On our way to the door I had a brainwave.

I halted suddenly as we stepped on to the pavement. I was frightfully sorry - it had almost slipped my mind - but I'd promised Cecilia Nottingham that I would ride with her in Hyde Park that afternoon. Did she mind?

I went along to the Tate, I need hardly say, on the Saturday before, decked out like a walking stationery department, also with a pocket edition of the poet's work and the well-thumbed Thames and Hudson.

'I feel vaguely ridiculous saying this, it may be quite out of line - I can't tell any more where I stand with people - but listen. I ... well, I just think about you all the time, that's all, and I thought I'd better find out how you feel so that we can see what's best to do.' I waited. 'And because I'd really like to know. I'm getting tired —'

The fruit-machine burped, gave a deep, guttural judder, and, while the milkmen whooped, started to cough out a string of clamorous tokens.

'It's difficult—' Rachel began.

'What ? I can't hear.'

She bit her lip, again, and shook her head.

The machine hawked. The milkmen shrieked.

I patted the hand on her lap. 'Well. Never mind,' I said, relaxing, sinking, drained and battered into my seat. I felt completely hollow, as if I were a child. She could have sneaked away then without me lifting a finger, without me noticing.

'Let's get out of here.'

Rachel said that.

Let it just try anything when I had a pee and Christ would I show it who was boss. I washed, got out, slipped a towel over my shoulder - had a pee. I couldn't tell whether it hurt or not. So I worked it over anyway, and good.

Normal procedure: I flicked it; slapped it; I garrotted it with both hands; a final searing chinese-burn - a last attempt to tempt out a drop of that most dreaded commodity, discharge. None was forthcoming. It looked at me as if bullied, picked-on. Cautiously at first, I applied a nailbrush to the helmet. I combed, with the rigour of an orphan matron, my pubic hairs. I swabbed my balls with after-shave. Perhaps a pipe-cleaner, steeped in Dettol?

I experienced thrilling self-pity. 'What will that mind of yours get up to next?' I said, recognizing the self-congratulation behind this thought and the self-congratulation behind that recognition and the self-congratulation behind recognizing that recognition.

Steady on. What's so great about going mad?

But even that was pretty arresting. Even that, come on now, was a pretty arresting thing for a nineteen-year-old boy to have thought.

I was still soggy with retrospective alarm about the miraculous escape I had had eighty minutes earlier. When I followed Rachel into the room the first thing I saw was a huge notice on the mantelpiece. The notice had this to say:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T LET HIM TOUCH YOU HE HAS GOT AN UNUSUALLY REVOLTING DISEASE

The notice was written on a small bottle of pills (pressed into my shaking hand twenty-four hours before). The notice was in code form; it said :

Flagyll. One to be taken four times daily.

There was a warm, musty silence. The diagonal curls of smoke from her cigarette were spangled by a thousand grains of dust highlit by the shaft of autumn sun. The shaft of autumn sun struck through the recently dismembered tree in the front garden, squeezed between the railings, quartered itself against the window-frame, wormed its way into the room.

To pay back Norman (prick-fees and gambling debts), I even got a job, not on the railroad, but licking plates in a Shepherd's Bush restaurant, just for a week, in the evenings, quid a night. The restaurant was such an immobile concern that all I really did was sit smoking fags in the well-equipped kitchen and listen to the grumbles of Joe, the cook. Joe, a young and ambitious cook, was fed up to the teeth with cooking steak and chips for the odd Pakki, would far rather have been cooking exotic dishes in a flash restaurant. Accordingly, when people ordered steak and chips, and soup, Joe tended to hawk in it, to show his contempt for such an unimaginative choice, and also because he had heard that flash cooks always hawked in the soup if given the chance. I washed up after him.

On my last night, we had only one order: steak and chips, and soup. After mature consideration, Joe offered to let me hawk in it, as a treat. I did so, with enthusiasm.

Joe looked at it and looked at me. 'We can't give them that,' he said.

On the way back I entertained Rachel and kept things going with an account of my own sexual history. Now I had had ten girls. I considered doubling, even squaring, this figure. I ended up halving it. AH five, I stressed, had been important and serious relationships. I was sorry, but I had no time for the other kind. Excuse me, but I wasn't interested in purely sexual encounters, thank you, although it was true - one hated to say it - that most of the boys I knew were interested ... in precious little else - no, perhaps that wasn't fair. Of course I had tried it, more out of curiosity than anything, I supposed. It was odd, but - I don't know - it seemed that a girl's body was ... empty unless you liked its owner. Sure, the incredibly beautiful girls in these experimental liaisons had got in a bit of a state - what with being so incredibly sexed up at the time. Understandable. (One or two, I didn't mind telling her, had got pretty violent, pretty ugly, about the whole thing.) But I had had just to explain myself, as tactfully as possible. No - hell - they could keep their money; a boy can't fake it.

What was good sex? Well, good sex had nothing to do with expertise, how many French tricks one knew (how convincingly you munched on each other's stools, etc.). No: if there was affection and enthusiasm, that was enough.

By now my head is lodged dourly between her shoulder and the pillow - no flair, no finessing, just cock to the grindstone. Two times two is four. Three times two, moreover, is six. Stop kissing her mouth, work on ears. Let me come. Stop all movement and kiss her meditatively, in slow motion, so that she differentiates it and realizes what is happening: here I am kissing you. Ninety per cent withdrawal, prod her clitoris with my male reproductive organ, feel her contract, smile potently in the half-light. Withdraw to irreducible helmet depth feel her muscles clench and arms tighten pleadingly on my back withdraw till almost out - then - wait - BOOF. She goes stiff then floppy. Pound like an engine, go dog go. Hand on stomach between shuffling webs of pubic hair, take pressure off, pull legs up too sexy slacken calm down. Fast for three strokes then slow for three then fast. Slow and good, then quick and nasty, then slow and good. Suddenly she shouts, lifts and widens her legs, calls from the end of the world, hands knead my buttocks don't do that. Two thirteens twenty-six, three thirteens forty-nine, thirteen twenty-sixes forty-two. (As regards the physical aspect, by the way, this is all utterly intolerable.) Industrial accidents, pimples, bee-keeping, pus crapping Tampax exams ... Pick a poet - Because I do not hope to turn the mermaids round from the back singing because I do not hope to keep your hands off me I do not think bloody sheets that they will sing because there can't be anything left I do not hope to turn the pain the pain. Body strung out on a giant whip, the buckled praying mantis soon to be eaten. I grow old I grow old shall I feel her fingernails hear her neigh give me strength O my people affirm before the world no more and deny between the socks not long for the garden where end loves all ten more five more the bathroom in the garden the garden in the desert of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed. (I come now, a token sperm in the rubber nozzle; but that's hardly the point.) Tossed along with the strength of ten men, every second lucid agony, grating thrusts, the crunch of genitals. Then I surfed helplessly on the wave of her climax, pounded and tugged at as it broke by a thousand alien currents. And she came under my dead body.

Rachel's eyes were streaming. She smiled a shamed, apologetic smile. I tried to say something but had breath enough only to mouth it. She saw, though, in the half-light. 'Oh. I love you, too,' she said.

I saw Rachel only twice in the six days before she was due to come and stay. Just as well, really: there were still some texts I had to read for the exams, and a good deal of clerking was necessary to keep The Rachel Papers up to date, what with all these new emotions to be catalogued and filed away. First Love, you understand.