The Spider Truces by Tim Connolly Page B

fencing within new hedge lines of hornbeam, hazel and spindleberry. At the back of the orchard, he erected a tall panel fence to push the working men’s club out of reach and out of sight. But, to Ellis, the goings-on there became more exotic for being spied on through a knothole.
    Ellis watched his dad from the side lawn as the hills around the village turned to silhouette. He noticed that the old latch-gate in the fence beneath the conifers had been replaced by a fixed wooden panel. The discarded gate was propped against the trees, out of sight. It was mossy and rotten but Ellis had always liked it and considered it a veiled doorway to the world outside. The garden was enclosed now. There were no nooks and crannies left in the boundary, no loose timbers in rotten fencing, no gaps in the hedges, no hidden gates leading to the village green. The only way out was the driveway gate, in full view of the house, and that was shut.
    He peered in through Mafi’s kitchen window. There was a plate of meat cuttings on the table. His taste buds stirred in the knowledge that she would put that meat through the hand-cranked mincer and mix in some hard-boiled eggs and mustard, to make sandwich fillings. He walked along the cottage wall to Mafi’s living room, to knock on the window and ask for a sandwich. But he stopped and watched instead as she smoked a cigarette. She ran the palm of her non-smoking hand back and forth across the velveteen tablecloth. A deck of cards was laid out in front of her. She studied them and occasionally moved the cards. He watched the smoke rise in an ivory-white column from the ashtray to the light bulb overhead. The bulb sent back a rim of bright light which caught Mafi in a halo and revealed the shape of her bare head through her thinning white hair. Ellis thought of skulls, skeletons and X-rays from school books, and in a moment of lucidity he grasped the idea that Mafi was an animal with body parts and a shell to protect them and that her shell was growing old and would, one day, break down. He imagined her old naked body and he squirmed. His appetite was gone.
    Denny called out to him from beneath the willow tree.
    “Look, dear boy!”
    “What?” Ellis wandered down to him.
    “Watch.” Denny held his thumb across the hose and created a spray of water which revealed a dewy sheet of spider webs in the wire squares of fencing.
    Ellis grimaced. “I’ll show you something then,” he said, opening the front gate and stepping on to the lane. Denny followed him to a dense, low beech hedge which lined the track into Treasure Island Woods. Ellis crouched down and peered at the hedge with one eye closed.
    “Look from here,” he told his dad.
    Denny lowered himself to Ellis’s height where the low, pink dusk light unveiled strands of silk bunting, which fluttered horizontally in the breeze.
    “You can only see them first thing and last thing, when the sun’s low,” Ellis said authoritatively.
    “Well done,” his dad whispered.
    “I’m not saying I like them.”
    “Of course …”
    “Do you want to see Treasure Island?” Ellis asked.
    “It’s getting dark,” his dad said.
    “Don’t be scared,” Ellis said encouragingly.
    Denny O’Rourke smiled to himself.
    “What?” Ellis asked.
    “Nothing.”
    They followed Ellis’s own footprints into the woods until the footprints disappeared into a stream. They trudged through the stream, and laughed when their wellingtons were breached and their feet squelched. The stream joined another rivulet and twisted beneath steep banks of mossy clay until it reached a pool. Four streams ran out from the far side of the pool. Two headed into the fields and two ran through the woods either side of the track to Reardon’s farm. A small mossy hillock sat in the middle of the pool with a cluster of rotten tree stumps to sit on. This was Treasure Island and to Ellis and Gary Bird it was a place of infinite adventure.
    Denny sat there and Ellis explained the