Petah awoke as he scrambled out of the pipe.

‘What’s it…hey…hey, what’s your name. Willie. Where you going?’

Outside David was trying to climb up the riverbank, but it was very steep and all that his efforts brought him was a cloud of dust and bleeding knees. Petah grabbed hold of him.

‘What’s the matter? Listen man. No, stop it now.’

The others had stuck their heads out of their pipes and were calling. When they got no answers to their questions, they rushed to Petah’s assistance. Eventually they had David down on the ground.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘He just run.’

‘Hey—’

‘Willie.’

‘Hey Willie. What you doing?’

David looked at them, passing from face to face. He shook his head, it was gone.

‘I think,’ Petah said, ‘I think it was home.’

They released their hold on him, and crawled back to their pipes.

‘It’s no good,’ Petah told him. ‘It’s no good at night.’ It was all right, he explained, to look during the day. Like with Sam. He had found his mother, but it was during the day. They all looked, in a way, during the day. But at night there was danger. Like Joji, who like him had gone home at night, but other people were living in the room, not his, and when they heard the scratching at the door they thought it was a burglar and took their sticks and beat him to death…Joji.

‘So try tomorrow…listen.’ Petah turned to David. ‘Willie no good. You not Willie. What is your name? Talk! Trust me, man. I help you.’

David’s eyes grew round and vacant, stared at the darkness. A tiny sound, a thin squeaking voice, struggled out: ‘David…’ it said, ‘David! But no more! He dead! He dead too, like Willie, like Joji.’

‘I understand,’ Petah said. ‘You will choose your name. You will choose when you are ready.’

After Petah had spoken some more, and then gone to sleep, David watched the sky again through the opening. The spider came back and starting the same way, dropping down on a shiny thread, spun his web. David watched all the time. It was finished near dawn at the time of the first light in the sky and, seen through it, the morning star twinkled like a small insect caught in its trap.

He refused to go with them. They stood around and shook their heads. They coaxed him, they warned him, they even tried to threaten him, but without success. It wasn’t that he argued back, or cried, or did anything at all. He just sat at the mouth of the pipe where he had slept. Nothing had much meaning for him, least of all they, seen now for the first time in the light. In their wide, unsmiling eyes and thin faces and meagre bodies was a knowledge of things beyond his experience. But he was to learn it that day, and most days after that, and learn it so well that he would never forget it, because they went and left him alone.