Early on, before art school got to him, Phil painted Michael's portrait. This was before Philip stared to glue dirty carpet onto metal poles, so it was a perfectly conventional painting. Philip said that it was designed to fill a niche in the sitting room.

It portrayed Michael as ballast. The jacket, slightly crumpled, looked like a carved stone replica of clothing. The weight of his body was given a granite substance, and he stood feet well apart looking as immovable as the Earth. The painting was called 'Taurus'. At least in the beginning, Michael was an anchoring point.

Even then the sex didn't work. But it didn't work in a strange backward way that they both noted and were proud of. It seemed to confirm they were some kind of perfect match. They would allude to it lightly, discreetly to their very best friends.

Phil hated any male response from his partners at all. For all his fluttering, or perhaps because of it, he would not suck Michael's cock and found the idea of anal penetration repulsive. Which was just as well, considering Michael could not penetrate whipped cream.

It was no mystery to Michael why Philip was screwed up. A year after they met, Philip finally summoned the nerve to take Michael home to meet his parents. Michael would not have believed Roland and Virginia if he had not met them. They were fake posh. They pretended to be from Surrey, where they now lived. Who in their right mind pretended to be posh these days?

Philip's father was some kind of retired manager from ICI. He had a worn moustache and some kind of dressing on his hair which rendered it flat and glossy. Roland wore navy blazers without the right to, and shirts whose thick blue stripes were still somehow garish. Virginia 's hair was died orange and piled high like Margaret Thatcher's, and she had an air of studied, delicate refinement. She talked like an actress in a 1950s film.