Boyfriend in a Dress

by Louise Kean

  ‘Yeah, I feel a bit better,’ he says, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘Do you want to go out for dinner tonight – we could go for an Indian?’ I suggest.

  ‘I’d rather get a takeaway. I don’t really feel up to going out.’ All of a sudden his face darkens at the prospect.

  ‘Sure, we can do that as well. I quite fancy a nap first – I’m knackered. Shall we go back?’ I ask.

  ‘I think I’m going to stay here for a while, if you don’t mind.’ Charlie notices my nervousness at the thought of leaving him here on his own. ‘Honestly, I’ll be fine. I’m not the one who nearly drowned! I just want to do some thinking, on my own …’ He is almost apologetic. I don’t think it is a good idea to leave him on his own, or maybe I don’t want to leave him on his own. All of a sudden it is more comfortable to be with him than not. But I can’t start thinking like that. He is not himself. Once he’s done his thinking we’ll be right back where we started. It’s just the sun, messing with my mind.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure you’ll be ok, I don’t want to act like your mother, but you know, you haven’t been yourself,’ I say, but he sits up and puts his hand on my thigh.

  ‘I’ll be okay, I just want to chill out, give you a break.’ He smiles.

  I get up and shake the sand out of my shorts and towel. I look down at him one more time, and he smiles reassuringly.

  ‘Ok, well then, I’ll go back, have a quick sleep, and then we can get dinner in for about eight.’ He leans back on his towel and closes his eyes, his hands resting on his stomach. I trudge away in the sand.

  Walking back to the cottage, I remember I still haven’t phoned work, and it’s nearly five o’clock. I speed up slightly, and as soon as I get into the cottage, throwing my towel on the floor, jogging into the bedroom, I check my mobile – nine missed calls. I start going through the messages – Phil, Phil, Amy, Nim, Phil, Phil, Jules, Mum, Phil. Oops.

  I call Phil quickly, biting my lip with the guilt as the phone starts ringing.

  ‘Hello, Nicola Ellis’s office, Phil speaking.’

  ‘It’s me.’ I grimace as I say the words.

  ‘Nicola, where the hell are you?’ He sounds panic-stricken.

  ‘I’m in … I’m sick. I’ve been sleeping all day, just woken up. Sorry, is everything okay, have you covered for me? Did I miss anything massive? How did the shoot come out? What’s the situation with the trailer – am I in trouble? It’s nothing to do with me, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘You had Tony in at eleven but I saw him instead, told him you hadn’t turned up – he was pretty pissed off. He said you’d told him the footage had to be done first thing, and he’d had to break his neck getting it done. And you were supposed to have lunch with Jess to talk about promotions, but I cancelled her beforehand. Badgergate has reared up – Publicity are fighting it, but it looks like it might make it into Monday’s papers, and some mum is saying her three-year-old hasn’t stopped crying since. Apart from that, everything’s ok. What’s wrong with you anyway?’ Phil and I don’t really have a boss/assistant relationship. We are too close in age, and I only ever order him to do anything if I am in a really bad mood. I have heard him tell people before that he knows how to ‘play’ me, which I don’t take badly. He kind of does. He knows my moods.

  ‘Women’s things,’ I say, knowing it will shut him up.

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ he practically shouts down the phone. He doesn’t like discussing anything to do with women’s hygiene. He doesn’t even like knowing that we shave under our arms. I had to tell him once what a hymen was. Phil is very private school, very … square-jawed. He has something going on up top, but his concentration is for shit. Work wise, he’s fine if I ask him for something immediate, but anything with any longevity I might as well throw in the bin as soon as I ask him to manage it. But he makes me laugh, stops me getting too stressed, so he stays. Plus he knows the hours I keep, and that I am useless in the mornings, and to always cover for me with José. In return, I let him leave early on a Wednesday for football training. Football is still his life. He is slightly scared of women. He wouldn’t know what to do with his time if he woke up one random morning to find competitive sport had been banned. It’s all very concerning.

  ‘So no real problems then – did José say anything?’ Cunning bastard.

  ‘No, he’s in Spain for that conference.’

  ‘So he is, fantastic. Look, call Tony, apologize to him for me, make sure he didn’t offend our old woman. Have you had a look at the footage – does she look scary?’

  ‘I don’t know – what’s scary? I wouldn’t want to snog her …’

  ‘Jesus, you’re useless. Okay, call Jess and apologize, and ask her to email me her initial thoughts, so we can discuss when I see her. Apart from that, I’ll be in on Monday, anything you can’t cope with before then, just call me, yes? The badger thing, well just make sure Operations make another master up, for when it all kicks off next week, and check it yourself. Actually go down there while they do it, smell the suite, if you even think they’ve been smoking marijuana, take it somewhere else. If José calls tell him I’m ill, but then call me, with his mobile number from Angela. Okay?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Phil says, knowing full well he can leave early tonight if I’m not in the office.

  ‘Have a good weekend, Phil. Remember to do that catalogue breakdown for me as well.’

  ‘Doing it now!’ he almost shouts. He hates it when I remind him to do something more than three times.

  ‘Fine, I’ll go. See you Monday. Don’t leave before five-thirty.’

  ‘See you.’ Phil hangs up.

  I sigh with relief, and feel exhausted again, all my adrenaline spent on the phone making sure I hadn’t landed myself in it with José.

  I lie back on the bed, holding my mobile, closing my eyes. It’s still so hot outside. I like my job; it’s not like Charlie’s, it’s relatively creative. Charlie just pursued the cash, I went after something that seemed, at the time at least, to be a little less mercenary. Male graduates gravitate towards banking, trading etc – it’s where the cash is. Charlie wasn’t particularly interested in computers or the media or medicine or law. He just wanted to make some money. The trouble is, the City doesn’t just mean a different job, it means a different world.

  Charlie is a broker. He sells things apparently. I’m not sure exactly what. I realize now that we have never really discussed his work properly, I have to admit to not being that interested. At first it was all very exciting, when we got our first decent pay packets, as we impressed our bosses, and did reports, and got promotions. But this was in the early days, when we still socialized with our uni friends, and were still essentially the same people we had been at college, before the atmosphere we worked in and the people we worked with had a chance to change us and, as a knock-on effect, to impact our lives. We hadn’t turned bad yet, but our relationship had. I can’t place exactly when our relationship morphed from two young carefree lovers into the train-wreck it resembles now. I remember the time we went away with my sister Amy and her then-fiancé, and some friends, for New Year’s Eve. It was our first Christmas after America, and although we had experienced a difficult few months, we seemed to have passed through it. Of course nothing had been discussed, and little did we know what the eventual outcome would be. But we were still happy to be together, even if our sex had become a little awkward, a little cautious at times, always better when we had a few drinks inside us, and the recklessness set in. When sober, we skirted the issue: although each still dutifully making our way to the other’s student house at weekends, we would lie together, kissing or hugging – sex that would end in an orgasm, but no penetration. Only when drunk would we revert to the bedroom exploits we had so carelessly pursued in the States, crossing back over the line we had passed on our very first night together, unthinking. We didn’t discuss it, even then.

  We trekked up into the middle of Scotland for our December 3
1st, and stayed in two remote cottages that used to be barns or milking houses. They both had log fires, and the boys fought over who got to stoke them the most. Charlie was always there first, but luckily nobody saw the irony except me. The skies seemed huge, as big as those in America, and the silence seemed vast, bouncing off the snow-covered trees and hills of the countryside. We did unusual things, like horse-riding on ice – Charlie fell off, but laughed about it and, after a dramatic silence, so did we. We went clay-pigeon shooting, with a farmer who wore a two bore shotgun on his hip as naturally as we wore our belts. We crunched our way through the white fields, wearing our sunglasses to protect us from the glare of the sun, and stood expectantly in ear defenders that doubled up as earmuffs. I screamed as I shot, but hit the flying discs of metal that flew through the air. We stood in a snow soaked field, and aimed at cold blue skies, and marvelled at the thrill of it, how naturally it came. Charlie and Jake managed to shoot nearly everything. A woman appeared on the horizon, on top of the hill we were aiming at, and I lowered my gun in shock, but the farmer told us to continue because it was ‘only his wife’. Charlie laughed heartily, and I smiled at the farmer, only slightly concerned.

  There was a pub down the road where we went drinking in the afternoon, after our morning’s exploits and fried breakfasts, and we slammed shots and played darts, and downed drinks like the kids that we were. The locals were almost friendly, tolerating our money more than our conversation, and the fact that every day we drank them out of Aftershock and alcopops.

  New Year’s Eve itself was a strange affair. Amy and Andrew cooked all ten of us a meal, and we started drinking pina coladas at six, all dressed up and laughing, and hoping like hell we would be drunk by eight. Jake was there, with his new girlfriend, and two couples who were friends of Amy and Andrew, all teachers, all drinking more than the rest of us to make up for the responsibility they bore every day.

  We started playing very drunken games at nine, and by eleven fifty-five, three of the four teachers were asleep on the sofa, Amy and Andrew were curled up in front of the fire, Jake and his new girlfriend had mysteriously disappeared upstairs to see the New Year in rhythmically with the bongs, and Charlie and I were standing outside in the cold, with our coats on, arms around each other, looking at the sky, leaning on a wall that had been there for centuries.

  ‘Four minutes to go,’ I said, checking my watch and shivering slightly.

  ‘Do you want to go in?’ Charlie slurred.

  ‘No, let’s stay out here. It’s nice, just the two of us.’

  ‘We could always, you know, we could get upstairs in time … Jake seems to have the right idea.’

  I shivered again, and Charlie went quiet.

  ‘Let’s stay out here, it’s more … romantic,’ I said. All of a sudden ‘romance’ had become something to endure, like some Japanese quiz show where they bury you in sand and shine mirrors in your face. Except here it was minus ten and the cold was making my eyes water.

  ‘Three minutes to go.’ I checked my watch again.

  ‘Do you want to move in together, in the summer?’ Charlie asked suddenly, and I gasped in cold air.

  ‘What was that?’ he asked, surprised, turning me around to face him. I leaned against the wall and defended myself.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That gasp – why, would it be so strange?’

  ‘No, I just hadn’t thought that far ahead.’ I tried to meet his gaze, my eyes stinging.

  ‘I have – we could move to London, rent somewhere – we don’t have to buy straight away.’ Charlie shook my arms a little bit, trying to persuade me it would be fun.

  ‘Charlie, it really is still a long way off. I might have to move back to my parents’ for a while, pay off some of these debts …’

  He looked at me for a while, and to avoid his stares, I looked at my watch.

  ‘Thirty seconds to go,’ I said finally, almost embarrassed.

  Charlie looked confused, and to stop him ruining the moment, asking questions I already knew I didn’t want to answer, I kissed him. We kissed for a minute, and I deliberately counted the seconds.

  ‘Happy New Year,’ I said as we pulled apart.

  ‘Yeah.’ Charlie backed away slightly, but then reached out and took my hand.

  ‘Shall we go back inside?’ he asked.

  ‘Happy New Year, Charlie,’ I said again, taking his hand and pulling it slightly, to make him look at me.

  ‘Yes, Happy New Year.’ His eyes met mine briefly, and we walked back inside.

  We went to bed, and hugged for a while, but eventually made our way to separate sides of our temporary bed. I remembered to hug him again, in the middle of the night, and he accepted it in his sleep. But by the morning we had drifted apart again. I suppose that was the start.

  I did move back in with my parents after graduation, pleading poverty, and Charlie found a flat with some blokes he didn’t know in Islington. It became a den of sloth. You stepped in the door, sat on the sofa, and didn’t move for hours. It zapped your will to live. They had a cleaner, who swore at them in Polish for the mess they made, and the fact that it took her nearly the whole two hours each week just to do their washing-up, but she still came back for more. It was before Charlie became so house-proud, surrounding himself with high-tech gadgets and nothing else. His coffee table now has seven remote controls on it. He has a stereo that is wired up throughout the flat, which allows the music to come on in a different room when you enter it.

  I commuted in from Kent, and spent a couple of nights a week at his. But more and more, I felt inclined to catch the last train home, and more and more he filled his evenings, in my absence, with old university friends, but also with new friends, from work. These older guys took him under their wing, because they saw what a charmer he was; he attracted women he didn’t want because he still had me, and they could pick up the surplus.

  And so Charlie’s job became the thing that made him go out on work nights, and eventually to strip clubs disguised as pubs in the East End, fifty pence in a glass for a full strip.

  I moved out eventually, to Ealing, near friends, and my sister and Andrew, now her husband, but on my own, I needed the silence. Charlie bought his own flat, without any protests from me, on the opposite side of town. I bought my flat, without any protests from him, and we began to live our separate lives, punctuated with his arrival at my flat after heavy nights out, singing songs and slurring, tripping up and giggling.

  Only in the last six months, however, did I sense that Charlie had started shagging around. We had grown apart, that was obvious, but to solve it, or confront it, was a bigger issue than I felt able to cope with. If he wanted to leave, eventually he would, and it didn’t need emotional outpourings or digging up of the past on my behalf. And through it all I felt that deep down, I was at fault too, even if I wasn’t the one having sex with other people. I wasn’t a weak woman; I didn’t stay because I had to. I stayed to see if he would stop, if things would get better without us having to thrash it all out. Maybe we could skip forward, forget the past, and get comfortable again. I didn’t confront him about the affairs, the one-night stands, which surprised even me. Maybe it was the confrontation that he actually wanted. Typical me – good at getting angry about anything but our emotions, anything that might make me cry. We still attended the functions together, still did the rounds. But our sex became a drunken formality. And the christenings/weddings became more and more tiring, his behaviour more and more unacceptable. He became the perfect person not to take to a family occasion.

  Of course Charlie got all the laughs and reinforcement from the boys in the City. You could split them into two groups – public school or Essex. Neither particularly was better or worse than the other; they were all obsessed with money and sex, but mostly money. One group was just more eloquent than the other. Not that they would be interested in having a conversation about anything other than money anyway, so the real difference was only whether you cared if they used the
word ‘fiscal’ or not, and it’s never really bothered me.

  My friend Naomi went out with one of the Essex boys once; one of Charlie’s crew. On the third date he had asked her to go back to his place, which in itself was a record in abstinence for a City boy, and she had agreed assuming he lived in a converted warehouse in Spitalfields. But she had somehow ended up on the last train out of Liverpool Street heading towards Southend, a train charmingly nicknamed the ‘vomit comet’.

  She eventually got off the train at Rainham, at which point her escort decided he would actually rather have a kebab than Naomi herself, and she ended up following him around freezing cold streets while his pissed up mates came rolling out of local pubs and greeted him with shouts of ‘Oi Gary, you fuckin’ bender, it’s your round!’

  Naomi finished it the next day. She rang him to tell him it was over, at which point he told her he thought she was frigid anyway. Besides which he was still in love with his ex-girlfriend, Kylie, and he didn’t care whose baby she was having, he would love it like a brother. But essentially the only difference by then between Charlie, and Naomi’s three-date Essex boy was that Charlie pronounced the ‘t’ in ‘slut’.

  I realize I have fallen asleep when a phone begins to ring somewhere in my sleep, and eventually I realize it is my mobile, which has fallen off the side of the bed.

  I answer it sleepily.

  ‘Nicola speaking,’ I slur.

  ‘Sorry, did I wake you?’ Phil asks, matter-of-factly. I rub my eyes, and glance out of the window at the sun setting.

  ‘What? Yes, no, it’s fine. What time is it, Phil?’

  ‘It’s … 7.30.’

  ‘And you’re still in work?’ I ask incredulously, rolling my neck which has gone stiff.

  ‘No, I left about … an hour ago. I just forgot to tell you that somebody called, and he said he was an old friend. Hold on, I’ve got it written down here somewhere. Hold that, mate.’

  Phil passes the phone to one of his mates, and I hear him shuffling some paper, and music playing in the background, and the noise of a London pub on a sunny summer evening. I’m sure this can wait until Monday, but I’m not going to knock him for being conscientious. One of his mates is asking him if his boss is a ‘bird’ and I hear him say yes. He gets asked if he’d do me, and I hear him say ‘shut up, she’s on the bloody phone.’ And then a whispered ‘no’.