According to Amos Radcliff's disability claim, he lost a leg in an accident with a beer barrel, but when social worker Daniel arrives to investigate he meets with a shock. To begin with Amos is living in Daniel's childhood home, a council flat still full of his dead mother's possessions, and Amos's leg is still very much attached.

From this introduction a strange relationship develops between the two men. Daniel finds himself drawn back to the flat again and again to hear Amos's hypnotic seafaring stories and to relive his own memories of his troubled relationships with his mother, his best friend and his beloved wife Sally. Then comes Amos's final, shattering story...