The creation of Ben was, in fact, based upon a boy I met once.

Kristy had held a party while her parents were away, on a luscious summer evening, and everyone continued playing badminton even though the sun had disappeared and Sam was playing his more experimental-music records.

A carload of kids from Beylon arrived, and seeing as they didn't have their stories straight about how they knew Kristy, it was a mystery as to why they'd come. Or if they'd really come from Beylon.

At the back of Kristy's wardrobe in her bedroom upstairs, there was a small hatch-door in the ceiling that one could open by stacking up shoeboxes. In the ceiling space there were crosses marked in white paint on the backs of certain roof-tiles, and by removing these, one could climb onto the roof of Kristy's enormous house.

I hadn't heard about the carload of mystery guests, and I'd been unhappy lately, so I made my way to the roof-top for some quiet and some thinking space. Up there, I shone a torch into the sky and recoiled from spiderwebs hovering inches from my mouth.

I'd covered my tracks. I'd closed the wardrobe door, toppled the shoebox column, closed the hatch-door, and replaced the roof-tiles. Then someone else moved them and climbed up beside me, and it wasn't Kristy or Sam. I shone the torch into his eyes. I'd been crying, so it wasn't appropriate that he saw mine.

"One moment," he said, and slipped the torch from my hand. I covered my face.

"See," he said.

The light wasn't in my eyes, and I opened them to see the torch-stream focused on a very large multi-coloured leaf, hanging from a spiderweb in mid-air between the edge of the roof and a nearby tree.

The boy put the torch in his mouth and crawled to the edge, reaching and reaching and straining to rescue the leaf from sticky strands.

Then he fell, and I caught the material of his trousers in both hands.

He pulled himself back up to sit beside me.

"Couldn't reach it," he said.

Some kids yelled from the street that they were going home.

He handed back the torch, kissed my cheek, and rushed back into the roof-space, knocking several tiles halfway down the roof.

There had been scarcely any light, but he had behaved like someone who had known me, somehow.

I borrowed Sam's camera, photographed the leaf in the spiderweb, and hoped that he would gatecrash another party soon.