He sensed that all was not as it should be even before he got near to the cottage. What was the source of his instinct? Children seem to have a sixth sense that alerts them to adult behaviour that is slightly out of kilter with their normal experience - but then Alan Marshall was not strictly a child anymore. He was at that brink of life when the world at large would still see him has a young 'un, largely ignore his presence and expecting him not to observe, with a more acute and knowing eye, the secrets of the grown ups. Inside however he was a maelstrom of half-grasped knowledge - curious and sexually awakening, watching and observing with a shrewdly mature eye and both critical of and longing to be part of the man's world so vividly displayed around him.

It is an awkward time for any boy, that gangling and ungainly period when clumsiness and self-conscious embarrassment causes them such difficulty. It was even harder for a crippled lad who could not join in the ritual bravado of the other boys as they masked their lack of manhood in aping the rough and tumble of the older men. He could not roll about in mock fighting, climb trees, run wild or stride around and tease the girls. For him there was the added, painful, dawning realisation that even adulthood would not bring him to the place he desired - he would always be the one to sit and watch while life was lived by those who were able-bodied and strong.

Perhaps this was why he was a writer, keeping his secret thoughts and observations in a diary. If he could not participate then as least he had the satisfaction of believing that he was a little above it all by virtue of his intelligence - and he could work out what those lesser mortals could not see for themselves.

Perhaps this was why he had immediately sought out Grace McAlister to be his special friend as if his more gentle and refined nature allowed him to move within a class of people that the rough children of the district would not have suited. He might not impress the girls from his school but he could fantasise about wooing a lady with the courtesy and charm he had acquired from his wide reading.

Perhaps this was why he hung around with East Driscoll, the most virile of the manly men who lived in and around Turalla. He might not be able to compete with the tough boys but the most impressive man of all kept him close. There was reflected glory in that which enhanced Alan's self esteem.

It also allowed him to learn at firsthand about men and how they behaved. 

Alan occasionally wondered why East liked him. Was he just sorry for him? East had a gentle side, was kind to children and animals, had an easy way that did not seem to brush aside anyone as too insignificant to be seen with him. In fact, he seemed to prefer seeking out those less favoured than himself and had a deep mistrust of figures of authority - 'the bosses' as he called them. You never saw East Driscoll doff his cap or grease up to the big hats. That was not his style.

East seemed happiest surrounded by a few local kids as they watched in adoration while he broke in horses or carried out chores around his place. They followed him like a Pied Piper of the valley and fought amongst themselves to help him or catch his attention. Girls and boys alike were equally infatuated with him - probably for different reasons. Alan was shrewd enough to see that the same applied to adults. Men flocked round East Driscoll in the pubs, even though he never seemed to court their attention and women, well, women threw themselves at him and mostly East just laughed and shrugged it off him.

Alan often wondered what East did about that. He knew, because his own burgeoning sexuality was showing him, that men needed 'it'. He knew that they talked about 'it' in guttural crudities and dirty laughs when they were all together. He knew that many of the people of the town were involved in liaisons that were not proper. He was always watching and no one paid his presence any mind as if he were simple as well as handicapped. Alan knew far more than anyone would have imagined.

East Driscoll had no wife, had never had a girlfriend that Alan had met and did not seem to chase the local tarts. Alan wondered if he was not interested in all that. In his hero-worshipping view, he found it hard to imagine that East Driscoll would have the grubby desires of other men, pulling women into dark places and rummaging up their skirts or pleasuring himself in the dark of the night. East was wild and free and far too noble a creature to be plagued by the weaknesses of ordinary blokes.

Alan knew some men liked men rather than women. He had read the stories of the Greek heroes that made this out to be some lofty and glorious kind of love. But he had also heard the scurrilous stories about men who 'stick it up' other men. They were called 'pansies' or 'fairies' and were not real men. There was no way, in Alan's estimation, that East Driscoll was one of these.

Alan did not seem to connect this knowledge with the impact that East's physicality had on him. There were days when he followed East secretly to the creek and watched the young man strip and plunge into the water, cavort with the horses and then lie about naked in the sun. Alan did not wonder at the flush that came to his cheeks when he stared at the broad expanse of East's naked back, the sweet curve of his full, ripe buttocks, the swell of his wide chest, the hair that thickened and speared down his flat belly and the long, thick cock nestled in the thatch of brown curls, hanging over the heavier darker- skinned balls. Alan never suspected that the way his own cock hardened as he observed East naked and displayed, watched him swim and lark about, ride bare-arsed on his bare-backed horses or stop to urinate lazily against a bush or tree, was in fact a sexual moment. He was attracted to East Driscoll as viscerally as he was romantically besotted with the elegantly lovely Grace McAlister.

That morning as he hobbled slowly along the winding path up to East's cottage, he knew that something was up. It was quiet. Too quiet. Although the place was remote and, to a casual observer, often looked as if nothing much was happening, to an experienced eye that was never the case on a working stud. If you stopped and listened, even early in the morning, you would hear a lot of sounds that announced the place: the nickers and whinnies of horses, the barking of a dog, the clang of metal on metal, the sawing of wood, the splash of water, East singing tunelessly to himself as he shaved, the hiss of bacon hitting hot fat in a pan, the whistle of a kettle.

But today, all seemed unnaturally still, as if even nature was conspiring to give a subtle signal to anyone who had the wit to recognise it. It was something Alan had noticed in good literature that he had read - how the setting should reflect the narrative and give the reader a hidden clue as to the nature of what was to come.

The boy stopped to catch his breath; he closes his eyes and listened. The warm breeze blew over him and for an instant he thought he heard a soft cry - but then the silence returned. A languid feeling stole over him. It replaced the gnawing suspicion that he had been feeling lately.

Once or twice he had noticed a rather odd occurrence. It had all begun that day when the ostrich escaped at the train station. East had galloped off giving chase and so had Mrs. McAlister. Everyone had laughed and enjoyed the spectacle of the two of them, the lady with her correct style of horsemanship and East with his natural and loose seat racing against each other, as much as after the bird. Alan had chuckled along with the others until the pair returned empty-handed and Alan saw East hand an ostrich feather to Grace. There was something in the way it was done that struck Alan as meaningful although he could not fathom what it was. The man and woman had exchanged a glance and it had seemed to seer the air between them. Alan had not liked it at all.

Then there had been that night when they had chased the sparrows; East had shortly afterwards chased him and Joe home. Alan could have sworn he'd seen Grace on her horse in the mist that night although when he had looked back, there was no one there. But he could not shake the feeling that his vision had not been playing tricks and that the reason that East had so abruptly curtailed their visit had something to do with Grace McAlister.

He knew the pair met up. He had seen them riding on the plain and even once sharing the same horse, galloping at a wild pace, laughing together. He knew that was an odd thing for a man and woman to do together.

Unless.

Alan had felt a growing annoyance with East, despite his affection for him. For a few days he had kept clear and made no attempt to see his older friend, but that morning he had decided that he was being immature. There was no reason that East Driscoll couldn't be a friend of Mrs. McAlister's as well. After all, he was helping to service her mare - there was business between them, so they had to meet. Grace was a gracious lady and was gay and bright with everyone. He was just being silly because she had been his friend first and he resented the thought that she might prefer the handsome horse-breeder to a boy who couldn't even mount a horse's back.

But there was still something odd about the stillness this morning as he resumed his slow climb to the cottage. 

Standing in the yard outside, Alan looked about him. There was no sign of East. Maybe he was out riding. Normally, the boy shouted to announce his presence but something warned him against it this time. That nagging feeling that all was not quite as usual returned to still his tongue. Instead, he wandered towards the barn, drawn by some instinct that the mystery would be solved there.

The stable door was ajar, swinging softly in the light breeze. Alan slipped inside, careful not to make a noise with his crutch as he entered, although unsure why he was taking such pains to be quiet. The interior was dark and musty, the air thick with the strong scent of animal and hay. His eyes were unaccustomed to the blackness and for a moment he was unable to see anything, relying on his other senses, slightly bewildered by the momentary blindness added to his limited mobility.

A shaft of dappled sunlight streamed in through the broken slats of the wall high above him. The light danced imperfectly as if through foliage; Alan picked his way gingerly to the stalls where the beams were falling. Motes of dust, spores and minute particles of hay hovered in the light and he raised his eyes to bathe them in the glow but the contrast to the inner gloom only served to dazzle him more until his vision swam.

Then he heard a noise. He froze. It sounded like a soft cry, like that of someone in pain, except it was tempered by a note of longing and ecstasy that lingered in its trailing wake. He had never heard a sound quite like it. There was a rustle in the straw, another deeper, more guttural sigh and then a panting breath. Peering over into the neighbouring stall, Alan saw a strange and almost fantastical sight.

At first his brain, already startled by the strange sound, tried to rationalise what he saw as one does when woken suddenly at night. Then odd shapes emerge where in daylight familiar objects stand: the hanging coat becomes a ghostly apparition, the wardrobe with its door open, a giant advancing, the children's toy wedged behind a cupboard, a witch's hat revealing her presence crouched, ready to spring out.

Alan's eyelids blinked as he tried to understand the sight before his eyes. It appeared to be almost like a carving, made of lifelike marble; some incredible being intertwined, with two heads and a multitude of arms, writhing, the spark of life having sprung from the sunbeam that danced upon it. It was made of two fabrics - the one pale marble with a golden sheen, the other deeply bronzed. There were two textures - soft and pliant on one hand and hard and angular on the other.

And then his brain grasped the conundrum. It was a man and woman wrapped together in sexual congress.

Alan had some knowledge of what it was like when copulation happened. He had grown up in a country place where the mating of animals was a common sight. He had also once witnessed the blacksmith, Mr. Thomas, forcing himself on Nelly. It involved a lot of ungainly postures and grunting and sweating like pigs - even for the humans. He remembered Nelly's terrified expression of disgust and the wild eyed lust in the preacher's eyes as he struggled to get into her knickers and pumped away crudely. To Alan it had been little different from the sounds of a dog mounting a bitch in the farmyard and her whines of apparent discomfort.

He had never imagined that such things could look like this.

The woman sat with her back towards him, the ivory of the curving planes that swept from her narrow neck and shoulders on through her tiny waist to the fuller breadth of her sensuous hips, bringing a bead of sweat to his upper lip. She was crouched, straddled in a crude position, the spread of her thighs causing the cheeks of her buttocks to open in a way that made his cock ache and stiffen inside his rough wool breeches. Her head was thrown back as if in anguish, eyes closed, hair tumbling from its careful topknot, neck bared, another smooth sensuous slope revealed.

Beneath her was the man, the antithesis of the woman, rocklike and jagged next to the folding dunes of her soft desert landscape. His body was more concealed by hers but there was still enough visible for Alan to see the contrast. His head was lifted as if in supplication, the sharp angle of his jaw etched in shadow, his nose prominent as he reached for her lips and caressed the smooth curve of her chin with his mouth. His legs, hairy and sinewed, were wrapped about her sleeker thighs, protecting her inside the cocoon of his embrace. His body seemed sculptured from some solid marble, harder and more improbably muscled than even Alan had seen before, as if this moment with a woman had made his solid masculinity even more rocklike than ever.

The position that they had assumed also fascinated the boy. To him, the act of mating was where a male took a female; it was heavy with the familiar messages of male supremacy and female submission. But this couple were not in the usual pose. The man was beneath, legs open, displaying himself vulnerably, in a position where a woman might mock or hurt him. She was likewise exposed but by choice, squatting crudely and flaunting her intimate parts, even lowering herself down upon him. The whole arrangement spoke of equal partners, of willing and unbridled passion where the normal conventions of life were thrown away and these two lovers were acting on pure instinct.

And they were quiet. So very quiet that he had to listen hard to hear the soft exhaling of breath, the gentle sighs, the sudden repressed cry, the deeper moan forced out almost involuntarily. Alan thought men grunted and woman screamed. He never thought that lovemaking could elicit such tender and heartbreaking sounds as these. The boy watched spellbound as the couple gave themselves to each other.

Alan knew that he should not be here. This was an intensely private moment and no one should be a witness to such an act. But he could not tear himself away and he was afraid to move in case he announced his presence by some clumsy motion. His eyes were glued to the man and woman that he most cared about: East Driscoll and Grace McAlister.

When he had first realised what was happening, Alan had felt a dart of jealousy, tears pricking his eyes to see this virile man, who was all he would never be, loving the woman that he longed to touch. But oddly he found that unworthy emotion soon giving way to something else. He somehow felt a part of this act, drawn in by the hypnotic intensity of the place, the scene before his eyes and his bonds to both the participants. He began to disassociate from himself and become a part of them. He was East making love to Grace and, through his vivid imagination, he was allowed to experience this remarkable erotic moment with them.

Without realising it, his hand was stroking his own erection and he absentmindedly slipped his fingers into the opening of his fly to grasp his penis and squeeze in rhythm with the rising and falling of the man and woman.

His brain registered every aspect of the scene in intricate detail, storing the images away for later even as he was drawn into the act in the here and now. The couple were sitting on what he at first took for a blanket and later realised was her long heavy riding coat, protecting them from the prickle of the straw beneath. East's hands were gripping Grace's buttocks, kneading and squeezing the flesh of her arse and the small of her back in the same rhythm as her up and down movement. The horseshoe ring that East always wore drew his attention. It took on a new significance: a branding iron, a wedding band, a sign of possession. East was owning Grace and she was letting him own her, as a horse finally accepts it is broken even as it rears up and proclaims its free spirit.

Then a deeper thrust woke Alan from his reverie to a fuller understanding of the act taking place before him.  He realised that East's cock was erect and deep within Grace, the thought making him tighten his own grip on his turgid member. She was wet and tight, tighter than his hand. Alan shuddered at the imagined sensation and forced his eyes open to watch some more.

They were kissing deeply, using their tongues, sucking and licking on each other's faces. Grace's hands smoothed down East's brawny arm, ruffling through the hair of his forearm and clutching at his fingers before sliding back again, as if she were looking for his support to anchor her to the earth. His fingers held Grace's flesh, letting the softness fall and grabbing for it again, forcing her against his groin as he thrust upwards and she trembled at the action. She pulled on the lobe of his ear and ran her slender leg up and down his muscular, hairy one in an act of sheer sensual pleasure, the tactile feel of his maleness explicit in the way her head fell back and she sighed.

Alan pumped himself and in his head he was East, reaching up for her lips, pushing outwards to go deeper inside, grinding his hips to savour every part of her as she bore down on him until she cried out. Alan could feel himself nearing the end, biting on his own upper lip to stop himself from crying out as he spent himself in a few fast bursts, his semen splattering down the stall to hang dripping like silver threads on the straw beneath. He took a few deep breaths and prayed that they would not hear him.

But East and Grace could hear nothing but the pounding of their hearts as they too neared their peak. Both began to move faster, kiss more frantically, grasp and claw at each other in a wilder and wilder motion, no longer silent but panting and mewling softly. Alan fastened up his pants, weak and shaky from the after effect of his coming, watching with enrapt attention as the man and woman came to theirs. Grace dropped her head, soundlessly cried out and East held her tighter, thrusting harder a few times, his eyes flickering closed as he shuddered into her, moaning tenderly. His lips contacted with her chin, her throat, their lips met fleetingly; she slithered down his body to kiss his neck, his chest, as he kissed her hair and then she laid her head against his thudding heart to calm him.

Grace's eyes looked but did not see. And then they blinked - and saw. The illusion of the moment was shattered in an instant for all three of them as Grace enunciated the name:  "Alan!"

"Christ!" East snatched up his trousers, his nakedness now revealed as he pushed Grace aside into the shadows. Alan saw for an instant the still erect penis, large and swollen, hideously beautiful in its engorged splendour, glistening with the remains of their love. Then East was tucking himself away from sight and dashing forward, his hands clutching the unfastened fly of his pants in his rush to attack the intruder who had sought to invade this private idyll. He was enraged, a different man from the gentle, easy-going horse-breeder, pumped up with testosterone and defending his woman and his own territory.

East grabbed Alan by the scruff of his collar. "What the bloody hell are you doing here? Open your mouth and I'll ring your neck. You understand?" Alan trembled in shock. It was like another man speaking to him than the one he knew.

Grace ran up and laid her arm upon East, gentling him. "Alan won't tell anyone, will you? You weren't to know. And a friend can always be relied upon to keep a secret...can't he?"

Alan nodded, still shaking from the shock of discovery and East's violent response. East was calming himself now, breathing deeply and returning to his senses. "...Did my block there for a minute!" He ran his hand over his hair and smiled ruefully.

"I won't say a word to anyone!"

"You must swear!" Grace's urgent appeal stopped Alan in his tracks. This was grown up business. It was crucial that he acted like a man here and kept the honour code of silence. That would bind them all together; both East and Grace would be forever in his debt.

"Spit on my heart!" And he spat to the side.

"Then that seals the bargain!" Grace whispered and kissed him softly on the mouth.

And the kiss closed the circle. The lips that had just kissed the man who had been making love to her, now touched those of the boy who had watched and imagined himself in his place. They were all three forged together in a unity of secret knowledge and trust. With the taste of another man on her lips, with his scent on her body and in the trickle of his seed even now running down her white thighs beneath the coat she had donned, Grace showed Alan that he was the other partner in this hidden triumvirate of love.

Alan's heart sang with the awareness that he was now a member of this illicit liaison, sharing their experience through the power of the things he knew and had witnessed. He was not on the outside anymore but inside the circle. No more the watcher on the outside in the shadows.

As the couple dressed, Alan opened the stable doors fully and let the sunlight flood in. No more hidden mysteries. 

They all laughed out loud as they went out into the day together, harmony and peace restored between them in their fraternity of silence.