Boyfriend in a Dress (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

‘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 31
^st
, 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.