Read Online The Spider Truces by Tim Connolly - Free Book Online Page A

when his dad was a teenager he ate a frog, for a dare. Ellis wasn’t sure if this was true but he liked the way Mr Bird lit his cigarettes, leaning down towards his lighter and throwing his head back as he took the first puff.
    That’s how I’m going to do it too, Ellis told himself.
    Gary played for the village juniors football team. He talked Ellis into going along. The changing rooms at the recreation ground were in an unloved wooden pavilion. It wore thick layers of peeling green paint and Ellis found it strangely enchanting.
    “Like Hector’s House on TV,” he whispered, to no one other than himself.
    The two toilets were in wooden sheds, symmetrically set one each side of the pavilion, up a small set of steps. Inside the gents shed was a large oil drum, which Ellis had to stand on tiptoe to be able to pee into, whilst swatting away the flies and holding his breath.
    Soon after he was brought on as a substitute, Ellis lay down on the pitch and rested his head on the turf. From there, as he had begun to suspect, the pavilion looked just like a miniature Swiss weather-house, seen through colossal blades of grass. He waited patiently for a man and woman to glide out of their respective toilets and forecast sun or rain, but before they could, out of nowhere, Mr Souter, the manager, was kneeling beside him with a bucket and sponge.
    “Are you all right, son?”
    “Yes, thanks,” Ellis said, bewildered. “I’m fine.”
    He wasn’t called on again.
     
     
    When they weren’t at the allotment, Ellis and Gary played football on the side lawn or cricket on the driveway, using the green metal grass box from the mower as stumps, or they played in the oak tree, which bordered the bottom corner of the garden. It was one of the oldest trees in Britain. A man from a magazine once came to photograph it. The roots were exposed above the ground and Ellis could squeeze between them on his belly and climb up the inside of the hollow trunk to the first or second boughs, which were huge and cast shadows over the footpath to the village green. The boughs were split open and hollow, like canoes, and Ellis lay on his back inside them and enjoyed being invisible. He looked at the branches above him and patches of sky in between and then he rested his head against the bough and his eyes looked across the landscape of fissured bark canyons and mountains, and his heartbeat thumped in his ear like approaching foot soldiers.
    Chrissie was too big to crawl inside the tree but strong enough to climb it. From the front door of the cottage, Ellis watched her sit in the high bough on the evening that Vincent split up with her, which was a week after he slept with her.
    “When you cry,” he whispered, “your face goes red and the freckles round your eyes come out and you look like my baby sister not my big sister.”
    And when you lie curled up on your bed crying, he thought to himself, I want to rub your tummy and accidentally touch your boobs with my thumb, just to find out what they feel like.
     
     
    An invitation from Chrissie in early August led Denny and Ellis to visit the reservoir at Bough Beach for the first time. The still water turned purple in the early evening and Ellis lost himself in thoughts of vast oceans and far-away places and a girl of no vivid description holding his hand.
    “It must be so good to go places,” he sighed.
    Denny’s stomach turned. “Don’t go disappearing on me.” He tried to say it lightly.
    “Don’t go disappearing on me ,” Ellis countered.
    They crossed a meadow towards the nature reserve. Chrissie was waiting for them in the office. She introduced her dad to James, the assistant warden. She was nervous, and as a result she was polite, which Ellis found hilarious. They walked up the lane to the Frog and Bucket, where Chrissie and James had met three weeks earlier, watching a band called the Messerschmitts.
    When Denny asked James how old he was, Chrissie tensed up.
    “Twenty-three,” James