Westpoint Tales - JH Williamson & Billy T. Carver, 4

Over the next days, the new arrivals settled into the new homes, their new lives and their new town. Billy was delighted to be there. Well, mostly he was.

Billy loved his granddads and he knew that they loved him too. He even plucked up his courage and told them that he was gay too. Was he sure about that? Yes, he was. They were really cool about it – he knew that they would be. Even so, it was a relief to get that out in the open. Not that anyone would ever want him anyway, but he was glad that his granddads knew and they were okay with it.

Life was good, mostly. He still missed his mum. Hell, he still missed his dad, and he’d been gone for years. It was a strange thing, but he found that his granddad Justin reminded him very much of his lost and adored father.

That was crazy – Billy was Jeremy’s father really, not Justin. But, sometimes, in his mannerisms, the way he talked, the way he smiled, Justin was SO much like Jeremy it was weird. But then, Justin was Jeremy’s adopted father, kind-of. Jeremy must have really loved him. Billy T. certainly did.

To his surprise, he soon found that he loved the old lady too. Kathleen Reynolds was just an old sweetheart really. Underneath her gruff exterior, she was a really, really nice old lady. Billy adored her and so did all the rest of his family. Even the Carvers and the Mathiesons had adopted her as the matriarch of their families.

He had his granddads and his great, great grandmother and all the rest – the host of uncles and aunties and the cousins – dozens of cousins! The Reynolds, the Carvers, the Mathiesons, the Sheridans and all the others. Every day he seemed to meet even more cousins.

They were cool. They were family and they were friendly – but. There was always the ‘but’. They were a sporty lot on the whole, they were all close and comfortable with each other, and they’d known each other all of their lives. Billy was new. He was welcomed, but he was different.

Was he the only gay teenager in this whole town? In the midst of this big, this huge, loving family, Billy was lonely still. He guessed that he always would be.


JH was resigned to his fate. For better or for worse, he was stuck here now; he had nowhere else to go. His grandparents had gone and died on him. First his grandmother and then just a couple of weeks later, his grandfather. His father was all that he had left.

Jon was okay really, for a queer. He was a nice guy and they were getting on well – really well. Even the white hair didn’t look so bad on him. Maybe JH would get used to his own. He’d stopped wearing the wig, but he had his hair cut really short, almost shaved.

He still didn’t understand how a gayboy had come to be his father. Apparently, his mother used to ‘sleep’ with both of them, but DNA tests had shown that Jon was his father. His grandparents had never wanted to talk about that. They didn’t like queers either. Apparently his mother did.

There was another, more compelling reason why he’d stopped wearing the wig. With its straight, black hair and the jagged, pointy fringe that he’d always preferred, he looked far too much like Bobby Lyons when he was wearing it. That was weird!

JH hadn’t met Bobby yet. He’d prefer it if he never did. However, he knew what he looked like – he knew exactly what Bobby looked like. The apartment was full of photos of him; they were everywhere except in JH’s own room. They were all put away when he was at home, but when he was not there, Jon liked to have them around. JH, almost, could envy them their obvious closeness after all these years, but – yuck!

There was one picture that, apparently, was never taken down. It was a painting done from an old photograph taken when they were teens. It showed Jon sitting in a chair with Bobby and his brother Billy hanging over his shoulders and all three of them laughing. Billy was the brother who died, not long after that pic was taken. He was Bobby’s twin.

Anyway, in the black wig, JH definitely did look, sort-of, like Bobby. Maybe it wasn’t so weird; Jon and Bobby were, after all, some sort of distant cousins. The original JH Williamson, old James Hargreaves, was umpteen times, great grandfather to both of them.

The other, scary, thing was that Jon told him that there was a chance, a very slim chance, that it was actually Bobby who was his father. The timing was right, they had all ‘slept’ together and DNA tests were not 100% reliable. Scary. He didn’t want to think about that. JH stopped wearing the wig anyway. He’d put up with the white hair from now on.

He found that he had cousins. Jon got them to come around and introduced them to JH – two girls, (sweet!), and three boys, all teenagers. They weren’t really, actual cousins, (or were they?), they were Bobby’s nieces and nephews, his brother and sister’s kids.

They all went to Westpoint Technical Highschool where he’d be going soon, so JH made an effort. He didn’t really like them all that much, but they were okay. At least they’d be a start – some kids to hang with when he had to go to school.

One of the boys though, he was having nothing to do with! Justine’s 15 year old son, Anthony, was a right little fairy. He was SO gay, JH had no doubts about that and it gave him the creeps the way he kept watching him when he thought he wasn’t looking. Yuck!

He suspected that the kid was queer, and then one day he found out for sure. JH went to the pools for a swim, he loved swimming and the heated pools were great; much better than the cold sea across the road. Besides, it was a good place to check-out the semi-naked chicks.

It was still quite early when he arrived and the place was quiet. He went into the changing-room to shed his clothes and no-one else was in there, which was cool. The open-fronted cubicles in there just had half-doors, just enough to cover the naughty bits if you were shy, which he was.

He was about to go out to the pools, when he heard a noise – a sort of a shuffle and a moan. It came from a cubicle a couple along from his own, so he went that way to leave the room by the other door. It didn’t hurt to know what was going on, like who was doing what, and he was going out anyway. And, yes, he was curious. Queers were disgusting, but they still intrigued him, so he walked along quietly in his bare feet and looking into each cubicle along the way.

They were in the third cubicle – a pair of semi-naked teenage boys were in there, leaning against the back-wall and cuddled close together. They both had the same overly-long bleached-blond hair, one arm each around the other’s naked back and one hand groping inside the other’s swimming trunks.

Their eyes were closed as they kissed, French-kissed, and both were making little satisfied groaning noises. Their open legs and their slender bodies rubbed together. JH stopped and stared with his mouth hanging open. He should have been disgusted, but he wasn’t – he was fascinated. These guys were so getting into it and they were hot! It was the hottest thing that he’d seen in his life

Bloody queers! Well, they weren’t getting him.

It was only as he walked away, adjusting his own swimming trunks, (things were happening down there that should NOT have been happening!), that JH realised that one of those two was his ‘cousin’, Anthony. He knew it!

They were still kissing. He thought that they hadn’t seen him, but as he walked away, one pair of blue eyes was watching him go.

‘Bite me, JH. Williamson!’


Billy saw much the same thing later that same day.

There was yet another party going on, up on the 20th floor of the New Adelphi; the living/dining/entertaining level. The bedrooms were all on the 19th floor, but the living was done up on the 20th.

This level was also cut neatly in two by the dividing wall, separating Justin & Billy’s and Jonathan’s apartments, but when they had a ‘family party’, as they seemed to be always doing, the wall was opened up, combining the two big living rooms into one huge one.

These affairs were pretty tame parties really, no-one got smashed. No alcohol and no drugs at all were allowed. They were just family dinner parties really – huge family dinner parties with music, eating and talking – lots of talking. His granddads’ brothers were there too – Peter and Jay and Daniel and Tony and their wives. He’d met them before, but it was a long time ago.

That night’s party was to celebrate the end of the holidays and the resumption of school. (Pretty strange thing to celebrate, but some of the adults seemed to be delighted).

Granddad Billy had said that there was no need for Billy to go to school. They could get him a tutor, or two, or three. Billy wasn’t having that! He wanted to go to school, where the people were. Granddad Justin said he could understand that.

So, tomorrow, he was going to go to school. Kathleen would take him, in the morning, to enroll in Westpoint Technical Highschool. This was an old family tradition. She always took her grandchildren to enroll them in the schools. Nobody said ‘no’ to Kathleen Reynolds.

Tonight they were celebrating, some more enthusiastically than others. By about 10.30pm, Billy had had enough. He was tired and it would be a big day tomorrow, so he said a quiet ‘goodnight’ to Kathleen and his granddads and slipped away to bed.

No, he didn’t want a hand to get to bed. He wasn’t useless, didn’t they know? They knew that; they just loved him. He knew that too. He kissed and hugged them both and went off, smiling, to bed. He loved his granddads, he loved all of his family. So why did he still feel lonely?

Billy went down in his own personal elevator, (descender?), which delivered him into his bedroom. He didn’t bother turning on the lights. The room was well-lit by the full moon outside.

He picked up the remote from the cabinet by his bed, turned around to close the drapes, and stopped short. There, outside, silhouetted in the moonlight, he could see two of his cousins – two of his boy cousins – and they were making out!

15yo Carl Sheridan and 14yo Peter Reynolds were out there, wrapped around each other and kissing passionately. They were on the quiet, dark, west-side balcony outside Billy’s room. Wow!
He sat quietly watching the show. Their mouths were locked together, their legs were intertwined and their crutches thrusting and rubbing as their hands clutched at each other’s bodies. Wow.

He shouldn’t have been watching them, spying on them, like this. He knew that. But they didn’t know, they were oblivious to everything except each other and he was fascinated. He felt like crying, stupidly sorry for himself. He SO wanted someone to love him like that.

With a deep sigh, Billy lifted the remote and closed the drapes. He didn’t know it, but the motion caused the two outside to jump apart, guiltily. Which was silly, they weren’t doing anything wrong.