The Spider Truces Part 13

"That is the Marsh," his dad said proudly.

"I love it," Ellis said. And he meant it, because fifty miles from his own village he had found a place so different it made the world feel wonderfully colossal.

"It's flat as a pancake, Ellis," Chrissie said. "Your taste gets more surreal by the day."

"What's surreal?" Ellis asked.

"You are, smelly-Ellie, you're surreal. That you, of all people, don't know what it means is deeply ironic."

"What's ironic?"

Chrissie turned in despair to her dad. "Don't worry, you've got one normal child."

"Not that I can see," Denny said.

She gave him a dirty look. "Don't tell me you intend us to go for a walk?"

"I do intend."

"On foot?"

"That's the idea."

"Do we get to sit in a pub at some point?" she asked.

"We do," he said.

A barmaid in the Walnut Tree Inn told Ellis about the smuggling gangs on the Marsh and said she was a descendant of Cephas Quested, second in command of the Ransley gang in the 1820s. She walked him along a smuggler's tunnel and when they emerged from it the sun was out and Ellis knew that Mafi was going to be all right. The November afternoon sky slanted across the Marsh, huge and magnificently blue, the biggest sky Ellis had ever seen. They headed for the sea and arrived at a peninsula where a lighthouse stood on a shingle point. Chrissie watched from the car as her father and brother ran and wrestled together amongst the fishing boats. They tumbled down the steep pebble ridge towards the sea and fell out of sight. Chrissie opened the window a little and heard their laughter buffeted by the wind. She heard a shout and then they re-emerged, hurrying towards the car, with Ellis soaked to the skin and already shaking uncontrollably. Denny sped away. Ellis lay across the back seat and felt his body go numb and his brain slow down. A smile appeared across his face so angelic that Chrissie thought he was dying.

"Hurry up!" she urged her dad. "That sea must be b.l.o.o.d.y freezing!"

"You don't say," Denny muttered.

Ellis was coc.o.o.ned from their voices, wrapped in a cold numbing perfection. He felt amazing, and it was almost a disappointment to him when the owner of the sports shop in New Romney took them in and offered towels and an electric fire.

In the months that followed, Ellis took to immersing himself in cold baths. He failed to recreate that state of grace that falling into the sea in winter had gifted him but he enjoyed the baths nevertheless as a miniaturised form of transportation to another place, and he welcomed the arrival of his first chest-hairs, which appeared to be the baths' doing. As unexpected and welcome as the chest-hairs was the A star he received for an English writing project, the first time he had ever done better than a C plus in five years of secondary school. The brief the cla.s.s had been given by Mr Pulman was "My Weekend".

"It can be fact or fiction," Pulman had said. "Two pages long."

The handing back of marked homework was traditionally a tepid or embara.s.sing experience for Ellis. But on this occasion, his disbelieving eyes settled on red ink words which read, A* Excellent. Your spelling remains atrocious, almost a foreign language, and your boycott of grammar watertight, but this is a fine piece of writing, Ellis. I enjoyed it enormously. Thank you!

It didn't stop there. Mr Pulman announced that he was going to read an extract from the two best a.s.signments, starting with Ellis O'Rourke's.

"Ellis's 'My Weekend' is about a boy who spends a day on a marsh-like place with his father. The description of the landscape is well written and then there's some really rather original writing at the climax, and here's a bit of that. This is the place where the world begun. This is the land which woked up and found that it was the starting place of everything. This Marsh is a never-ending carpet. I love it most of all at dusk time when the black shapes of wind-blown bushes stand against a giant dusk sky like smugglers turned to stone by the customs men. Every single dusk on the Marsh is magical, every dawn brand new. When I am there with my dad I know that he and I have been together for a thousand years and will never die. The end."

The cla.s.s sn.i.g.g.e.red. One girl whined, "It's a never-ending carpet where I can play with my teddy bear because I'm Ellis and I'm a baby!" This caused a ripple of laughter which Mr Pulman talked down.

"That was by far the best piece of writing in the fiction category, whilst of the factual ones I want to read you an extract from ..."

Ellis let Mr Pulman's voice recede and looked at Tim. Tim slapped his shoulder.

"That was brilliant, Ellis. Brilliant," he whispered. "Don't listen to these idiots. They're jealous of you."

Ellis was wearing his confused face and muttered helplessly back, "But it wasn't fiction."

Ellis and Denny would leave early for the Marsh, setting out when the village was a dark procession of cadaver houses and hollow-eyed windows. At shearing time, they heard the cries of ewes separated from their lambs reverberate across the flatlands and rise to them on the escarpment at Bilsington Monument. In midsummer, they listened to the hum of a light aircraft looping the loop over the Midley ruin. At dusk, Ellis saw smugglers out of the corner of his eye. They sought the eeriness of winter. The beauty of summer. The holiness of it all. At the ruins of Hope All Saints, they lay together on the gra.s.s and watched the domed sky.

"All churches should have their roofs removed," the younger O'Rourke said. "Then I'd go."

"Why bother, when you can come here?" his dad replied.

"But you go sometimes?"

"Very occasionally ... just in case."

And being of the age when threads of desire were beginning to unravel in his imagination and the romantic poets were being forced upon him by Mr Pulman, Ellis decided that the Marsh had been the birthplace of his soul, somewhere in the past.

From beneath the pall of apprehension that was the legacy of being left responsible for this boy and his sister, Denny O'Rourke glimpsed a different future when he and his son were on the Marsh. He had first seen the Marsh from on board ship, in wartime. Then, in the first warless summer of his adulthood, he had borrowed a car and gone to visit his Aunt Mafi on the coast. The two of them had driven out on to the Marsh on a gleaming bright summer's day and every colour and detail and field and d.y.k.e and bullrush and poppy and bugloss had reflected in the mirrors and panels of the car, a Technicolor peacetime. During a picnic on the shingle point, beneath the lighthouse, Denny had dwelled deeply on the vision of a boy he had had when looking at this peninsula from his ship. He had toyed with the idea of telling Mafi about the boy but had thought better of it. And by the time he was married and his son was finally born, he had locked that vision away, out of reach. Now that he and his son were regularly visiting this same place, the future took on a new appearance in Denny's eyes. It was less solitary, with fewer battles. It was shinier, like a polished car crossing the Marsh in summer. It was beautiful.

Denny and Ellis marked the longest day of 1984 by watching the sun rise and set over the Marsh. They started at Fairfield, beneath a deep ocean sky that waited patiently for dawn. They sheltered in the shadow of the bellcote and drank tea from a flask.

"You want a bench here, really," Denny said. "Right here, tucked against the wall. Port in a storm, dear boy. Someone should do that, put a bench right here."

The first warm tones of gold and orange entered the sky and reflected in the still water of the drainage ditches. The sun appeared, showing up the lichen on the church bricks and on the tiles.

They ran with stooped backs to the Listening Posts at Greatstone, hiding from the crane operators excavating the gravel lakes. Ellis threw a pebble into an immense concrete dish expecting it to echo, but it didn't.

"They used these to detect enemy aircraft," Denny said. "Don't ask me how."

"How?" Ellis asked.

His dad lobbed a pebble at him. "Fool!" he laughed.

They stopped at the bikers' cafe on the main Marsh road at Old Romney and had breakfast. They were the only customers. Ellis's mug had lipstick on it and, out of nowhere, he announced, "You don't have to worry about me sitting you down and asking for s.e.x education or stuff like that. I'm pretty well clued up on that ... from a visual angle, if you know what I mean."

Denny didn't flinch. "Good, 'cos I'm a bit rusty."

They parked at the lifeboat station beneath a fluttering ensign. Denny O'Rourke followed the caterpillar tracks across the beach to the launch. Ellis walked amongst the fishing boats. In the windows of a winch-shed he was confronted by a reflection of his dad looking out to sea. Denny's hands were clasped behind his back and from his stance Ellis knew that his dad was whistling to himself, through his teeth, the way he did when he was happy. When he was Ellis's age, the man whistling at the water's edge had presumed he would spend his whole life at sea. When he was told that he couldn't, Denny O'Rourke thought he would never get over it. But he learned to live on land and life was bearable and then he met the b.u.t.terfly-lady and life was wonderful again, as wonderful as the oceans for being loved by her.

Ellis did not wish to cross the seas as his father had, but their trips together to the Marsh, though only an hour and a half away, were planting in him a desire to see those seas from all the different continents that rose up out of them, and to then, one day, live back here at the water's edge. Mafi once said to him that his mother had died of adventure. He wondered if it were possible to die of the lack of it.

They sat at the Point and Ellis noticed the wreck of a small fishing boat half buried in the sandbanks out to sea.

"This is the photograph next to your bed."

"It is," Denny said.

"I never noticed the wreck before."

"No? Maybe the tide's always been in."

"Maybe ... Did you take that photograph?" Ellis asked.

"Yes, from on board ship. On my last ever day at sea."

"Is that why you kept it all this time?"

Denny didn't answer for some time. He was distant for a while, as he toyed with the idea of telling a certain story. Then he smiled at his son.

"Sort of," he said. "Partly."

Streaks of pale pink cloud dissected the lowest horizontals of the sky and measured the sun's descent. It offered up a glow of warm, pastel colours to the shingle peninsula and a small, white, timber-clad house accepted them, becoming saturated by the evening's delicate hues. The house sat alone on the shingle, removed from the other houses there but constructed, like many of them, round the sh.e.l.l of an old railway carriage. It was surrounded by a wind-blown wooden fence which flapped in the wind.

"I am definitely going to live here," Ellis said.

After the sun had gone, the sky continued to repaint itself every few minutes. Their footsteps were heavy on the deep shingle, then light and silent upon carpets of moss. The power lines crackled above a shanty town of magpie traps. The lighthouse beam threw monochrome patterns on to the shingle. The wind picked up. Neither of them wanted to return to the ba.n.a.lity of being in a car or deciding what to eat. They wanted to remain together in the incomplete darkness of midsummer. Ellis flirted with the possibility of telling his dad that the crimson sunsets above the village were his mother appearing to them, but he said nothing. The knowledge that something immense was missing overcame him. It wasn't simply that he couldn't talk to his dad about her but that he shouldn't. It had never been all right to ask. The moment was never right. He wondered if he could start by asking for the letters, the letters wedged inside the pages of Denny's blue canvas-bound naval diary and locked in the bottom drawer, the ones from his mum to his dad, in the pale blue envelopes with foreign stamps.

Dad?

Yes, my dear boy.

When we get home, could I read those letters from Mum that are in your drawer?

Of course you can, dear boy. And I'll tell you all about her.

Ellis let this imagined exchange drift away into the night. His dad was the sort of dad who gave him a day off school so that they could watch the sun rise and set on the longest day. Perhaps he shouldn't ask for more.

9.

The hay was harvested in early summer at Longspring Farm. Reardon kept Ellis and Tim busy, manoeuvring the herd around the gra.s.sland harvest. The boys watched a weasel suck the blood from the jugular vein of a rat. They discussed the idea of trying drugs for the first time, without having any intention of doing so.

"We should go up to the sun barn later on," Ellis said, "browse some mags ..."

Tim's response changed everything between them.

"I'm not doing that any more. No need."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing."

Tim meandered away towards the farmhouse.

"Why does everybody in the blooming world walk away from me when I ask them a serious question?"

"Let's make a cuppa," Tim said.

Ellis ran to catch up with him.

"And say 'f.u.c.king world'!" Tim added.

"What?"

"Say 'f.u.c.king' not 'blooming'. You're using words that don't fit the bill."

"What are you talking about?" Ellis asked.

"What the f.u.c.k am I talking about!"

"Yeah, what are you?"

"You're not expressing yourself, Ellis. You need to revamp your vocab. What the f.u.c.k are you talking about, Tim!"

"But what are you talking about?"

"What the f.u.c.k am I talking about. Spit it out, it'll do you good."

"But what the f.u.c.k are you going on about?"

Tim handed Ellis the cigarette he'd been rolling.

"Swearing and f.u.c.king, mate. Vital. Get them both on your agenda, p.r.o.nto."

"Like you've done any f.u.c.king," Ellis sneered.

Tim lit Ellis's cigarette. "We'll have a cuppa."

Ellis seized him by the arm. "Have you done it?"

Tim smiled and headed off to Reardon's kitchen.

"You're doing it again. Walking away from me when I ask something important! It's really annoying!"

"f.u.c.king annoying!"

They drank strong, sugary tea in Reardon's orchard and Ellis sat quietly, subdued by a premonition of being left behind. He didn't ask Tim again, for fear of sounding desperate. Beyond the shade, the day was growing extremely hot. The gra.s.s was yellow and there were cracks in the earth.

When the windfalls land on gra.s.s this pale, Ellis thought to himself, it's going to look pretty. Someone should take a photograph.

"My dad's out this evening. Come over and I'll dig out some alcohol."

"Can't," Tim said.