In a side street a team of young black men with high yellow wings and tails like birds of paradise were preparing for the parade. "It's marvellous what they do," said Rachel.

"Not very nice music," said Elena, with a cheerful shiver. Nick didn't reply-and found himself in fact at one of those unforeseen moments of inner transition, when an old prejudice dissolves into a new desire. The music shocked him with its clear repetitive statement of what he wanted. Then one vast sound system warred happily with the next, so that there were different things he wanted, beautiful jarring futures for him-all this in forty or fifty seconds as the car slipped out and away into the ordinary activity of the weekend streets.

Still, if he couldn't be with Leo it was best to be somewhere quite different. Gerald drove them out along the A40, at a somehow preferentially high speed, as if led by an invisible police escort. Soon, however, they came into massive roadworks, and a long unimpressionable tailback, as you did everywhere these days. Here they were taking out the last old roundabouts and traffic lights and forcing an unimpeded freeway across the scruffy flat semi-country. Nick gazed out politely at the desert of digging and concrete, and beyond it a field where local boys were roaring round and round on dirt-bikes in breakneck contempt for the idea of actually going anywhere. They didn't care about the carnival, they'd never heard of Hawkeswood, and they'd chosen to spend the day in this field rather than anything else. Beside them perhaps a mile of solid traffic stood stationary on the motorway of the future.