In his dreams, Ellis walked through the cottage and found secret doorways to hidden rooms and stairways. For a few moments, upon waking, he’d believe they were real.

Behind Denny’s bed, set into a low wall beneath the slope of the old roof, there was a wooden door, three feet high, covered in syrupy black paint. And although it was just like the doors in his dreams, Ellis was scared of it. He saw it as a mouth that could eat him alive.

Pholcus phalangioides lived amongst the ceiling beams in the downstairs of the cottage. Back then, Ellis knew them simply as daddy-long-legs. He wasn’t too bothered by them as they showed no tendency to descend into his air space. Two Nuctenea umbratica took up residence over the front door. When winter came they ceased replenishing their webs but, by then, Ellis had taken to using the kitchen door instead.

The downstairs toilet had no door, just a temporary curtain destined to remain there for many years. Hanging from a nail in the wall was a paint-splattered cassette player with a tape of Strauss’s Four Last Songs in it. A drawn curtain and the sound of Strauss meant that the toilet was in use. This room was heavily inhabited by various orb-web spiders. Most of them were too small to see but their webs were in the angles of the doorframe, window and pipework. Ellis couldn’t go in there.

The garden shed was also a complete no-go area. It was jammed full with spiders and webs. The first, and only, time Ellis stepped inside it, he fainted. Mafi found him lying half in and half out of the shed and he was rushed to hospital, for fear of meningitis.

It angered Ellis that the shed was held by the spiders because it meant he couldn’t get his hands on all the things inside it, his outdoor toys and Denny’s tools, without asking either Mafi, Chrissie or his dad to go in there for him. He believed that the shed was where all the bad and deformed spiders lived. It was the home of the lawless. The spiders there were freakishly large and jet black in colour; they sat around playing Russian roulette. They ate each other without a care and were weighed down by weird growths. The shed was the wild west of the spider world. Ellis couldn’t even walk past it. He had to run at full speed and as he did so he’d shout bitterly, “You are leper spiders, so rubbish they won’t even let you live in the cottage. Everyone hates you! I’m not scared of you!”

At night, he heard sounds of movement which had no explanation. Asking about the creaks and groans in the cottage caused his dad to tense up or change the subject, the same way as asking about his mum, and in the absence of an explanation Ellis suspected that the noises were spiders turning in their sleep. The creaks grew noisier in the second winter as a freezing cold January was met by an unusually mild February. April showers arrived a month early and set in for three weeks, by the end of which the hallway ceiling was turning brown again with water marks. Denny O’Rourke cursed the stains and Ellis knew not to bother him.

Ellis went to his sister’s room but the door was locked.

“Let me in.”

“No thanks,” Chrissie said, from the other side of the door.

“Please.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“Dad’s got us a puppy!”

Ellis listened to a crashing sound as Chrissie fell off her chair, thundered across the room, grappled with the lock and flung the door open.

“Where?” she said breathlessly.

Ellis stepped into her room and threw himself down on the bed.

“Let’s do something,” he said, lazily.

She glared at him. “Have we got a puppy?”

“No. I’m bored. Do you wanna do something together?”

Chrissie skulked back to her desk.

“Yeah. I’d like to play with our puppy, you horrible little pile of dogshit. Go and bother Dad.”

“He’s fixing the roof. It’s falling down, apparently.”

“Fascinating,” she said, and returned to her work.

“Why are you always in your room doing homework nowadays?” he asked.

“They’re called O levels and they’re the devil’s work,” she replied. “But they’ll be over in June and then I’ll never work again.”

“Until your A levels.”

“Not for me, buster.”

“Dad won’t like that.”

“He’ll get over it. You can be his golden boy.”

“You know I’m rubbish at school. I’m having an allotment.”

“That’s not a job, Ellis. That’s a hobby, like chess or riding or peeking at my friends through the curtain when they’re taking a pee.”

“I don’t!”

“Never said you did, derr-brain. Is lunch ready? Is that why you’re up here?”

“No. I wanted to ask Dad something but he’s busy, so I came to ask you instead.”

“Do I want you to go to boarding school in China? Yes please.” She beamed him a psychotic smile.

“Have spiders got eyes? Can they see us?”

Chrissie slumped and pulled a face. “That’s worth failing an O level for? What sort of a question is that, Ellie-belly?”

And as he started to protest at being called that, she jumped off her chair and tickled him until he begged for mercy and agreed to be her slave for the rest of the day.

The spare room at the top of the stairs was bare and sun-filled. It sucked in warm rays of light even in winter, as if awaiting the arrival of someone wise. The vast cherry tree laid its fingertips on the window sill. Denny decided this room should be Mafi’s bedroom and her bedsit downstairs a proper living room.

“We don’t need a spare bedroom because we don’t have any visitors,” Chrissie muttered, as she and Ellis helped Denny carry Mafi’s bed into the room. Chrissie slipped and the bed fell against the wall, tearing a hole in the wallpaper. Behind the tear was a black-painted beam. It was set back into the wall and the wallpaper had been pasted over it, shoddily, leaving a gap between the two. As Denny peeled the wallpaper away, Ellis watched the beam emerge. It was colossal. Near the corner of the room, it disappeared behind plasterwork into the centre of the cottage.

“How could anyone slap wallpaper over a beam like this?” Denny sighed. “We’ll sort this out next weekend. Can’t leave it like this.”

“Then Mafi will have a lovely beam in her bedroom and we can paint it shiny black and hang stuff on it.”

“That’s right,” Denny said. “These things matter.”

But they didn’t matter to Mafi. She decided that the best place for her wardrobe was against that wall. It would cover the beam anyway and there was more pressing work for Denny to do on the cottage. When she made decisions they tended to be final, owing not so much to a profound strength of opinion on her part as to her preference for keeping debate on trivial issues brief. Chrissie pinned a paper horseshoe to the beam for good luck and then the beam disappeared behind the wardrobe, to remain out of sight for as long as Mafi lived.

At six o’clock every morning, Mafi took a cup of tea back to bed and watched the cherry tree. She called it her special time, when she felt lucky to be alive, and she called the years since she left the pub her “borrowed life”, the life after hers was meant to have finished. Ellis encouraged her stories of being landlady at the Gate Inn. His favourites were of Mr Prag getting stuck inside the grandfather clock, the piglets falling into the beer cellar, and the war: of Nissen huts going up along the canal, doodlebugs and Mafi refusing evacuation to Hampshire. She taught him and Chrissie how to clean a glass properly and how to shuffle a pack.

In spring, the garden looked dewy and luscious from Mafi’s bedroom window. Ellis studied her face. She was lost in thought and had barely noticed him come in. From beneath them, in the dining room, came the sound of Denny’s electric shaver. Ellis wondered what part of her life Mafi was revisiting. She had never married. Chrissie claimed she had been engaged to a man in the war and he died of TB. Ellis didn’t know if this was true. He liked Mafi as she was, old and unmarried and inclined towards throaty laughter.

“Ellis, old thing,” she said, “I’m afraid to say that cherry tree is not well.”

The woodsmen came on the same day Ellis found spotted jelly bubbles in the pond on Eggpie Lane. They said the tree had to come down. Before they returned, Ellis visited the pond four more times. The black spots grew into semicircles and by late March the jelly had fallen apart and a sprawl of wriggling tadpoles appeared. When he took his dad to see them they found a mass of froth on the water’s surface.

“They’ve disappeared,” Ellis said.

“They do,” his dad replied.

In April, Mafi showed Ellis how to tap a bird’s nest and set off the calls of baby blackbirds inside. Sometimes, the young poked their heads out and Ellis caught a glimpse of their open beaks clamouring for food. By the time the woodsmen came, the nests in the garden were empty and the shrubs nearby filled with birdsong. Cats prowled beneath the bushes. Chrissie tried to adopt them and Mafi shooed them away.

Denny O’Rourke took photos of the cherry tree and Mafi unravelled the roses from its trunk and laid them out across the lawn.

“We’ll plant a new one,” Denny said.

“How long will it take?” Ellis asked.

“When you’re as old as Mafi, the new tree will be half the size of that one,” Chrissie said.

Ellis sighed. That was far too slow.

“You plant trees for the next generations,” Denny explained.

Chrissie joined her hands together and chanted “Aaaaa-men.” Ellis copied her. Their dad marched them away in a head lock, one under each arm.

“I’ve a pair of idiots for children,” he told the woodsmen.

Ellis watched from Mafi’s bedroom window. The woodsman with a thick orange beard dangled from a rope within touching distance. A chainsaw hung from his waist and a cigarette was wedged behind his ear. Ellis felt Mafi’s breathing on his neck as they watched. After lunch, a young apprentice woodsman turned up on foot and was bullied by the two men for being late. They barked orders at him all afternoon. Later, the apprentice was caught sharing his cigarettes and hip flask with Chrissie. The bearded man dragged him away and struck him.

After nightfall, from his pillow, Ellis heard shouting and doors slamming. Chrissie ran past Ellis’s bedroom to her own and his dad thundered after her. Later, Ellis found Chrissie lying under her blanket, still dressed. She had been crying and now she was staring at nothing and twisting the ends of her long hair round her fingers.

“What happened?” Ellis whispered.

She pulled him close. “Dad caught me crawling back through the hedge,” she whispered.

“Where had you been?”

“Drinking beer in the skittle alley with that lad.”

“The man with the drink in his pocket?”

“It’s called a hip flask.”

She held Ellis’s face in her hands. Her eyes twinkled.

“Ellis …”

“What?”

“I saw a man and a woman doing it, in the toilets. I saw them actually doing it.”

Ellis stared at her wide-eyed and she saw the need for clarification. “Having sex, Ellis. They made these ridiculous noises. Don’t mention it to Dad or Mafi or anyone.”

Ellis nodded his head earnestly. He didn’t know what she was talking about. But, feeling that he should respond to what she clearly considered momentous news, he said with equal seriousness: “Another interesting thing is that the man with the chainsaw never smokes the cigarette behind his ear. It just stays there all day.”

The Formula 1 racetrack in the hallway was renowned on the F1 circuit for its challenging combination of breakneck quarry tiling and slow rug. Because the ceiling beams were lushly decorated with berried holly from Dibden Lane, the pre-Christmas Grand Prix was coming from the jungle, somewhere in South America – Ellis’s commentary didn’t specify where. Or it was, until the appearance of a house spider straddling the chicane caused a cancellation. The spider was huge and made Ellis’s stomach churn and his feet tingle, as if he were standing on a cliff edge.

“Right!” he hissed. “That’s it! I want a meeting with the most highest-up of spiders. It’s not fair!”

There was no reply and the sound of his own voice embarrassed him. He wondered if Ivy had heard him. She was the only other person in the cottage. Ivy, who was unfeasibly old in Ellis’s opinion, lived on the lane and babysat for Denny O’Rourke on the rare occasions when Mafi couldn’t do it. She was reading the local paper in the kitchen. Ellis had shut her in there so that he could commentate on his F1 race without feeling self-conscious. Ivy did not remove spiders. She had made that clear from the start.

Ellis grabbed his toy cars and made a run for the kitchen, leaping over the spider and slamming the door behind him.

“Impersonating a stampede, Ellis?” Ivy muttered, without looking up.

“When are Dad and Mafi getting back?” Ellis asked.

“Don’t know,” she murmured.

Ellis walked on the spot to relieve himself of the last shivers of repulsion.

“Do you need to go to the toilet, Ellis?”

“No, thanks. Do you?”

“Don’t be cheeky.” She put down the paper and lit a cigarette.

“Don’t suppose you want to come outside and play in the garden?”

She shook her head.

“Are they my dad’s cigarettes?”

“No, they’re mine, thank you for checking.”

“Wasn’t checking. He wouldn’t mind.” Ellis put his boots on. “You’re not like a real babysitter.”

“Aren’t I? How’s that?”

“Not out. Well, you don’t seem to like being with children very much and you’re not very chatty and you don’t like playing.”

“If I wasn’t here they wouldn’t be out buying you Christmas presents and you’d get nothing.”

Ellis thought this through. She had a point. He stamped his boots on and threw on his coat. He felt braver with boots on.

“You don’t like doing stuff with me,” he concluded. “That’s what I’m getting at. I like you but you’re not much fun.”

On the bookshelves in the dining room Ellis found a large hardback volume of Jane’s Fighting Ships. An idea had come to him as he was putting on his boots. He hadn’t decided on the idea exactly, nor advanced it once it had appeared in his head. He simply realised that he was going to do this certain thing and that it was better for him not to stop and think about it.

From halfway up the stairs, he leant out between the stairwell beams and dropped the book on to the floor below. Then he went outside to play and the voices of accusation and denial began in his head.

Mafi used a damp cloth to remove the carcass of the spider from the book cover. When she kissed Ellis goodnight, she whispered, “If you want to live and thrive, let a spider run alive.”

Ellis woke with itchy nipples. This was happening more and more. He knelt up on the bed and resolved to speak to Mafi about his harsh polyester pyjamas, the purple ones with gold trim. He yawned and stretched, and as he thought of breakfast Chrissie glided past and, without breaking stride, pointed under Ellis’s bed in horror.

“Jesus, Ellis! Under your bed! Three huge tarantulas!”

She screamed, a cheesy horror-movie scream, and ran downstairs.

When his dad found him, half an hour later, Ellis was marching on the spot on his mattress. Denny stepped forward to hold his son but Ellis became hysterical.

“They’ll kill you, Dad! They’ll bite you and kill you!”

Denny rocked him and soothed him with whispers. “You’ve got to do something about this,” Denny said.

“About what?”

Chrissie appeared at the doorway, holding a volume of her encyclopaedia. “I’m sorry, Ellis,” she said.

Denny pointed an accusing finger at her. “We’ll talk about this later.” He looked his son in the eye. “Come on, Ellis, you’ve got to get over this.”

Chrissie found the page she was looking for and read from it with mock seriousness. “The tarantula lives in a burrow and darts out to catch passing prey. It can inflict a painful bite if molested but, despite the legends surrounding it, it is not a dangerous spider.”

“I don’t care if they’re dangerous, they freak me out!”

“Only trying to help.” Chrissie slammed the book shut, put it under her arm and swung one-handed on the doorframe. “It also says the only place in the world you could live and be sure not to see a single spider at all is Antarctica.”

Ellis tapped his dad on the arm. “Can we move to Antarctica?”

“It’s very cold, Ellis. Me and your sister wouldn’t fancy it at all and it would probably kill Mafi instantly.”

“Please.”

“Too cold.”

Ellis crossed his arms defiantly. “Well, I’m not staying here with them.”

“We could send Ellis to Antarctica on his own,” Chrissie offered. “I’d chip in if it were a matter of the fare.”

“Chrissie, shut up!” Denny snapped.

Ellis began to shiver. Tears streamed down his face.

“They keep appearing out of nowhere and scaring me. I call out that I’m coming in and give them time to get out first but they don’t. It’s not fair. It’s our house and we were here first.”

“Well, that’s not strictly true, I’d imagine, Ellis,” his dad said. “You don’t mind the glow-worms and things like that though, do you? Up at the bonfire?”

“No, they’re amazing,” Ellis said.

“Well …” Denny sighed, “just try to think of spiders the same way. You’ve really got to snap out of this.” He lifted Ellis off the bed.

“Don’t put my feet down!” Ellis cried.

“Come on, Ellis! This isn’t like you.”

“It is like me! It’s exactly like me. We have to move house!”

“Well, we’re not moving! So get dressed and come down for breakfast.”

Chrissie followed her dad to the kitchen.

“Nice one, Dad. What a hero!”

“Help me get the breakfast, Chrissie. We’re all late.”

“Dad, look, I don’t particularly like spiders either but I don’t talk to them and demand meetings with their elders. Ellis does. So telling him to snap out of it really doesn’t cut the mustard. You’re going to have to be more creative.”

“I’m not creative.”

“Then get creative!”

And because Chrissie sounded like her mother, her challenge stuck with Denny, though at first he had no idea how to rise to it. When an idea did come to him, he bought a book about spiders, did some research and took notes in his unreadable handwriting. But when he thought about putting the idea to Ellis, when he imagined saying it out loud, he felt foolish and hoped instead that in time Ellis would forget his fear.

One evening soon after, when Denny went to Ellis’s bedroom to say goodnight, he found the room empty. A glow of light outside drew Denny to the window, where he saw the children’s tent erected, unsteadily, on the side lawn.

Denny stopped a few yards short of the tent and peered in. Ellis was reading a Whizzer and Chips annual by the light of a kerosene lamp. He had blankets above and beneath him. Denny crawled in on his hands and knees and lay on his stomach, beside his son.

“Evening.”

Ellis smiled.

“Having fun?”

Ellis nodded and returned to his reading.

Denny watched him for a while and then he left the tent and circled it, moving the pegs further out and pushing them firmly into the ground. Ellis watched the canvas tauten around him then listened to Denny go back inside the cottage. There were two large house spiders in opposite corners of Ellis’s bedroom, down by the skirting board. Denny cupped them in his hands, one at a time, and ushered them out of the bedroom window.

“They’re gone,” he called out.

“Don’t care,” the glowing tent called back. “Never going inside again. Never ever.”

Denny wrapped up warm and took a chair outside where he guarded the tent from a distance, without Ellis knowing. At nine o’clock Mafi joined him for a cigarette and together they watched Ellis’s shadow put the book aside and turn off the lamp. Later, Denny scooped his sleeping son up and laid him in his bed.

Mafi had poured Denny a glass of whisky.

“You’ve got to be pretty unhappy about spiders to take yourself outside to sleep, all alone, at his age,” she said.

“Yes …” Denny said. He was distant. “I did think of one thing, but …”

“But what?” Mafi asked.

“I really don’t know if it will help him.”

“Don’t know until you’ve tried. What is it?”

Denny shook his head. “It feels a bit silly.”

“Try me,” Mafi said.

Denny remained tentative. “What I thought of is an ‘agreement’. It sounds ludicrous, but a sort of agreement between us and …” He laughed at himself. “An agreement between us and them. Based on a little science and a little mopping up of stray spiders on your and my part.”

“Sounds good.”

Denny blushed and hid his face in his hands.

“What are you worried about?” Mafi asked.

“I’m too embarrassed to put it to him, so I don’t know what to do.”

“Embarrass yourself,” Mafi said.

“I’ll pay you 50p to empty this shed.”

Gary Bird opened the shed door and peered inside.

“Easy,” Gary said. “Show me the 50p first though.”

“I’ll give it to you up front. You’re my best friend. I trust you.”

Gary looked at Ellis suspiciously and then at the shed again. “What do you mean exactly, empty?”

“Take the mower and the cans and everything else out and put it on the path. Just leave the shelves and the shed.”

“Obviously. I can’t take the shed out of the shed.”

“I’ll wait inside.”

“Am I going to get bollocked?” Gary asked.

“There’s no one here,” Ellis assured him.

Gary weighed this up. Fifty pence was worth a bollocking, even though Ellis was now proceeding to pay him in 2p pieces, which were going to be annoyingly bulky in his pocket.

When Gary had finished, he found Ellis upstairs.

“Done it.”

“Was there much activity?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Is it completely empty?”

“Yes, except for the shed. The shed’s still in the shed. Why do you want it empty?”

“I’m going to paint it.”

“So, why didn’t you empty it yourself?”

“I’m saving my energy for the painting. See you later.”

“I’ll help you paint.”

“No, I’d better do it on my own. You go to Bridget’s and start spending that money.”

Gary Bird knew when he was being got rid of. He waved goodbye to Ellis, walked down the rutted driveway, as if returning to his house across the lane, and then double-backed up the alleyway alongside the cottage and watched from there. Ellis appeared from Mafi’s garage with a cardboard box full of newspaper. He dropped a yellow can of cigarette-lighter fuel into the cardboard box, set fire to the newspaper and threw the box into the shed. At this point, Gary ran, as fast as the twenty-five coins in his front pocket allowed him.

The simplest ideas are sometimes the best. But sometimes they’re just the simplest.

“What do you mean you just found it on fire?” Denny stood with the contents of his shed at his feet and a smoking black scar, where the shed had been, nearby.

“Someone must have, you know …” Ellis said, shrugging his shoulders.

“So, what we have here is a vandal who burns down people’s sheds but he likes to empty them first so as not to damage the contents.”

“Or a she …” Ellis said, “it could be a woman.”

Ellis smiled, satisfied that he had distanced Gary from the crime scene by raising the spectre of a female arsonist. He was blissfully unaware that Gary was not in the frame and that there was one suspect and one suspect only. Denny smiled and discovered that he could not feel angry about this. Ellis motioned towards the cottage, a little unnerved by the peaceful expression on his dad’s face, and said, “Well, I’ve got a busy day so I’ll be in my room if you want me.”

Denny and Mafi watched Ellis wander inside.

“Denny,” the old lady said. “Might I suggest you embarrass yourself with that truce idea before Ellis burns down the cottage.”

Ellis was confused. Any ten year old would be. He’d been told to sit up for Sunday lunch but there was no food on the table.

“Is lunch ready?” he asked tentatively.

“In a moment or two,” Mafi said.

Denny laid a sheet of paper down in front of him, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat.

“Right then …” he murmured, laughing nervously under his breath and blushing. “Ellis, I’ve been in discussions with the spiders, on your behalf.”

This didn’t shock Ellis. He had, after all, been talking to them for over a year.

“They’re as upset as you that you don’t get along.”

“Did they say that?”

Denny nodded. “They’ve proposed an agreement and I think it’s a sensible one. Do you want to hear it?”

Ellis nodded.

“During the winter, when you tend to spend more time indoors, they’ve agreed to mostly withdraw from the cottage and leave you alone. What they said was that because there aren’t many insects about in winter anyway to be caught in their webs …”

Ellis swallowed sickly at the thought.

“… they will pretty well stop spinning their webs in the cottage in winter, and if any did accidentally appear then, during the winter, it’s permitted for us to take them down.”

“Where are they going to live?”

“They will be allowed run of the downstairs toilet, which you never use anyway. But, mostly, they’ve agreed to hibernate outdoors, in the soil or under the leaves.”

“Ace!” Ellis said.

His dad continued, “But, Ellis, this is a two-way street. One of the conditions is that you will learn about them. I’ll teach you; we all will. You learn what an incredible species they are, just like humans. This is important. I’ve bought a book we can learn from.”

“I cannot look at pictures of them!”

“OK, but you’ll have to listen. This is a condition of the agreement, Ellis.”

Denny looked down at his notes and read from them, his voice more formal than he had wanted it to be.

“Spiders are incredible creatures, Ellis, and everyone concerned wants you to understand that. For instance, the hunting spiders that have agreed to spend the winter in the garden, they have a thing called glycerol in them and it’s an antifreeze, like we put in the car radiator. It’s so clever, they have antifreeze in their bodies and in their eggs too, so that’s how they can survive the winter out there. Some of the others will build themselves nice warm sleeping bags with their own silk.”

“That’s clever,” Ellis conceded.

“Very clever,” agreed Mafi.

Denny continued, “I have told the spiders how nervous you are of them. As I said, they were very sorry to hear it.”

“They really said that?”

“They did,” Chrissie said.

“Part of the agreement, though, is that you think about all the dangers they face and all the creatures they are frightened of. As you learn about this, I’m sure that the last thing you will want to be is another one of the animals harming them every day, don’t you think?”

Ellis didn’t respond. He didn’t want to give any ground without being sure what he was agreeing to.

“Did you know that spiders stroke each other, Ellis?” Mafi asked encouragingly.

“They eat each other too,” he responded.

Denny intervened. “Well, that’s true, yes, but not often. Not most of them. It’s a complicated business, but … where was I?” He returned to his notes. “Yes, that’s it … I’m sure you don’t want to join the long list of things that harm spiders, do you, Ellis? Starlings and robins like to eat spiders, so do the blue tits we encourage with the monkey-nut strings. Frogs and toads eat thousands of spiders. Spiders are under attack from all these things all the time, Ellis, and they have to live somewhere.”

Ellis’s face lit up. “We could dig a pond in the garden and have frogs and toads in it, loads of them.”

“No fear!” Mafi said.

“That would just drive the spiders into the house,” Chrissie said.

“Then have the frogs in the house.”

“Mafi hates frogs,” Chrissie countered.

“Even if Mafi loved frogs, we’re not having them inside our house,” Denny said.

“But Dad,” Ellis said.

“Yes, Ellis?”

“Wait a minute.” Ellis didn’t know what he wanted to say, but he didn’t want to lose the initiative here. “Oh, yeah, what about putting toy frogs all around the house, like scarecrows, to scare the spiders back to the garden?”

Chrissie shook her head. “Ellis! Spiders don’t see frogs and think, ‘Oh shit! A frog.’ They sense them by smell and sound. A toy frog isn’t a frog to a spider.”

Ellis turned to his dad. “Is it OK to say shit?”

“No, it isn’t. You’re getting confused, Ellis. There’s no point having frogs inside the house to scare off spiders that have only flocked inside because they’re scared of the real frogs you’ve put in the garden pond. Especially when we have a better solution here in front of us.”

“I don’t think spiders ‘flock’, Dad,” Chrissie said. “Sheep flock. I can’t believe spiders and sheep share the same word for group-movement.”

Ellis was confused now. He had no clear image in his head of this truce thing so it wasn’t real to him.

Denny leant across the table, closer to his son.

“Ellis, this agreement isn’t foolproof. By that I mean that there are bound to be moments when you come into contact with spiders. When that happens, you come to one of us and you accept that it was just an accident, that they weren’t intentionally trying to make you nervous. You just stay calm and in time you’ll be fine with them. On the occasions when you accidentally kill a spider without even being aware you’ve done it – which happens a lot, by the way – they have agreed to accept that this is an innocent accident and not to retaliate.”

“They’d better not,” Ellis said.

His dad looked him in the eye. “It’s a generous, helpful offer on their part. Can I go back to them with your agreement?”

Ellis thought about it, looking as serious and thoughtful as he could. Then he nodded, gravely.

“Good.” Denny put his notes into his breast pocket and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

Ellis felt exhausted and very grown up. He climbed on to his dad’s lap. They hugged and rocked back and forth.

“There’s nothing for you to be worried about,” Denny whispered, in a way that sent a rich, warm chocolatey feeling through Ellis’s heart.

“OK,” Ellis whispered back.

“Can I tell you one more thing?”

“My brain’s full.”

“One more.”

“All right, then.”

“See those beams?” He pointed to the ceiling beams.

“Yeah.”

“If it weren’t for them, you know our house would fall down?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, guess who it is that protects those beams from the woodworm that would eat the beams up, given half a chance?”

“Spiders?”

“You said it.”