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 wore the same expectant faces they had worn five years earlier, moments before they told him he would never see his mother again.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Sit down,” his dad said.

Denny made a joke of squashing his children as he sat on the sofa between them.

“Take a look at this,” he said.

He showed them a colour photograph of an old tile-hung cottage with a large cherry tree and a weeping willow in the front garden.

“Who lives here?” Chrissie asked.

“An old man and his wife,” said her dad.

“It’s pretty,” Ellis said.

“Yes,” Denny said, “it’s very pretty but it’s pretty worn out too. It needs a lot of time spent on it to make it good again. But it’s quite big and there’s a lovely garden and an orchard and lots of space.” Then Denny added softly, “Space to play in.”

Chrissie flung her arms round her father and they tumbled back on the sofa.

“What?” Ellis asked. “What’s going on?”

Denny pulled his son to him and whispered in his ear.

“Would you like to move out of Orpington and live in a beautiful village surrounded by farmland, in this house?”

Ellis whispered back, “Yes. Please.” And in an act that left his father speechless, Ellis crossed the room and hid behind his Great-aunt Mafi, burying his head against her back, because his happiness was more than he could bear.

Denny O’Rourke parked his Rover 110 at the top of Hubbards Hill and took photographs. His daughter and son stood beside him, taking in the view. The Kentish Weald opened out in front of them, wide and majestic, a ruffled quilt of fields watched over by majestic oak and trustworthy beech, their trunks dark in the low autumn sun.

The lane in front of him descended into the Weald, crossing a new main road built into the seam of the valley. By the bridge, a toll cottage with two chimneys watched begrudgingly over the fast new traffic beneath it. Beyond a church tower, amongst woodland and half hidden by the undulant fields, were the village rooftops. The village was surrounded on all sides by fields and farm buildings. Two giant silos rose side by side above the tree line. Beyond them, ripples of countryside overlapped in shades of green and brown and yellow towards the Crowborough Beacon and beyond that was the faint outline of the South Downs on the horizon.

Ellis looked into the expanse and pictured Great-aunt Mafi threading her way along an invisible network of lanes from the coast.

“She’s out there, somewhere,” he said. “I am looking at where she is but I can’t see her.”

Denny smiled. “Ready?” he asked, ushering Chrissie and Ellis back to the car.

“Yes!” said Chrissie. “Very, very ready!”

“Ready for what?” Ellis asked.

His dad shrugged and smiled happily. “Everything,” he said, “everything.”

When the car drew to a halt again, they were in a narrow lane. To the left of them was a short row of council houses in the shade of a beech tree. Denny leant forward in his seat and sunlight flooded into the back of the car. Ellis put his hand up to shade his eyes and saw, to his right, emerging from the glare, a garden with a weeping willow, a tall cherry tree, and beyond them the cottage in the photograph. Their new home. A home without the ghost.

The cottage had welcoming eyes and a low fringe of Kent peg tiles. The leaves that had settled around the walls were oak and cherry and cobnut. At the bottom of the garden they were willow and Ellis threw a pile of them above his head into a small, short-lived cloud. If laughter had a colour in October 1976, it was pale yellow, the colour of weeping willow leaves in mid-air.

“Look, Mafi!” Ellis said, pointing up into the willow tree. “Look at those two big branches. They look like Felix the Cat running fast!”

Mafi looked up.

“See it?” he urged her.

“Yes, I think so.”

Ellis stared happily at his discovery and Mafi looked happily at him.

“We never ever get to see a tree from the top down, do we?” Ellis said.

“We don’t. You’re right.”

“What I would have for my ninth birthday if I could is to be able to fly.”

“Me too, for my seventy-ninth!”

“Why can’t we fly?”

“It’s technical, I think. No wings and all that.”

“There must be a good, you know, there must be a … why we can’t, a …”

Ellis looked skywards and scrunched up his face, the way he did when he couldn’t think of a word.

“A reason why?”

“Yes! There must be a reason why we’re not allowed to fly. Something we’re not supposed to see.”

She held her hand out to him.

“Let’s go for a walk and get our bearings,” she said.

From the high point of the village green they watched people come and go. Ellis introduced himself to the rolling hills distributed equally to the north, south, east and west of the village.

“Is this our bearings?” he asked his great-aunt.

Mafi kissed Ellis on the head. He had no idea why.

At the lower end of the village, the old forge was a petrol station that had room for one car at a time. Opposite it, by the bus stop, was Ivan’s greengrocers with tiered counter displays covered in rolls of plastic grass. Whilst Mafi set up her account, Ellis ran his fingers through the grass and wondered how plastic was grown. He would feel that grass beneath his hand hundreds of times in the next decade. He would wave to William Rutton the butcher just as many times and Carrie Combe would wink at him from her window in the middle of the village as many times again. Carrie had a hairdressers in her front room. There was space for two blow-dryers, and every other Thursday morning Mafi occupied one of them immediately after collecting her pension. Carrie was round and busty and pretty and was the first person in the village to have an Afro. She had a beauty spot above her lip and it was this that Ellis would stare at when she cut his hair. Sometimes, after a haircut, he would go to the bench on the village green and wonder why Carrie Combe’s beauty spot was called that of all things. Often, when he didn’t notice it growing dark, traces of crimson would paint themselves into the evening sky, and by the time he got home the sky above Ide Hill would be emblazoned with blood-coloured clouds. He pictured himself searching for a seam in the crimson sunset and when he found it he unpicked the stitches and peered through to the other side, and his mum was waiting for him there.

It was before they moved to the village, during the strange times in Orpington when Ellis was four years old, that Mafi began to visit frequently, to babysit the children and wake Ellis each morning with the words, “Let me see those beautiful big blue eyes.”

The first time she visited, she sat on the edge of Ellis’s bed reading The Water Babies. Over her shoulder, in the corridor beyond the bedroom door, a policewoman and a man in a suit walked past. The man in the suit supported Denny O’Rourke by the arm and the policewoman held Denny’s hand. When Ellis saw that his dad was crying he looked away to a green-ink illustration of a water-baby kissing the hand of Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. He never wanted to see his dad cry again, and nor would he have to, not for a very long time.

Mafi was born in 1899 on the day of the relief of Mafe-king. She was the youngest daughter of Henry King of Ilford and he christened his daughter May Ada Florence Enid. For nearly eighty years, M. A. F. E. King had been known as Mafi, pronounced Maffy.

She had no big toes. They were amputated long before Ellis was born. Whenever he thinks of Mafi he starts with this fact, as if he is telling someone who never knew her.

“The first thing I should say is that Mafi had no big toes. The next thing I want you to know about her is that she lived on the south Kent coast where she was landlady of the Gate Inn. She taught me how to play cribbage when I was seven and she took me for walks along the Military Canal.”

Her big toes were amputated because of her circulation but it didn’t do the trick. She left the pub and went to her best friend’s house on the hill, looking across the Channel to France. She was told she would die within a year. That was twenty years before the holiday in Exmouth. Now her best friend had died and Mafi was moving on, with the slow, stiff walk she had, and a handkerchief up her sleeve to wipe away her tears when she laughed. Moving on to live with her nephew and his two children in a creaky old cottage in the Kentish Weald where she had her own bedsit and kitchen in one corner of the downstairs. Chrissie named it “MafiKingdom”.

“If you try to move me to a new school I’ll tell everyone you’re on LED,” Chrissie warned, even though the subject of school hadn’t been mentioned.

“LSD,” Denny corrected her, politely.

“I’m thirteen and I have my friends! This is 1976, not 1876, children have rights.”

“I’ve no intention of moving you from your school.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Denny O’Rourke turned to his son. “Nor you.”

Ellis shrugged. He had no strong opinion on the subject. His school in Orpington was acceptable because there was swimming once a week and his enormous capacity for daydreaming was tolerated. His teacher had a habit of reminding him he wasn’t particularly good at anything, a view that Chrissie reinforced from time to time, but he didn’t seem to get in trouble for being ungifted so he didn’t care. More important, there was the deal which he and his dad had struck. When Ellis reached the age of thirteen, they had agreed, he would be allowed to cycle from the cottage to Hildenborough station and catch the train to Orpington each day. Alone. This was the sort of freedom and adventure Ellis dreamed of. He would go to the Wimpy bar with his friends after school and they would look on in admiration as he headed off to the train station for his epic journey home. Alone. A girlfriend would soon result, surely, and she’d have a mum who would smell the way a mum smells and she’d stroke the fringe up off Ellis’s forehead, as a matter of habit, from time to time.

Life was getting good again at nearly nine, Ellis thought, but at thirteen it was going to be simply fantastic.

Denny gave his son a Brazilian football kit on his ninth birthday. Ellis tore off his clothes and put it on and ran down the corridor to show Mafi. As he did so, he dropped the tin mouse Chrissie had given him. The mouse was grey with red plastic wheels, a shiny black tail and painted-on whiskers, and it was small enough to bury in the grip of your hand. It was still lying on the floor when Chrissie got back from school. That night, she slumped down heavily on Ellis’s bed and grimaced at him.

“Goodnight, Smelly-Ellie. Happy birthday,” she said abruptly.

“Night-night …” he ventured, unsure of her tone.

“I threw your tin mouse somewhere you’ll never find it and if you tell Dad I’ll just deny it and insist that you’re making the whole thing up and who do you think he’s going to believe?”

“Me?”

“No, stupid. Me. Because I’m thirteen and you’re only nine and five hours.”

“Where did you put it?”

“I didn’t put it anywhere. I threw it away and you’ll never find it, so forget it.”

“Why did you take my tin mouse back?”

“I didn’t take it back, you left it on the floor and I heard you tell Mafi it was a boring present.”

“I didn’t mean it. Can I have it back please?”

“Too late. You should learn to be more grateful.”

Chrissie went to her room, and as Ellis listened to the floorboards creak beneath her feet his eyes strayed to the attic hatch above his bed. Not for the first time, he thought he saw the hatch door open and spiders emerge. He buried himself under the bedclothes and called out, “I’m not scared of you but you ought to be scared of me. Look at the size of me.”

“Stop hiding and we’ll see the size of you,” they replied.

Ellis couldn’t think of a response to that. He listened to his own thudding heart and reminded himself what his Great-aunt Mafi had told him. Before houses existed, spiders in England lived in caves. Nowadays, old houses are the same as caves from a spider’s point of view.

And the problem, Ellis thought to himself, is that the house my dad has moved us into is a really, really old house. But I’ve got to remember they’re only here because they think it’s a cave. It’s nothing personal.

“I’m going to let you off,” he called out. “But don’t think I’ll be so lenient next time.”

He made himself an air hole and slept beneath the sheets.

When they lit the first fire of winter, the flames reflected in a glass-fronted cabinet which held trinkets, glasses, and china that Denny O’Rourke’s father had collected from all over the world.

“Now it’s home …” Denny purred.

An oil tank was installed at the back of the cottage and a new boiler in the walk-in cupboard in the kitchen. When the boiler men drove away, Mafi wedged the driveway gate open.

“I think it’s more friendly to leave that gate open seeing as we’ve just moved in,” she told Denny.

He shovelled a heap of left-over coal into potato sacks, which Ellis held open. They hosed the coal shed down and, it being Ellis’s bath time anyway, his dad soaked him through until Ellis nearly laughed himself sick. Mafi and Chrissie whitewashed the walls and the coal shed became the bike shed and the place for stacking up anything to be burnt. Sunday evenings was the time for bonfires and a charred pile established itself in the far corner of the orchard, next to the compost heap. A path to it was worn in the grass. Mafi kept her distance as glow-worms and grass snakes and toads lived around the compost and she welcomed them as readily as Ellis welcomed spiders.

Chrissie would stray from the bonfire and look through the back hedge to the working men’s club. It was an old wooden pavilion, patched with corrugated iron. There was a skittles alley out the back which had a tin roof but was open at the sides. From a vantage point beneath the hedge, where they lay on their bellies, Chrissie and Ellis watched the skittles matches and other less clear transactions between the men, in which money and goods and whispers were exchanged. Saturday and Sunday evenings, when women were allowed, were occasionally rowdy and Ellis heard noises which he could not account for and his sister declined to explain.

She often spent time alone there, hidden within the gnarled old hedge, hugging her knees to her chin, watching the inanimate wooden building. When she caught herself thinking of the change that had entered their lives with their mother’s leaving, she would scold herself and some force would rear up in her, a defiance in a girl with no previous inclination to defy, an instinct to push blindly towards wherever the new boundaries might be. The tools with which she pushed were not unique to her. Cigarettes and attitude. Harmless boys and dangerous girlfriends. Things that did not truly interest her but appeared to be what she ought to show interest in, because the previous things were those of a girl’s life and she couldn’t pretend to herself that she was a girl any more.

With Ellis she was sometimes censorious and other times tender as she responded unsurely to the instinct to protect him and the temptation to stifle him and preserve the adoring little brother that suited her well.

She liked to make a mug of tea for her dad when he returned from work and then leave him alone. Denny drank his tea at the kitchen table, sitting in his shirt and braces, with his suit jacket hanging on the kitchen door. Sometimes he would stare into space, his top lip resting on the rim of the mug. Other times, he drew sketches of the renovations he had in mind and wrote lists, in unintelligibly small handwriting, of 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 said it as if the thought was a new one but Chrissie had heard it from him often in the last five years. She smiled at him reassuringly.

“No sweat, Dad.”

“I’m allowed to do silly things though, aren’t I, because I’m only nine?” Ellis asked.

“We can do silly things when we’re all together, at home, safe and sound,” his dad answered.

“But I still don’t get why you are putting tiles up there when there wasn’t any drips,” Ellis said, faithful to his own unique train of thought.

“I know, Ellis, but somewhere that roof is damaged and hopefully this’ll do the trick.”

“But what if it doesn’t?”

“I’ll have to sell you to the slave trade to raise money to employ a roofer.”

Chrissie laughed, whilst Ellis weighed up whether or not he liked the sound of this.

“I wouldn’t mind being a slave if it was in some interesting country.”

“You’re my slave,” Denny reminded him.

“Then you ought to pay me!”

“You don’t pay slaves, you spaz,” Chrissie said.

“Charmingly put,” Mafi said. “What have you been up to, Chrissie? I haven’t seen you all morning.”

“I’ve cured the common cold, cut a hit LP, written to Idi Amin about his diet and concocted a formula to rid the world of Communism which I’ll unveil after lunch.”

“Chrissie?” Denny said.

“Yes, Daddio?”

“Remember late 1973?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“That was the last time you gave a straight answer to a question.”

Chrissie opened her mouth to rattle off a response but couldn’t come up with anything. Her dad smiled, victorious, and she buried her head in his chest with a stupid smile. Mafi reached for her handkerchief. Her watery eyes spoke only of how she loved being part of this nonsense.

“In 1973 I was six,” said Ellis, counting his fingers. “But now I’m nine.”

Chrissie stared at him bug-eyed. “Reeeeally, Ellis? Do keep us informed!”

His children were still wrestling on the front lawn as Denny O’Rourke surveyed the roof from the foot of the driveway. Their screaming and laughter filled the air. He smiled to himself and leant back against the gatepost and as he did so he felt the breath of a woman on his neck.

“You must be the widower.”

Denny turned. The middle-aged woman standing far too close to him was handsome, a rural version of elegant, with shining eyes that swallowed him whole. Her voice was throaty and coarse and she stared into him as she spoke.

“Yes. Very nice indeed. I see what they mean.”

An impulse Denny had not hosted for half a decade was upon him. He introduced himself and learned that she was Bridget and she ran the village shop that formed a triangle at the foot of the green with the post office and the pub.

“Come in and set up your account. If the shop’s empty, just come straight upstairs.”

She pressed her hands against her rib cage and filled her lungs, in a gesture of her appreciation of this crisp winter’s day that left Denny helpless but to imagine the strong, full, impressive physique beneath her clothing. For a moment, as Bridget watched the children, Denny let himself fall deep into her body.

“Yes. Very nice …” she repeated, and left.

Denny found his son and daughter staring at him. Ellis burst into laughter that made his face vibrate. Chrissie stared angrily at him and said, “NO!”

Denny shook his head dismissively and smiled, swatting away her fears and his own lust. He kicked the wedge from beneath the driveway gate and let it swing shut behind him as he returned to work. Ellis followed him inside.

The third attic in the cottage was above Ellis’s bedroom, the door to it directly over his pillows, and it was where family heirlooms, Christmas decorations and dressing-up rags and costumes were stored. Ellis found his bed pushed aside and the ladders propped against the open attic door.

He called out, “Can I come up?”

“If you’re careful.”

The attic was long and narrow and low enough to force Denny on to his hands and knees. There was a bare light bulb hanging from the rafters, which blinded Ellis as he climbed in. He found his dad peering over the end wall. It was a strange wall, Ellis noticed, in that it didn’t reach the roof.

“What’s the other side of this wall?” Ellis whispered.

“I think this must be the join in the roof where they extended the cottage. The bit we’re in was added two hundred years ago but the other side of this wall is what was the original little house.”

Denny leant further over the wall and strained. “I think … that what I’m looking at, Ellis, is the slope of the original roof. It used to be on the outside of the cottage. It’s four hundred years old, Ellis. Think of that.”

“Older than Mafi.”

“Yes …”

“Has it got tiles on?” Ellis asked.

“They’d have taken them off and used them on the new roof. It’s just the timbers.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll tell you, Ellis,” Denny said, “there’s a helluva lot of roof on this old cottage. I hope there’re no nasty surprises.”

Ellis liked his dad saying things like “helluva” because he didn’t use words like that very often.

“It’s a really big house,” Ellis agreed. “Lots of nooks and crannies.”

Denny smiled to himself. There was something he liked about his nine-year-old son saying things like “nooks and crannies”.

“So, what room is under that old roof?” Ellis asked.

“My bedroom,” Denny said.

“Oh, yeah. Can I look?”

Denny lifted his son up to see over the wall. The bulb threw enough light to see the faint outline of the old, sloping roof. As Ellis’s eyes adjusted, a skeleton of rafters and beams materialised in front of him. The timbers disappeared into a well of blackness. He wondered what could be down there. It was the darkest, most unreachable place he could imagine a house to have. A place not originally intended to exist, brought about by change. If there are places one never goes, places that one would never ever have reason to find oneself in, if such places exist, then this well was one of them.