The Spider Truces Read Online Free PDF Page A

jobs to do on the cottage.
    Ellis would follow his dad upstairs and sit on the bed whilst Denny changed into his “messy clothes”. More often than not, Ellis would examine the framed photograph on Denny O’Rourke’s bedside table. It had always been there, in the old house too. It was a black and white image of a lighthouse on a shingle shoreline. In the foreground was a length of railing from a ship’s deck and between the railing and the shore, surrounded by a choppy sea, was a sandbank upon which a fishing boat had run aground.
    “What was the name of your ship?”
    “You know. You’ve asked me a million times.”
    “Don’t exaggerate. The Hororata . And you drank a lot of rum all the time.”
    “Only the once.”
    “How old were you, again?”
    Denny stamped his feet into his work boots and beamed his son a smile. “Seventeen, when I drank the rum.”
    “Seventeen is only four more than Chrissie,” Ellis said.
    Denny’s face altered a little, the way it did before he changed the direction of a conversation.
    “The great thing about having no carpets in this house yet, Ellis, is that I can wear my boots indoors and not get told off.” He grinned and headed out of the room.
    “Who’s going to tell you off?” Ellis asked.
    Denny faltered but kept on walking. Ellis followed him down to the utility room where antique ledge and brace doors were stacked up on Denny’s workbench, ready for planing. Ellis watched his dad measure up the doorframes in the hallway and repeat the measurements under his breath, “74 by 38, 74 by 38, 74 by 38 …”
    “34, 78, 44, 68, 78, 34 …” Ellis whispered.
    “You little sod!” Denny said, and chased Ellis into the orchard where he tickled him purple and left him for dead in the old goose bath.
    Returning inside, Denny noticed that damp stains had appeared on the hallway ceiling.
    “Bugger!” he muttered. He rolled up his sleeves and sat on the bottom stair to think. Ellis joined him, breathless from laughing. He stroked the hairs on his dad’s arm, his fingers dwarfed by the contours of muscles and veins.
    “Change of plan, dear boy,” Denny said. “I’m going to need your help. We’re going into the attic.”
    There were three attics in the cottage. The one immediately above the top of the stairs was the least interesting, in Ellis’s opinion. The water tank was in it but the rafters were bare so nothing was stored up there. The second attic was known as “the hatch” and Ellis was the only one small enough to do anything useful inside it. Entry to it was through a hatch in a cupboard used to store suitcases. Inside the hatch, the roof was vast and slanting but claustrophobically low. Even Ellis could only fit in on his hands and knees. Denny directed his son across the rafters until he was kneeling directly above the hallway ceiling, but Ellis found no sign of dripping water.
    “You sure?” his dad asked.
    “Yup!” Ellis confirmed proudly.
    He sat next to his dad in the suitcase cupboard whilst Denny deliberated what to do. It was like being in a tent together, where everything was gentle and close-up, especially the faint growling noises Denny made when he was thinking long and hard.
     
     
    The following Saturday, Denny removed the Kent peg tiles from the dilapidated garage in which Mafi kept her Morris Minor and used them to replace the damaged ones on the roof of the cottage.
    “But there weren’t any leaks in the hatch attic,” Ellis protested, from the bottom of the ladder.
    He got no reply. His dad was preoccupied. Chrissie had been gone for a few hours and he didn’t know where. When she showed up for lunch, Denny was subdued and attempted to find out where she’d been without asking her directly, a process that amused Mafi.
    “You’ll always be very careful, won’t you?” he said to Chrissie, out of nowhere. “When we’re not all together. Don’t do anything silly or unusual, will you?”
    His voice was grave but not unkind. He