The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher

mother gave him a startled glance. And then, without any intervening time, Basil was apparently being driven away. He felt drowsy but full of ideas. It had been very nice, he had told his mummy. The others had been fun. It had been a nice evening. And she had had a nice evening too. He wasn’t going to tell her everything! About the vodka, no fear. She didn’t need to know about that. And the other stuff, that came later, the poppers, he wasn’t going to mention that. There would be a fearful row if he mentioned that, or if she found out about it somehow, she or Daddy. It had been strange and he wasn’t sure at first he liked it. But he had liked it, it had been fun to feel all wobbly and wavey for five minutes. The other stuff, the stuff that Anita had given them from her daddy’s secret drawer, the white stuff called cocaine, he didn’t think that was so good. She had said that he might feel frightened and he hadn’t felt frightened exactly, but he’d wanted to talk a lot and he was worried afterwards, and it made his nose hurt, and it felt really strange, the idea of doing that. He wouldn’t be doing that again, no fear. But it was interesting to have tried all those things and to have found out about that thing called anal sex, which Basil had never heard of before and then to have seen it even later on, that had been really quite a coincidence and Basil felt quite grown-up to know about all these things. Basil remembered that those twins had said that they had bought the poppers from a boy called Kevin or a brother called Chris and their name was Garry. He was fairly sure that there was another brother at his school, a boy called Adam Garry, and on Monday he would surprise him by telling him that he would like him to get some of those poppers for Basil, too. There was the Christmas money which he would spend on it. And then there were plenty of people at school who would be interested to try it. You could charge 50p for every time someone sniffed it. He couldn’t wait to tell people how nice and strange it was, and they carried on journeying the short distance into the night.