The Spider Truces Part 17

"I know how, don't I, Ellis?" Mafi said.

"It doesn't matter how. What matters is I'm going."

"If you think I am going to let you walk out of here when you're still just a child and get yourself ripped off or hurt or killed in some foreign country then you must think that being your dad is some part-time hobby I don't give a s.h.i.t about, which makes you just about the most stupid little b.u.g.g.e.r I've ever met."

Denny marched inside.

"Could he possibly have a more negative view of the world?" Ellis muttered.

"I can't believe you tricked me like that, Ellis. I really can't."

"It doesn't matter about that. It's just important that I get going somewhere."

"You're not even going to apologise to me?"

Ellis looked at his feet. "I'm sorry. But he'd sailed round the world four times before he was twenty-one, that's the ridiculous thing!"

"He wasn't on his own," Mafi reminded him.

Ellis went to his bedroom and found his dad there, looking through his belongings.

"Where's the ticket?" Denny asked softly.

"I'm not giving it to you."

They both sat on the bed in silence.

"You're not to go. Do you understand?"

Ellis said nothing.

"Please," Denny said.

There was that word again, sounding strange coming from his dad.

"Ellis ... if anything ever happened to you, I would be devastated."

"If nothing ever happens to me, I'll be devastated."

"You've a clever answer for everything today. You're not ready. I do not want you to go." Denny let his voice trail away.

"Then I won't go," Ellis muttered.

"So, give me the ticket."

"No."

"Ellis ..."

"I said I won't go. That's it. If you think I'm not ready, that's one thing. If you think I'm untrustworthy, that's another. I'm giving you my word."

In the silence, the air between them calmed. Denny felt relief so close to elation that he had to control himself not to show it. "I trust you," he said, and left the room.

That day, and the sixteen that followed it, Ellis tried all of his magic places in the village: every tree he loved to climb, every field he loved to sit in. Each of these places was a favourite and familiar face and every one of them looked Ellis in the eye and reminded him that all other seventeen year olds were having the time of their lives.

On 1 July, Ellis packed and stood in his bedroom perfectly still, clutching the bag, as if he were a photograph of himself, taken moments before leaving the room. But he didn't leave the room, because he was terrified. That night, he couldn't sleep for taunting himself that his life was destined to be a small, monochrome one. The morning brought with it a morsel of courage, fed by nothing more substantial than the comfort of daylight, and he convinced himself that if he hesitated again and failed to embark on this small adventure, then he would never embark on any.

He gave himself the hour-long train journey to Folkestone to justify his going. His fear of inertia was real but not reason enough to inflict this agony on his dad. But, just when he needed her, his mother flew to his aid. He knew nothing about her. He had been dissuaded from asking all his life. This failure on Denny's part, as he suddenly felt able to see it, was his excuse for going and it was strong enough to withstand the increasing nausea he felt at every revised point of no return, as he boarded the ferry, as the ropes slid from the quayside, as the hull pa.s.sed the line of the harbour walls on to open sea.

By dinner time he was in France, his only companions the taste of salt air and the smell of ferry fuel. He was hungry but having booked into a room in a drab area near to the harbour he was too nervous to leave it. In the darkness, the idea of justifying his trip with the memory of his mother crumbled before him. It was irrelevant. He had never pushed for information about her. He'd never truly confronted his dad and demanded to know. He had taken little dissuading from the subject because he was happy if his dad was happy and his dad was not happy when they talked about his mum.

Once again, the arrival of morning boosted Ellis. Great journeys must be planned at first light, he realised, when the heart is fearless. He rang Chrissie from a call box in Paris and after he had spoken to her he stepped out on to the boulevard de Magenta and, for the first time, the adventure began to outweigh the fear. Europe beckoned. If he stayed four weeks then he had six pounds a day to spend. He would sleep on trains and in train stations to make the money last. This, he had read, was what everybody did. On the train to Nice he slept in the heat of the window. He took a roll-up mattress on the roof of a youth hostel where the dormitories were full. The roof was a free-for-all for latecomers and Ellis watched through the gaps of his folded arms as grown men and women undressed and slept within sight of him. He felt the unfamiliar musty, warm air of the Mediterranean cling to his skin and climbed out of his sleeping bag and lay on top of it in his jeans and T-shirt. At midnight, he woke and imagined how angry his dad was and bitterly regretted not calling him. When he had called Chrissie instead, she had laughed and told Ellis he was going to get "the b.o.l.l.o.c.king of all time".

"... so you might as well enjoy it," she had concluded.

"Might as well," Ellis had replied unconvincingly.

Chrissie had agreed to tell their dad where Ellis was on the condition that Ellis called home within two days. He was looking ahead with dread to that phone call when a woman in her late twenties laid a mattress down alongside his.

"Bit of a latecomer," she whispered, with a tw.a.n.g in her voice.

Ellis smiled and lay back, resting the back of his head in his clasped hands. The woman laid a white sheet on the mattress and removed her clothes, lying down on the mattress in her underwear. She smelt of suntan lotion. Ellis became aware of his own breathing. His toes tensed up and he wiggled his ankles.

"Mind if I have a smoke?" the woman said, sitting up on her side.

Ellis smiled and shook his head. He stole a glance. She was tanned and had long, straight, straggly blond hair. Her face was angular. She wasn't pretty but she was handsome and healthy-looking and almost her entire body was visible and lying inches away from him. He forgot his fears. He forgot his home. The woman offered him a cigarette. He declined and pulled out his tin box and rolled one. She approved of this.

"Where you from?" she whispered.

"England. Kent," he said, shyly.

"New Zealand. I've been travelling for three years."

Ellis's mouth dropped open. Three years! She smoked one of Ellis's roll-ups after she'd smoked her cigarette and then she turned on to her back and slept. When the cathedral chimed for three o'clock, she moved in her sleep and her foot came to rest across Ellis's calf muscle. He savoured the sensation and soon afterwards he fell asleep.

Mostly, they lay on the beach and read and went swimming, taking it in turns to watch each other's belongings. She sunbathed topless and asked Ellis to rub lotion into her back, which he did with growing confidence. They swam together some of the time and he grew accustomed to the sight of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Accustomed, but not blase. They were as magical and wonderful to him on their third day together as the first. Her thighs were strong and her calves defined. She could have been an athlete or a swimmer, or a manual labourer. A farmer, even. Her skin was extraordinarily tanned. He didn't feel the need to speak much. She wanted to do the talking. After three years away she was feeling homesick and was thinking of going home. On their last evening, they ate a picnic on the beach at Menton and got blind drunk whilst she told him what she called "her life story".

"Ours is a perfect friendship," she said. "After tomorrow, nothing can ever damage it."

To his surprise, Ellis realised that he wasn't in love with her, even though he'd rubbed oil into her back. He didn't idolise her, even though she was prepared to give him the time of day. He wasn't aching with s.e.xual desire for her. He just liked being with her. They slept side by side on the beach in sleeping bags that last night. The stars spun above Ellis's head. He heard the woman crying to herself. She laid her head on Ellis's chest and slept there. The weight of her body against him brought sobering stabs of joy to him. They swam in the morning, before they said a word, and their hangovers eased. Ellis swam only briefly, deliberately, so that he could sit on the beach and watch the woman from New Zealand walk out of the sea towards him one final time. He locked the image away for keeps, where it remained more fresh and magical than many of the more intimate moments since.

At the train station she said that they should not exchange addresses, that they would part now with their friendship untainted. They hugged tight but they didn't kiss.

"Have a wonderful life," she said.

He couldn't speak.

She climbed the steps to the station and he watched until she was taken by the crowd. He made a wish for happiness to be with her all her life and as he walked down the Boulevard Gambetta towards the hostel, he felt lonely and burst into tears.

The phone call was made from a train station concourse.

"Dad, it's me. I'm in Italy and I'm fine. Please don't be angry."

"Where in Italy?"

"Verona."

"Is it nice?" his dad asked, in a disarming, clipped monotone.

"Yes ..." Ellis faltered.

"Are you safe?"

"I'm safe and well and I'm planning to ..." Ellis heard the receiver being laid down on the small bureau desk by the front door. He waited for something to happen. There were footsteps and then his dad spoke in the same foreign monotone.

"I was looking for Mafi so she could talk to you but she's gone for a drive with Chrissie."

Silence fell between them.

"Right then ..." Ellis said, after some while.

"I want you to do something for me, Ellis," Denny said.

"Yes? Anything."

"I want you to ring Mafi every other day so that she knows you're safe. She worries about you and that's not fair on her."

His voice was taut and brittle in its show of strength.

"You can call during the day, there's no need to wait until I'm back from work. It's your great-aunt who worries."

"OK."

There was no fight. No argument. None of the things Ellis had prepared for. Just coldness.

He's good at this, Ellis thought.

The finest part of Ellis's adventure was already over. No one and nothing would quite compare to his friend from New Zealand. He didn't care too much. All that mattered to him was that he had gone away. He had had an adventure. He had done something that Tim hadn't, and that Chloe might want to. But, for all the new ground broken, Ellis also discovered that it was still his father he wanted to share this with. In the evenings, it was Denny he imagined talking to about the day, and in moments of awe and adventure it was Denny he wished could see him there.

He rang Mafi every few days and she asked him excitedly about where he was. He saw Florence and Siena and got knocked over by a moped in Lucca. He slept in the giant tent in the botanical gardens in Munich with hundreds of others like him. He got so drunk in Munich that he boarded a night-train to Vienna and woke in Koblenz. He walked in the mountains above Innsbruck and stood at the top of the Olympic ski jump in its snowless state. He slept in a meadow of long gra.s.s and wild flowers where the temperature dropped and breathing felt like drinking fresh water. There, he felt a yearning which has been in him ever since, which never dilutes, never increases, but is ever-present, sometimes gentle, other times desperate. The possibility of fulfilment? The promise of joy? A glimpse of heaven? He doesn't know. Perhaps it was no more than the clean mountain air.

11.

The village looked small and altered. It would take a day or two for it all to look familiar again. William Rutton the butcher waved. Denny's bedroom curtains were drawn against the sunlight. Ellis saw him peer out and withdraw again. Mafi rained kisses on him. The stairs seemed shallower and the cottage smaller.

Ellis sat beside his dad on the bed and touched his arm. Denny feigned waking and put on his gla.s.ses. His breathing was loud and slow, through his nose. He raised Ellis's hand into the air and let it drop limply on to the bed. He got up and walked out of the room, shutting the door gently behind him. Ellis listened to him descend the stairs and his eyes settled on the imprint of his father's body on the sheets.

Chrissie came home for the weekend. "You look like George Michael with that tan."

"Why thank you," Ellis said courteously.

"Wasn't a compliment," she said. "What's going on?"

"He's not talking to me."

"What? Not much? Not at all?"

"Not a word," Ellis said.

She found out for herself at dinner. "This is ridiculous," she told her dad. "You can't just not talk to someone."

"What would you like me to talk about?" Denny asked.

"Anything," Ellis said.

"Shall we talk about trust?"

Ellis looked away. "No."

"Lying to my face. Shall we talk about that?"

He got no answer.

"OK then, Ellis. Shall we talk about what it feels like to lie awake for twenty-nine nights waiting for the phone to ring with a foreign voice on a distant line telling me where I can come and identify my son's body? Let's talk about worrying myself sick about you, and losing the ability to eat or think straight. Let's talk about my happiness being at the mercy of whether or not you've managed to spare five minutes of your precious time to call Mafi to let her know how you are."

"You didn't want me to call you!"

"Which of those things do you want to talk about, Ellis?"

Ellis shook his head.

"WHICH OF THOSE?" his dad raged.

"I don't want to talk about any of them," Ellis whispered.

"Well, there's nothing else I'm interested in talking about with you."

Ellis went to his room and emptied his rucksack, in the hope that his perfect friend had broken her own rules and left him a note with her number in New Zealand, amongst his belongings. But she had not.

Denny began renovating the dining room walls. It gave him reason to shut himself away. He cut out areas of rotten lath and plaster and pinned in new strips of chestnut which Terry Jay had split for him. Two post-beams were rotten. Dark slithers of wood crumbled between Denny's fingers.

"Can't make that out ..." he muttered.