The village looked small and altered. It would take a day or two for it all to look familiar again. William Rutton the butcher waved. Denny’s bedroom curtains were drawn against the sunlight. Ellis saw him peer out and withdraw again. Mafi rained kisses on him. The stairs seemed shallower and the cottage smaller.

Ellis sat beside his dad on the bed and touched his arm. Denny feigned waking and put on his glasses. His breathing was loud and slow, through his nose. He raised Ellis’s hand into the air and let it drop limply on to the bed. He got up and walked out of the room, shutting the door gently behind him. Ellis listened to him descend the stairs and his eyes settled on the imprint of his father’s body on the sheets.

Chrissie came home for the weekend. “You look like George Michael with that tan.”

“Why thank you,” Ellis said courteously.

“Wasn’t a compliment,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“He’s not talking to me.”

“What? Not much? Not at all?”

“Not a word,” Ellis said.

She found out for herself at dinner. “This is ridiculous,” she told her dad. “You can’t just not talk to someone.”

“What would you like me to talk about?” Denny asked.

“Anything,” Ellis said.

“Shall we talk about trust?”

Ellis looked away. “No.”

“Lying to my face. Shall we talk about that?”

He got no answer.

“OK then, Ellis. Shall we talk about what it feels like to lie awake for twenty-nine nights waiting for the phone to ring with a foreign voice on a distant line telling me where I can come and identify my son’s body? Let’s talk about worrying myself sick about you, and losing the ability to eat or think straight. Let’s talk about my happiness being at the mercy of whether or not you’ve managed to spare five minutes of your precious time to call Mafi to let her know how you are.”

“You didn’t want me to call you!”

“Which of those things do you want to talk about, Ellis?”

Ellis shook his head.

“WHICH OF THOSE?” his dad raged.

“I don’t want to talk about any of them,” Ellis whispered.

“Well, there’s nothing else I’m interested in talking about with you.”

Ellis went to his room and emptied his rucksack, in the hope that his perfect friend had broken her own rules and left him a note with her number in New Zealand, amongst his belongings. But she had not.

Denny began renovating the dining room walls. It gave him reason to shut himself away. He cut out areas of rotten lath and plaster and pinned in new strips of chestnut which Terry Jay had split for him. Two post-beams were rotten. Dark slithers of wood crumbled between Denny’s fingers.

“Can’t make that out …” he muttered.

The wheat at Longspring Farm had been harvested. Ellis sat in the east field and admired the farmhouse. In the half-light, further down the track, he thought he saw Chloe Purcell step out of the herdsman’s house into the shadows of the lime trees. He told himself it couldn’t be her. Whoever it was standing in the shade, she rubbed her neck wearily and returned inside, leaving the door open for Michael Finsey’s return.

Ellis wandered aimlessly away. Back on the village green, he sat on a bench in front of the primary school. He ate an ice cream then drank a can of lager and contemplated how poorly the two mixed in the palate. Katie Morton appeared from the top of Wickhurst Lane and joined him.

“Look!” she said, flashing him a toothy, white smile. “Braces off!”

Ellis nodded his approval.

She looked impatiently at the darkening sky and asked, matter-of-factly, “So, did you lose your cherry on your travels?”

“No,” said Ellis.

“Isn’t that what these trips are for?” she asked.

“Why aren’t you at work?” he retaliated.

She pulled a face at the clouds. “Came home early to sunbathe but that’s buggered.” She settled down next to him. “At a loss what to do now,” she said. “Might go for a dip.”

“Where do you go?” Ellis asked.

“The pond at that farm on the hill, whatever it’s called.”

“Dale Farm. I wouldn’t.”

“I’ve swum there before.”

“I hope not. There’s an open pipe goes into that pond, full of you know what.”

“Is there?” Katie pulled a face. “Bloody hell …”

Ellis looked blankly across the village green. Katie Morton studied the sky and watched her hopes of a tan evaporate.

“I wouldn’t know how to lose my virginity,” Ellis murmured.

She didn’t respond and Ellis became more self-conscious the longer they sat in silence.

“Well …” Katie Morton said, eventually, with the pragmatic air of someone who didn’t want to waste an afternoon, “you’re not going to lose your virginity to me, Ellis, but if you like I’ll give you a guided tour.”

Ellis kept his eyes fixed on the grass and wondered what she meant. Katie Morton stood up and offered him her hand. “I’m taking you home …” she said.

She stirred because Ellis had moved in his sleep, muttering someone’s name.

“Who’s Jo?” she whispered. “Not that I’m bothered.”

“Uh?” Ellis moaned sleepily. His head swam in a syrupy daylight. Semi-conscious, he dragged the sheet up to cover their naked bodies. Beneath that sheet, his body felt the indelible touch of another naked human being lying warm beside him for the very first time. Katie Morton pulled the sheet away again and placed Ellis’s hand on her tummy. He breathed the strange and subtle aroma of her unperfumed skin and he drank in the sight of her pale stomach and the wiry hair, unable to fully take in how wonderful life was becoming this summer.

“You said ‘Jo’ in your sleep,” she said.

“She was from New Zealand,” he said. “Rotorua.”

“The woman you didn’t lose your virginity to?” she teased.

He shut his eyes. “I think you know full well by now that I’ve never made love to a woman.”

This made her smile. “Yes,” she said.

He breathed in lazily and she moved her head across to his chest. She pressed her feet against his and they flexed their toes against each other’s. Then the bedroom door opened. Ellis was not aware of the door but of Katie’s body becoming rigid against his. She sat bolt upright. The middle-aged woman standing at the foot of the bed was shaking and her shoulders started to heave. She was a strong woman, Ellis soon learned, with her daughter’s height and the added bulk of middle age.

Ellis’s passage out of the house bore the sensation of being propelled without touching the floor. It happened too fast for him to become concerned. He was aware only of the strength of Mrs Morton’s hands as they somehow made a handle out of the flesh on his shoulders with which she threw him out.

He found himself standing on the Mortons’ lawn. The front door slammed shut with a thick, substantial thud. On a day of new experiences, the latest was that of being naked outdoors. In itself, it was possibly a lovely sensation, he thought, but weighed against it right now were some powerful negatives; chiefly, that the most populated part of the village lay between his naked body and home. He heard footsteps on Wickhurst Lane. Miss Spinazi, the primary school infants teacher, was walking home. The wiry spinster stopped and stared.

This, Ellis told himself, is probably the only adult in Kent less sexually experienced than me. It had to be her who came along.

“I got kicked out,” he explained weakly, thumbing towards the Mortons’ house behind him.

Miss Spinazi’s mouth dropped open.

“It was like going through a wormhole,” Ellis added. “Are you on your way home, Miss?”

She nodded and swallowed fearfully. Ellis pointed in the direction of her small, terraced cottage and nodded encouragingly.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance that I could …”

And at this she scurried away. Ellis returned to the Mortons’ front door and called through the letter box.

“Please could I have my things?”

He could hear nothing from inside. He stepped away and looked for a place to hide in the garden until he was reunited with his clothing. The front door burst open. Mrs Morton marched towards him and sent him down the driveway with a series of rough pushes to the chest.

“You are not getting any clothes back, you beast! If you don’t leave immediately I shall get the PC.”

The last shove sent Ellis sprawling on to the loose gravel of the lane Katie had led him along a few hours earlier. He landed badly, cutting the palms of his hands and grazing his knees. He stood up, dusted the clinging stones off his skin and watched Mrs Morton march back into the house. Now he was shaken up, not so much by the playground cuts and grazes as by the realisation that he was going home naked. He was also alarmed by how small his penis suddenly seemed to be. He had two choices. To hack across the fields to Longspring Farm or to cross the village green to the cottage. The latter option was infinitely quicker. In fact, if he put his head down and ran, he could do it in two minutes. But it meant going through the centre of the village. The route to Reardon’s was comparatively long but it was possible that Ellis could get there without being seen by another human being. Better still, he realised, and closer, would be to cut across the fields to Tim Wickham’s house. Then his heart sank as he realised that neither Reardon’s nor Tim Wickham’s was an option. If Ellis had to list the three people he could least afford to be seen naked by, they would be, first, Tim’s mum – due to an adolescence filled by fantasies of her which still had the potential to stir an ill-appreciated erection. Second, Chloe, who could well be at the Wickhams’ house or Reardon’s and would probably have the opposite effect on Ellis’s penis precisely because he wouldn’t want her to; and, third, the goat-lady, whose cottage Ellis would have to pass by. It was just too scary to contemplate being seen by her. She might ask him inside, offering to help. He’d be scared of entering her house with armour on. Naked didn’t bear thinking about.

“Shit!”

Another sub-dilemma presented itself. Did he run freely and go for speed, thereby allowing his genitals to move however genitals moved when unsupported by underwear, or did he hold on to them with one hand? Freestyle, he decided. Because speed was paramount. And realising that his situation was not going to improve whilst he stood there, he started to run. And the faster he ran the more free he felt, and he understood that if he chose not to care then he didn’t care; if he chose not to be embarrassed then he wasn’t; if he chose not to feel the pain on the soles of his feet then he didn’t feel it. He stuck two fingers up to his own instincts and ran, leaving Wickhurst Lane behind and fixing his sights on the far side of the village green as he stormed across it, oblivious of everything and everyone outside his tunnel vision. He ran faster than he had ever run. To do so in bare feet felt wonderful. Natural. Easy. To do so naked changed him, in the course of a few hundred yards, from a circumspect boy to a young man. For the first time in his life, that part of his brain that had often whispered, “You’d better not, Ellis,” now murmured, “Fuck it, Ellis, why not?”

Suddenly, he was over the garden fence and scrambling through the conifers, the harsh branches scraping his skin until he stumbled out on to the side lawn where Denny was carrying rotten lath to the bonfire heap. Ellis bent over to catch his breath and work out what to tell his dad. When he looked up, his dad wasn’t there. Ellis waved innocently to Mafi as she stared from her living room window. Denny was at the washing line, unpegging a towel. He wrapped it around his son.

“You’re bleeding …” he said, unable to mask the tenderness.

“Just a stupid dare with Tim, Dad. Just stupid, got a bit out of hand. I’m really sorry.”

Denny picked off the stones embedded in his son’s arm.

“Dad, I’m sorry,” Ellis repeated.

“Make sure you get your clothes back,” Denny said, sidestepping the infinity of his son’s apology.

“I’ll take care of it,” Ellis said and thanked God his dad was talking to him again. “I’m such an idiot,” he added innocently.

Denny nodded in agreement and although his head was bowed as he attended to his son’s cuts, Ellis saw him smile.

Ellis slept and bathed and dressed and put what cash he had in his pocket. He was going to find Tim Wickham wherever he was and take him for a pint. It had been an incredible day and he didn’t want it to end in a hurry. He wanted to go out. He wanted to sit in a pub and smoke and nurse a pint and, hopefully, look as good as he felt. If Chloe was with Tim then fine, he didn’t mind at all. He had his own private life now and they were welcome to theirs.

The phone rang. Ellis looked for a pair of shoes that weren’t sprayed with dried mud, and the phone kept ringing. Ellis never answered the phone, neither did Mafi, unless they were walking past it as it rang. It was unusual for Denny to let it ring. Ellis stamped his feet into his shoes and went down the landing to his dad’s room and picked up the phone by the bed.

“Hello,” he said.

“Ellis?”

“Katie?”

“Yeah. Christ that wasn’t funny!” She laughed. “They’ve freaked out. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

“Who?”

“My parents, who else? They’re not at yours, are they?”

“No. Your mum’s pretty strong.”

“I’m so sorry for what happened.”

“I don’t mind. It was worth it.”

“You wanna meet?”

“OK.”

“Don’t sound too enthusiastic. Meet me up by the bypass, in Morley’s café, in an hour.”

“OK.”

On his way downstairs, from the small window on the half-landing, Ellis saw Katie Morton’s parents walking down the driveway to their car. He found his dad sitting at the dining table. The two chairs opposite him had been pushed away and come to rest like a car crash beside the wall that Denny was gutting.

Ellis’s tendency to make the wrong observation at the wrong time kicked in. “Can you believe they drove here when it’s a five-minute walk?”

Denny’s face was set angrily in thought. Ellis fought the urge to continue out of the cottage and took a seat.

“I’ll go if you don’t want to talk,” he offered.

“You’ll do what pleases you,” Denny muttered bitterly.

“Whatever that’s meant to mean,” Ellis added.

There was a long silence. Then Ellis started to get up.

“It means,” his dad hissed, sending Ellis back on to his chair, “that if you stopped and thought about me let alone bothered to think for one second about your mother even, then maybe you’d just …”

His voice faltered into silence.

“Maybe I’d just what?” Ellis asked. “Think what about my mother?”

Denny O’Rourke fixed his angry gaze at nothing.

“Think what about my mother?” Ellis repeated accusingly. “I know diddly-squit about her. Except that she’s dead.”

“Exactly,” his dad whispered.

Ellis leapt to his feet. “WELL, WHAT THE JESUS IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?”

“Don’t shout at me, boy!”

“What is it supposed to mean, I said! Now fucking well answer me!”

“Ellis!”

“Because just what the fucking hell I am supposed to think about my mother beats me. I know nothing about her, do I? How dare you tell me to think about someone you’ve spent my whole life pretending never existed!”

“SHUT UP, ELLIS!” Denny bellowed.

But Ellis ploughed on. “You’ve kept her from me all my life and now you want to use her as an example! Of what? I don’t know anything about her! You’re useless, you’ve always been useless and bringing her up now is just about the most useless you’ve ever been!”

Denny O’Rourke fell back on to his chair. His hearing and vision became distant and unfocused. When he managed to raise his head again, he was alone.

Morley’s café and truck stop was spread out on a plateau above the main road. From here, Ellis watched the toy houses of a miniature village in the soft, low, late afternoon light and scoured the lanes and fields for a sight of Katie Morton. He wandered across to the café entrance. Steam had obscured the warm orange windows, making indistinct silhouettes of the few people within. Ellis peered through them as best he could. Katie was not inside and Ellis was too intimidated to go in alone. In the car park, he noticed the driver’s door of a large decrepit Mercedes open. The interior light came on and illuminated a small, rounded, curly-haired man as he took a last drag on a joint and threw the roach away. As he passed Ellis and pushed open the café door, he smiled vacantly. “Going in?”

“Nah,” Ellis said casually. “Waiting for my girlfriend.”

He walked away and sat on the fence at the far end of the car park. He listened to the metallic flashes of sound as cars sped by on the main road.

He was used to being in the dark about the transactions that occurred between people. This evening it was different. Only he and Katie Morton knew what they had done. The others thought they knew. They presumed the obvious, and Ellis saw his dad diminished in some small way by his ignorance.

“We began with a lie, you and me,” Katie had said to Ellis, as she led him upstairs six hours earlier. Ellis didn’t understand what she meant. “Oh Lord! They’ve sent us the wrong tickets!” she mocked.

In the bathroom, she asked him to remove a medium-sized Tegenaria saeva from the bath and run the taps. She took a pee in the toilet next door whilst Ellis’s resolve to cup the spider in his hands and place it on the window ledge failed him and he ushered it, with a loofah, down the plughole, convincing himself that it would have plenty of time to escape through the pipes before the bath was emptied. There were protests, but he turned a deaf ear.

Katie added bubble bath to the running water. “But we’ll not tell any lies today. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know and I’ll be truthful.”

“So will I,” Ellis said, not knowing what the hell she was talking about.

She told him to sit down on the chair beside the bath and then she undressed.

“We aren’t going to have sex. I don’t want to go out with you or to cop off with you. I don’t find you especially good-looking or fascinating. But I like you more than other boys I can think of, three of whom I have slept with I might as well tell you. I’m not planning on adding to that number in a hurry.”

Ellis listened obediently and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t particularly want to ‘cop off’ with her either. He just wanted to be exactly where he was, listening and watching. He was happy not to be expected to do anything. She was naked now and he was aware of the sound of his own breathing and swallowing in a way he had never been before. She turned off the taps and felt the water. Her body could not have been more different from the woman from New Zealand’s.

“Don’t you tan?” Ellis asked.

“Don’t I what?”

“Tan? In the sun.”

“Not spectacularly,” she said. “But it’s not for the lack of trying.”

She climbed into the bath and told Ellis to kneel alongside. “You can look at me and you can ask anything, but you can’t touch. I’ll place your hands where I don’t mind them going.”

“OK, thanks,” Ellis said, as if being given road directions.

She cleared the bubbles away from her breasts and placed his right hand on them.

“Mine are rather small, Ellis,” she said. “You’ll decide what you like as you find out.”

“I’m going to like big ones,” he said immediately, without thinking.

She burst into laughter. “Honest Ellie, that’s you.”

Ellis withdrew his hand, though not abruptly. “Please don’t call me Ellie,” he said gravely. “Only my mum called me Ellie.”

She was taken aback. “You’re an odd fish,” she said.

“And you’re not?” he replied, stretching out his arms to remind her where she was and what she was doing.

The affection in her face gave him confidence enough to say, “I can’t see your body for all the bubbles.”

“Soap gets rid of bubbles,” she replied.

He took a bar of Mr and Mrs Morton’s not inexpensive soap, dunked it in the water and rubbed it between his hands, allowing the lather to drip from the bar and fall on the bubbles. The bubbles fizzed as they dissolved. Katie Morton raised one leg out of the water and presented it to Ellis. He washed her legs and her tummy and her breasts. The bubbles crackled all the while and soon he could see her, through the milky water.

After that, she led him to her bedroom and she removed his clothes and told him not to worry about his erection. They lay on the bed together and hugged. She took his right hand and placed it on her tummy and then she slid his hand down until it rested on her pubic hair. He stared peacefully at her body and never thought to explore or probe further. He had no urge to lie on top of her, or to fondle her or to penetrate her. He did not burn with the stabbing, restless desire he felt when he and Tim used to go to the goat-lady’s place. What Katie and he were doing was just right. It was peaceful and tender and it placed no pressure on him to know more than he knew.

And all the while he kept telling himself, What a summer! What a summer!

An ivory glare emanated from the cloud cover and flooded the room with smooth light. Ellis smiled inwardly at the bright new world appearing before him.

“It’s like watching underwater films,” he said, blissfully unaware of speaking.

“What is?”

“A woman’s body.”

“Like I said,” Katie stroked his arm, “an odd fish.”

And then they fell asleep.

The village had sunk into dusk. In that gloom, beyond the charcoal fields of Elsa’s farm, Ellis could no longer place the once infinite joys of village life: the avenue of lime trees at Longspring, the view of the Downs glowing crisp and blue in the frost of winter, a peek at Kerry Moscow’s knickers as she climbed the gate to the Rumpumps when they were both nine years old, a meringue handed to him by Mrs Brown at Forge Cottages as he waited with his sister for the 454 bus, helping his father cut the grass in the orchard, handing a cigarette to Tim Wickham as he handed one back with the greater part of the day still ahead, the field at Long Barn a ripple of tall, swaying wheat. All these and a thousand other delights lay discarded in the corner of Ellis’s restless mind, like neglected toys in a bedroom cupboard. The smallness of the place was what he saw now, and the lights of the bypass and distant towns which rose out of the settling darkness and glimmered and twinkled with their own imprecise promises.

Sometimes, as a very small boy, Ellis looked close up at his hands, at his fingerprints, at the faint pathway of a vein beneath his skin, and he had the sensation of being newly born, immediately out of the womb, a few hours old, the process of his cells dividing and his body forming still ongoing, but with no one watching, no one gathering him up to wrap layers of clothing around him. The feeling of living inside a space suit and instead of the sound of your own breathing all you can hear is your own voice wondering aloud what happens next.

“Still waiting?” The man with the Mercedes stood nearby beneath a street light. He was short and unshaven, in his early forties, with a beer gut and Marty Feldman eyes. By the looks of him, Ellis thought, possibly a Whitesnake roadie. Behind him, the café was in darkness.

“Women!” The man had a lazy East End accent. “Need a lift?”

Ellis looked away. He watched the sodium lights that snaked around the valley and out into the world. He felt the breeze that followed the cut of the main road blow against his face. This moment was open-ended and it was his own. His own adventure, his own story, his own mistake.

“OK,” he said.

They travelled in silence at first and Ellis stole glimpses of the man’s head rolling back and forth as he drove.

“Do you toke?” the man slurred, bringing himself back from the edge of sleep.

“Do I what?”

“Toke,” the man repeated. He leant across Ellis and opened the glove compartment. Ellis looked at the cigarette papers, small blocks of hash and ready-rolled joints. He said nothing. He had been contemplating trying pot for some months now but had done nothing about it. Now, he suspected, was not the time.

“I’m a roofer,” the man said, reaching for one of the joints and lighting it. “Roofer and builder. Build roofs.”

He took a few tokes and then handed it to Ellis, who accepted it, vowing to embrace a non-inhalation method. The smoke tasted sweet and beguiling and he broke his vow on the third toke.

“That’s nice and mild,” the driver said, “you’ll be OK with that. I never smoke anything major when I’m driving. I don’t like people who do.”

Ellis took another drag and handed it back. “It’s very nice,” he whispered, although he had intended to say it aloud.

“Never smoke anything that mashes your brain when I’m behind the wheel,” the man repeated. “Just a little toke on something mellow.”

“Probably wouldn’t pass as a road safety campaign, that,” Ellis said.

The man looked confused, then changed the subject.

“Employ loads of people, I do. Good money in roofing.”

Ellis felt a ripple of nausea. He rested his head back and closed his eyes.

“Know anything about roofing?” the driver asked.

“No,” Ellis said.

“You can start tomorrow then!” The driver wheezed a laugh to himself and handed the spliff back to Ellis. Ellis defied his own instincts and smoked the rest of it.

“Road safety campaign … yeah …” the driver slurred to himself, confused. “Yeah … nice one.”

Ellis was woken by the seagulls. It was morning and he was in the Mercedes. It was parked in a dead-end street beside a large, bleak-looking pub called the Harbour Lights. A blanket was wrapped around him. Opposite the pub was a sea wall and the tide was high the other side of it. The beach was shingle and to the left was a harbour with a tall, blue-grey tower. Mist was burning off the water and a large cargo ship manoeuvred through the harbour entrance. Somewhere out to sea, an invisible vessel boomed a low signal that made the windows of the pub vibrate.

Ellis hauled his shivering body on to the sea wall. A young man appeared, tall and lanky with long dyed-black hair. He looked as though he got no daylight.

“There you go.” He handed Ellis a mug of tea.

“Thanks,” Ellis said.

“Mick says you can start today or leave it till tomorrow if you’re knackered.”

Ellis watched the young man go back inside the lifeless pub. He sipped the strong, sweet, piping hot tea and looked out across the water. Contentment swept through him. He wondered where he was. He looked around. From the top of Coastguards Alley, a phone box stared accusingly at him. The red paint had faded to matt pink. One pane of glass was broken, low down, an impromptu cat flap. He rang Chrissie and told her that he was on the coast and that he had work. He asked her to tell their dad. She refused and told him to go home, but he knew that she would call Denny immediately. She loved to break news.

He returned to the sea wall and rolled himself a cigarette and vowed not to go back home for one whole year. That would be amazing, he told himself. That would make him mysterious and desirable. That would mean he had his own life. OK, this place was not like the photographs he had pored over in the pages of National Geographic, but it was something new and that felt good. The phone box in the alley glared at him again. He rehearsed a phone call to Denny but even in his imagination the conversation strayed into argument.

It’s private, Dad, Ellis imagined saying. See how you like it.