The Spider Truces Part 32

"That's why we don't talk much," Ellis said.

"Do you mind me asking?" she said.

"Not at all. But there's no problem. There's nothing to tell, that's why I'm not telling you much."

Their conversations were usually in whispers, with their heads almost touching. Lying together. Pillow, sofa, carpet, gra.s.s. They didn't use sentences, nor express their wishes or fears. They would, instead, gently push towards each other images of a love affair they dare not attach their own names to. Places two lovers might go. Things two lovers might do. Moments two lovers might share. But Ellis didn't risk asking for these things to really happen, he did not venture to lay claim to her love, for fear that her answer would be no or that she would simply disappear. He was naive enough, inexperienced enough, to believe that the affection and intensity that she showed for him could possibly be manifestations of a casual fling and that she could be repeating it all, or even usurping it, with her boyfriend. There was something perfect, almost sacred, to Ellis about the expectation of love, the hope for it during the long times they were apart, that outshone love itself. He thought sometimes of the Tudor ship that was lifted from the bottom of the sea. It was live on the television, one rainy morning when Ellis was young. As soon as the ship was out of the water, they had to keep hosing it down so that the air didn't kill it. He and Tammy belonged at the bottom of the sea together, where no one could see them and no one could stop them and the air couldn't harm them.

She's not a b.u.t.terfly-lady, she's a mermaid.

The place still smelled of Fry's Peppermint Cream. He was sure of it. In the waiting area, patients stole glances at each other and guessed what stage of the mock battle they had reached. Denny sat forward on his chair with his hands wedged beneath his legs. He breathed diligently. Beside him, Ellis slipped deep, deep into daydreaming of a small rented flat with Tammy. It had slanting ceilings and a narrow balcony high above the streets. Their bed was tucked into a corner and there were candles in a small recess in the wall above the pillows. Opposite the bed was a window that framed the sky and Tammy's sleeping body was drenched in sunlight. In one corner was a pile of books Tammy had read or was soon to read and in another were Ellis's photographs. Photographs of places they had been to together. Beautiful photographs, the work of master craftsman, Ellis O'Rourke.

Denny brushed against Ellis as he got up and walked towards the open door, in which stood the consultant, with a closely guarded smile for his two o'clock. Ellis watched the door close and turned his attention to a rack of pamphlets. He read eight of them in detail and by the time his dad reappeared he had a worrisome ache in his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and a large tumour pressing against the wall of his brain.

"I have to get a prescription," Denny said, heading off slowly down the corridor, grateful to be accompanied by a son who would not plague him immediately for information. He felt guilty thinking it but he knew things would not be the same if Chrissie were here. It would be more traumatic.

They sat on a bench at the entrance to the children's cancer ward and waited for the prescription. Hairless children appeared at the far end of the corridor, chasing in all directions like a swirl of leaves. Amid the shrieks of laughter, Denny and Ellis O'Rourke caught each other's eye.

"We should have no complaints," Denny said.

"No," Ellis agreed.

Denny took the chain from round his neck and handed it to his son.

"I want you to have this," he said. "It was your mother's."

Ellis ran his thumb across a worn-down St Christopher and put the chain round his neck. A nurse swept through the corridor, sending the children scattering, and suddenly they were all gone.

They went to the hospital cafe so that Denny could take his new pills with a cup of tea and something to eat. On a table nearby, two elderly ladies were selling Christmas cards in June.

"It's not very good news," Denny said calmly.

Ellis nodded and smiled weakly.

"I'll talk to you both together though."

Ellis nodded again. This is what it's like to feel empty, he told himself.

Chrissie had evolved into a person who was always late and always angry and surprised about being late, as if it was always the first time. As Ellis and Denny drove out of the car park, she drove in at speed, agitated.

Denny muttered, "I just want to get home."

Ellis went across to Chrissie's car. "Follow us home, OK?"

"What's happened?"

"He hasn't said a single thing, I promise."

She nodded and smiled.

"Drive slowly," Ellis told her, as she tended not to.

"Six months to a year," Denny O'Rourke said. "A year at the very most."

From his daughter and son came gentle nods of comprehension and faint, brave smiles.

"The consultant did say that if my breathing improved and I grew stronger, then there is a final option of intensive treatment. A last throw of the dice. It would change me radically and it would probably not work."

Ellis heard this with a degree of vindication. As he had suspected from the outset, all they had to do was to keep him breathing until an idea came along. They had a year to come up with something and that was time enough.

"I've already told him that I'm not going to have any more treatment," Denny said.

"But you could change your mind, if you do get stronger?" Ellis said.

"Ellis ..." his dad sighed. The sigh fell into a smile and he hadn't the willpower to say any more.

Chrissie experienced the same peaceful calm as her brother that morning. Life was simple for them. There were no dilemmas. There were no headlines or traffic jams, no financial worries or private life complications. There was no compet.i.tiveness. The world was quiet. There was just one inescapable truth. Life, at its worst moment, was less complicated than it had ever been.

"We'll have the summer together," Denny said. "Let's enjoy the summer and then we'll let it be."

Ellis stepped out of Charing Cross station and waited on the Strand for his bus. Some minutes later, a stranger brushed against him and he found himself walking past the National Gallery and following his dad's daily route to Jermyn Street, with no recollection of having decided to take a walk. He imagined the thoughts his dad would have carried with him along these streets over thirty years, then watched people come and go through the swing doors of Denny's office building. He felt all the while like an invisible man, at liberty to stand and watch without being noticed. He ordered some food in the cafe opposite the office and took a seat by the window. There was a blast of sunlight reflecting against a gla.s.s-fronted building. A middle-aged man with a brown leather briefcase walked by. Although he was walking briskly, the man seemed momentarily suspended in the sunlight as Ellis looked up, the same way the second hand on a clock seems not to move when you first glimpse it. The man was of a certain slim, old-fashioned build that reminded Ellis of his dad and Hedley and their colleagues. Men of a certain timeless appearance, reminiscent of an era when men in their twenties looked middle-aged. Men who have the sort of hair that needs to be brushed or combed, who wear suits that don't shine in the light, suits that accentuate height rather than breadth. Men who don't seem to rush or get fl.u.s.tered, who were born to Victorian parents but are growing old in an almost unshockable world. The man in his suit, hovering a few inches above the pavement in a heat haze and caught in the glare of sunlight, was one of these men. It struck Ellis as strange that of all the worlds Denny had inhabited, it would be this one, the one he valued the least, that would remain preserved for Ellis to visit at any time if he wished to. Jermyn Street had changed little in the decades Denny worked here and promised to carry on in the same vein, offering Ellis a living museum of a thousand faithfully recreated details, a perfect re-enactment of Denny O'Rourke's London save for the sight of Denny's own commanding frame and handsome face emerging on to the street at four o'clock in the afternoon with thoughts, hidden beneath his placid expression, of only his family and his home, and the irritating sense of never being able to get back to them quickly enough.

By the way he held on to her, Tammy knew that something was on Ellis's mind. When he buried his head against her chest, she stroked his hair. When she asked him if he were all right, she felt him nod. When she peppered his head with little kisses, he kissed her back and they made love unnecessarily, because she thought it was what he wanted to do and he didn't know how to say that it wasn't, without having to explain why.

The following Sat.u.r.day, Ellis found his dad at the bottom of the garden, feeding papers on to a bonfire.

"You seem better today," Ellis ventured.

"Abusing the nebuliser with abandon," Denny said. "And clearing the decks. Making everything shipshape."

They watched the fire with the reverence that flames inspire and Ellis recalled the muted buzz of the football reports on a portable radio as his dad worked in the garden at the cottage on Sat.u.r.day afternoons.

"What was that guy on LBC called?" he asked.

"Steve Tongue ... sounded like he was broadcasting from the moon."

"Adverts for the Houndsditch Warehouse and d.i.c.kie Dirts jeans ..."

"Chrissie forced me to drive her up to Camberwell to go to d.i.c.kie Dirts!"

A church clock chimed somewhere above the sprawl of rabbit hutch houses and Ellis sensed that his father would have liked an extra hour or two to himself this evening.

"I suppose we'll start going to church now," he said in a tone of voice which might have meant it and might not.

"I did, months ago. With Reardon," Denny said.

"Fat lot of good it's done you," Ellis said.

Denny flashed his son a smile. He welcomed that sort of chat. He wanted that rather than the other sort.

"I'm on a mission. Want to sort all this stuff out whilst I'm in the mood."

Denny marched back to the house. Ellis stayed and felt the warmth of the fire on his face and the cool evening air on the back of his neck. He watched the flames and his eyes were drawn to a familiar bundle of letters sitting on a book-shaped mattress of white ash. An image came to him, of the blue canvas-bound diary Denny had kept as a young merchant seaman. It seemed that the diary, which had for many years cradled the letters written by Ellis's mother, was now an ashen altar on which the letters were about to burn. The chevroned envelopes lay unchanged for a few moments more. Then an Indian stamp curled in the heat, the handwriting began to melt and a white flame licked around the bundle from underneath. The letters ignited. Ellis grabbed a pitchfork and dug them out of the fire, tossing them on to the gra.s.s. He picked them up and scurried across the garden, tossing the hot bundle from hand to hand "f.u.c.kf.u.c.kf.u.c.k ..."

and dropped them out of sight, behind the shed. He looked at his hands. They were red from the heat. A slow, incurable sting released itself across his palms, which he wedged under his armpits. At his feet, the bundle of letters reignited. Cursing himself, he took the pitchfork, speared the burning letters and returned them to the fire, pushing them into the centre of the glow. He shook the pitchfork free and a small shower of embers broke from the envelopes and floated into the air. One danced above his head and descended slowly, charmingly, towards him. Ellis c.o.c.ked his head obligingly to one side so that the ember fell against his neck and burnt him there.

Ellis found his dad writing at the kitchen table.

"What's that on your neck?" Denny asked.

"A little burn."

"Looks nasty."

"I like it."

"Strange boy," Denny muttered, and smiled at his son.

"What you writing?"

"A letter."

"Who to?"

"No one."

"No one?"

"Pour me a drink, make yourself useful," Denny purred.

"No one writes to no one. Who's it to?"

"It's to you."

"Me?"

Denny put his pen down and feigned annoyance. "Yes, you. Now stop disturbing me."

"What's it about?"

Denny ignored him. Ellis laughed nervously.

"Why don't you just tell me? I'm right here."

"Don't want to."

"Just tell me!"

Denny snapped. "I don't want to tell you, Ellis!" He lowered his voice, without sweetening its tone. "I don't want to tell you. I want to write it and I don't want to give it to you now. It's not all about you, Ellis, you losing your father. I'm losing my life. I know you're scared of being without me but I'm terrified of going, so sometimes you've got to just b.l.o.o.d.y well leave me alone. I need to prepare and don't tell me I'm not going to die, Ellis, it's not appropriate any more!"

The room fell silent. Neither of them moved.

Then Ellis said, "You're right. I'm sorry."

"No, I'm sorry I shouted."

"You were right to shout ... you could have shouted more often."

Denny lifted a black metal box, the size of a s...o...b..x, off the floor and placed it on his lap. He had kept bills and chequebooks and papers in there all his adult life but this evening, with the bonfire done, it was empty. He clicked his fingers, reminded of something, and started to rifle through the mess around him.

"Where the h.e.l.l did I put that note?" he muttered.

"What note?"

"Note for you. She made me promise I'd write it down and put it by your bed."

"Who did?"

"Tammy."

"What's the message?"

"To call her."

"I think I can remember that without the note."

"Yes, but that doesn't mean you'll do it. She always sounds so lovely, that girl. Why don't you like her?"

"I like her too much."

"Well, you're an idiot then. Just call her."

"That's your expert advice, is it?"

"You can't like someone too much. More to the point, a young man as hideously unattractive and talentless as you is in no position to turn down a Tammy."

Ellis smiled. "Tell me then, smarta.r.s.e, did she mention her long-term boyfriend?"

"Oh."

"Oh, indeed."

Denny gave up searching for the note and despaired. "That's ridiculous! I only wrote it ten minutes ago. I promised her I'd put it by your bed."

"Well, what exactly does the note say?"

"Call Tammy."

"Those two words?"