battered trucks. Towzer Temple leans heavily against his boat and coughs himself awake. He takes a banana from his coat pocket and eats it. He delves into the same pocket and pulls out an old crisp packet, which he seems surprised to have found. He makes a chute out of the packet and pours the crisps into his mouth, pulling a sour face as he tastes them. Lazily, he kicks the side of his boat, betraying their stale marriage, and pulls a bottle from the other coat pocket, and starts to drink.
A few hundred yards away, the tide snakes around the wreck of the Bessie Swan . Ellis watches it curiously, as if he’s arranged to meet someone there but can’t remember who.
Perhaps, he tells himself, if I swam out there …
But he knows he will not do it.
If I walked out of the house and across the beach without stopping and dived in and swam there and back and ran straight home and dried myself in front of the fire, I’d have done something extraordinary. I’d have pushed myself. Kick-started my system. If I did it once, I could do it again the next day, and again, and I’d do it every day, it would become second nature and I’d be a different person, the sort of person who did that every day. My life would have changed.
But he’s not able to change it. He’s too busy. Too busy playing tunes on his shrimping net, watching his neighbour’s washing loop the loop in the wind, seeking out pebbles with perfect holes, lying beneath the lighthouse and watching it sway. Too busy photographing clouds when the colour of crimson bleeds into them at dusk. Too busy waiting. Too busy keeping watch.
He takes from the metal box something unfamiliar. It looks like a blue plastic cigarette, and when he picks it up the plastic unravels and Ellis sees that it is the long, thin wrapper of a packet of dried spaghetti, the sort Denny used to buy when Ellis was a child and pasta was as long as your arm. As long as your dad’s arm.
2
They made spider webs out of pasta in the drought of 1976, a calm time, before the need for boundaries or truces. Denny O’Rourke would lay a single piece of cooked spaghetti in a circle on an empty dinner plate. On a good day, Ellis manoeuvred it into the hexagonal shapes of the Uloborus as his dad’s deep, treacly voice encouraged him.
“There’s no building ever built as intricate and brilliant as a spider’s web …”
That dry summer, Great-aunt Mafi came with them on holiday. On a village green in Dorset they ate ice cream in the shade of a tree. The grass was brown and there were cracks in the earth the size of snakes. They stayed on the water’s edge on the estuary at Exmouth, in a bungalow made from two railway carriages. Three wooden steps led to a sandy beach with a palm tree. Ellis has a photograph of Mafi and Chrissie posing under the palm tree, holding fruit in their hair and laughing.
Denny drove them to Budleigh Salterton to see Jaws . He had taken them to see it earlier that summer but the queues were too long and they watched Earthquake on the second screen instead. The poster for Earthquake promised Rumble-O -Rama special effects that would make their seats shake, but the rumble never materialised.
“If I live to be a hundred and fifty years old, I’ll never see a worse actor than Charlton Heston,” Denny O’Rourke said on the way home. Then he laughed to himself, wound the window down and lit a cigarette.
“Could you?” Ellis asked, more than an hour later, when his dad kissed him goodnight.
“Could I what?”
“Live to be a hundred and fifty years old.”
“I’ll give it my best shot.”
There were no problems with spiders in Exmouth. Ellis didn’t think about them. He was too concerned about the sharks. On the last evening of the holiday, when Ellis finished saying his goodbyes to the sailboats on the beach and the lights of the Penzance train across the bay, he found Chrissie, Mafi and his dad waiting for him inside. He shook with fear, because they
A few hundred yards away, the tide snakes around the wreck of the Bessie Swan . Ellis watches it curiously, as if he’s arranged to meet someone there but can’t remember who.
Perhaps, he tells himself, if I swam out there …
But he knows he will not do it.
If I walked out of the house and across the beach without stopping and dived in and swam there and back and ran straight home and dried myself in front of the fire, I’d have done something extraordinary. I’d have pushed myself. Kick-started my system. If I did it once, I could do it again the next day, and again, and I’d do it every day, it would become second nature and I’d be a different person, the sort of person who did that every day. My life would have changed.
But he’s not able to change it. He’s too busy. Too busy playing tunes on his shrimping net, watching his neighbour’s washing loop the loop in the wind, seeking out pebbles with perfect holes, lying beneath the lighthouse and watching it sway. Too busy photographing clouds when the colour of crimson bleeds into them at dusk. Too busy waiting. Too busy keeping watch.
He takes from the metal box something unfamiliar. It looks like a blue plastic cigarette, and when he picks it up the plastic unravels and Ellis sees that it is the long, thin wrapper of a packet of dried spaghetti, the sort Denny used to buy when Ellis was a child and pasta was as long as your arm. As long as your dad’s arm.
2
They made spider webs out of pasta in the drought of 1976, a calm time, before the need for boundaries or truces. Denny O’Rourke would lay a single piece of cooked spaghetti in a circle on an empty dinner plate. On a good day, Ellis manoeuvred it into the hexagonal shapes of the Uloborus as his dad’s deep, treacly voice encouraged him.
“There’s no building ever built as intricate and brilliant as a spider’s web …”
That dry summer, Great-aunt Mafi came with them on holiday. On a village green in Dorset they ate ice cream in the shade of a tree. The grass was brown and there were cracks in the earth the size of snakes. They stayed on the water’s edge on the estuary at Exmouth, in a bungalow made from two railway carriages. Three wooden steps led to a sandy beach with a palm tree. Ellis has a photograph of Mafi and Chrissie posing under the palm tree, holding fruit in their hair and laughing.
Denny drove them to Budleigh Salterton to see Jaws . He had taken them to see it earlier that summer but the queues were too long and they watched Earthquake on the second screen instead. The poster for Earthquake promised Rumble-O -Rama special effects that would make their seats shake, but the rumble never materialised.
“If I live to be a hundred and fifty years old, I’ll never see a worse actor than Charlton Heston,” Denny O’Rourke said on the way home. Then he laughed to himself, wound the window down and lit a cigarette.
“Could you?” Ellis asked, more than an hour later, when his dad kissed him goodnight.
“Could I what?”
“Live to be a hundred and fifty years old.”
“I’ll give it my best shot.”
There were no problems with spiders in Exmouth. Ellis didn’t think about them. He was too concerned about the sharks. On the last evening of the holiday, when Ellis finished saying his goodbyes to the sailboats on the beach and the lights of the Penzance train across the bay, he found Chrissie, Mafi and his dad waiting for him inside. He shook with fear, because they
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