Boyfriend in a Dress Read online

  ‘Do you need me to sign for it?’

  ‘Nah, it’s fine.’

  He walks off as I shut the door, saunters back to his van. He looks like he gets a lot of sex. He looks like he has them queuing up. You can tell he is good in bed, in a young excitable way.

  I thought my parcel would be from the book club, but it’s not. It’s the organic meat my father keeps ordering for me and having sent directly to my house. He is worried about contaminants, about what they put into beef these days. If I refuse to become a vegan, like my dad, he is going to keep ordering me ‘clean cow’ as Charlie calls it, which just makes me want to chuck it straight in the bin. Somewhere deep inside of me I know I don’t want to eat meat any more. If Charlie calls our bacon sandwich ‘pig’ I retch. I can’t eat the animal, and hear or say the animal’s name at the same time. Unfortunately I just really like the taste. It’s yet another issue I’m avoiding, I know, but today isn’t a day for confrontations, especially with myself. I just put the meat in the fridge, in the knowledge that it will probably have gone bad, organic or not, by the time I get around to cooking for myself in my own flat. Cooking for one demands minimal effort, and therefore the use of either the toaster or the microwave, and I don’t think I can put steak in either of them. Of course I don’t know for sure.

  My neighbours are out now, going to work, going to the shops. I say good morning to a couple of them, the older ones. I smile at the young guy who has moved into the flat on the first floor. He is tall and broad and looks like he does a lot of sport. He is wearing a suit, which puts me off slightly, and swings a gym bag by his side. He will work out today, at the gym at work, with the other City boys, but in his own little world, picturing his muscles expanding with every bench press. I can picture his lungs, clean and clear, the little hairs swaying, not tarred and blackened like the anti-smoking programmes show me mine will be by now. He’ll sweat a lot, maybe get a little red in the face, exactly the look he’d have after sex; not that I know.

  Walking is only ever a pleasure for me on a day like today, with the sun out and sensible trainers on my feet. Today is a day to smile. The man on the fruit and veg stall by the station makes a remark about melons, which I choose to ignore, my bubble will not be burst this early at least, if at all on a day like today. If I could just wander around all day, in my comfortable footwear, getting a tan, smiling to myself and not having to talk to anybody I know, it would be heaven. But I have to go to work. And even if I manage to make it through the political minefield that has become making TV programmes for a living, it won’t last. Tonight I am going over to Charlie’s, and I will cook for us both, and sit out on his much bigger balcony – with a glass of wine afterwards. It’s amazing how easy it is to ignore a problem. You just don’t say it, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve done it for years.

  I was going to do something. I decided, somewhere in my sleep, to talk to Charlie about us, but on waking, today doesn’t seem to be the right day. I just want to enjoy it. I want the entire day to go without a hitch, without a raised voice or argument. Maybe I’ll leave it and talk to him next week. I’ve been seeing Charlie for nearly six years. I met him in America, but we are both British. It’s not working out. It’s more than a bad patch …

  I work in Covent Garden – it’s a lovely place to be based, apart from all the fucking tourists. I know that might seem a bit strong, but I am smacked by an oversized rucksack at least three times a day, just walking from the tube to work, and back again.

  By the time Tony arrives to drive us to the shoot in a studio in Islington, José has still not turned up at work. He’ll think I was running late and went straight to the shoot, which pisses me off, so I send him a quick innocuous e-mail, asking him when the video for Evil Ghost, the original film, is due for release, so that we can tie up our TV sales. We haven’t even made the film yet. This is the way that it works. By the time we get around to actually making this damn sequel we are going to have about six weeks to finish the thing. We have been teaser trailering for months on the front of all our other videos. And the thing isn’t even made. The marketing comes first, then we film. I don’t know my job title exactly. There are only thirty of us in total. We do a lot of everything, masters of all trades.

  I am left to direct the shooting of the foggy woman myself. She is very sweet, actually – Tony hung up the phone after he spoke to me last night, and caught the first bus he saw. He spoke to three OAPs before he found us this one. She is grateful for the money – she lives on her pension, and after Tony proved he was legitimate, and I don’t ask him how he did this, but it had something to do with carrying shopping and playing gin rummy at her ‘Home’, she agreed to come along. She asks if she can sit behind the fog machine, because her legs aren’t as strong as they used to be, and I almost feel bad saying no, she has to stand. An old woman sitting in a cloud of smoke just doesn’t scream ‘horror’ to me.

  To be honest, there are only so many ways you can shoot it. But the day itself will still cost about five grand. Tony and I spend most of the time sitting outside on the steps of the studio, smoking cigarettes and eating the muffins that were supplied by some eager beaver production assistant keen to impress the television lady. It embarrasses me slightly – I am not quite so impressed with myself. Not fresh muffin impressed. My phone rings, and I check the number before answering – it’s Phil.

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘Nicola, it’s me,’ he says.

  ‘I know, what’s wrong?’

  ‘There’s a problem with the teaser trailer.’ He sounds panicked. It’s rare to hear him this worried, which panics me.

  ‘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 i
t 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?

  Psycho

  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 h
e 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.