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the germs?’
    Kidney wouldn’t answer.
    Roland kicked at the door with his foot and it swung inwards and back again.
    ‘Go away,’ Kidney said.
    Obediently Roland ran away up the path to Hut 4 to find his father. He found him on his knees beside the wicker basket. With
a nail file Joseph was turning a screw in a white plug.
    ‘What’s that for?’ Roland squatted down beside him and watched the shiny screw come loose.
    ‘My electric razor. I’m trying to mend it.’
    ‘But you’ve got a beard.’
    ‘I know.’ He probed with the nail file at the veins of red wire, sucking a strand of beard between his full lips.
    ‘William hasn’t got a beard,’ said Roland. William was his mother’s friend, who missed his last bus home sometimes and was
in the bathroom in the morning, standing before the gold mirror, scraping soap off his chin.
    ‘Oh well,’ said Joseph. ‘I like to keep my neck tidy.’
    ‘It’s a super toilet,’ said Roland. He lay on the floor and spread his arms wide as if he were swimming.
    ‘Lavatory, not toilet,’ Joseph told him. ‘Toilet’s too damn refined.’
    ‘They say toilet at school.’ To add weight he added, ‘Mummy says toilet.’ He moved his legs up and down in the invisible sea.
‘It’s all black and leaves all round the door – and that bastard Kidney sitting on the can of germs.’
    ‘Don’t you like Kidney?’ Joseph sat back on his heels and spat shreds of wire out of his mouth.
    ‘Yes,’ said Roland. He stopped swimming and looked round the hut. ‘Don’t expect there’s anywhere to put your plug here.’ He
looked carefully at all the places where plugs might go if this were home.
    For a moment his father was silent. Then he shrugged his shoulders and opened the lid of the basket and dropped the plug and
nail file inside. ‘How right you are,’ he said, getting up from his knees and wiping dust from his trousers.
    Kidney entered the hut and saw Joseph at the mirror, legs braced wide apart, combing his hair back behind his ears.
    ‘Wash your hands,’ Joseph said, putting the comb away. ‘We’re going over to George’s hut for tea.’ He avoided looking directly
at Kidney. Roland had opened the wicker basket and was holding the useless plug in his hands. ‘Put that down,’ his father
told him.
    Blushing, Roland dropped the plug into the basket and fiddled with the strap of his brown sandal. He didn’t like being shouted
at in front of Kidney.
    At the far end of the hut, at the sink, Kidney dried his hands
carefully on the red towel which Joseph had placed on a hook above the draining board. The towel was one from the flat that
Joseph lived in, that he lived in too. He used it in the mornings before going to college with Joseph. He used to go to college
every day, but recently Joseph hadn’t come into his room in the mornings and he had lain there in his bed listening to the
sound of Joseph doing his exercises, the tea being made, the soft buzzing noise of the electric shaver as Joseph tidied his
neck and throat, the footsteps running downstairs, the slam of the door and the final sound of the car being started. Only
then did he leave his bed and go to the window, staring along the street in the direction in which Joseph had gone, imagining
he saw the vapour of the exhaust still rising in the empty road. Then he would wander from room to room, not knowing what
to do, picking up the book of poems given him by Joseph, not reading them – he had never read them – just holding the thin
book in his hands. Sometimes Dotty came out of the bedroom in a long nightgown and a face white as chalk, not looking at him
at all, not seeing him, as if he didn’t exist, looking only for the box of matches. He turned to face Joseph, nervously crumpling
the towel in his rubbed-dry hands.
    ‘Do you want me to come?’
    ‘Of course, you silly bastard.’
    ‘I thought I might stay here and read a book. I don’t feel very hungry.’ Kidney looked down at the floor, lost