In June, Ellis’s headmaster wrote to Denny O’Rourke questioning whether there was any point in Ellis returning to school for his final year. He enclosed a questionnaire that all the pupils in Ellis’s year had completed.
Question 6: Where would you like to be in five years’ time? Ellis’s answer: The late eighteenth century. Question 4: What would be your chosen career if you were to decide on it now? Freelance contraband smuggler, self-employed. Question 20: What single change would most directly improve the world you live in? This test stopping at question 19.
Denny heard himself chuckle. The sound reminded him of his wife and suddenly, again, the bed he was lying on was enormous. A few yards away, Ellis lay on his own bed in deeply self-critical mood. What sort of seventeen year old daydreams they are a Marsh smuggler, he berated himself. My peers are daydreaming about having sex with Joan Jett or Bananarama.
He was too restless to sleep.
Smugglers would have got a lot of sex, his inner voice continued. Although women had brown teeth in those days so it can’t have been much fun. There again, men in those days had no concept of women with white teeth and you can’t miss what you don’t know.
Yes, you can, he remembered.
Fearing his mind could implode, he slipped downstairs and poured vodka into a glass and took it to bed.
Chrissie came for the weekend and brought with her some concert tickets and many questions.
“Have you asked the new girl out yet, Ellis?”
“No, but I saw her today.”
“What, you went to her house to see her or you saw her half a mile away?”
“We walked past each other on the footpath.”
“And what did you say to her?”
“Hi Katie.”
“And what else?”
“Just ‘Hi Katie’.”
“That was it?”
“When two people walk past each other there’s only a couple of seconds of actual talking time!” Ellis protested. “You can’t fit many words in.”
“You can if you stop walking.”
“And what if she doesn’t stop when I stop? I’ll be left standing there, looking like an idiot!”
“Ellis! What on earth – what on God’s earth! – makes you think that Katie Morton would walk past you if you stopped and said hello?”
Ellis didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry. I come with a plan,” his sister continued.
“Please don’t humiliate me in front of her,” Ellis said. “I have to live in this village, you know.”
“Well, you’re seventeen so that’s not strictly true.”
She handed him two tickets. “Bruce got hold of these for you.”
Ellis read them:
Finsbury Park Rainbow – Friday 11 June 1985 – Whitesnake plus support band
.
The Whitesnake album Bruce had taped for Ellis was his current favourite, a fact he hid from his contemporaries at school, who loathed hard rock. Many of them had started going to concerts in London. Their treks to the Astoria or the Brixton Academy were the stuff of legend in Ellis’s mind. How on earth, he wondered, did they know how to use the Underground system? How did they know where to go to find their seat when they got to the venues? How did they get tickets in the first place? How had any of them returned from London with their lives?
“What have these tickets got to do with anything?” he asked, dreading the answer.
“You’re taking her to the gig,” Chrissie said.
“Who?”
“Mother Teresa of Calcutta! Katie Morton, you nitwit.”
Ten minutes later, Ellis was out of excuses and Chrissie had got Katie’s number from the operator and marched Ellis upstairs to the privacy of the phone in Denny’s bedroom. Now, Ellis found a cold sweat upon him as Katie Morton herself answered the phone.
“Hello, it’s Ellis here, from down the lane.”
“Hello Ellis from down the lane.”
“Hello. How are you, Katie?”
“I’m fine. How are you Ellis from down the lane?”
“Fine thanks.”
“What do you want?”
Ellis physically recoiled from so blunt a question. Chrissie pushed the receiver back towards his mouth.
“What do I want?”
“Yeah.”
“Er … I just wondered if you fancied coming to a concert with me?”
Chrissie mouthed the word “gig” at him.
“I mean a gig,” Ellis corrected himself, at the exact moment Katie Morton said, “What’s the concert?”
“Sorry, what?” Ellis asked.
“No, go on. What did you say?”
“Nothing. What did you say?”
“I just asked what the concert was. What did you say?”
“I just said it was a gig not a concert.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know,” Ellis faltered.
“What band is it and when is it?” Katie asked, in her shopping list kind of way.
Ellis went silent. At that moment, he realised that there was no way Katie Morton was going to want to go with him to a Whitesnake concert. She wouldn’t want to go to a Whitesnake concert with anyone and she would not want to go to any concert with him. The situation was peppered with negatives.
“You there, Ellis?” Katie asked.
“Talking Heads …” he replied blankly.
Chrissie looked confused.
Katie became animated. “Talking Heads! Really? Very cool. When?”
“I don’t mind,” Ellis muttered distantly, knowing he had screwed up.
Chrissie cuffed him across the back of the head.
“You don’t mind? How about David Byrne, does he mind?”
“Who’s David Byrne?”
“
For fuck’s sake!
” Chrissie mouthed, collapsing back on to the bed.
“Are you drunk, Ellis from down the lane?” Katie asked.
Ellis pulled himself together. “No. I’m not drunk at all. Sorry, I was distracted, my sister walked into the room.” He picked up the tickets. “The concert is on Friday June the eleventh at the Finsbury Park Rainbow and I would really like you to come with me.”
“That’s next Friday. I’ll think about it and call you back, OK?”
“OK.”
“It’s really sweet of you to invite me and I really appreciate it. I’m just not sure what I’m up to that evening.”
“OK.”
“Bye, Ellis.” She hung up.
Ellis held the receiver against his chest and smiled. He had crossed the threshold. He had invited a girl out. It hadn’t gone quite to plan and she wouldn’t accept, but the ordeal was over and he could now say he had done it. He felt elated. He flopped back on to the bed, alongside his sister, emotionally exhausted.
“Talking sodding Heads?” Chrissie whispered.
Ellis shrugged. “There’s no way she’d go to a Whitesnake gig.”
Ellis sat in the living room, hoping the phone wouldn’t ring. Denny turned the lights off and he and Ellis watched the horizon catch fire. The sky arched its crimson back across the village. Its blackening ribbed patterns reminded Ellis of the markings of the
Cheiracanthium
species he had been forced to read about during the truces.
What, he asked himself, if the entire world is the belly of a huge spider and we’re all inside it? Beyond our universe is the outer body of a spider bigger than known existence and beyond that spider we call the universe are a trillion other spiders. And those trillion spiders live in just one spider well and there is a world full of wells.
“Spiders are little and we are big, they are big and we are little. It makes no difference either way round.”
“None at all,” Denny agreed.
And if it makes no difference, Ellis resolved to himself, it makes no sense to be scared of anything.
In the near darkness, he looked at the shape of his father’s body and a faint glow of dusk on his face.
“Dad.”
“Yes, dear boy?”
“You know … I am going to do new things.” His voice was gentle and strong. It was a new voice and it was as alien to him as it was to his dad. “I’m going to travel and seek out things. You know that, don’t you?”
He got no response. Denny was motionless. There was more movement in the sky beyond him, as it gave up its last colour and detail to darkness.
Katie Morton rang three days later and said yes. Ellis was devastated.
“You have to tell her immediately that she’s not going to see Talking Heads,” Chrissie told him.
Ellis agreed absolutely. Definitely. Obviously. But kept putting it off until, suddenly, it was Friday and Katie was waiting for him at the foot of her parents’ driveway on Wickhurst Lane. She opened the door to Mafi’s car before Ellis brought it to a standstill, and was in a hurry to get away. Her parents, she said, were in a “foul mood, as usual”.
Ellis had memorised the map of the London Underground during the week. He found it easy thanks to the colour scheme, which his brain could immediately make sense of. He did a last dummy run to calm his nerves as the train approached Victoria station. On the pale blue line, they sat opposite a row of seven long-haired men, all of whom wore Whitesnake T-shirts. Katie Morton looked at them curiously and turned to ask Ellis a question, but he cut her off.
“Where did you live before?”
“Near Brighton,” she replied.
“I’d like to go to Brighton,” Ellis said.
“It’s great.”
“Do you miss it?” Ellis asked.
She shrugged. “I’m not too bothered for now. I’ll tell you something that no one is meant to know,” she said, leaning close to his ear. “My parents would kill me if they knew anyone knew.”
“What is it?” Ellis said.
“My brother’s in prison. That’s why we left Brighton.”
“What did he do?”
“Not much. He’s only in for a year.”
Ellis didn’t know what to say. He wanted to know what the crime was but feared that to ask again would be immature. Maybe everyone except for him knew someone in prison. If so, he shouldn’t find it too amazing. But it was amazing, so would she think him dull for not asking more about it?
More David Coverdale lookalikes boarded the train at Highbury and Islington and Ellis decided it was time. He pulled the carefully resealed envelope from his pocket and ripped it open. “Jesus!” he said. “I don’t believe it!”
“What?” Katie Morton asked.
“They’ve sent the wrong tickets!”
As Katie Morton studied the tickets, Ellis doubted the wisdom of messing with a criminal’s sister. She laughed. It was a laugh Ellis couldn’t begin to decipher. He didn’t say anything else about it and neither did she. At the entrance to the Rainbow, he asked her again if she wanted to go for a drink instead or to just go home and she pushed him towards the door with the same knowing smile.
They saw a support band called Redfoot but they never did get to see David Coverdale’s Whitesnake. As they waited for them to come on stage, a very large woman stood alongside them, drinking vodka straight from the bottle. She was huge, more than six feet tall, broader than Ellis and fat; very, very fat. Her hair was long and bushy and dyed black. Her skin was talcum-powder white and she wore dark make-up around her eyes and black lipstick. Ellis saw that she was crying as she swigged from the bottle, as if the vodka was streaming out of the pores of her skin. She smiled at Ellis and Katie through maroon mascara tears and pulled down her leather jacket to reveal a denim jacket beneath, and on the back of it an intricate spray-on picture of a smiling young man holding a guitar. Around it, in metal studs, were the words
Ronnie, 1961–1983, Gone But Still Loved
.
“This is my first concert without him,” the enormous woman said, hauling the leather jacket back across the vast expanse of her rounded back.
Katie Morton placed her hand sympathetically on the huge woman’s arm. When she did so, Ellis had no idea that Katie was drunk, but moments later he found out just how drunk she was.
“Did you eat him?” Katie asked the woman.
With four thousand people pressing against them, Ellis’s world, miraculously, fell silent. His mind sank into a numbing incredulity at what had just been said. The woman turned, it seemed to no one in particular, and screamed, “Bunny!”
“She’s sorry!” Ellis said urgently.
“BUNNEEEEE!” Her face contorted with anger.
Ten feet away, a tall, Caucasian version of Mr T heard the huge woman’s call of distress. His face sank immediately into a darkness, as if already expressing regret over what he was yet to do to whoever had upset his friend.
“Did I say something?” Katie shouted.
Bunny moved towards them.
“We’re leaving,” Ellis yelled, pushing Katie away as the huge woman lunged at them so drunkenly that she seemed to be aiming to simply fall on top of them and squash them to death.
This was the first time Ellis had taken the initiative with a member of the opposite sex. He held Katie’s arm so tight he was almost lifting her, and as Bunny chased them through the syrup-thick crowd Ellis took advantage of being half the width of his pursuer and weaved and ducked himself and Miss Morton out of the arena to the now empty bar, from which they ran without looking back. The Seven Sisters Road would never look so attractive again, nor would the air of Finsbury Park ever taste so fresh. On the tube and train that carried Ellis and his liability of a date back to the garden of England, it occurred to Ellis that a trip up to London to see Whitesnake had been in no way diminished by not actually seeing Whitesnake. His attachment to hard rock and big-hair bands was, he concluded, a little cosmetic. He would check out this David Byrne bloke tomorrow.
The lights of the village nestling in the valley were benevolent and welcomed Ellis home.
“You can’t drive down to the house,” Katie said. “My parents are arseholes.”
Ellis parked by the primary school and walked her home. As they crossed the top of the village green, a truck drove past, catching the couple in its headlights. It sounded its horn in friendly recognition.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“Haven’t a clue.”
They picked their way across the rutted surface of Wickhurst Lane in the darkness. She stumbled and took hold of his hand.
“You don’t like London much, do you?” she said.
“Scares me rigid.”
“Just remember, all those terrifying-looking people in London would be scared stiff walking down here in the pitch dark. They’d shit themselves at every animal sound.”