Ellis and Chrissie sat by the open fire and watched their father gardening in the last vestiges of daylight. Shin-deep in willow leaves that refused to dissolve into the earth, Denny stopped to rest. Steam rose from his head. Momentarily, his broad shoulders slumped and he appeared defeated. Then, catching sight of his children, he slung the rake over his shoulder, stood to attention and saluted them. He smiled and his flushed cheeks rose to transform his face.

His limbs were long and lithe and he laboured relentlessly. He warned himself against becoming obsessive or joyless in renovating the cottage. It remained an act of love. What he did he did well, with care and to the best of his abilities, but he did not confer or seek advice, as if he and his family were living on an island, beyond reach, or as if he wanted them to be.

When Denny worked on the cottage Ellis was beside him, watching, learning, hoping to be asked to help in any way. And even though on this island there was no one to show off to, Ellis bragged nevertheless to imaginary observers of his life. He bragged not about the fact that he was his dad’s right-hand man or that he knew how to mix lime mortar and straighten old floorboard pins and plant bare-root hedging without creating air pockets. He bragged about having a dad whom the spiders respected enough to do business with.

The cottage walls had contours that appeared tidal, but they were dry and the rooms warmed quickly when the fires were lit. The contours hinted at the huge old timbers within the walls. Sections of these brutal beams were exposed here and there and one vertical post stood proudly, two feet thick, in the middle of the dining room. Chrissie snaked gold tinsel around it at Christmas. The brick-floored dining room was a room that prolonged winter. Ellis preferred the living room, where he would sit at dusk and watch the silhouettes of furniture and familiar objects take on a new appearance in the low light as he waited for the sky above Ide Hill to fill with crimson, which it would from time to time, especially in autumn.

The evenings grew longer by a few precious minutes each day and Ellis became impatient for spring. The snowdrops stayed late on the front lawn, exchanging glances with the violets as they departed.

Before it all, Denny O’Rourke would pick the first violets of the year and give them to his wife in a posy tied so delicately it defied the apparent brute strength of his hands. How she had loved violets.

Denny stock-fenced the garden boundaries and hid the 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 names he and Gary had given the four streams: the Medway, the Rother, the Panama and the Mississippi.

“Some rivers feel as wide as the ocean,” Denny said. “I would love to see the Mississippi.”

They went on to the wooden gate at the far end of the wood. The sensation of his son leading him by the hand and the cold water swilling around his boots sent ripples of happiness through Denny O’Rourke.

“This is as far as I go,” Ellis said.

Opposite the five-bar gate, across a narrow lane, was the entrance to Reardon’s farm. Ellis sat there often to look for activity in the yards or to watch Reardon in the fields. The farmer was rugged-looking and strong, despite some sort of injury to his left leg, for which he used a stick. His face was expressive and his cheeks were lean and bronzed. His hair was wavy and thick and silver grey. He remained defiantly handsome in the face of old age. His was the face of a man who has done many interesting things, Ellis had decided. He felt drawn to him and scared of him at the same time.

The yard lights of the dairy lit up the moisture in the dusk air. Ellis longed to be under those lights doing whatever work it was that went on there. It was dark when he and his dad got home. Their faces were flushed and their heads full of the images that only woodland in twilight can conjure up.

In the Wimpy Bar in Orpington high street, Ellis saw Chrissie kissing a boy. The boy’s hand crept up his sister’s skirt. What the hell for, Ellis couldn’t fathom. He wondered if his dad had done this with his mum and concluded that it was highly unlikely.

Ellis found out that the boy was called Vincent and that he was in the final year, a year above Chrissie. He was the first boy she ever brought home. Denny was welcoming but formal. Mafi overfed him. Ellis watched Vincent as if he were a lab rat, which in some ways he was.

“Have you had sex with Vincent?” he asked his sister, having made the trip up to her bedroom especially to use this word he didn’t comprehend.

“No.” She was reading the spider book.

“Are you going to?”

“Yes. Definitely. Someone has to be first and I’ve decided he’s got the gig.”

“What if he doesn’t want to?” Ellis asked.

She laughed disdainfully. “He’s a boy.”

“So am I.”

“He’s a boy of seventeen. Boys of seventeen want to. You’re eleven and a half. I don’t know what boys of your age want to do.”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When are you and Vincent going to have sex?”

“At eight twenty-three on Tuesday week.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know when! When you’re not around.”

She pushed Ellis to the ground and knelt on his chest. This made him laugh, automatically. She held the spider book open above him.

“Don’t show me pictures!” he screamed.

“This’ll make you hurl, spider-boy!”

“No pictures!”

“I’m not going to show you any fucking pictures. I’m here to educate you.”

He loved her to swear.

“Get this, freak-boy … ‘Throughout the whole of their development, spiders may fall victim to other predators. From the egg stage to adulthood they may be eaten by insects, other arachnids (including spiders), birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Perhaps the only thing worse than being eaten alive is being eaten alive slowly. Some parasitic wasps lay their eggs in spiders’ egg sacs or on the spiders themselves. The larvae hatch and either eat the eggs, or feed on the living spider as it moves around.’”

She slammed the book shut triumphantly. “Feel sick?”

Ellis shook his head. “Uh-uh. We’ve got to get loads of wasps next summer.”

Chrissie climbed off Ellis’s chest and stood over him.

“Ellis, I don’t think you’re getting your head round this truce thing at all.”

Gary Bird’s arms and legs were twice the thickness of Ellis’s. The two of them spent most of their time on Gary’s dad’s allotment at Long Barn. Gary told Ellis that when his dad was a teenager he ate a frog, for a dare. Ellis wasn’t sure if this was true but he liked the way Mr Bird lit his cigarettes, leaning down towards his lighter and throwing his head back as he took the first puff.

That’s how I’m going to do it too, Ellis told himself.

Gary played for the village juniors football team. He talked Ellis into going along. The changing rooms at the recreation ground were in an unloved wooden pavilion. It wore thick layers of peeling green paint and Ellis found it strangely enchanting.

“Like Hector’s House on TV,” he whispered, to no one other than himself.

The two toilets were in wooden sheds, symmetrically set one each side of the pavilion, up a small set of steps. Inside the gents shed was a large oil drum, which Ellis had to stand on tiptoe to be able to pee into, whilst swatting away the flies and holding his breath.

Soon after he was brought on as a substitute, Ellis lay down on the pitch and rested his head on the turf. From there, as he had begun to suspect, the pavilion looked just like a miniature Swiss weather-house, seen through colossal blades of grass. He waited patiently for a man and woman to glide out of their respective toilets and forecast sun or rain, but before they could, out of nowhere, Mr Souter, the manager, was kneeling beside him with a bucket and sponge.

“Are you all right, son?”

“Yes, thanks,” Ellis said, bewildered. “I’m fine.”

He wasn’t called on again.

When they weren’t at the allotment, Ellis and Gary played football on the side lawn or cricket on the driveway, using the green metal grass box from the mower as stumps, or they played in the oak tree, which bordered the bottom corner of the garden. It was one of the oldest trees in Britain. A man from a magazine once came to photograph it. The roots were exposed above the ground and Ellis could squeeze between them on his belly and climb up the inside of the hollow trunk to the first or second boughs, which were huge and cast shadows over the footpath to the village green. The boughs were split open and hollow, like canoes, and Ellis lay on his back inside them and enjoyed being invisible. He looked at the branches above him and patches of sky in between and then he rested his head against the bough and his eyes looked across the landscape of fissured bark canyons and mountains, and his heartbeat thumped in his ear like approaching foot soldiers.

Chrissie was too big to crawl inside the tree but strong enough to climb it. From the front door of the cottage, Ellis watched her sit in the high bough on the evening that Vincent split up with her, which was a week after he slept with her.

“When you cry,” he whispered, “your face goes red and the freckles round your eyes come out and you look like my baby sister not my big sister.”

And when you lie curled up on your bed crying, he thought to himself, I want to rub your tummy and accidentally touch your boobs with my thumb, just to find out what they feel like.

An invitation from Chrissie in early August led Denny and Ellis to visit the reservoir at Bough Beach for the first time. The still water turned purple in the early evening and Ellis lost himself in thoughts of vast oceans and far-away places and a girl of no vivid description holding his hand.

“It must be so good to go places,” he sighed.

Denny’s stomach turned. “Don’t go disappearing on me.” He tried to say it lightly.

“Don’t go disappearing on me,” Ellis countered.

They crossed a meadow towards the nature reserve. Chrissie was waiting for them in the office. She introduced her dad to James, the assistant warden. She was nervous, and as a result she was polite, which Ellis found hilarious. They walked up the lane to the Frog and Bucket, where Chrissie and James had met three weeks earlier, watching a band called the Messerschmitts.

When Denny asked James how old he was, Chrissie tensed up.

“Twenty-three,” James replied confidently. “Six years older than Chrissie.”

Ellis stared open-mouthed at the scandalous age difference and waited for the shit to hit the fan.

“My maths could have coped with that one,” Denny O’Rourke responded, with the hint of a smile.

“My dad is capable of twenty-three minus seventeen, you know,” Ellis said assertively.

“Right,” said James.

“So am I, in fact,” Ellis added.

Chrissie fled to the bar.

Denny offered her daughter’s new boyfriend a cigarette and lit it for him. “Seventeen is very young,” he purred. “Do not get her up the duff.”

James didn’t flinch. Denny settled back in his seat and put an arm round Ellis, who felt confident he knew what “up the duff” must mean and decided it would be more grown up not to seek confirmation.

The house spider waiting for him in the bath when they got home was the biggest yet. Something inside Ellis buckled and, as the shivers of repulsion shot up his body from the soles of his feet, he became angry. He lunged for the taps and sent two jets of water plunging into the bath. He turned his back and counted to one hundred, then turned the taps off. When the water had run away, he glanced to check the bath was empty and saw a waterlogged spider-carcass lying a few inches from the plughole.

From the living room window, Ellis picked out the shapes of the cattle in Scabharbour Meadow in the balmy half-dark. The accusing stares of the drowned spider’s family weighed heavily on him.

“Ellis! You haven’t bathed!” Mafi turned him round to face her. “Upstairs now and get in that bath.”

“I bathed!”

“You’re filthy!”

Denny followed Ellis up to his bedroom.

“Where is it, dear boy?” he asked.

“In the bath. I killed it. They’re going to get their own back on me.”

From the bathroom, his dad called out, “Ellis, you didn’t kill it. Come and look.”

“I don’t want to look. And I did kill it.”

“How can I show that you didn’t kill it, if you won’t look?”

Ellis hadn’t killed it and in the pages of the spider book Denny found out why. “‘Spiders in the bath are usually male house spiders that have fallen in while searching for females. By closing their book lungs and tracheae, they can survive in water for half an hour or more. Even spiders that appear quite dead can suddenly get up and walk when they dry out and open up their breathing systems again.’” He jabbed the page with his finger.

“You’re making that up,” Ellis said.

“I’m not!”

“You must be.”

“I’m not!”

“Is there a picture?” Ellis asked.

“No, I promise.”

Ellis read it for himself. Denny wasn’t making it up. Whilst Ellis bathed, Denny sat on the toilet seat and read more to him.

“Oh my Lord, Ellis!”

“What?”

“There’s a spider here they talk about and it’s absolutely covered in hairs and it spits a poisonous juice on to its prey and eats them.”

“Don’t, Dad!”

“And, ugh! Sometimes it injects its prey with venom first to paralyse them and then eats them. When it isn’t killing other creatures it kills its own.”

“Don’t!”

“Imagine that, Ellis, a hairy, killing, cannibalistic monster with eight eyes.”

Ellis scrunched his face up. “I feel sick.”

Denny growled. “Guess how big it is?”

Ellis shook his head. “Don’t want to.”

“The body of this savage, savage beast is … a quarter of an inch long.”

“Oh,” said Ellis. “That’s tiny.”

“Isn’t it just?”

Ellis thought on. “Really small …” he murmured, holding his thumb and finger a quarter of an inch apart and examining the gap.

Denny put the spider book down. “Imagine how we look to a creature that tiny. Our horrible smelly flesh, our body sounding like an old boiler.”

Ellis didn’t intend to, but he found himself picturing Ted Heath sitting in a cellar eating chips and smoking cigarettes and drinking Tizer and burping and farting and scratching himself.

“Ellis …”

“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 those years ago, that water could be in this stream right now. It could be the same water, couldn’t it?”

His dad thought about it. “In a roundabout way, yes.”

“Don’t you think that’s amazing?” Ellis exclaimed.

“Yes, you’re right, Ellis. It is rather amazing.”

“In the time it took you to grow up and leave the merchant navy and meet Mum and have Chrissie and me, in all that time …” Ellis stretched out his arms, “for all those years, the water in the photo was slooooowly coming and going in all the seas and rivers and today it ended up here. That is absolutely amazing!”

Denny’s upside-down smile looked like a grimace. He felt the blood rush in his head.

“But …” Ellis went on, “why don’t you have a photograph of Mum next to your bed instead?”

Denny took his glasses off and threw water on to his face. He splashed his son and challenged him again to give up. Ellis refused.

“Then you win.”

Denny heaved himself up on to the bridge. The railway lines began to chime and Ellis leapt instinctively to his feet and moved towards the tracks. Then, remembering he had a visitor, he smiled innocently at Denny and sat down again before the train roared past.

They dragged their feet through long field grass. Ellis’s flares threshed against the stalks. From her bedroom window, Mafi saw in their walking a reluctance to return home, and it made them look like brothers, not father and son. They helped each other over the fence and on to the lane as a tractor passed. Denny waved to the driver.

“Who was that?” Ellis asked.

“Reardon,” his dad replied.

“Reardon the farmer?”

“No, Reardon the ballet dancer who drives to the theatre on a tractor.”

Ellis laughed so much he squirmed and Denny chased him home, calling him a fool.

Ellis went straight to his room and because he felt so happy he knew it would be safe to go to his shoebox, to see his mum. Inside the box were war-torn ping-pong balls, Plasticraft paperweights, used Instamatic flashbulbs and Top Trump cards held together by elastic bands. From beneath these objects he took a matchbox. He slid it open and took from it a solitary slide, which he held up to the window. He held one eyelid closed and moved his open eye up close to the photograph. This slight head movement took him into an Ektachrome world, where he stands as a four year old in the back garden in Orpington. He is wearing wellington boots that reach his shorts and a mac and a thick mustard-coloured sweater. The garden is wintry and a little overgrown. The shadows of the trees are long. The grass is tingling with dew. Standing at the garden gate is Ellis’s mother. She is holding her hand out to Ellis and saying something to him. She has a smile on her face. She looks happy and her expression is the embodiment of what Ellis perceives, to this day, to be beauty.

The next thing she will do is place her hand in Ellis’s hand and lead him out of the garden. Whenever he returns to this scene she is waiting for him, offering to take him by the hand.

He knew from Chrissie that she had called him “Ellie”. Sometimes, when he dreamed about her, it was of her voice calling “Ellie-boy … Ellie-boy …” But it was only her voice. He could never see her for all the sunlight glaring into his eyes. Chrissie remembered her vividly but not her death. She knew that her mum was going on holiday and then that she was very ill and that they couldn’t visit her. Not even their dad could go. Then she died. Once, she asked if their mum had died of cancer and her dad nodded and said yes. Another time, when Ellis was alone with Mafi, the old lady said she had “died of adventure”.