Bright green grasshoppers appeared in the meadow on Philpotts Lane where Ellis went when he wanted to be alone. He could lay himself and his bike down there and disappear from view. The edge of the meadow was flanked by durmast oak and when he saw the green acorns he knew that it was time to start at his new school.

Ellis knew kids who liked school and kids who didn’t. He and Tim were kids who didn’t. Their cycle ride home was rushed and breathless. It took them twenty minutes to change out of their uniform and meet at the farm.

Only an encounter with Chloe Purcell on Oak Lane was worth delaying for. Chloe Purcell had been at Ellis’s school in Orpington until she was eleven, when her parents put her into the convent school. The bus dropped her in the old high street from where she walked two miles home along Oak Lane, in the deep blue of her convent sweater. She had short, straight black hair and a small brown birthmark beneath her left eye. She was quiet and plain and unextraordinary but in the first weeks of that school year Ellis saw that she was the most beautiful girl in the world and decided he loved her. He felt excited and terrified whenever he saw her up ahead on the lane.

On the day that Ellis and Tim had discovered they would be at the same school they were so ecstatic they invented a dance of celebration, which they called “The Goose” because when they performed it in the farmyard the geese got agitated and attacked them. They celebrated because they loved being together, but when Ellis saw Chloe Purcell on Oak Lane he always wished, just for these few minutes, that Tim wasn’t with him.

However early in the morning Ellis and Tim set out to pick autumn mushrooms, there was always a light coming from the kitchen at Longspring Farm. They found parasol mushrooms on the path leading into Eight Acre Wood. They picked eight large stems and wrapped them in a piece of cloth. The temperature dropped as they walked into a dip in the fields. Emerging from it, they saw the farmhouse caressed by a slow-drifting, head-high mist.

“Ghosts …” Ellis muttered.

He watched the ghosts drag themselves across the farm buildings. He sucked the cold air in and it tasted of dewy pasture. Reardon emerged from the milking shed, crossed the farmyard and headed into the flat fields where his Highland herd were. Today, he would move them on to the high pasture and bring the heifers down alongside the bullpens for mating.

It was best to avoid Reardon first thing. He was notoriously grumpy until noon, even on a good day. It took that long for the night to leave him. It was at night that the pain in his shattered leg returned, darting into his spine and filling his head with worries and the memory of two women who had loved him but whom he hadn’t wanted to marry. He slept under the same heavy bedding he had known as a child, in a single bed tucked into the corner of a cavernous, sloping bedroom. He had been on the farm for forty years and every single night of them he had felt that he was struggling against gravity, crushed under the weight of bedding and solitude. He didn’t know that he could change that. He didn’t know how acceptable it would be to reserve for his own life some of the enthusiasm he showed for other people’s. It would not be selfish. It would not be immodest. It would not be vain or too earthly. It would not offend God. But this kind, inspirational man did not know that. He knew how to farm. He knew how to tell a story in a delightful way. He knew how to inspire other people into action. He knew how to talk gregariously with people and never allow the conversation to centre on himself. He knew that to read the poems of John Clare and look at the paintings of Constable, Piper and the Wyeths brought him profound pleasure and helped to form his faithful image of what heaven might be. But he didn’t know that to buy a double bed and to level the floor around it and to purchase lightweight bedding would be to transform the nature of his nights’ sleep. He didn’t know that it might change the dreams that plagued him and the moods that were their legacy.

This morning, he appeared weary. Ellis felt a short, painless stab of affection for him and decided to leave some mushrooms for his breakfast. The kitchen was warm. A half-drunk mug of tea stood lonely on the table. Ellis washed the mug up and put it on top of the Rayburn next to the teapot. He unfolded the cloth rag and took out four of the mushrooms. He washed them and dragged the skin off with a blunt knife. He sliced them and left them on the bread board next to the hotplate.

The sun struggled to burn through. When its first beams perforated the sky, the mist departed, looking over its shoulder at Ellis with a vow to return.

Ellis shrugged nonchalantly. “It doesn’t bother me if you do.”

Denny’s secretary found him sitting with his back to his desk, gazing out at the pedestrians on Jermyn Street. He heard the teacup rattle and said, without turning, “Do you know what I had for breakfast this morning?”

She replied, of course, that she didn’t.

“I had fresh wild mushrooms on buttery toast. They were picked for me by my son and cooked for me by my daughter. Can you imagine a more marvellous breakfast for a man to have?”

And she thought to herself, Yes, I can. One shared with your wife. But she smiled kindly at his back and said, “There couldn’t be one.”

And then she left him and returned to her desk in the entrance hall, moved, because Mr O’Rourke never spoke like that. He was genial but private. He was kind to his staff but they felt they didn’t know him. He could name their children but rarely spoke of his own, fearing that to admit how much he loved them would be to risk losing them too.

On Sunday evenings, Denny would sit with Mafi in her living room. They smoked and talked about the children, the village, the state of things. Occasionally, perhaps two or three times a year, when she was feeling bullish, Mafi would tell her nephew to find himself a girlfriend and he would ignore her. From time to time, in the silences they were happy to share, Denny had said, “I’m so glad you’re here with us, Mafi.” She respected him more than any man she’d known. And she loved him dearly.

“All of this is a bonus,” she would tell her friends in the village. “A life I hardly deserve.”

Ellis would join Denny and Mafi and tell them what was going on at Longspring. It was the only subject he talked about and Denny loved to listen.

“Did you know that you get paid more money for the milk in winter than in summer?”

“No …”

“Well, you do, so that’s why they had the calves last month so that there’s tons of milk now.”

“That’s good …”

“And do you know why we didn’t let any of the herd into the east fields in July?”

“No, I don’t …”

“Because we were letting the grass grow for hay and if the cows had been in there they’d have eaten the grass.”

“I see …”

“You can’t put them in and just ask them not to graze.”

“No, I suppose you can’t.”

“Guess why there’s some ploughed fields at Longspring even though we do milk?”

“Fodder?”

“How did you know that?”

“Just a guess … what are you and Reardon growing for fodder?”

“And Tim and Michael Finsey,” Ellis reminded him. “Turnips and maize for silage. Do you know what silage is?”

“I do, yes.”

“Mafi?”

“I do, too.”

“Oh. Do you have to be born on a farm to run one or can you save up and buy one?” Ellis asked.

“You’d need to go to agricultural college before you do anything,” Denny said. “You could go to Wye or Hadlow. They’re nearby.”

“When could I go?”

“After your A levels.”

“Not after my O levels?”

“They’ll expect good A levels.”

Ellis slumped and sighed. “Even with all the work I’m doing on the farm?”

“Yes,” his dad confirmed, “even with.”

“You might want to try other things out, or see the world first, before you decide,” Mafi said.

Her words hung in the room without finding a comfortable place to sit. Denny O’Rourke stood up. “I’ve things to do,” he said, and left, with an expression which resembled a smile without amounting to one.

“In next to no time you’ll be a teenager,” Mafi said, as if shocked by the fact.

“I’m in love with Chloe Purcell,” Ellis responded.

“And I bet she’s in love with you, too.”

“No way,” Ellis fired back. “Fat chance. Girls don’t go for me.”

“Well,” Mafi sympathised, “you’re only young.”

“But so are they,” Ellis said helplessly.

They brought the dairy herd in at the beginning of November. A sea of breathing Jersey brown flooded the yard and a steam cloud levitated above it. The willow lines were pollarded and Tim and Ellis saw a fox jump from a hiding place inside the rotten middle of one of the trunks. They bundled up the branches and watched Terry Jay split them into three-sided stakes for hedge laying. Terry showed the boys how to set the stakes out an elbow-arm’s length apart through the hedge line. He pleached the hedges through the winter. The game crops were well out of sight of the farm and Tim and Ellis ran amok there amongst the kale and root artichoke, scaring straggling pheasant into flight and throwing stones at them once they were airborne.

The calves were released from their weaning pens into pasture to be fattened as steers. Bullfinches gathered on the phone lines without ever venturing too near to the farm. The boys were allowed into the milking shed for the first time and given the job of hosing down the udders prior to milking. Afterwards, Michael Finsey ordered the boys to wait for him in the yard where three heifers stood in pens. The pens had staggered brick walls on each side, which Tim and Ellis climbed like steps until they were standing on the back wall above the heifers. Michael and Reardon pulled a hired mating bull into the yard using poles hooked to the ring in the bull’s nose. Climbing the staggered walls of the pen, they hauled the bull up on to the first heifer’s back.

“You lucky lady, you lucky little thing!” Michael Finsey cackled.

Steam poured from the bull’s nose as it arched its huge bulk and pumped in and out of the beast beneath it. The expression on the heifer’s face turned from alarm to indifference.

“She looks bored stiff!” Michael shouted. “Better get used to that look, boys!” He roared with laughter.

Ellis was open-mouthed. As the bull was manoeuvred from one heifer to the next, pints of semen poured from its gross member on to the yard.

“Oh my giddy aunt,” Tim muttered, incredulous.

The bull rammed itself into the second heifer.

“Foreplay’s over!” Michael cried out. “We’ll bypass the clit seeing as they charge by the hour!”

Tim and Ellis shrugged at each other inquisitively. Whatever a clit might be, it seemed they were bypassing it. Michael’s lungs collapsed into nicotine-coated laughter. Within ten minutes, Reardon was returning the bull to the oast barn with all three heifers seen to. Michael, Tim and Ellis skated back and forth across the semen-coated yard floor until Tim was physically sick from laughing and he and Ellis decided they should call it a day.

“Sick and semen stew!” Michael Finsey yelled out, as the two boys disappeared across the fields. “The rats will feast tonight!”

A graphic account of the bull’s sexual performance, which Tim Wickham included in his creative writing project the following Wednesday, and its faithful reproduction of Michael Finsey’s vernacular, placed Tim in a two-hour detention on the afternoon of Ellis’s birthday. Ellis cycled home alone and, seeing the blue of Chloe Purcell’s school uniform up ahead, moved down a couple of gears to buy himself some thinking time. He attempted to compose something fascinating to say but arrived alongside her tongue-tied as ever.

“Hello,” he ventured.

“You alone today?” she asked.

“Yup.”

“Want to come home for some tea?” she said casually.

They had to remove their shoes at the front door, which was a new one on Ellis. Chloe’s mum remembered Ellis from the school in Orpington. Ellis didn’t remember Mrs Purcell. He had expected her to be serious and religious and not much fun because she had sent her daughter to a convent school, but she wasn’t like that at all. Maybe, he told himself, he had this convent thing all wrong.

“Is it like St Trinian’s actually?” he asked.

“Is what like St Trinian’s?” Mrs Purcell asked back.

He looked at Chloe. “Your school.”

Chloe smiled. That, Ellis came to discover, was how she laughed, by allowing a delicate smile to trespass on to her face. To Ellis, it was a fireworks display.

Things like smiling and laughing are all relative to what someone’s like the rest of the time, he told himself years later, after finally witnessing Chloe’s silent, compact sexual ecstasy.

“I blooming well hope it’s not like St Trinian’s!” Mrs Purcell said.

Ellis really liked her. She was a proper mum. It would be great if he and Chloe got married.

“Mafi says ‘blooming’ a lot too,” he said. “She’s my great-aunt and she lives with us.”

They drank tea round the kitchen table. Ellis said what a nice house they had and asked where Chloe’s two younger sisters were. They were at ballet. It immediately worried Ellis that Chloe might consider it an embarrassment being married to a farmer. Their children were hardly going to want to be picked up from ballet in a muddy truck.

Chloe and her mother watched the ebb and flow of thoughts and expressions criss-cross Ellis’s face.

“What if you don’t like farm smells?” Ellis said, unaware he was thinking aloud.

“What if I do?” Chloe replied.

“Do what?” he asked, bemused.

“I love farm smells,” Chloe announced.

“Why do you ask, Ellis?” Mrs Purcell asked.

Ellis carefully steered his lips away from telling Mrs Purcell he loved her daughter, even though a part of his brain was threatening to blurt the words out.

“I work on a farm and I’m going to be a farmer.”

“You’re lucky,” Chloe told him.

“Yeah …” He adored her.

“What sort of thing do you get up to there?” Mrs Purcell asked.

“All sorts, bringing the cows in for milking mainly, throwing out bales into the fields from the flat-bed, mending fences …” Ellis chose randomly.

“Sounds very exciting,” Mrs Purcell said.

“It’s brilliant,” Ellis beamed, and encouraged by the blissfulness of being in Chloe Purcell’s kitchen on his birthday, he forgot to disengage his mouth from the free-fall of pictures in his mind.

“We just recently rented a bull to make the heifers pregnant and its thing was the length of a broom handle, but thicker, much thicker. And once it started to, you know …”

They shook their heads in unison.

“… once it started to … once the spunk started pouring out, it didn’t stop. It just went from heifer to heifer gushing out this stuff.”

Mrs Purcell’s mouth had dropped open.

“Poor cows,” she muttered.

Chloe sat back and flashed Ellis an adoring smile and replayed in her head the sound of the words “gushing spunk” being said in front of her mother. Ellis interpreted her smile as a signal to continue.

“When Reardon had gone we went skating on the concrete in the farmyard ’cos it was so slippy with all the stuff.”

Mrs Purcell slid the biscuit tin firmly towards Ellis. “Shall we talk about something else now?”

Chloe stepped in. “Let’s talk about the barn dance. Would you like to come to it with us?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” Ellis said immediately.

And in the living room, filled by the fragrance of Lent lilies in a vase, Ellis felt the foreign softness of a deep carpet beneath his every step as Mrs Purcell played the piano and Chloe taught him how to dance for a barn dance. Ellis said nothing. Now that Chloe was taking hold of his hand, now that she was putting her hands on his shoulders to position him, now that he was so close to her that he could smell the fragrance of her sweater, now that all these things had happened, he could not speak. He was a mute in paradise. The afternoon became a succession of smiles and nods and piano notes and his voice failed him.

It was dark outside when they stopped so Mrs Purcell told Ellis she would drive him home.

“We can put your bike in the back.”

Ellis looked at her as if she were daft. “Put a bike in a car?”

“It’s no trouble.”

“No thank you, Mrs Purcell. I cycle home, always.”

“Isn’t it a bit dark?”

He shook his head. “It’s just winter,” he explained, unnecessarily. “I hate cars. I like bikes and trains, and that’s all.”

“What about planes?” Chloe asked.

“I haven’t been on one,” Ellis said. “We could go on one,” he added, then felt like a fool for doing so.

“As long as you’re sure you’ll be OK,” Chloe’s mum said.

“More than OK.” Ellis beamed. “From the top of Hubbards Hill you can see lights all the way to the Crowborough Beacon. I bomb down there like a bullet.”

That wasn’t exactly what Mrs Purcell wanted to hear but Ellis was already putting on his shoes and coat. He wanted to get out of the house as quickly as possible because he felt like an idiot for saying that he and Chloe could go on a plane together and he realised that an invitation to a barn dance was not a declaration of love. Maybe she went to barn dances every week and each time with a different boy, or maybe he’d get there and find he was one of six or seven boys she’d invited.

I don’t like this, he thought to himself as he opened the front door. I don’t know where I stand or what I think and I don’t like it one bit.

He wanted to be at the farm right now, doing physical jobs and saying nothing. That’s what I really like, he told himself. Not girls.

As he bent over to tuck his trousers into his socks, his coat swung forward and engulfed his head comically. His heart sank.

I look like a tool, he cursed.

Chloe pulled the coat gently off his face, and as she did so she whispered in his ear.

“I’d love to go on a plane with you, Ellis O’Rourke.”

And in that moment, Ellis’s birthday flipped back over on to its stomach. Girls were the best thing he’d ever discovered, even better than the farm, better than Tim, better than anything he could think of. If we got married at sixteen, he told himself, we could move into Mrs Purcell’s house. We’d meet on Oak Lane after school and walk home arm in arm and in the morning I’d come down to breakfast and everyone else in her family would know we’d been in bed together all night.

“Is your dad grumpy in the mornings?” Ellis asked.

Chloe looked at him curiously. “No, he’s nice.” She smiled her disarming smile.

“Thank goodness for that,” Ellis said, somewhat seriously.

Eleven days later, Chloe’s father opened his front door to a polite-looking young man.

“You must be Ellis.”

“Hello, Mr Purcell.”

Mrs Purcell appeared. “Hello, Ellis.”

“Hello, Mrs Purcell. I’m sorry I said spunk last time.”

When they took their places for each new dance, Chloe pressed her little finger into the soft flesh at the base of Ellis’s thumb as a signal for him to start. He spent each dance writing conversations in his head but when the music stopped the words had gone. The more he tried to think of something, the further he got from saying anything. They stopped for a cup of tea and sat on metal-framed chairs with canvas seats, on the perimeter of the dance floor.

You only get these chairs in church halls, Ellis thought to himself, and he opened his mouth to share this observation with his future wife before deciding that it wasn’t interesting enough.

“Well, what do you want to do now, go outside for a walk or have another dance?” Chloe asked, threading her arm through his.

Ellis wanted to go for a walk, with her arm threaded through his. He wanted it very much. But, paralysed by guessing what she wanted to do, he managed only to mumble, “I don’t mind. Dance, if you like.”

And she danced heavily, the light stolen from her face by the indifference of this boy who had declined her offer to step outside. And he, he avoided catching her eye because he felt suddenly so ugly and idiotic for his inability to speak to her. She went to the bathroom before they left and stared accusingly in the mirror at her plainness. He walked her home and asked himself why someone as beautiful as her would have asked him out in the first place.

When I get home I’ll look at my map of the world, he told himself, and tomorrow morning I’ll go back to the farm and I’ll forget all about tonight. I’m not cut out for this.

They said goodbye outside her house. He got on his bike and she watched him disappear.

Neither Tim nor Ellis was sure what the goat-lady did apart from minding Reardon’s small herd of British Tappenburgs.

“It can’t be a full-time job,” Ellis said.

“Search me,” Tim agreed.

She lived alone in a shabby cottage, tied to the farm, and seemed to know nobody. The cottage was low and dark and in summer it disappeared beneath creeping ivy. It backed on to the Great Field where Reardon grew wheat and barley as feed. Alongside the cottage was a deep-furrowed track linking the Great Field to the lane. On the other side of the track was a ruined cart shed which Tim and Ellis called the sun barn because there was so much roof and cladding missing that the sun shone in there like being outside.

The goat-lady was about fifty, had short straight hair and wore excessive rouge on her cheeks. They presumed she cut her own hair, as it was bowl-shaped. At all times of the day, she wore a bright pink dinner-lady’s overall.

She had never spoken to the boys or acknowledged them until one summer’s afternoon when she put out two glasses of lemonade on the garden seat and disappeared inside. Tim and Ellis climbed down from the rafters of the sun barn and sat for a while in her garden, which was wild and overgrown, enchanting and unnerving. They were discussing whether or not to go to the front door to thank her for the drink when she appeared again, carrying a cardboard box. She thumped the box down on the grass in front of them.

“I expect you’d like a look at these,” she said and disappeared inside, never to speak to them again.

The boys looked at each other curiously, then delved into the box. Lying inside, at the top of the pile, was a woman wearing a black bra and sucking her fingers. She was staring at Ellis and Tim. Her skin was very pale and her body was round and soft to look at. Her breasts were extremely large. Ellis looked between her legs but she didn’t look like the women in the encyclopaedia. For a start, her legs were spread impressively wide apart and her feet were sticking up in the air. She had forgotten to take off her high-heeled shoes but had remembered to take off her underpants. He stared at where the hair should be but there wasn’t any there. He didn’t quite understand what he was looking at in its place. Beneath that magazine were others, all similar. Ellis’s heart thudded and his penis seemed to be bursting at the seams. He felt thirsty and confused and wonderful and ill.

“Oh my sweet Jesus!” Tim muttered, holding a page up to Ellis. “Look!”

Ellis looked. There were half a dozen pictures on the page and the woman in them wasn’t alone. There was a naked man with her and they were doing “it”. Ellis stared and stared until Tim whispered, “What if she’s watching us? Let’s skedaddle.”

Ellis had to reach inside his trousers and adjust himself before he could stand up, for fear his penis would snap. The boys hurried away across the fields, stopping inside Eight Acre Wood to pee, only to discover that they couldn’t.

After that, for many months, whenever they played at the sun barn there was lemonade and the box of magazines. The boys spent as long as they wanted poring over the pictures but they never took a magazine away and they still didn’t know what they were meant to do with the erections that stirred as soon as they saw the pink of the goat-lady’s coat. Their tastes differed. Ellis liked it to be just two people, not of the same sex, and for the couple to start with their clothes on and for there to be some sense of a story unfolding as they undressed and he liked the man and woman to look as if they really cared for each other. He also found it helpful if one person was white and the other black because then he could unravel exactly which body part belonged to whom. Tim preferred orgies.

“Maybe … maybe she’ll do something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Tell us what to do.”

“Or show us.”

They both feigned retching.

“Maybe there’s someone in the village who would let us do it with them for five pounds.” There was a hint of desperation in Ellis’s voice.

“There are prostitutes in Sevenoaks, apparently,” Tim said.

“I don’t want to go with a prostitute!” Ellis was horrified. “I meant, just someone nice who would be happy to help out, for a little cash.”

“I can’t think of anyone. Shall we get the gun?”

Ellis shrugged and nodded. Shooting something seemed a decent alternative to losing their virginity.

“But let’s keep thinking,” Tim said, “let’s bear it in mind and maybe we’ll think of someone who might help out.”

“We’ll write a list and just keep adding to it when we think of someone. My dad writes lists for everything. We’ll put down the name of every woman we know or know through someone else and then we’ll look at it and see if there’s anyone we think we can approach.”

“Except teachers. We won’t put our teachers on the list. The thought of sleeping with Mrs Stanton makes me want to puke.”

“I should think her husband feels the same way.”

Considering how adept Tim was at picking locks, it was a skill he abused less than many thirteen years olds would. Mr Wickham’s air pistol, kept in a locked cabinet in the kitchen, was easy pickings. The gun was wrapped in a duster and placed inside a blue Mappin & Webb cutlery box.

They returned to the sun barn where Ellis stood on a crossbeam and balanced himself, ignoring the thirty-foot drop to the ground. Tim had lined up bottles and cans on the beam at the opposite end of the barn. He climbed up and pressed the pistol into Ellis’s hand and sat on the beam, swinging his legs back and forth as he rolled himself a ciggie. Ellis shut his eyes. The sun bore down on his eyelids. In the heat, he felt his senses refine and heighten. He was as aware of the bright green leaves of hornbeam in Eight Acre Wood as he was of the first target bottle as he was of the Crowborough Beacon on the horizon as he was of the lone house on Bayley’s Hill as he was of the erect pink nipples inside the glossy pages inside the goat-lady’s house. Nothing was any nearer or further away than anything else. Everything was perfectly vivid.

He had a tendency to take too long over his aim and to squeeze the trigger late, after a shake had settled into his forearm. But today, handling the pistol so soon after having an erection, a combination that had not occurred before, he felt overwhelmed by clarity. He fired immediately and blasted the bottle away. Without taking his eye off the next target he took a pellet from his pocket, reloaded, fired and hit it dead centre. He stared at the next bottle as he reloaded, raised his arm and fired. Tim laughed under his breath as the bottle cracked and fell. This was not like Ellis.

The throaty ticking of a tractor grew in volume as it descended the lane. It came into view at the track to the sun barn. It was one of Sedgewick’s tractors, from Dale Farm. It towed a large wooden trailer and sitting in it, legs splayed out and arms draped over the side, was Des Payne, sixteen years old, shaven-headed, built like a brick wall, with hands like coppice stumps and a skull so square a nut and bolt would not have looked out of place through his neck. Des’s eyes were shut, his face screwed up against the sunshine, his thick arms straining against his T-shirt, his massive thighs tight against the stonewashed drainpipe jeans that were his trademark.

Ellis trained the pistol on Des’s head. He did so without thought or reason, knowing only that the trailer would soon disappear behind the hedge and this moment would be lost for ever. This unique opportunity to be bold would have passed him by. He locked his elbow and squeezed the trigger, shooting Des Payne in the back of the head. Des’s bear-like body sprang up on to its knees, clutching its skull. As the trailer disappeared, Des’s wild, darting eyes found Ellis, his outstretched arm steady and his pistol aimed still at the eyes that now fixed on him a glare of immeasurable menace.

The trailer took Des away. He made no attempt to stop it or to jump off. He simply wiped away the nick of blood on his shaven head and lay back in the sun, knowing that in doing nothing he was beginning the worst of all punishments for a boy of imagination like Ellis O’Rourke.

Ellis lowered the gun and listened to the tractor fade. He sat down next to his friend and let his legs hang limply from the rafters. His body began to shake with fear and he wanted to whimper with regret, even though what he had done also made perfect sense to him, in a way he would not be able to explain.

Tim stared at the lane where the trailer had been.

“Interesting …” he muttered.

Five torturous days later, when Des came looking for him, Ellis resolved to look him in the eye whatever happened, to apologise but not to be pathetic. As Des’s stale breath hit his face, what struck Ellis as particularly strange was that he didn’t dislike Des Payne in any way. He was frightening to look at but he’d never done anything bad to Ellis, or anyone else for all Ellis knew. It was going to be tricky to justify his decision to shoot him in the head.

“I know that shooting you seems confrontational …”

Ellis trailed off into silence, distracted by the realisation that his fear had brought him to the brink of uncontrollable laughter.

“I don’t think everything we do in this world has an explanation and I think that the woman I marry will need to agree on that,” he heard himself say.

Des chewed on an old piece of gum.

His breath bears no trace of mintiness, whispered the dangerous little voice inside Ellis’s head.

Please don’t say that out loud, Ellis implored himself.

Des breathed in and his massive chest expanded as if to cast a shadow.

“Sorry,” Ellis said. It was unclear whether he was apologising for telling Des about his marriage plans or for the shooting.

Des took hold of Ellis beneath his armpits, lifted him off the ground and threw him on to the grass bank in front of Cyril Bates’s house. Cyril Bates was elderly and obese. His ankles were permanently swollen and he never wore socks. He moved around on a Zimmer frame and was usually to be seen in his leather farrier’s apron, hobbling between the workshop and the forge to the side of his house, where he rearranged the tools and left-over materials of a business that had folded some years previously. He always appeared busy at a glance but if you observed him for any length of time, as Ellis often had, you soon understood that he was merely moving objects from one place to another and then back again. But in passing, all one would see was a busy man with blackened hands, wearing a leather apron, hard at work. And that was how Cyril Bates wished to be seen.

Looking at Cyril’s upside-down house, Ellis cursed his luck that, for the first time he could remember, the old man was not in his workshop, from where he would have been able to keep an eye on these proceedings and bring them to a halt before Ellis was killed.

Des knelt on Ellis’s shoulders, pinning him painfully to the ground. He leant over and smiled menacingly.

“You’re a very silly little boy.”

He took the gum from his mouth and shoved it firmly up Ellis’s left nostril, further up than gum should probably go. Then, as Ellis braced himself for worse, Des was gone, meandering up the road to the village shop as if nothing much had happened.

Ellis rested his cheek against the lush, long grass. The smells of spring entered his unblocked nostril. It was over. It had hardly hurt at all and he hadn’t cried.

This is so much more interesting than a normal day, Ellis thought, and sighed with the happiness of having not been kicked to death.

He pictured his map of the world. Travelling across the world must feel this good, he told himself. Getting into trouble and travelling must feel equally fantastic.

Then he saw Chloe Purcell on the pavement, approaching him. Today, on this beautiful spring day, she looked supremely good, so good that he almost forgot to ask her what she was doing in the village.

“Visiting someone,” she answered.

“Who?”

“A friend.” She smiled innocently enough for Ellis not to notice the lack of innocence.

“How did you get here?”

“The bus. You’ve got something up your nose.”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Peppermint or spearmint, I’m not sure.”

“Are you looking up my skirt, Ellis?”

“Yes,” he said, blissfully, continuing to stare at the place where Chloe’s thighs disappeared into the shadows of her pleats.

She wandered off, unimpressed. Ellis shut his eyes and burnt the image of her into his brain. Some time later he heard the grass beside him move and felt a body lie alongside him. He fantasised for a moment that it was Chloe Purcell’s body and it felt wonderful to imagine. He knew who it was though, without looking. Chrissie extracted the gum from his nostril and threw it away.

“I was saving that for later,” he complained.

She pinched him and called him a fool. He cuddled up next to her and it occurred to him that since discovering the farm and pornography and shooting people in the head and the touch of Chloe Purcell’s hand on his arm, he had ceased worrying about the spiders.