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By Root 1196 0

Shuddering lorries squeezed them and dared them and flushed their reeking fumes through the coverless car, as four lanes funnelled into one outside the Hilton Hotel. Wani had whisked Nick up one night to the top-floor bar of the Hilton, perhaps not fully aware of its glassy vulgarity—it was a place his father liked to take guests to, and there was something touchingly studied in the paying for the cocktails and the lordly gaze out over the parks and the palace and the fur and diamonds of the London night. And now here they were, trapped, motionless, half asphyxiated on the roadway outside. Since Nick was driving he felt guilty and clumsy, as if it were his fault, as well as angry and slightly nauseous. Wani's face tightened and his lips were pursed with blame. Even Ricky was letting out puffing sighs. Wani reached over and put a hand on Packy's thigh and Nick kept an eye on them in the mirror. He tried to make normal conversation, but Ricky had no views on any current topic, and was marvellously incurious about his new friends. He'd given up his job at a warehouse in favour of doing nothing, and now obviously he couldn't find a job even if he wanted to, with three and a quarter million out of work: he smiled at that. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, and he never read books. "Perhaps we'll put you in a film," said Wani archly, and Ricky said, "All right." He seemed to have forgotten he had a girlfriend, until Nick asked another question about her. At last they rushed out into Hyde Park Corner, and jostled their way round into Knightsbridge. Wani said, "What's your girlfriend's name?"

"Felicity," said Ricky—which was written on the awning of Felicity Prior's flower shop just beside them. "Yeah . . ."

Wani turned and said, in a painfully roguish tone, "Felicity's a very lucky girl."

"Yeah, she is, isn't she," said Ricky.

When they reached Wani's place there was no one in the office, the boys had left, and they went straight upstairs to the flat, Ricky following Wani, and Nick coming close behind, unpleasantly jealous of the other two. It was like the tension of a first date, but with an extra player who was also a competitor and critic. He was squeamish at the thought of Wani's little predilections being exposed, and angry because he was the one who had been trusted with the secret of them. He didn't know if he could go through with that drama in the presence of Ricky, whom obviously, elsewhere, he would have loved to fuck. Or perhaps it wouldn't be like that, they would just fool about a bit. He went across the room and put the car keys down on the side table, and when he looked back Ricky and Wani were snogging, nothing had been said, there were sighs of consent, a moment's glitter of saliva before a shockingly tender second kiss. Nick gave a breathy laugh, and looked away, in the grip of a misery unfelt since childhood, and too fierce and shaming to be allowed to last.

He took down the leather-bound Poems and Plays of Addison and got out the hidden gram of coke—all that was left of last week's quarter-ounce. He knelt down by the glass coffee table to deal with it, polishing a clean spot. The new issue of Harper's was open at "Jennifer's Diary," and he peered at the picture of Mr Antoine Ouradi and Miss Martine Ducros at the Duchess of Flintshire's May ball. The pale inverted reflection of the two men kissing floated on the glass beside the photographed couple. If this was one of Wani's films—not the ones he wanted to make but the ones he liked to watch—Nick would have to join them in a moment. Sometimes there was an unaccountably boring scene where one man knelt and sucked the dicks of the other two in turn, or even tried to get them both in his mouth, and Nick could see Wani needing to do that. He chopped and drew out the fine white fuses of pleasure and watched Pdcky tug at the buckle of his lover's belt.

8

WANI'S NEW CENTRE of operations was an 1830s house in Abingdon Road which he had had converted by Parkes Perrett Bozoglu. On the ground floor was the glinting open-plan Ogee office, and on the two upper