The Spider Truces Part 11

He shook his head. "It's just winter," he explained, unnecessarily. "I hate cars. I like bikes and trains, and that's all."

"What about planes?" Chloe asked.

"I haven't been on one," Ellis said. "We could go on one," he added, then felt like a fool for doing so.

"As long as you're sure you'll be OK," Chloe's mum said.

"More than OK." Ellis beamed. "From the top of Hubbards Hill you can see lights all the way to the Crowborough Beacon. I bomb down there like a bullet."

That wasn't exactly what Mrs Purcell wanted to hear but Ellis was already putting on his shoes and coat. He wanted to get out of the house as quickly as possible because he felt like an idiot for saying that he and Chloe could go on a plane together and he realised that an invitation to a barn dance was not a declaration of love. Maybe she went to barn dances every week and each time with a different boy, or maybe he'd get there and find he was one of six or seven boys she'd invited.

I don't like this, he thought to himself as he opened the front door. I don't know where I stand or what I think and I don't like it one bit.

He wanted to be at the farm right now, doing physical jobs and saying nothing. That's what I really like, he told himself. Not girls.

As he bent over to tuck his trousers into his socks, his coat swung forward and engulfed his head comically. His heart sank.

I look like a tool, he cursed.

Chloe pulled the coat gently off his face, and as she did so she whispered in his ear.

"I'd love to go on a plane with you, Ellis O'Rourke."

And in that moment, Ellis's birthday flipped back over on to its stomach. Girls were the best thing he'd ever discovered, even better than the farm, better than Tim, better than anything he could think of. If we got married at sixteen, he told himself, we could move into Mrs Purcell's house. We'd meet on Oak Lane after school and walk home arm in arm and in the morning I'd come down to breakfast and everyone else in her family would know we'd been in bed together all night.

"Is your dad grumpy in the mornings?" Ellis asked.

Chloe looked at him curiously. "No, he's nice." She smiled her disarming smile.

"Thank goodness for that," Ellis said, somewhat seriously.

Eleven days later, Chloe's father opened his front door to a polite-looking young man.

"You must be Ellis."

"h.e.l.lo, Mr Purcell."

Mrs Purcell appeared. "h.e.l.lo, Ellis."

"h.e.l.lo, Mrs Purcell. I'm sorry I said s.p.u.n.k last time."

When they took their places for each new dance, Chloe pressed her little finger into the soft flesh at the base of Ellis's thumb as a signal for him to start. He spent each dance writing conversations in his head but when the music stopped the words had gone. The more he tried to think of something, the further he got from saying anything. They stopped for a cup of tea and sat on metal-framed chairs with canvas seats, on the perimeter of the dance floor.

You only get these chairs in church halls, Ellis thought to himself, and he opened his mouth to share this observation with his future wife before deciding that it wasn't interesting enough.

"Well, what do you want to do now, go outside for a walk or have another dance?" Chloe asked, threading her arm through his.

Ellis wanted to go for a walk, with her arm threaded through his. He wanted it very much. But, paralysed by guessing what she wanted to do, he managed only to mumble, "I don't mind. Dance, if you like."

And she danced heavily, the light stolen from her face by the indifference of this boy who had declined her offer to step outside. And he, he avoided catching her eye because he felt suddenly so ugly and idiotic for his inability to speak to her. She went to the bathroom before they left and stared accusingly in the mirror at her plainness. He walked her home and asked himself why someone as beautiful as her would have asked him out in the first place.

When I get home I'll look at my map of the world, he told himself, and tomorrow morning I'll go back to the farm and I'll forget all about tonight. I'm not cut out for this.

They said goodbye outside her house. He got on his bike and she watched him disappear.

Neither Tim nor Ellis was sure what the goat-lady did apart from minding Reardon's small herd of British Tappenburgs.

"It can't be a full-time job," Ellis said.

"Search me," Tim agreed.

She lived alone in a shabby cottage, tied to the farm, and seemed to know n.o.body. The cottage was low and dark and in summer it disappeared beneath creeping ivy. It backed on to the Great Field where Reardon grew wheat and barley as feed. Alongside the cottage was a deep-furrowed track linking the Great Field to the lane. On the other side of the track was a ruined cart shed which Tim and Ellis called the sun barn because there was so much roof and cladding missing that the sun shone in there like being outside.

The goat-lady was about fifty, had short straight hair and wore excessive rouge on her cheeks. They presumed she cut her own hair, as it was bowl-shaped. At all times of the day, she wore a bright pink dinner-lady's overall.

She had never spoken to the boys or acknowledged them until one summer's afternoon when she put out two gla.s.ses of lemonade on the garden seat and disappeared inside. Tim and Ellis climbed down from the rafters of the sun barn and sat for a while in her garden, which was wild and overgrown, enchanting and unnerving. They were discussing whether or not to go to the front door to thank her for the drink when she appeared again, carrying a cardboard box. She thumped the box down on the gra.s.s in front of them.

"I expect you'd like a look at these," she said and disappeared inside, never to speak to them again.

The boys looked at each other curiously, then delved into the box. Lying inside, at the top of the pile, was a woman wearing a black bra and sucking her fingers. She was staring at Ellis and Tim. Her skin was very pale and her body was round and soft to look at. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were extremely large. Ellis looked between her legs but she didn't look like the women in the encyclopaedia. For a start, her legs were spread impressively wide apart and her feet were sticking up in the air. She had forgotten to take off her high-heeled shoes but had remembered to take off her underpants. He stared at where the hair should be but there wasn't any there. He didn't quite understand what he was looking at in its place. Beneath that magazine were others, all similar. Ellis's heart thudded and his p.e.n.i.s seemed to be bursting at the seams. He felt thirsty and confused and wonderful and ill.

"Oh my sweet Jesus!" Tim muttered, holding a page up to Ellis. "Look!"

Ellis looked. There were half a dozen pictures on the page and the woman in them wasn't alone. There was a naked man with her and they were doing "it". Ellis stared and stared until Tim whispered, "What if she's watching us? Let's skedaddle."

Ellis had to reach inside his trousers and adjust himself before he could stand up, for fear his p.e.n.i.s would snap. The boys hurried away across the fields, stopping inside Eight Acre Wood to pee, only to discover that they couldn't.

After that, for many months, whenever they played at the sun barn there was lemonade and the box of magazines. The boys spent as long as they wanted poring over the pictures but they never took a magazine away and they still didn't know what they were meant to do with the erections that stirred as soon as they saw the pink of the goat-lady's coat. Their tastes differed. Ellis liked it to be just two people, not of the same s.e.x, and for the couple to start with their clothes on and for there to be some sense of a story unfolding as they undressed and he liked the man and woman to look as if they really cared for each other. He also found it helpful if one person was white and the other black because then he could unravel exactly which body part belonged to whom. Tim preferred orgies.

"Maybe ... maybe she'll do something."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Tell us what to do."

"Or show us."

They both feigned retching.

"Maybe there's someone in the village who would let us do it with them for five pounds." There was a hint of desperation in Ellis's voice.

"There are prost.i.tutes in Sevenoaks, apparently," Tim said.

"I don't want to go with a prost.i.tute!" Ellis was horrified. "I meant, just someone nice who would be happy to help out, for a little cash."

"I can't think of anyone. Shall we get the gun?"

Ellis shrugged and nodded. Shooting something seemed a decent alternative to losing their virginity.

"But let's keep thinking," Tim said, "let's bear it in mind and maybe we'll think of someone who might help out."

"We'll write a list and just keep adding to it when we think of someone. My dad writes lists for everything. We'll put down the name of every woman we know or know through someone else and then we'll look at it and see if there's anyone we think we can approach."

"Except teachers. We won't put our teachers on the list. The thought of sleeping with Mrs Stanton makes me want to puke."

"I should think her husband feels the same way."

Considering how adept Tim was at picking locks, it was a skill he abused less than many thirteen years olds would. Mr Wickham's air pistol, kept in a locked cabinet in the kitchen, was easy pickings. The gun was wrapped in a duster and placed inside a blue Mappin & Webb cutlery box.

They returned to the sun barn where Ellis stood on a crossbeam and balanced himself, ignoring the thirty-foot drop to the ground. Tim had lined up bottles and cans on the beam at the opposite end of the barn. He climbed up and pressed the pistol into Ellis's hand and sat on the beam, swinging his legs back and forth as he rolled himself a ciggie. Ellis shut his eyes. The sun bore down on his eyelids. In the heat, he felt his senses refine and heighten. He was as aware of the bright green leaves of hornbeam in Eight Acre Wood as he was of the first target bottle as he was of the Crowborough Beacon on the horizon as he was of the lone house on Bayley's Hill as he was of the erect pink nipples inside the glossy pages inside the goat-lady's house. Nothing was any nearer or further away than anything else. Everything was perfectly vivid.

He had a tendency to take too long over his aim and to squeeze the trigger late, after a shake had settled into his forearm. But today, handling the pistol so soon after having an erection, a combination that had not occurred before, he felt overwhelmed by clarity. He fired immediately and blasted the bottle away. Without taking his eye off the next target he took a pellet from his pocket, reloaded, fired and hit it dead centre. He stared at the next bottle as he reloaded, raised his arm and fired. Tim laughed under his breath as the bottle cracked and fell. This was not like Ellis.

The throaty ticking of a tractor grew in volume as it descended the lane. It came into view at the track to the sun barn. It was one of Sedgewick's tractors, from Dale Farm. It towed a large wooden trailer and sitting in it, legs splayed out and arms draped over the side, was Des Payne, sixteen years old, shaven-headed, built like a brick wall, with hands like coppice stumps and a skull so square a nut and bolt would not have looked out of place through his neck. Des's eyes were shut, his face screwed up against the suns.h.i.+ne, his thick arms straining against his T-s.h.i.+rt, his ma.s.sive thighs tight against the stonewashed drainpipe jeans that were his trademark.

Ellis trained the pistol on Des's head. He did so without thought or reason, knowing only that the trailer would soon disappear behind the hedge and this moment would be lost for ever. This unique opportunity to be bold would have pa.s.sed him by. He locked his elbow and squeezed the trigger, shooting Des Payne in the back of the head. Des's bear-like body sprang up on to its knees, clutching its skull. As the trailer disappeared, Des's wild, darting eyes found Ellis, his outstretched arm steady and his pistol aimed still at the eyes that now fixed on him a glare of immeasurable menace.

The trailer took Des away. He made no attempt to stop it or to jump off. He simply wiped away the nick of blood on his shaven head and lay back in the sun, knowing that in doing nothing he was beginning the worst of all punishments for a boy of imagination like Ellis O'Rourke.

Ellis lowered the gun and listened to the tractor fade. He sat down next to his friend and let his legs hang limply from the rafters. His body began to shake with fear and he wanted to whimper with regret, even though what he had done also made perfect sense to him, in a way he would not be able to explain.

Tim stared at the lane where the trailer had been.

"Interesting ..." he muttered.

Five torturous days later, when Des came looking for him, Ellis resolved to look him in the eye whatever happened, to apologise but not to be pathetic. As Des's stale breath hit his face, what struck Ellis as particularly strange was that he didn't dislike Des Payne in any way. He was frightening to look at but he'd never done anything bad to Ellis, or anyone else for all Ellis knew. It was going to be tricky to justify his decision to shoot him in the head.

"I know that shooting you seems confrontational ..."

Ellis trailed off into silence, distracted by the realisation that his fear had brought him to the brink of uncontrollable laughter.

"I don't think everything we do in this world has an explanation and I think that the woman I marry will need to agree on that," he heard himself say.

Des chewed on an old piece of gum.

His breath bears no trace of mintiness, whispered the dangerous little voice inside Ellis's head.

Please don't say that out loud, Ellis implored himself.

Des breathed in and his ma.s.sive chest expanded as if to cast a shadow.

"Sorry," Ellis said. It was unclear whether he was apologising for telling Des about his marriage plans or for the shooting.

Des took hold of Ellis beneath his armpits, lifted him off the ground and threw him on to the gra.s.s bank in front of Cyril Bates's house. Cyril Bates was elderly and obese. His ankles were permanently swollen and he never wore socks. He moved around on a Zimmer frame and was usually to be seen in his leather farrier's ap.r.o.n, hobbling between the workshop and the forge to the side of his house, where he rearranged the tools and left-over materials of a business that had folded some years previously. He always appeared busy at a glance but if you observed him for any length of time, as Ellis often had, you soon understood that he was merely moving objects from one place to another and then back again. But in pa.s.sing, all one would see was a busy man with blackened hands, wearing a leather ap.r.o.n, hard at work. And that was how Cyril Bates wished to be seen.

Looking at Cyril's upside-down house, Ellis cursed his luck that, for the first time he could remember, the old man was not in his workshop, from where he would have been able to keep an eye on these proceedings and bring them to a halt before Ellis was killed.

Des knelt on Ellis's shoulders, pinning him painfully to the ground. He leant over and smiled menacingly.

"You're a very silly little boy."

He took the gum from his mouth and shoved it firmly up Ellis's left nostril, further up than gum should probably go. Then, as Ellis braced himself for worse, Des was gone, meandering up the road to the village shop as if nothing much had happened.

Ellis rested his cheek against the lush, long gra.s.s. The smells of spring entered his unblocked nostril. It was over. It had hardly hurt at all and he hadn't cried.

This is so much more interesting than a normal day, Ellis thought, and sighed with the happiness of having not been kicked to death.

He pictured his map of the world. Travelling across the world must feel this good, he told himself. Getting into trouble and travelling must feel equally fantastic.

Then he saw Chloe Purcell on the pavement, approaching him. Today, on this beautiful spring day, she looked supremely good, so good that he almost forgot to ask her what she was doing in the village.

"Visiting someone," she answered.

"Who?"

"A friend." She smiled innocently enough for Ellis not to notice the lack of innocence.

"How did you get here?"

"The bus. You've got something up your nose."

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"Peppermint or spearmint, I'm not sure."

"Are you looking up my skirt, Ellis?"

"Yes," he said, blissfully, continuing to stare at the place where Chloe's thighs disappeared into the shadows of her pleats.

She wandered off, unimpressed. Ellis shut his eyes and burnt the image of her into his brain. Some time later he heard the gra.s.s beside him move and felt a body lie alongside him. He fantasised for a moment that it was Chloe Purcell's body and it felt wonderful to imagine. He knew who it was though, without looking. Chrissie extracted the gum from his nostril and threw it away.

"I was saving that for later," he complained.

She pinched him and called him a fool. He cuddled up next to her and it occurred to him that since discovering the farm and p.o.r.nography and shooting people in the head and the touch of Chloe Purcell's hand on his arm, he had ceased worrying about the spiders.

8.

During the second spider truce it was unthinkable the truces could ever end again. It was not a formal truce like the first. It had evolved as Ellis's fears became diluted. It was better than a truce, it was the new status quo and in it Ellis was free to enjoy the two mainstays of his life, renovating the cottage with his dad and being at Longspring with Tim. And there were other delights making the first of his teenage years a happy one. His romantic life was perfectly balanced by the combination of poring over the goat-lady's p.o.r.nography and adoring Chloe Purcell from his moving bicycle. These days, he didn't even slow down when pa.s.sing her on Oak Lane. In fact, he gained a little speed. The last thing he wanted was to disturb his gradual deification of her by trying to speak to her again. Occasionally, not often, Tim would change down a gear and say something amusing or pleasant to Chloe but Ellis cycled on, casting her a smile that he was fairly confident could be described as enigmatic, a smile that hinted at the fathoms and fathoms of personality he possessed deep inside and which he would, one day when he had found his voice, astound her with. For now, he was content more than content, he felt actively satisfied by merely thinking about her. Never did his "reading" of p.o.r.nographic magazines and his daydreaming about Chloe take place at the same time or overlap or get confused in any way. Debi Diamond, Pandora Peaks and Little Oral Annie occupied a different universe from that which angelic Chloe Purcell called home.

In the autumn, the bulb-planting season brought two small firsts into Ellis's life; he drank tea and he heard his father use the f-word. A local nurseryman had placed an advert in Bridget's window, offering a surplus load of bulbs at a greatly reduced price if bought by the thousand. Gripped by a vision of the orchard carpeted by wave upon wave of narcissus, cyclamen, snowdrops, anemones and bluebells, Denny O'Rourke bought four thousand, and after planting one hundred of them he settled back on his haunches and muttered, "What a f.u.c.king ridiculous idea." Ellis sn.i.g.g.e.red. Denny looked at his son, who had planted thirty or forty bulbs himself, and said, "Down tools, Ellis. Life's too short."