Boyfriend in a Dress (3 page)

‘Oh what now?’ I ask, and close my eyes, ready to concentrate on today’s catastrophe.

‘Somebody has called it porn.’

‘What?’

‘It’s been put on the front end of the new
Bristo the
Badger
videos, and some mum has written in and called it porn.’

‘It’s what?’ I say again; I don’t know why, I heard him the first time.

‘Somebody’s put it on the new
Bristo the Badger
video and José’s going mad. He says it’s your fault. And then he asked if you had got me to send him an email from your computer this morning. I said no.’ Phil goes quiet at the other end of the phone.

Evil Ghost: The Return
is going to be the equivalent of an eighteen certificate for television – it will be strictly post-watershed. Needless to say, the trailer that I cut was very much an eighteen certificate. Some young model, who I now have to write into the film, practically naked but for a wet bra, but it’s fine because we would have had one in there somewhere. I spliced in shots from the first film, the one with a decent budget and a film release, the one we didn’t get to make. This is what I do; you’ve got to hook your audience. And we stick it all over our adult comedy videos, our soft porn videos. It raises awareness, so when we finally come to sell the thing, we can say we already have a market. But my audience is not three- to five-year-old kids, or their mums, who stick their pride and joy in front of our bestselling kids’ video franchise,
Bristo the Badger,
for an hour’s peace in the mornings. As usual it has nothing to do with me. Some bright spark in the mastering department, some doped up operations type, has got confused. It’s a publicity nightmare. Not that anybody is going to care so much about that. What José is obviously doing his nut about right now is the fact that it’s going to cost us tens of thousands of pounds to recall all the tapes, and replace the trailer with something a little more three-to-five-year-old friendly. Saying that, I doubt it’s the kids themselves that have complained. More likely some young mum with a rich husband, who gets to sit about all
day thinking about playing tennis, has happened to catch a glimpse of our original
Evil Ghost,
after hearing her offspring having a good old giggle at the naked lady on the television. Again, this is not my fault. Why doesn’t she just take her kid to the park, instead of sticking it in front of a box all morning? I have a feeling they won’t let me send a letter back saying that. And even though José knows it has nothing to do with me, you can bet he is damn well telling anybody who will listen back at the office that it is, because I am the person who doesn’t happen to be there. I am the one out, on his orders, photographing an old bird in smog.

‘Phil, I’m coming back. Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing to do with us.’

‘One last thing.’

‘What?’ Surely nothing else can be wrong.

‘Charlie called.’ I catch the tone of his voice, but ignore it. I am more surprised than anything. Charlie doesn’t call my work any more.

‘Really? Charlie? What did he want?’

‘I don’t know, but he sounded weird. I answered the phone, and he asked me if I was you. Obviously I said no, and he hung up.’

‘That’s not weird, Phil, that’s just him,’ I say. Obviously he doesn’t even recognize my voice any more.

‘Yeah, but he sounded really strange, like he was upset or something.’

‘It’s probably just the coke,’ I say, and hang up. I don’t even know if he still does it. I know he was doing a lot, a couple of months ago. I’ve stopped asking now.

I go over to Charlie’s apartment early, just to get away from José, who is making vaguely disguised accusations in my direction about ‘Badgergate’, as it has already become known by the time I get back to the office. Charlie lives in East London. We live on opposite sides of town – Charlie in his urban wasteland
outer and minimalism inner on one side, and me amongst the trees and families and pubs with gardens, on the other.

If I lived with him, I’d have to see him shagging other women, and that might force me to confront things. I wouldn’t be able to ignore an orgasm in our bed.

I wonder at what point love became so trivial. I wonder when I began to deride my heart, instead of feeding it, when I decided it didn’t matter and wrote it off. I wonder when the loneliness and despair became almost laughable. I wonder when we learnt to dismiss the pathetic who went back again and again to have their hearts trampled on. I wonder when they became ‘pathetic’.

When romance does break through all the walls these days, it leaves me in tears. If people sing in tune, or run the marathon, or exemplify any kind of harmony or commitment it leaves me crying, in private of course. Because these are the things my life lacks, and I cry that I wasn’t more careful to hold onto them.

I wonder why starvation, or racism, are so much more weighty issues, so much less pathetic than the emotional heartburn caused by the one you love trampling all over your feelings, and your heart. Why is this not deemed just as bad as an earthquake? Sure it affects just you, and not ten thousand people, but you can bet your life there is more than one person in the world at any given moment feeling like their world has ended, because they have been unbearably hurt by the one they love. There must be at least ten thousand at any one time. An earthquake for every day of the year. We are told to spend our whole lives looking for real love, and then if we find it and lose it again, we are supposed to underplay it, pull ourselves together, and get on with life.

When did love become a joke?

When did I?

I was at university in America for a year, the autumn of 1995 to the summer of 1996, and so was Charlie, but we were from different universities back home in Britain. I had to walk through the quad to get to most of my lectures – a huge rectangle of grass and crossing paths, of students with backpacks, and haggy-sac games, flicking tiny bean bags off their feet and ankles and heads and shoulders, and smelling of illegal substances and youth. Massive trees spotlighting the season, framing buildings that seemed older than everything else in town. The library was at one end and the theatre at the other, where I had seen a particularly gratuitous performance of
Hair,
students making a big deal of being naked, to prove that being naked wasn’t a big deal. On either side were the humanities buildings – the science buildings were off to one side, supposedly in case of explosions, but mostly because science students don’t mesh well with other students, and there would be too much bullying between lectures.

The day Charlie and I met had been eventful. It was November, and freezing outside. The weather in Urbana-Champaign was a curious set of extremes; ninety percent humidity in
the summer – asthmatics didn’t make it through July – and minus forty in the winter, when the wind chill could freeze up the water in your eyes given two minutes. And either side, in spring and fall, were the tornadoes – green silent skies before a killer wind whipped through town. I strongly believe in the effect of the weather. It makes you do things you normally wouldn’t, it’s the backdrop to all our greatest dramas. More than anything it affects the moods. Bad things shouldn’t happen on sunny days, it’s confusing.

It was an exchange year, with an American student who got to be conscientious in England while I pissed it up in Illinois for three terms. The only downside was that I had to stay in university accommodation, which meant sharing a room with a complete stranger.

And my roommate was trained to kill. This was the thought most prevalent in my mind early on the day I met Charlie. Her face, contorting with rage, her mouth screaming random obscenities, and she was trained to kill: not just chickens after two days of starvation in some mosquito swarm of a jungle, but real people, actual humans, in battle. She had spent two years in the American Army Reserves, and they let her have a knife, and probably a gun, which she had no doubt stolen and kept. She was trained to kill, and in the process of throwing my stuff around the room, beating my bed with her pillow, twisting and snarling at me, and screaming abuse. This was not the first time, but certainly I had never actually feared for my life before. Trained in the art of slitting a man’s throat in the dead of night, and she was very much pissed off with me. I knew for a fact that she was seeing a counsellor. My roommate, Joleen, mentally, medically unstable, able to slit my throat, and barely two feet away from me. The last time she was mad, which wasn’t even this mad, I had been nearer to the door. But on this particular day, I was practically pinned against my debunked bunk bed, while she held the sides of her
head, palms wide, pressing her temples, as if the pain wouldn’t stop, as if the voices wouldn’t stop. Did she hear voices? I’m not sure, but I would never bet against it. J. Edgar Hoover? Probably. He was a psychopath in women’s clothing as well. Like attracts like they say.

Joleen turned to face me, and started screaming. I was petrified.

‘You fucking bitch, you are like a dog on the street, I have less respect for you than a fucking dog on the street, you fucking piece of shit, you fucking bitch.’

She was pretty much repeating this over and over. I don’t know what the voices in her head were telling her, but they were anti-me, that much I deduced.

‘Joleen, simmer down and at least tell me what I have done!’

I tried desperately to keep the situation reasonably calm – no rising to the bait and feeding her fury. I felt it was important not to make direct eye contact with a psychotic, so I looked at her forehead with one eye, while sizing up the door with the other.

‘You can’t use my fridge, it’s my fucking fridge, don’t put your stuff in there, you bitch!’ she screamed back, her face turning a yellowy red, the colour of serious illness.

‘Oh, right.’

At least now I knew why she was angry. She hadn’t said anything before. And it was only some beers to drink while I got ready that night, and an eye mask.

‘Don’t you think you’re blowing this all out of proportion, Joleen? It’s a couple of beers, for a couple of hours. Let’s talk about what this is really about. It’s Dale, right?’

The last time Joleen had actually tried to do me harm was because of Dale. Dale was her friend, her only friend. She loved him, I knew that much. You could tell from every sideways glance, every admiring beam in his direction, every
distracted glazed daydream of what they could be together. But he did not love her. He used her. He used her car, used her soap powder, used her phone. He had a room in our dorm, not two hundred feet away, yet he was never there. He wore Bryan Ferry suits. He quiffed his hair, but rarely washed it. He was a five feet six, nine-stone weasel of a man. He wore second-hand winkle-pickers, which were so badly scuffed at the front it looked like he kicked dustbins for a living. He chain-smoked Marlboro Reds, and he wrote poetry on a bashed-up old typewriter with keys missing. None of his poems contained the letter J, he said, through choice. He was a womanizer, of sorts. He preyed on the insecure; he lured the weak ones with romantic ramblings, and implied sensitivity, and had sex with them when nobody else would. Or else he lucked out and got a cheerleader who was looking for something ‘deeper’ and ‘darker’ and ultimately dirtier. And if Dale looked one thing, it was dirty.

Dale had five women on the go at any one time. They left messages for him on Joleen’s answerphone. The messages weren’t just ‘meet me at six o’clock in the coffee house’. They were nearly always sexual, mostly bordering on the perverse. ‘I want to lick you from the tips of your toes to the tip of your …’ or ‘I want you to dip your fingers in honey and push them up my …’ The challenge was always stopping the message before anything truly disgusting was disclosed. I could make it from one side of the room to the other in a quarter of a second. He enjoyed both sides of the coin – getting them to say things to a machine they would never say to somebody’s face, and having Joleen listen to them after a hard day of lectures and taking the bus because Dale had her car. Sometimes he even had the luck to see her face drop, and witness first hand any dismal light in her fade.

But Joleen loved him anyway. She saw how he treated these women, saw them fall in love with him as he kissed parts of
their body that had never been kissed, whispered things to them that they longed to be true, and then he turned on them. One day he was their hero, the next their only hope, as he told them nobody else would want them, told them how fucked-up they were, how neurotic, how stupid, how insecure, how pathetic, how boring, how unintelligent, how unworthy. Joleen thought he did this for sport, for some Machiavellian fun: in the mixed-up world that was her mind, Dale was some twentieth-century Marquis de Sade, playing games with whores and handmaidens who somehow deserved it.

Joleen looked at me in sheer horror at the audacity of my even saying his name in her presence. Seconds lapsed but time stood still, and then she hit me with the full verbal force of her startling originality: ‘You fucking bitch.’

She glared at me, and I half-expected to see venom fly from the sides of her mouth. This was all a real shame, as despite the hate campaign waged against me since day three, I didn’t dislike her … that much. I felt sorry for her, I wished she’d go out more, I wished she’d see Dale for what he was, but I didn’t hate her. How can you hate somebody that fucked up? Everything she did to me, every perverse stab in my direction, was fuelled by jealousy, and jealousy is a terrible affliction. It hurts its victim most, and I was getting the easy bit compared to what must have been going on in her head. The room was quiet, but the silence itself seemed loud. The threat of impending noise seemed to hang everywhere, in the air around the two desks, our beds, our book-filled shelves, the wardrobes on either side of the door, my shoes kicked off under my bed, the papers on my desk, the photos of her naked scrambling up a tree (I know!) on her desk, everywhere.

The phone began to ring, and we both jumped a little. She was nearest, with her back to it. I didn’t move to answer it. Joleen stared at me, daring me to grab for it, so in one swift
movement she could get me in a head lock and flash her blade in front of my dying eyes while blood oozed from the slit in my throat; she’d claim it was self-defence because I ‘lunged’ towards her. I decided not to move, and let the answerphone get it. It was, after all, exactly this kind of situation that answerphones were created for. The phone kept ringing. We both waited for the sixth ring and the click. We stared at each other and mentally counted, although I swear I saw her fingers folding in one by one, and her lips moving. At last, the answerphone kicked in. A male voice, young but gruff. It was Big John from the dorm upstairs.

‘Dale, if you leave one more death threat on my answerphone, I swear to God I will kick your ass. Get a fucking life!’

Joleen and I both turned and stared at the answerphone incredulously for a moment, before she turned back to face me, but a little less angry, a little more concerned. She was worried for Dale and rightly so. I don’t know what the sick little shit had been up to but, by the sounds of it, it was no good. And more frightening still, for Joleen and Dale at least, Big John’s nickname was not ironic.

‘Don’t do it again,’ Joleen hissed at me, turned and grabbed her keys. I flinched and covered my face – oh the vanity! – but I don’t think she even noticed. She snatched her coat and goose-stepped out the door.

Joleen believed that deep down Dale loved her too. She would come up behind him and hug him, the only real outlet of affection I ever saw her indulge in, at which point he would push her away with absolute disgust. It takes real love to keep coming back for more of that kind of treatment. She saw a twisted black prince – I saw a pretender, intent on making everybody feel as bad as he did about his failed notions of poetic greatness, about rejection from a father who wanted a son with a crew cut and a football in his hand.

And despite his sexual indifference towards her, Dale had long since convinced Joleen that she needed him like oxygen. Every time it started to dawn on her that he was a destructive force in her life, and in fact scaring away any new friends she seemed on the verge of making, he sensed it, and offered her some weak branch of hope that he might actually feel something for her too. She was hooked again. The previous year he had changed his surname from Woodfood to Curse for the devilish connotations. I don’t need to say ‘wanker’, but I will.

I shared my room with Joleen, not through choice, but through a complete lack thereof. I had requested a smoking room, and I had got hers. This was America, after all; they weren’t all lighting up down the corridor. We were a grim novelty at the end of the hall, hippies or beatniks or freaks or arseholes, depending on who you asked. Smoking was our badge, and we wore it like a cloud of smoke around our heads at all times. Nobody had a single room; they were like gold-dust. I was obliged to stay in halls of residence and I had nowhere else to go. It was a battle of wills, mostly. I didn’t realize she was a fruitcake on day one. Maybe day three, when all my pictures got mysteriously smashed during dinner. It was about the same time that Dale started to make advances towards me. He was in our room twenty hours a day and I literally had to ask him to step outside while I changed my clothes, which he found amusing more than inconvenient. I broached it with Joleen.

‘Dale’s here a lot, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s his roommate like? Don’t they get on?’

‘He’s a moron.’

‘Who, Dale or his roommate?’ I laughed, but Joleen didn’t get the joke.

‘His roommate of course.’

‘So do you think he might mind not coming round if neither of us is here – I don’t know, it just makes me feel uncomfortable if you’re not here and I come back, and he’s already hanging out here.’

Joleen stopped sorting her socks, and was completely still. I seriously thought she had slipped into a coma. Or was suffering some minor epileptic fit at least.

‘Joleen?’ I edged forward.

‘He’s got nowhere else to go.’

‘What about his room? He could hang out there, I mean, until you got back at least.’

The conversation was starting to make me fell uncomfortable. Joleen was not being as receptive to my feelings as I anticipated.

‘Joleen?’ I asked again, as she fell silent.

‘Dale stays.’

‘Oh come on, don’t you think you’re being just a little unreasonable?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Sorry?’

I heard her the first time. I shouldn’t have asked her to repeat it.

She leapt up from her bed, dumped the basket of freshly washed clothes on the floor, screamed ‘Fuck off’ at me again, and left the room. I was a little shocked if I’m honest.

I stayed, because it was my room too. In this land of democracy, I wasn’t about to surrender my rights. But mostly, and despite my political high-mindedness, I stayed to prove I could. I should have asked for a transfer in week one, but some weird sense of determination and fairness kicked in, and I decided that I would not be driven out by a fruit loop and her twisted sidekick – Batmad and Dobin.