The Spider Truces Read Free

Denny O’Rourke’s career in the merchant navy, beginning in 1943, age sixteen, aboard the SS Papanui and ending in 1946 when his eyesight fell below acceptable standards for service. There’s a loose page inside, a temporary shore pass for Colombo Port, dated 15 November 1946.
    My dad was twenty then, Ellis thinks. Two years younger than me.
    He half closes his eyes and imagines being propelled across the sea, hugging the curvature of the earth, and arriving at Colombo Port. He sits there a while, in the heat, his image of the place indistinct and blinded by the sun. A wave breaks and he finds himself back home, listening to the shingle being dragged by its fingertips into the sea. It is a sound softened by its journey across the beach to Ellis’s house and it reminds him of the breeze that swept through the walnut trees on the morning his dad died. Joseph Reardon the farmer, who had been praying for Denny O’Rourke, told Ellis that the back door of the church flew open and a wind swept in at the exact time of Denny’s passing. Ellis doesn’t know what he thinks about that sort of thing but he does know that in the days and weeks that followed he and Chrissie received many letters and they sat shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, silently passing them back and forth until their bodies came to rest against each other and he felt a surge of love for his sister which found no expression and would inevitably dissolve as the day wore on. Jed, whom Ellis had never seen hold a pen, wrote a letter; Ellis, your dad was one of life’s good blokes. Not all of us can say that. Be happy. Jed . Ellis showed Jed’s letter to Chrissie and she handed an envelope to him in return.
    “Make sense of this,” she said. “Got it yesterday.”
    It was a card from Dino, a Maltese guy Chrissie slept with on and off for six months when she was doing a journalism course in London. Dino had written: Dearest Spaghetti and Ellis, my condolences at your sad loss. Love Dino . And try as they might, Ellis and Chrissie could not begin to recall what cryptic, spaghetti-related episode or in-joke had occurred between them back then that Dino had clearly never forgotten.
    “Did you ever tell him about the pasta spider webs?” Ellis asked.
    “No. We just fucked.”
    “You must have done. There’s no other possible explanation.”
    “I didn’t. I tend not to chat about you and your weirdness when I’m having sex. Maybe he was just writing a shopping list at the same time as the card and got confused.”
    “Write back to him,” Ellis said, “and tell him we were touched by his writing to us after dad had pasta-way.”
    They laughed until their stomachs hurt. Then they sat awhile in silence and thought their own thoughts and felt the taste of grief on their tongues and discovered that in the space of only a few days the taste had grown familiar and now it felt second-hand. Ellis shut his eyes and watched his father emerge from the bike shed at the cottage, carrying a bucket full of water. Denny swung the bucket round in wide circles above his head but none of the water fell out.
    “I thought he was a magician when he did that,” Ellis said. “Did you know how he did it or did you think he was a magician too?”
    “You’re doing that thing again,” Chrissie said.
    “What thing?”
    “That thing of having a conversation in your head and then bringing me in on it late. You’ve always done it. You’re so useless, Ellis. If you were the last man left on earth, you wouldn’t notice it for weeks.”
    She kissed him and left him to the freefall of random memories in his head.
     
     
    Another wave breaks. Ellis drops the Colombo Port shore pass back into the box and notices the dark scratched wood of a once familiar picture frame, in which is held a photograph of a lighthouse and a fishing boat run aground. He carries it outside and looks across the water to that same lighthouse and wreck. He watches the fishermen arrive at the huts in their