The future began with a job interview at the Bullet Photographic Agency and, an hour beforehand, a rendezvous with Chrissie at her office where Ellis was introduced to Milek, professional photographer and broker of this life-changing career opportunity. Ellis allowed Chrissie’s pre-interview lecture in how to behave in front of grown-ups to pass without protest, but when she came at him with a hair brush he drew the line.

There were two women and one man at the interview. Ellis tried to describe them to Jed that evening but it was difficult because they didn’t talk the way he was used to people talking. When they asked him a question they seemed to answer it for him and then invite him to agree.

“How long have you been passionate about photography?” asked the man, a Spandau Ballet lookalike. “For ever, or for ever and a day?”

Ellis looked to the women for help but they seemed to think this a reasonable question too, judging by their expectant faces.

“Well,” Ellis ventured, “I’m not ‘pash …’”

He discovered that “passionate” was not a word he could finish. It just sounded so wet.

“I’m not pash … about it yet. Really. Not yet. I’ve only just got my first camera …”

“What you got?” interrupted the man.

“Pentax K1000,” Ellis smiled.

“Amateur hour, my friend. Don’t show your face in public without a Nikon.”

Ellis smiled submissively and kept his opinions to himself. “I’m keen on photography,” he continued, deciding that “keen”’ was a perfectly good substitute for the p-word. “Anyway, you only want someone to make tea and catalogue slides, don’t you?”

The two women smiled in unison. The junior one muttered, “Priceless …”

“We call them trannies, not slides, but it doesn’t really matter,” the man said.

Then why say it? Ellis refrained from asking.

“You would also, in time, be going out with our staff photographers as their assistant. You need to at least like photography to be good at that,” the boss woman said.

Ellis sensed that he had strayed from Chrissie’s directive that he portray himself as “highly motivated”.

“I do,” he said, injecting some enthusiasm. “I really like it a lot.”

“What, in your view,” asked the younger woman, “is the hallmark of an iconic image?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what the question means. I understand depth of field though. Milek took me through it, if that’s any help.”

The man jumped back in. “Look. Point is, my friend, you have to get your head around the diversity factor. Follow? One moment you might be holding a negative crafted by one of the finest photographers in the world, the next you’ll be making the tea or taking my laundry to the dry cleaners.”

The room fell silent.

“Do you follow?” the man asked, expectantly.

Ellis smiled politely. “Um … I don’t want to seem rude but I can tell you for free that I will not be taking anyone’s laundry anywhere.”

Again, there was silence. The three Bullets fixed their attentions on separate fictitious objects in the middle distance over Ellis’s shoulder and did a passable impression of being lost in thought.

“I do feel passionate about photography, by the way,” Ellis said, meekly. “I don’t know why I said I didn’t earlier.”

“Good lad,” Spandau-man said, pressing his blue-rimmed specs up on to the bridge of his nose. “Good lad.”

Cunt, Ellis thought.

Ellis rang his sister from the call box on Joy Lane.

“They’ve given me a form to fill in and it says I have to write a letter of intent.”

“They’re bastards to get right, those sorts of letters,” Chrissie said. “Just tell them it’s exactly the job you’re looking for and that you’ve a passion for visual media.”

“OK, I’ll do my best.”

“Keep it short. Half a page.”

“OK.”

“Ellis, there’s something else.”

“What?”

“He read your letter.”

There was a little silence.

“I found him sitting on the bed folding it up. He cried on my shoulder.”

“Oh.”

“Ellis?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

“What for?”

“Letting me see Dad cry. I’ve never seen him cry. I wish you could have seen it too.”

The image of his father at the altar came to him. He suspected Chrissie would resent Ellis for that moment, if she knew.

“I’m glad you saw,” he said.

He sat on the beach and pictured his dad reading the letter. Ellis had left it by Denny’s bed, propped against the photograph of the lighthouse shore. He imagined the words entering his dad’s eyes and mind and heart. “Dear Dad,” he whispered to the white horses crossing the estuary, “I will always be grateful that you brought Mafi into our home. I have loved growing up with Mafi there. You are a private person for your own reasons and you have made me into one too. But that doesn’t mean that I do not feel the need to tell you how much I love you. I will be thinking of you there without Mafi and I will never forget her. I love you, Dad.”

He smiled to himself and nodded with satisfaction.

Awaiting him on the doormat were the first photographs from his new camera and, amongst them, a picture of himself and Denny, side by side in the snow, wearing identical clothes and expressions of disbelief. He heard Mafi’s voice call out. “Yoo-hoo …”

It surprised and pleased him how similar he and his dad looked. They had the same set of lines arching across their faces towards high cheekbones and large, bright eyes. They stood shoulder to shoulder these days, the greying hair and deeper lines on Denny’s face the only notable differences between them. Mafi’s camerawork had almost left Ellis with a picture of snow and nothing else. She had cut Ellis and his dad off at the chest and placed them in the bottom corner of the frame, devoting the majority of the photo to the whiteness. Her frail, shaky hands had also conferred a slight blur on the image. Ellis placed the photograph beside his bed and decided he would post a copy of it to his dad. He laid the job application form on the table beneath his bedroom window. Beside it, he placed blank sheets of paper, ready for the moment he felt inspired to write his letter of intent. Outside, a posse of Jed’s friends were dragging timbers across the beach to a huge bonfire stack. A barge bringing timber from Malaysia for the rebuilding of the sea defences had shed its load in a storm. Timber had been washed up along the shoreline between Margate and the estuary for days on end. It was going to be a big fire. It was going to be a big night.

Ellis never read in a book that sandwiching sixty micrograms of acid between skunk blowbacks was a bad idea, but he probably should have worked it out for himself before finding himself face down in the shingle struggling to breathe. Someone had placed his head in setting concrete but he dared not move in case whoever had done it was still in the room. On the point of suffocation, he panicked and flipped over on to his back where he was met not by the face of his fictitious attacker but by plumes of his own manic breath rising into a starry sky. The crackle of the bonfire and the buzz of conversation and laughter were nearby. He knew he had to sit this one out and wait for his organs to return to his jurisdiction. His vision was shooting all over the place and he felt sick as well as paranoid. When he regained the use of his legs, he returned to the bonfire and sat on a railway sleeper watching the flames. His mind settled and he saw, hovering in the sky across the bay, a great waterfall, a mile wide, with crystal-blue water cascading down it. At the foot of the falls, a gathering of strange green creatures sat on the water’s surface fishing with brass curtain poles. Ellis recognised the creatures from previous Dr Seuss dreams. He smiled gormlessly at them and didn’t care that they probably weren’t there at all. It was just good to see them again.

A friend of Jed’s, called Marianne, stood over Ellis and asked him if he’d like a cup of hot chocolate. She took a mug from the tray her girlfriend was carrying and placed it in Ellis’s hands, securing his fingers around it. Ellis watched her hands on his and felt happy and vivid. He sipped the sweet hot drink and decided that now would be a perfect time to write his letter of intent.

He knelt at the table in his bedroom and placed a blank sheet of paper in front of him. He felt inspired and clear about what he was going to write but struggled at first, until he realised he was writing with his left hand. When he started again, using his right hand, the words poured forth and a letter which had threatened to be difficult to compose was suddenly the easiest thing in the world. His only reservation when he knelt back and surveyed the six pages he had produced was that his black biro had run out after four and a half and he had found only a blue pen to replace it. Taking into account the red pen he had used for the illustrations, there were three different colours on the page. He worried it might look messy or indecisive. Conversely, it might look passionate, which was a good thing. That presentational issue aside, it was a job well done. He put the letter and the application form in the envelope provided.

It was the start of a beautiful morning beneath a bright winter moon. Ellis guessed at six o’clock. He stopped at the post box on Joy Lane, kissed the envelope once for good luck and despatched it. He walked up the hill, past Hedley Wilkinson’s frogs, across the fields above Medina Avenue, and on to the Thanet Way, where he jogged through the gaps between fast-moving lorries on the dual carriageway. When he reached Mac’s Café, the truck stop on the London-bound side, he looked back and wondered why the lorries had sounded so angry with him.

Ellis had placed his order. The lady behind the counter was staring back at him, trying not to laugh, and Ellis was confused. He looked at the lorry drivers at their tables. Each one was looking at him with amused curiosity.

“That didn’t make a word of sense, my love. Do you want to try again?” the lady said.

Ellis took a deep breath and repeated himself. “All the … ’n’ thing talkie ’bout, foodum you know, like freedom.”

He smiled, secure in the knowledge he had asked for the set breakfast for a second time.

“Like before, darling, I’m not getting you.”

“And a hottie,” Ellis added, “like Marianne did.”

The lady smiled kindly and the giggle she was trying to suppress crept out. Ellis smiled back wide-eyed. He looked like a child. He turned to the men in the café, his big blue eyes dilating merrily.

“Shame Marianne herenay, ain’t she?”

One of the men stood up and approached him. He was fat and hairless and gummy. He put his flabby arm round Ellis.

“You – want – to – eat?”

Ellis nodded and pointed to the lady behind the counter with an expression of despair.

“No, it’s not her fault, you were talking gobbledygook. You aren’t making sense,” the big man explained.

Ellis smiled. “Oh …” He nodded thoughtfully.

He walked across to a table where four men in boiler suits were eating and pointed to a mound of baked beans.

“You want beans?” the big man asked.

Ellis nodded, like Harpo Marx.

“He wants beans,” the man said to the lady.

Ellis pointed to the fried eggs.

“A fried egg? How many?”

Ellis lifted his index finger.

“One fried egg.”

Ellis withdrew his finger then stabbed it into the air again.

“Two fried eggs?”

The lady behind the counter took down the order. As the set breakfast came together item by item, the other men around the café willed Ellis on, nodding their heads without realising they were doing so, and when Ellis drew a line through the air to signal that his order was complete a round of applause rang out from the tables.

Strange bunch, Ellis thought to himself.

He took a seat in the corner and tucked a white paper napkin into his shirt. The lady brought him a mug of tea.

“Will Mac be cooking my foody?”

“Who, darling?” she asked.

Ellis looked at her in amazement and then pointed to the neon sign outside.

“Oh!” the lady said. “Mac! Yesss! He’s cooking it right now, sweetness …”

Ellis nodded his approval. There seemed little point going to a café called Mac’s if Mac wasn’t going to cook your breakfast. When his food arrived seeing the baked beans seemed to spark an idea.

“You know what I find not-ly good about the Buddhists?” he called out.

The café fell quiet. By the looks on their faces, none of the men there did know what Ellis’s objection to the Buddhists was.

“Are they the ones who believe in reincarnation?” he checked. “Well, whoever it is that do, they’re just as bad as the rest of everyone else. See, everyone slags off Christians for being all clever about everything and, you know, like you tell them how stupid all their stuff is and doesn’t add up to two plus two and they say ‘But we’ve got faith so we know anyway even if no prove’ and so there’s not a lot you can say to that really. Is there?”

There was no reply.

“Is there?”

Silence reigned. A number of plentifully loaded forks hovered just outside the mouths they were aimed for.

“Like picking a fight with fresh air. Religion. Same with recarnation milk. We believe you borny gain as another shrub and don’t remember the last time. Bingo and don’t forget the custard! You can’t argue with it ’cos you don’t remember the before. I was Horatio Nelson and you can’t prove I was not. Don’t mind the shaved-headed vibe and the robes though. It’s all bollocks. Who’s with me?”

This was a tough audience to warm up.

“Anyone else feel the same way?”

He awoke in a tight, windowless box-bedroom, on a narrow bed surrounded by blue-grey walls. In one corner, within reach, was a wash basin and a single towel hanging from a rail beneath it. In the other corner was a small wooden chest painted thick with white gloss. A drawer was missing. On top of the chest was a small red book. The words “Holy Bible” were in gold on the front and side and a purple silk page-marker extended from the bottom of the red gilded page edges. There was a sound of ticking, but Ellis could see no clock. The blue-grey paintwork was so thick and featureless that he couldn’t see the join between the walls and the ceiling. A lady entered. She was middle-aged and wearing the same sort of pink and white apron as the lady in Mac’s Café. She placed a mug of tea beside the Bible and sat on the edge of the bed. Her skin was shiny and there were greasy spots on her cheeks which led to her dimples. She smiled and her top front teeth protruded slightly and rested on her lower lip.

“Do you know the Mockingbird song?” Ellis whispered.

She shook her head and felt his forehead. Her hand was cold and clean and slightly pudgy.

“You’re not her, then …” he muttered.

She did his coat buttons up for him as his hands were shaking. As they left the room, Ellis saw a small Tupperware container on the floor catching drips from a radiator.

“Oh!” he said. “It’s not a clock.”

“It’s a radiator,” she said.

She navigated Ellis through a maze of faceless corridors to the outside world. He stood in the early evening darkness and came to terms with the fact that the day had passed without him. Mac’s Café flashed in neon in the corner of his eye. He felt disorientated and weak and he couldn’t think straight. The lady held on to his elbow until there was a big enough gap in the traffic for Ellis to cross the dual carriageway. He looked back and she disappeared behind the crossfire of lorries.

By the time Chrissie came for him, the snow had gone but the pebbles were still freezing together at night. Ellis spent the morning lying with his face against the shingle, listening to the distant church bells on Borstal Hill and watching the sunshine thaw the beach. His eyes were as close as they could be, whilst remaining focused, to two small pebbles frozen fast together. He set his heart on seeing the pebbles part in the thaw, on witnessing the exact moment their frozen bond evaporated. But no such drama unfolded and, in time, he realised that a paper-thin gap had appeared between them without his noticing.

Jed walked past, heading into town.

“What are you doing, Ellis O’Rourke?”

“Waiting for two pebbles to part.”

“Some might argue you are pissing your life away.”

“Nonsense! I’m waiting to become a great photographer.”

“Will you be rich?”

“Very.”

“Then you can buy me a pint at lunchtime. I’ll see you in there.”

“Talk to my secretary.”

As he took his seat in the pub, Ellis thought to himself how similar to his sister the woman on the sea wall looked. He started his burger and chips and had got halfway through his pint when he looked again and realised that the woman on the sea wall was his sister, staring back at him.

“Why?” Chrissie said to him, as he walked towards her.

“What you doing here?” he asked, going to embrace her.

“Why?” she repeated.

Her monotone stopped him dead. “Why what? What’s up?”

“Why?” she persisted.

“Why what?” He laughed nervously.

“You must hate me. I can’t think of another reason.”

“Chrissie, what are you on about? I mean, what’s up? Why are you here? Has something happened?”

She pulled a fistful of papers from her coat and held them up for him to see. The writing was childishly erratic and interspersed with little sketches. He let out a faint, involuntary gasp, but nothing specific came to him, just ominous warning signals flashing around his brain.

“I feel like … something is familiar, but, no …”

“I thought so,” Chrissie said. “I thought you just might have been so pissed you wouldn’t remember. It doesn’t make it any less shitty on your part, you little wanker.”

“What?” he implored.

She held up the sheets and read aloud, struggling to navigate the misspelled, unpunctuated mess.

“Dear Bullet Photographic Agency, Letter of Intent from Ellis O’Rorck – you’ve actually spelt your name wrong there – First thing I should point out clear is that I am not an Irish. Many make that mistake and yes, with a surname like mine, somewhere way way way back of course, but I am not allowed a Irish passport and I have never visited the Emrold Isle or the Emrold Forest, subject of John Boorman’s very very very fine recent film which I took the liberty of catching at the Cannon Cinema in Herne Bay which offers admittens – which you spelled like kittens – for one pound on Monday nights. Secondly, I was concerned at how pale you all looked, a Irish affliction as it goes. You might consider trying beach life. It does wonders and excellents for the skin.

“About the interview, it struck me that …

“Then,” Chrissie said, “there’s just a scrawl. Your writing becomes a sort of cardiogram for a page or two.”

“My writing?” Ellis protested.

Chrissie ignored him and continued reading.

“We are having a bonfire this night. I’d ask you to photograph Marianne for me but you’d only steal her soul. Passion! Passion! Passion! Do I have a passion for photographs, you ask me? Well, yes, but not for photographs which people like you wrote ‘processed peas down to 29p’ all over, if you get my drift. My O’Rourke’s drift! Ha! Never noticed that one before.”

Chrissie took a moment to shake her head in disbelief.

“Anyhow, I wish to be considered for the post as … thingy, you know, the job. I could do some hanging out in London and up my social life huge notches. I am feen and kit – I suppose you meant keen and fit – alert, stealthy, rarely steal from others and have a talent for taming seals. I know the location of every dried food item in the supermarket and speak fluent barcode.

“Now, some seemingly random facts from modern world history for you just on the off chance I discover that you have employed Mr Townsend, my history teacher from school, to assess this application form: Irish Free State, 1921. French Revolution, 1989 – it was 1789 actually, Ellis. We haven’t had 1989 yet – Normandy Landings, 1944. First ever episode of Starsky and Hutch 1973. That’s it, that’s all the dates I can remember.

“In conclusion, photography can be used for the greater good, for exampley, you know that picture of the girl running away in Vietnam and that picture of Gandhi with his legs crossed. I’m making that up but somewhere there just has to be a famous photograph of that man with his legs crossed cos he was forever crossing his legs. Or the photographic art can be abused, like, you know, those photographs of what they call in the porn trade sticky cum-whores lap-it-up moments and also photographs of sunsets used to sell people pensions.

“So, my plea to you is to leave the office, get some sea air (trains run from London to this part of the world twice an hour and you can walk at the beach in fifteen minutes if you take Station Road and Cromwell Road and Oxford Street – no not that Oxford Street derr-brain! – Nelson Road, Island Wall and Edwards Alleyway. Return to your place of work refreshed and inspired to work for the common goody goody two shoes of man. Study human rights legislation in the evenings and you, the bloke on the right as I looked at you, stop wearing those ridiculous blue specs and stop patronising job applicant people, and you, the woman in the centre, return your breasts to the inside of your clothing where tradition dictates they should be during daylight hours. You are too late for the French revolution my dear – there is absolutely no punctuation here whatsoever, Ellis – My name is Ellis O’Rourke. I really want this job and I hereby announce my contemplation to be chosen as the astronaut to pilot the Bullet photographic agency crusie ship into the second half of the 1980s. Good evening.”

Chrissie fell silent for a moment before erupting into mock animation.

“Ooooh and look Ellis! You’ve done some illustrations to bolster you chances! There’s a sketch of your house on the beach, there’s the man’s spectacles with a bullet hole through them and, look, there’s the two ladies from the interview in what I guess is one of those cum-whores lap-it-up moments! And they’re in red, which is lovely!”

Ellis remembered some of this now but not much of it.

“It wasn’t really me,” he pleaded. “It wasn’t …”

He lowered his head and waited for the torrent of self-criticism to engulf him but instead he found himself thinking that some of the letter had really been quite amusing and well written, especially when one considered the state he must have been in when he wrote it. He didn’t dare ask how Milek felt about all this.

“I think I need a drink,” he said, nodding towards the pub.

“I think that’s the last thing you need,” she muttered.

He took his pint to a spot where Chrissie wouldn’t be able to see him from outside. There, he drank his self-loathing. Trying to piece together the night of the bonfire party was hopeless. He and Jed had both tried that in the previous couple of weeks without success.

The unpalatable thing for him was that he knew that he had written the letter simply because it was just the sort of thing he would do. The letter itself wasn’t what bothered him. That was a one-off. He could move forward from this point in time fairly confident of never writing a letter like that again. But the idea of Ellis being so off his face that he wrote a long, detailed letter which he then forgot the existence of, that was pitifully like him these days.

“I’m a bad person,” he said to a man nearby.

The man picked up his pint and walked away. “I didn’t come here to listen to your whining, you middle-class cunt.”

Ellis laughed to himself.

“Did you laugh at me?” the man said.

“No,” Ellis said softly. “I did not.” He met the man’s stare and didn’t flinch. The man curled his lip and let it go.

Ellis lit a cigarette. This moment is recoverable, he told himself. I need to apologise and take things from there.

The obstacle to doing this successfully was that Ellis was as intrigued by what he’d done as he was contrite. For a start, he asked himself, what made me think of my old history teacher when I was on acid? He seemed the dullest man but he was probably quite a good bloke in real life. Whatever real life is supposed to mean.

“Would the real real life please step forward?” he whispered to his drink.

He wanted to take a good look at those sketches. He was no artist and yet the glimpse that Chrissie had allowed him, admittedly brief, suggested there was some latent drawing ability there. If Chrissie could recognise the drawing of the two women as being of two women then the likeness can’t have been bad, he reasoned.

Chrissie entered the pub and went to a table in the corner. Ellis followed obediently, reminding himself that the first words out of his mouth needed to be an apology, a really good one. Their knees touched momentarily as he sat down opposite her.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

She blanked him. He filled the silence, clumsily and blindly, just to get her talking again.

“Don’t you think it’s incredible that all those history dates were stored in my head without me knowing?”

She looked at him, incredulous. “Amazing,” she muttered, shocked by the brevity of his remorse.

Misreading her response, he leant forward conspiratorially, pressing his knee against hers.

“Yeah, and to be able to draw just because you’re off your head. Could I take another peep at those sketches?”

She stared at him, and realising that he was serious, she turned purple in the face.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?”

The pub stopped to take a look. Ellis watched his sister march out. He stared at the open doorway, at the daylight hitting the buildings on Island Wall. Then he looked to the bar, where a line of drinkers were still watching him.

“Fuck off the lot of you,’ he said, without projecting his voice.

“Keep it to yourself,” Kitty snarled from behind the bar.

Dyke, Ellis thought.

He returned to his drink. The day had started so nicely, he reminded himself. But, then, watching pebbles defrost is a fairly safe way to start the day.

One of the problems, he couldn’t help feeling, as he attempted some sort of analysis, both out of a sense of duty and just in case his sister stormed back into the pub and asked him what he had to say for himself, was that Ellis didn’t “get” adult life, even though he had been flirting with it for nearly a year. He did not appreciate why Chrissie was so angry. He understood why but he didn’t appreciate why. Why couldn’t this episode be funny, something to be laughed off with a sense of knowing, even loving, despair? OK, he wasn’t expecting to be offered the job after this, but why did it all have to matter so much? Why did it matter to Milek that his girlfriend’s brother was an immature prat? Why did it matter to the agency that one of their photographers had suggested a guy who turned out to be a fool? And why couldn’t Chrissie just find it hilarious? She, Milek, the agency, they were all on the same side; the side where you have a good job, clothes you buy but don’t wear and a Sony Walkman cassette player. It was Ellis who was the loser in all this. Fair enough, Spandau Ballet-man is going to have been offended by the bullet hole in his spectacles. That drawing, admittedly, sent out a negative message. But why was it such a problem for the two women? Their sketch, from what Ellis could glimpse, had been pretty kind to each of them. In fact, he’d taken years off them both.

And here was the problem in a nutshell. Ellis couldn’t take adult life seriously even in moments like this when he was thinking to himself, and the internal mechanics of that fact were preventing him from constructing a heartfelt apology for his sister. Unlike most eighteen year olds, Ellis was not finding life away from the confines of home, with all its freedoms and pleasures, amazingly satisfying. He was already getting a bit bored by it all and he’d hardly dipped his toe in. Some eighteen year olds would love to be living his life. Des Paine would swap places with him. Tim Wickham might, too. And, yes, Ellis loved living by the sea and he loved going to work rather than school. And he liked the feeling of being tired and stopping for a break and drinking a hot cup of tea and smoking a cigarette. But how many more times was he going to do that in his life and still find it wonderful? And that’s why the job at the photographic agency would have been good, he reminded himself. Because it would have moved him on and been a new challenge and it would have opened up his life to new people and places. It would have been a step up, a marker of growing maturity. At that precise juncture in Ellis’s life, not drawing a cartoon of his potential bosses shoving dildos into each other would have been the sensible course of action.

Jed saw Ellis up ahead on the beach, sitting against a breakwater. For Ellis, recovering from an hour of intense reflection in which he arrived at a degree of self-realisation was a radical departure from cohabiting with whatever random visual ideas entered his head, and the experience had left him mentally exhausted. In an effort to freshen himself up, he rolled over and attempted a headstand and made a pretty good fist of it.

“Good afternoon, my most peculiar friend,” Jed said as he crunched his way across the pebbles.

“Hello there,” Ellis replied, in a squashed upside-down voice.

“Weird but kind of impressive, that,” Jed said, inspecting the headstand.

“Hurts my head,” Ellis moaned, the words squeezed out of his brain as his face turned red. He collapsed on to the pebbles. “How was Ben?”

“Fine,” Jed said. “Slaughtered him at snooker.”

“Some would argue you should let your six-year-old brother beat you at snooker,” Ellis said, brushing himself down.

“Maybe,” Jed shrugged. “But we wouldn’t want to knock about with them.”

“I’ve decided to quit,” Ellis said.

“Glad to hear it,” Jed said. “Quit what?”

“Weed, for a start.”

“Well, you’re not exactly Keith Richards.”

“And the drinking to oblivion and the drinking on weekday lunchtimes. My weeks are getting hazy.”

“I’ll stop too,” Jed said.

“Serious?” Ellis asked.

“I’ve a lump in my pocket and that’s all I’ve got. We’ll smoke it now and then that’s it. No more. Tomorrow’s a new day. You’re only saying what I’ve been thinking. It’s all become a little boring.”

“We could just chuck the lump in the sea and stop immediately.”

“That’s not going to happen, is it?”

They worked their way through the last of the stash and through Jed’s hip flask of brandy. Ellis wondered if the two little pebbles would be freezing back into an embrace for the night. At one point Jed hugged Ellis and Ellis slapped Jed on the back.

“You’re not very physical,” Jed commented.

Ellis dismissed this as rubbish.

“No, it’s true. You laugh a lot, you’ve got a Cheshire cat smile, you listen to your friends and you sleep with women, but you never embrace your friends or hold hands with the women you’ve brought home and slept with.”

Jed reached into his jacket pocket and took out his wallet. With practised ease, he slid out a small photograph of his kid brother.

“He’s my son,” he said.

“I guessed,” Ellis replied. “Is there a story?”

“Not an original one. His mother doesn’t like me and I’d be lying if I said I wanted to be with her. That’s it. I’m doing my best.”

The first stars were appearing in a fathomless, dark blue sky. A line of fire laced the horizon to the west. The sea looked magnificent, a calm, tender, shimmering grey. The flask was empty and the weed was gone. They hauled themselves up unsteadily and walked on past the silhouettes of houses with names they would never forget: “Breakwater”, “The Reef”, “Bellbottoms”, “Captain’s House”. Jed staggered up the embankment and stopped to admire his mobile home. Ellis remained on the beach, watching a London-bound train clatter past. His thoughts chased after the train and an idea came to him. He would catch a train right now and follow his sister up to London and make his peace with her.

“You coming?” Jed called out.

“No,” Ellis said, and wandered away, deep in thought.

Jed picked up a couple of pebbles to lob at Ellis, but seeing that his friend had made one of his rapid trips into his own private world he let the pebbles fall out of his hand and watched Ellis disappear across the shadow line where the house lights of Joy Lane Beach ended.

As his train moved off, Ellis changed his mind, after a premonition in which Chrissie dismissed him as a fool for making the trip. He saw the estuary and Joy Lane Beach from the train, his hands cupped round his face at the window. An hour later, he watched the street-lit climbing frames, goalposts, potting sheds and glowing TV screens of suburbia from the same place and then the hospital where he was born. Something desperate reared up in his heart without revealing itself. The train pulled into the station and, unsurely, confusedly, Ellis found himself stepping down on to the platform. Crowds of returning commuters and shoppers brushed past him in the entrance to Orpington station. He stood deliberately amongst them, amongst each wave of them that came with each train, and waited patiently for someone to tap him on the shoulder and exclaim, “Why! You’re the little boy who used to live here! Oh, I so liked your mother. I knew her well. I have the most vivid memories of her. I can tell you all about her, her voice, her expressions, her smell …”

The house looked the same. Or a little smaller perhaps. The side alley was less overgrown than Ellis remembered it but the back garden looked exactly as it did in the slide. The low brick wall was still there and so was the garden gate his mum had beckoned him through. But, once inside the garden, breathless from climbing the fence, he felt immediately confused and kept glimpsing the mustard brown of the sweater he wore in the slide. Turning to catch sight of himself once too often, he became dizzy. He tried to reach the wall, knowing that his mother would have sat there many times, but his legs gave way beneath him and he slumped on to the grass.

He remembers the white room but nothing else. He has never dredged up a memory of what happened before the room. In the white room, there was only a table and chair and a phone. The receiver was lying to the side of the telephone when Ellis was escorted to it. He sat at the table and stared at the phone for some considerable length of time.

Denny had taken the call on the same evening that the nagging ache in his stomach first turned to stabbing pain.

The owners of the house had seen the man sitting on the grass in their back garden. They didn’t risk approaching him, and as they watched him the stranger grew agitated. They could not see his face but his shoulders heaved up and down. Then they heard him sobbing and then wailing and they called the police. The police tried to talk to him but the stranger seemed unable to speak for grief. They took him away. The owners of the house saw him pull a bunch of grass stalks up from the lawn and put them in his pocket as he was hauled to his feet. The man didn’t seem drunk or mad or angry. Just inconsolable.

Ellis was exhausted. A policeman led him to a cell where they allowed him to sleep on a bed. In his coat pocket they found a roll of masking tape and a diary. In the address book of the diary, under the letter U, they found a phone number against the entry “Us”. When Ellis woke, he had no idea where he was. A policewoman led him into the white room with the table and the chair and the phone. He stared at the receiver but didn’t think to pick it up. He looked at the blank walls and wondered if he’d died and, having wondered it, believed it. He had died and was being processed. He couldn’t remember what age he had reached prior to dying. He heard a noise down the phone. It was his mum on the line. She was going to tell him where to go after he’d been admitted so they could meet. He hoped the rooms would get nicer than this one. He didn’t want their reunion to take place in a room like this. He’d rather they met outside, in the fresh air. He picked up the receiver and listened. He could hear breathing but it wasn’t as he’d imagined her breathing to be.

“Hello?” he ventured.

“Ellis?” came Denny’s voice.

“Am I dead?”

“No, dear boy.”

Ellis smiled at the sound of his dad’s voice.

“Ellis?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Was it the spiders?”

Ellis fell silent. Then he remembered splintered pieces of the evening.

“No. It was my mother.”

There was silence again and it lasted a long time.

Then Denny said, “Why don’t you come home for a while, to live?”

“OK,” Ellis said.