Two empty pint glasses fell from the table and smashed across the floor.
“Put those anywhere you like!” Jonesy cried out.
The boys roared and the landlord stormed over.
“Another broken glass and you’re barred, the lot of you! Last warning! And you can cut out the swearing as well or I’ll be down on you fellers like a ton of bricks!”
Ellis climbed on to the table, stopping halfway to steady himself, with his bum stuck out like a novice surfer. He regained his balance, stood atop the table, looked down on the clientele and beamed them a smile.
“FUCK! BUGGER! WANK!” he announced, raising his pint glass to them before draining it and smashing it on to the floor.
They went quietly.
Ellis woke lying star-shaped on the beach. The morning sun levered his swollen eyes open as far as they would go. He heard footsteps on the shingle and squinted to see the silhouette of someone standing over him, their hands rammed into the pockets of a long, fashionable-looking winter coat. He raised his hand to the sun and as shadow covered his eyes he saw his sister. She winked at him, as if they’d seen each other yesterday, and he laughed to himself, which hurt his ribs.
“How did you get here?”
“I got a lift. You look like a shipwreck.”
They sat shoulder to shoulder on the breakwater letting the sun soak their faces. Ellis suspected that pneumonia was lurking somewhere beneath his hangover. Two of the Welsh boys were passed out on the beach. At some point in the night they had cuddled together against the cold and they were still stuck to each other, like sleeping lovers. Ellis wished he had a camera.
“I’m surprised we never came here with Dad on one of our days out. It’s pretty nice,” Chrissie said.
“How is Dad?”
She looked at his bruises and didn’t answer. She ran her finger across the scab on his temple.
“Tim?” she asked.
He nodded and his lips trembled.
“So its true you knobbed his wife?” she said.
His shoulders slumped and he bowed his head. He walked a few paces away and looked out to the sea forts on the horizon. For a moment, he thought he was going to throw up.
“Yes,” he muttered. “It is true. It’s the truth. It is a true fact. Coming to you straight from the planet Truth, after a quick stopover in the galaxy of Unforgivable Fuck-up.”
He watched the waves and she watched him and they didn’t move and they didn’t speak. The tide was turning. Baldie East would be preparing his nets and cages in the harbour before moving out to the whelk and mussel beds as the receding tide unveiled them.
“You are so useless with women, Ellie-boy,” Chrissie said affectionately.
“Don’t call me Ellie-boy,” he whispered.
She lobbed a pebble towards his feet.
“It is unforgivable,” she said, without reproach. “And you look so awful.”
In the fish and chip shop on Harbour Street, in the restaurant area at the rear of the shop, amidst the Formica tables and the wood-panelled walls, hidden at first by the clutter of sugar shakers, ketchup bottles and mustard pots, was Mafi. Ellis sat beside her and kissed her. She gasped at the bruises on his face.
“Who did this?” she asked.
“I did,” Ellis said.
She gripped his hand.
They sipped tea and then Ellis excused himself politely and walked outside. He crossed Harbour Street, hurrying to the corner of Sydenham Street, and threw up on the Jubilee rose bed. He returned to the table and nothing was said about it. In the silence, it occurred to Ellis that they might have come with bad news.
“Is Dad all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mafi said.
Ellis looked at the familiar contours on her face and the liver spots on her skin and thought how much he loved her.
“That’s not why you’ve come? Nothing bad has happened?”
“Nothing bad has happened,” Mafi assured him softly. “It’s just a day out for me. I wanted to see my boy.”
They sat in silence for a while. Ellis’s mind wandered and he thought of the spiderlings pouring out of his arm and taking his mother.
“Did I do something to harm Mum?” he said.
Mafi and Chrissie looked appalled.
“What would make you ask that?” Mafi said.
“Just …” He was distant. “Just a thought …” He rubbed his eyes and smiled brightly. “And, you know, Chrissie’s been reminding me how useless I am with women and it’s probably true, I am crap at most things. I suddenly wondered if I did something. That would be why no one will ever tell me what happened. If it was my fault.”
“If what was?” Mafi asked.
“Mum.”
“No!” they replied in unison.
“I’m a woman and you’re not useless with me,” Mafi added.
“He did trick you into signing his inter-rail ticket,” Chrissie reminded her.
Mafi ignored her. So did Ellis.
“He just thinks that there’s a lot of her in you,” Mafi said.
The words hung before him. It was nice for him to replay them in his head. A brief sentence, unannounced and unheralded, but explaining much and promising more.
“What happened to my mum?” Ellis asked.
Mafi smiled to herself in a way Ellis couldn’t fathom. Absent-mindedly, she stroked Ellis’s arm, as if she thought it was her own. Three plates of buttered toast were placed on the table. Chrissie looked affectionately at Ellis but didn’t say anything. Ellis pushed his plate away calmly.
“What happened to my mum?” he repeated. He placed his hand on Mafi’s cheek and gently turned her to face him. He nodded at her and whispered, “Now’s the time …”
Mafi took his hand. “One day, all of a sudden, your mother panicked that she could see the rest of her life stretching ahead of her with no more surprises. You were four years old. She was subdued for a long time, for months, then she admitted how she felt. Your dad believed that she should do something about it sooner rather than later. He was scared that if she didn’t, she’d tell him something worse one day, when you and your sister had grown up and moved on. He didn’t want to be left alone. Your mother and you were great together. She loved you. There were no problems with you. She just had an accident and if she hadn’t had an accident she’d have come back home to you all. You had a mother and she loved you and she died. It wasn’t your fault at all.”
Mafi sipped her tea. Ellis glanced at Chrissie. She smiled innocently back at him and took a piece of toast, concentrating on it exaggeratedly. He stretched out his leg and tapped her shin with his foot. Without looking up, Chrissie said, “Keep going, Mafi.”
Mafi licked the tip of her index finger and used it to wipe away the tea stain on the lip of her mug, something she had never done before and would never feel the need to do again.
“She went on an adventure with a girlfriend from school. Your father saw her off and she wrote to him often. She swam in the Arabian sea. She went to the holy lake of Pushkar. She was young and she was confused and she felt that she had missed out on a whole way of living and that soon it would be too late. She wrote long detailed letters to your father about what she was seeing and feeling. And she went to a place called the Golden City and she met a man. She liked the man and she fell out with her friend over him. The man liked her too and they had an affair …”
Mafi faltered. She had resolved to talk through this moment, to downplay it as far as possible, but had been brought to a halt by the words “they had an affair”. She needn’t have worried. Far from being crushed by the revelation of his mum’s infidelity, Ellis welcomed any detail about her. He felt particularly unselective and non-judgemental about it. He just wanted to know anything, everything, there was to know.
“It lasted a week and then she left him. She set off alone to escape him and return home. She missed you and your sister dreadfully. She wanted to be with your dad again. She took any lift or bus she could and headed for a place called Jaipur because she knew how to get home from there. She wrote to your dad. She told him everything. She apologised and told him the truth and she said she was desperate to come home to him and the two of you. And …”
Mafi’s voice trailed away.
Ellis smiled at her. “And?” he asked.
“And … she took a ride in some old truck on some rotten old road and it crashed off the road and that’s where she died.”
“In India …” Ellis whispered.
“In northern India,” Mafi confirmed.
“Northern India,” Ellis repeated, to accustom himself to the idea. “That’s a long way from home.”
Chrissie leant across and held Ellis’s hand. He felt fine and he gave her a wide-eyed smile to let her know. His priority was to take in his surroundings and to create a snapshot in his mind’s eye, so that he would never forget the moment when he found out. As for the details of what he’d been told, and how he felt about them, well, he had the rest of his life to think about that. All that mattered for now was that he had been told. Finally. On 2 November 1985, in the Harbour Street fish and chip shop.
“Poor Dad …” Ellis said.
“Do you remember when Mafi first came and stayed with us in Orpington?” Chrissie asked him.
Ellis shrugged. “Sort of.”
“That’s when Dad went out there. He scattered her ashes in a place she had written about in a letter to him because she said it was the most beautiful place she had ever seen.”
“The reason you’ve no relatives on your mum’s side of the family,” Mafi said, “is they’ve not spoken to him since he decided not to bring her body back home.”
“We should go there, one day?” Ellis urged his sister.
“Maybe. But when we’re older, after Dad’s gone.”
But that, Ellis knew, was a time so distant that it needn’t exist.
“We’ll be too old then. We should go, now, with Dad.”
On the sea wall, alongside the Red Spider café, Ellis stared at the waves. He shut off his mind and the storm of thoughts within it and filled his head with the colour of seawater. He lost his bearings and drifted, anchorless, for a while until Mafi broke the silence.
“Any day you see the sea is a good day,” she said.
It was too cold for her to sit outside for long. She shuffled along the sea wall to the pub and found a seat next to the radiator. She sipped a glass of barley wine and watched her great-niece and great-nephew from the window. This evening she would be able to tell her nephew that she had seen his son and that he was safe. She looked at the arthritic swelling on her hands and at the knots in the floorboards. She unbuttoned her overcoat and sat back. She felt happy to be on the coast again and at ease with the knowledge that her time was winding down. Today was a great adventure, perhaps the last. She was quite content.
Ellis watched Mafi’s Morris Minor disappear round the bend at the top of Nelson Road before setting off purposefully to the call box on Coastguards Alley. He took a deep breath and dialled the only London number in his diary apart from his sister’s, and asked to speak to Mr O’Rourke.
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“His son.”
The line was silent. Ellis covered the mouthpiece whilst he swallowed and cleared his throat. Then the tone of the silence changed and Ellis knew that his dad was there. Ellis allowed himself to breathe, inviting his dad to speak. Denny declined the invitation.
“Dad?”
Still there was silence.
“It’s Ellis.”
“Hello, Ellis.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine, son. How are you?”
“Pretty good.”
“Good.”
His dad’s pitch was perfect. It carried neither anger nor a crumb of tenderness.
“I just called to say I’ve seen Chrissie and Mafi today and that I’m going to call you every Friday evening from now on.”
“Did you know Tim Wickham and his wife split up?” Denny O’Rourke asked.
Ellis slumped and looked across the bay. “That’s probably because I slept with her,” he said solemnly. He knew that his dad wasn’t going to speak again. “Bye, Dad,” he said, tenderly.
Ellis and Jed shared a spliff on the beach that evening. The sea ripples rolled in softly at perfect intervals. The moonlight rode them like a folded paper boat. Ellis thought of his dad’s voice. Jed thought of what he and the little boy he called his baby brother might do together this weekend.
“The European water spider is the only spider that has evolved to live permanently under water,” Ellis murmured.
“Go on,” Jed said.
Ellis did so, gazing at the lights on the headland across the estuary and whispering, as if Jed were a sleepy child.
“It lives in ponds and streams, slow-moving streams. It spins a dome-shaped web and anchors it to a plant. It comes to the surface of the water and gulps down a bubble of air and takes it to the web and releases it. Gradually, it fills the web with air until it is like an air-filled balloon. It lives in the balloon, under the water.”
“I don’t know where you get it from,” Jed said, dragging deeply on the joint.
“I read it in a book,” Ellis said.
Hedley Wilkinson knocked on Ellis’s door on Christmas Eve. “A strange thing,” he said, “but fortuitous, in a sad way.”
“What?” Ellis said, wondering if the old boy had finally lost his marbles.
“I was walking, not five minutes ago, past the phone box on Joy Lane when it rang and I picked it up and it was a young lady saying she wanted to speak to you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you, and did I happen to know you? I said that I had that honour and she requested that I give you this message. Your aunt Mafi is sick and she may die any time, tonight probably. You’re to go home straight away. Would you like to borrow my car for the Christmas period?”
Ellis stood bemused. Hedley’s role in his life was becoming more odd. “No, thanks. I’ve got one.”
“But is it reliable? A good runner? This is important.”
“Was it my sister?”
“Yes. Oh … I suppose so. I don’t know. It would have been, I imagine. How would I know? Do you have one?”
Ellis thanked Hedley and ushered him out.
“Ellis!” Hedley’s eyes appeared at the letter box.
“What now?”
“You will go, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
Although he had never sat beside a human body so frail, Ellis adjusted swiftly to the sight of her. Mafi had grown old at a steady pace. What he saw now wasn’t a marked decline, just further erosion taking her to the brink.
He knew he should have gone straight to his father but something – fear probably – had propelled him directly up the stairs to Mafi’s room. This was, he already sensed, yet another error of judgement on his part. Before he had time to rectify it, the door opened and Denny tiptoed in, pressing his forehead against the door as he closed it noiselessly. Only then, as he stepped towards the bed, did he see his son. His face tautened to anger and he left the room immediately. Ellis cursed himself and rested his head on the bed. He listened to Mafi’s breathing whilst her hand made circles in his hair.
“Imagine this …” Her voice was faint and very slow. “There was a meadow on the edge of the Marsh. Your daddy was walking there when he saw her standing among the campions and poppies and when she ran her hands across the tips of the meadow grass up flew butterflies, hundreds of butterflies, white and red and brown and pale blue. They danced and fluttered around her head. When she laughed they flew away. Disappeared into thin air. Your daddy knew that he wanted to be with her for ever.”
“Was that my mum?” Ellis asked.
“It was,” Mafi said.
“Did it really happen?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know for sure?”
“Because I was there. And it feels like yesterday to him. He never wants you or Chrissie to have a broken heart, that’s all.”
“I don’t think he’s very pleased to see me.”
She tugged sharply on Ellis’s hair, causing him to sit up. “If only you’d talk to people, properly, the way you talked to your spiders when you were little,” she said.
Ellis walked downstairs and from the kitchen doorway he watched his father making a pot of tea. For the first time ever, he glimpsed the unbroken entirety of Denny O’Rourke’s life and he saw a man still in love with the butterfly-lady, still missing her, still hurt by her.
“Hello,” Ellis said, with all the apology he could invest in the word.
Denny pressed a mug of tea down in front of him and left the room without speaking.
Chrissie arrived from London and pulled the Christmas tree out from its hiding place in the corner of the living room. At three o’clock, she and Denny left Mafi’s bedside and curled up together in the dining room window to listen to the carols from King’s College. Ellis was outside turning over the vegetable patch with the pickaxe. He stopped for a cigarette and clambered over the fence to the working men’s club, which was boarded up. A planning notice detailed the three small houses to be built in its place. As the day faded, Ellis lit a bonfire and burnt off the tree brash his dad had cut in the autumn. He regretted that nightfall would force him back inside. His dad had not spoken to him all day nor remained in the same room as him.
He sat with Mafi, who was too weak to speak now. Later, he bathed in deep, steaming hot water and smelled Chrissie’s fish pie in the kitchen. When he appeared for supper,
clean-shaven
and wearing the only shirt he possessed that had a collar, his dad finally ended his silence.
“You’ve used up all the hot water, you selfish little bugger.”
Ellis went upstairs and packed his bag. Chrissie followed him and persuaded him to stay.
“You’ll never undo it if you go now,” she said.
She took Ellis’s boots downstairs and placed them next to Denny’s gardening shoes. Ellis switched the light off and lay on his bed and returned to the butterfly meadow. It was not so long ago, he reminded himself. That man downstairs is still the man in the meadow. He didn’t come into being on 17 November 1967 when I was born. He wasn’t put on this earth just to be my father.
On Christmas morning, Denny took a pot of tea and a jug of water up to Mafi’s room and did not acknowledge his son. Chrissie gave Ellis a camera. A Pentax K1000. He was thrilled.
“My friend Milek is a photographer and he says this is the ideal first camera for you.”
“Knobbing him?”
“Negative.”
Ellis took Chrissie out to the car. Wrapped in a blanket and sticking out of the back window was a large mirror, almost full length. Ellis had made it himself out of pale driftwood from the beach. There were tar marks in the grain and the words “Le Havre” burnt into the wood.
“I love it. I absolutely love it,” she said.
They sat in the back of the Herald and shared a cigarette. The day was cold and still and the sky pale grey, the sort of grey that looks a mile deep.
Denny refused to acknowledge his son over Christmas dinner and Chrissie winced at the tension. Ellis grabbed the bottle of red wine from the table and marched out. He drank as he walked up the path to the green. He read the village notices on the school railings. There was a meeting in January to organise the campaign to save the post office from closure and there was a call to sign the petition to fight the reduction of the 454 bus service.
He sat on a bench on the green and, with a lack of imagination that was becoming habit, decided to get stoned.
The cherry-faced man whose arm was always in a sling crossed the green and entered the Methodist chapel. Ellis had never known his name nor the reason for the sling. He wondered what ribbon of circumstances had left the man alone on Christmas Day. Then a pair of giant hands covered his face. The skin was coarse and the fingers were fat and brutal and pressed hard against his eyes.
“Guess who?” It was an effortlessly menacing voice.
“Don’t know.”
The voice laughed and the hands lifted. Ellis turned and found Des Payne taking a seat beside him.
“Happy Christmas,” Des said, sincerely, and laughed.
Ellis laughed nervously. “Jesus, Des …”
“Had you going,” Des said. He leant forward in his
skin-tight
jeans and pulled a half-bottle of brandy from his Parker coat. He offered it up. Ellis took a nip and, having lit the spliff, handed it to Des.
“Dog’s bollocks,” the big man said appreciatively. “Always go for a walk on Christmas Day when my uncle starts picking on my dad. Tradition.”
Ellis had never credited Des Paine with a real life. He was just the overgrown skinhead from Morleys Road who had kindly declined to kill him once.
“I’ll murder my uncle one of these Christmas Days.”
“Why?”
“Takes the piss. Always scrounging off my dad, always eating the fucking turkey my dad pays for, getting pissed on Dad’s booze and then he starts bullying him. Dad doesn’t like an argument but I could kill my uncle without breaking sweat or giving a shit.”
They toked and gazed at the grass as if it were entertaining them.
“Not really,” Des muttered, as an afterthought. He puffed out his cheeks and sighed, weakened by the weed. “Where did you run off to then?”
“The seaside,” Ellis said.
“Fuck me! That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I like it.”
“Fuck me! Gotta hand it to you.” Des smiled and nodded to himself, impressed. “So, you just left here and went somewhere else?”
They fell quiet whilst Des toyed with the idea curiously. They both felt quickly stoned.
“Must be cold by the sea.”
“Sometimes it’s colder, sometimes it’s warmer.”
“Is it? Fucking hell! What are the pubs like?”
“Pretty good.”
“And there’s loads of this flying about, is there?” Des waved the joint at Ellis.
“Plenty.”
“Fucking hell.” Des breathed out smoke and handed the dog-end to Ellis, who sucked the life out of it, felt the burn of the roach and tossed it away.
“You’ve done all right for yourself,” Des said. “Yeah … you just left here and went somewhere else.” Des whispered the words, as if repeating a riddle he couldn’t make sense of. He stretched his legs out and let his arms hang lifelessly. The energy had drained from him and so had the desire to crush his uncle.
“You still scared of spiders?” he asked.
“Not sure at the moment,” Ellis said.
“My girlfriend’s pregnant,” Des said. “Mum’s going to bring the baby up. We can’t handle it. Bionic balls, me.”
They sat in comfortable silence until Des laughed under his breath and muttered, “Fuck me.” It was his mantra. It’s what he would have said if he’d discovered America, or gravity.
Ellis crawled off the bench and lay flat out on the grass. A few gaps appeared between the clouds and beyond them glowed a reddening sky.
“Your dad put a note up in Bridget’s shop saying that you’d fucked off and if anyone heard anything to let him know. Then he put another note up saying you were all right.”
“The goldfish bowl …” Ellis muttered.
“I wouldn’t rush into Bridget’s, by the way. She don’t like you one bit.”
“What’s it got to do with Bridget?”
“Fancies your dad. Always has. No, I definitely wouldn’t go in there unless you’re really desperate for bread or milk or something. Even then I’d just borrow off someone, you know? Or pay a child to go into Bridget’s and get what you need and wait round the corner, except if you want cigarettes ’cos Bridget’s clamping down on selling them to kids. I think she was warned.”
“Des! Shut up, man, you’re stoned.”
“Oh … Yeah …”
Ellis returned to the bench and took another joint from his pocket. He dangled it in front of Des. “Up for it?”
“Fuck me, yes!”
Des stood up and shook his head and torso to wake himself up, the way a dog shakes itself dry. Then he sat down and wrapped a huge arm round Ellis and looked him in the eye, as if he were going to kiss him or kill him. Ellis recoiled.
“I’ll tell you something,” Des growled.
“What?” Ellis swallowed.
“I was in Bridget’s when your dad came in …”
Des went quiet. His eyes pierced Ellis from close range. He breathed deep into a chest carved from stone.
“He looked like a dead man. I shan’t forget it. He looked like a ghost. Made me want to say something to him, say something nice …”
Ellis found that by tensing up his neck and flaring his nostrils he could prevent his eyes from welling up. He walked away and lay down again on the grass. He watched the clouds close rank and darken. Des lay beside him and took the spliff from Ellis’s fingers and lit it. He toked, then placed the joint between Ellis’s lips. Ellis drew heavily and felt the drug rise behind his eyes.
“Sorry for shooting you in the head.”
“Sorry for stuffing gum up your nose.”
Their laughter rang out across the village green to the old man inside the Methodist chapel, who mistook it for the laughter of children. It drew a smile across his face and he returned his polio-ravaged body to his empty house on Glebe Road with an uplifted heart.
Denny emerged from Mafi’s room late on Christmas night. He said to his children, “It’s nearly time, I think.”
Mafi’s skin seemed paper thin, as if the life had already slipped away beneath it. They sat with her, deep into the night, until tiredness overcame them all.
Denny slept late for the first time in many years. He was woken by the sound of Ellis shuffling sleepily along the landing corridor to Mafi’s door. He heard his daughter’s bedroom door open and moments later she appeared in his room and sat on his bed.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked wearily.
Before Denny could answer, they heard Mafi’s bedroom door burst open. Ellis thundered in.
“Can you come!” he gasped and ran out again.
Denny bowed his head. Dignity was a priority for him from this moment on. Chrissie waited. There was no need to rush. Their eyes met and he nodded, with the faintest of smiles. When they entered Mafi’s room, Ellis was plumping up the pillows and Mafi was sitting bolt upright in her bed. She beamed her nephew a rosy-cheeked smile.
“You know what I fancy, Denny? A lamb chop.”
Ellis felt Mafi’s forehead. She found it irksome and waved his hand away.
“With peas and potatoes, preferably.”
“Right …” Denny replied, unsure.
After she had eaten, Mafi talked, without significant pause, into the evening. Then she slept.
Ellis drove Chrissie up to the town, where she was getting a lift back to London with an old school friend. On his return, he parked his car facing down the driveway so that he was ready to head off next morning. He breathed the cold air deeply, gave thanks for Mafi’s return to health and smiled in anticipation of his return to the coast next day. As he walked towards the kitchen door, he readied himself for a final evening at the sharp end of his father’s resentment. He stepped inside the cottage and, behind his back, the first flakes of snow began to fall.
He woke beneath a bedroom ceiling that radiated light, and he knew that he was trapped.