Boyfriend in a Dress (16 page)

There was another thing. Dale. Possibly in London. Dale phoning out of the blue. If I saw Dale, maybe I could … relax again with Charlie. Maybe we could be together now, but as two different people, better people than we were. If Charlie could change, then maybe I could to. I have baggage, issues I need to resolve. The truth is, this weekend, for all his madness, and all his stupidity and stripping, I have felt something for Charlie. And it was new, not the old feelings resurfacing, but new, definable feelings that made me want to get close to him again. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I had fallen in love again …

‘I don’t know, Charlie. I’m not saying never. Things are … different now.’

Charlie turns and looks out at the sea, and I feel sunburn on the back of my neck, and my legs aching from the walk, and my bikini straps digging into the flesh on my shoulders like cheese-wire. I get up from the rock I’m sitting on and stretch. Charlie looks around and stares at me for an age.

‘Shall we head back?’ I ask, holding his gaze.

‘Yeah,’ he says, and I offer my hand to help him up.

He takes it.

We find the coast road – we are both too tired to scramble over rocks now – and we walk in silence, side by side, blinking at the sun, both thinking our own thoughts again, not dreaming of sharing them now. We have opened up to each other more, and it has left a residue of embarrassment, I feel like I have dropped my guard. All the romance that is suddenly racing around my head is foolish, childish. But I can’t shrug it off; it keeps forcing its way back to the front of my mind, and I want it there, it makes me smile. I am so tired of being disappointed; I want to be surprised for a change. Does everything have to be so much of a challenge, does everybody, everything, have to let you down?

I start to hear a twisted tinkling music, and covering my eyes I look into the distance, and see a very small big wheel. It is a funfair, a permanent fixture, a tourist trap belonging to a different time, twenty years ago, when my parents took me on holiday, and we found a funfair, a miniature town, and an adventure playground. My mother held my baby sister in her arms while Amy and I ran around and around, climbing over rope ladders, jumping between tyres, hanging off poles. Around and around, as my parents took a well earned break. I would be wearing some oddity I refused to take off – my white holy communion hat with a swimsuit and trainers. Amy would be wearing her jumper dress, and we would race around the course, with stomachs full of Devonshire ice cream. We would only stop when we were forced, when my parents both needed a cup of tea, and we retreated to our holiday home in the middle of some wooded campsite.

As we walk closer, Charlie hears the music as well, which sounds ancient and sinister now, we have both seen enough horror films where these innocent destinations of fun have turned into psycho hiding death traps. But as we get closer, we can see little kids bobbing in the air on trampolines, squealing with delight, landing and launching themselves on
different parts of their bodies. You can’t walk past something like this.

‘We have to go in,’ Charlie says to me suddenly, with eyes wide.

‘Thank God,’ I laugh at him; I thought he would think me childish.

‘Charlie, you’re not going to flip out at a Punch and Judy show, are you?’

‘No,’ he says, a little too defensively, and I realize I have crossed a line. His madness is subsiding, as his brain allows him to rationalize his thoughts, and he doesn’t want to be reminded of his actions over these last two days. It’s not a joke any more.

We pay our pound entry each, separately, like school kids, and stop to survey what to do, where to go. There is paint peeling off every small building, but in the sunshine it looks charming – it shouldn’t be too new, it makes it just right. We stroll around for a while, watching the parents of kids with too many additives roaming through their bloodstreams telling them to calm down. The parents look exhausted. There is a mirror arcade, and we walk through it, bored after the first mirror which makes me look tall and Charlie look short.

‘Do you want to go on the big wheel?’ Charlie asks, looking around for something to do.

‘It’s not exactly the London Eye, is it?’ I say, and disappoint myself immediately. We are finding it difficult to enjoy these simple pleasures. London is starting to call. We have to manage our expectations. Bigger isn’t always better.

There is a crooked house, but we both eye it suspiciously, not wanting to go in. We are both too big for it now.

We stop in the middle of the fair, and look around, disappointed that we couldn’t make it more fun for each other, ashamed of how boring we both are, of how we must look in each other’s eyes.

‘You know the only thing I really want to do?’ Charlie turns and says to me, and my stomach flips.

‘No …’

‘The trampolines.’

‘No, Charlie, it’ll hurt.’

‘What are you talking about?’ He tugs at my arm.

I give him a look, and then gesture to my bikini top – it’s not exactly a sports bra.

‘Oh right! Just hold them or something!’ He starts to laugh, and drags me over to where the kids are bouncing. We peel off our shoes, and stuff our sunglasses into our backpacks, and wait for a couple of kids to get bored. There are only four trampolines, next to each other, pulled tight over concrete craters. I look at them dubiously – the kids bouncing on them, even the big kids, still weigh at least three stone less than me, and probably six stone less than Charlie.

‘Char, are you sure these are going to hold us?’ My nerves start to tingle slightly.

‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine!’ he says, as two kids are dragged off by their respective fathers who, I swear, are both smiling at me as they gesture for us to have a go. I take a deep breath and, fixing Charlie with an accusatory stare, I step up onto the trampoline. Charlie leaps on with a bounce, and springs high into the air straight away, shouting ‘Come on’ at the world, and laughing, waving with his arms. I feel the trampoline beneath my feet, bending as I take each step. I look around and see both fathers eyeing me at a distance.

‘Charlie?’ I hiss.

‘Come on, just bloody jump, it’s great!’ Charlie yells, as he lands on his arse, and bounces straight back up again.

I take another deep breath, and make sure I am in the middle of my trampoline. What if I bounce off onto the concrete? What if I have a faulty one, and it gives way – would I die from the fall, or from the embarrassment?

I watch Charlie bouncing away, making faces at the kids who stand with their dads watching us, who sneer back at the idiot having fun on something so childish.

I bend my legs and do a baby bounce.

‘Shit,’ I whisper, and stop myself. I am holding onto my bikini top with two full palms.

I try again, and bounce a little more, trying to let go of my self-conscious mind. I close my eyes to ignore anybody looking at me, and then open them again very quickly as I bounce a little higher, scared that I will drift out to the edges. And I bounce, for at least two minutes. I can’t get the height that Charlie gets, because I can’t use my arms – they are clamped firmly to my chest. But I laugh, at the unusual feeling, at Charlie, at the very fact that we are doing this. I watch the world bob up and down, and just as I feel myself getting too high, I tense my legs and bring myself back down to earth. You don’t have to let go all at once. Small bounces are fine for now.

‘I’m knackered,’ Charlie says, and I turn to see him lying on his stomach, staring at me bouncing about in front of him. ‘And I’ve hurt my balls,’ he whispers, and starts laughing.

I stop my bouncing and sit down in the middle of the trampoline. We stare at each other. Is it just because of the bouncing, the redness of our faces? I can’t pull my eyes away from him. We both know what happens next. We have managed, against all the odds of our cynicism, and our anger, and our mutual disappointment, to have fun.

I hear a kid behind me complain to his dad – I want a go, why won’t they get off? – and I say,

‘Shall we go?’

‘Yeah.’

We scramble off, and kids replace us immediately, and start bouncing straight away.

We pull on our shoes, retrieve sunglasses from our bags
and force them onto our eyes, to shield us from the sun, and each other. We head for the exit, and start to walk quickly now, back towards the cottage. We stumble up the incline we edged our way down previously, and Charlie turns and offers me his hand to pull me up the final steps. I take it, and get tugged to the top. I am out of breath slightly, but Charlie doesn’t step back. Our chests graze each other, and I look down rather than look at him. He pulls my sunglasses off, and I sigh deeply, knowing I shouldn’t do this sober. Somebody in the wings should pass me a drink, some old farmer should whizz past on a tractor and pass me a bottle of red wine that I can neck in one. Because sober it’s going to hurt when it goes wrong. But my thoughts are stopped, my whirring mind distracted by Charlie’s lips touching mine. I feel my heart heavy in my chest, and try and catch my breath. It’s like he hasn’t kissed me for years. I can see his half-closed eyes, the blue and the brown, the light and the dark. I feel his hands – one in my hair, one on the bare skin of my back.

The sex isn’t like before.

The rain falls down hard outside, and we are so close in bed, but not touching. The closeness of his thigh to my thigh makes my skin tingle, makes his hairs stand on end. Still we are not touching. We both slipped into bed without speaking, under the pretence of sleeping, and then turned and rolled towards each other. My breathing is fast, his is slow. I can almost feel his lips against mine, but not quite. My body reacts to the heat, and my limbs shake with an involuntary current that presses skin to skin suddenly, and Charlie leans forward and presses his parted lips to mine, slowly moving them around my mouth, letting his tongue creep into my mouth, letting it slide against my own, as we twist heads and hands twist into hair. His lips move down my neck, along my breastbone, my hands cradling his head as he moves it around my breasts, and then everything becomes one. With Charlie’s hands in mine, and his legs between my thighs, and breast to chest, nipple to nipple, hands creeping around and holding my back, hands running down his back, nails slightly grazing the bottom of his spine, finding places to stop, and then moving on, with him on top and me on top and me on my side, and Charlie
behind me, and slowly, slowly, with hands in my hair, and lips on lips again, eye to eye eventually, starting again, it’s all new.

As the rain pelts the window, and we lie thoughtfully side by side, Charlie says, ‘Are you alright?’

‘I’m fine.’

We could go to Sydney – a lot of people start there – or South America: Cuba has become very popular. We could go anywhere, do anything. We could go scuba-diving in the Caribbean, snorkelling in Thailand, on safari in Kenya, we could drive Route 66. We could leave our lives behind, leave the people we have become. We could go and sit on top of mountains, look out at oceans, at seas of buffalo roaming the plains, and palm trees, and deserts. We could wear shorts all year round; we could trek through forests; meditate with Buddhas; taste monkey brains; pick berries in foreign fields; hear languages that sound like symphonies. We could walk, and get the bus, get the train, hire bicycles, fly in helicopters over canyons, charter boats, swim, sail, dive. We could drink, dance, sing, skip our way around the world. We could get carried away.

The train is both exciting and depressing. I lean my head on Charlie’s shoulder and try to sleep, but I am too nervous. I am nervous that I will actually do it, that I will hand in my resignation. That I will phone my estate agent and place an advert to rent out my flat. That I will do all of this with
a man I hardly know, not the man that I have been seeing for the last six years. Because Charlie is different now. I am convinced of that. He has his arm around me. He even smells different, tastes different. His eyes glisten, they’ve stopped dying, just in time, before it was fatal. He is clean and bright and full of hope. He wants to be with me again, and I want to be with him. I want us to be together, talking, looking at a picture postcard view.

There is something I have to do first, and I shift uncomfortably in my seat as I think of it. I need to see Dale. I need to tell him everything, sweep out the cobwebs that have been clouding my judgement, driving Charlie away. I need to resolve everything, before I go away, and now is the perfect time. The train speeds through countryside that seemed so alien to me just a few days ago. Before it was a world of pessimism, of cynicism, of people I would never know. Now I feel like every door has opened up for me – the places we can go, the people we can talk to, the dreams we can experience together are becoming a reality. In just a month we could be gone. I take a sharp breath, and Charlie holds me tighter. Charlie has realized our lives should be better thank God. Just in time. I was falling before, into a trap of monotony, of a dull average life experienced by too many people, but not me, not now.

We get back to London, and I feel elated.

‘I’ll see you later – I’ll get a cab over.’ Then I whisper something in Charlie’s ear, and he smiles at me, surprised.

‘I need to tidy up my flat!’ he says laughing.

‘Yes you do!’ I kiss him softly, and he kisses me, with his hand in the small of my back.

‘Nix, I can’t believe you did this for me. I can’t believe how … lucky I am to have you.’ We stand so close it is a crime not to keep on kissing.

‘You know what, Charlie, I feel like I should be thanking you. I feel like … I don’t know, like you’ve woken me up. I feel like I’ve got something to look forward to! I can’t believe we are going to do this!’

‘We bloody are going to do it! You and me.’

‘Damn right, you and me. Against the world!’ I laugh and kiss him again, and pull away, picking up my bag, climbing into the taxi that has pulled up.

Charlie leans into the open window and kisses me goodbye.

‘I’ll see you later.’

As the cab pulls off, I feel so high, I barely even notice I am back in London, on the way back to my flat. The rain is coming down in sheets, the heat still hangs in the air between the raindrops. I wipe the sweat off my breastbone, and lean back, closing my eyes. I jolt upright as the taxi pulls outside my flat, and I hear thunder. My phone bleeps the arrival of a text.

Don’t be too long, Char xxx

Two hours later, after a long shower, an inspection of my post, a change of clothes, I phone Charlie’s mobile.

‘Can I come over now? I’m all done here.’

‘Of course. I’m just sitting here waiting for you to turn up, you fool!’

I hang up laughing. I’m smiling like a bloody school kid. I take the tube, and stop off at the market up the road from Charlie’s flat to buy flowers and wine.

I get to Charlie’s and let myself in with my key. He is sitting, naked on his sofa, staring straight ahead. I almost drop the wine. I stare at him mouth open, aghast.

‘Charlie?’ I ask uncertainly, ‘are you okay?’ I gulp back tears straight away.

He keeps a straight face for about a second, and then cracks the broadest smile.

‘Just waiting for you, honey!’ he laughs, and my shoulders droop with relief.

‘You bastard!’ I shout and laugh, as I hit him with the flowers, and he pulls me on top of him, kissing me forcefully on the mouth, unbuttoning my cardigan, reaching inside.