No matter how he worded the conversation, Denny O’Rourke felt as if he was asking his children for permission to stay out late.

“Guess where I’m calling from?”

“Where?” Ellis asked.

“Longspring Farm.”

“You’re so lucky! What are you doing there?”

“I’m going to stay and have supper with Mr Reardon and some of his friends, if Mafi doesn’t mind holding the fort. Do you want to put her on?”

“Are you going to milk a cow or anything?”

“I hope not.”

“I won a goldfish,” Ellis said, in what was to him a seamless line of conversation. “I’m calling it Yootha. Can I keep it? And before you say no can I just say that do you realise I was born in 1967 and now it’s 1979 and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything, so think about that before you say no.”

The answer was yes. His dad reminded him that Chrissie had had one in Orpington.

“We’ve still got the fish tank, Ellis.”

“Where?”

“I think I might have put it in that little cupboard in my bedroom. We’ll dig it out tomorrow.”

But Ellis couldn’t wait until then. He pulled his dad’s bed away and yanked open the small black door. He saw the fish tank immediately. It was beyond reach and shrouded in cobwebs. He recoiled and went to the bedroom window. Felix the Cat was still running through the willow tree, getting nowhere.

If I am brave enough to get that fish tank, then my mum is in heaven, Ellis told himself.

If I’m not, she’s in hell.

He crouched down to the same height as the miniature door and readied himself to step, crab-like, into the tiny cupboard. What he had to do was clear in his head. He had converted the challenge, which scared him, into a picture, which did not. He would pull the tank out into the bedroom in one swift movement. Then he’d ask Mafi to dust the cobwebs off whilst he stripped and washed.

He made his move and got a hand on the fish tank before losing his balance. Instinctively, he came up off his haunches to prevent himself from falling backwards, raised his arms to hold on to the low cupboard ceiling and discovered there was no ceiling. Curious, he extended his arm fully but still felt nothing. He looked up. High above him was the faintest hint of light and in it he thought he could make out two walls converging towards each other and, on top of them, the skeletal frame of a roof. Looking down again, he saw a switch in the gloom, the sort houses had when electricity was a new invention. He flicked it and was instantly blinded by a light bulb a few inches from his face. He looked down, and as his eyes recovered his mind made a connection between the bare bulb that had blinded him and the bare bulb that hung in the attic above his bedroom. He realised that the cupboard he was crouched in now was the bottom of the dark, bottomless well he had peered down into from the attic, the well that he had once decided went deep into the earth, possibly to Australia. Now the well was lit and he stood and looked into it, and instead of seeing the cave of magic he had once dreamt of finding through this small black door, he saw a maze of timbers draped in cobwebs which seemed to groan beneath the weight of house spiders. He detected movement by the doorframe and, despite the warnings in his head not to look, his eyes fell upon a community of Scytodes. He had encountered them before, on page 74 of the book. Each spider was swamped by clusters of small white growths. Ellis began to shake. His breathing became rapid and sucked the triangular cobwebs towards his face. He shut his eyes and brushed the webs away, activating silken tripwires which, his mind decided, was the scuttling towards him of a million spiders. He let out a succession of long, piercing screams until a wall of noise spewed from his mouth.

Mafi found Ellis’s legs floodlit by the bare bulb and framed by the cupboard door. Unable to talk him out, she crawled inside and dragged him out. She pushed him on to Denny’s bed and wrapped the sheets around his shaking body until he was curled up on his side. She held him there and he screamed until exhausted. Barely strong enough to breathe, he wiped the tears from his face and smiled bravely.

“I’m fine,” he whispered.

“You’re not yourself,” Mafi said, stroking his hair.

This was one of those adult sayings which Ellis didn’t understand.

“I am, actually …” he corrected her, politely, then passed out.

He woke in his own bed. Denny was asleep in a chair close by. The world was perfectly quiet, the night over but the sun not yet up. Ellis’s eyes came to rest, inevitably, on the attic door above him. A house spider squeezed its thick, black legs through the gap and took up position, upside down, on the ceiling overhead. The longer Ellis looked at it the less he could be sure it was there. His back tingled with sweat, his head swam in the anaesthetic of semi-consciousness and he fell back to sleep.

He woke again when his dad drew back the curtains and daylight broke into the room. The attic door and the ceiling were clear, for now at least. Ellis arched his head back on the pillow and looked at the wall separating his bedroom from his dad’s. In his mind’s eye, he saw through the wall and into the spider well.

“Don’t worry, dear boy. I’ve cleaned up in there.”

“If you’ve killed them, all the others will take revenge,” Ellis said reproachfully.

Denny O’Rourke placed a finger on his son’s lips.

“There’s been no killing,” he whispered. “Just a little dust up. They were warned; they had time to move out first. It was all quite amicable.”

Ellis looked at his dad doubtfully. He’d never suspect him of lying. But he thought he was being naive.

The truce that had held firm for over a year was over. All around him, Ellis knew, there was an exodus taking place from the spider well. A colony of Tegenaria had taken the hatch attic. Ellis would now live in fear of rain, because it was rainfall that sent him into the hatch attic to move buckets to catch the drips. The dining room fireplace, the boiler cupboard and the pantry, all previously protected areas, were now spider zones. Worst of all, the spider hub had relocated from the well to the attic above Ellis’s bedroom.

Ellis now had to raise the subject of their selling the cottage and moving on. He suspected his dad would take a few days to come round to the idea.

Things were a mess. A brief ceasefire was ruined when three spiders appeared in the corridor between Ellis’s bedroom and Chrissie’s. Ellis complained bitterly but the elders insisted that those particular spiders were members of a small, unaccredited, anti-truce movement.

“How is that fair?” Ellis moaned. “You can use that excuse to get away with anything. There’s only one of me! If I do something wrong, I can’t blame someone else!”

The spiders took offence.

One thing we are not, Master O’Rourke, is liars.

Early in the New Year, Ellis inadvertently stepped on one of four spiders that had formed a scouting party to investigate the plausibility of moving into the landing cupboard, where toilet paper and cleaning materials were stored. Ellis argued that he hadn’t seen the spider in time to avoid it.

“Seeing as you lot seem to know what I’m thinking before I do, you’ll know that I’m telling the truth!”

He offered them the complete run of Mafi’s garage in return for leaving the cottage. They reminded him that they had been in Mafi’s garage since he burnt down the shed. If spiders could laugh, they’d have laughed at him now.

He knew that if he were to ask his dad to sweep through the cottage and clean out the spiders, not bothering to preserve them in the process, his dad would do it for him. But even as a twelve year old, Ellis sensed that a conquest of this nature would be a defeat; that to drive the spiders out would be to put out of reach the possibility of there ever being peace in his head. And sometimes, when he imagined life without the spiders, after a successful war, he got a sense of incurable emptiness.

In the spring the cobwebs became as sinister to Ellis as the spiders themselves. They were everywhere, at all times. In the grassland, in the meadows, in the woodlands surrounding the village, in the moss banks of Treasure Island, in the boggy fields around the Rumpumps. They were beside the streams and ponds and lakes. In all these places, which Ellis considered his playgrounds, they were there. He had seen them glistening in the dew and he had seen them caught in the low evening sunlight. He had seen them fluttering in the breeze. He’d seen them even if they weren’t there, because he’d read about them in the book.

Chrissie was trying to be a more serious human being. She had taken to reading the papers and watching the news.

“Is it so you hope James will think you’re interesting and not dump you?” Ellis asked.

James dug his elbow into Ellis’s ribs. Ellis had planted himself in between Chrissie and James on the sofa, uninvited.

“No, death-breath, it’s because I’m thinking of doing a journalism course.”

She glanced at Denny to see if he had heard her. He was scribbling in his notebook. Chrissie had been waiting all evening for a good moment to talk to her dad. Now, she felt her lips tremble before she spoke.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Dad, please don’t throw an eppie, but I was thinking I might not go away to college next month. I might do a journalism course in London instead, and stay living at home another year. You know, commute with you.”

Denny O’Rourke took a sip of his tea and hid his elation in the drinking of it. Without looking up from his note-making, he said in a firm yet whispered voice, “Very sensible, my dear girl … good idea.”

Chrissie and James glanced at each other blissfully. She snuggled up against Ellis and draped an arm round him. She was often lazy and affectionate with her brother after she and James had been making love.

At the point when the newsreader said it, no one was watching the TV. Chrissie and James were looking at each other and the prospect of another year’s lovemaking. Denny appeared to be reading his list but was in fact thinking joyfully of another year with his family remaining no further undone. And Ellis was using his vantage point, and the pretence of sleep, to cast an eye over the curves of his sister’s maturing body. Beneath this inactivity, almost but not quite unheard, unfolded the story of two Brazilian children killed in their sleep by a Phoneutria fera, one of South America’s deadliest wandering spiders. The spider had crawled into their bed during the day. In the footage, a mother was screaming and tearing at her hair.

“The South American wandering spider occasionally,” the newsreader explained, with the pained expression he adopted for any human interest story, “turns up on our own doorstep in Europe, having hitched a ride in a consignment of bananas and surviving as long as it remains in well heated buildings.”

An exceptional calm enveloped the room. The calm that is aware of an approaching storm.

“Here we go …” Chrissie muttered.

Ellis marched out.

“That’s a bloody stupid thing to say on national television,” Denny O’Rourke muttered bitterly.

They found Ellis in the boiler cupboard, grappling with the thermostat.

“The heating’s off,” his dad assured him.

Chrissie shut the fridge door.

“Leave that open!” Ellis shouted. “We’ve to get the temperature down in this house.” He climbed up on to the kitchen table and scoured the floor for any activity.

“I’m never getting into bed again. I want a hammock, hanging from the ceiling.”

“The hammock would still be attached to the floor, Ellis, via the walls,” Chrissie explained. “You can’t levitate in mid-air.” She saw no point in giving him false hope.

“I assure you there aren’t any of those spiders here, Ellis,” his dad said.

“You don’t know that. It was on the news. They could be here! In the bananas! It does happen! And they eat you alive, you can see them doing it as they eat you.”

Denny took Ellis in his arms and held him tight. He knew that now was not the time for science or common sense.

“Ellis, I promise you, I will not let anything bad happen to you. Do you think you are going to throw up?”

“Can’t tell yet.”

They wandered into the orchard, holding hands, and walked in silent, meandering shapes beneath the apple trees whilst Ellis’s shivering waned. The light came on in Chrissie’s bedroom. Ellis watched her draw the curtains and he wondered what it felt like to be a boy in Chrissie’s room, when Chrissie wasn’t your sister.

I never get spider shivers when I think about girls, Ellis thought to himself. Maybe that’s the thing, maybe if I was allowed to have some sex I’d not be afraid of spiders any more.

He looked at his dad.

No, he’ll never buy that.

Ellis didn’t mention the Brazilian spiders again but for some weeks he wouldn’t allow himself to be alone in the house. One June evening, he found his dad kneeling at the dresser in his bedroom. Denny was holding a pair of silk stockings. He laid them across his wrists and studied them. He held them to his cheek. And then the floorboards creaked beneath Ellis’s feet and Denny turned with a flash of anger, which disappeared when he saw his son.

“Are they Mum’s?” Ellis asked.

“Yes.” Denny placed the stockings back inside the bottom drawer. “I wanted to show you them for a reason,” he said, thinking on his feet. “Something amazing and very beautiful …”

He walked out of the room to the bookcase on the landing.

“But you didn’t show them to me,” Ellis said, confused.

Ellis stared into the drawer. Next to the stockings was Denny’s blue canvas-bound diary from his time in the merchant navy. As a three or four year old, Ellis had pestered his dad to read stories from the diary. At some point after his mother died, it occurred now to Ellis, the diary had disappeared. There was a bundle of airmail letters wedged between the pages of the diary. The letters had been written by his mum, to his dad. Ellis had caught sight of them from time to time when he was younger and had often fantasised of being allowed to search through them for mention of his own name.

Denny returned, holding the spider book. “Have you heard of denier?” he asked, pushing the drawer shut with his foot.

“What?” Ellis muttered, watching the stockings, the diary and his mother’s letters disappear from view.

“The denier of a silk stocking is how they measure how fine it is,” Denny said, locking the drawer and putting the key in his pocket. “Listen to this …”

He began to read from the spider book: “‘The denier of a thread is the weight in grams of a nine-kilometre length. Human hair averages about fifty denier. Silkworm silk is about one denier, meaning that a nine-kilometre length weighs just one gram. But the dragline silk of the garden spider is 0.07 denier. A strand of silk long enough to encircle the earth – about twenty-five thousand miles – would weigh twelve ounces. Yet spider silk is the strongest of all natural fibres.’”

Ellis offered no reaction.

“I think that’s pretty incredible, Ellis, don’t you?”

“S’pose so …”

And although he did think it was amazing that a strand of silk that long could weigh so little, he didn’t want to encourage the spider book any more. It didn’t really help. He didn’t need convincing that they were interesting creatures. He knew he shouldn’t kill them and it was rare he ever did so knowingly. But knowing more and more about them was not helping. He was still repulsed by them, occasionally to the point of being physically ill. He wanted to fill his mind with other things. That, it seemed to Ellis, was the direction he should take.

“What happens at the top of them?” Ellis asked.

“At the top of what?”

“At the top of the legs. Where do the stockings stop?”

“They just stop. They’re just held up by … another bit of clothing,” Denny offered.

Ellis persisted. “But what’s there, what is actually there?”

“Well, just underwear really, Ellis. Basically, they attach to the underwear with buttons.”

“No, Dad.” Ellis smiled patiently. “I mean what is actually there? The lady …at the top of the stockings, what would you find there … on the lady?”

Denny thought how best to answer. How far to answer. He went again to the landing bookcase and returned with a volume of the encyclopaedia.

“Not another book! Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Hold your horses …” Denny searched the index and, when he found the page, he looked at his son decisively. “You mean, what does a woman’s body look like?”

“I suppose so.”

“Here.”

Ellis looked. On the page in front of him were two black and white photographs and some very small print. One photograph had five naked men standing in a line. They looked ridiculous, especially the two with beards, who also had hairy chests. The other photograph was of five naked women. The youngest woman was in fact a girl, probably Ellis’s age. The oldest was very old. But the three in between were great, Ellis thought, staring at their breasts and at the patch of hair where their stockings would end.

I take it back, he told himself, this encyclopaedia is great. My dad is brilliant. This is the book we should be looking at. This book, not the spider book!

He made a mental note of the page number. Two hundred and fifty-two. The naked women were already making him feel a little different. All in all, different felt good.

Denny O’Rourke took a cigarette from the packet in his breast pocket and lit it with practised ease.

“Do you drive an automatic so it’s easy to smoke?” Ellis asked.

Denny smiled. Only his son asked him questions like that. “No.”

It was the last day of the summer term. Denny told Ellis to empty his desk and make sure he brought all his possessions home for the holiday.

“Don’t leave anything behind,” he emphasised.

Ellis wasn’t listening. He was thinking about the startling discovery he’d made, whilst watching the previous evening’s news, that the Olympic games were to be held in Moscow. He couldn’t understand how the Olympics could take place in such a dangerous country full of bad people.

“Won’t they try to kill everyone who goes there?”

“I mean everything, Ellis. All your art stuff and everything.”

“Won’t they though?”

“Ellis! Are you listening to me?”

“Yes! I said yes about five hours ago. Won’t the Russians try and kill everyone at the Olympics?”

“It’s not quite like that.”

Ellis floated into class. Nothing could better the end of the school year. Two months of summer in the village beckoned and, after it, the deal he and his dad had struck would finally come of age, meaning that the next time he came to school he would do so independently, cycling to Hildenborough station on his own and taking the train to Orpington and arriving at school under his own steam. By then, he’d be two months from turning thirteen. He’d be grown up and free. On the way home each day, he’d freewheel down Philpotts Lane with his hands outstretched and his head thrown back and his eyes showered by sunlight breaking through the trees, the way people cycled in films.

Ellis and two of his friends had decided that they would try alcohol for the first time. When they met in the park under the appointed tree at the start of lunch break, Ellis and Andre Heart immediately suspected that their commitment to alcoholic experimentation did not match Justin Dearly’s. For, whilst they came bearing two cans each of Top Deck shandy and ten B&H between them, Justin arrived armed with a Benylin bottle into which he had mixed cognac, Scotch, port and vodka from his dad’s drinks cabinet. Although the cocktail was given a comforting aftertaste by the residue cough mixture, one sip was more than enough for Ellis and Andre, who returned to supping their shandy with manful intent.

In the slow, forward-shuffling line that entered the school hall that afternoon, Ellis and Andre Heart became aware that Justin Dearly could no longer support his own bodyweight. The obese and unpopular Reverend Mr Fullah wheezed his way through an opening prayer and then the headmaster motioned for his pupils and staff to sit. As Justin Dearly lowered himself unsteadily towards the moving target that seemed to be his chair, he took the chewing gum from his mouth and placed it carefully on the seat in front of him, moments before Roddy Stockton placed his backside on it. As the headmaster spoke, Justin leant forward in his seat and whispered repeatedly into Roddy Stockton’s ear, “It was me, it was me, it was me …”

Irritation got the better of Roddy. “What was you?” he hissed.

“It was me.”

“What was?”

“If you ask yourself later ‘Who did that?’, it was me.”

“Prick!”

Speeches dragged on and the need to rid himself of the shandy in his bladder was almost more than Ellis could bear. Just as he dared to hope that the service was ending, Mr Fullah hauled himself back up to the microphone.

Ellis cursed Fullah and thought to himself, I don’t believe in fat vicars, not when there’s people starving in the world.

“It is with great sadness,” Fullah said, “that I must inform you all of the unexpected death of one of the most long-serving figures in our school. Mr Marshall, who has been caretaker here for thirty-five years, died suddenly the night before last after a massive stroke.”

The hall fell into polite silence.

“Mr Marshall will be buried on Friday,” the chaplain added gravely.

“GOOD! THE MISERABLE OLD BASTARD!”

It was Justin’s voice that had reverberated across the hall, bearing a telltale slur. The standing masses turned and found Ellis O’Rourke bent double holding his crotch and Andre Heart urinating into Dylan Foster’s packed-lunch box. In between them, Justin Dearly slumped back on to his chair. Two members of staff wove their way towards the culprits. Then, as six hundred boys and girls sat down, Justin Dearly stood up. And moments after he stood up, he threw up, on Roddy Stockton. And as he was dragged away he smiled at Roddy Stockton and said, “That was me too.”

“Sit down, Ellis,” Mr Teague said.

He was a good headmaster. Everyone thought so, including Ellis. He limped a little and carried a large bundle of keys in his front trouser pocket and the net result was that you knew when he was approaching from quite a way off. When Ellis had been reported to him for singing “Friggin’ in the riggin’” at the top of his voice whilst walking to class, Mr Teague had quickly recognised that Ellis had no idea what the words meant and dealt with him kindly. That was two years ago and Ellis still didn’t know what the words meant.

Mr Teague pulled up a chair next to Ellis.

“Are you going to expel me?” Ellis asked.

Mr Teague shook his head ruefully. “Quite the opposite,” he said. He delivered a mild warning on the perils of alcohol, then patted Ellis’s shoulder and told him to enjoy his summer holiday.

“Do I have to do lines?”

“No, you don’t. You just have to have a good summer.”

“Oh. Ace! See you in September, sir. I’ll be coming by train, on my own. How great is that!” Ellis beamed, smelling freedom.

And then, without a shadow of a doubt, Ellis saw the headmaster’s bottom lip tremble, as if he was going to cry.

“I want you to take care of yourself, young man,” Mr Teague said, and ushered Ellis out hurriedly.

Ellis wandered off to find Andre Heart, confused by the leniency shown him and trying to figure out what would be the opposite of being expelled.