The Spider Truces Part 19

"Don't I what?"

"Tan? In the sun."

"Not spectacularly," she said. "But it's not for the lack of trying."

She climbed into the bath and told Ellis to kneel alongside. "You can look at me and you can ask anything, but you can't touch. I'll place your hands where I don't mind them going."

"OK, thanks," Ellis said, as if being given road directions.

She cleared the bubbles away from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and placed his right hand on them.

"Mine are rather small, Ellis," she said. "You'll decide what you like as you find out."

"I'm going to like big ones," he said immediately, without thinking.

She burst into laughter. "Honest Ellie, that's you."

Ellis withdrew his hand, though not abruptly. "Please don't call me Ellie," he said gravely. "Only my mum called me Ellie."

She was taken aback. "You're an odd fish," she said.

"And you're not?" he replied, stretching out his arms to remind her where she was and what she was doing.

The affection in her face gave him confidence enough to say, "I can't see your body for all the bubbles."

"Soap gets rid of bubbles," she replied.

He took a bar of Mr and Mrs Morton's not inexpensive soap, dunked it in the water and rubbed it between his hands, allowing the lather to drip from the bar and fall on the bubbles. The bubbles fizzed as they dissolved. Katie Morton raised one leg out of the water and presented it to Ellis. He washed her legs and her tummy and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The bubbles crackled all the while and soon he could see her, through the milky water.

After that, she led him to her bedroom and she removed his clothes and told him not to worry about his erection. They lay on the bed together and hugged. She took his right hand and placed it on her tummy and then she slid his hand down until it rested on her pubic hair. He stared peacefully at her body and never thought to explore or probe further. He had no urge to lie on top of her, or to fondle her or to penetrate her. He did not burn with the stabbing, restless desire he felt when he and Tim used to go to the goat-lady's place. What Katie and he were doing was just right. It was peaceful and tender and it placed no pressure on him to know more than he knew.

And all the while he kept telling himself, What a summer! What a summer!

An ivory glare emanated from the cloud cover and flooded the room with smooth light. Ellis smiled inwardly at the bright new world appearing before him.

"It's like watching underwater films," he said, blissfully unaware of speaking.

"What is?"

"A woman's body."

"Like I said," Katie stroked his arm, "an odd fish."

And then they fell asleep.

The village had sunk into dusk. In that gloom, beyond the charcoal fields of Elsa's farm, Ellis could no longer place the once infinite joys of village life: the avenue of lime trees at Longspring, the view of the Downs glowing crisp and blue in the frost of winter, a peek at Kerry Moscow's knickers as she climbed the gate to the Rumpumps when they were both nine years old, a meringue handed to him by Mrs Brown at Forge Cottages as he waited with his sister for the 454 bus, helping his father cut the gra.s.s in the orchard, handing a cigarette to Tim Wickham as he handed one back with the greater part of the day still ahead, the field at Long Barn a ripple of tall, swaying wheat. All these and a thousand other delights lay discarded in the corner of Ellis's restless mind, like neglected toys in a bedroom cupboard. The smallness of the place was what he saw now, and the lights of the bypa.s.s and distant towns which rose out of the settling darkness and glimmered and twinkled with their own imprecise promises.

Sometimes, as a very small boy, Ellis looked close up at his hands, at his fingerprints, at the faint pathway of a vein beneath his skin, and he had the sensation of being newly born, immediately out of the womb, a few hours old, the process of his cells dividing and his body forming still ongoing, but with no one watching, no one gathering him up to wrap layers of clothing around him. The feeling of living inside a s.p.a.ce suit and instead of the sound of your own breathing all you can hear is your own voice wondering aloud what happens next.

"Still waiting?" The man with the Mercedes stood nearby beneath a street light. He was short and unshaven, in his early forties, with a beer gut and Marty Feldman eyes. By the looks of him, Ellis thought, possibly a Whitesnake roadie. Behind him, the cafe was in darkness.

"Women!" The man had a lazy East End accent. "Need a lift?"

Ellis looked away. He watched the sodium lights that snaked around the valley and out into the world. He felt the breeze that followed the cut of the main road blow against his face. This moment was open-ended and it was his own. His own adventure, his own story, his own mistake.

"OK," he said.

They travelled in silence at first and Ellis stole glimpses of the man's head rolling back and forth as he drove.

"Do you toke?" the man slurred, bringing himself back from the edge of sleep.

"Do I what?"

"Toke," the man repeated. He leant across Ellis and opened the glove compartment. Ellis looked at the cigarette papers, small blocks of hash and ready-rolled joints. He said nothing. He had been contemplating trying pot for some months now but had done nothing about it. Now, he suspected, was not the time.

"I'm a roofer," the man said, reaching for one of the joints and lighting it. "Roofer and builder. Build roofs."

He took a few tokes and then handed it to Ellis, who accepted it, vowing to embrace a non-inhalation method. The smoke tasted sweet and beguiling and he broke his vow on the third toke.

"That's nice and mild," the driver said, "you'll be OK with that. I never smoke anything major when I'm driving. I don't like people who do."

Ellis took another drag and handed it back. "It's very nice," he whispered, although he had intended to say it aloud.

"Never smoke anything that mashes your brain when I'm behind the wheel," the man repeated. "Just a little toke on something mellow."

"Probably wouldn't pa.s.s as a road safety campaign, that," Ellis said.

The man looked confused, then changed the subject.

"Employ loads of people, I do. Good money in roofing."

Ellis felt a ripple of nausea. He rested his head back and closed his eyes.

"Know anything about roofing?" the driver asked.

"No," Ellis said.

"You can start tomorrow then!" The driver wheezed a laugh to himself and handed the spliff back to Ellis. Ellis defied his own instincts and smoked the rest of it.

"Road safety campaign ... yeah ..." the driver slurred to himself, confused. "Yeah ... nice one."

Ellis was woken by the seagulls. It was morning and he was in the Mercedes. It was parked in a dead-end street beside a large, bleak-looking pub called the Harbour Lights. A blanket was wrapped around him. Opposite the pub was a sea wall and the tide was high the other side of it. The beach was shingle and to the left was a harbour with a tall, blue-grey tower. Mist was burning off the water and a large cargo ship manoeuvred through the harbour entrance. Somewhere out to sea, an invisible vessel boomed a low signal that made the windows of the pub vibrate.

Ellis hauled his shivering body on to the sea wall. A young man appeared, tall and lanky with long dyed-black hair. He looked as though he got no daylight.

"There you go." He handed Ellis a mug of tea.

"Thanks," Ellis said.

"Mick says you can start today or leave it till tomorrow if you're knackered."

Ellis watched the young man go back inside the lifeless pub. He sipped the strong, sweet, piping hot tea and looked out across the water. Contentment swept through him. He wondered where he was. He looked around. From the top of Coastguards Alley, a phone box stared accusingly at him. The red paint had faded to matt pink. One pane of gla.s.s was broken, low down, an impromptu cat flap. He rang Chrissie and told her that he was on the coast and that he had work. He asked her to tell their dad. She refused and told him to go home, but he knew that she would call Denny immediately. She loved to break news.

He returned to the sea wall and rolled himself a cigarette and vowed not to go back home for one whole year. That would be amazing, he told himself. That would make him mysterious and desirable. That would mean he had his own life. OK, this place was not like the photographs he had pored over in the pages of National Geographic, but it was something new and that felt good. The phone box in the alley glared at him again. He rehea.r.s.ed a phone call to Denny but even in his imagination the conversation strayed into argument.

It's private, Dad, Ellis imagined saying. See how you like it.

12.

The flat above the Harbour Lights pub had four bedrooms. One was used by Sapphire, the barmaid. Mick and his crew slept in the others. Ellis had to wait until the men finished watching videos in the early hours of the morning before he could brush the food and roaches off the sofa and use it as his bed.

"See these stairs here?" Mick said, giving Ellis a tour.

"These two steps?"

"Yeah." Mick stood over them, the way TV detectives stand over a corpse. "These two steps down to the kitchen and living area mean that the flat is split-level. Right?"

"With you so far," Ellis said.

"And you know what that means, don't you?"

Ellis shook his head.

"That it's a maisonette, not a flat."

"Right." Ellis nodded.

"That is to say, it's a maisonette as opposed to being a flat, if you get me."

Ellis could only wonder how a man with such a slavish devotion to mind-enhancing drugs had been left so cruelly unenhanced.

Mick put Ellis into the care of Jed, his foreman on a house renovation at Joy Lane Beach. Jed was softly spoken and quick-witted, handsome and strong, with small, piercing eyes. He was twenty-four and already tanned and marked by eight years' labouring. Ellis stuck close to Jed, did what Jed told him and spoke hardly a word, using the first two weeks to weigh up the new sort of people around him. His first pay packet consisted of ten five pound notes, a carton of French cigarettes and a block of hash. He bought jeans, a T-shirt, underwear and a toothbrush.

High above the town, from the rooftop at Joy Lane, they watched students. .h.i.tching to summer jobs in Canterbury and Margate, dressed in dungarees and torn jeans.

"It's like a Dexy's Midnight Runners convention," Jed said.

Dark clouds brewed out to sea and the downpour came in heavy sheets. The crew took cover inside the house and smoked spliffs and turned up the radio, above the sound of rain peppering the tarpaulins. One guy cursed a Madonna song and said she was "s.h.i.t" but added, after further contemplation, that "he'd give her one, though, if she begged". Another man announced that he was "too f.u.c.ked to raise a finger, let alone walk home".

"You should go for a swim," Ellis said. "It'll freshen you up."

The crew turned and stared.

"It talks," one of them muttered.

They carried Ellis's wriggling body across the beach and threw him into the sea. He floated away on his back, a sodden spliff between his grinning lips. The men laughed and splashed in the water. In time, they dispersed. Slithers of lightning shot from the underbelly of black clouds out to sea. The storm moved eastwards, parallel to the coast. The lightning was silent, the waves gentle and unperturbed, but black, jet black. Ellis laid his wet five pound notes on the sea wall, pinning them flat with pebbles. He lay on his back in his soaking clothes. It felt good to have a little money.

He learned how to re-bed ridge tiles, use a slater's ripper, lay bricks, bake hash, spike a B-bomb and brew home-made honey oil. And, seven weeks after leaving home, he lost his virginity to Sapphire, the barmaid from the Harbour Lights, real name not known, and an event which he had expected to transform his life and propel him into a state of supreme wisdom pa.s.sed without ceremony or pleasure, leaving him crushed by the disappointment of their loveless encounter on the beach.

"You could do with a proper girlfriend," she told him, as she stepped back into her knickers, snagging them on the soles of her Dr Martens. "Someone you really like. I'm not going to do any more f.u.c.king until I meet someone I actually fancy."

He nodded purposefully, to paper over her comment.

"Can I say something blunt?" she asked.

"Blunter than what you just said?" he asked back.

"You have it all to learn in the s.e.x department. Get an actual girlfriend and you'll improve your technique."

Ellis thought about this. Just getting to do it in a bed might help him, he thought.

"You'll crack it," she added. "Pardon the pun."

He smiled bravely, and wondered what the pun had been.

Next day, hungover and grieving for his stillborn romantic dream, Ellis was in no mood to go to work and knowing that Jed had a day off he wandered around the bay to the foreman's mobile home.

"I'm not working today, I'm too depressed," Ellis announced, at the doorstep.

"Depressed? How exotic. Have you told Mick you're not turning up?"

"No, I'm just taking the day off."

"That's a stunningly bad idea."

They walked across Graveney Marshes as far as Horse Hill, to pick mushrooms.

"I used to pick mushrooms at Reardon's," Ellis said. "For breakfast."

"Not mushrooms like these you didn't," Jed said.

No, not mushrooms like these.

"I've never had anything like these before ..."

"Yeah," Jed said, watching Ellis vomit at the foot of one of his bird tables. "They do taste a bit cheeky. We might be a tad premature eating these. Probably need some Daddy's sauce."

"Sweet Jesus!" Ellis groaned, as the garden folded in on him. "I'm gonna go to work."

"Another remarkably bad idea."

Ellis wandered away and was sick again on the beach. He waited for the spiralling to go. He felt lonely. He slept and he was cold when he woke so he walked at a pace. He crossed the footbridge over the rail line and climbed through the allotments to the Rose In Bloom pub. Specks of rain dappled his face and made him smile. He looked at the greying sky and saw that the droplets of rainwater had begun their journey in another sphere, somewhere between the skies and outer s.p.a.ce, in a world not detectable to the human eye. It was a world of flat water, moving horizontally in sheets between beams of starlight, a world of iridescent blue, more mysterious than the base of the ocean. The rain came from this world and he welcomed the droplets on to his face. They fell in slow motion towards him, each one distinct and crystal clear, and as they permeated his skin and entered his body he felt that he belonged to that other world.