Junction X (17 page)

“You idiot,” I said, between urgent kisses to every part of his invisible face, “what if it hadn’t been me?”

“My bedroom’s at the front. I was watching your house. I saw you leave.”

I went warm with pleasure. I loved his exuberance, his passion for life. Nothing, for Alex, was impossible. He made me feel invulnerable, and far more special than I am.

“Come upstairs,” he whispered. He was on tiptoes, his mouth against my ear.

 
I was swept away by him. He burned my thought processes. It was hard to remember my own name when he was like that: naked, squirming, rubbing his body against mine.

Somehow I summoned enough strength to pull my mouth from his skin and ask: “This is some sort of set up then? No broken fuse?”

He chuckled, pulling himself closer, his cheek against my chest. “No broken fuse. Mum and Dad are out. They always used to go to Bingo on Fridays, but since moving here,” his hands moved to my trousers, undoing the belt, “they didn’t think it was the sort of thing they should still do. I’ve been trying to convince them for ages.”

My clever, clever boy. He’d been making plans even longer than we’d been together. I wonder now if he ever considered that he might fail?

“Come upstairs,” he said again. “You want to.
This
wants to.”

“I need to fix the not-broken lights. Valerie might look over.”

“Oh. Yes.” He let go. “If you are going to turn the hall lights on, I’d better get out of sight.” He kissed me again, but didn’t disappear as he’d promised. I couldn’t keep my hands off him. I pulled him back against me and murmured his name.

“And how long have we got?” I said after a while.

“They always ring when they leave. So I can heat some plates up. For fish and chips.”

“You should be running the country,” I said, laughing. I smacked his backside hard. “Now go. I don’t want the street to see you like this.”

“I’ll wait in my room.” He kissed me again and I reached down and found the torch. I could hear him pounding up the stairs. When he went quiet, I flipped the torch on, waved it around for a minute or two, then switched on the hall lights. I spotted the phone on a hall table and phoned Valerie. “All fixed,” I said.

“Thank goodness you were around,” she said. “Trains now?”

“Trains now,” I said with a twinge of guilt, “I should check out the track, if that’s what’s causing the problems. Probably a loose connection somewhere.”

She laughed. “Enjoy yourself, darling, and ask him if he wants to come over and help the twins with the Guy tomorrow night. He’s welcome to stay for supper too, of course.”

I hung up, then followed the stairs up to the landing. The upstairs hall was unlit—and only one bedroom door was open. I pushed the door and stood utterly speechless. Alex was lying face down on the bed, sprawled in the position he’d no doubt been in when he raced up here. His bed was nearly too small for him and his feet reached the end. I think this one instant is the first moment that I stopped and took a mental picture. I knew—for all that every nerve and instinct was telling me to throw myself on top of him—that this time, this ‘before’ would never happen again. It was important to stop and catalogue it. A postcard of Alexander.

Have you ever hesitated from beginning an experience because to do it would almost be to spoil it? Did you never gaze at the perfection of a present, or hold a virgin book in your hand? I remember, during the war, being given what seemed to me to be a huge slab of chocolate. It was heavy and thick in my young hands and the foil was so beautiful that I couldn’t bear to rip it. My parents thought I was funny, but I kept that chocolate for weeks before I finally tore it open. “The war will be over before that boy eats it,” my mother often said.

Once you start something, there is no mending the gold foil. The ribbon on the box will never be quite the same again, will never tie the same way. That’s how I felt, in that endless moment, staring at him as he grinned back at me from the bed.

Is there any point putting down what happened next? Should there be a record of it? My hand falters, but my mind pictures him so clearly. Were I able to paint more than stick figures I could do more justice to him with a painting than words. But I can’t
not
share it. Somewhere in albums and boxes, there are photos of Alex, but they are family portraits, not images of the young man who was later to cling to me, his hair damp with our exertions. Perhaps in those dusty albums he is waving from some beach in Wales; perhaps he kicks a football across a muddy field. Maybe he’s pulling open some brightly coloured Christmas present. The pictures show a son, not a lover. They don’t show Alex as he truly was—and as I’m the only one who ever saw that side of him, perhaps I have a responsibility to write down what he was really like. However hard that is. However self-indulgent.

His skin was surprisingly pale, for all that we had just had a warm and sunny summer. Not white or pink, but holding a light pale tan. His arms were a little darker, the forearms browned but the skin shading lighter as the eye travelled to his shoulders. His figure was slighter than it had felt in my arms, but gave the promise of growth; his shoulders seemed a little wider than they needed to be, accentuating the angle of his torso as it swept towards his hips. His legs were long and slender and beautifully muscled, sprinkled with golden hair which became almost so fine as to be almost invisible by the time it reached the crease where his legs stopped and his backside began.

The soles of his feet were particularly grimy, which made me smile. I had been standing there in some kind of trance, worshipping a young man with grubby feet.

I knew I loved him. I wanted to tell him that night, but I was Edward Johnson.

“Come in.” He propped himself up on his elbows, tipping his head around, pleading with me. “Please.”

The word caught me in the pit of my stomach and I walked forward. I felt large, in a clumsy adult way, suddenly uncomfortable to be in his room. If it had been decorated in a boyish fashion, I don’t think I could have entered it at all, but due to the Charles’ newly-moved-in status, it was pretty impersonal. There was nothing much more than a piece of horrible art in a green frame; a shelf of books, some school, some classics; and a medley of garish comic strips pinned up on one wall.

“Ed?”

My attention returned to him immediately. I dropped down to my knees at the end of the bed and leant over to kiss the base of his spine. He lay down flat, his face buried in his pillow and groaned. He smelled of Pears soap.

“Edward,” I said, my lips feeling as if they were burning against the warmth of his back. “You gave me the idea. No one’s ever called me Edward.” That wasn’t true. Valerie had said it just one time.

His voice was muffled, deep in the pillow. “It’s like keeping things for best and never using them. More. Please.”

I took him by the hips and pulled him gently down the bed. His legs went either side of my waist. Then I touched him as I’d never touched another person in my life. My fingers trembled as they felt the curls on the back of his neck; I spread my hands wide and eased them down his back. His body shifted, pushed against my palms. My thumbs teased the little bumps of his spine, and when my hands reached his bottom, I squeezed, smiling at my own enjoyment. His hands gripped the bedspread. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. I don’t even know why I said that.

“I know,” he said. He pushed himself up onto his elbows again and looked back at me. “That’s not it. I’m not china. Touch me. Every day I’ve imagined you here, doing this to me. And more. Every day. You had fewer clothes on in my head, though.”

He caught hold of my wrist and pulled hard. I had no choice but to pitch forward onto the bed beside him. Time blurred. I felt that everything was out of sync, that I was growing or the room was shrinking; it was a peculiar feeling. We lay on the narrow bed face to face, and he pulled my hand down to his cock. “There. I want you to touch me there. And other places. Everywhere. Don’t you? Don’t you?”

I took hold of him and he gasped in pleasure. I knew what I was doing there, at least. I ran my thumb around the head while my fingers drummed at the length of him, then my hand dropped between his legs to cup his balls, then slid further to massage the skin behind them.

Alex swore and fumbled with my fly. His face was flushed, his eyes tightly closed.

“No,” I said. “Not now.” I wanted to wallow in the giving of pleasure, to drown in his open mouth, the sounds he made.

As he came, I held him tighter than I’d ever held anyone, except perhaps Mary when she’d fallen out of a tree and hadn’t woken for two hours. When she had opened her eyes, I thought I’d never be able to let her go.

Gradually he stirred again, and started to kiss my neck. I wished I could cut the room out from the house and put it somewhere safe for the both of us.

“It’s much better when I don’t have to imagine you doing it.” He sounded delightfully husky.

I had a sudden thought. “Have you done this before?” I rolled him under me and kissed him long and slowly before I let him answer me. Maybe I was giving him time to lie.

“Mmm,” he said, his hands around my neck. “Once. With a school friend. We experimented a bit, but he got glandular fever and had to be pulled out of school. You don’t mind?” His eyes looked suddenly a little scared, as if he wished he hadn’t said anything at all. I shook my head and the worry was replaced with his sunny smile. “And you? You must have. You seem to know—you know.”

I gave a weak laugh. Him thinking I was confident and experienced was pretty amusing. “With a friend.” I didn’t want to say more than that, and I hoped he wouldn’t push it. He didn’t, but he looked thoughtful.

“Won’t you let me do you? I want to.”

I pushed his fringe back from his forehead. “No. I want you to. I
do
. More than I can say. But not here. I don’t think my old heart can stand the strain.” It wasn’t true, really. From the moment I’d touched him, I’d forgotten where we were.

He laughed, and wriggled delightfully against me. “My old man,” he said teasingly. “Respectable Edward. Middle-aged spread and pinstripes. I know better, though, don’t I?”

“You know better.” We kissed again and again, his slender naked legs tangling in mine. In between kisses, I told him about the flats over the station and his grin seemed to fill the room.

Then the dreaded phone began to ring, making my heart leap twenty feet in the air, and I was off the bed, putting myself back together. I watched him with greedy eyes as he pulled on his jeans; I found watching him dress as arousing as seeing him naked. The way his jeans slid over his backside, the way he took care to zip himself up with no underpants. Then he ran past me and down the stairs leaving me to follow more slowly as he spoke to his parents. I picked up my tools and, with a last look at him, I let myself out while he was still talking, and went straight upstairs for a bath, terrified that the scent of him lingered on my skin.

That night, Valerie turned to me in the night and I took her in a hardened passion. I closed my eyes and if I thought of her at all, it was only as a means to an end. I finished, sweat dripping from my chin and went to touch her cheek. She rolled away and the bed became a raft between two islands.

Chapter 13

“Did you ask Alec about tonight?” Valerie asked the next morning. “Mrs. Tudor has brought some old clothes over for the children to use.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said to Mrs. Tudor as she came out of the kitchen.

“George’s clothes were not doing anyone any good in the wardrobe,” Mrs. Tudor said. “I’d rather the children had some fun making a Guy with them than giving them to the charity shop and seeing some fellow walking down the high street in them.”

“Well, darling?” Valerie sighed and stared at me.

“Well what?”

“Honestly, you’ve been in a dream all morning. Did you ask Alec about coming to help the children?”

“Ah. No. I forgot.” The memory of what I had been doing had stayed with me, and I hoped would shore me up until the next day.

“Too busy with the trains.”

“As you say. And fixing their lights. I haven’t got time now, I’ll miss the train. You’ll have to do it.” I thought I was so clever.

She nodded and gave me a mock glare. I didn’t think she was really angry with me; when we’d woken earlier, she’d been affectionate in a way she hadn’t been for a few years, and I felt worse about that than anything. I knew what I had been thinking as I made love to her; now I was unfaithful in body and mind. I hadn’t even made love to
her.