Junction X (26 page)

“I don’t know what’s worse,” Valerie said to me one afternoon when I came home from the Sands. “You working too much or not. At least when you worked too much this spring, you were spending more time with your family.”

She was strange that afternoon, nothing that I could describe, but her whole body seemed to be held in check, her limbs and movements jerky—like she was not thinking about her movements until after she’d made them.

As for Alex, we’d both been ignoring what his absences, his extra work, and those blissful and rare afternoons as we lay on the bed or the floor as he studied, were actually all about. Time and again I wanted to ask him if he’d had offers from the universities but I didn’t, and he never spoke of it. I never even asked him how his interviews went. Perhaps we thought that time wouldn’t move forward if we ignored it.

So much we should have talked about, and so much we didn’t. And then, so much—perhaps—we shouldn’t have.

Once when he had me safe and sated, filled with nothing but the wait for the return of desire, he said: “Do you love her?”

I was silent, and I pulled the sheet aside. His body was edible; stark and angular. His eyes ranged my face, and his eyes seemed black in the half light. He lay with a sullen faked tiredness, like a cat that lies flat before a mouse hole. I reached for his hip, but his hand caught mine before it reached its target and gathered it in to his chest.

“Don’t change the subject,” he said.

“There is no subject.”

“What are you thinking?”

I didn’t answer him.

“Thinking what to say?”

“Yes.”

“Thinking what to lie?”

“…yes.”

“How often do you lie to me, Edward?”

I had to stop from snapping, from being automatically defensive. It was something Val might have said, but never had. He dropped my hand and I moved it up, holding a skein of his hair in my fingers, rolling the strands together, crisp beneath my fingertips, and thought: There is nothing but this. I will remember how this felt all my life. It was like a death, somehow.

“I. Don’t. I don’t lie to you.” I hadn’t. Not until then.

“Do you?”

“Don’t, Alex.” I rolled forward and my hand moved down to his flank, and moved against his skin. I rubbed hard as if he were cold, up and down the endless length from his hip to his knee. He was right. It was prevarication. When my palm was red hot I slid it over the cool cheeks of his bottom, feeling them ripple and clench beneath my hand.

He groaned and tipped up his face. The lamplight made tenuous hollows in his throat.

“Just tell me. Do you love her?”

“All right. Yes.” My palm cooled and my fingers made circles at the base of his spine.

He looked as if I’d slapped him, his eyes huge in their masochism.

“Alex…”

“
Tell
me.”

I rolled away and he spooned behind me. He felt cold. “She’s my wife.” A hundred images flooded my mind like torn up photos. “I have to,” I said finally, knowing that he couldn’t understand. How could he? What young man with his life before him—can comprehend daily life, daily squabbles, children, measles and the constant fear of inadequacy?

“And Phil?”

“Oh, Christ. It’s
not
the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. No, it isn’t.” If I was sure of anything, it was that. I turned to my left and pinned him beneath me again. I wanted to hurt him for raising phantoms that we’d both left dormant so long. We’d come this far without bringing the outside in, and here he was, lifting the lid of the box with the vicious curiosity of a child picking at a scab.

“Phil’s nothing.” I said. “Nothing. If you believe nothing else I say—believe that.”

I pushed his arms back over his head and tangled my fingers in his. I can still feel the pressure on my hands now. He just looked up at me and, though we were chest-to-chest, hip-to-hip and cock-to-cock, it was if he were beyond arm’s length and drifting away. As if he were the older. The wiser.

I put my mouth over his, but it wasn’t to kiss him. It was to stop him saying the words that somehow he’d already said. I took the breath from his lungs and my hands tightened in his hair. Don’t say it,
I begged him silently, beneath closed lids. Don’t. Be dead. Don’t ask me. Forget. It’s not the same.

“And me? What am I?”

This time the silence didn’t work. The kisses I attempted to give him didn’t work. He lay beneath me immobile, unyielding. Every inch of him hard. Then he pushed me off and was out of bed in a flash, and the words I hadn’t said couldn’t
be
said. I tried to catch at his arm but he turned away.

“Alex.” I said, forcing out a calm tone, calmer than I felt. “Alex. What use would it be if I said it? Haven’t we got enough—not enough, but as much as anyone like us can hope for? What good would it be to you? Or me? Why build it up into something we can never have? What would you do with it? Who could you tell?”

He turned towards me, and dropped his shirt on the floor. His eyes seemed crazy. Not hurt, but a little mad. He hit himself hard in the chest with his fist, and his whisper came like a shout.

“I could tell me. Don’t you get it? Every day. Every second of the rottenness—out there. I could tell
me
.”

I hadn’t told him when I first realised it. I hadn’t told him when I’d taken him. How could I tell him then, at that moment? It would have seemed like I was just saying it—a boy’s lie to get a girl into bed. All I could do was sit there on that horrible brown bed and watch him getting dressed, praying that this wasn’t going to be the last time I saw him like this. I was selfish in my idiocy, too. How was I to know he felt the same?

“Alex.”

“I have to go; it’s late.” He picked up his satchel and I was out of the bed, uncaring that he was fully clothed and I wasn’t. His face was flat and he wouldn’t look at me.

“Don’t go.”

“It’s late. Dad will be waiting.”

“It’s no later than normal.” I pulled the satchel from his shoulder, and set it down. He didn’t resist; he just stood there his face closed off, head down. The words were there in my head, everything I wanted to say—but I’d left them too late to mean what they should.

“Do you doubt it?” I pulled him close and he didn’t resist. Finally, his arms went around me and I knew I could keep it from ending. “Alex. Do you?”

His face was buried against my shoulder and it seemed forever before he spoke. “Not all the time. But I don’t want to be nothing.”

I pulled him back to the bed, sitting him on my lap and stripping him between the kisses and promises and lies. His eyelashes tasted of salt. I told him he could never be that. I should have kept my mouth shut.

Chapter 21

He breezed through his exams, as I’d expected he would, but while he was sitting them he was damned near impossible to cope with, and for a brief few weeks I discovered a harder and far more brittle young man than I had ever encountered. He had a temper, too, fuelled by a lack of faith in himself, lashing out when anyone told him that he’d ‘do fine.’ He understood numbers; he had a talent for seeing and grasping concepts faster than I could. However, he constantly doubted his own abilities, which surprised me, as he was so confident in other ways. I think his parents’ expectations drove him almost to the breaking point. I watched him chew his nails and try to keep a calm exterior, and I took the flak when his casing fractured and his self-belief shattered into a million pieces.

Three weeks before the actual exams he withdrew completely, and my reasoning with him—
begging
him—to maintain some contact made him angry. The glimpse of stubborn temper I’d seen from him came flashing to the fore. It was selfish of me, but imagining a month away from him cut me in ways I’d never been hurt. It felt like talons.

“I
can’t
,” he kept saying. “It’s important. Don’t you see? It’s so important. You don’t, do you?”

“I do see that making yourself blind with study and frantic with worry isn’t going to help.”

“You
don’t
understand. If anything is going to help, then it’s this. It’s got to be A grades or the whole bloody thing is a waste of time.”

“So you are going to make yourself sick. Keeping away from me.”

He glared at me, which put me off a little. “It’s
because
of you.”

I behaved badly at times, too, matching childishness with childishness, but we always made it up.

Then, stubborn, determined and infuriating, he
was
gone from me, as suddenly as an axe falling. And my marriage continued to fall apart.

Well, that’s hardly true—it would be fairer (and truer) to say that in his absence, I used the intervening time to tear apart what was left of my marriage with my bare hands. Val and I had progressed, by way of interrogation, to an edgy armistice. She questioned almost everything I did. In idiotic retaliation, I had stopped telling her anything without being asked, which did nothing but to draw the circle of suspicion tighter around us. Cut loose from Alex, I was trammelled and trapped in some pathetic game of self-loathing.

And so, from time to time throughout my separation from Alex, I found myself walking out into The Avenue without any announcement to anyone, blazing in anger (mainly at myself) and seeking refuge in the one place I had to myself, even if it was missing the one person who made it a refuge. It felt cavernous without him, and the bed was cold. And it was there, as I was coming out of the lift, that I bumped into Phil, who was waiting to get in.

“Christ, you made me jump!” I looked accusingly at the door behind him. “This is supposed to be secure. You told me. How the hell did you get in?”

“I know the station master as well as you do.”

I turned around and hit the lift switch again, but when we got to the top, I stopped.

“Eddie?”

I didn’t want him intruding. He had too much of my life. I didn’t want him in the room. In
that
room. “Get back in,” I said. I hit the lift button again and he had no option but to do so.

“Oh—I see.” He was smirking.

“No. You don’t.”

He raised himself on his toes, his hands deep in his pockets as the doors opened again. “Shielding the fair maiden.”

“What did you expect? That I’d let you in?”

He looked a little ashamed at that. I walked away from him, down the corridor and out of the main door. He caught me up as I was climbing the stairs. I could hear the Sunday afternoon ‘Puffer,’ the country-route slow-train rattling the tracks as it laboured its way towards the Junction. His car was in the car park and I got in without even thinking.

“Did Val send you?”

“No. She didn’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“She didn’t.”

“But you’ve seen her.”

“No. No—but I rang. She—”

“You don’t have to. I know.”

There was a long silence as he drove. He asked me for a cigarette; after I lit one for him, he pushed his sports car away from the Junction and into the country. I stared out of the window, but I didn’t see the fields. I saw Alex—Alex—Alex.

Finally he pulled up outside a pub and manoeuvred the car into a deserted, tatty car-park at the back. I went to open the door but he took hold of my elbow. “Eddie.”

I tried to pull away from him, but the space was too small and I’d just about had enough in any case. All the fight I’d been harbouring slid away from me and I slumped back into the car.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally. I had a sudden memory of broken glass and Phil’s hand wrapped in a handkerchief.

The pub was shut and there was no one around. He put his hand on my knee and I sat and stared at it as if I couldn’t work out why he’d touch me like that. I remember wishing that I still welcomed his touch, that I could put my hand on his, but that seemed to be gone forever. We wouldn’t ever be what I had wanted. Not lovers. We weren’t even friends. He had nothing to offer me.

 
After a while, he took his hand away and we had another cigarette in silence. Suddenly he turned the engine on and turned the car for home. We talked on the way back—about work, the twins, cricket, golf. I wondered why he had nothing to say, nothing to give. Afterwards I realised that he didn’t know either, for all his savoir-faire.