Boyfriend in a Dress

by Louise Kean

  This weekend pretence and the confusion it’s throwing my way makes me hate him slightly, and I ‘accidentally’ spill lemonade on his chest while I am pouring myself a glass, and he jumps up from his daydream. I almost feel bad for disturbing him, but why should he relax? Charlie isn’t the only one with feelings all over the place. He sits up and crosses his legs like a kid in assembly. I offer him a glass and a piece of melon. He takes it and says thank you. We sit in silence for a while, and the heat makes even the slightest conversation seem exhausting. After half an hour, all our problems drift to the back of my mind, and I begin to think of sunscreen and wrinkles, and the normal things I think of in the sun. Generally, when I think of suntan lotion, I am abroad – being at home doesn’t seem to warrant it – the sun is so rare in this country. I don’t associate ‘holidays’ with England; the people are too familiar, the smell isn’t right. Holidays always smell the same – suntan lotion and moisturizer and chlorine, slight damp and dry heat.

  Holidays smell different in the evenings: desperation and sunburn, too much hairspray, and po-faced English girls storming down neon strips, glaring off sleaze filled assaults by the locals, and sternly pretending not to hear the equally sunburnt heckles of their male compatriots who have somehow got lucky, got beer, got sun, got cheap quick sex at four a.m. the night before with an underage girl who has crept out of the villa window while her sangria-filled parents slept off their holiday excesses.

  These holidays are pink – be they Spain, any of the Greek Islands, the Canaries. The faces are pink, the Lycra is pink, the drinks are pink. It is not a girly pretty shade, it is not baby pink. It’s the holiday bleached out version of hooker red.

  And every conversation you have with a stranger is fuelled with having to say a major yes or no at some point, usually NO! to the opportunists, who can’t take a hint. Every conversation is one rather avoided, and brought to as hasty an end as politeness allows. No I don’t want to talk to you, no I don’t want you to rub cream in my back, no I don’t want to see your menu, or your tan line, or come into your bar no matter how many shots of cheap local shit you are offering. And no, of course I don’t want to have sex with you – do I look that drunk? Are you mad? Is the sun in your eyes? Can you see me? Now remember what you look like – put two and two together and make fuck off. Of course you rarely say it that bluntly. I try to be polite. I say no thanks very much.

  There was one holiday that was different. Spring Break of our American year. There were groups of people going everywhere – Florida Keys, Cancun, party resorts. But Charlie and I just wanted to be on our own and experience somewhere distinct together. We booked a cheap-looking hotel over the internet, and two flights to … San Francisco. It was a surprisingly small city, but fantastic, intimate. And we were the golden couple, getting on so well. Charlie laughed and made me feel loved and admired by this gorgeous man, and I listened to him as he flustered his way through thoughts he had never voiced before, trying to make sense of being a child and feeling loved, but alone. Of people never really wanting to listen to what he had to say, of not being needed, just being seen. It was something that had never occurred to me. I knew what it was like to get admiring glances, to feel eyes following me across a room, but I had never entertained that it was the sum of me, or that anybody would ever feel that it was the sum of me. I have always had something to say, and have always had people to listen. Charlie said he hadn’t. It broke my heart. We don’t generally feel sorry for the ones whose lives seem to be too smooth, too blessed, who genetically struck gold, who have an innate charm that wins the world over at a glance. Who would have thought they were desperate for something else, to feel weighty, and deep, and necessary, and valued as something more? Too many people love them, for any of it to count.

  We went to Alcatraz, on our one stormy day, and we wandered around the tiny island with headphones on, listening to the misery of people’s lives like gossip. We wandered around Fisherman’s Wharf, and strolled with the tourists through Haight-Ashbury, wondering how different it had been when it was Love Street, and people believed in things. We didn’t pretend to understand. We passed the greatest preponderance of same-sex couples wandering down the street holding hands that we had ever seen. It was a very personal city.

  We took one very special day, and walked our way from Ghirardelli Square to the Golden Gate Bridge, and watched the sun go down over the Pacific. We skimmed stones and ate a picnic; Charlie dragged me up a hill I never thought I could climb. It was just the two of us, walking all day – a dog tried to hump Charlie’s backpack while we took our shoes off and kicked through the sand of the beach. We found what looked like a Roman monument and stood in the shadows and the sun. We smoked and talked and held hands the whole way. It was young love indeed.

  ‘Sorry?’ I am roused from my dozing by Charlie mumbling.

  ‘I wonder what happened to us?’ he says, not looking at me, but taking his sunglasses off, shielding red eyes from the sun with his forearm.

  I feel a lump in my throat. I am not good at ‘emotional’. If things aren’t going well, if it’s personal. It always makes me want to cry. Especially if the person I am talking to may be about to pay me some misplaced compliment and tell me that they love me. I either feel awkward or suddenly tearful.

  I shrug, with my head down, and make a face that I hope says I don’t know, but covers up my quivering chin.

  ‘We were great to begin with, in the States. We had a great laugh. And we were in love, weren’t we?’ Charlie knows we were. I nod my head.

  ‘And I know when we left, well, it wasn’t great for a while, but we stayed together, and we came through it, didn’t we? We were okay for a couple of years, we wanted to be together, so what has happened to us?’ I am shocked that he has brought that up. We had agreed never to talk about it. We have hardly acknowledged it since it happened.

  ‘Charlie, I think we just drifted apart. People do! You get jobs, you meet different people, you pay bills. It’s not as much fun as it was.’ It sounds lame.

  ‘But, Nix, I thought we would last, I really did, if we could get past what happened.’

  ‘Charlie, I really don’t want to talk about that, ok?’ I snap at him. ‘Fine, so you are feeling shitty, and confused and depressed, but don’t drag me down, this is your crisis not mine, I’m here to help.’ I cross my arms, and then uncross them, fearing tan lines.

  ‘Nix, you know it’s part of the problem. You know it’s part of the reason we’ve ended up hating each other,’ Charlie says.

  ‘I don’t … hate you,’ I say, upset, confused. All of a sudden this has become about me.

  ‘I think maybe you do, a little bit. I hate you, a little bit. We’ve never talked about the abortion, just ignored it, and these things build up inside you.’

  I get up, grabbing my cigarettes, and walk away. Angry, tears streaming down the side of my face, I storm into the house, and out the back door, into the garden behind the house. It’s much more cultivated than the front, much neater, much more like an old person’s garden, like the Blue Peter garden. It’s not relaxing at all. You feel like all the ants are marching in line, along the rock borders.

  I light a cigarette, and breathe it in heavily. I wasn’t ready for that, Charlie has never brought it up, not since the day I asked him not to. I don’t want to talk about it. It happened two months after we got back from America. I wasn’t even going to tell him, but he guessed. You can’t ignore morning sickness. Charlie might think he is getting in touch with his emotions at last, and that’s up to him, but my emotions are just fine, I don’t need him lashing out at me too.

  Then I hear Charlie walk up behind me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I’ve just been doing some thinking. I haven’t thought about anything really, for ages, it’s easier not to. I didn’t mean to drag it all up again.’

  I turn around and smile at him, wiping the tears off my face.

  ‘It’s fine, Charlie, it’s just, you know
I don’t like to … I can’t talk about things like that.’

  Charlie just stares at me, and I can tell what he is thinking. He doesn’t say he actually ‘blames’ me, but he thinks it’s my fault. I don’t think I’m here by accident. I think Charlie is after saving us both.

  ‘Let’s go swimming, shall we?’ he asks suddenly, like it’s the first idea he’s ever had.

  ‘Let’s go down to the beach, it’ll be great. Nix, do you fancy it?’

  It’s about three o’clock. It’s a good time to go swimming. I see him trying to make it right. He is bursting with an old innocence, a need for fun. He isn’t hungover, or silent.

  ‘Sure. Let me grab some towels.’

  He doesn’t move out of the way as I walk past him back into the house, and the hairs on my arms bristle slightly as they brush past his skin.

  We walk down the beach road, both of us with a towel in hand, a couple of feet apart, and we run down the grassy sand to the beach itself. There are a couple of people about, old folks in deckchairs about thirty feet up from us, and a couple of kids with buckets dancing around the edge of the water as it laps their little legs.

  We both run in, and dive under the water, which is cold and slaps us both simultaneously. We come up for air at the same time.

  We make our way out further into the sea, to jump waves, that lap at us to begin with, but then start to carry us into the air with them. Charlie looks back over his shoulder and laughs at me as he gets pulled backwards by the water. I think of San Francisco, I think of the way we used to talk, I look at him laughing and I feel something stirring inside me. I forget where I am, until the wave snatches me and drags me under. My mouth is full of water, my head pushed back by the force of the wave, my legs drag along the bottom, cut and scratched by sand. I feel my limbs twist and unceremoniously I am dumped back on the beach by the sea, now bored with me. I cough and wipe my eyes, feeling sick and shocked by what has happened. Charlie is running towards me, frightened. He dives onto his knees by my side, and stops himself at the last second from hugging me. He jumps up quickly, and then falls onto his knees again, a little further away.

  ‘What happened – I looked around and you were gone!’

  ‘I didn’t time my jump right,’ I say, wanting to laugh now, with relief.

  ‘Jeeesus,’ Charlie whistles and looks out at the sea, then turns back to me. ‘Are you okay?’ He reaches out to touch my arm, but doesn’t.

  ‘I’m fine, Charlie. I just scared myself. That’s enough swimming for me today.’

  I clamber to my feet, relieved that at least my bikini didn’t get dragged off. I feel sand in the fresh cuts on the back of my legs stinging already. Salt is getting into all my wounds.

  Highlights

  It was a month before we were due to leave the States, and I began to feel sad about leaving this town I had been complaining about for the past year. I realized I was in a strangely happy bubble, and when we left of course everything would change. Joleen had even become almost bearable, if I ignored the swearing tantrums, which were less frequent, partly because we had both grown tired of it, but mostly because the end was in sight. Charlie and I were getting along fantastically. We had already agreed that we were going to keep on seeing each other when we got back home – we wanted to make it work. Our universities weren’t that far apart, we could and would carry it on. I wanted to. We were in love, I suppose. Charlie was fun, and we laughed all the time. We were very alike. We didn’t really delve into things, the way we were feeling, and we both liked it like that. He told me he loved me, and I didn’t need to know when or why or how much. That was more than enough.

  If I particularly wanted an intense conversation, I had Jake, or even Dale. He had got a little more serious than usual with this one girl he had been seeing, and I had seen a lot less of him. I was at Charlie’s half the time, he was with his new, almost-exclusive girlfriend, even Joleen had managed to make a new friend, an equally unattractive girl on one of her courses. They went to the theatre together, to see strange contemporary dance pieces with lots of blood and incest. She seemed happier.

  It got so that our little room, previously so claustrophobic and cluttered and stuffy, was frequently empty for hours at a time. On the occasions that I went back there, I could often find myself alone for a couple of hours before anybody showed up, and then mostly it was Dale. We talked about his girlfriend, and how Joleen was taking it quite well, all things considered, and I asked if he really liked this one.

  ‘Well, you know, she’s not you, but yeah we get on.’ He smiled at me and winked, and I laughed back. Only ever in jest these days, the sleaze had stopped altogether.

  ‘What does she look like?’ I was curious.

  ‘Jealous, are we?’ he asked.

  ‘Now, Dale, even if that were true, you know I would never admit it!’ I batted it back to him.

  ‘Well, let’s see.’ He sat down, and put his boots straight up on Joleen’s desk as always, unbuttoned his jacket, loosened his tie. He obviously liked this girl, because he was looking much … cleaner. Instead of staying up all night writing, and then going to lectures in the clothes from the night before, Dale was now frequently going to his girlfriend’s for his bedtime cookies, and his hair even started to look shiny, underneath the gel of his quiff.

  I unpacked my books from the day and was laying out all the requirements for that night’s essay – cigarettes, coffee, Maltesers my mum had sent me from home, and of course pens and paper and stuff. Take That were playing quietly on my CD player, and after at first grimacing, Dale had even started singing along; hearing it as much as he did, now he knew the words in spite of himself.

  ‘Well, she’s very bright.’ He stared off into space, hands together thinking seriously about his answer.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked, looking at him over my shoulder as I placed a highlighter next to a set of black biros.

  ‘No, there’s other stuff. I’m just trying to put it in order.’

  I carried on arranging and then, realizing he had gone quiet, I looked over my shoulder, and caught him looking at me.

  ‘What?’ I asked him, confused.

  ‘Do you know what I like about you?’ he said.

  ‘I thought we were talking about your girlfriend!’

  ‘We are, we are, I’m just saying. You sing the music as well as the words. You sing the instrumental bits as well. Do you realize you do it?’ He looked a little embarrassed as soon as he said it.

  ‘I suppose, kind of, I don’t know.’ I was embarrassed as well. I hoped he wasn’t about to say something serious, and nice.

  ‘Well, it’s the sign of a happy heart, you know,’ he said, regaining his cool.

  ‘Hurrah!’ I said, and pulled at my top slightly, feeling it cling to me a little too tightly.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, shrugging, ‘she’s very sweet. Doesn’t understand jealousy.’ He said it with an admiring look on his face, like he was picturing her in front of him.

  ‘I’ve never understood the point in getting jealous myself. Waste of effort,’ I said, partly because it was true.

  ‘I don’t think you understand jealousy unless it’s part of your make-up. It’s inherent,’ Dale said.

  ‘Maybe, or somebody makes you jealous. Anyway, I don’t get jealous,’ I said conclusively.

  ‘Not even of Charlie, not even if he’s flirting with a cheerleader?’ Dale asked slyly, trying to make me jealous.

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Not on my radar. If he wants to go off with her he can, just means he can’t go off with me again. I’m not going to worry about it.’

  ‘Do you love him?’ Dale asked, suddenly.

  ‘Hang on a minute, I thought we were talking about you. Stop changing the subject!’ I laughed, but turned away, trying a little too hard not to answer.

  Dale went silent, and I could feel him looking at me again.

  ‘Dale.’ I turned round. ‘Pack it in, you know I love him. Alright, now you, do you love what’
s-her-name?’

  ‘Marie. No, I don’t. I like her very much. But I don’t love her. She’s too nice for me. I need somebody a little darker – I need somebody with … a nasty streak.’ We stared at each other for a second too long. I felt like he was talking about me. I felt like he knew that I knew. I pulled at my top again.

  ‘Dale, you think you’re nasty but you’re not. Nobody wants nastiness anyway.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he replied.

  Suddenly it had got very dark outside, and the lights needed to be switched on. The room felt very small, and Dale felt very … close. He got up suddenly and instead of turning on a light, he lit one of Joleen’s candles on her desk.

  ‘I’ve lost my highlighter, I need to get another one,’ I said quickly. We both clocked the highlighter on my desk. I grabbed my keys and purse.

  ‘I’ll see you later on,’ I said, hesitated slightly, and then grabbed for the door.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, as I shut the door behind me.

  I took a large breath as I walked down the corridor, away from the room. I felt something terrible in my stomach. I felt nervous and strange.

  I waited by the bus stop and had a cigarette. I saw Dale crossing the road a little way up, and ducked behind the shelter. He could see me out of the corner of his eye, and I saw him flinch slightly. I walked back to the room. I didn’t see him for a week.

  Swim When You’re Winning?

  Exhausted, shivering slightly, Charlie and I collapse onto our towels.

  ‘I needed that,’ I say, lying back.

  Charlie looks at me strangely, and then turns, not understanding, and smiles at the sun, covering his eyes.

  ‘Do you think it did you some good – cleared your head a bit? You seem a lot more relaxed,’ I say. I am going to get control again. I am helping him out.