Free The Spider Truces by Tim Connolly

…”
    “Yes, Dad?”
    “Do you know what ‘infinite’ means?”
    “Sort of, not really though. I get the gist.”
    Ellis climbed out of the bath. Denny knelt and wrapped the towel around him and held him.
    “Infinity means never-ending,” Denny told him, “as big as for ever. This world is infinite and we are a tiny part of it. From space, you, Ellis O’Rourke, don’t even register as a speck, but down here you and your sister are the biggest thing in the world to me. You are infinite to me: there is no part of my world that you don’t touch. And yet, in the infinity of space, you and I are invisible. That’s what makes the world so amazing. Do you see?”
    Ellis didn’t see, but it reiterated two things to him. First, that a quarter-inch-long spider really shouldn’t be worth getting into a tizz over and, second, that he loved his dad more than anything in the world. More than Mafi and Chrissie put together. So he looked at his dad and said, “Yeah, I see,” and dished out one of his wide-eyed smiles, the sort that makes adults feel useful.
     
     
    That summer, Ellis took to standing on the compost heap until he was bitten by midges and horseflies, so that Mafi would rub cream on to his bites. When the holidays arrived, he usually chose a walk to the Rumpumps as his first excursion of the day. He tended to go alone because the Rumpumps, though it was about many things, was mainly about the train track and Ellis liked to look at trains alone and not have talking, the same way he prefers to go to the cinema alone nowadays and not discuss the film afterwards.
    He had to cross the bull field on Elsa’s farm to reach the Rumpumps and if the bull was on the near side of the two beech trees he didn’t dare go in and the trip was aborted. He struck various deals with the gods on his approach to the field. “I promise not to think about Virginia Wade’s knickers for a week if the bull can not be on the near side today …” And, more often than not, the gods would go along with it.
    In the next meadow, a cattle tunnel passed beneath the railway embankment. In the shadow of the embankment, a small stone bridge crossed a stream. This bridge, the stream, the cattle tunnel, the railway line and the surrounding copse was known by all the children in the village as the Rumpumps. Ellis didn’t know why then and he doesn’t now.
    The harbour train between Folkestone and London passed every fifteen minutes. The tracks chimed and vibrated and Ellis stood in the cattle tunnel to listen to the carriages pass overhead before scrambling up the embankment on to the tracks to watch the train recede.
    When he took his dad to see the Rumpumps for the first time, he assured him that he never went near the line. They hung by their knees from the iron railing on the stone bridge, with the sun glistening on the upside-down stream.
    “Your face is going red,” Ellis said.
    “Yours is purple.”
    Crack willow swayed in the warm August breeze and the sound of flowing water filled Ellis’s head. His dad’s hair was nearly in the stream and his glasses hung precariously off the bridge of his nose.
    “Give in?” Ellis asked.
    “Not on your nelly,” said his dad.
    Ellis reached for the water but his fingertips fell a few inches short.
    “Dad?”
    “Yup.”
    “Why do you go all quiet on Sunday evenings sometimes?”
    “The weekends go too fast for my liking.” Denny let his arms hang down too, plunging his hands and forearms into the cool water.
    “Dad?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Why don’t you marry your secretary?”
    “Her husband wouldn’t like it.”
    “Oh,” Ellis said. “I didn’t know she was married.”
    “I didn’t know you wanted me to get married.”
    “I don’t. Don’t know why I said it. I’d hate it if you got married.”
    “Then I promise I won’t.”
    “You know the photograph beside your bed, of the lighthouse and the shipwreck?”
    “Yes, dear boy.”
    “The water in that photograph, from all