Junction X (12 page)

I sat and watched him walk down the path to his front door, my knuckles whitening as I gripped the steering wheel. I knew then what I was, how I felt and what was wrong-not-wrong with me. For about thirty whole seconds, I didn’t bloody care. My blood was on fire and my skin tingled. I was warm and complete. I felt like a boy who’d just asked the girl of his dreams out on the best date he could afford.

Thirty perfect seconds. Then the real world crept back and the colours bleached a little. Elation is a bubble that lasts for tiny tiny moments but leaves something of its memory in scents and sounds so that later, when you need that boost, you can close your eyes and remember happiness.

Like an automaton, I put the car away and went straight upstairs to see the children before lights out. They were pleased as Punch to have an outing with Daddy to look forward to. That feeling of smug rebellion stayed with me for a while.

The guilt and the worry took longer to resurface. I argued with myself over coffee and liqueurs. What was I doing that was so wrong? All I was doing was taking Alec somewhere he’d enjoy, and I was going there anyway. There was nothing odd that he should accompany us. No one,
no one
could point a finger and say there was anything strange about that.

But I remember sliding down into my chair, closing my eyes as I wrapped my hands around the brandy glass. I remember smiling as the music poured from the radio. I remember knowing that it was wrong. And I remember holding that glass close to me on that first night as if this secret—
my
secret—were captive in the glass and would be easy to keep. Yes—it was wrong and I just didn’t care.

Trashy novels would state that my world changed in an instant, but it wasn’t like that. I didn’t see the world change. You don’t, if you are standing too close. I don’t know
when
it started to change, but I remember knowing when it had. It was like standing in a field after the densest fog has finally lifted and finding out, after thinking that you were so good at navigation, that you are not at all where you thought you were. You find you are not safely in the wheat field where you started out, but high on a cliff with cormorants below you. It was dizzying, disorientating. It wasn’t until after I realised that I felt a strong physical and mental attraction for Alec that all that confusion I’d been feeling meant something. Stupid? Naïve? Yes. Yes. All those and more.

What then, I remember thinking, am I going to do about it?

Nothing, of course. The implications of “doing anything about it” were unthinkable. A thirty-three-year-old man turns to a seventeen-year-old boy and says…what? You’re beautiful? I haven’t been able to get the image of your face, your lips, your legs—God help me—out of my mind for days? One shout to his father and Edward Johnson’s perfect life would end there. What Phil and I, consenting adults, did in secret, was no one’s business. Even though that wasn’t true either. But Alec was untouchable.

Untouchable.

The word echoed around my mind as if I’d shouted it. Untouchable. No one could know. Most certainly Alec himself must never know.

Was I then mad then, to make excuses to see him? I was already concocting schemes to do this. Other fairs. Model villages.

Would it not be better to break the connection and treat him as the teenage son of a neighbour? It should be his father I was cultivating. I should be inviting Albert to evenings at the club, introducing him up and down The Avenue. I should be planning dinner parties with just the four of us, perhaps thinking about a joint Christmas. I shouldn’t be thinking of ways to take Alec out of The Avenue in my car, just so I could be alone with him.

But God help me, I was. And it made me feel alive.

Later that week, I finally got back in touch with Phil. One of the reasons we hadn’t seen each other since Claire leaving him was that he’d been throwing himself into his job—which is what I suspected he’d do and what I’d probably have done in his circumstances. I asked him if he wanted me to come over to his house, but he told me that he had arranged client meetings in pubs and clubs the length and breadth of the commuter line. I couldn’t help but smile. Claire’s departure might have knocked the bottom out of Phil’s world, but if he was really working the way he said he was, the firm would benefit from his family tragedy.

On Friday, he surprised me by being on the train, and as soon as the doors slammed and the whistle sounded, he slid next to me and kissed me. I was too startled to do much more than let him. Phil instigating a kiss was unheard of. He pushed me back onto the cushions. My hat tumbled to the floor and he had my cock out of my trousers before I could think straight. It didn’t take him long to get me off. It never did.

To show my appreciation, I put my paper on the floor, knelt on it fastidiously and gave him the best blowjob I was capable of. We said nothing about it, but he ruffled my hair afterwards before asking my opinion on the chances of sugar cane going down that winter.

I wanted to talk to him about these feelings I had for Alec, but of course I didn’t. I was confused enough as it was, and I worried what his reaction would be. I longed just to say ‘Do you…? Should I? How can I?’ But of course I didn’t. I didn’t even have the words to ask him how he was managing on his own. I pushed my cowardice away and invited him for a round at the weekend.

“Can’t,” he said, “I’m booked solid, but I can do Monday evening.”

“Probably better,” I replied. “It’ll remove the temptation to get drunk.”

“It won’t remove mine,” he muttered from behind his paper. “I’ll ring Bryant and Rydell and see if they can make a foursome.”

The train slid into the next stop and I retreated behind my
Times
, but I didn’t concentrate on the news. I was imagining what it might be like to be alone with Alec in an empty train compartment, wondering how it would feel if instead of the solid adult-ness of Phil, my hands could wrap around Alec’s slender frame. I was so engrossed in my imagination that I forgot that my hat had rolled under the seat and was almost to the barrier at Waterloo when I realised and had to hare back to fetch it.

It was like that throughout the rest of the day. My thoughts spent more and more time in a fantasy of what—if things had been different in a way that even I couldn’t imagine—it would be like if my episodes were with Alec, and not with Phil.

It was the sweetest torture, and Sunday week seemed a lifetime away.

Chapter 9

We were about half a mile down the road when I wondered about the wisdom of bringing the twins, for all of their convenience as a smoke screen. First, there had been a fight about who would sit in the front seat, but I quashed that almost immediately. Not only did I want Alec where I could see him and could almost feel the heat from him, but also I couldn’t subject him to the vicissitudes of my over-excited offspring. They continued their feud in the back of the car until I stopped before we reached the roundabout and they shut up instantly. They knew I was quite capable of taking the car home, although I wouldn’t have done, even if they’d been throwing things. But they did not know that.

Alec was dressed rather formally, in a shirt and tie and his school blazer—a decision, I’m sure, made by his mother. While I would have preferred to see him in those rather-too-tight jeans for my own pleasure, I was happy that he was smart enough to take to a restaurant—which I planned to do.

As I curved the car around the roundabout, I was terribly aware of the fact, in a way I never had been even when Valerie and I were courting, that the car had a bench seat. I wondered how stupid I had been to not push up the armrest between Alec and me. Had that armrest not been there, I could easily have taken a left hand turn a little too fast and Alec might have slid across the polished leather…but with the armrest down, that was never going to happen. As it shouldn’t. Of course.

The children kept us occupied for the journey, first discussing what might be at the fair, then roping us all into a game of I Spy which descended into argument and recrimination at Alec’s “Something beginning with S” which turned out to be escargot. Although he swore that he had actually seen a snail on a fence post, and that, anyway, snail did begin with an S, the children were outraged at his cheating. I had to smile as I saw them in the rear view mirror going into a huddle as they planned their revenge for the return journey, no doubt with fiendish methods.

As the twins went silent, I had a chance to speak to Alec, but I was suddenly tongue-tied. I had to force my fingers to grasp the steering wheel tightly just to prevent my right hand from resting casually on the seat beside me, to stop myself from touching his leg. It was like a sickness, a craving. I had no idea back then that the pangs of longing that I was suppressing were nothing—
nothing
—to what they would be like later.

Alec eventually shifted in his seat and turned his head towards me. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

I could feel the answer bubbling up in my mind. I risked a look away from the road and met his eyes, warm and grey and deadly to me. How had I not seen how very clear they were?

“Not really.” As I spoke, I wondered if I should have had a cover story ready. Obviously Alec hadn’t realised that this trip was a farce, a cover screen, and I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. If he didn’t, then I was free to admire him without his knowledge, but if he
did
…that was a different story altogether, and one I dared not hope could ever be true. But if he didn’t—and I stopped myself before I drove myself insane. “The twins aren’t interested in trains.”

“We like
Alec’s
trains,” Mary said, crowding forward. “He’s got a farm, and a mountain and a roundtable…”

“
Turn
table,” John said, with the world-weary sigh of an older brother. Seventeen minutes older.

“Anyway, just going round in circles is boring.”

“Well, I’m not getting you a layout like Alec’s,” I said, firmly, ignoring the wails of disappointment from John. “That takes years of collecting. We’ll see what else is there.”

“It’s good of you to bring me,” Alec said.

“It’s not good of me. It was essential.” I meant that it was to give me a buffer against the over-enthusiasm of the twins; they were wearing in large doses. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw his head snap around to stare at me.

I wanted to look back, but by then I was negotiating the Bentley into the narrow car park. I worried, my stomach churning into knots as I carefully parked in a sheltered spot behind the pavilion. What if he suspects my true motives? What if—what if?

As I got out of the car, I gave myself a severe talking to, the first of many.
If you are going to embark on this madness,
I thought,
then you need to get a hold of your reactions. If you go flinching or staring at every look, every movement of his, you are going to scare him away. You mustn’t give him any reason to bolt.
I was more than happy that he was prepared to spend time with a man old enough to be his father for no apparent reason other than a shared interest in trains. I was grateful for whatever reason he had decided to befriend me, and I wanted to hang on to it, whatever it was, for however long it lasted.

I locked the car. The children had run ahead and were waiting by the entrance, but Alec was standing by the boot, seemingly staring at the gravel, his cheeks flushed a dull red. Again my stomach contracted in fear, and I wondered if this ‘admiring from afar’ was going to be possible if I shuddered with fear every time Alec looked nervous or upset.

I kept my voice casual. “What’s up? Suddenly realised that you’ve gone off trains and don’t know how to admit it?”

He looked up sharply with almost the exact same look that Mary gave me when she thought I was being spectacularly stupid. As I stopped in front of him, he pushed a ten-shilling note into my hand.

I was momentarily speechless. My hand felt burned where he’d touched it, and a jolt of warmth shot down my arm and centred exactly between my hips. My cock stirred and I swallowed in fear. “I don’t need this,” I said. My voice sounded husky, as if I had a cold.

“Mum said that I was to give it to you.”

I took his arm and forced his hand open. “Keep it. This is my treat. It was
my
idea and you are
my
guest. If you can’t accept that I’m taking you—and my children—out for the day, then you can wait in the car, or I’ll be happy to take you home.”

I think that I said this or something similar, but I have no idea what I actually said. I know I spoke and that he was staring at me, and that as I spoke, his eyes lost their worried look. I know that my hand was over his, in effect giving the money back. But all I can really remember is the heat of his palm and the crisp-sharp feel of the ten-shilling note between us like a secret. I was buying my secret with lies.