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By Root 1147 0

funny angles, streaked hair and glistening skin, a floating tableau of men against the sky. Sex made them half conscious, half forgetful of the picture they made; they were sportsmen resting in stunned camaraderie, but some of them wriggled and held hands and breathed lustfully in each other's faces. They kicked their feet in the water, indolent but purposeful. One of them who was standing behind leant forward, out of the sky and the trees, and Nick reached him a hand and shot up and hopped out streaming as two queens plumped apart to make room for him. He stood breathing and grinning in a loose but curious embrace with the men in the middle. He had a sense of something fleeting and harmonic, longed for and repeated—it was the circling trees, perhaps, and the silver water, the embrace of a solitary childhood, and the need to be pulled up into a waiting circle of men.

"Don't I see you at Bang last week?" the man beside him said, who had put a steadying hand on Nick's shoulder and left it there.

"I think not," said Nick, who in fact had never been there. But he carried some memory-print of this man, some unplaced excitement. It took him a moment to realize that he used to see him at the Y, last year perhaps, in the showers there; and a moment more to confirm that as Nick had grown slowly and unseriously heavier, the Spaniard, if that's what he was, black-haired and lean, with large rosy nipples, had grown perceptibly thinner, into an eerily beautiful, etched-out version of himself. He leant lighdy on Nick now, and seemed almost to shrug off this undeniable fact, or perhaps to challenge him to see it, but not himself to allude to it in any way, unless by a lingering, fearful glance. Nick twisted casually away from him, and what came back gleaming out of the blur of memory was his round bottom and the tiny black curls just showing when he bent over: an image which also reminded him of Wani. He scanned the water blandly, and thought that perhaps he had gone in—just then the fun began again, the Spaniard abruptly dive-bombed, everyone shouted, and the raft itself groaned and creaked. Nick hopped around, laughing and shouting something himself into the unavoidable drench after drench as people jumped in. And there, in the wallow, was Wani's face, almost tearful with concentration as he tried to avoid the reckless arms and legs of the other men and find a moment to clamber out.

"Hello, darling!" said Nick, and went down on one knee to help him heave himself up. Wani didn't answer and didn't smile.

A few minutes later it was almost calm again. They were sitting there beside a man of fifty with thick grey chest hair and a restlessly sociable manner. His much younger friend, a Malaysian perhaps, was swimming some way from the raft, cruising other men outrageously, and doing clever duck-dives which made his trunks come off. "Oh, he gives me some trouble, that one," the man said. "Look at him." Wani smiled politely and turned to Nick; he wasn't used to meeting people like this, in the near-naked free-for-all of a public place. "Don't get me wrong, though—it's all good fun." The man waved cheerfully as if the boy was paying him even the faintest attention, and said, "He's devoted to me, you know. I don't know why, but he is."

"What's his name, then?" said a rough-voiced man, who was squatting behind them.

"He's called Andy."

"Andy, yeah?" said the man. "Here, Andy," he shouted, getting to his feet, "show us your arse!"

"He will!" said his old protector. "He will!"

The raft shook and on the other side of them a sleekly muscly man twisted up out of the water and landed with a promising thump on the boards. Nick saw Wani glance across at him from under his long lashes, as if assessing a new kind of problem or possibility; Nick himself had seen him here last year. He was balding and dark eyed, round faced, with a nice long nose and the lazy but focused expression of a man who thinks of nothing but sex. Nick remembered his idling gaze, the huge dark pupils that seemed to fill his eyes, and the curving weight of him in his black trunks.