The Boy Next Door

by Emlyn Rees

  It had taken me a while to realise this. When I’d started having sex with her I’d (rather naively, in retrospect) assumed that I – either through sheer animal magnetism or a fortunate combination of pheromones – had been the catalyst behind her insatiable sexual appetite and ensuing ecstatic delights. It hadn’t been until months later that I’d come to understand quite how incidental I was to the whole process. I was a witness to her fantasies, an accessory to the fact of her libido, a personal personal assistant, but nothing more integral than that.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she suddenly moaned. ‘I – think – I’m – going – to –’

  But before she got the chance, a man’s voice boomed her name out across the garden.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ she growled through gritted teeth, hurriedly rolling off me. ‘Dad.’

  A minute later we were sitting peacefully, both now fully dressed, on a cast-iron garden bench, just as her father came into sight.

  George Dickenson is a lean man, at least six foot three in height, with a youthful, upright stance and a wide, square jaw. He’s always been good to me, ever since the first time we met. He treats me like a son, knowing that I no longer have a father of my own, and I, in turn, am always careful to show him the respect a father should deserve.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, putting his arm round Rebecca’s shoulders and giving her a hug, ‘there you both are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

  Rebecca picked at a thread of cotton hanging from the pocket of his striped, short-sleeved shirt. Like George, she’s slim, well-proportioned and, at five foot nine, just a few inches shorter than me.

  ‘I’ve been showing off the gardens to Fred,’ she told him. ‘They’re so pretty at this time of year.’

  ‘Been over to the pond yet?’ George asked me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve stocked it up with trout since your last visit,’ he went on to announce. He looked up, surveying the state of the sky, before raising a hand to smooth down his thinning grey hair. ‘Still plenty of light,’ he concluded, smiling first at Rebecca and then at me. ‘Mike’s feeding them at six thirty. We could go over and watch, if you like …’ he suggested.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  He turned to Rebecca and asked, ‘How about you?’

  ‘Fish,’ she said with a grimace. ‘Gross. No, I’ll head back to the house for a shower.’

  ‘As you like,’ George told her, before kissing her on the forehead and setting off with me down the path.

  A low stone wall separated the pond from the tennis court and, following George’s lead, I sat down on it. Together we watched Mike, a middle-aged man from the village who helps George around the place, as he threw handfuls of feed into the wide round pond. Rainbow trout broke the surface instantaneously, causing it to boil like a pot of water on a stove.

  George had just finished telling me about how he and his sister, Julia (who’d broken her neck falling off a horse when she’d been sixteen), had always come down here to cool off during the summer when they’d been kids. ‘Childhood’s a magical thing,’ he said. ‘Everything you learn about the world starts there. It’s like being given a blank sheet and being told you can draw anything you want on it. It’s up to you.’ He looked up at me. ‘You and Becky …’ he probed. ‘Children … are they something you’re considering?’

  ‘Children?’ I teased him affectionately. ‘Shouldn’t we just start with one?’

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ he conceded with a chuckle, digging out a cigar and lighter from his shirt pocket. ‘It’s none of my business.’ But nevertheless he continued to stare at me as he lit his cigar.

  ‘We’ve never talked about it,’ I told him in deference to the lingering curiosity in his eyes. ‘We’ve both been so busy since we met, you know, what with our careers taking up so much of our time and now the wedding as well.’

  He nodded with understanding, but I knew that he wasn’t satisfied.

  ‘We’re still young,’ I added weakly, suddenly seeing how important all this was to him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, finally looking away and drawing reflectively on his cigar, ‘and you’ve got a whole future to build together. Why should you rush?’

  We remained in silence for a minute or two and I stared across, over the walls and trees which lay between here and Thorn House.

  Then George said, ‘I was thinking of putting up a marquee on the front lawn for the wedding, if the weather’s good.’

  ‘That’d be lovely,’ I agreed.

  Mike threw a final handful into the pond and called over, ‘Till the morning, then, George.’

  ‘Right you are, Mike,’ George called back. ‘Six weeks,’ he then said, turning to face me. ‘Not long. It’s going to be a good day, eh? When our Becky transforms from Miss Dickenson into Mrs Wilson.’

  Even after all these years Wilson, my own surname, still sounded to me like notes played on an out-of-tune piano. ‘Yes,’ I said, picturing myself out in the marquee, dancing with Rebecca. ‘I’m a lucky man.’

  ‘And so am I,’ said George. ‘I couldn’t have chosen a better husband for her myself.’

  I nodded my head in appreciation of this comment and George looked away. ‘We should get going,’ he said, consulting his watch.

  Following his lead, I rose and turned to face the house. The gardens were in full bloom and swallows circled above the chimneys. The sun hung low and shadows were beginning to creep across the ground. It was a perfect moment and I made a conscious effort of freeze-framing it, saving it up in its entirety for posterity, fearful, as I always am when anything gets too good, that it might not last, that every moment from here on would be downhill.

  I heard George sigh beside me. ‘I hope you and Becky will be as happy here one day as Mary and I are now,’ he said, starting off down the path. ‘I’m very proud, you know, very proud of you both, and very pleased indeed.’

  I fell into step alongside him and, saying nothing, walked on, breathing in the smell of his cigar and listening to the sound of our shoes crunching along the gravel path. Maybe George was right and one day Rebecca and I would grow into the vacant roles he and Mary would leave behind. Maybe, I considered, that was where I’d find my comfort and my peace.

  That was two weeks ago. Now – here on the roof terrace, waiting for Eddie to reappear – it’s just gone one o’clock on a Friday afternoon in the middle of June in the year two thousand – or Y2K, depending on whether or not you bought into the whole millennium marketing deal.

  I didn’t. This was, I admit, partly due to an aversion on my behalf to commemorative merchandising of any sort – a psychosis which stems largely from being surrounded by the stuff at work. But mainly, my lack of Y2K jingoism can be put down to an innate dread of the actual event itself.

  I don’t mean the getting drunk and watching fireworks illuminate the recently refurbished London skyline side of it. I was there for that, part of the two-million-strong human concertina that squeezed and cheered its way up and down the banks of the River Thames. I got rained on with the best of them. I ate armpit and swapped sweat. No, I did all that and loved every second of it, and wouldn’t have missed it for the world. When I say I’d been dreading the actual event itself, I mean just that. I mean the very moment when the twentieth century slid inexorably into the past.

  From across the river I watched as Big Ben, like a referee at a boxing match, counted out the old millennium to the rising cheers of the crowd and introduced the new. And it was then and only then – once I’d seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears – that I finally accepted the horrid truth: the future, my future – the part of my life that, up until this moment, had always seemed impossibly distant – had suddenly arrived.

  ‘I love you, sweetie,’ Rebecca told me.

  ‘And I love you too,’ I replied.

  I held her in my drunken arms and kissed her rain-soaked face, and gazed up at the myriad of fireworks bursting across the inky depths of the night sky. Inside me, thou
gh, darkness remained. I felt the cold finger of death scraping his jagged fingernails across the sinews of my heart.

  Surely, I told myself, this couldn’t be true. The year two thousand couldn’t really have arrived already, could it? But everywhere I looked, the answer came back ‘yes’. In the tiny, almost imperceptible, wrinkles at the corners of Rebecca’s eyes as she excitedly reminded me that this was the fourth new year we’d seen in together: yes. In her shoulder-length haircut that I still regarded as new, even though, I now realised, she’d first had the old auburn Rapunzel locks lopped off over two years ago: yes. In the familiar touch of her hands in mine, the segments of our fingers perfectly intertwined, as if they’d grown together that way like vines: yes. And there, in the miniature instamatic picture that Eddie thrust at me: the skin on my face somehow greyer than I remembered, the line of my hair somehow further back than I would have imagined, and the look of the cigarette hanging from my mouth somehow less James Dean than I would have wished for. Yes, yes and yes again.

  It was, then, with a heavy heart that I, along with Rebecca, Eddie and the rest of our gang, set out on the slow trudge homewards across Westminster Bridge. Two thousand years of civilisation, I pondered, and what world-trembling contributions had I made? Had I invented the wheel? No, I hadn’t. Had I propounded the theory of relativity? Nope, not that either. Had I dreamt up the idea of a World Wide Web. Uh-huh, not me. So what had I accomplished with my allotted time? A job I was good at? Yes, I was lucky there. A woman I had fallen in love with and still loved? Yes, I was fortunate there, too.

  There was little security in any of this, though. I could get fired from my job. I could get dumped from my relationship. I drank too much … I smoked too much … and I could therefore die. Even now, the walls of my blood vessels could be dilating, forming sacs … An aneurysm could be but a blink away. And if that was indeed to be my fate, then who would remember me? What epitaph would they carve on my grave? Here Lies Fred Wilson, Who Never Really Did That Much? What else could they write? I wasn’t religious. I wasn’t political. I hadn’t reproduced. Here I was, ageing by the second, moving closer to death with every breath I took, and what efforts had I made to sink my grip into life? None, came back the answer. None at all. I’d coasted. I’d procrastinated. I’d put off living till later.

  Well, now was the time to do something about it. Now was the time for some New Year resolutions. Only this was no ordinary New Year and these would be no ordinary resolutions. These would be New Millennium resolutions, built to last a thousand years and capable of changing the course of a life – my life – for ever.

  The cigarettes went first. I took one final drag of the Marlboro Light I was smoking, before sending it spinning and sparkling like a miniature Catherine wheel up into the sky. I then pulled the packet from my pocket, crushed it in my fist, and struggled away from Rebecca and the others. Breaking free from the flow of the crowd at the side of the road, I clambered over an unguarded police barrier and dropped down on to a patch of unlit wasteland at the edge of the river bank.

  The noise of the crowd diminished immediately and, walking forward, I cast my cigarette packet down into the black and swirling waters of the Thames below. Standing there, with the suitably austere backdrop of the Houses of Parliament before me, I solemnly swore that I would smoke no more. I didn’t want another bout of bronchitis like the one that had choked my throat down to the width of a pipe-cleaner the previous November. I’d smoked enough of my future years away already.

  ‘What are you doing?’ a voice – Rebecca’s – called out.

  I spun round from my reverie to see her peering over the police barrier. Her jacket collars were turned up and her ski hat was pulled down low over her brow. I didn’t give myself time to think. Now was the time for action. If the cigarettes had been my first resolution, then Rebecca would be my second. ‘Come here,’ I shouted.

  She screwed up her face in distaste. ‘But it’s filthy.’

  I walked over to the barrier and stood beneath her. Reaching out my arms, I told her, ‘Drop. I’ll catch you. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘But why?’ she asked, peering at me with suspicion.

  ‘Because.’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘Because I’ve got something to say and I need to say it in private.’

  She lurched slightly, drunkenly, to the left. ‘Can’t it wait till we get home?’ she asked. ‘I’m freezing.’

  ‘No, it can’t,’ I replied firmly. ‘Just trust me. It’ll be worth it. You’ll see.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘It better be,’ she said, unsmiling, before reluctantly climbing over the barrier and swinging down into my arms.

  Gently, I lowered her to the ground. ‘Don’t move,’ I told her, quickly taking a couple of steps back.

  Her eyes flickered as she scanned the surrounding area for signs of danger. ‘Hurry up,’ she said. ‘This place is giving me the creeps.’

  ‘What I want to know …’ I began.

  But before I could say any more, my voice trailed off like a car radio in a tunnel. I opened my mouth to speak once more, but again with no success. It was like all the saliva had been drained from me, leaving my tongue as rough and as speechless as a cat’s.

  Rebecca looked me over as she might a collapsed drunk on the doorstep of her favourite designer boutique. ‘If this is meant to be some kind of a joke …’ she warned.

  I shook my head furiously, but still I couldn’t speak. What was going on? I railed internally. Why had I dried up like this? Was it me? I’d made up my mind, hadn’t I? This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? She was my girlfriend of four years. She was beautiful and she was bright. We made each other laugh and the sex was fantastic. And I loved her. Of course I did.

  Was it the thought of starting a family of my own, of finally stepping out from the debilitating shadow of my parents, then? No, security was something that I craved. Or was I simply afraid that Rebecca would say no, then? Was that what my tongue-tied state was all about? Of course, this was something I’d considered. God knew I wasn’t perfect, and if God knew, then I sincerely doubted that Rebecca was going to be very far behind. But if she declined my offer, she declined… . There was nothing I could do about it, and there was certainly no point in letting it put me off asking her in the first place.

  I lowered myself to my knees and knelt down on the ground.

  Rebecca peered at me through the urban twilight. ‘You’re not going to puke, are you?’ she asked.

  Dumbly, I shook my head and watched as she heaved out a sigh of relief. I patted the rough earth before me.

  ‘What?’ she queried, cocking her head to one side as she picked at a fleck of dirt on her jeans. ‘You don’t expect me to get down there with you, do you?’

  I nodded my head.

  She folded her arms across her chest. ‘Forget it. You’re pissed. Now get up before you get bitten by a rat.’

  I sucked air into my lungs. ‘Please,’ I hissed. ‘Please … for me …’

  ‘I must be mad,’ she said, riffling through her bag and pulling out a curled-up copy of Time Out. She leant down and spread it out in front of me, telling me, ‘This had better be good,’ as she knelt down on top of it.

  ‘It is,’ I hissed, seizing her hands in mine. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone looking so beautiful. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone looking so beautiful,’ I told her, tears welling up in my eyes.

  ‘And that’s it?’ she asked, failing to conceal her disappointment. ‘That’s what you wanted to tell me?’

  Solemnly shaking my head, I took a deep breath. ‘I want …’ I started to croak. Then, sliding my hands down over her thighs, I filled my lungs and blurted out: ‘You, Rebecca. I want you …’

  She stared at me with mounting disbelief. Then she stared down at my hands on her thighs. ‘Here?’ she queried. ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I wheezed at her. ‘Right here. Right now.’ My God, this was the biggest thing I’d ever said in my
life.

  I waited with bated breath for her answer and – there – something in my face must have touched her, because suddenly her expression softened.

  ‘Well,’ she said, a twinkle in her eyes, ‘I must admit … the thought of all those people being so close …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘… and those policemen … on their big black stallions … who could catch us at any second …’

  ‘Sorry?’

  But she wasn’t listening. ‘Not to mention the possibility of arrest and incarceration … and …’ – her eyes rolled momentarily backwards – ‘… mmm … handcuffs …’ Lost, I watched in silence as she bit down on her lip in consideration for a couple of seconds. ‘OK,’ she finally decided. ‘You’re on.’

  ‘OK?’ I checked. This was hardly the outright embrace or denial of my proposal that I’d been expecting.

  ‘But it’ll have to be quick,’ she added.

  ‘Quick?’ We were talking about a lifetime of commitment here.

  Then she stood up. ‘Lucky I’m not wearing any knickers,’ she said with a wink, before glancing around excitedly. ‘Where do you want me?’ she hissed. ‘Up against the barrier? Or how about over that mooring post?’ Then, catching my expression, she chastised, ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to chicken out now …’

  Comprehension struck me and, hurriedly, I pulled her back down.

  ‘No,’ I blurted out, ‘you don’t understand. I … I don’t want you …’

  I felt her whole being tense. ‘But –’

  ‘No, I do, but I mean more than that … I mean I want you …’ I explained. ‘I mean now … for ever …’ I hesitated, desperate. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘I thought …’ She shoved her face up close to mine, staring hard into my eyes, as what I was saying finally began to dawn on her. ‘You don’t mean … ?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered. ‘Yes, I do. I want you to marry me.’

  There! It was out. My eyes locked on hers and I awaited her response.