Katie Morton was the first. She was neither his girlfriend nor his lover but she was the first. He met her in the spring of 1985 when his school career was petering out a year short of the finish line and Chloe’s presence on Longspring Farm had made it yet another place where he fumbled for words, doubted himself and, consequently, no longer ventured. Katie Morton lay sunbathing on the green on the day her parents moved to the village. She was tall, with tight curly black hair and braces on her teeth. When she walked, her arms were folded across her chest, like a schoolteacher. She was nineteen. What a catch it would be for Ellis to go out with a girl two years older. Lazily, and without meaning it for one minute, he told Chrissie and Bruce, his sister’s current boyfriend, that he was going to go out with the new girl.

In June, Ellis’s headmaster wrote to Denny O’Rourke questioning whether there was any point in Ellis returning to school for his final year. He enclosed a questionnaire that all the pupils in Ellis’s year had completed.

Question 6: Where would you like to be in five years’ time? Ellis’s answer: The late eighteenth century. Question 4: What would be your chosen career if you were to decide on it now? Freelance contraband smuggler, self-employed. Question 20: What single change would most directly improve the world you live in? This test stopping at question 19.

Denny heard himself chuckle. The sound reminded him of his wife and suddenly, again, the bed he was lying on was enormous. A few yards away, Ellis lay on his own bed in deeply self-critical mood. What sort of seventeen year old daydreams they are a Marsh smuggler, he berated himself. My peers are daydreaming about having sex with Joan Jett or Bananarama.

He was too restless to sleep.

Smugglers would have got a lot of sex, his inner voice continued. Although women had brown teeth in those days so it can’t have been much fun. There again, men in those days had no concept of women with white teeth and you can’t miss what you don’t know.

Yes, you can, he remembered.

Fearing his mind could implode, he slipped downstairs and poured vodka into a glass and took it to bed.

Chrissie came for the weekend and brought with her some concert tickets and many questions.

“Have you asked the new girl out yet, Ellis?”

“No, but I saw her today.”

“What, you went to her house to see her or you saw her half a mile away?”

“We walked past each other on the footpath.”

“And what did you say to her?”

“Hi Katie.”

“And what else?”

“Just ‘Hi Katie’.”

“That was it?”

“When two people walk past each other there’s only a couple of seconds of actual talking time!” Ellis protested. “You can’t fit many words in.”

“You can if you stop walking.”

“And what if she doesn’t stop when I stop? I’ll be left standing there, looking like an idiot!”

“Ellis! What on earth – what on God’s earth! – makes you think that Katie Morton would walk past you if you stopped and said hello?”

Ellis didn’t say anything.

“Don’t worry. I come with a plan,” his sister continued.

“Please don’t humiliate me in front of her,” Ellis said. “I have to live in this village, you know.”

“Well, you’re seventeen so that’s not strictly true.”

She handed him two tickets. “Bruce got hold of these for you.”

Ellis read them: Finsbury Park Rainbow – Friday 11 June 1985 – Whitesnake plus support band.

The Whitesnake album Bruce had taped for Ellis was his current favourite, a fact he hid from his contemporaries at school, who loathed hard rock. Many of them had started going to concerts in London. Their treks to the Astoria or the Brixton Academy were the stuff of legend in Ellis’s mind. How on earth, he wondered, did they know how to use the Underground system? How did they know where to go to find their seat when they got to the venues? How did they get tickets in the first place? How had any of them returned from London with their lives?

“What have these tickets got to do with anything?” he asked, dreading the answer.

“You’re taking her to the gig,” Chrissie said.

“Who?”

“Mother Teresa of Calcutta! Katie Morton, you nitwit.”

Ten minutes later, Ellis was out of excuses and Chrissie had got Katie’s number from the operator and marched Ellis upstairs to the privacy of the phone in Denny’s bedroom. Now, Ellis found a cold sweat upon him as Katie Morton herself answered the phone.

“Hello, it’s Ellis here, from down the lane.”

“Hello Ellis from down the lane.”

“Hello. How are you, Katie?”

“I’m fine. How are you Ellis from down the lane?”

“Fine thanks.”

“What do you want?”

Ellis physically recoiled from so blunt a question. Chrissie pushed the receiver back towards his mouth.

“What do I want?”

“Yeah.”

“Er … I just wondered if you fancied coming to a concert with me?”

Chrissie mouthed the word “gig” at him.

“I mean a gig,” Ellis corrected himself, at the exact moment Katie Morton said, “What’s the concert?”

“Sorry, what?” Ellis asked.

“No, go on. What did you say?”

“Nothing. What did you say?”

“I just asked what the concert was. What did you say?”

“I just said it was a gig not a concert.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know,” Ellis faltered.

“What band is it and when is it?” Katie asked, in her shopping list kind of way.

Ellis went silent. At that moment, he realised that there was no way Katie Morton was going to want to go with him to a Whitesnake concert. She wouldn’t want to go to a Whitesnake concert with anyone and she would not want to go to any concert with him. The situation was peppered with negatives.

“You there, Ellis?” Katie asked.

“Talking Heads …” he replied blankly.

Chrissie looked confused.

Katie became animated. “Talking Heads! Really? Very cool. When?”

“I don’t mind,” Ellis muttered distantly, knowing he had screwed up.

Chrissie cuffed him across the back of the head.

“You don’t mind? How about David Byrne, does he mind?”

“Who’s David Byrne?”

“For fuck’s sake!” Chrissie mouthed, collapsing back on to the bed.

“Are you drunk, Ellis from down the lane?” Katie asked.

Ellis pulled himself together. “No. I’m not drunk at all. Sorry, I was distracted, my sister walked into the room.” He picked up the tickets. “The concert is on Friday June the eleventh at the Finsbury Park Rainbow and I would really like you to come with me.”

“That’s next Friday. I’ll think about it and call you back, OK?”

“OK.”

“It’s really sweet of you to invite me and I really appreciate it. I’m just not sure what I’m up to that evening.”

“OK.”

“Bye, Ellis.” She hung up.

Ellis held the receiver against his chest and smiled. He had crossed the threshold. He had invited a girl out. It hadn’t gone quite to plan and she wouldn’t accept, but the ordeal was over and he could now say he had done it. He felt elated. He flopped back on to the bed, alongside his sister, emotionally exhausted.

“Talking sodding Heads?” Chrissie whispered.

Ellis shrugged. “There’s no way she’d go to a Whitesnake gig.”

Ellis sat in the living room, hoping the phone wouldn’t ring. Denny turned the lights off and he and Ellis watched the horizon catch fire. The sky arched its crimson back across the village. Its blackening ribbed patterns reminded Ellis of the markings of the Cheiracanthium species he had been forced to read about during the truces.

What, he asked himself, if the entire world is the belly of a huge spider and we’re all inside it? Beyond our universe is the outer body of a spider bigger than known existence and beyond that spider we call the universe are a trillion other spiders. And those trillion spiders live in just one spider well and there is a world full of wells.

“Spiders are little and we are big, they are big and we are little. It makes no difference either way round.”

“None at all,” Denny agreed.

And if it makes no difference, Ellis resolved to himself, it makes no sense to be scared of anything.

In the near darkness, he looked at the shape of his father’s body and a faint glow of dusk on his face.

“Dad.”

“Yes, dear boy?”

“You know … I am going to do new things.” His voice was gentle and strong. It was a new voice and it was as alien to him as it was to his dad. “I’m going to travel and seek out things. You know that, don’t you?”

He got no response. Denny was motionless. There was more movement in the sky beyond him, as it gave up its last colour and detail to darkness.

Katie Morton rang three days later and said yes. Ellis was devastated.

“You have to tell her immediately that she’s not going to see Talking Heads,” Chrissie told him.

Ellis agreed absolutely. Definitely. Obviously. But kept putting it off until, suddenly, it was Friday and Katie was waiting for him at the foot of her parents’ driveway on Wickhurst Lane. She opened the door to Mafi’s car before Ellis brought it to a standstill, and was in a hurry to get away. Her parents, she said, were in a “foul mood, as usual”.

Ellis had memorised the map of the London Underground during the week. He found it easy thanks to the colour scheme, which his brain could immediately make sense of. He did a last dummy run to calm his nerves as the train approached Victoria station. On the pale blue line, they sat opposite a row of seven long-haired men, all of whom wore Whitesnake T-shirts. Katie Morton looked at them curiously and turned to ask Ellis a question, but he cut her off.

“Where did you live before?”

“Near Brighton,” she replied.

“I’d like to go to Brighton,” Ellis said.

“It’s great.”

“Do you miss it?” Ellis asked.

She shrugged. “I’m not too bothered for now. I’ll tell you something that no one is meant to know,” she said, leaning close to his ear. “My parents would kill me if they knew anyone knew.”

“What is it?” Ellis said.

“My brother’s in prison. That’s why we left Brighton.”

“What did he do?”

“Not much. He’s only in for a year.”

Ellis didn’t know what to say. He wanted to know what the crime was but feared that to ask again would be immature. Maybe everyone except for him knew someone in prison. If so, he shouldn’t find it too amazing. But it was amazing, so would she think him dull for not asking more about it?

More David Coverdale lookalikes boarded the train at Highbury and Islington and Ellis decided it was time. He pulled the carefully resealed envelope from his pocket and ripped it open. “Jesus!” he said. “I don’t believe it!”

“What?” Katie Morton asked.

“They’ve sent the wrong tickets!”

As Katie Morton studied the tickets, Ellis doubted the wisdom of messing with a criminal’s sister. She laughed. It was a laugh Ellis couldn’t begin to decipher. He didn’t say anything else about it and neither did she. At the entrance to the Rainbow, he asked her again if she wanted to go for a drink instead or to just go home and she pushed him towards the door with the same knowing smile.

They saw a support band called Redfoot but they never did get to see David Coverdale’s Whitesnake. As they waited for them to come on stage, a very large woman stood alongside them, drinking vodka straight from the bottle. She was huge, more than six feet tall, broader than Ellis and fat; very, very fat. Her hair was long and bushy and dyed black. Her skin was talcum-powder white and she wore dark make-up around her eyes and black lipstick. Ellis saw that she was crying as she swigged from the bottle, as if the vodka was streaming out of the pores of her skin. She smiled at Ellis and Katie through maroon mascara tears and pulled down her leather jacket to reveal a denim jacket beneath, and on the back of it an intricate spray-on picture of a smiling young man holding a guitar. Around it, in metal studs, were the words Ronnie, 1961–1983, Gone But Still Loved.

“This is my first concert without him,” the enormous woman said, hauling the leather jacket back across the vast expanse of her rounded back.

Katie Morton placed her hand sympathetically on the huge woman’s arm. When she did so, Ellis had no idea that Katie was drunk, but moments later he found out just how drunk she was.

“Did you eat him?” Katie asked the woman.

With four thousand people pressing against them, Ellis’s world, miraculously, fell silent. His mind sank into a numbing incredulity at what had just been said. The woman turned, it seemed to no one in particular, and screamed, “Bunny!”

“She’s sorry!” Ellis said urgently.

“BUNNEEEEE!” Her face contorted with anger.

Ten feet away, a tall, Caucasian version of Mr T heard the huge woman’s call of distress. His face sank immediately into a darkness, as if already expressing regret over what he was yet to do to whoever had upset his friend.

“Did I say something?” Katie shouted.

Bunny moved towards them.

“We’re leaving,” Ellis yelled, pushing Katie away as the huge woman lunged at them so drunkenly that she seemed to be aiming to simply fall on top of them and squash them to death.

This was the first time Ellis had taken the initiative with a member of the opposite sex. He held Katie’s arm so tight he was almost lifting her, and as Bunny chased them through the syrup-thick crowd Ellis took advantage of being half the width of his pursuer and weaved and ducked himself and Miss Morton out of the arena to the now empty bar, from which they ran without looking back. The Seven Sisters Road would never look so attractive again, nor would the air of Finsbury Park ever taste so fresh. On the tube and train that carried Ellis and his liability of a date back to the garden of England, it occurred to Ellis that a trip up to London to see Whitesnake had been in no way diminished by not actually seeing Whitesnake. His attachment to hard rock and big-hair bands was, he concluded, a little cosmetic. He would check out this David Byrne bloke tomorrow.

The lights of the village nestling in the valley were benevolent and welcomed Ellis home.

“You can’t drive down to the house,” Katie said. “My parents are arseholes.”

Ellis parked by the primary school and walked her home. As they crossed the top of the village green, a truck drove past, catching the couple in its headlights. It sounded its horn in friendly recognition.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Haven’t a clue.”

They picked their way across the rutted surface of Wickhurst Lane in the darkness. She stumbled and took hold of his hand.

“You don’t like London much, do you?” she said.

“Scares me rigid.”

“Just remember, all those terrifying-looking people in London would be scared stiff walking down here in the pitch dark. They’d shit themselves at every animal sound.”

He dared to stroke her hand with his fingertips, in a way that could have been accidental if she objected.

“I liked the way you didn’t try to hide how scared you were up there,” she said.

“I did try to hide it,” he said, “all evening.”

Katie Morton smiled but Ellis couldn’t see it. They parted at a small stone bridge that crossed a stream at the foot of the Mortons’ driveway. Ellis told her that at this time of year, if she walked a hundred yards up the stream to the line of pollarded willow, and if she waited in the stream downwind of the line of exposed tree roots as evening fell, she’d see badger cubs playing.

“Have you seen them?” she whispered.

“Yes, every year,” he said. “I know this village like the back of my hand.”

“Now that I do believe,” she said. “I think you and I should just be friends, don’t you?”

“Oh, yeah, definitely. I agree,” Ellis said.

As he stepped into Bridget’s shop the next afternoon, Ellis was scolding himself for talking to Katie about badgers when she might have been waiting for him to fondle her. Perhaps it was this that had put the kybosh on things between them. The bell above the shop door was still ringing when Bridget’s voice met him like a physical barrier.

“Here comes lover-boy. Better luck next time.”

Mrs Hawking was at the counter, dropping loose change into her purse. She winked at Ellis, saying, “She’s too old for you. You’re a nice boy.”

“I’ve forgotten my money,” Ellis stuttered, untruthfully, and left.

Emotionally and mentally exhausted by the aftermath of going on a date, Ellis was happy to lie low at home and do work on the cottage for his dad. He went into the town to collect floorboard pins and varnish, and in the window of the Small World Travel Agency a poster told him that for £126 he could buy a train ticket that would take him anywhere in Europe for a month.

“Oh my God …” he muttered, as he stood inside the travel agents reading the leaflet. And he began to shake with excitement.

A truck arrived on the Saturday morning and hoisted antique floorboards on to the driveway. For a decade, Denny O’Rourke had wanted to replace the flooring in the downstairs of the cottage and his pleasure at the job ahead made him eager and boyish. Mafi sat in the garden and watched Denny and Ellis as they worked side by side, co-ordinating instinctively, rolling up their sleeves in the exact same way and sharing mannerisms as if they had handed them to each other from a shared tool box at the start of the day. Their thoughts, however, were not in harmony, for Ellis could think only of the rail map of Europe he had bought and of the thin black lines that spread across the continent, some solitary and remote, others converging in thick swirls on Madrid and Munich, Paris, Rome and Milan.

On the Monday morning, when his dad had left for work, Ellis shoved the small, folded document with its orange boxes under Mafi’s nose.

“It’s just to do with the summer and work experience and everything … I forgot to get dad to do it,” Ellis said rapidly. “I’m really late, Mafi. Just sign it there.”

She signed inside the orange box, unwittingly confirming herself as Ellis’s next of kin.

The next weekend, they ate a Sunday roast outside, by the side lawn. The living room windows were open and a smell of floorboard varnish laced the air.

Denny breathed deep with contentment. “We’ve been here ten years and it’s taking shape … on a perfect day. It’s never finished, but today … it feels great.”

And Denny O’Rourke did, indeed, feel truly great for a few seconds more, until his son spoke up, with the exquisite mistiming of a teenager.

“Dad …”

“Yes, my dear boy?”

“I’m going inter-railing in Europe this summer. For a month. On my own.”

“No. You’re not.”

“I am.”

The afternoon changed.

“Maybe next year.”

“I want my life to get going,” Ellis complained.

“Don’t be dramatic,” his father said.

Mafi smiled at Ellis and faintly shook her head, to steer him off the subject.

“If you’re feeling desperate to go abroad for the first time, then we’ll go somewhere together this summer. How about that?” His dad smiled encouragingly.

Ellis slumped. Just when he needed his dad to create a rift between them, from which Ellis could justify escape, he did just the opposite.

“I’ve already got a ticket,” Ellis said, without defiance.

“How? You can’t have,” Denny said, trying to sound unperturbed. “You’re only seventeen. You’d need my permission.”

“You’re wrong and I’ve got one.”

There was silence. “How?” his dad finally asked.

Ellis shrugged his shoulders.

“I know how, don’t I, Ellis?” Mafi said.

“It doesn’t matter how. What matters is I’m going.”

“If you think I am going to let you walk out of here when you’re still just a child and get yourself ripped off or hurt or killed in some foreign country then you must think that being your dad is some part-time hobby I don’t give a shit about, which makes you just about the most stupid little bugger I’ve ever met.”

Denny marched inside.

“Could he possibly have a more negative view of the world?” Ellis muttered.

“I can’t believe you tricked me like that, Ellis. I really can’t.”

“It doesn’t matter about that. It’s just important that I get going somewhere.”

“You’re not even going to apologise to me?”

Ellis looked at his feet. “I’m sorry. But he’d sailed round the world four times before he was twenty-one, that’s the ridiculous thing!”

“He wasn’t on his own,” Mafi reminded him.

Ellis went to his bedroom and found his dad there, looking through his belongings.

“Where’s the ticket?” Denny asked softly.

“I’m not giving it to you.”

They both sat on the bed in silence.

“You’re not to go. Do you understand?”

Ellis said nothing.

“Please,” Denny said.

There was that word again, sounding strange coming from his dad.

“Ellis … if anything ever happened to you, I would be devastated.”

“If nothing ever happens to me, I’ll be devastated.”

“You’ve a clever answer for everything today. You’re not ready. I do not want you to go.” Denny let his voice trail away.

“Then I won’t go,” Ellis muttered.

“So, give me the ticket.”

“No.”

“Ellis …”

“I said I won’t go. That’s it. If you think I’m not ready, that’s one thing. If you think I’m untrustworthy, that’s another. I’m giving you my word.”

In the silence, the air between them calmed. Denny felt relief so close to elation that he had to control himself not to show it. “I trust you,” he said, and left the room.

That day, and the sixteen that followed it, Ellis tried all of his magic places in the village: every tree he loved to climb, every field he loved to sit in. Each of these places was a favourite and familiar face and every one of them looked Ellis in the eye and reminded him that all other seventeen year olds were having the time of their lives.

On 1 July, Ellis packed and stood in his bedroom perfectly still, clutching the bag, as if he were a photograph of himself, taken moments before leaving the room. But he didn’t leave the room, because he was terrified. That night, he couldn’t sleep for taunting himself that his life was destined to be a small, monochrome one. The morning brought with it a morsel of courage, fed by nothing more substantial than the comfort of daylight, and he convinced himself that if he hesitated again and failed to embark on this small adventure, then he would never embark on any.

He gave himself the hour-long train journey to Folkestone to justify his going. His fear of inertia was real but not reason enough to inflict this agony on his dad. But, just when he needed her, his mother flew to his aid. He knew nothing about her. He had been dissuaded from asking all his life. This failure on Denny’s part, as he suddenly felt able to see it, was his excuse for going and it was strong enough to withstand the increasing nausea he felt at every revised point of no return, as he boarded the ferry, as the ropes slid from the quayside, as the hull passed the line of the harbour walls on to open sea.

By dinner time he was in France, his only companions the taste of salt air and the smell of ferry fuel. He was hungry but having booked into a room in a drab area near to the harbour he was too nervous to leave it. In the darkness, the idea of justifying his trip with the memory of his mother crumbled before him. It was irrelevant. He had never pushed for information about her. He’d never truly confronted his dad and demanded to know. He had taken little dissuading from the subject because he was happy if his dad was happy and his dad was not happy when they talked about his mum.

Once again, the arrival of morning boosted Ellis. Great journeys must be planned at first light, he realised, when the heart is fearless. He rang Chrissie from a call box in Paris and after he had spoken to her he stepped out on to the boulevard de Magenta and, for the first time, the adventure began to outweigh the fear. Europe beckoned. If he stayed four weeks then he had six pounds a day to spend. He would sleep on trains and in train stations to make the money last. This, he had read, was what everybody did. On the train to Nice he slept in the heat of the window. He took a roll-up mattress on the roof of a youth hostel where the dormitories were full. The roof was a free-for-all for latecomers and Ellis watched through the gaps of his folded arms as grown men and women undressed and slept within sight of him. He felt the unfamiliar musty, warm air of the Mediterranean cling to his skin and climbed out of his sleeping bag and lay on top of it in his jeans and T-shirt. At midnight, he woke and imagined how angry his dad was and bitterly regretted not calling him. When he had called Chrissie instead, she had laughed and told Ellis he was going to get “the bollocking of all time”.

“… so you might as well enjoy it,” she had concluded.

“Might as well,” Ellis had replied unconvincingly.

Chrissie had agreed to tell their dad where Ellis was on the condition that Ellis called home within two days. He was looking ahead with dread to that phone call when a woman in her late twenties laid a mattress down alongside his.

“Bit of a latecomer,” she whispered, with a twang in her voice.

Ellis smiled and lay back, resting the back of his head in his clasped hands. The woman laid a white sheet on the mattress and removed her clothes, lying down on the mattress in her underwear. She smelt of suntan lotion. Ellis became aware of his own breathing. His toes tensed up and he wiggled his ankles.

“Mind if I have a smoke?” the woman said, sitting up on her side.

Ellis smiled and shook his head. He stole a glance. She was tanned and had long, straight, straggly blond hair. Her face was angular. She wasn’t pretty but she was handsome and healthy-looking and almost her entire body was visible and lying inches away from him. He forgot his fears. He forgot his home. The woman offered him a cigarette. He declined and pulled out his tin box and rolled one. She approved of this.

“Where you from?” she whispered.

“England. Kent,” he said, shyly.

“New Zealand. I’ve been travelling for three years.”

Ellis’s mouth dropped open. Three years! She smoked one of Ellis’s roll-ups after she’d smoked her cigarette and then she turned on to her back and slept. When the cathedral chimed for three o’clock, she moved in her sleep and her foot came to rest across Ellis’s calf muscle. He savoured the sensation and soon afterwards he fell asleep.

Mostly, they lay on the beach and read and went swimming, taking it in turns to watch each other’s belongings. She sunbathed topless and asked Ellis to rub lotion into her back, which he did with growing confidence. They swam together some of the time and he grew accustomed to the sight of her breasts. Accustomed, but not blasé. They were as magical and wonderful to him on their third day together as the first. Her thighs were strong and her calves defined. She could have been an athlete or a swimmer, or a manual labourer. A farmer, even. Her skin was extraordinarily tanned. He didn’t feel the need to speak much. She wanted to do the talking. After three years away she was feeling homesick and was thinking of going home. On their last evening, they ate a picnic on the beach at Menton and got blind drunk whilst she told him what she called “her life story”.

“Ours is a perfect friendship,” she said. “After tomorrow, nothing can ever damage it.”

To his surprise, Ellis realised that he wasn’t in love with her, even though he’d rubbed oil into her back. He didn’t idolise her, even though she was prepared to give him the time of day. He wasn’t aching with sexual desire for her. He just liked being with her. They slept side by side on the beach in sleeping bags that last night. The stars spun above Ellis’s head. He heard the woman crying to herself. She laid her head on Ellis’s chest and slept there. The weight of her body against him brought sobering stabs of joy to him. They swam in the morning, before they said a word, and their hangovers eased. Ellis swam only briefly, deliberately, so that he could sit on the beach and watch the woman from New Zealand walk out of the sea towards him one final time. He locked the image away for keeps, where it remained more fresh and magical than many of the more intimate moments since.

At the train station she said that they should not exchange addresses, that they would part now with their friendship untainted. They hugged tight but they didn’t kiss.

“Have a wonderful life,” she said.

He couldn’t speak.

She climbed the steps to the station and he watched until she was taken by the crowd. He made a wish for happiness to be with her all her life and as he walked down the Boulevard Gambetta towards the hostel, he felt lonely and burst into tears.

The phone call was made from a train station concourse.

“Dad, it’s me. I’m in Italy and I’m fine. Please don’t be angry.”

“Where in Italy?”

“Verona.”

“Is it nice?” his dad asked, in a disarming, clipped monotone.

“Yes …” Ellis faltered.

“Are you safe?”

“I’m safe and well and I’m planning to …” Ellis heard the receiver being laid down on the small bureau desk by the front door. He waited for something to happen. There were footsteps and then his dad spoke in the same foreign monotone.

“I was looking for Mafi so she could talk to you but she’s gone for a drive with Chrissie.”

Silence fell between them.

“Right then …” Ellis said, after some while.

“I want you to do something for me, Ellis,” Denny said.

“Yes? Anything.”

“I want you to ring Mafi every other day so that she knows you’re safe. She worries about you and that’s not fair on her.”

His voice was taut and brittle in its show of strength.

“You can call during the day, there’s no need to wait until I’m back from work. It’s your great-aunt who worries.”

“OK.”

There was no fight. No argument. None of the things Ellis had prepared for. Just coldness.

He’s good at this, Ellis thought.

The finest part of Ellis’s adventure was already over. No one and nothing would quite compare to his friend from New Zealand. He didn’t care too much. All that mattered to him was that he had gone away. He had had an adventure. He had done something that Tim hadn’t, and that Chloe might want to. But, for all the new ground broken, Ellis also discovered that it was still his father he wanted to share this with. In the evenings, it was Denny he imagined talking to about the day, and in moments of awe and adventure it was Denny he wished could see him there.

He rang Mafi every few days and she asked him excitedly about where he was. He saw Florence and Siena and got knocked over by a moped in Lucca. He slept in the giant tent in the botanical gardens in Munich with hundreds of others like him. He got so drunk in Munich that he boarded a night-train to Vienna and woke in Koblenz. He walked in the mountains above Innsbruck and stood at the top of the Olympic ski jump in its snowless state. He slept in a meadow of long grass and wild flowers where the temperature dropped and breathing felt like drinking fresh water. There, he felt a yearning which has been in him ever since, which never dilutes, never increases, but is ever-present, sometimes gentle, other times desperate. The possibility of fulfilment? The promise of joy? A glimpse of heaven? He doesn’t know. Perhaps it was no more than the clean mountain air.