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By Root 1175 0

Nick was still in the alien high reach of the road, with the canal and the council estates, and longing for the other end, his own end, the safety and aloofness of white stucco and private gardens. He wondered what Leo thought as he made the transition, which occurred at the dense middle part by the market and the station, under clangorous bridges, where people loitered and shouted . . . After that there was a stretch of uneasy gentility, before the Grove climbed, taking palpable advantage of the hill as a social metaphor, and touching into life the hint of an orchard or thicket in the very name of the street. He didn't fool himself that Leo was sensitive to these things—he was a figure of wrenching poetry to Nick, but was not himself poetic, and clearly found something daft and even creepy in Nick's aesthetic promptings and hesitations. Nick sometimes made the mistake of thinking that Leo didn't feel things strongly, and then the shock, when his love and need for him leapt out, angry at being doubted, took his breath away, and almost frightened him. He thought back over the meal, the visit, and saw that of course it had meant a lot to Leo as well, but that everything was squashed and denied by secrecy: if he had been a woman the occasion would have had a ritual meaning, and Leo's mother could have let herself dream of the altar steps at last. To Nick the bulging subject of the visit had been his love for Leo, which obsessed him just as much as Mrs Charles's love of Jesus did her; but she had given herself licence to express her fixation, had embraced a duty to do so, whilst his burned through only in blushes and secret stares. She had eclipsed him completely.

When he got to the cinema he found Leo near the head of the queue. "You made it," he said, looking round at the people behind and nodding—"Yeah, it's the first night," as if it was a bore, he was a martyr to first nights. And when they reached the window it turned out that the cinema was nearly full, and they wouldn't be able to sit together. Nick shrugged and said, "Ah well . . . " backing into the couple behind them, who were trying to overhear. "We can come at the weekend."

But Leo said, "Yeah, we'll have them—god, we're here now," and gave him a look of friendly concern.

Nick said quietly, "I just thought, if we can't sit together . . ." since the only reason for sitting through a super-violent three-hour gangster movie was to have Leo's weight and warmth against him and his hand in his open fly. They had touched each other like that, with cautious delirious slowness, in Rumblefish, under the dreamy aegis of Matt Dillon, and in Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, which had been Nick's hopeless choice of picture and a peculiar backdrop to an orgasm. Otherwise, they had only made love in parks, or public lavatories, or once in the back of Pete's shop, which Leo had kept a key to, and which felt even more furtive than these cinema handjobs. The thing about the cinema was that they seemed to share in the long common history of happy snoggers and gropers, and Nick liked that.

But now he was alone again, he felt it very keenly, accepting the "better" ticket, in the middle of the back row. The ads were already showing as he clambered along and in their patchy glare he loomed and ducked and apologized, and was a clumsy intruder in a world of snuggling coupledom. He squeezed in and even the space of his seat seemed half absorbed by the lovers' coats and bags and angled limbs. The 170 minutes stretched out ahead like a long-ago detention, some monstrous test. They stretched out, in fact, like a film he had no wish to see, and for a moment he was gripped by a tearful bolshiness that he himself thought astonishing in a grown man. He saw that he could get up and go home and come back at the end. But then he was frightened of what Leo would say. There was so much at stake. There was a Bacardi advertisement, and the brilliance of tropical sea and white sand lit up the auditorium. He stared at the left side, near the front, to try to spot Leo, but he couldn't find him. Then he