On a flight back from Lisbon with Milek, Mafi appeared to Ellis. She was a stewardess. She touched him gently on the arm and said, “Any day you see the sea is a good day.”

Ellis hired a car at the airport and drove to the Marsh. On the shingle peninsula, near to the lighthouse, there was a small house to let. It was timber-framed, with a flat roof, and a part of it had once been a meat wagon. He viewed the house as a blizzard consumed the beach. From the dining room window he looked through a veil of snow flurries at the container ships heading south-west on the Channel.

He drove to Fairfield to think things over. He crossed the pasture to the church and hid from the winter wind at the spot where he and Denny had often stood.

“Good place for a bench,” he heard his dad say.

When he had fixed things with the agent he rang the vicar of the Marsh churches and offered to purchase a bench to be situated on the sheltered side of Fairfield church.

“There’s no sheltered side at Fairfield,” the vicar said.

“That’s true,” Ellis agreed. “It was just tradition to say there was. I want to put a dedication on the bench, to my father.”

He drove off the Marsh towards the Downs to the cemetery on the hill. He carried a bottle of champagne and stood over his father’s grave.

“I’m moving to the beach, Dad, like I said I would. Come and find me there, because I can’t find you anywhere.”

A voice called out, “I wondered if we’d bump into each other here.” Katie Morton was kneeling at a freshly dug grave nearby. He went to her.

“Your mother or father?” he asked, immediately fearing it could be her brother.

“My mother.”

The sand and earth on Mrs Morton’s grave was still piled high in a comically human shape, an observation Ellis kept to himself. He raised the bottle a fraction.

“To your mum …”

He swigged and handed the bottle to her.

“To your dad …” she said, and drank.

He held her when she cried. “You’re freezing cold,” he told her.

He wrapped his coat around her. She told him that Denny had visited her parents’ house the day after she and Ellis were caught together.

“Did you know that he came round?”

“No … I had already gone away.”

Katie had watched from the top of the stairs.

“My parents shrank in comparison to him. They often did that with people.”

“What did my dad say?” Ellis asked.

“Yesterday is the last time you ever humiliate my son. No matter what you think he might have done wrong, you need to feel ashamed.”

Ellis said nothing. How many other moments had he never seen? What other things had he not credited his dad with being capable of?

As he watched Katie Morton walk away from the graveside that afternoon it occurred to Ellis how her body, the first he ever truly saw, would venture out across the earth now, covering maybe a few miles of it, or perhaps many thousands. She will forget him, or she will go years and years between remembering him. She will grow up and grow old. They might each become unrecognisable as the people they were. But she will still be there. That person who bared herself, those eyes that smiled and laughed at him, that very young woman who invited him to touch her.

And the aching he felt, he could not be sure whether it was urging him to smile or to sob. We don’t love each other, but we knew each other. We knew each other for a moment. And one day, one of us will take their last breath and the other won’t know of it. Those days of innocent exploration, when life is abundant with potential, will be distant but Ellis O’Rourke, he promised himself, will remember it all. And unlike the jewellery on Mafi’s dresser, which it was impossible to believe had ever been brand new, the Katie Morton who led me by the hand and slept tight against me will always be there. However the shell around her ages, even when it is worn out and dies, she will always be there. And I will never behave as if none of these things happened. I will never hide from my children all that I have ever been.

He stood up and stretched and looked at the sky. In it, he saw Mrs Morton, with wings and a harp, looking very pissed off indeed as she glared from a film-set heaven at him, that wretched boy, standing on her own grave, with a bottle of champagne.

Lovely! Ellis thought to himself, grinning back at her and resisting the urge to dance. You deserve this, you mean old cow.

On the window sill of the kitchen, the champagne bottle stands with a candle in it. Ellis washes his face at the kitchen sink. He feels tired out by a glut of memories. It is early afternoon. He returns to the dining table and draws the metal box to him. A small piece of blue peeks at him from the very bottom of the box. Ellis clears the way to it and sees his father’s diary emerge. He runs his hand across the blue canvas book he thought had burnt in Denny’s final bonfire. As a young boy, Ellis pestered his dad to read episodes from the diary. Mostly, he wanted to hear about entering Auckland Harbour on VE day, crossing the Western approaches and seeing the German wolfpacks attack the North Atlantic convoys. He has never read the diary for himself. It’s possible he’s never even held it before now. On the cover is a faint ink thumbprint, left years ago.

The diary falls open towards the back, where a photograph and an envelope are wedged between the pages. The photograph is of Ellis and his father standing knee-deep together in snow. On the envelope, in his father’s writing, is Ellis’s name. He breaks the seal and pulls out a single piece of folded paper. In the letter, Denny describes a walk he frequently made when he was a boy, growing up in Ilford in the 1930s. It was along a footpath, through a field, in the nearest open country to his home. There were two big old trees in the field. At a certain point on the path, the sun would be hidden behind the first tree, and as young Denny walked it would appear from behind it and then, a few paces later, disappear behind the second tree.

I would imagine that I was watching the sun rise and set, a whole day come and gone in a few moments. My dear boy, when your time is up, it seems to have been just a moment. So don’t waste any of it. There’s a lot for you to cram in.

If Ellis thinks of Denny being born in 1926, if he thinks of the number, 1926, then his father’s life doesn’t appear short because 1926 seems a long time ago. The rising sense of panic Ellis is feeling today is not caused by the brevity of his father’s life but by the relentlessness of all life. He summons up the scant few details he can remember from history lessons and maps out his father’s era. When the Empire State Building was built, my dad was five years old. When war broke out, he was thirteen and he dreamed of going to sea like his father. He was a teenager on the Panama Canal when the Enola Gay flew over Japan. He was twenty-eight when Bannister broke the four-minute mile – he would have read about that in the papers with admiration – and he was thirty-four at the time of Sharpeville and by then he was married to Mum. And then Chrissie was born and then there was Aberfan and soon after that there was me and Neil Armstrong and Chrissie’s desperate, heartbreaking crush on Ryan O’Neal that she insisted she would never get over. And then Dad was alone with us and he found the cottage and he had that and he had us and he was happy and we were together and then there was our great storm in England and there were floods in Bangladesh and an earthquake in Armenia and a bomb over Lockerbie and cheats at the Olympics and my dad died and I want to halt the earth and ask when does all this stop for a single moment’s breath and when do we get the chance to be still and stop moving forward so quickly through time?

The deception of childhood is the impression it gives of never ending. The risk of growing up in a place you love so much is to be haunted by it. Perhaps, if they had never left the cottage, his dad would not have died. The cottage was the glue holding everything together. But then again, nothing ever is held together like that. The elements of any life are constantly shifting. From time to time they gather into a constellation that works well and feels good. And we dare to imagine that those constellations we are happy with might gain permanence.

As he looks at the beach, itself a peninsula of ever-shifting land with no pretensions to permanence, it occurs to Ellis that no one ever does have it all sorted out. A few might think they do, but what sort of people are they? Denny never did have everything in order. The cottage was never completed, his income never secure, his children never safe and sound and guaranteed to remain that way. And certain of his scars were for life, bearable but not the sort that heal.

It is the same for all the men and women walking so purposefully along Jermyn Street, it is the same for the fishermen on the beach. It is the same for Joseph Reardon, who doesn’t even own the farm that has consumed him. A wonderful life of chaos and hope and disarray awaits all those prepared to risk it.

As Ellis folds his father’s letter and slides it back into the envelope, he sees a Post-it note clinging to the back of the envelope like a stowaway. On it, in Denny’s handwriting, are the words Call Tammy.

He listens to the gulls and to the shore break. He watches the woman sketching on the beach. A few hours ago he imagined her entering his house and making love to him. He added her to a long list of nameless, non-existent women who had loved him in this way. It was only a few hours ago but he is already embarrassed by what he used to be.

He goes to his bedroom. In a drawer, underneath his vests, is his address book. He goes to the kitchen and makes a call. He does it all swiftly so that he doesn’t leave time to talk himself out of it. A woman answers and says “Hello” and Ellis speaks tentatively.

“Does Tammy still live there?”

The phone goes quiet but he can hear her breathing.

“Is that you, Ellis?” Tammy asks.

“Yes.”

She laughs under her breath. He asks her how she is. She asks him where he is calling from and he tells her that he has moved to the coast. She says, “Nice.” He asks her if she’s OK again. Her breathing is as if she’s lying beside him.

“I don’t want to do lots of talking about everything under the sun, like people seem to want to do. But I’d really like to see you,” he says.

“See me but not really talk? Didn’t we do that before?”

“I suppose … have you got a boyfriend?”

“Ellis, I don’t want to be unkind, but after more than a year I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”

“No. That’s true. But have you?”

“I’m not very good at being on my own. I get lonely.”

“I am good at being alone. But I get lonely too.”

“Then maybe you’re not as good at it as you think.”

He thinks to himself and nods, neither of which helps the conversation.

“I just like my own space,” he says.

“Why?” she asks. “What’s so fascinating about it?”

Ellis covers the receiver with his hand and swallows hard. That was, he can’t help feeling, a very good question, to which he definitely does not have a good answer.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and hangs up the phone.

He lies on his bed. He stares at the photograph of himself and Denny in the snow and he cries. The tears clog his throat and place pools of liquid in front of his eyes. He shuts his eyes and the tears are squeezed out and stream across his face.

When he wakes, the world is so silent that it must be the dead of night. There are no lights on in the house. The pilot buoy and the shipping lanes twinkle brightly above a black sea. Ellis walks through the house. He remembers the excitement as a child of being awake when the world was asleep. He recalls the night the police came to the house and supported his dad by the arm. That was a special night too. They were awake when the world wasn’t. It was exciting in its own strange way.

He returns the photograph to the page of the diary where he found it. Low down, amongst the tightly packed lines of Denny O’Rourke’s faded blue handwriting, are the words Ilford, 10 February 1946.

Ellis reads his father’s words.

Ellis sits motionless at the table. Hours later, the stirring of sunrise distracts him. He opens the back door and goes to the shed. He takes out the shrimping frame and buckets and his shrimping belt and loads them into the car. He runs a bath. Steam fills the tiny bathroom. He opens the window and the steam snakes towards the cool air outside. He pours blue bath foam into the water. The label has been peeled off and in its place, in black marker pen, are the words Spider Blood! He wrote that when he was drunk. He lies in the bath and the water is too hot. He feels his body temperature rise and he reads the Spider Blood label over and over again. He decides that it is time to call a truce with himself. A truce with his yearning. A truce with the mute world of accepted forfeiture he has made his domain. He considers the lengths his father went to to avoid being hurt again, and it occurs to him that he does not want to emulate his father; that he does not want to be like him in every way. He toys with this idea as if it were blasphemy. He allows it to settle. It does so without kicking up a fuss.

I do not want to wait until the end to say what I am feeling.

He makes the phone call, again.

“Hello?” Tammy’s voice is dense with sleep.

“Hello,” Ellis whispers, as if not wanting to wake her.

“Is that you, Ellis?”

“Yes.”

She isn’t annoyed but she tells him it’s five-thirty in the morning.

“Sorry.”

She breathes heavily and it is almost a laugh. He knows she is smiling right now. Smiling at him.

“Did I tell you that my dad died?”

“No.”

“Well, he did. And I’d like to tell you about him, so I was wrong when I said about not talking much because I could end up talking for a week.”

There is a long pause before she says, “I’ll listen for a week.”

“What if you break my heart?”

“Or you mine.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that.”

“You don’t know that. Ellis, given how young we are, there is a good chance we won’t last for ever and that one day one of us will hurt the other. But that might not happen. Even if we stay in love for ever, we are going to get hurt from time to time. You do realise that?”

“That’s one of the few things I do know.”

“But are you up for that? There’s no place to hide, you know?”

“I enjoyed being with you more than I enjoyed anything.”

“You never told me that.”

“I know. I’m telling you now.”

He hears her smile to herself. “Yeah … you are,” she mutters, then adds, “You’re an orphan, Ellie.”

“No … not really.”

“Well, you are.”

“I’m too old to be an orphan. I just lost my mum and dad, that’s all.”

“Sounds awfully like being an orphan to me.”

They fall silent, as if their foreheads are touching.

“Ellie …”

“Yeah …”

“I want to be loved to bits.”

“OK.”

“I’m glad you rang.”

“Me too.”

“Don’t go yet. Tell me something, Ellie … any old thing, just talk a while.”

There is silence. Ellis looks at the very first traces of colour bleed into the sky from the east. Then he says, “There’s a ticklish spot on the hind legs of a tarantula and if you can get your little finger in there to caress it, then that hairy old tarantula is putty in your hands and if you’re very quiet you can hear it chuckle. My dad told me that and he never lied when it came to spiders.”

He walks to the lighthouse, thinking all the while how he loves her calling him Ellie. At the foot of the lighthouse, with his back pressed against the concrete, he looks up and watches the sway of the tower. It is always moving, even in this stillness before dawn.

The tide pulls on the shingle. Relentless. Unstoppable. Each shore break could be a passing soul. Denny once said that Ellis was both infinite and minuscule in the same breath. It is the same with deaths, each one unique yet commonplace, shocking and predictable.

Ellis asks of the morning: Do I have what I came for? Have I captured it, retrieved what I needed? And so, if I have, can I go now please? May I leave the table? Because I’ve been here at the water’s edge long enough.

Time is finite and Ellis intends to waste no more of it debating the likelihood or absurdity of a life beyond. The soul may be a fanciful luxury. The afterlife mere solace. Faith, a spiller of blood. Church, a house of fear. But something has passed and even if the true dimensions of eternal life are no more than the volume of Ellis’s imagination, something resides there. Even imaginary, it is real. To doubt it is to glimpse it.

The morning stirs and the wind picks up across the beach. A series of clouds are draped across a world which, becoming lighter, reveals a familiar crimson sky. Until now, his mother has always appeared at dusk, but today she is in the sunrise, first to arrive. The strengthening wind sweeps across the peninsula like a shadow and Ellis finds himself crossing the shingle as if pursuing it. At the water’s edge he sees the waves being stirred by the wind, each one lifted a little higher than the last and becoming the colour of storm. He takes deep breaths and realises, with surprise but without doubt, what it is he is on the brink of doing. It is no longer a challenge in words, it is no longer a fear that crushes him, it is an image, an image of cold blue, an image that makes perfect sense to his mind’s eye, an image he can lose himself in. He is already stripped to his pants and, for a fraction of time, airborne above the water. And he is swimming and immediately he feels the brutal strength of the currents. He remembers to swim towards the steeple on the Marsh and yes! the currents are taking him to the Bessie Swan and oh! it feels wonderful and Christ! the water is so cold, it’s so extraordinarily cold that only panic and exhilaration prevent his blood from freezing as he is yanked towards the silt ridge by the will of the sea and deposited there on his knees, left with the strength only to hold on to the world as if it were a passing raft.

Out by the wreck, the wind is even stronger. Sucked through the bottleneck of the Channel, it rages at Ellis. He gets to his feet and digs his heels in, to anchor himself. Inside the furious gale comes Denny, roaring across the face of the earth. He is as forceful and pure as a child again. Instantly, Ellis sees that his father has better things to do now than remain with his son. The wind howls around him and rocks his body. His father circles him once, twice, then soars into the sky and heads across the water towards Ellis’s mother in crimson. Ellis watches Denny’s final moments as a lost soul and sees him reach his mother. They are reunited on the horizon at the vanishing point and then they disappear out of sight.

Ellis’s body shivers to the point of spasm. His heart is at the brink of transparent joy. He could not have dreamt that it would feel so good to let go. He would not have imagined that the words he uttered a thousand times through his school days, which tormented him and riled his teachers, would be waiting for him here to offer him such peace, such self-knowledge.

“I don’t know …”

“I don’t know …”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer …”

I don’t know the answer, God.

I know you don’t, comes his reply. And that’s fine. Neither did I, my dear boy. Neither did I.

The sky is left dishevelled, like bed sheets in the morning. The wind has calmed and the world seems quiet. Ellis is alone with the Bessie Swan and he sees her for what she is, a vessel abandoned, having done the best she could. Now comes the sound of an outboard motor and the sight of Towzer Temple’s small clinker-built boat cutting through the water. Instead of sitting, as he normally would, Towzer is standing, his body contorted so as to reach down to the tiller whilst straining upwards to look across the water at the sodden figure standing out by the wreck. Towzer grabs the black woolly hat off his head and throws it down at his feet.

“You mad bugger!” he yells, and begins to laugh and cough and splutter. “You mad fucking bugger!”

And the sight of this hysterical man, held together by whisky and weather-bitten skin, makes Ellis laugh as he shivers. He waves his arms exuberantly and shouts back, “I did it! I did it! Now I’ve done it too!”

Towzer leaps up and down, unable to contain himself, and the boat rolls from side to side.

“Too! Too! You’re the fucking first, you mad bugger!”

And he falls into his boat and screams with laughter. The boat shoots off at an angle until Towzer regains control of himself and the tiller. He comes alongside the silt ridge. Ellis clambers aboard. Towzer removes his coat and throws it to Ellis. The coat smells of cigarettes, of drinking and of fish. Ellis puts it on. They head back to the shore, to the lighthouse shore. To the beautiful, bleak, spent shore. Ellis looks across the surface of the water to the lights of the café next to the lifeboat station, as they flicker on. The café is the sort of place where being lonely felt warm and familiar and solid to him in yesterday’s world, when lonely was something he thought he was meant to be. But, this morning, he has no desire to go to the café or do anything else familiar. And there’s no need to keep watch here any longer. His father will not be returning. It will take him only a few minutes to pack his belongings and lock up the house and put the keys in an envelope for the agent, but even that will seem too slow because, for the first time in a long time, he cannot wait to get going.