What Are You Doing In There?

When I was young, my mother started letting me and my brother Gareth catch a bus up to Watford to go shopping together on Saturday afternoons when we were home from boarding school. Gareth is a couple of years older than me and was always the more responsible of us, so I guess she felt I'd be pretty safe under his supervision.

Although my tastes and interests back then were at the opposite end of the spectrum from those of Gareth, it was good to feel "grown up" and to get away for a few hours together. We quickly came to an agreement that he'd spend a couple of hours with me looking in sports, music and clothes shops, so long as I would tag along with him without complaint while he browsed through the shelves of collectable comic and action figure stores.

The first half hour or so of our weekly trip was invariably spent in the same place, though: the bus station gents. Gareth always insisted that he needed the loo as soon as we stepped off the bus and I'd prepare myself for a long stint of boredom waiting for him, wondering how long he was going to take this week. The shortest time he ever took in there was fifteen minutes; the longest – after which he said he'd had a really bad stomach – was two hours.

The bus station gents at Watford back then were pretty squalid and dilapidated. The stink of piss hit you almost as soon as you stepped through the door and the walls were scrawled with graffiti. Worst of all was the fact that the plywood partitions between the stalls had holes hacked out of them, some large enough to get your hand through. I would never have wanted to pull my trousers down in there, knowing I could so easily be observed by other people.

In spite of their poor state, though, the toilets were always busy on Saturday afternoons. Sometimes all the stalls would be in use and Gareth had to stand and wait in a queue of men until one became free. And quite often the trough urinal on the far wall would have five or six men standing alongside each other, squeezing into the small space, with others waiting to take their places when they'd finished.

I once asked Gareth why he always had to use the toilets in the bus station when there were much cleaner ones in the main shopping centre, but he'd said, snappily, "I can't help when I need the loo! The vibration of the bus must make we wanna go, or something!"

I'd said, "Well, the time you spend in there has to come off the time we spend in your shops, not mine."

He'd tried to argue with me, acting like I was unreasonably counting every second he was taking to go to the toilet, but had quickly conceded when I'd threatened to ask mum what she thought was fair when we got home.

I was pretty naοve back then and I accepted, without question, my brother's claim that he needed the toilet after bus journeys – though why I didn't wonder about car journeys not having a similar effect, I'm not sure – and believed completely that Gareth was spending so long in there because it just happened to take him a long time to use the toilet.

After all, what else could he be doing?

One afternoon during that winter, when it was so cold that I couldn't stay for long on the bus station benches, I decided to go and sit in one of the cubicles in the gents to wait for Gareth and bought a magazine from the shop to read while I was in there. The gents were pretty cold too, but at least I would be out of the icy wind.

I chose the stall at the nearest end to the door, locked the ill-fitting door, wiped the toilet seat, and then sat myself down it to read the magazine.

My eye was drawn to a crude sketch scrawled on the back of the door. I knew enough, even at thirteen, to understand that it showed two men having sex together rather than playing leapfrog. I remember thinking that what they doing looked painful and that I wouldn't particularly want to be in either man's place, but I didn't give any thought as to why the drawing might have been made in these toilets.

Just then someone came into the cubicle next to mine, slammed the door shut and, after fumbling with his zip and clothing, began pissing noisily into the toilet bowl. I glanced to my left and noticed that a hole had been carved out of the partition, level with where his cock would be. Intrigued, I leaned across to peer through it.

The man's cock looked very large as he held it between his finger and thumb and it shot a steady stream of piss into the toilet. He'd withdrawn his foreskin to expose a bulbous, helmet-shaped bell-end that looked about as big, on its own, as my entire cock did back then. I was quite fascinated.

He finished pissing, shook his incredible cock a few times and then forced it, with some difficulty, back into his underwear inside his fly.

A few minutes after he'd left, someone else came into the cubicle and I watched him pull a much smaller cock out from his black trousers. It looked similar in size to my own and I might have thought the guy was around my own age if it hadn't have been for his worn, craggy-looking hands.

He finished up quickly and was replaced by a guy wearing jeans and a leather jacket. This guy unfastened his jeans, hitched down his blue checked boxer shorts exposing his white pimpled arse, and sat himself down on the toilet seat as if preparing to take a crap.

I left him to it and got on flicking through my magazine.

After a couple of minutes of silence from his side of the partition, I heard a 'psst' sound from him and glanced down to see him holding a scrap of toilet paper under the partition between our stalls.

Intrigued, I reached down to take it from him, unfolded it, and found that he'd scrawled on it, in blue biro: "What do you like?"

I stared at the message for a while, wondering what he could mean. I turned it over to see if there was further explanation on the back of it, but there wasn't.

Was he expecting to write back about my interest in basketball, Nirvana and clothes? For me to ask him about his interests and whether he had any brothers and sisters?

Unsure as to what was going on – this seemed an unlikely place to try and find pen-friends – I pushed the note between my legs down into the toilet bowl beneath me.

After a couple more minutes, during which his foot darted around beneath my side of the partition as if trying to find a note I'd written in reply, he flushed his toilet and left the cubicle.

A few moments later, I peered through the hole again to see a man in a dark blue tracksuit enter the cubicle and slam the door shut behind him.

I watched him hitch his tracksuit bottoms down a few inches to reveal a pair of dark green briefs with a pretty large bulge. He pulled out his cock, which was very thick, and tucked the waistband of his briefs underneath his balls which looked extremely hairy to me.

He didn't start pissing, as I'd assumed he would, but to my surprise, began masturbating his foreskin back and forth across his moist red-looking bell-end. His cock developed rapidly, thickening to fill his fist and almost doubling in length in the space of less than a minute.

I thought, "Jesus – he must be really horny to need to do this!"

My mother had hissed at me a couple of years earlier never to 'touch myself' except when I was in bed or in the bathroom. I guess she must have noticed me playing with myself through my trouser pocket or something around the time I first discovered how much fun having a cock can be.

The idea that men might wank in a public toilet was actually quite alien to me at thirteen: as absurd as it might sound, back then it seemed just a small step from wanking in the street.

The guy stopped stroking himself and allowed his cock, now looking larger than the first man's cock, to stand upright on its own and to throb intermittently as if demanding further attention.

I was hoping my own cock would one day look as large as his.

Just then, the man bent down and his eye stared through the hole straight into mine.

I jumped straight off the toilet, yanked the lock open and bolted out of the building. I was convinced he was going to chase me as soon as he'd put his cock away. It seemed as if he had to: after all, I'd been spying on him doing a most private thing.

But he didn't follow me.

I walked quickly over to the far side of the bus station and stared over at the door to the gents, ready to duck behind a board of timetables if anyone in a dark blue tracksuit emerged.

The place was busy, with men trotting in and out of the door every minute or so, but no-one in a tracksuit came out.

I sat down on a bench at the far side of the bus station in spite of the cold, and leafed through my magazine keeping an eye on the door of the gents.

After a quarter of an hour or so, Gareth emerged from the toilet accompanied, to my horror, by the man in the dark blue tracksuit – a black haired guy in his early twenties by the look of him. The two of them were saying something to one another.

I assumed, stupidly on reflection, that the guy in the tracksuit was telling Gareth what I'd done. That somehow he knew Gareth was my older brother and was reporting me.

When they'd parted – they only said a few words to another – and the man had gone, I walked over to meet Gareth.

I said, "What did he say?"

Gareth blushed. "Who?"

"The guy in the tracksuit. Did he tell you what happened?"

Gareth shook his head. "No-one was speaking to me. I just came out." He was lying. He could never tell a convincing lie.

"He told you that I was watching him wanking, didn't he?"

Gareth looked horrified. "What?"

I felt myself blush at how ridiculous the story I was about tell was going to sound. "I went into the toilet to wait for you and I saw him through a hole in the wall..."

"Saw who?"

"The guy in the tracksuit."

Gareth looked like he was about to deny he knew who I meant but then seemed to think better of it. He said, "Oh right."

"So what did he say to you?"

Gareth shrugged. "I dunno. He didn't say anything really. Maybe just, 'Some of us have places to get to,' or something. Maybe I was dawdling."

The lie was so obvious as to be derisible, but I let it drop.