The Complete Stories Read Free Page A

the more odd, I thought, that he began at the same time to latch on to me.
    He had left school by now, was working in a garage and ran with a set of older fellows, all of whom were wild, as he was, and “reputations.” But suddenly we were always in one another's path.
    He would appear out of nowhere, it seemed, on my way back from the pool, and offer me dinks on his bike. And when he exchanged his Malvern Star for a Tiger Cub he would stop, talk a bit, and offer to take me pillion.
    I was wary. I had too often been on the wrong side of Stuart's roughness to be easy with him. It was flattering to be treated, in my own right,as a grown-up, but I did not trust him. He was trying to win me over. Why? Because he had seen the little gap that had opened up between Braden and me and wanted to widen it? To bring home to me that if Braden was odder than any of us had thought, then I had proved to be, like Stuart himself, more ordinary?
    I resented his attention on both counts, and suspected that his unlikely interest in me was a form of mockery. It took me a while to see that mockery was not Stuart's style, and that by seeking me out, a younger boy and the brother of a girl he was sweet on (I learned this amazing fact from a bit of conversation overheard while I was sunbaking on the bleachers at the pool), he was putting himself helplessly in my power; making himself vulnerable to the worst mockery of all. That he trusted me not to take advantage of it meant that I never would of course, but I hated the familiarity with which he now greeted me “Angus, old son,” “Angus, old horse,” as if there was already some special relationship between us, or as if getting close to me brought him closer somehow to her. My own belief was that Stuart McGowan was just the sort of rough, loud fellow she wouldn't even look at. Then suddenly he and Katie were going out together, and he was at our house every night of the week.
    Taking a break from my homework or the book I was absorbed in, and going through to the kitchen to get a glass of water or cold milk from the fridge, I would hear them whispering together on the couch in our darkened front room, and would turn the tap on hard to warn them I was about.
    Or if it was late enough, and Stuart was leaving, I would run into them in the hall: Stuart looking smug but also, somehow, crestfallen, Katie hot and angry, ready I thought to snap my head off if I said more in reply to his “ ‘lo, Angus, how's it going?” than “Hi, Stuart,” and ducked back into my room.
    The truth was, I had no wish to know what was going on between them. I did not like the look of shy complicity that Stuart cast me, as if I had caught him out in something, but in something that as another male I must naturally approve.
    Two or three nights each week he ate with us. I have no idea what he thought of the noisy arguments that marked our mealtimes. Perhaps it attracted him, as I was attracted by the old-fashioned formality I found at the McGowans'.
    Occasionally, to kill time while Katie was helping in the kitchen, he would drift to the sleepout on the side veranda where I would be sprawled on my bed deep in a book. I would look up, thinking, God, not again, and there he would be, hanging awkwardly in the open doorway, waiting for me to acknowledge him and taking my grunt of recognition as an invitation to come in.
    Oddly restrained and self-conscious, he would settle at the foot of the bed, take a book from the pile on the floor, and say, with what I thought of as a leer, "So what's this one about?” The way he handled the book, his half-embarrassed, half-suggestive tone, the painful attempt to meet me, as I saw it, on unfamiliar ground, made me uncomfortable. “You don't have to pretend you're interested,” I wanted to tell him, "just because you're going out with my sister.” On the whole, I preferred the old Stuart. I thought I knew better what he was about. It did not occur to me that what I was reading, and