The Spider Truces Part 30

"Does Milek like Henry's penthouse?" he asked.

"They've not met."

"You don't say."

Denny O'Rourke stirred. His face creased up and his eyes flickered open.

"Pain ..." he groaned.

"I know," Chrissie whispered.

They watched the waves of agony cross their father's face. They held his hand, avoiding the tubes that ran into his nose, hand and stomach. Chrissie found a payphone in reception and settled down to make work calls. The day pa.s.sed in silence and was beautiful. In the late afternoon, Denny's eyes opened again. He grimaced, looked at the ceiling and squeezed his son's hand. Ellis sat up. He blinked his eyes affectionately. Denny smiled back meekly and drifted back to sleep. He stirred again later as Ellis left the room.

"I'm just popping out for a cigarette, Dad," Ellis said. He stood over Denny and grinned. "A lovely, smooth, satisfying smoke, outside in the sunshine. A lovely, lovely ciggie."

Ellis drew on an imaginary cigarette and exhaled ecstatically. In response, Denny muttered his first distinct words of the day: "You b.a.s.t.a.r.d ..."

They were days of sunlight and simplicity. Ellis needed no props, no magazines or books. There were no hours. There was only the sunlight that filled the room and his father, lying in bed, squeezing his hand, smiling bravely.

With the breeze playing percussively in the walnut trees and his son and daughter there to a.s.sist him, Denny washed the first of his chemo pills down with a bottle of wine. He said they were celebrating the removal of the headache and brushed aside talk of the shadow that had been detected on his lungs since the operation.

"These pills will take care of that as well, especially with a Chablis like this," he declared.

Ellis believed him and the belief took root fast and grew vigorously. Chrissie smiled at the men who were her family and knew that her dad would never get well again.

Denny spent the summer sitting in the garden and watched the evening primroses appear, the hedge become speckled white with flowering bindweed, and the walnut trees, whose leaves transformed from orange to green, stand out against light blue skies. He no longer heard the motorway and he ignored the surrounding houses, living within the open country of his mind's eye and noticing only that which enriched his days. The paleness departed from his complexion, his movements became less laboured and the soreness inside him abated, allowing him to laugh out loud again.

In midsummer, as if to take everybody's mind off the shadow on Denny's lungs, Chrissie dumped Milek for Henry the banker and moved into his penthouse overlooking the Thames. Ellis felt he could now ask Milek for work without turning to his sister for help.

"Look, Milek," he started, "I know that my sister dumping you, and me drawing a picture of your clients engaged in lesbian s.e.x isn't a great platform, but I was wondering if you'd give me a job."

"Ellis, I presume."

"Yes. I really want to work for you and get into photography."

"OK. No problem."

And that was it. The job application and interview was over. He started the following week and Milek took him out for dinner and Ellis ate j.a.panese food for the first time and when Ellis saw the bill his heart skipped a beat and Milek threw a credit card into the wicker tray and slapped Ellis on the back.

"Come and meet my new girlfriend."

Milek seemed to be largely over Chrissie. Carla was Italian and worked as a.s.sistant to a costume designer called Richard. Ellis could not speak to Carla the first time he met her, such was the extent and exoticness of her beauty. Richard was the first gay man Ellis had ever met and Ellis told him so.

"I doubt that, somehow," Richard replied.

They took to Ellis immediately, the way rich women take to Pomeranians.

"She drinks pints!" Ellis muttered in admiration.

"That's the tip of the iceberg," Milek confided.

"I'll tell my sister she's a dog," Ellis said.

Ellis worked six days that week, two in a studio in Wandsworth, one in a forest in Buckinghamshire, a day at a lido in south London and the other two doing runs to the labs and stock shop. Milek corrected his invoice and adjusted it upwards.

"You don't calculate your overtime at the normal rate," he explained. "Welcome to the joys of time-and-a-half and double-bubble."

"I've earned six hundred quid," Ellis muttered in disbelief.

"Doing something you enjoy ... sick, isn't it!" Milek said.

That night, exuberantly happy and with an audience of strangers, Ellis announced that he was spending his first pay packet on taking his dad to Paris. It was an idea born of champagne and j.a.panese lager but as soon as he'd said it he knew he was going to do it. When most places were closed, Milek and his friends led Ellis to a bas.e.m.e.nt bar with black leather sofas and neon floors and, here, Milek took Ellis aside.

"Ellis ... are you sober enough to listen and take heed?"

"Yes ..." and Ellis tried very hard to be.

"The following is non-negotiable, so listen well. You are working for me and when you are out enjoying yourself you are doing it on the money I pay you. You can party, you can drink, you can get high, you can enjoy. But no cocaine. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, you are banned from cocaine and if you break that I'll kick you out. I've been in your father's house and I've been close to his daughter. I will not allow you to do that drug. No second chances."

"Are you banned, too?"

Milek nodded. "These days."

Ellis paid his dad the five hundred pounds he had borrowed since moving back home. He gave it to him in cash, placed within the pages of Fodor's guidebook to Paris.

In the September sunshine, they walked in the Jardin de Luxembourg, stopping every quarter of an hour for Denny to catch his breath, on a bench within the chestnut groves, or on the low wall around the fountains, beside the lake where Denny stared at the toy sailboats. His hair had turned a little greyer in his illness and in the bright sunlight it was silvery and handsome.

"I've wanted to come to this city all my life," Denny sighed. "And now I'm here. Unbelievable, isn't it?"

"Easy, isn't it?" Ellis replied.

Every hour or so, Ellis would ask his dad how he was feeling or if he was tired. "I feel good," Denny would reply. Only on the second afternoon, when they had walked through the Marais after lunch, did he need to rest. He caught a taxi back to the tiny Hotel de Maison on rue Monge and fell asleep to daydreams of buying a garret in the Place des Vosges. As Denny slept, Ellis walked the halls of the Musee d'Orsay and bought a print of Redon's Les Yeux Clos because it made him think of his mother. He crossed from the museum to the river and reflected on the day.

It's similar, he told himself, to when you glance up at the sky and the clouds are the shape of a face or a mandolin. You look away and glance up again but either the shape has gone or it's there but without the magic of first seeing it. That's what it's like to walk into the Sainte Chapelle for the first time, if you've not been told what to expect. That's what it's like when the towering columns of thirteenth-century stained gla.s.s first flood into your vision, causing a sensory double-take at the volume of beauty in front of you as you arch backwards to take it all in. At least, that's what it was like when I took my dad there today.

"My G.o.d, Ellis," Denny whispered, putting his arm round his son. "We're in heaven. Thank you, dear boy, thank you."

My pleasure, Ellis whispered, to the fast-flowing river.

Denny telephoned Chrissie from a payphone on the street. When he stepped out of the booth, he wandered away thoughtfully and Ellis followed.

"Oh dear," Denny muttered, "I think your big sister is jealous of our trip."

They wandered towards the dome of the Pantheon and sat in the Place de la Contrescarpe. "I feel inspired to plan my travels when the evenings set in," Denny declared.

"And I feel inspired to rent myself a little pad in London," his son replied.

"I'm glad to hear it. Good for you. Good old Milek."

They talked about the countries they would visit together and they drank cognac and watched French women.

"Wonderful ..." Denny O'Rourke muttered.

They fell silent for an hour, lost in daydreams and a cool air that promised the autumn.

When he lost his dad, Ellis lost the one person who knew truly how to be silent. The silences they shared in Paris were their masterpieces, at the end of a lifetime's work. In that city, Ellis O'Rourke took care of Denny O'Rourke for the first time and it made him feel that he and his dad had known each other for ever and that they were each other's father and each other's son.

On a Thursday morning in mid-October, Denny O'Rourke rang his daughter and then his son and told them to come home that evening for dinner.

"The spot on my lungs has halved in size, more than halved in fact. We're looking good!"

"Let's get p.i.s.sed!" Ellis said.

"You said it was only a shadow," Chrissie replied.

They got drunk on champagne and Denny went to bed undecided as to whether he should take his chemo pills after so much alcohol. Ellis and Chrissie settled down in their beds soon after midnight, as the long graceful sweeps of wind which had buffeted the evening became more forceful.

Panic-stricken, Chrissie woke Ellis at five in the morning. "There's the most peculiar noise coming from Dad's bedroom!"

"Go back to bed!" Ellis grunted.

"How can you sleep! There's a h.e.l.l of a racket in the garden. I don't know what it is."

Ellis sat bolt upright. "You don't know what it is?" He cupped his hands round his ears and listened theatrically. "It's wind, a natural occurrence. It won't bite."

"Come and sleep next to me, Ellie."

"No. Chrissie, you treat me like a right dork when it suits you. You can't have it both ways. Now let me sleep."

She returned at a quarter to six and this time she switched the light on and tore the blankets away.

"I'm not f.u.c.king around, Ellis! This house sounds like it's going to collapse! There is the most terrible noise coming from Dad's bedroom window and I cannot wake him."

Ellis didn't argue this time. He went to the window and looked out. "f.u.c.king h.e.l.l!"

In Denny's room, the window frame was groaning. The gla.s.s heaved as if it were trying to draw breath. The wind howled around the house and outside, silhouetted against an angry, early morning sky, were the walnut trees, bent by the gale.

"Never seen anything like it," Ellis muttered.

They pushed and prodded Denny but he didn't stir. Chrissie resorted to shouting in his ear.

"Dad! You've got to wake up!"

Denny opened his eyes, touched Chrissie's face and said, "By all means ask the captain but he won't be able to come about in snowfall. We're not even at Mauritius, you know." He turned over and went back to sleep.

"I'd stick my neck out and say Dad opted for taking his medication last night, on top of the booze," Ellis said.

At that moment, the bedroom wall let out a groan. The gla.s.s cracked and the entire window cas.e.m.e.nt was sucked out of the wall and hurled across the garden. The storm poured in through the gaping hole. Ellis and Chrissie stared open-mouthed whilst their father slept on.

The shed had been picked up and deposited in a shattered heap on the other side of the garden. As Ellis dragged a section of it towards the house he was thrown backwards and sideways by the gusts.

"It's amazing out there! Amazing!" he spluttered exuberantly, as Chrissie held the front door open for him.

They had to fall against the door to close it. She helped him upstairs with the shed panel and they found their dad standing by the bed, looking as if he'd been electrocuted.

"There's a hole in the house," he said to them, with pupils the size of pinholes. "It's like going round the Cape. Fantastic! Let's go outside!"

"You're not going anywhere," Chrissie said.

Chrissie took Denny downstairs. Ellis slid the panel across the floor. As soon as he held it up, it was sucked out of his hands and flew at the wall, covering the hole where the window had been. The room fell silent.

"Like slaying a dragon ..." Ellis gasped.

When he'd caught his breath, he nailed the panel to the wall and then he went downstairs where his sister was making tea and his dad was b.u.t.tering a piece of toast.

"Dad's got the munchies," Chrissie said knowingly.

"This toast couldn't taste any better if it was served up on Selina Scott's thighs!" Denny O'Rourke announced.

"You're off your t.i.ts, Dad," Ellis said.

"Ellis! You can't say that!" Chrissie protested.

Denny nodded his agreement with a mouth full of toast.

"He's right, dear girl, I think I am."

Ellis had not slayed the dragon that night. No one had. The dragon slayed the town and the park. It slayed the wooded plateau leading to Ide Hill. It slayed millions. Oak, beech, yew, chestnut. Denny said that Jim Croucher up at Emmetts wept when he saw the devastation. On the television news, people in Jerusalem were praying for England's trees.

"At least it was natural," Denny said. "At least it wasn't us."

A month after the storm, the phone rang at midnight, waking Denny.

"h.e.l.lo, Dad!" Ellis was in a call box.

"Are you all right?" Denny asked.

"Yup."

"Sober?"

"Just about. Wasn't earlier. But are you, more importantly?"

"Yes. Why do you ask?" A smile broke across Denny's face, one of the many that no one would ever see.

"'Cos I need picking up."

"Why so late and why the surprise visit, not that I mind either?"