Junction X

by Erastes

  “Where are we having this pint, Eddie,” he said, pulling me out of my reverie, “London?”

  I realised how far we’d come, past the seafront and almost as far as we could go without having to turn around. This was the bohemian section of our local area, filled with fishing sheds, cobbled streets and tatty fishermen’s pubs which had become the haunt of the local student population. I drove into the tiny car park of The Lobster Pot and we said nothing to each other until we were seated, with our pints, in a dark corner booth.

  “So, what’s up?” he said, finally. The foam had stuck to his lip a little. Once I would have wanted to kiss it away.

  I was prickly—unnecessarily so, I realise now. I’d sought him out, after all. “Nothing.”

  “Crap.” He put his glass down with a thump and the barmaid looked over at us, startled. I remember she was wearing pink and her eyes were beautiful but ruined with black clumps of mascara which stuck to her eyelashes like soot. “I know you well enough.”

  I could have bluffed it out. I could have said nothing at all, but I knew that I was going to tell him; I had known it from the first moment I’d told Mrs. Tudor I was going out.

  “We shouldn’t have lost touch before,” he said. “I’m beginning to wonder why we ever bloody moved.” He looked at his drink as if he hated it. “Come on. You and I could always talk.”

  His eyes were soft and I was pleasantly warmed by his concern, for all that he was deluding himself. We’d never really talked. “There’s nothing…wrong exactly. I’ve…” I could have stopped right there. “I’ve met someone.”

  He looked at me as if I’d said I was a Martian, his face frozen in the look of intimate regard he’d been holding. Slowly, his face went blank as he sat back. Far too late—for the ice had already broken beneath my feet—I realised that I hadn’t considered that he might take it badly, given his own circumstances.

  “Forget it,” I said. As if he could. “I shouldn’t have… I…you and Claire.” I couldn’t say anything and I could feel my ears growing hot with embarrassment.

  “I’m still registering the shock,” he said finally. “I thought you and Val were…you know she’ll kill you, right? With her bare hands. Or a tennis racket. Just make sure she doesn’t find out.” He laughed then.

  A peculiar feeling swept over me—I could not have said what it was, although it felt like emotion draining through my body, taking the strength from my legs. I don’t think I could have stood up at that moment. I hadn’t realised he’d be so amused, and I wished I’d said nothing.

  “You dog, Eddie. It’s always the quiet ones.” He leant forward a little and licked his lips. If I hadn’t known before now that I no longer desired him, I would have done then, for in the gloom and with that leering expression, he looked brutal. “Come on, then, tell me everything. Where did you meet her? It’s not someone from the typing pool?”

  He was my best friend, and yet he didn’t know me at all. In the seconds that followed, as I stared at his mouth, red and open in expectation of the tittle-tattle he waited to hear, I realised he’d never known me, had never cared enough to think about his actions. I don’t know why I was surprised, now when I look back on it. I’d always accepted that he was an opportunist, a climber. I was just someone he clambered over on his way up. This didn’t come to me all at once, of course; it filtered through to me over the next couple of weeks.

  He tried to get me to talk, and trod on my toe under the table. “Come on,” he said, “you can’t leave me in suspense like this.”

  I grabbed the empty mugs and went back to the bar. I felt sick. There was one person in the world that I believed I could confide in, I thought. One person I knew would understand. I hadn’t been planning on giving out any names, but I’d wanted to talk about Alex to someone. What’s the point of being infatuated if you couldn’t talk about it?

  While the barmaid filled the glasses, I pulled myself together and, by the time I went back to the table, I had it under control.

  “You’re a tease, Edward Johnson,” Phil said, with a smile that meant more than it seemed. “I’ve always thought so.”

  I was lying to my wife and lying to myself, so what harm could lying to Phil do? I looked him straight in the face and gave him the conspiratorial face I’d seen on other men. Sharing a dirty little secret. Giving him what he wanted. I was good at that. I could sell; that’s what I did.

  “No. No one at work. No one you know.” It was a good start and, so far, true. “I’m not sure where it’s going.”

  “Going?” He looked amazed. “Christ. Ed, you are amazing—you take everything so seriously. You’ve got a beautiful wife, great kids, good job. You’ve got me—and now you’ve got a bit on the side?”

  “Shut up!” He was too loud and I wanted to hit him. Hearing Alex (even mistakenly) talked of in that way made me angry.

  “And you are worrying about it already? How long has this been going on? You still haven’t said where you met her.”

  “And I’m not going to, either.”

  “You can trust me, Ed. You know that. We keep each other’s secrets.”

  “It’s not been going on long, a few weeks.”

  I could see his mind working, and I was grateful he wasn’t as privy to my movements as he used to be. There weren’t many places I had the opportunity to meet anyone except for work. Or the wife of a client. Let him think that.

  “And?” he demanded. “What’s she, you know, like?”

  His skin is hot and when he kisses me he closes his eyes and his fingers curl. I want to see if his toes do too.

  I could continue to tell the truth, grateful that the word for fair haired men was the same for fair haired women—if spelled differently. “Blond. Slim. Nice eyes.”

  “You have such a thing for blondes,” he laughed. “I bet she’s got no tits and no hips, either. Like Valerie.”

  I want to hold his bare hips in my hands. I want to kiss the hollows, trace his hipbones with my fingers

  I laughed in spite of myself at that. “No. You are right.”

  “And have you?”

  I glared at him.

  “Oh come on, don’t go all chivalrous on me. You wouldn’t have told me this much if you didn’t want to tell me it all.”

  “No, we haven’t. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “There are…obstacles.”

  “Ahhhh.” He sat back, his face suddenly world-weary. “She’s married.”

  “There is family to consider, yes.” I was almost proud of myself for not lying to him. I allowed him to lie for me.

  “I understand completely. And so you have nowhere to do the deed. There are hotels, old boy. I can give you some names.”

  I shrugged.

  “Too sordid for you?”

  “I don’t like the idea, no.” It was impossible, in fact. No doubt there were grubby little places in London that turned a blind eye to two men for a healthy tip, but I didn’t know which ones and couldn’t ask—and there were none in my town.

  “Then it seems to me that you’ll have to get a flat,” he said. “Plenty of them on the market, more expensive in London than round here, obviously, but as I don’t know where this blonde beauty is from…”

  It wasn’t something that I’d considered up to that moment. I’d been thinking of stolen moments here and there, but no place was going to be any use, not for what I wanted to do to him. With him. It was still risky, though.

  As if Phil had heard my thoughts, he echoed them. “Of course it’s chancy, whichever way you play it. Somewhere you can both go to without being seen, and then there’s the rent. Does Valerie check your accounts?”

  I shook my head. It was all spiralling into something sordid. The grimy pub, the leering expressions. A flat just for…assignations. It shouldn’t be like this. Something hidden and backstreet. I’d spoiled it. Spoiled it by telling him.

  “Good. Well, the first and most obvious place I
can think of is the flats above the station.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Not at all. Makes perfect sense to me.”

  “It’s the busiest place in the area!”

  “Only at certain times. Eddie, use your head. Morning and evening rush hours are busy. So are Saturday morning and evening. That’s about it. The rest of the time…try going down there at eight in the evening or first thing on a Sunday morning. Ideal. Big car park. A train so your lady-love can arrive discreetly, if necessary. The only access to the flats is the door in the tunnel under the tracks; time it right and no one will see you coming or going.”

  He winked at me and I felt sick again, guilt and fear poisoning me. I finished my pint and pushed my chair back. I didn’t want to discuss it with him anymore; he was already too smug about it. He was right about the flats—but he knew. He knew where I’d be. I knew I’d made a mistake, telling him.

  I led the way out and we drove back in the same brittle silence that we’d arrived in. As we reached his driveway, I pulled up without driving in and braced my arms against the wheel without looking at him.

  “Eddie?” I knew my face was revealing my growing annoyance, but I didn’t really care. “Eddie, I’m just trying to help.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “I’m flattered, really. And you know I won’t say anything. You know that, right? It makes no difference to us.” He reached across and squeezed my crotch quickly, then let it go.

  “Another time.” He believed everything he’d just said; I didn’t doubt it for a minute. But he was deluding himself, and he’d underestimated me for the last time. It made all the difference in the world.

  Chapter 12

  It is one thing to have a plan and another to effect it. In a day or so, I had pushed aside the thought that it had been Phil who had suggested the station. The image of Alex—that day at the Toy Fair—holding The Junction sign in his fingers and looking so bloody beautiful razed Phil’s leering expression from my mind and I managed to convince myself that it was meant to be. Trains had brought us together, I rationalised, and oh, I was so good at rationalisation.

  After a while, I couldn’t think of any other place that would be as perfect, and when I sat down to write a letter to the Railway Board asking about letting a flat, I knew that I’d be disappointed if they turned me down.

  My talent for deception entered a new level at this stage. It was at this point that the old Eddie died forever, I think, for there wasn’t a day after this when I wasn’t lying to someone. Perhaps because it was I’d stopped lying to myself.

  I wrote on plain notepaper, giving a Post Office address that I had once set up to arrange a secret delivery of a gift for Valerie. I said that I was a travelling salesman who often needed to base his operations in the south of England, and that rather than travel down from London and pay for hotels, I had decided that a rented apartment would be more economical. I wouldn’t be constrained by a hotel shutting its front door at midnight, for example. It took me several drafts before I was happy with the thing. Then I smugly put it into my inside pocket to post from London, muddying the waters still further.

  I had been living and planning for the next Wednesday, arranging client meetings out of town so that I had an excuse to use the Bentley, even though I hadn’t arranged anything with Alex. Valerie brought me down to earth when she reminded me—and I could never understand how she carried all this information around in her head—that it was half-term the next week and that, consequently, none of the children would be at school.

  My disappointment was so internally violent it surprised me. I felt like a child being taken home from a party where he was winning all the prizes. So I scouted around for compensation and a replacement.

  Inspiration struck me as I overheard the children discussing Bonfire Night.

  “How about we have a fireworks party here?” I asked. On previous years we had gone to the organised “do” at Woodlands, but my resignation from the club gave me a good excuse to not to go there.

  “Really, darling?” Valerie looked up from her magazine. “You’ve never shown any interest before.”

  “The children are older,” I said. Oh, the lies came so easily now. “Less likely to stick sparklers in each other’s eyes.”

  “Accidentally, at least,” Mrs. Tudor called darkly, from the kitchen. We both laughed at that.

  “I suppose we could put a bonfire at the very end, by the wall,” Valerie mused. I could see her mind working; she hadn’t really built the garden with bonfires in mind.

  “A smallish one.”

  “We could ask Tyler to build it.”

  I bristled at that. “I’m quite sure I’m capable of building a bonfire.” I am a bloody engineer, I wanted to say.

  “If you insist.” She waved an airy hand. “I’ll leave it to you, shall I?”

  After she put the twins to bed, we sat and watched the television and discussed who to invite to the bonfire party. We to and fro-ed as to whether to invite Phil or Claire. Valerie had brought it up and I was reluctant to have Phil at the house.

  “We can’t invite both of them,” I’d said. “If we invite Claire we’ll have to invite the starving artist, and if we invite the starving artist…”

  “His name is Fred.”

  “Fred?” I roared with laughter. “How naff! Not Fabian, or Sebastian? Fred. Well, if we invite Fred, we can’t invite Phil.”

  “Obviously,” she sighed. “It’s awkward.”

  “It would be easier not to invite either of them.”

  “I think it’s best,” she said, to my enormous relief. “But I do hate losing touch with people.”

  “I know,” I said, giving her a sympathetic smile, “But we’ll invite Albert and Sheila, of course.”

  “And Alec.”

  “He might not want to come, a load of adults…” I kept my eyes on the screen, but my heart was pounding.

  “Well, I’ll include him anyway. He might like to help the twins with the Guy.”

  “All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “I’ll do that now,” she said, “in case they were thinking of doing their own.”

  “Good idea.” I felt Machiavellian, but good. “Ask Alec if he wants to bring a friend.” I was careful, always careful, to keep his real name to myself.

  She turned to look at me as she pulled open the door to the hall. “What is the matter with you recently?”

  The euphoria and smug satisfaction at my own cleverness sank back into fear. “What?”

  “Bonfires, inviting strange people over you don’t know…it’s like you’ve got a new lease of life, or something.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s just that the children are more interesting now that they are older.”

  She rolled her eyes and went to invite Alex’s parents.

  + + +

  I hadn’t seen Alex in private for what seemed like years, although it was less than two weeks. We’d not even been able to say more than a formal ‘hello’ to each other since our brief tryst in the car, and the less I saw him, the stronger my obsession grew. I found myself secretly looking out of the windows in the hope that he’d be in the garden, but as the weather worsened that week, my hope weakened. Then the rain set in, threatening the bonfire night completely.

  A day or so before the fireworks party, I was draining the commute from my soul with a whisky and the evening paper when the phone rang. Valerie answered it and my ears immediately went into alert when I heard her talking.

  “Oh, hello Alec, dear. Yes. Yes. Oh, no! Oh, yes, I can see from here—how awful! Yes, of course he will. He’s got a box in case it ever happens to us. What time will they be back? Why don’t you come over…? Oh, I see. Don’t worry. I’ll send him over right away. Goodbye, Alec. Yes, don’t worry.”

  I forced myself to remain motionless, my arm casually draped along the back of the settee as she pulled open the dividing door and came in, but my heart was thudding hard
as my blood pressure rose. “Who was that?”

  “It was Alec from next door,” she said. Alec from next door. Were there any other Alecs in the world? “He thinks the train-set has done something drastic to the lights. He turned on the…duplex?”

  “Dublo?”

  “That was it. And the house went dark. He asked if you will go over and look at the fusebox.”

  I tried to look irritated. After all, it was how I would have reacted if Claire had done the same thing when she’d been living there. “Where’s his father?”

  “His parents are out somewhere, and aren’t expected back for a while. You will go, darling? I said you would. I asked him to come here and wait, but I think he’s worried about not being there in case they phone or something.”

  I gave an exaggerated sigh and threw the paper down onto the settee, as if my evening was being spoiled instead of suddenly turning wonderful. I’m no actor and I probably overdid it.

  “Oh, darling, you can’t leave him in the dark.”

  “All right. I know.”

  She kissed my cheek. “You are a wonderful neighbour. Treat yourself. Stay and play with his trains.”

  “Valerie. They aren’t toys.”

  “No, of course not, darling,” she said in a tone which clearly meant she thought they were. She gave me a smirk and turned on the television. I escaped. I rummaged in the cupboard under the stairs and found my toolbox. I think that I’ve portrayed myself well enough here for anyone to tell that I’m not a handyman, but I can put a picture on a wall and I can change a fuse. All right, the gardener thinks I’m barely able to tie my laces, but he’s a smug bully. I was pleased to be able to be called out to Alex. It made me feel like a knight in shining armour.

  The house next door was completely in darkness, as Valerie had said. I wondered for a moment as I knocked why on earth Alex didn’t have a candle burning, at least. Perhaps the Charleses were unprepared for a power problem. Some people don’t plan ahead. I turned on my torch as the door opened.

  “Turn it off!” Alex’s voice hissed from the seemingly empty hall. I didn’t obey him immediately as I had to check the position of the step before entering the house but as soon as I stepped in, I clicked the torch off, puzzled.