The Spider Truces Part 18

The wheat at Longspring Farm had been harvested. Ellis sat in the east field and admired the farmhouse. In the half-light, further down the track, he thought he saw Chloe Purcell step out of the herdsman's house into the shadows of the lime trees. He told himself it couldn't be her. Whoever it was standing in the shade, she rubbed her neck wearily and returned inside, leaving the door open for Michael Finsey's return.

Ellis wandered aimlessly away. Back on the village green, he sat on a bench in front of the primary school. He ate an ice cream then drank a can of lager and contemplated how poorly the two mixed in the palate. Katie Morton appeared from the top of Wickhurst Lane and joined him.

"Look!" she said, flas.h.i.+ng him a toothy, white smile. "Braces off!"

Ellis nodded his approval.

She looked impatiently at the darkening sky and asked, matter-of-factly, "So, did you lose your cherry on your travels?"

"No," said Ellis.

"Isn't that what these trips are for?" she asked.

"Why aren't you at work?" he retaliated.

She pulled a face at the clouds. "Came home early to sunbathe but that's b.u.g.g.e.red." She settled down next to him. "At a loss what to do now," she said. "Might go for a dip."

"Where do you go?" Ellis asked.

"The pond at that farm on the hill, whatever it's called."

"Dale Farm. I wouldn't."

"I've swum there before."

"I hope not. There's an open pipe goes into that pond, full of you know what."

"Is there?" Katie pulled a face. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l ..."

Ellis looked blankly across the village green. Katie Morton studied the sky and watched her hopes of a tan evaporate.

"I wouldn't know how to lose my virginity," Ellis murmured.

She didn't respond and Ellis became more self-conscious the longer they sat in silence.

"Well ..." Katie Morton said, eventually, with the pragmatic air of someone who didn't want to waste an afternoon, "you're not going to lose your virginity to me, Ellis, but if you like I'll give you a guided tour."

Ellis kept his eyes fixed on the gra.s.s and wondered what she meant. Katie Morton stood up and offered him her hand. "I'm taking you home ..." she said.

She stirred because Ellis had moved in his sleep, muttering someone's name.

"Who's Jo?" she whispered. "Not that I'm bothered."

"Uh?" Ellis moaned sleepily. His head swam in a syrupy daylight. Semi-conscious, he dragged the sheet up to cover their naked bodies. Beneath that sheet, his body felt the indelible touch of another naked human being lying warm beside him for the very first time. Katie Morton pulled the sheet away again and placed Ellis's hand on her tummy. He breathed the strange and subtle aroma of her unperfumed skin and he drank in the sight of her pale stomach and the wiry hair, unable to fully take in how wonderful life was becoming this summer.

"You said 'Jo' in your sleep," she said.

"She was from New Zealand," he said. "Rotorua."

"The woman you didn't lose your virginity to?" she teased.

He shut his eyes. "I think you know full well by now that I've never made love to a woman."

This made her smile. "Yes," she said.

He breathed in lazily and she moved her head across to his chest. She pressed her feet against his and they flexed their toes against each other's. Then the bedroom door opened. Ellis was not aware of the door but of Katie's body becoming rigid against his. She sat bolt upright. The middle-aged woman standing at the foot of the bed was shaking and her shoulders started to heave. She was a strong woman, Ellis soon learned, with her daughter's height and the added bulk of middle age.

Ellis's pa.s.sage out of the house bore the sensation of being propelled without touching the floor. It happened too fast for him to become concerned. He was aware only of the strength of Mrs Morton's hands as they somehow made a handle out of the flesh on his shoulders with which she threw him out.

He found himself standing on the Mortons' lawn. The front door slammed shut with a thick, substantial thud. On a day of new experiences, the latest was that of being naked outdoors. In itself, it was possibly a lovely sensation, he thought, but weighed against it right now were some powerful negatives; chiefly, that the most populated part of the village lay between his naked body and home. He heard footsteps on Wickhurst Lane. Miss Spin.a.z.i, the primary school infants teacher, was walking home. The wiry spinster stopped and stared.

This, Ellis told himself, is probably the only adult in Kent less s.e.xually experienced than me. It had to be her who came along.

"I got kicked out," he explained weakly, thumbing towards the Mortons' house behind him.

Miss Spin.a.z.i's mouth dropped open.

"It was like going through a wormhole," Ellis added. "Are you on your way home, Miss?"

She nodded and swallowed fearfully. Ellis pointed in the direction of her small, terraced cottage and nodded encouragingly.

"I don't suppose there's any chance that I could ..."

And at this she scurried away. Ellis returned to the Mortons' front door and called through the letter box.

"Please could I have my things?"

He could hear nothing from inside. He stepped away and looked for a place to hide in the garden until he was reunited with his clothing. The front door burst open. Mrs Morton marched towards him and sent him down the driveway with a series of rough pushes to the chest.

"You are not getting any clothes back, you beast! If you don't leave immediately I shall get the PC."

The last shove sent Ellis sprawling on to the loose gravel of the lane Katie had led him along a few hours earlier. He landed badly, cutting the palms of his hands and grazing his knees. He stood up, dusted the clinging stones off his skin and watched Mrs Morton march back into the house. Now he was shaken up, not so much by the playground cuts and grazes as by the realisation that he was going home naked. He was also alarmed by how small his p.e.n.i.s suddenly seemed to be. He had two choices. To hack across the fields to Longspring Farm or to cross the village green to the cottage. The latter option was infinitely quicker. In fact, if he put his head down and ran, he could do it in two minutes. But it meant going through the centre of the village. The route to Reardon's was comparatively long but it was possible that Ellis could get there without being seen by another human being. Better still, he realised, and closer, would be to cut across the fields to Tim Wickham's house. Then his heart sank as he realised that neither Reardon's nor Tim Wickham's was an option. If Ellis had to list the three people he could least afford to be seen naked by, they would be, first, Tim's mum due to an adolescence filled by fantasies of her which still had the potential to stir an ill-appreciated erection. Second, Chloe, who could well be at the Wickhams' house or Reardon's and would probably have the opposite effect on Ellis's p.e.n.i.s precisely because he wouldn't want her to; and, third, the goat-lady, whose cottage Ellis would have to pa.s.s by. It was just too scary to contemplate being seen by her. She might ask him inside, offering to help. He'd be scared of entering her house with armour on. Naked didn't bear thinking about.

"s.h.i.+t!"

Another sub-dilemma presented itself. Did he run freely and go for speed, thereby allowing his genitals to move however genitals moved when unsupported by underwear, or did he hold on to them with one hand? Freestyle, he decided. Because speed was paramount. And realising that his situation was not going to improve whilst he stood there, he started to run. And the faster he ran the more free he felt, and he understood that if he chose not to care then he didn't care; if he chose not to be embarra.s.sed then he wasn't; if he chose not to feel the pain on the soles of his feet then he didn't feel it. He stuck two fingers up to his own instincts and ran, leaving Wickhurst Lane behind and fixing his sights on the far side of the village green as he stormed across it, oblivious of everything and everyone outside his tunnel vision. He ran faster than he had ever run. To do so in bare feet felt wonderful. Natural. Easy. To do so naked changed him, in the course of a few hundred yards, from a circ.u.mspect boy to a young man. For the first time in his life, that part of his brain that had often whispered, "You'd better not, Ellis," now murmured, "f.u.c.k it, Ellis, why not?"

Suddenly, he was over the garden fence and scrambling through the conifers, the harsh branches sc.r.a.ping his skin until he stumbled out on to the side lawn where Denny was carrying rotten lath to the bonfire heap. Ellis bent over to catch his breath and work out what to tell his dad. When he looked up, his dad wasn't there. Ellis waved innocently to Mafi as she stared from her living room window. Denny was at the was.h.i.+ng line, unpegging a towel. He wrapped it around his son.

"You're bleeding ..." he said, unable to mask the tenderness.

"Just a stupid dare with Tim, Dad. Just stupid, got a bit out of hand. I'm really sorry."

Denny picked off the stones embedded in his son's arm.

"Dad, I'm sorry," Ellis repeated.

"Make sure you get your clothes back," Denny said, sidestepping the infinity of his son's apology.

"I'll take care of it," Ellis said and thanked G.o.d his dad was talking to him again. "I'm such an idiot," he added innocently.

Denny nodded in agreement and although his head was bowed as he attended to his son's cuts, Ellis saw him smile.

Ellis slept and bathed and dressed and put what cash he had in his pocket. He was going to find Tim Wickham wherever he was and take him for a pint. It had been an incredible day and he didn't want it to end in a hurry. He wanted to go out. He wanted to sit in a pub and smoke and nurse a pint and, hopefully, look as good as he felt. If Chloe was with Tim then fine, he didn't mind at all. He had his own private life now and they were welcome to theirs.

The phone rang. Ellis looked for a pair of shoes that weren't sprayed with dried mud, and the phone kept ringing. Ellis never answered the phone, neither did Mafi, unless they were walking past it as it rang. It was unusual for Denny to let it ring. Ellis stamped his feet into his shoes and went down the landing to his dad's room and picked up the phone by the bed.

"h.e.l.lo," he said.

"Ellis?"

"Katie?"

"Yeah. Christ that wasn't funny!" She laughed. "They've freaked out. I don't know where they've gone."

"Who?"

"My parents, who else? They're not at yours, are they?"

"No. Your mum's pretty strong."

"I'm so sorry for what happened."

"I don't mind. It was worth it."

"You wanna meet?"

"OK."

"Don't sound too enthusiastic. Meet me up by the bypa.s.s, in Morley's cafe, in an hour."

"OK."

On his way downstairs, from the small window on the half-landing, Ellis saw Katie Morton's parents walking down the driveway to their car. He found his dad sitting at the dining table. The two chairs opposite him had been pushed away and come to rest like a car crash beside the wall that Denny was gutting.

Ellis's tendency to make the wrong observation at the wrong time kicked in. "Can you believe they drove here when it's a five-minute walk?"

Denny's face was set angrily in thought. Ellis fought the urge to continue out of the cottage and took a seat.

"I'll go if you don't want to talk," he offered.

"You'll do what pleases you," Denny muttered bitterly.

"Whatever that's meant to mean," Ellis added.

There was a long silence. Then Ellis started to get up.

"It means," his dad hissed, sending Ellis back on to his chair, "that if you stopped and thought about me let alone bothered to think for one second about your mother even, then maybe you'd just ..."

His voice faltered into silence.

"Maybe I'd just what?" Ellis asked. "Think what about my mother?"

Denny O'Rourke fixed his angry gaze at nothing.

"Think what about my mother?" Ellis repeated accusingly. "I know diddly-squit about her. Except that she's dead."

"Exactly," his dad whispered.

Ellis leapt to his feet. "WELL, WHAT THE JESUS IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?"

"Don't shout at me, boy!"

"What is it supposed to mean, I said! Now f.u.c.king well answer me!"

"Ellis!"

"Because just what the f.u.c.king h.e.l.l I am supposed to think about my mother beats me. I know nothing about her, do I? How dare you tell me to think about someone you've spent my whole life pretending never existed!"

"SHUT UP, ELLIS!" Denny bellowed.

But Ellis ploughed on. "You've kept her from me all my life and now you want to use her as an example! Of what? I don't know anything about her! You're useless, you've always been useless and bringing her up now is just about the most useless you've ever been!"

Denny O'Rourke fell back on to his chair. His hearing and vision became distant and unfocused. When he managed to raise his head again, he was alone.

Morley's cafe and truck stop was spread out on a plateau above the main road. From here, Ellis watched the toy houses of a miniature village in the soft, low, late afternoon light and scoured the lanes and fields for a sight of Katie Morton. He wandered across to the cafe entrance. Steam had obscured the warm orange windows, making indistinct silhouettes of the few people within. Ellis peered through them as best he could. Katie was not inside and Ellis was too intimidated to go in alone. In the car park, he noticed the driver's door of a large decrepit Mercedes open. The interior light came on and illuminated a small, rounded, curly-haired man as he took a last drag on a joint and threw the roach away. As he pa.s.sed Ellis and pushed open the cafe door, he smiled vacantly. "Going in?"

"Nah," Ellis said casually. "Waiting for my girlfriend."

He walked away and sat on the fence at the far end of the car park. He listened to the metallic flashes of sound as cars sped by on the main road.

He was used to being in the dark about the transactions that occurred between people. This evening it was different. Only he and Katie Morton knew what they had done. The others thought they knew. They presumed the obvious, and Ellis saw his dad diminished in some small way by his ignorance.

"We began with a lie, you and me," Katie had said to Ellis, as she led him upstairs six hours earlier. Ellis didn't understand what she meant. "Oh Lord! They've sent us the wrong tickets!" she mocked.

In the bathroom, she asked him to remove a medium-sized Tegenaria saeva from the bath and run the taps. She took a pee in the toilet next door whilst Ellis's resolve to cup the spider in his hands and place it on the window ledge failed him and he ushered it, with a loofah, down the plughole, convincing himself that it would have plenty of time to escape through the pipes before the bath was emptied. There were protests, but he turned a deaf ear.

Katie added bubble bath to the running water. "But we'll not tell any lies today. I'll tell you whatever you want to know and I'll be truthful."

"So will I," Ellis said, not knowing what the h.e.l.l she was talking about.

She told him to sit down on the chair beside the bath and then she undressed.

"We aren't going to have s.e.x. I don't want to go out with you or to cop off with you. I don't find you especially good-looking or fascinating. But I like you more than other boys I can think of, three of whom I have slept with I might as well tell you. I'm not planning on adding to that number in a hurry."

Ellis listened obediently and found, to his surprise, that he didn't particularly want to 'cop off' with her either. He just wanted to be exactly where he was, listening and watching. He was happy not to be expected to do anything. She was naked now and he was aware of the sound of his own breathing and swallowing in a way he had never been before. She turned off the taps and felt the water. Her body could not have been more different from the woman from New Zealand's.

"Don't you tan?" Ellis asked.