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 massive 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 grass 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 apron, 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 passing, all one would see was a busy man with blackened hands, wearing a leather apron, 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 grass. 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 grass 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 pornography and shooting people in the head and the touch of Chloe Purcell’s hand on his arm, he had ceased worrying about the spiders.
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 pornography and adoring Chloe Purcell from his moving bicycle. These days, he didn’t even slow down when passing 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 pornographic 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 fucking ridiculous idea.” Ellis sniggered. Denny looked at his son, who had planted thirty or forty bulbs himself, and said, “Down tools, Ellis. Life’s too short.”
Ellis sat opposite his dad at the kitchen table. Denny shut his eyes with satisfaction as he sipped his tea.
“You should get Michael Finsey’s kid brother to plant all these bulbs. He’s backward and works like a demon. Pay him to do it.”
Denny blew on his tea. “That’s a good idea, Ellis. A really good idea. Unless you want to do it. Seems a shame to pay someone else when you could have the money.”
“No. No way. I don’t ever want to be paid by you for anything. That’s official. Anyway, I don’t want to plant another bulb in my entire life. It’s the most boring thing I have ever done, not including school of course.”
“Of course. Guy Finsey is a good idea.”
Ellis leant across and peered into Denny’s mug.
“Can I try a taste?”
Denny shrugged and smiled and slid his mug across the table. Ellis took a sip and impersonated his father’s closed eyes and contented sigh, as if it was impossible to drink tea without them.
“Yeah, I think I like it.”
Denny took his son to the stove, opened the fire box and placed more logs on the flames, and showed Ellis how to make a pot of tea, using tea leaves.
“How much sugar do you have?” Ellis asked.
“One.”
“Think I’m gonna need two.”
“How strong do you want it?”
“Exactly the same as yours.”
“Nice and strong, then.”
They sat together and drank their tea. Over Denny’s shoulder, Ellis saw Mafi in the garden. She inspected the boxes of unplanted bulbs and wiped the laughter from her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Mafi’s laughing at you,” Ellis said.
“She called me an idiot when I turned up with those bulbs.”
Ellis’s face creased into a smile at the thought. He had never known his dad to abandon a job before.
“Four thousand is quite a lot,” Ellis said.
“Do something for me,” Denny said, taking a bulb from his pocket and placing it solemnly in Ellis’s palm. “Go and put that on Mafi’s pillow.”
Ellis wriggled and laughed. “Really?”
“Really. Then we’ll go and speak to Mrs Finsey.”
It was in the darkness just before dawn, when there was colour in the winter sky and flames in the stove and his father moving softly around the kitchen, that tea tasted best to Ellis O’Rourke. It was a communion wine, warm, dark and sugary, drunk by himself and his living God. After it, the arrival of words and daylight stole something precious from the day.
On Christmas morning, Ellis took tea in to Mafi and placed it beside her bed and she hugged him the same as if he was still a little boy. He carried the tray into Denny’s room where he and Chrissie presented their dad with a stocking. It was the first Christmas they had insisted they were too old for stockings and instead reversed tradition by filling one for their dad. They climbed into Denny’s bed and drank tea, three in a row, filling the bed with laughter and body-heat, and jostled Denny as he opened his stocking.
“A pair of socks, why thank you … and a pair of Superman underpants, fitting … what’s this …” He read the cover of a pre-recorded cassette. “Felicity Lott, Strauss, how wonderful. Thank you.”
Then he delved again, and pulled out a volume of
Colemanballs
and a bar of Woods of Windsor soap and a box of milk chocolate footballs and then a small cardboard box, which he scrutinised but didn’t understand.
“What on earth is this?”
“It’s a packet of condoms,” Chrissie said, “in case you get lucky this Christmas.”
“Pop ’em in your bedside drawer,” Ellis said.
Denny bowed his head. “Idiots …” he muttered, and his shoulders heaved a little with laughter. He turned the stocking upside down and out rolled a satsuma. He placed it on the bedside table, next to the photograph of the lighthouse on the shingle beach and the fishing boat run aground. Chrissie cuddled up next to him, resting her head on his shoulder, and Denny flashed his eyes at Ellis.
“More tea please, dear boy, if you’re spoiling me.”
In the kitchen, warmed by a fire lit that Christmas morning by the son for his father, Ellis stood over the brewing pot and felt the elation of giving.
Reardon taught the boys to shoot rabbits that winter. William Rutton showed them how to paunch and skin them. He crunched the rabbits’ testicles under his butcher’s knife, to make the boys laugh, and shouted, “There go the Harrises!”
Mafi made rabbit pie which was tough to eat.
“Just bring me the younger ones in future, my darlings,” she told the boys. Denny pulled faces as he chewed.
When the clocks went forward, and Guy Finsey’s bulbs adorned the orchard floor, Ellis and Tim got their first paid job, delivering grocery boxes for Ivan. On Thursday afternoons, after school, the boxes would be laid out on the brick floor of Ivan’s shop, beneath the tiers of plastic grass. They had a porter’s trolley each, which took eight boxes, and they set out from the forge crossroads in opposite directions, Ellis delivering to Windmill Road, Morleys Road and Elsa’s Farm Cottages, Tim to Scabharbour Road and Mount Pleasant. They ate a Golden Delicious as they went, pushing the trolley one-handed as they bit into it, and when Ellis returned home, three pounds richer, Mafi would call out to him in mock disgust, “French apples, Ellis O’Rourke! I ask you!”
And, often, he’d appear at her living room door and shrug. “I like them, I just do. They’re nice and soft.”
And if Mafi over-played her growl of disapproval, she’d cough and splutter and begin to laugh. She’d always laugh, even when she felt a little weak, even on the days she didn’t have the energy to do much, which occurred now from time to time. And when she went into hospital for an operation, just before Ellis’s fifteenth birthday, there was still her throaty laugh, even then.
Ellis never got a straight answer from Denny as to what the operation was, just an assurance in a vague tone: “There’s nothing to be worried about, dear boy.”
And whilst Denny sat holding Mafi’s hand, as she waited nervously to be wheeled away to theatre, Ellis tiptoed down the lane and followed Chrissie and James into Treasure Island Woods, determined to see for himself, at last, the act of lovemaking. He had witnessed the beasts of the field doing it, he had seen pictures of professionals performing it, but no magazine could have prepared him for the transformation in two people he thought he knew, or for the noises they would not normally make or the words they would not otherwise use. He ran from his hiding place and didn’t stop until he found himself in the West Wood where he walked the length of a fallen oak and perched on a bough above the ground. The West Wood was the territory, in late summer, of the Bermondsey Boys and Ellis would not have considered being here then. A coachload of children arrived in the village each August weekend from different parts of London. Children who never saw the countryside, who lived in tall blocks of flats and walked to school along the edges of main roads. Kids with weird voices. Kids with dark skin. They stayed for a week at Halls Green House where rumour had it there was a swimming pool and a snooker room and stables. There was always tension, but rarely trouble, until the last week in August when the Bermondsey Boys came and then Ellis lay low all week because there was always trouble.