The Spider Truces Part 2

"How old were you, again?"

Denny stamped his feet into his work boots and beamed his son a smile. "Seventeen, when I drank the rum."

"Seventeen is only four more than Chrissie," Ellis said.

Denny's face altered a little, the way it did before he changed the direction of a conversation.

"The great thing about having no carpets in this house yet, Ellis, is that I can wear my boots indoors and not get told off." He grinned and headed out of the room.

"Who's going to tell you off?" Ellis asked.

Denny faltered but kept on walking. Ellis followed him down to the utility room where antique ledge and brace doors were stacked up on Denny's workbench, ready for planing. Ellis watched his dad measure up the doorframes in the hallway and repeat the measurements under his breath, "74 by 38, 74 by 38, 74 by 38 ..."

"34, 78, 44, 68, 78, 34 ..." Ellis whispered.

"You little sod!" Denny said, and chased Ellis into the orchard where he tickled him purple and left him for dead in the old goose bath.

Returning inside, Denny noticed that damp stains had appeared on the hallway ceiling.

"b.u.g.g.e.r!" he muttered. He rolled up his sleeves and sat on the bottom stair to think. Ellis joined him, breathless from laughing. He stroked the hairs on his dad's arm, his fingers dwarfed by the contours of muscles and veins.

"Change of plan, dear boy," Denny said. "I'm going to need your help. We're going into the attic."

There were three attics in the cottage. The one immediately above the top of the stairs was the least interesting, in Ellis's opinion. The water tank was in it but the rafters were bare so nothing was stored up there. The second attic was known as "the hatch" and Ellis was the only one small enough to do anything useful inside it. Entry to it was through a hatch in a cupboard used to store suitcases. Inside the hatch, the roof was vast and slanting but claustrophobically low. Even Ellis could only fit in on his hands and knees. Denny directed his son across the rafters until he was kneeling directly above the hallway ceiling, but Ellis found no sign of dripping water.

"You sure?" his dad asked.

"Yup!" Ellis confirmed proudly.

He sat next to his dad in the suitcase cupboard whilst Denny deliberated what to do. It was like being in a tent together, where everything was gentle and close-up, especially the faint growling noises Denny made when he was thinking long and hard.

The following Sat.u.r.day, Denny removed the Kent peg tiles from the dilapidated garage in which Mafi kept her Morris Minor and used them to replace the damaged ones on the roof of the cottage.

"But there weren't any leaks in the hatch attic," Ellis protested, from the bottom of the ladder.

He got no reply. His dad was preoccupied. Chrissie had been gone for a few hours and he didn't know where. When she showed up for lunch, Denny was subdued and attempted to find out where she'd been without asking her directly, a process that amused Mafi.

"You'll always be very careful, won't you?" he said to Chrissie, out of nowhere. "When we're not all together. Don't do anything silly or unusual, will you?"

His voice was grave but not unkind. He said it as if the thought was a new one but Chrissie had heard it from him often in the last five years. She smiled at him rea.s.suringly.

"No sweat, Dad."

"I'm allowed to do silly things though, aren't I, because I'm only nine?" Ellis asked.

"We can do silly things when we're all together, at home, safe and sound," his dad answered.

"But I still don't get why you are putting tiles up there when there wasn't any drips," Ellis said, faithful to his own unique train of thought.

"I know, Ellis, but somewhere that roof is damaged and hopefully this'll do the trick."

"But what if it doesn't?"

"I'll have to sell you to the slave trade to raise money to employ a roofer."

Chrissie laughed, whilst Ellis weighed up whether or not he liked the sound of this.

"I wouldn't mind being a slave if it was in some interesting country."

"You're my slave," Denny reminded him.

"Then you ought to pay me!"

"You don't pay slaves, you spaz," Chrissie said.

"Charmingly put," Mafi said. "What have you been up to, Chrissie? I haven't seen you all morning."

"I've cured the common cold, cut a hit LP, written to Idi Amin about his diet and concocted a formula to rid the world of Communism which I'll unveil after lunch."

"Chrissie?" Denny said.

"Yes, Daddio?"

"Remember late 1973?"

"Not particularly. Why?"

"That was the last time you gave a straight answer to a question."

Chrissie opened her mouth to rattle off a response but couldn't come up with anything. Her dad smiled, victorious, and she buried her head in his chest with a stupid smile. Mafi reached for her handkerchief. Her watery eyes spoke only of how she loved being part of this nonsense.

"In 1973 I was six," said Ellis, counting his fingers. "But now I'm nine."

Chrissie stared at him bug-eyed. "Reeeeally, Ellis? Do keep us informed!"

His children were still wrestling on the front lawn as Denny O'Rourke surveyed the roof from the foot of the driveway. Their screaming and laughter filled the air. He smiled to himself and leant back against the gatepost and as he did so he felt the breath of a woman on his neck.

"You must be the widower."

Denny turned. The middle-aged woman standing far too close to him was handsome, a rural version of elegant, with s.h.i.+ning eyes that swallowed him whole. Her voice was throaty and coa.r.s.e and she stared into him as she spoke.

"Yes. Very nice indeed. I see what they mean."

An impulse Denny had not hosted for half a decade was upon him. He introduced himself and learned that she was Bridget and she ran the village shop that formed a triangle at the foot of the green with the post office and the pub.

"Come in and set up your account. If the shop's empty, just come straight upstairs."

She pressed her hands against her rib cage and filled her lungs, in a gesture of her appreciation of this crisp winter's day that left Denny helpless but to imagine the strong, full, impressive physique beneath her clothing. For a moment, as Bridget watched the children, Denny let himself fall deep into her body.

"Yes. Very nice ..." she repeated, and left.

Denny found his son and daughter staring at him. Ellis burst into laughter that made his face vibrate. Chrissie stared angrily at him and said, "NO!"

Denny shook his head dismissively and smiled, swatting away her fears and his own l.u.s.t. He kicked the wedge from beneath the driveway gate and let it swing shut behind him as he returned to work. Ellis followed him inside.

The third attic in the cottage was above Ellis's bedroom, the door to it directly over his pillows, and it was where family heirlooms, Christmas decorations and dressing-up rags and costumes were stored. Ellis found his bed pushed aside and the ladders propped against the open attic door.

He called out, "Can I come up?"

"If you're careful."

The attic was long and narrow and low enough to force Denny on to his hands and knees. There was a bare light bulb hanging from the rafters, which blinded Ellis as he climbed in. He found his dad peering over the end wall. It was a strange wall, Ellis noticed, in that it didn't reach the roof.

"What's the other side of this wall?" Ellis whispered.

"I think this must be the join in the roof where they extended the cottage. The bit we're in was added two hundred years ago but the other side of this wall is what was the original little house."

Denny leant further over the wall and strained. "I think ... that what I'm looking at, Ellis, is the slope of the original roof. It used to be on the outside of the cottage. It's four hundred years old, Ellis. Think of that."

"Older than Mafi."

"Yes ..."

"Has it got tiles on?" Ellis asked.

"They'd have taken them off and used them on the new roof. It's just the timbers."

"Oh."

"I'll tell you, Ellis," Denny said, "there's a h.e.l.luva lot of roof on this old cottage. I hope there're no nasty surprises."

Ellis liked his dad saying things like "h.e.l.luva" because he didn't use words like that very often.

"It's a really big house," Ellis agreed. "Lots of nooks and crannies."

Denny smiled to himself. There was something he liked about his nine-year-old son saying things like "nooks and crannies".

"So, what room is under that old roof?" Ellis asked.

"My bedroom," Denny said.

"Oh, yeah. Can I look?"

Denny lifted his son up to see over the wall. The bulb threw enough light to see the faint outline of the old, sloping roof. As Ellis's eyes adjusted, a skeleton of rafters and beams materialised in front of him. The timbers disappeared into a well of blackness. He wondered what could be down there. It was the darkest, most unreachable place he could imagine a house to have. A place not originally intended to exist, brought about by change. If there are places one never goes, places that one would never ever have reason to find oneself in, if such places exist, then this well was one of them.

3.

In his dreams, Ellis walked through the cottage and found secret doorways to hidden rooms and stairways. For a few moments, upon waking, he'd believe they were real.

Behind Denny's bed, set into a low wall beneath the slope of the old roof, there was a wooden door, three feet high, covered in syrupy black paint. And although it was just like the doors in his dreams, Ellis was scared of it. He saw it as a mouth that could eat him alive.

Pholcus phalangioides lived amongst the ceiling beams in the downstairs of the cottage. Back then, Ellis knew them simply as daddy-long-legs. He wasn't too bothered by them as they showed no tendency to descend into his air s.p.a.ce. Two Nuctenea umbratica took up residence over the front door. When winter came they ceased replenis.h.i.+ng their webs but, by then, Ellis had taken to using the kitchen door instead.

The downstairs toilet had no door, just a temporary curtain destined to remain there for many years. Hanging from a nail in the wall was a paint-splattered ca.s.sette player with a tape of Strauss's Four Last Songs in it. A drawn curtain and the sound of Strauss meant that the toilet was in use. This room was heavily inhabited by various...o...b..web spiders. Most of them were too small to see but their webs were in the angles of the doorframe, window and pipework. Ellis couldn't go in there.

The garden shed was also a complete no-go area. It was jammed full with spiders and webs. The first, and only, time Ellis stepped inside it, he fainted. Mafi found him lying half in and half out of the shed and he was rushed to hospital, for fear of meningitis.

It angered Ellis that the shed was held by the spiders because it meant he couldn't get his hands on all the things inside it, his outdoor toys and Denny's tools, without asking either Mafi, Chrissie or his dad to go in there for him. He believed that the shed was where all the bad and deformed spiders lived. It was the home of the lawless. The spiders there were freakishly large and jet black in colour; they sat around playing Russian roulette. They ate each other without a care and were weighed down by weird growths. The shed was the wild west of the spider world. Ellis couldn't even walk past it. He had to run at full speed and as he did so he'd shout bitterly, "You are leper spiders, so rubbish they won't even let you live in the cottage. Everyone hates you! I'm not scared of you!"

At night, he heard sounds of movement which had no explanation. Asking about the creaks and groans in the cottage caused his dad to tense up or change the subject, the same way as asking about his mum, and in the absence of an explanation Ellis suspected that the noises were spiders turning in their sleep. The creaks grew noisier in the second winter as a freezing cold January was met by an unusually mild February. April showers arrived a month early and set in for three weeks, by the end of which the hallway ceiling was turning brown again with water marks. Denny O'Rourke cursed the stains and Ellis knew not to bother him.

Ellis went to his sister's room but the door was locked.

"Let me in."

"No thanks," Chrissie said, from the other side of the door.

"Please."

"Give me one good reason."

"Dad's got us a puppy!"

Ellis listened to a cras.h.i.+ng sound as Chrissie fell off her chair, thundered across the room, grappled with the lock and flung the door open.

"Where?" she said breathlessly.

Ellis stepped into her room and threw himself down on the bed.

"Let's do something," he said, lazily.

She glared at him. "Have we got a puppy?"

"No. I'm bored. Do you wanna do something together?"

Chrissie skulked back to her desk.

"Yeah. I'd like to play with our puppy, you horrible little pile of dogs.h.i.+t. Go and bother Dad."

"He's fixing the roof. It's falling down, apparently."

"Fascinating," she said, and returned to her work.