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believed that the shed was where all the bad and deformed spiders lived. It was the home of the lawless. The spiders there were freakishly large and jet black in colour; they sat around playing Russian roulette. They ate each other without a care and were weighed down by weird growths. The shed was the wild west of the spider world. Ellis couldn’t even walk past it. He had to run at full speed and as he did so he’d shout bitterly, “You are leper spiders, so rubbish they won’t even let you live in the cottage. Everyone hates you! I’m not scared of you!”
     
     
    At night, he heard sounds of movement which had no explanation. Asking about the creaks and groans in the cottage caused his dad to tense up or change the subject, the same way as asking about his mum, and in the absence of an explanation Ellis suspected that the noises were spiders turning in their sleep. The creaks grew noisier in the second winter as a freezing cold January was met by an unusually mild February. April showers arrived a month early and set in for three weeks, by the end of which the hallway ceiling was turning brown again with water marks. Denny O’Rourke cursed the stains and Ellis knew not to bother him.
    Ellis went to his sister’s room but the door was locked.
    “Let me in.”
    “No thanks,” Chrissie said, from the other side of the door.
    “Please.”
    “Give me one good reason.”
    “Dad’s got us a puppy!”
    Ellis listened to a crashing sound as Chrissie fell off her chair, thundered across the room, grappled with the lock and flung the door open.
    “Where?” she said breathlessly.
    Ellis stepped into her room and threw himself down on the bed.
    “Let’s do something,” he said, lazily.
    She glared at him. “Have we got a puppy?”
    “No. I’m bored. Do you wanna do something together?”
    Chrissie skulked back to her desk.
    “Yeah. I’d like to play with our puppy, you horrible little pile of dogshit. Go and bother Dad.”
    “He’s fixing the roof. It’s falling down, apparently.”
    “Fascinating,” she said, and returned to her work.
    “Why are you always in your room doing homework nowadays?” he asked.
    “They’re called O levels and they’re the devil’s work,” she replied. “But they’ll be over in June and then I’ll never work again.”
    “Until your A levels.”
    “Not for me, buster.”
    “Dad won’t like that.”
    “He’ll get over it. You can be his golden boy.”
    “You know I’m rubbish at school. I’m having an allotment.”
    “That’s not a job, Ellis. That’s a hobby, like chess or riding or peeking at my friends through the curtain when they’re taking a pee.”
    “I don’t!”
    “Never said you did, derr-brain. Is lunch ready? Is that why you’re up here?”
    “No. I wanted to ask Dad something but he’s busy, so I came to ask you instead.”
    “Do I want you to go to boarding school in China? Yes please.” She beamed him a psychotic smile.
    “Have spiders got eyes? Can they see us?”
    Chrissie slumped and pulled a face. “That’s worth failing an O level for? What sort of a question is that, Ellie-belly?”
    And as he started to protest at being called that, she jumped off her chair and tickled him until he begged for mercy and agreed to be her slave for the rest of the day.
     
     
    The spare room at the top of the stairs was bare and sun-filled . It sucked in warm rays of light even in winter, as if awaiting the arrival of someone wise. The vast cherry tree laid its fingertips on the window sill. Denny decided this room should be Mafi’s bedroom and her bedsit downstairs a proper living room.
    “We don’t need a spare bedroom because we don’t have any visitors,” Chrissie muttered, as she and Ellis helped Denny carry Mafi’s bed into the room. Chrissie slipped and the bed fell against the wall, tearing a hole in the wallpaper. Behind the tear was a black-painted beam. It was set back into the wall and the wallpaper had been pasted over it,