"It is like me! It"s exactly like me. We have to move house!"
"Well, we"re not moving! So get dressed and come down for breakfast."
Chrissie followed her dad to the kitchen.
"Nice one, Dad. What a hero!"
"Help me get the breakfast, Chrissie. We"re all late."
"Dad, look, I don"t particularly like spiders either but I don"t talk to them and demand meetings with their elders. Ellis does. So telling him to snap out of it really doesn"t cut the mustard. You"re going to have to be more creative."
"I"m not creative."
"Then get creative!"
And because Chrissie sounded like her mother, her challenge stuck with Denny, though at first he had no idea how to rise to it. When an idea did come to him, he bought a book about spiders, did some research and took notes in his unreadable handwriting. But when he thought about putting the idea to Ellis, when he imagined saying it out loud, he felt foolish and hoped instead that in time Ellis would forget his fear.
One evening soon after, when Denny went to Ellis"s bedroom to say goodnight, he found the room empty. A glow of light outside drew Denny to the window, where he saw the children"s tent erected, unsteadily, on the side lawn.
Denny stopped a few yards short of the tent and peered in. Ellis was reading a Whizzer and Chips annual by the light of a kerosene lamp. He had blankets above and beneath him. Denny crawled in on his hands and knees and lay on his stomach, beside his son.
"Evening."
Ellis smiled.
"Having fun?"
Ellis nodded and returned to his reading.
Denny watched him for a while and then he left the tent and circled it, moving the pegs further out and pushing them firmly into the ground. Ellis watched the canvas tauten around him then listened to Denny go back inside the cottage. There were two large house spiders in opposite corners of Ellis"s bedroom, down by the skirting board. Denny cupped them in his hands, one at a time, and ushered them out of the bedroom window.
"They"re gone," he called out.
"Don"t care," the glowing tent called back. "Never going inside again. Never ever."
Denny wrapped up warm and took a chair outside where he guarded the tent from a distance, without Ellis knowing. At nine o"clock Mafi joined him for a cigarette and together they watched Ellis"s shadow put the book aside and turn off the lamp. Later, Denny scooped his sleeping son up and laid him in his bed.
Mafi had poured Denny a gla.s.s of whisky.
"You"ve got to be pretty unhappy about spiders to take yourself outside to sleep, all alone, at his age," she said.
"Yes ..." Denny said. He was distant. "I did think of one thing, but ..."
"But what?" Mafi asked.
"I really don"t know if it will help him."
"Don"t know until you"ve tried. What is it?"
Denny shook his head. "It feels a bit silly."
"Try me," Mafi said.
Denny remained tentative. "What I thought of is an "agreement". It sounds ludicrous, but a sort of agreement between us and ..." He laughed at himself. "An agreement between us and them. Based on a little science and a little mopping up of stray spiders on your and my part."
"Sounds good."
Denny blushed and hid his face in his hands.
"What are you worried about?" Mafi asked.
"I"m too embarra.s.sed to put it to him, so I don"t know what to do."
"Embarra.s.s yourself," Mafi said.
"I"ll pay you 50p to empty this shed."
Gary Bird opened the shed door and peered inside.
"Easy," Gary said. "Show me the 50p first though."
"I"ll give it to you up front. You"re my best friend. I trust you."
Gary looked at Ellis suspiciously and then at the shed again. "What do you mean exactly, empty?"
"Take the mower and the cans and everything else out and put it on the path. Just leave the shelves and the shed."
"Obviously. I can"t take the shed out of the shed."
"I"ll wait inside."
"Am I going to get b.o.l.l.o.c.ked?" Gary asked.
"There"s no one here," Ellis a.s.sured him.
Gary weighed this up. Fifty pence was worth a b.o.l.l.o.c.king, even though Ellis was now proceeding to pay him in 2p pieces, which were going to be annoyingly bulky in his pocket.
When Gary had finished, he found Ellis upstairs.
"Done it."
"Was there much activity?"
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing. Is it completely empty?"
"Yes, except for the shed. The shed"s still in the shed. Why do you want it empty?"
"I"m going to paint it."
"So, why didn"t you empty it yourself?"
"I"m saving my energy for the painting. See you later."
"I"ll help you paint."
"No, I"d better do it on my own. You go to Bridget"s and start spending that money."
Gary Bird knew when he was being got rid of. He waved goodbye to Ellis, walked down the rutted driveway, as if returning to his house across the lane, and then double-backed up the alleyway alongside the cottage and watched from there. Ellis appeared from Mafi"s garage with a cardboard box full of newspaper. He dropped a yellow can of cigarette-lighter fuel into the cardboard box, set fire to the newspaper and threw the box into the shed. At this point, Gary ran, as fast as the twenty-five coins in his front pocket allowed him.
The simplest ideas are sometimes the best. But sometimes they"re just the simplest.
"What do you mean you just found it on fire?" Denny stood with the contents of his shed at his feet and a smoking black scar, where the shed had been, nearby.
"Someone must have, you know ..." Ellis said, shrugging his shoulders.
"So, what we have here is a vandal who burns down people"s sheds but he likes to empty them first so as not to damage the contents."
"Or a she ..." Ellis said, "it could be a woman."
Ellis smiled, satisfied that he had distanced Gary from the crime scene by raising the spectre of a female arsonist. He was blissfully unaware that Gary was not in the frame and that there was one suspect and one suspect only. Denny smiled and discovered that he could not feel angry about this. Ellis motioned towards the cottage, a little unnerved by the peaceful expression on his dad"s face, and said, "Well, I"ve got a busy day so I"ll be in my room if you want me."
Denny and Mafi watched Ellis wander inside.
"Denny," the old lady said. "Might I suggest you embarra.s.s yourself with that truce idea before Ellis burns down the cottage."
Ellis was confused. Any ten year old would be. He"d been told to sit up for Sunday lunch but there was no food on the table.
"Is lunch ready?" he asked tentatively.
"In a moment or two," Mafi said.
Denny laid a sheet of paper down in front of him, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat.
"Right then ..." he murmured, laughing nervously under his breath and blushing. "Ellis, I"ve been in discussions with the spiders, on your behalf."
This didn"t shock Ellis. He had, after all, been talking to them for over a year.
"They"re as upset as you that you don"t get along."
"Did they say that?"
Denny nodded. "They"ve proposed an agreement and I think it"s a sensible one. Do you want to hear it?"
Ellis nodded.
"During the winter, when you tend to spend more time indoors, they"ve agreed to mostly withdraw from the cottage and leave you alone. What they said was that because there aren"t many insects about in winter anyway to be caught in their webs ..."
Ellis swallowed sickly at the thought.
"... they will pretty well stop spinning their webs in the cottage in winter, and if any did accidentally appear then, during the winter, it"s permitted for us to take them down."
"Where are they going to live?"
"They will be allowed run of the downstairs toilet, which you never use anyway. But, mostly, they"ve agreed to hibernate outdoors, in the soil or under the leaves."
"Ace!" Ellis said.
His dad continued, "But, Ellis, this is a two-way street. One of the conditions is that you will learn about them. I"ll teach you; we all will. You learn what an incredible species they are, just like humans. This is important. I"ve bought a book we can learn from."
"I cannot look at pictures of them!"
"OK, but you"ll have to listen. This is a condition of the agreement, Ellis."
Denny looked down at his notes and read from them, his voice more formal than he had wanted it to be.
"Spiders are incredible creatures, Ellis, and everyone concerned wants you to understand that. For instance, the hunting spiders that have agreed to spend the winter in the garden, they have a thing called glycerol in them and it"s an antifreeze, like we put in the car radiator. It"s so clever, they have antifreeze in their bodies and in their eggs too, so that"s how they can survive the winter out there. Some of the others will build themselves nice warm sleeping bags with their own silk."
"That"s clever," Ellis conceded.
"Very clever," agreed Mafi.
Denny continued, "I have told the spiders how nervous you are of them. As I said, they were very sorry to hear it."
"They really said that?"
"They did," Chrissie said.
"Part of the agreement, though, is that you think about all the dangers they face and all the creatures they are frightened of. As you learn about this, I"m sure that the last thing you will want to be is another one of the animals harming them every day, don"t you think?"
Ellis didn"t respond. He didn"t want to give any ground without being sure what he was agreeing to.
"Did you know that spiders stroke each other, Ellis?" Mafi asked encouragingly.
"They eat each other too," he responded.
Denny intervened. "Well, that"s true, yes, but not often. Not most of them. It"s a complicated business, but ... where was I?" He returned to his notes. "Yes, that"s it ... I"m sure you don"t want to join the long list of things that harm spiders, do you, Ellis? Starlings and robins like to eat spiders, so do the blue t.i.ts we encourage with the monkey-nut strings. Frogs and toads eat thousands of spiders. Spiders are under attack from all these things all the time, Ellis, and they have to live somewhere."
Ellis"s face lit up. "We could dig a pond in the garden and have frogs and toads in it, loads of them."
"No fear!" Mafi said.
"That would just drive the spiders into the house," Chrissie said.
"Then have the frogs in the house."
"Mafi hates frogs," Chrissie countered.