The hay was harvested in early summer at Longspring Farm. Reardon kept Ellis and Tim busy, manoeuvring the herd around the grassland harvest. The boys watched a weasel suck the blood from the jugular vein of a rat. They discussed the idea of trying drugs for the first time, without having any intention of doing so.

“We should go up to the sun barn later on,” Ellis said, “browse some mags …”

Tim’s response changed everything between them.

“I’m not doing that any more. No need.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

Tim meandered away towards the farmhouse.

“Why does everybody in the blooming world walk away from me when I ask them a serious question?”

“Let’s make a cuppa,” Tim said.

Ellis ran to catch up with him.

“And say ‘fucking world’!” Tim added.

“What?”

“Say ‘fucking’ not ‘blooming’. You’re using words that don’t fit the bill.”

“What are you talking about?” Ellis asked.

“What the fuck am I talking about!”

“Yeah, what are you?”

“You’re not expressing yourself, Ellis. You need to revamp your vocab. What the fuck are you talking about, Tim!”

“But what are you talking about?”

“What the fuck am I talking about. Spit it out, it’ll do you good.”

“But what the fuck are you going on about?”

Tim handed Ellis the cigarette he’d been rolling.

“Swearing and fucking, mate. Vital. Get them both on your agenda, pronto.”

“Like you’ve done any fucking,” Ellis sneered.

Tim lit Ellis’s cigarette. “We’ll have a cuppa.”

Ellis seized him by the arm. “Have you done it?”

Tim smiled and headed off to Reardon’s kitchen.

“You’re doing it again. Walking away from me when I ask something important! It’s really annoying!”

“Fucking annoying!”

They drank strong, sugary tea in Reardon’s orchard and Ellis sat quietly, subdued by a premonition of being left behind. He didn’t ask Tim again, for fear of sounding desperate. Beyond the shade, the day was growing extremely hot. The grass was yellow and there were cracks in the earth.

When the windfalls land on grass this pale, Ellis thought to himself, it’s going to look pretty. Someone should take a photograph.

“My dad’s out this evening. Come over and I’ll dig out some alcohol.”

“Can’t,” Tim said.

Ellis drew shapes on the grass with a twig. “Please. I need you to pick a lock for me. Dad’s hidden something in a drawer and locked it.”

“It’d have to be early.”

They walked back through the farmyard, removing their T-shirts and throwing them on to the fence. Tim stepped into the hay barn. He placed his hands on his hips and arched his back to look up at the roof girder.

“What’s in the drawer?” he said, distantly.

“Nothing,” Ellis answered, remaining outside on the track. “Come on.”

“Not a lot of point opening it then.”

“Something of mine,” Ellis said.

“The thing is,” Tim said, “I’ll pick that lock for you if you cross the barn.”

The same panic swept through Ellis whenever Tim challenged him to cross the girder spanning the roof of the hay barn. Tim had done it but Ellis knew he wouldn’t be able to. He presumed that Tim was stronger than him, in exactly the same way he presumed every boy alongside him in class was more clever and every boy in the street more gifted with girls. He failed to see that he had all the same sinewy muscles that Tim had. They could hardly have been more similar physically. All Ellis lacked was whatever chemical it was that made a boy decide it would be a great idea to inch his way across a girder like that, hanging on by his fingers above a fifty foot drop. Tim possessed that chemical in bucketloads.

This moment had been and gone before, two or three times a year in the four years they had known each other, and Ellis had always withstood the suffocating process of pressure, refusal, pressure, refusal until Tim got bored or Ellis walked away. But today the balance was different. Tim was different. And Ellis wanted to read the letters inside that locked drawer a great deal. He surveyed the approach route, a stairway of hay bales stacked up to the roof at each end of the barn. He looked at the girder itself. It ran for fifty feet from one end of the barn to the other, and the same distance from the roof to the ground. In the centre of the barn, for a quarter of the crossing, there were no bales to break the fall.

“I don’t want you laughing at me or winding me up whilst I try to do it,” Ellis said, gravely.

“Course not! I’m going to be doing it with you anyway. You’ll follow me and do exactly what I do. I’ve always said that. Just trust me. I’d trust you.”

The trace of hurt in Tim’s voice comforted Ellis. Tim ushered him forward to the bales and for a moment it seemed that he was going to offer Ellis his hand. Ellis would have taken it. Tim climbed to the top of the bales and Ellis followed. Up high, sunlight leaked in through gaps in the barn wall, illuminating particles of floating dust as if the great movie show of grown-up life was trying to burst in and play. Tim turned to Ellis.

“Just follow me across and don’t stop to think. Don’t stop for a moment and the next thing you know you’ll be across and then you’ll have finally done it and you’ll feel great. OK?”

Ellis nodded. Tim wrapped his fingers round the H-shaped steel beam and stepped off the highest bale. His body-weight pulled his arms taut. He twisted his body with each extension of an arm and slid his hands along the beam, never letting them lose contact with the girder and never committing his weight to just one hand. Ellis reached up to the girder and placed one hand around it. He willed himself to move forward but his body didn’t respond. He watched the veins in Tim’s forearms and biceps fill with blood and he tried again to step off but his body was rigid and the two boys found themselves facing each other from opposing peaks of hay.

“You can do it!” Tim called across.

Ellis peered at Tim as if he was disappearing from view. He tried one more time to move but already knew that he possessed the wrong mind for the uncomplicated sort of boy he wanted to be. He felt the blood rise to his face in embarrassment. He looked at his friend again and was unable to stop himself asking, “You’ve done it, haven’t you?” His voice was resigned but not envious.

Tim sighed. “I have, yeah. But, after we’d done it, I swore to myself I wouldn’t be one of these guys who goes and blabs about it. She might not want anyone to know. So, don’t ask me about it or about her but when I know she doesn’t mind I’ll tell you first. That’s a promise. Who else would I tell but you? Come on, we’ll go open that drawer for you.”

They went to the drinks shelf in the larder as soon as Denny left for the evening. The spirit bottles were dusty and some stuck to the shelf, so rarely were they disturbed. The boys took their drinks up to Denny’s bedroom, where Ellis showed Tim the drawer.

“Easy as …” Tim muttered.

He took a leather pouch from his pocket, untied the shoelaces which held it together and rolled it open on the carpet. In the pouch were lengths of wire of different thickness, a penknife and some jeweller’s screwdrivers. He took one length of wire and bent it into the shape of a square hook at the end and slid it into the lock. Then he held two thicker pieces of wire close to his eye and decided between them.

“What time you meeting her?” Ellis asked.

“Half past eight.”

“That’s late to start an evening. Won’t you get a bollocking for being out so late?”

Tim looked hard at Ellis. “First of all, she’s worth it, believe me. Secondly, of course I’ll cop a bollocking but you just tell them. Or, in your case, you just tell him.”

“Tell who what?”

“Ellis-the-trellis! Parents don’t turn to their children at a certain age and suggest we start going out and having a good time. If you don’t do it, it won’t happen.”

“But I do have a good time …”

“Yeah, but you could have a better time,” Tim said. “Much better! It’s like this. You behave yourself, you don’t act like an idiot, but you just tell him, ‘Dad, I’m going out this evening and I’ll be back at eleven and this is where I’ll be.’ And he’ll say he wants you back at nine-thirty but you come back at eleven as you said in the first place and he sees you’re fine and you’ve not been arrested or behaved like a tool and the point is that you said you’d be back by eleven and you were. He will realise he can either have a life of arguing with you and you lying to him and him not knowing where the hell you are, or he can accept that you are going to start doing your own thing and he’s just got to get used to it.”

Ellis didn’t say anything. It sounded good in theory but he wasn’t totally sure where there was to go to round here until eleven at night.

Tim returned to the job in hand. “What’s in here that you’re so desperate to get back?”

“Letters.”

They were distracted by the sound of a car turning into the driveway. The boys watched from Denny’s bedroom window as Chrissie climbed out of the passenger seat of a convertible whilst a tall, besuited, slightly older man emerged from the driver’s side, wearing the sort of sunglasses that were 100 per cent reflective and Ellis had wanted to own until approximately ten seconds earlier.

“This is Dino. He’s a journalist.”

Chrissie announced this with grave reverence, mistakenly thinking it would impress two sixteen-year-old boys.

“Yeah, and …?” said Ellis.

“Where you from?” Tim asked.

“I’m from Malta,” Dino replied.

“Cool,” the boys said, in unison.

“Thanks. Glad you approve.”

Dino looked extremely old to Ellis and Tim and, sure enough, it soon came to light that he was twenty-nine.

“James was also much older than my sister,” Ellis observed, shortly before Chrissie slapped him on the head.

They all sat in the garden. Chrissie poured herself a glass of wine and Dino a vodka and tonic.

“Don’t you drink beer?” Tim asked disdainfully.

Dino ignored him and made an effort with Ellis. “Bet you miss your sister now she’s living up in the big city,” he said.

Ellis checkd his hair in Dino’s lenses. “How much?”

Dino took off his jacket and settled back with his drink.

“Whoa!” Tim said. “Your shoulders have come off with your jacket! And you’re actually pretty skinny underneath. That’s weird.”

“It’s trendy, you hick,” Chrissie intervened.

If Dino felt uneasy in the crossfire of Tim and Ellis’s disdain, that was nothing compared to the discomfort caused him by Ellis’s glassy silence as he drifted off into his own thoughts, achieving a vacant expression his sister and best friend took in their stride but which unnerved the newcomer.

Ellis was thinking how strange it sounded to be introduced in terms of what your job is. Dino is a journalist. Fine, sure, OK. But I’m really not bothered what his job is. How hot is it in Malta? How did he meet my sister? What sports does he play or watch? What’s his room like? Can he walk on his hands like me and Tim can? How long can he hold his breath? What age did he start shaving? Are his parents divorced? What’s his absolute best joke? How many times has he had sex in his life and is he knobbing my sister yet?

Somewhere between being his own age and Dino’s age, it was occurring to Ellis, you probably have to decide to do something and what you do defines what sort of life you have. So far, he had just been a boy and being a boy wasn’t a career option. Looming over him, all of a sudden, was the possibility that everything he had done and enjoyed up until now would soon be inappropriate or unsatisfying, and that possibility felt like a small death.

And all this change was appearing on the horizon simply because Tim had slept with a girl and Dino was a journalist.

Tim leant forward and confided to Dino, “You know those peope in Haiti that are buried alive, the living dead sort of thing, but real, like zombies? That’s what Ellis looks like when he’s thinking. Don’t be scared. He looks the same in lessons, too.”

They watched Ellis as his thoughts led him further from them. He was now considering his future. Basically, he wanted to farm but he didn’t want to be like a farmer. He wanted to be a sexy farmer, and a part-time explorer. The Indiana Jones of dairy. Or Ian Botham, he’d like to be Ian Botham. The way Ellis saw it, Ian Botham was naturally talented, therefore put no real hard work into being him, had great personal skills and a tremendous social life, could hold his drink, was massively respected and knew where to buy joints, or however it is you get hold of that stuff, and was married so got regular sex. So, yes, he’d like to be Ian Botham but without the cricket. A Botham-farmer. But, wait a minute, someone else was Ian Botham already: Ian Botham. Becoming Ian Botham was no more realistic a career plan than being a boy. This was hard.

He looked up. The others were staring at him.

“Hello …” he said quietly. Then he burst back into life. “Hey! Wait! That means you’re a Malteser!”

Chrissie slumped. “Please tell me it hasn’t taken you this long to come up with that? Jesus wept!”

Dino smiled, uneasily, and glanced at his watch. He and Chrissie didn’t stay long. They looked in on Mafi and then, whilst Dino gave Tim a tour of his Golf Cabriolet, Chrissie slapped her arms round Ellis and forced a kiss on to his lips. He feigned disgust. In truth, he liked her doing this, although he did sometimes wonder if the cause of his conversational inertia with girls might possibly be the fact that his sister remained the second most fanciable girl he’d ever known, behind Chloe Purcell.

She led him away. “I know Dino’s not your sort of bloke, but don’t be horrible. He’s a nice guy.”

Ellis put his arm round her, too. “You’re not gonna go and marry him, though, are you?”

“No way!” She stopped and faced him. “I’m knobbing him, as you’d put it. That’s all.”

They wandered back to the car holding hands. At sixteen years of age, nothing made Ellis feel better than a conversation like this one, where he actually got told something. A few of those conversations with his dad, he suspected, and he might not feel so out of the loop.

“What letters?” Tim asked.

Ellis watched Dino’s car take his sister away, and remained looking at the empty lane long after the car had disappeared.

Tim asked again, “What letters?”

Ellis dug his heel into the driveway gravel and avoided looking Tim in the eye. “Eh?”

“Upstairs, in the drawer …”

Ellis sighed. “From my mum. Old letters.”

“Why’s your dad taken them?”

“They’re to him, from my mum.”

“To him?”

Ellis nodded and smiled over-confidently at Tim.

“They’re not to you?”

“No,” Ellis said. “Please, let’s get on with it. I just want to read the letters. It’s OK. It’s fine. He wants me to read them.”

“Then why has he locked them up? They must be private.”

“He lost the key ages ago.”

“Sure,” Tim muttered unconvincingly. Now it was his turn to bow his head and study his feet.

“Come on!” Ellis urged him.

“But they’re not yours.”

They stood in silence. Tim looked at his watch and wore the pained expression of a friend who didn’t want to pass judgement.

“It’s getting late. I’ll be late for her.”

He started off down the driveway.

“It can’t be half past eight already!” Ellis pleaded.

But Tim was gone, walking at speed on to the lane without looking back, the leather tool pouch wedged into his back pocket.

Ellis sat on the front lawn. His mother’s handwriting turned to ribbons of ink and snaked away from him into the evening, leaving his world poorer and prompting him to see things anew. He saw the garden for what it was, a series of impenetrable borders camouflaged by wild flowers and birdsong. He pictured the lady living here with them and realised she was a generation too old. Mafi was the sort of relative Ellis should be visiting from time to time, not living with. The only woman in the world he could be held by and laugh with, and love one minute and hate the next, had left him for London and was dragging home bores who wouldn’t know how to talk to him. And his father continued to torture him by being the loveliest, loneliest, least penetrable of men.

Ellis dragged himself inside and told Mafi that he was going out with friends and would be back at eleven o’clock. He left the room before she could answer. He didn’t know where to go. All that mattered to him was that he was not in the cottage when his dad got home and that he arrived back no earlier than eleven.

He wandered towards Sedgewick’s land at Dale Farm from the back fields above Wickhurst lane, avoiding the roads in case his dad was driving back into the village. Sedgewick, who was high up in the council, had sold a meadow to a developer who started to build a small, highly unpopular cul-de-sac of commuter houses there. There was a rumour in the village that every time the builders started to work there the site was vandalised, but Ellis and Tim hadn’t been to investigate. Now, Ellis climbed the site fence and found the burnt-out shell of an excavator and footings that had been set about with a sledgehammer. Some weeds and crops were coming up through the concrete.

He walked slowly out of the valley to the bridge at Hubbards Hill. He sat beneath it, watching the traffic on the bypass. When Harry Lyle, the son of the people who owned the post office, ran away from home, this is where they found him, huddled up beneath the concrete buttresses. Most children in the village ended up here at some point in their life, watching the traffic, having their first grope, avoiding PC Bachelor, running away from home or just feeling bored. Ellis had spent some time hiding here after he shot Des Payne, and now he was back again. He watched the cars and guessed at the time. He tried to calculate how long he’d been gone, how long it had taken him to cross Dale Farm and how long he had been sitting here. Another half-hour here would probably do it, he decided, and then a slow walk home. That should make it eleven o’clock.

In a rare lull in the traffic he heard a whimpering from nearby. He looked around but could see nothing. He heard it again, this time stronger and, he realised, from further away than he had thought. He looked across the road and as a fresh wave of traffic stole the silence back he saw, tucked under the bridge, Tim Wickham and Chloe Purcell, their arms and legs wrapped round each other. They shared kisses, more tender than the ones Chrissie and James had shared. Her eyes were closed and her face wore a depth of passion Ellis could never have imagined her capable of. He felt his legs buckling as he got to his feet and hurried away without being seen.

He was disgusted at himself. He cursed his naivety. He was sick of being the viewer. Sick of watching. Sick of wondering. Angry at never knowing.

He had always felt that of all the girls he knew, Chloe Purcell was the plainest and most quiet. He had presumed he would end up with her because she was so plain and he was so useless. And, despite himself, he’d always thought she liked him. She had once said she wanted to fly away with him, after all. Now, presumably, Chloe and Tim would laugh at how Ellis had gone to a barn dance with her and not spoken a word or made a move.

No one, he told himself, ever tells you what’s really going on. I have to do my own thing and have my own secrets, otherwise I’m just a baby. One day I’ll show them. I’ll be gone. I’ll meet people who don’t know me and I’ll be different with them. I’ll have lots of friends and I’ll get letters and phone calls. My girlfriend will be a prettier version of Chloe and she’ll get up out of bed in the mornings and walk naked to the kitchen and make us tea and bring it back to bed.

But as he marched furiously back into the village, another part of him said, “That won’t ever happen to you.”

He found Mafi in her kitchen. She asked him if wanted a cup of tea.

“Are you having one?” Ellis asked resentfully.

“Yes.”

“Yes, please, then.”

He moped into Mafi’s living room and threw himself down on to the armchair his dad usually sat in. He looked at the ship’s clock that a great-uncle he had never known brought back from his voyages. It was only half past nine.

“Bollocks,” he muttered. “Fucking virginal tatty bollocks.”

He sighed dramatically and listened to the ticking of the ship’s clock take over the room.

“Can’t be that bad …” Denny’s voice came from behind Ellis’s head.

Surprised, Ellis looked round and saw his dad standing at the window, smoking a cigarette and watching the night sky.

“I didn’t see you.”

“I guessed that.” Denny laughed under his breath and laid his hand on Ellis’s shoulder as he passed him and took a seat in the corner of the room. Between his thumb and forefinger, he played with the length of wire Tim had left protruding from the lock of Denny’s drawer.

“Oh …” Ellis sighed, involuntarily, when he saw it.

They sat in silence for a while until Denny said, “I’m not angry with you, Ellis,” and smiled cautiously.

“Well, I sort of wish you were.”

“Why?”

“Then I could get angry too.”

“I don’t want either of us to be angry. There’s no need, no need at all. But some things of mine are not for sharing. It’s private, Ellis. It’s very private.”

Ellis stared at the floor. “Now I am angry,” he said. “Private …” He muttered the word bitterly. “There’s nothing I hate more than bloody private. Everything is private. I’m not allowed to know anything.”

“We have a good life, Ellis, everything we need.”

Ellis felt unable to breathe and rose to his feet.

“That’s a stupid thing to say to me,” he said, and walked out.

Tim left school without finishing and went to work full time for Reardon. Chloe spent every weekend at Longspring. She remained quiet and plain and incapable of laughter, but the smile she smiled where others would laugh still overwhelmed Ellis.

Ellis kept himself to himself. He stayed in the cottage and returned to Treasure Island, surprised that no younger boys had made it their own. Once, he set out for the goat-lady’s house but turned back halfway.

He read National Geographic and imagined a score of different lives for himself, his favourite being the one in which he was a world renowned, hugely respected and sexually sought-after roving farmer, an international agricultural trouble-shooter, a genius with instincts for farming in any country and climate and an ability to read the landscape that inspired the awe of those who witnessed it. He slept out under the stars, on hillsides, by riverbanks and on beaches and saw things that no one in Kent had ever seen. When he imagined this life the technical details of his genius were omitted, as was the training and experience which would be required of him to attain it. He thought purely in terms of sensory pleasures; fresh air, travel, Eden-like views, excitement, being admired, looking rugged and, of course, indulgent women.

He tried to tell Denny little, to curb his lifelong instinct to share all his unedited thoughts and ideas with his father, in the hope that this would be the start of his being a grown-up. He attempted to create an illusion of there being much that Denny didn’t know about in Ellis’s life, even though this wasn’t true. He tried to smile and laugh less with his dad too, but repeatedly found himself looking back on the day and realising he had forgotten to do so.

It’s hard, he had to admit to himself, pretending you’ve some interesting secrets when you haven’t.

In the February of 1985, winter tightened its grip on the landscape for a few more weeks and Ellis heard from Michael Finsey that Chloe Purcell was going to run a livery yard for Reardon when she left school, and that her parents were furious she wasn’t going to college. The hurt poured into Ellis. He hadn’t been to the farm since Christmas, nor had he seen Tim, a feat that Mafi rated as “quite an achievement” in a village so small. At Easter, Tim phoned and persuaded Ellis to go for a drink.

“Just the two of us,” he assured him.

In the twilight of half-drunkenness, Ellis told his friend a half-truth. “I suppose I felt a bit annoyed ’cos you were always with your girlfriend, so I decided I’d come over a bit less.”

Tim laughed. “You disappeared!” His eyes sparkled and laughter-lines cradled them in optimism.

“You didn’t come looking for me,” Ellis said.

“I was in love. Girls do that. I’m sorry.”

“Anyway,” Ellis said, “that’s that sorted out.”

They left the pub with their arms round each other and drove when they shouldn’t have, through the back lanes into the Rother valley. From the top of Catt’s Hill they saw an electrical storm heading inland off the Channel. At Fairfield, they ran in great circles as curtains of rain swept across the Marsh and soaked them through. When the lightning came it lit up the flatlands, silhouetting the lonely church and the wind-bent thorn bushes. They chased after lightning bolts and goaded the thunder. And when the storm had become a silent slither of white light above the ridge, they wandered aimlessly in the darkness, catching their breath and feeling the blood race around their bodies. They drove up the lane to the turkey farm at Becket’s Bridge and parked in the Dutch barn. They slept in the car until Ellis was woken by his own shivering, shortly after five.

They were at Reardon’s by seven. Ellis stood at the highest point on the farm and surveyed his village. It felt good to be back at Longspring, but it felt different too. A few months’ absence made him feel like a visitor now. He liked the idea of being a prodigal son, to his family, but most of all to Tim, and through him to Chloe. He wanted to be missed. He wanted to be a mystery. This morning, his ambition took no more form than that. He didn’t know what to do or where to go. But he knew now that he wanted to leave and go to that fictitious place where his daily struggle to communicate and to concentrate was cured. He would return regularly to see his dad and they would meet on the Marsh often. His dad would be proud of him.

Shivering and tired, he went home, resolved to force his way out of a life that threatened to consume him with disappointment, now that Chloe loved Tim. As he waited for the bath to fill, he looked at the framed poster on Mafi’s wall of a painting called Nuit d’Eté by Winslow Homer. In it, two women dance happily together on a moonlit beach. Silhouetted against a rough, silvery sea is a cluster of onlookers. A pale blue trail of moonshine beckons the dancers towards the horizon.

Denny appeared at his son’s side, just when Ellis wanted to be alone. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much. I’m just bored.” He pressed his index finger against the picture and said, “I want evenings like this. I want to go places and see things.”

Denny sighed heavily. “It’ll happen, dear boy. But there’s no hurry. You’ve plenty of time. Please, dear boy. Please.”

Later, after Ellis had bathed and eaten porridge with golden syrup, he saw from his bedroom window that Denny was in the far corner of the orchard, sitting against an apple tree, staring at the sky. He looked scared, as unlike Denny O’Rourke as Ellis had ever seen him look. And Ellis could hear his father’s voice in his ear: “Please, dear boy. Please.”