the wedge from beneath the driveway gate and let it swing shut behind him as he returned to work. Ellis followed him inside.

The third attic in the cottage was above Ellis’s bedroom, the door to it directly over his pillows, and it was where family heirlooms, Christmas decorations and dressing-up rags and costumes were stored. Ellis found his bed pushed aside and the ladders propped against the open attic door.

He called out, “Can I come up?”

“If you’re careful.”

The attic was long and narrow and low enough to force Denny on to his hands and knees. There was a bare light bulb hanging from the rafters, which blinded Ellis as he climbed in. He found his dad peering over the end wall. It was a strange wall, Ellis noticed, in that it didn’t reach the roof.

“What’s the other side of this wall?” Ellis whispered.

“I think this must be the join in the roof where they extended the cottage. The bit we’re in was added two hundred years ago but the other side of this wall is what was the original little house.”

Denny leant further over the wall and strained. “I think … that what I’m looking at, Ellis, is the slope of the original roof. It used to be on the outside of the cottage. It’s four hundred years old, Ellis. Think of that.”

“Older than Mafi.”

“Yes …”

“Has it got tiles on?” Ellis asked.

“They’d have taken them off and used them on the new roof. It’s just the timbers.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll tell you, Ellis,” Denny said, “there’s a helluva lot of roof on this old cottage. I hope there’re no nasty surprises.”

Ellis liked his dad saying things like “helluva” because he didn’t use words like that very often.

“It’s a really big house,” Ellis agreed. “Lots of nooks and crannies.”

Denny smiled to himself. There was something he liked about his nine-year-old son saying things like “nooks and crannies”.

“So, what room is under that old roof?” Ellis asked.

“My bedroom,” Denny said.

“Oh, yeah. Can I look?”

Denny lifted his son up to see over the wall. The bulb threw enough light to see the faint outline of the old, sloping roof. As Ellis’s eyes adjusted, a skeleton of rafters and beams materialised in front of him. The timbers disappeared into a well of blackness. He wondered what could be down there. It was the darkest, most unreachable place he could imagine a house to have. A place not originally intended to exist, brought about by change. If there are places one never goes, places that one would never ever have reason to find oneself in, if such places exist, then this well was one of them.

3

In his dreams, Ellis walked through the cottage and found secret doorways to hidden rooms and stairways. For a few moments, upon waking, he’d believe they were real.

Behind Denny’s bed, set into a low wall beneath the slope of the old roof, there was a wooden door, three feet high, covered in syrupy black paint. And although it was just like the doors in his dreams, Ellis was scared of it. He saw it as a mouth that could eat him alive.

Pholcus phalangioides lived amongst the ceiling beams in the downstairs of the cottage. Back then, Ellis knew them simply as daddy-long-legs. He wasn’t too bothered by them as they showed no tendency to descend into his air space. Two Nuctenea umbratica took up residence over the front door. When winter came they ceased replenishing their webs but, by then, Ellis had taken to using the kitchen door instead.

The downstairs toilet had no door, just a temporary curtain destined to remain there for many years. Hanging from a nail in the wall was a paint-splattered cassette player with a tape of Strauss’s Four Last Songs in it. A drawn curtain and the sound of Strauss meant that the toilet was in use. This room was heavily inhabited by various orb-web spiders. Most of them were too small to see but their webs were in the angles of the doorframe, window and pipework. Ellis couldn’t go in there.

The garden shed was also a complete no-go area. It was jammed full with spiders and webs. The first, and only, time Ellis stepped inside it, he fainted. Mafi found him lying half in and half out of the shed and he was rushed to hospital, for fear of meningitis.

It angered Ellis that the shed was held by the spiders because it meant he couldn’t get his hands on all the things inside it, his outdoor toys and Denny’s tools, without asking either Mafi, Chrissie or his dad to go in there for him. He believed that the shed was where all the bad and deformed spiders lived. It was the home of the lawless. The spiders there were freakishly large and jet black in colour; they sat around playing Russian roulette. They ate each other without a care and were weighed down by weird growths. The shed was the wild west of the spider world. Ellis couldn’t even walk past it. He had to run at full speed and as he did so he’d shout bitterly, “You are leper spiders, so rubbish they won’t even let you live in the cottage. Everyone hates you! I’m not scared of you!”

At night, he heard sounds of movement which had no explanation. Asking about the creaks and groans in the cottage caused his dad to tense up or change the subject, the same way as asking about his mum, and in the absence of an explanation Ellis suspected that the noises were spiders turning in their sleep. The creaks grew noisier in the second winter as a freezing cold January was met by an unusually mild February. April showers arrived a month early and set in for three weeks, by the end of which the hallway ceiling was turning brown again with water marks. Denny O’Rourke cursed the stains and Ellis knew not to bother him.

Ellis went to his sister’s room but the door was locked.

“Let me in.”

“No thanks,” Chrissie said, from the other side of the door.

“Please.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“Dad’s got us a puppy!”

Ellis listened to a crashing sound as Chrissie fell off her chair, thundered across the room, grappled with the lock and flung the door open.

“Where?” she said breathlessly.

Ellis stepped into her room and threw himself down on the bed.

“Let’s do something,” he said, lazily.

She glared at him. “Have we got a puppy?”

“No. I’m bored. Do you wanna do something together?”

Chrissie skulked back to her desk.

“Yeah. I’d like to play with our puppy, you horrible little pile of dogshit. Go and bother Dad.”

“He’s fixing the roof. It’s falling down, apparently.”

“Fascinating,” she said, and returned to her work.

“Why are you always in your room doing homework nowadays?” he asked.

“They’re called O levels and they’re the devil’s work,” she replied. “But they’ll be over in June and then I’ll never work again.”

“Until your A levels.”

“Not for me, buster.”

“Dad won’t like that.”

“He’ll get over it. You can be his golden boy.”

“You know I’m rubbish at school. I’m having an allotment.”

“That’s not a job, Ellis. That’s a hobby, like chess or riding or peeking at my friends through the curtain when they’re taking a pee.”

“I don’t!”

“Never said you did, derr-brain. Is lunch ready? Is that why you’re up here?”

“No. I wanted to ask Dad something but he’s busy, so I came to ask you instead.”

“Do I want you to go to boarding school in China? Yes please.” She beamed him a psychotic smile.

“Have spiders got eyes? Can they see us?”

Chrissie slumped and pulled a face. “That’s worth failing an O level for? What sort of a question is that, Ellie-belly?”

And as he started to protest at being called that, she jumped off her chair and tickled him until he begged for mercy and agreed to be her slave for the rest of the day.

The spare room at the top of the stairs was bare and sun-filled. It sucked in warm rays of light even in winter, as if awaiting the arrival of someone wise. The vast cherry tree laid its fingertips on the window sill. Denny decided this room should be Mafi’s bedroom and her bedsit downstairs a proper living room.

“We don’t need a spare bedroom because we don’t have any visitors,” Chrissie muttered, as she and Ellis helped Denny carry Mafi’s bed into the room. Chrissie slipped and