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

replied confidently. “Six years older than Chrissie.”
    Ellis stared open-mouthed at the scandalous age difference and waited for the shit to hit the fan.
    “My maths could have coped with that one,” Denny O’Rourke responded, with the hint of a smile.
    “My dad is capable of twenty-three minus seventeen, you know,” Ellis said assertively.
    “Right,” said James.
    “So am I, in fact,” Ellis added.
    Chrissie fled to the bar.
    Denny offered her daughter’s new boyfriend a cigarette and lit it for him. “Seventeen is very young,” he purred. “Do not get her up the duff.”
    James didn’t flinch. Denny settled back in his seat and put an arm round Ellis, who felt confident he knew what “up the duff” must mean and decided it would be more grown up not to seek confirmation.
    The house spider waiting for him in the bath when they got home was the biggest yet. Something inside Ellis buckled and, as the shivers of repulsion shot up his body from the soles of his feet, he became angry. He lunged for the taps and sent two jets of water plunging into the bath. He turned his back and counted to one hundred, then turned the taps off. When the water had run away, he glanced to check the bath was empty and saw a waterlogged spider-carcass lying a few inches from the plughole.
    From the living room window, Ellis picked out the shapes of the cattle in Scabharbour Meadow in the balmy half-dark. The accusing stares of the drowned spider’s family weighed heavily on him.
    “Ellis! You haven’t bathed!” Mafi turned him round to face her. “Upstairs now and get in that bath.”
    “I bathed!”
    “You’re filthy!”
    Denny followed Ellis up to his bedroom.
    “Where is it, dear boy?” he asked.
    “In the bath. I killed it. They’re going to get their own back on me.”
    From the bathroom, his dad called out, “Ellis, you didn’t kill it. Come and look.”
    “I don’t want to look. And I did kill it.”
    “How can I show that you didn’t kill it, if you won’t look?”
    Ellis hadn’t killed it and in the pages of the spider book Denny found out why. “‘Spiders in the bath are usually male house spiders that have fallen in while searching for females. By closing their book lungs and tracheae, they can survive in water for half an hour or more. Even spiders that appear quite dead can suddenly get up and walk when they dry out and open up their breathing systems again.’” He jabbed the page with his finger.
    “You’re making that up,” Ellis said.
    “I’m not!”
    “You must be.”
    “I’m not!”
    “Is there a picture?” Ellis asked.
    “No, I promise.”
    Ellis read it for himself. Denny wasn’t making it up. Whilst Ellis bathed, Denny sat on the toilet seat and read more to him.
    “Oh my Lord, Ellis!”
    “What?”
    “There’s a spider here they talk about and it’s absolutely covered in hairs and it spits a poisonous juice on to its prey and eats them.”
    “Don’t, Dad!”
    “And, ugh! Sometimes it injects its prey with venom first to paralyse them and then eats them. When it isn’t killing other creatures it kills its own.”
    “Don’t!”
    “Imagine that, Ellis, a hairy, killing, cannibalistic monster with eight eyes.”
    Ellis scrunched his face up. “I feel sick.”
    Denny growled. “Guess how big it is?”
    Ellis shook his head. “Don’t want to.”
    “The body of this savage, savage beast is … a quarter of an inch long.”
    “Oh,” said Ellis. “That’s tiny.”
    “Isn’t it just?”
    Ellis thought on. “Really small …” he murmured, holding his thumb and finger a quarter of an inch apart and examining the gap.
    Denny put the spider book down. “Imagine how we look to a creature that tiny. Our horrible smelly flesh, our body sounding like an old boiler.”
    Ellis didn’t intend to, but he found himself picturing Ted Heath sitting in a cellar eating chips and smoking cigarettes and drinking Tizer and burping and farting and scratching himself.
    “Ellis