Late one night there was a car crash on Graveney Marshes in which three young men were killed. The local radio was full of it next morning and Ellis woke to find a man peering in through his bedroom window. The man was in his seventies, wore old-fashioned tweed and had the look of a Victorian gentleman. He was giraffe-like, tall and thin, with tight waves of grey hair. All of which made him noticeable, but what made him appear positively strange was the way his hands were cupped together in front of him.

“What are you doing?” Ellis called, through an inch of open window.

“Ah, excellent,” the man said.

“What’s excellent?”

“That you’re alive and well. All in one piece, thank God.”

At that moment, a frog leapt out of the man’s hands.

“Damm!” he said, and scrambled after it.

Ellis threw on some clothes and followed the man – who followed the frog – off the beach, across the railway bridge and on to Joy Lane. At the bottom of Medina Avenue the man stopped to straighten up a wonky road sign, whilst the frog continued up the avenue to the furthest house. The road sign was home-made but convincing. It was a triangular warning sign with a red border, inside which was a frog.

“What’s that sign for?” Ellis asked.

“Ah!” the man exclaimed. “Excellent! Excellent!”

“What’s so excellent now?”

“That you’re here.”

“You’ve got to be the tallest man I’ve ever seen,” Ellis said.

“Got to be,” the man replied.

“How tall are you?”

“Six seven.”

“And is this your sign?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it all about?”

“It’s all about the fact that I am a preserver of frogs. Rare frogs. They come to my pond and I protect them. They are wild. They are free to come and go. Those that want to come and go near the road need protection.” He gestured to the road sign, then smiled benevolently. “I am glad you followed me,” he added. “I like curiosity in youth.”

“Why were you peering through my window like a pervert?”

“Just checking you and your chum were unharmed. More neighbourly than perverted, I hope you’ll agree. Come on, I’ll show you the clan.”

“It’s OK.” Ellis retreated. “I don’t want to disturb you.”

But the old man was already walking away, his long back stooping noticeably. “It’s no bother at all. We’ll have some tea. My name is Hedley, unusual nowadays I know, but it was fashionable once.”

Ellis followed the man to the furthest bungalow, keeping his distance. It was the one house that backed on to fields. Hedley led Ellis down the side of the house and straight into the garden and, as promised, Ellis’s eyes and ears fell immediately on a colony of frogs in a corner, where a pond nestled in the shadow of a scarlet willow.

A lady appeared. “Would you chaps like some tea?”

She seemed unsurprised to find Ellis there.

“Yes, please, old thing,” Hedley said. “Darling, this is Ellis.”

“Good-oh. Hello, Ellis.”

Framed by a chorus of frog-song, Ellis managed a bemused smile.

“Make yourself at home,” the lady said. “I’m glad everything’s all right.”

Amusing though it was to discover that there were people who actually said “Good-oh”, Ellis felt uneasy. He didn’t know why. He lit himself a cigarette. Hedley pulled two garden chairs out of the shade. Both men sat and looked across the layered bungalows at a view of the sea.

“Bit cold for tea on the lawn but I don’t expect you want to come inside,” Hedley said.

“This is fine,” Ellis said defensively, exhaling smoke.

“Can you spare me a cigarette?” Hedley asked, and proceeded to puff it in the manner of a man who has never smoked a cigarette in his life.

This does not add up, Ellis told himself.

“Well, I like your frogs,” he said, feeling uncomfortable with the silence.

“Thank you. I won the MBE for them.”

“I don’t believe in all that.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then why did you accept it?” Ellis asked.

“For the experience. Life’s too short to dodge them.”

“A bit hypocritical.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

Soon after, having discovered that in Hedley he had met his match when it came to carving out long silences, Ellis left. It was hours later, when he was slipping from rational thought into hallucination, that Ellis realised why he had felt perturbed by the old man. When Hedley had introduced him to his wife, Ellis had not, he was quite certain, told him his name.

Ellis gave Jed six months’ rent in advance when he broke the news that he could no longer work for him.

“Why can’t you?”

“Too many spiders. It’s coming back a bit.”

“What is?”

“Nothing. I just need a different sort of work.”

His money lasted three weeks, at which point he sought credit at the shop on Joy Lane for the first time.

“You look like shit,” said Raj, the shopkeeper.

Ellis realised that he was being watched by Hedley, the frog-man, from behind a carousel of KitKats. He ignored him.

“It’s just the once, Raj,” Ellis said.

“Yes to the milk, eggs, potatoes, onions and corned beef, but no tobacco and Rizlas on credit. If you’re too broke to pay you’re too broke to smoke that shit!”

Hedley joined Ellis at the counter.

“Excuse my language, Mr Wilkinson,” Raj added.

“Quite all right, Raj, couldn’t agree more.” Then Hedley smiled at Ellis. “Good morning.”

“Hello.” Ellis was guarded.

Hedley laid down his shopping basket on the counter and removed his wallet from his jacket pocket in his own unhurried manner.

“Wait for me outside, young man,” he instructed Ellis.

Ellis left the shop and stood on the kerb, in two minds whether to stay or go.

He can’t molest me on the street, he told himself. So he stayed.

When Hedley emerged, he tossed a packet of cigarettes at Ellis with a flourish.

“Asking for tobacco and those other fiddly things would have lacked subtlety on my part, so you’ll have to make do with those,” Hedley said, and wandered away to his bungalow.

“Er … thanks,” Ellis called out, uncertainly.

Three days later, Hedley was back, standing amongst the bird tables in torrential rain, unnaturally tall despite his stoop, under a large black umbrella with brass tips and a polished wood handle. He wore a shin-length raincoat, more suited to a Manhattan sidewalk in the fifties. The coat was immaculate and without a crease, even in the wind and rain. Hedley smiled and made a half-wave and Ellis went to the door.

Hedley raised his voice above the downpour. “I won’t come in, but I needed to talk to you.”

Oh, Jesus! Ellis thought.

“My wife and I need someone to do some paid work whilst we’re on holiday.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ellis smiled, unaware of his own pained expression.

“Frog-sitting. It’d be four hundred pounds a week and we’ll be away for two weeks. I make that eight hundred pounds.”

Ellis’s mouth dropped open.

“Are you interested?”

“It seems a lot of money,” Ellis said.

“It’s the going rate for a qualified frog-sitter.”

“I’m not a qualified frog-sitter,” Ellis said, raising his voice as the wind picked up. “I’m not a qualified anything.”

“You have a backside, don’t you?”

Ellis glanced at the heavens and wondered if he ought to invite his unfathomable visitor in.

“And, presumably, you know how to sit on it?”

“I know how to sit on my arse, yes.”

“Splendid!” Hedley triumphed. “I’m going to stick my neck out and say you’ll be able to perform the dual role of sitting and frog-watching.”

Feeding the cat would have been more strenuous, though less time-consuming. If any frogs left the garden and headed for Joy Lane, Ellis was to stand in their way. They would, Hedley assured him, “hop back home” when he did.

“If it’s terribly rainy, I suggest a large golfing umbrella as the garden shed is somewhat riddled with creepy-crawlies.”

“Right …” Ellis said, struck yet again by the sense of things not adding up with this man.

“Some people are averse to creepy-crawlies,” Hedley added. “If you’re not, then by all means take shelter in the shed. But I suspect you might be.”

Hedley advanced him one hundred pounds. Ellis’s hours were nine in the morning until noon and two in the afternoon until five.

“Do they understand they’re not supposed to hop off during the two-hour lunch break?” Ellis asked, his bemusement undiluted.

Hedley ignored the question. “Bring some kind of contraption for your cigarettes with you. I don’t want cigarette butts all over the garden.”

“Are we talking about an ashtray?” Ellis replied.

He watched the frogs do nothing, read an account of Cornish wreckers and pored over a book of Cornell Capa’s photographs that inspired him to buy a Kodak Retinette camera from a junk shop in Swalecliffe, in which his first film became irretrievably jammed. On three occasions in the fortnight he walked alongside a frog as it made an excursion on to Medina Avenue and back. Ellis couldn’t be sure whether or not it was the same frog each time but he liked to think it was. A lone voice of dissent. A troublemaker.

Hedley paid him a hundred pounds in cash on his return and the remaining six hundred pounds he wrote out as a cheque. “You do have a bank account, I take it?”

“A Post Office book.”

“Fine. Just pay it in and use it steadily. And eat something healthy from time to time, I implore you.”

It was a fortune and nothing could convince Ellis that what he had done was deserving of it. In fact, he wasn’t convinced that it had been necessary to have him, or anyone, babysit the frogs at all.

“What do you normally do when you go away?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve got you now,” Hedley said.

In the winter, Hedley found Ellis a succession of small and largely unnecessary tasks, for all of which he was overpaid. Occasionally, Hedley would be sitting on the sea wall outside Jed’s place and Ellis would join him and they would look at the estuary together and have a chat. Hedley would always ask Ellis if he was all right and in good health before leaving.

“You can turn to Mrs Wilkinson and me if you are in trouble,” he once said. “Any sort of trouble, or no trouble at all. Turn to us for anything.”

A towering sky arched across the coast, revealing the earth’s curvature to those who cared to stop and look. Far out on the low tide the noises of the town were distant and mottled, as if the world were underwater. The houses on Joy Lane Beach seemed no more than a raised scar on a muddy skin. Ellis roamed amongst the stooped bait-diggers and nervy oystercatchers as thin streams of seawater trickled across the bay, painting the estuary floor with silver streaks of reflected sky. Then he saw a man crossing towards him.

The first blow was graceful. It flew not from an isolated fist, but from Tim’s entire, momentarily airborne, body. Ellis peeled himself out of the mud and up on to his knees, where he received the second blow. Thereafter, he made no attempt to defend himself as Tim kicked and punched him to the edge of consciousness. His only retaliation was to show nothing. When it was over, Ellis rolled on to his back. His ribs contracted and groaned and he felt his eyes closing over. Tim pressed his boot down on Ellis’s head, inviting the earth to swallow him. A mussel shell, lodged in the mud on the sole of Tim’s boot, pierced Ellis’s skin and made a tear in the vein on his temple.

“That wasn’t about her,” Tim said. “If it was about her, I’d keep going till you were dead and then I’d bury you. That was just about you and me.”

The redeeming quality of being kicked half to death, it occurred to Ellis, as ice-cold water trickled from the mud around him into his clothes and his ears, was that so much pain invades your body so quickly that the rest doesn’t hurt at all. It damages, but you barely feel anything.

Tim had gone. Ellis was deaf and almost blind but he knew that he was alone. He stared at the sky through slit eyes and felt his way through rolling a skunk reefer. With short, sharp breaths he lured himself to the threshold of comfort and became oblivious of the freezing bed of mud he could not rise from. It occurred to him that spiders the size of pylons might be advancing towards him across the flats. He plastered the ash-coloured mud over his face, and they passed by without seeing him.

Some time later came the chugging of a diesel engine and the sensation of being lifted. His body was laid down on to something hard and he wondered if he was dead.

“Hello, Mr East,” he heard himself slur, from somewhere beyond his own body.

Baldie East, the whelk-man, peered down at him. He was old and shrunken. His face was lined and his eyelids were creased and his head was crowned with thick, snow-white hair. The smell of mussels and whelks streamed into Ellis’s nose and he lay blind again as his body jarred and rattled with the movement of the trailer on which he lay as Baldie’s tractor dragged it back to shore.

Still caked in mud, Ellis found the Welsh boys in the Rose In Bloom pub on Joy Lane. There were seven of them and they lived together in a two-bedroom flat above the sweet shop on Harbour Street. They drank heavily every night and impersonated Richard Burton whenever they were close to passing out, which was often. Four of the seven were called David Jones. They were distinguished as Dave, Davey, Jonesey and DJ. All seven men were mighty drinkers.

“You’re looking pretty this evening, O’Rourke,” Skip Williams said. He was the calmest of the seven.

“You look like a corpse covered in crap,” Davey said.

“Lowering the tone, you are, O’Rourke … lowering the fucking tone!”

“Nose suits you, spread over your face like that.”

“It’s been there once before,” Ellis said. “I’m only stopping for one. I’m freezing cold. And I need crisps, loads of the fuckers.”

By ten o’clock they were drunk. The roar of their laughter and foul language carried to every part of the pub, intimidating the regulars and provoking two warnings from the landlord. If Hedley and his wife had been pubgoers, this would have been their local. It served the gentlefolk who inhabited the sea-view bungalows on the hillside above Joy Lane and the gentlefolk were not happy.

Two empty pint glasses fell from the table and smashed across the floor.

“Put those anywhere you like!” Jonesy cried out.

The boys roared and the landlord stormed over.

“Another broken glass and you’re barred, the lot of you! Last warning! And you can cut out the swearing as well or I’ll be down on you fellers like a ton of bricks!”

Ellis climbed on to the table, stopping halfway to steady himself, with his bum stuck out like a novice surfer. He regained his balance, stood atop the table, looked down on the clientele and beamed them a smile.

“FUCK! BUGGER! WANK!” he announced, raising his pint glass to them before draining it and smashing it on to the floor.

They went quietly.

Ellis woke lying star-shaped on the beach. The morning sun levered his swollen eyes open as far as they would go. He heard footsteps on the shingle and squinted to see the silhouette of someone standing over him, their hands rammed into the pockets of a long, fashionable-looking winter coat. He raised his hand to the sun and as shadow covered his eyes he saw his sister. She winked at him, as if they’d seen each other yesterday, and he laughed to himself, which hurt his ribs.

“How did you get here?”

“I got a lift. You look like a shipwreck.”

They sat shoulder to shoulder on the breakwater letting the sun soak their faces. Ellis suspected that pneumonia was lurking somewhere beneath his hangover. Two of the Welsh boys were passed out on the beach. At some point in the night they had cuddled together against the cold and they were still stuck to each other, like sleeping lovers. Ellis wished he had a camera.

“I’m surprised we never came here with Dad on one of our days out. It’s pretty nice,” Chrissie said.

“How is Dad?”

She looked at his bruises and didn’t answer. She ran her finger across the scab on his temple.

“Tim?” she asked.

He nodded and his lips trembled.

“So its true you knobbed his wife?” she said.

His shoulders slumped and he bowed his head. He walked a few paces away and looked out to the sea forts on the horizon. For a moment, he thought he was going to throw up.

“Yes,” he muttered. “It is true. It’s the truth. It is a true fact. Coming to you straight from the planet Truth, after a quick stopover in the galaxy of Unforgivable Fuck-up.”

He watched the waves and she watched him and they didn’t move and they didn’t speak. The tide was turning. Baldie East would be preparing his nets and cages in the harbour before moving out to the whelk and mussel beds as the receding tide unveiled them.

“You are so useless with women, Ellie-boy,” Chrissie said affectionately.

“Don’t call me Ellie-boy,” he whispered.

She lobbed a pebble towards his feet.

“It is unforgivable,” she said, without reproach. “And you look so awful.”

In the fish and chip shop on Harbour Street, in the restaurant area at the rear of the shop, amidst the Formica tables and the wood-panelled walls, hidden at first by the clutter of sugar shakers, ketchup bottles and mustard pots, was Mafi. Ellis sat beside her and kissed her. She gasped at the bruises on his face.

“Who did this?” she asked.

“I did,” Ellis said.

She gripped his hand.

They sipped tea and then Ellis excused himself politely and walked outside. He crossed Harbour Street, hurrying to the corner of Sydenham Street, and threw up on the Jubilee rose bed. He returned to the table and nothing was said about it. In the silence, it occurred to Ellis that they might have come with bad news.

“Is Dad all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mafi said.

Ellis looked at the familiar contours on her face and the liver spots on her skin and thought how much he loved her.

“That’s not why you’ve come? Nothing bad has happened?”

“Nothing bad has happened,” Mafi assured him softly. “It’s just a day out for me. I wanted to see my boy.”

They sat in silence for a while. Ellis’s mind wandered and he thought of the spiderlings pouring out of his arm and taking his mother.

“Did I do something to harm Mum?” he said.

Mafi and Chrissie looked appalled.

“What would make you ask that?” Mafi said.

“Just …” He was distant. “Just a thought …” He rubbed his eyes and smiled brightly. “And, you know, Chrissie’s been reminding me how useless I am with women and it’s probably true, I am crap at most things. I suddenly wondered if I did something. That would be why no one will ever tell me what happened. If it was my fault.”

“If what was?” Mafi asked.

“Mum.”

“No!” they replied in unison.

“I’m a woman and you’re not useless with me,” Mafi added.

“He did trick you into signing his inter-rail ticket,” Chrissie reminded her.

Mafi ignored her. So did Ellis.

“He just thinks that there’s a lot of her in you,” Mafi said.

The words hung before him. It was nice for him to replay them in his head. A brief sentence, unannounced and unheralded, but explaining much and promising more.

“What happened to my mum?” Ellis asked.

Mafi smiled to herself in a way Ellis couldn’t fathom. Absent-mindedly, she stroked Ellis’s arm, as if she thought it was her own. Three plates of buttered toast were placed on the table. Chrissie looked affectionately at Ellis but didn’t say anything. Ellis pushed his plate away calmly.

“What happened to my mum?” he repeated. He placed his hand on Mafi’s cheek and gently turned her to face him. He nodded at her and whispered, “Now’s the time …”

Mafi took his hand. “One day, all of a sudden, your mother panicked that she could see the rest of her life stretching ahead of her with no more surprises. You were four years old. She was subdued for a long time, for months, then she admitted how she felt. Your dad believed that she should do something about it sooner rather than later. He was scared that if she didn’t, she’d tell him something worse one day, when you and your sister had grown up and moved on. He didn’t want to be left alone. Your mother and you were great together. She loved you. There were no problems with you. She just had an accident and if she hadn’t had an accident she’d have come back home to you all. You had a mother and she loved you and she died. It wasn’t your fault at all.”

Mafi sipped her tea. Ellis glanced at Chrissie. She smiled innocently back at him and took a piece of toast, concentrating on it exaggeratedly. He stretched out his leg and tapped her shin with his foot. Without looking up, Chrissie said, “Keep going, Mafi.”

Mafi licked the tip of her index finger and used it to wipe away the tea stain on the lip of her mug, something she had never done before and would never feel the need to do again.

“She went on an adventure with a girlfriend from school. Your father saw her off and she wrote to him often. She swam in the Arabian sea. She went to the holy lake of Pushkar. She was young and she was confused and she felt that she had missed out on a whole way of living and that soon it would be too late. She wrote long detailed letters to your father about what she was seeing and feeling. And she went to a place called the Golden City and she met a man. She liked the man and she fell out with her friend over him. The man liked her too and they had an affair …”

Mafi faltered. She had resolved to talk through this moment, to downplay it as far as possible, but had been brought to a halt by the words “they had an affair”. She needn’t have worried. Far from being crushed by the revelation of his mum’s infidelity, Ellis welcomed any detail about her. He felt particularly unselective and non-judgemental about it. He just wanted to know anything, everything, there was to know.

“It lasted a week and then she left him. She set off alone to escape him and return home. She missed you and your sister dreadfully. She wanted to be with your dad again. She took any lift or bus she could and headed for a place called Jaipur because she knew how to get home from there. She wrote to your dad. She told him everything. She apologised and told him the truth and she said she was desperate to come home to him and the two of you. And …”

Mafi’s voice trailed away.

Ellis smiled at her. “And?” he asked.

“And … she took a ride in some old truck on some rotten old road and it crashed off the road and that’s where she died.”

“In India …” Ellis whispered.

“In northern India,” Mafi confirmed.

“Northern India,” Ellis repeated, to accustom himself to the idea. “That’s a long way from home.”

Chrissie leant across and held Ellis’s hand. He felt fine and he gave her a wide-eyed smile to let her know. His priority was to take in his surroundings and to create a snapshot in his mind’s eye, so that he would never forget the moment when he found out. As for the details of what he’d been told, and how he felt about them, well, he had the rest of his life to think about that. All that mattered for now was that he had been told. Finally. On 2 November 1985, in the Harbour Street fish and chip shop.

“Poor Dad …” Ellis said.

“Do you remember when Mafi first came and stayed with us in Orpington?” Chrissie asked him.

Ellis shrugged. “Sort of.”

“That’s when Dad went out there. He scattered her ashes in a place she had written about in a letter to him because she said it was the most beautiful place she had ever seen.”

“The reason you’ve no relatives on your mum’s side of the family,” Mafi said, “is they’ve not spoken to him since he decided not to bring her body back home.”

“We should go there, one day?” Ellis urged his sister.

“Maybe. But when we’re older, after Dad’s gone.”

But that, Ellis knew, was a time so distant that it needn’t exist.

“We’ll be too old then. We should go, now, with Dad.”

On the sea wall, alongside the Red Spider café, Ellis stared at the waves. He shut off his mind and the storm of thoughts within it and filled his head with the colour of seawater. He lost his bearings and drifted, anchorless, for a while until Mafi broke the silence.

“Any day you see the sea is a good day,” she said.

It was too cold for her to sit outside for long. She shuffled along the sea wall to the pub and found a seat next to the radiator. She sipped a glass of barley wine and watched her great-niece and great-nephew from the window. This evening she would be able to tell her nephew that she had seen his son and that he was safe. She looked at the arthritic swelling on her hands and at the knots in the floorboards. She unbuttoned her overcoat and sat back. She felt happy to be on the coast again and at ease with the knowledge that her time was winding down. Today was a great adventure, perhaps the last. She was quite content.

Ellis watched Mafi’s Morris Minor disappear round the bend at the top of Nelson Road before setting off purposefully to the call box on Coastguards Alley. He took a deep breath and dialled the only London number in his diary apart from his sister’s, and asked to speak to Mr O’Rourke.

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“His son.”

The line was silent. Ellis covered the mouthpiece whilst he swallowed and cleared his throat. Then the tone of the silence changed and Ellis knew that his dad was there. Ellis allowed himself to breathe, inviting his dad to speak. Denny declined the invitation.

“Dad?”

Still there was silence.

“It’s Ellis.”

“Hello, Ellis.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine, son. How are you?”

“Pretty good.”

“Good.”

His dad’s pitch was perfect. It carried neither anger nor a crumb of tenderness.

“I just called to say I’ve seen Chrissie and Mafi today and that I’m going to call you every Friday evening from now on.”

“Did you know Tim Wickham and his wife split up?” Denny O’Rourke asked.

Ellis slumped and looked across the bay. “That’s probably because I slept with her,” he said solemnly. He knew that his dad wasn’t going to speak again. “Bye, Dad,” he said, tenderly.

Ellis and Jed shared a spliff on the beach that evening. The sea ripples rolled in softly at perfect intervals. The moonlight rode them like a folded paper boat. Ellis thought of his dad’s voice. Jed thought of what he and the little boy he called his baby brother might do together this weekend.

“The European water spider is the only spider that has evolved to live permanently under water,” Ellis murmured.

“Go on,” Jed said.

Ellis did so, gazing at the lights on the headland across the estuary and whispering, as if Jed were a sleepy child.

“It lives in ponds and streams, slow-moving streams. It spins a dome-shaped web and anchors it to a plant. It comes to the surface of the water and gulps down a bubble of air and takes it to the web and releases it. Gradually, it fills the web with air until it is like an air-filled balloon. It lives in the balloon, under the water.”

“I don’t know where you get it from,” Jed said, dragging deeply on the joint.

“I read it in a book,” Ellis said.