Boyfriend in a Dress Read online

  ‘Shit,’ Phil says, and grabs my mouse from me, and has a go himself, as I press hold again.

  ‘Sorry, did we decide?’ I ask.

  ‘Yep, drinks and dinner, Café Bohème,’ Jules says.

  ‘Cool, I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Can I bring some guys from my office?’ Nim asks.

  ‘Who?’ Jules asks suspiciously, knowing full well that she doesn’t want to run into at least two of them.

  ‘Neither of them,’ Nim pre-empts her.

  ‘They’re nice,’ as some sort of explanation.

  ‘And they work at your office?’ I ask, incredulous. I know some of the guys who work with Nim; they know Charlie.

  ‘Yes, some of them are nice.’

  ‘None that I’ve met,’ I say.

  ‘They’ve just started.’

  ‘Oh, okay, cool.’

  ‘See you later then, I’ve got to go,’ I say, as I see Phil smack the monkey at six hundred miles an hour.

  ‘Cool, byeeeee,’ we all squeal off the phone, trying to go higher than each other.

  ‘Give me that.’ I grab the mouse off Phil, who is looking smug. I smack it a couple more times, but can’t beat his score. He strolls around to the front of my desk, wipes the sweat off his forehead, and throws himself into a chair.

  ‘Are you going out with them tonight?’ he asks, the picture of innocence.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Seven.’ I start going over the photos again, trying to see past the crowned teeth and sunbed tans.

  ‘Can I come for a couple? I’m meeting the boys at eight.’

  ‘Yep,’ I say, and then, ‘these are shit.’ I throw the photos across my desk, lean back in my chair, and sigh. ‘What time is it?’

  Phil checks his watch.

  ‘Ten to six.’

  ‘Have you got any more games?’ I ask wearily.

  ‘Of course, but aren’t we supposed to set up that shoot or something?’

  ‘Shit, SHIT, yes! Well done! Call Tony, get him on the case. I’ll make some calls.’

  I grab my numbers.

  ‘What exactly am I supposed to ask him?’ Phil hasn’t moved from the chair.

  I look at him and feel bad at the prospect of making him work hard for the next hour. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll call him.’ I plug the number into my phone, as Phil closes his eyes in front of me, deciding it’s time for a well-earned nap.

  ‘Out,’ I shout at him and point at the door.

  ‘Alright, darlin’.’ I hear Tony’s Scouse greeting on the hands free and pick up the receiver. ‘I was just about to leave – whattdaya need?’

  ‘Tone, I need a massive favour, hon. A shoot tomorrow. I need mist. For Evil Ghost 2.’

  ‘Not a problem, you tell me how much.’

  ‘And an old lady.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I need an old woman, but I’d rather not pay for her, I haven’t got the cash. Is there anybody that you know – how old is your mother?’

  ‘Not old enough, I’m from Liverpool, remember.’

  ‘Of course, she’s probably younger than me.’

  ‘Pack it in.’

  ‘Okay, but you have to find me some old dear, preferably one without her own teeth, who’ll work for a hundred quid tops tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Not a problem, darlin’.’

  ‘You are a star.’

  I go over the details with Tony for the next twenty minutes, try my best to discuss last night’s Liverpool game with him without sounding bored, make some more calls, and then head for the toilets to sort my make-up out. I catch Phil chatting to the boys at the end of the corridor, playing imaginary cricket shots and laughing. I don’t bother telling him to do what he should be doing: actual work. I’m done for the day.

  At seven Phil and I wander up the road into Soho, dodging tourists and drinkers, completely oblivious to the pace at which everything moves around us, or the gulps of steaming pollution-filled air we are inhaling. It is still hot, but becoming bearable. The restaurant is cool inside, and Nim is already at the bar. I kiss her hello, and Phil looks like he wants to do the same, but she turns back to the barman.

  ‘What are you having?’ she asks over her shoulder, while gesturing with a twenty-pound note at the young French guy behind the bar with a mole on his cheek that looks like eyeliner. These are vain days. Everybody’s caking it on, and moisturizing themselves into a slippery mess that enables us to slide past each other down the street. I can’t remember the last time I saw a real spot on anybody I actually know. Strangers have them, but they don’t count. Hell, even Phil hides his blemishes now. I had to buy him blackhead strips from the chemist because he was too embarrassed to buy them himself. It used to be condoms. The world is spinning differently these days.

  ‘Dry Martini,’ I say.

  ‘Phil?’ she asks, as he shifts uncomfortably, about to reach for his wallet.

  ‘Oh, I’ll have a pint of Stella, thanks.’

  ‘Did you go to the gym?’ I ask, over her shoulder at the bar.

  ‘No, played some monkey-slapping game and then came over here.’

  We sip our drinks, and I catch Phil staring as Nim takes her jacket off.

  ‘I don’t know how you work in a suit in this weather,’ I say as a distraction.

  ‘It’s not so bad, the blokes aren’t even allowed to take off their ties,’ she says, and sips her gin and tonic.

  Phil is chatting to the guys from Nim’s office about last night’s Liverpool game. I could join in, but I’ve done my football talk already today. The boys wear make-up and the girls know the offside rule. Mostly due to the fact that the footballers seem to have got better looking, and the boys need to look like them to get a girlfriend. The icecaps are melting – the sea is the only thing today that is growing less shallow.

  ‘How’s work?’ Nim asks.

  ‘Shit – you?’

  ‘Boring,’ she says, and we move onto more interesting topics.

  ‘How’s Charlie?’ she asks eventually.

  I turn my nose up, but say ‘fine.’ We move on again to more interesting topics.

  Jules turns up late, and we are seated at our table.

  Two hours later, we are lashed on some new cocktail one of the guys from Nim’s work has introduced us to. But it’s the tequila that really pushes us all over the edge – the implication that we got drunk by mistake on some new and peculiar concoction is a lie. We wanted to get drunk, so we drank tequila. There are no real mistakes any more, not where losing yourself is concerned. In every other facet of your life maybe, but the pursuit of oblivion is a knowledgeable one. Nobody is snorting that coke for you. Phil has completely forgotten about his mates, and is falling asleep at one end of the table, while Nim shrugs his head off her shoulder. The whole place is giggling in the end of the day heat, and I start to think about going home. We kiss our goodbyes outside, making the responsible decision not to go dancing on a school night, and Nim’s mates help me put Phil in a cab back to his grandfather’s house in some leafy south-west London road where car insurance is still affordable. I walk to the tube with one of them, Craig, who is a few years younger than I am.

  ‘So, Naomi tells me your boyfriend works around the corner from us.’

  ‘Yep, at Frank and Sturney, he’s been there for a few years, started there straight out of university – like you,’ I say, and hope to hell that this sweet, funny, young guy doesn’t turn out the same way.

  ‘Are you enjoying the job?’ I ask, at the same time as he decides to ask for my number.

  We stop outside the tube and look at each other uncomfortably.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say, and he looks down at his smart City shoes, embarrassed.

  I lean forward and catch him with a kiss, and he is surprisingly quick to react and kiss me back. As we stand on the street, kissing, I feel his tongue and his breath, and let it drag me back five years, out of London, into the country, onto a campus, surround
ed by friends. It is a young kiss, not cynical, not dirty, but the kind of kiss you got at the end of the night back in the days of lectures, of drinking all day on a Wednesday, and taking your washing home to your mum.

  ‘That’s just because of the sun,’ I say, as I pull back and smile, remembering I have grown up since then. He smiles back.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he says, all of a sudden the confident young City thing, stepping into a new world of arrogance fuelled by an ever-growing bank account. He will turn out like Charlie, they can’t help themselves – it’s a breeding ground, almost a social experiment.

  ‘Yep, I’ve got … Charlie.’ The words ‘relationship’ and ‘boyfriend’ stick in my throat and refuse to come out. Neither my head nor my heart will let them.

  I sit on the tube home, drunk, and try not to get upset. I only ever let myself get really upset when I’m drunk. My head flops from side to side, and the heads of all the other drunk people around me, opposite me, do the same. The middle-aged couple who came up to town to see a show squirm in their seats in the corner, and pray they won’t get leaned on, making mental notes not to come again until at least Christmas. It’s our city now, us drunk young things on the tube late at night, it stopped being their’s years ago, when people started to ignore the beggars instead of acknowledging them with a turned-up nose or an incensed disgusted remark. Nobody says anything any more. They are as much a part of life as Switch and internet shopping.

  I phone Nim as I get off the train, staggering in the dark towards my flat.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ she asks straight away.

  ‘I’m just being stupid,’ I say as I wipe the tears away from my face, and try to stop them reappearing immediately in the corners of my eyes.

  ‘It must be something,’ she says, and I can’t help myself saying something stupid.

  ‘I’m alone, aren’t I!’

  I hear Nim laugh slightly.

  ‘How melodramatic, Miss Ellis. Besides, you have Charlie.’

  ‘I don’t “have” Charlie at all. We just keep going, like the Queen Mum. But even she died in the end.’

  ‘Well, then do something,’ she says.

  ‘I will, thanks, hon, I’ll speak to you at the weekend.’

  I fall through my front door, and into bed.

  I should do something.

  Amen to That

  When I was sixteen a kiss was a wonderful thing. The mere idea of pressing my open lips to some boy’s mouth lit a fuse of excitement within me that sizzled its way through my bloodstream, and I could only imagine the joyride that would follow when I realized what to do with my hands. A kiss was a great step forward into the world of people who drove cars and owned their own houses and had babies. I was still learning, still believed I could somehow ‘do it wrong’. A kiss was enough for me then. It was the world.

  At twenty-eight, a kiss just never seems to be enough. Today it’s all about sex. I have sex because I can, I am allowed, I have that house, I drive a car. I know that nice girls only kiss on the first date, but the whole notion of being a ‘nice girl’ is relegated to my teens, when it passed out of my consciousness, and I realized I was perfectly within my rights to go further than that without stigma, because stigma was just sexism, and I am a liberated woman. That’s my excuse at least.

  Sex can be many things, and about many things. It can be animal, fatal, it is political, natural, it is a weapon, it is illegal in some countries, it is about control: there is even some particularly vicious propaganda out there that says it is something to do with love. It is easy to become obsessed with it, and its emotional effects, and the physical realities it can leave behind. I live in a world obsessed with something it still finds it hard to talk about. Religion stamps its ugly muddied footprints all over the sex act for so many of us, and it is this notion that true love waits that muddles my subconscious time and time again. The very fact that I should postpone some random physical act for three weeks because then I will know that it is ‘right’ makes a rebel of me. Do anything too soon and you are cheating yourself, you have low self esteem, you are desperate, you are, in a word, a ‘slag’. I don’t want those rules to apply to me, but still I feel them hanging over my head like the ‘snood’ my grandmother knitted me when I was fourteen.

  I’ve realized recently, as you’ve probably already guessed, that a good Catholic schooling has affected me more than I previously thought. I never labelled my hang-ups before, but now I do and I name them ‘convent school’. Guilt is like a sperm stain on a suede skirt – it shouldn’t be there, you want to get rid of it, but even dry cleaning won’t get it out – basically, if you want to keep wearing the skirt, you’re stuck with it. You can try to ignore it, but accept that it is always going to be there, making everything not quite perfect.

  I feel guilty about everything – about the big things and the small things, the things I haven’t done, the things I should have done. Rationally, I know I should really focus on the actions of my hooded teenage tormentors rather than their words.

  The nuns mostly seemed angry, and I seriously believe it was due to their ‘lifestyle choice’. Their major release of emotion, as far as I could see, was belting out a good hymn. Now I can only manage to hit a high ‘C’ with a little help from the man of my choice, and yet they manage it most days in church, but I honestly doubt we’re feeling quite as good when it happens. Although it’s very possible that there are ‘nun exercises’ that compensate for their chastity and produce the same ‘reaction’ – you can probably even buy the video in Woolworth’s – it’s why they are always so keen to sing everything an octave too high. Bless ’em for trying, I suppose. You’ve got to get your kicks somewhere, and one bonus is that they don’t get itching diseases their way, or mild concussion from an unforgiving headboard.

  But their frustration, or restraint, or choice, or whatever it is, has had a knock-on effect. They managed to get to me at a particularly vulnerable stage in my mental and emotional development, and even though I personally have chosen to pursue a life where sex is allowed, I still feel guilty about doing it the first time, the next time, too many times with too many people, not loving the one I’m with. I can’t help feeling that if only somebody had p-p-picked up these penguins once or twice, I’d have a much healthier sexual mindset now.

  And even though I can admit that, with regard to this particular incident, the incident in question, the sex itself isn’t the only thing I have to feel guilty about, and that there are feelings and emotional repercussions that weigh just as heavily on my mind, it is still a big part of my guilt. No need to hide the truth from everybody, including my mother, but most importantly, Charlie. I could have been so much happier. But I can’t change it now. This is me.

  You wouldn’t know to look at me that I am so terribly mixed-up – my hair is long, my eyes are brown. I burn first, then tan. I stand five feet seven in bare feet. I look perfectly normal, perfectly average. I don’t know my vital statistics. This is the measure of me, I suppose.

  I like ordinary things: red wine, whisky goes down smoothly, Martinis the most. Lychee Martinis are my favourite – swollen with vodka like a juicy alcohol eyeball.

  I like to go dancing, any kind. I have a few drinks and do stupid things. Once at a summer barbecue in the garden of one of my friend’s houses, as we all fought the chill and the need to go inside at nine p.m., I tried to do a front roll over a piece of plastic cord that had been hung between a tree branch and some guttering as a makeshift washing line. We had been drinking since three. It was positioned over paving stones nearly two metres off the ground. I got halfway over and the cord snapped. I fell face down onto the paving, and chipped my front tooth. I still have a lump on the back of my head from that one, which I should probably get checked out. The tooth got fixed the next day obviously; you can see that.

  I wake up early the next day, another wild warm day when you feel like big things are supposed to happen. The sky is bright blue, even at eight in the morning, d
usted with fairy-tale clouds, and the air already smells of cut grass – the community servicers have been out early – and I fight the urge to have ice cream for breakfast.

  I wake up on my own. I spend the first twenty minutes breathing in the heat and the sun and the silence. The phone doesn’t ring, I am left alone, the way it should be on a day like this. Everybody is praying for something to happen to their lives, to whisk them away on the sunshine express to a much better time.

  Instead of ice cream, I light a cigarette, and hang over my balcony which overlooks the communal gardens that nobody uses, in case they have to sit twenty feet from somebody they don’t know. A breeze creeps up, and everything sways, including me. A spider stuck in the middle of its cobweb rocks to and fro, and seems to enjoy it, and the hairs on my arms search up for the sun. I feel it, where I always feel it, in the small of my back, and the heat closes my eyes, and I dream, standing. I breathe warm air, think I hear music somewhere, not here. It is a small bliss. It is a beautiful day. I know something should happen today. It makes me feel giddy. I should do something. This thought snaps me back to reality, and the moment is gone.

  ‘I don’t want to go to fucking work,’ I complain to myself, in a staccato voice, accentuating every word, as if somebody, God, maybe, might hear me and say ‘that’s ok, you don’t have to – take your passport and run away!’ It doesn’t happen, nobody says anything to me, and I sigh, facing the inevitable, and move back into my flat to get dressed.

  The doorbell buzzes while I am pulling on yesterday’s jeans, having the age-old footwear debate in my head as I look at my strappy sandals sitting prettily next to my starting-to-reek trainers: longer legs, or still being able to walk by lunchtime?

  ‘Package for you,’ my intercom says.

  ‘I’m coming down.’

  I button up my shirt as I run down the stairs. The delivery boy is waiting by the door – a kid really, maybe five years younger than me, but a world away. He looks like he has fun in the evenings. He likes his job in that it gives him no hassle, but it is the evenings that are his. A young black guy, good-looking and charming. He smiles, I smile back.