Boyfriend in a Dress (11 page)

I looked back at Dale who was standing with his head down, smiling at the floor.

‘Dale, you don’t have to go yet, if you don’t want to,’ I said.

He looked up at me, still smiling.

‘I have women to bed and small children to upset,’ he replied.

‘Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow, have a good night,’ I said.

‘Yeah, see ya, mate,’ Charlie said, and jumped down off the bed to shake off the crumbs.

‘See ya,’ and Dale span out of the room.

I sat and stared at the door for a minute, until Charlie noticed, and stopped dusting himself down.

‘What?’ he asked, and reached for my hand.

I looked at him, and couldn’t be angry – he would never understand.

‘I feel sorry for him,’ I said.

‘I thought you hated him.’

‘I know.’

I dream I am running away from something, although I can’t remember what. I wake, with a start when I fall off a kerb on Charing Cross Road. It startles me so much I am wide awake. For a moment, as is always the case in an unfamiliar bedroom, I have no idea where I am, and I stare at the wardrobe and the curtains in scared surprise. A moment of terror, and then a moment of recollection, followed by relief. Same old, same old. I roll over, hook the duvet under my leg, and close my eyes. It is already too hot to be in bed, and the sun creeps in from beneath the curtains, lighting up all my stuff dumped under the window in the corner. I can hear a faint ringing somewhere, and realize it’s my mobile phone, deep within my bag. I belt out of bed, naked, and trip over the rug, landing clumsily in a pile of breasts and limbs. I scramble towards my bag, turn it upside down, empty the contents onto the floor and grab for my phone. It could be important, it could be somebody desperately needing me back in London straight away: our old lady in the mists could be suing for sexual harassment because Tony has told her in his native Scouse that she’s done a ‘boss job’, something that has caught me out in the past. It could be an emergency – I want to go
home! I don’t want to be here, I’ve only just woken up and I’m already shattered at the thought of going and seeing if Charlie is up and about, depressed, or worse, doing wild crazy man things.

I flip the phone open, and the screen says ‘anonymous’.

‘Hello,’ I say, out of breath, with half a ring to go before I lose the call to the answerphone.

‘Hello,’ a man’s voice, old, West Country.

‘Who is this?’ I ask – the amount of wrong numbers I get on my mobile is ridiculous.

‘Yes, hello, this is Salcombe Bowls club. Can I speak to Nicola Ellis, please?’

‘Speaking.’ I’m a little confused. I check the clock – it’s late, I’ve slept until ten forty-five and I haven’t phoned work yet.

‘We have a bit of a situation down here, and this is the number the young man gave me. Charles Lloyd said I could contact you.’

My heart is sinking already. I close my eyes to prepare, and hold my head in one hand. ‘Yes, where is he – is something wrong?’ It’s going to be a long day.

‘Well, he’s here. He’s out on the green.’

‘Right, sorry, who am I speaking to?’

‘My name’s William.’

‘Okay, William, what has he done?’ William sounds like a nice man. God only knows what Charlie has done to him.

‘Well, he’s a … buoyant young man, and he’s not in any trouble, I just thought I should give someone a call, and he asked me to call you.’

‘Right, William, what has he done?’

‘Well, he’s out on the green, you see.’

‘On the bowls green?’ I ask, although I don’t know what other green he’d be talking about.

‘Yes, out on the green, and he’s having a lovely time, but he’s refusing to put his trousers back on, and he’s actually
trying to get some of our members to take theirs off, and, you see, I wouldn’t mind, but we have strict dress codes on the green. He should really be in white, but he’s only in his undershorts, and they are black.’

‘He’s taken his clothes off?’ I don’t know why I am repeating this, rubbing my forehead to make this information go in, as I sit stark naked on the floor.

‘Yes, most of them, yes. To begin with, he just insisted on keeping score and shouting out encouragement – we had a couple of complaints from the usual old sticks, but everybody else found it quite amusing and we don’t get many youngsters down here, so in truth, my love, it was actually quite refreshing. But then, you see, he started taking his clothes off every time somebody knocked out, and now he’s down to his undershorts, as I say, and he’s started singing songs.’ Poor William sounds quite apologetic, and I feel the anger rising up inside me. How dare Charlie go and ruin these people’s day with his stupidity and shock value tactics! Poor William has been nominated to phone me and is embarrassed as hell by all of this. I am going to kill Charlie. I am going to break both his thumbs.

‘William, I’ll come and get him. Whereabouts are you based?’

‘On the Salcombe road, just before the beach huts.’

‘Is that just up the road from the Seaview cottages?’ I ask, fingers crossed.

‘Yes, that’s right. Just before you turn to go down to the coast road.’

‘Great, William, I’ll be there in ten minutes. Can you tell him I’m coming for him, and, William, can you tell him I’m angry.’

‘Oh well, I’ll tell him you’re on your way at least. Thanks. Bye.’

I’m fuming. What the hell is wrong with him? For Christ’s
sake, you don’t strip off in front of old people – William probably fought in the war! It’s all very well going off the rails a bit, but you have to maintain some sense of personal responsibility, and you can’t just go around showing no respect for senior citizens in the twilight of their lives. He’s gone too far. I’m going to kick his arse.

I jog down the road in my hanging around the house tracksuit bottoms which I had the sense to stuff in my bag as we hurriedly packed in London, and a vest top I normally wear in bed. I’m wearing my flip-flops with flowers on the front which keep threatening to trip me up. Hair scraped back, sunglasses on, jaw set, in need of a shower, key and mobile in one hand, purse in the other, in case the bowlers need some kind of cash incentive to keep the peace. They may be old, but the old can be cunning. As a rule, I don’t trust them. They are far too knowing for my liking.

I see the bowling club set back from the road, and trying to keep calm, I slow down to a swift walk, and try to work out what I am going to say. He may have completely lost it, in which case I’ll just call an ambulance and keep well back. But if not, if there is even the possibility that his sanity has not completely left him, if he is not dribbling and slapping himself, I am going to rip his throat out. They’ll think I’m his girlfriend – officially, I suppose I still am – and they’ll feel sorry for me. The thing I hate most in the world is pity. I can’t stand it, and Charlie has put me in this position. I don’t understand what’s wrong with him.

I can hear him singing as I open the door to the clubhouse. It’s coming from the back. It’s dark as I walk in and, as my eyes adjust to the light, I head towards the patio doors, where a lot of old people appear to have congregated, like an OAP Persil advert, all dressed in white, pleated skirts, little hats, tank tops over short-sleeved shirts. It amazes me
how much old people can wear in the heat and not sweat – if I wear closed-in shoes and it’s more than seventy degrees, I’m mopping my forehead.

The whole herd turns and stares at me as I walk through them and outside, ignoring their mutterings and remarks. They may not have been bothered before, but they are outraged now. I take a deep breath and stride towards Charlie, who is singing ‘Feelings’ in the middle of the lawn, holding a bowl in each hand and gesturing to the sky with every word. A couple of old men are about twenty paces away from him, talking quietly together. I can see the skin on his shoulders turning red in the sun, and the glow from behind him makes him look almost angelic … almost. Angels generally don’t wear black jockey shorts, not in the pictures I’ve seen at least. I wonder when exactly Charlie went from the epitome of cool to an idiot.

‘I’m looking for William, he called me,’ I say.

‘Yes, that’s me.’ A well-presented old man in glasses and a starched shirt turns towards me. The creases in the front of his trousers seem even whiter than the rest of him.

‘I’m sorry about this. If I take him away, will you guys forget this ever happened.’ I am practically begging them.

‘Well, yes, I suppose,’ he says, looking uncomfortably at Charlie, wondering how the hell I’m going to get the singing crazy man off his lawn.

‘Thanks, William, I owe you a drink,’ I say, and walk towards Charlie. He is singing skywards but out of the corner of his eye he sees me approaching. The singing quietens a little, then stops, his arms out at his sides like a bowling green crucifixion. He looks at me uncertainly, nervously. He knows he’s been bad. He looks like a man, with the face of a guilty child. I feel something in me weaken as I storm towards him. He looks really scared. I get to within two feet, and stop and stare at him.

‘Hi,’ he says quietly.

‘What the bloody hell are you doing?’ I ask through gritted teeth.

‘I was just, I just felt like … I just needed to …’ He trails off.

‘Are you angry with me?’ he asks, and I feel like his mother.

‘No, Charlie, I’m not angry. Exasperated maybe. I don’t understand what you’re doing. I don’t know what to say to you, I don’t feel like I know you, I don’t know what’s got into you. Are you, do you feel like you’re cracking up?’ I ask him quietly, my teeth and jaw loosening, the anger fading.

‘I just wanted to feel like a cloud,’ he says quietly, head down.

‘You wanted to feed cows?’ I ask, incredulous.

‘I wanted to feel like a cloud, I wanted to float away, I wanted to be clean,’ he says, not raising his head, not looking at me.

‘Let’s go back to the cottage.’ I bend down to make eye contact, as he’s still staring at the grass.

‘We’ll have a shower, have some lunch, and have a talk. How does that sound?’

‘Fine,’ he says, without looking at me.

‘Okay, let’s go. I’ll get your shirt, you get your shorts.’

‘Okay,’ he says, and walks over to where he flung his shorts at the side of the green. I walk over and pick up his shirt, and hand it to him. They are both still damp – we had stuffed them in a bag last night, the unshrinkable cotton clothes that had survived Charlie’s impromptu laundry-fest. He starts to walk off.

‘No, Charlie, put them on first.’

‘Oh, okay.’ And he climbs into his clothes.

We walk back past William, and Charlie hangs his head.

‘Thanks, William,’ I say.

‘My pleasure, bye, Charlie,’ William offers, but Charlie just walks towards the clubhouse, head down, ashamed now.

The old people mutter as we push our way through them to the door at the front. I hear their little jibes, and choose to ignore them, until I hear a particularly blue rinse say, ‘She could have brushed her hair.’

‘Alright love, at least I’ve got my own teeth!’ I snap back.

We leave to the sound of geriatric tutting.

I make Charlie promise he will not leave the cottage, and he agrees sheepishly, as I deliver him to the front door and head off in the direction of the village shop. It’s always been the same down here – loaves of bread, but no croissants, chunks of Edam, but no Mozzarella; you check the sell-by date on everything. I manage to cobble together a breakfast slash lunch fit for a loon and his ex-girlfriend – somehow they manage to have a single melon for sale, and two tubs of strawberries that haven’t gone mouldy yet, but my requests for bagels are met with incredulous stares.

I think maybe, with regard to breakfast, lunch, dinner, and ‘supper’, for God’s sake, we’ve got out of hand in London; we expect every meal to be a feast. We don’t just sit down and eat cheese on toast any more. It has to be sundried tomato bread, and three cheeses at least one of which has to have a name whose pronunciation is up for debate, pepper, ground, not just dusted on (God forbid!), and a tub of olives and Feta chunks in olive oil to accompany. And generally we have champagne with it, or mineral water – sparkling, of course. Why can’t we just have Cheddar? What’s wrong with sliced white bread? The world’s gone mad. I live in constant fear of one of my
friends spontaneously crashing at my house one night, and waking up in the morning only to be met with a stale loaf and some two-week-old Anchor butter. For shame!

Charlie has managed to have a shower by the time I get back, and is in his jeans. He dances around behind me in the kitchen as I unpack our food.

I spin round to put water in the fridge, and Charlie jumps back.

‘Charlie, are you ok? You seem a little edgy.’

‘No, I’m fine, I mean, I feel alright.’ He gives me a weak smile and rather than get into it, I carry on unpacking our breakfast.

‘Can I help?’ Charlie darts forward, and picks up a knife and a melon simultaneously.

‘Jesus!’ I jump back, and Charlie looks confused.

‘What’s wrong? I can cut a melon, I’m not an idiot.’

‘I’m not sure, Charlie … do you think you’ll be okay … with a sharp object?’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Fair enough. Look, I’m going to have a quick shower. You cut the melon, but Charlie, if the knife scares you at any point, just put it down and walk away.’

I leave the kitchen, but glance back to see Charlie gingerly cutting the melon at arm’s length.

I’m not even going to think about it.

I grab a towel out of his parents’ airing cupboard. They have at least ten matching towels in different sizes and textures – soft, super soft, want to make love to it soft, want to give birth to it, it smells so good. They are all neatly folded in the airing cupboard, which smells of roses and babies’ heads, not damp or mould. And they come to this house for one month a year. My towels in my flat back in London, in which I live twelve months of the year, are generally damp, on my radiator which isn’t radiating, and in three different colours,
none of them big enough to cover my front and back. The middle-aged can organize their time so much better than the rest of us – it’s either years of practice, or boredom. It’s either part of their strictly adhered to daily routine, or the only thing they have to do.

Blasting away the sweat with a slightly cold shower, I just begin to relax when the door opens, and I hear Charlie come in.

‘Charlie, what the hell are you doing? Did you cut yourself doing the melon?’ I poke my head out of the shower curtain. I don’t want him to see me naked. I can’t remember the last time he soberly saw me with no clothes on. We hide away from each other these days, unless we are too drunk to care, and having sex. I haven’t had sober sex with Charlie in over six months. I haven’t had sex with him at all for two months.

He puts the toilet seat down and slumps down on it.

‘I just felt like talking,’ he says, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.

‘Yes, okay, but Charlie, is now really the time?’ I ask, holding the shower curtain around my neck.

‘I don’t know, I just keep losing myself, like back there at the bowling green. What was I thinking?’ Charlie runs his hands through his hair. He looks despondent.

‘I know, and I do want to talk, but can I get dressed first?’

‘Sure, I’ll get the stuff ready,’ and he mopes out, leaving the door open.

I dash out and close the door behind him, and kick the mat up against it to stop it opening from the outside.

But now my shower is quick; I can’t enjoy the getting clean experience, because I am worried about what he is doing.

I pull my shorts on over still damp legs, and my wet body sticks to the material. It’ll dry in the sun. I put my bikini top on, towel dry my hair, apply concealer, grab my sunglasses,
and head outside. Charlie is lying down on the throw that usually covers the bottom of his parents’ bed; the melon is cut into quarters – not slices. Not chunks, no design of any description. It looks great, it’s the way melon should be eaten, with your hands, juice dripping all over your chin. I sit down on the blanket next to him, but he seems to be dozing. He looks great in just his jeans, with his sunglasses on. His face looks troubled, but the rest of him looks good. I still find him attractive, I still like the look of his body, but it’s like the history we share now coats him with a ‘do not touch’ Vaseline. If he was anybody else, looking that good lying next to me in the sun, I would be distracted. If it were still the beginning. But it’s not like that any more with us, because to kiss him isn’t just to kiss his mouth, it’s to kiss what we were in the beginning, what we became, and what we are now: it’s to open up a body full of issues and accept them pouring into me. Sometimes there are just too many complications for the simple things to be possible, particularly a kiss. It’s a tragedy.

But even without all the history and just dealing with the here and now, I don’t like the person he is any more. This weekend with Charlie being so weak and so confused, it’s confusing
me.
He isn’t a different person at all, he’s just having a minor breakdown, but in a few days we’ll be back in London, and he’ll be whoring about town again, not wanting to have a two-line conversation with me any more. It’s easy to forget it lying in the sun in the middle of nowhere, with the faint sound of the sea ebbing and flowing as a soundtrack. I am still a romantic, God knows how, but Charlie isn’t my knight in shining Armani, he is not hero material any more.

This weekend pretence and the confusion it’s throwing my way makes me hate him slightly, and I ‘accidentally’ spill lemonade on his chest while I am pouring myself a glass, and he jumps up from his daydream. I almost feel bad for
disturbing him, but why should he relax? Charlie isn’t the only one with feelings all over the place. He sits up and crosses his legs like a kid in assembly. I offer him a glass and a piece of melon. He takes it and says thank you. We sit in silence for a while, and the heat makes even the slightest conversation seem exhausting. After half an hour, all our problems drift to the back of my mind, and I begin to think of sunscreen and wrinkles, and the normal things I think of in the sun. Generally, when I think of suntan lotion, I am abroad – being at home doesn’t seem to warrant it – the sun is so rare in this country. I don’t associate ‘holidays’ with England; the people are too familiar, the smell isn’t right. Holidays always smell the same – suntan lotion and moisturizer and chlorine, slight damp and dry heat.

Holidays smell different in the evenings: desperation and sunburn, too much hairspray, and po-faced English girls storming down neon strips, glaring off sleaze filled assaults by the locals, and sternly pretending not to hear the equally sunburnt heckles of their male compatriots who have somehow got lucky, got beer, got sun, got cheap quick sex at four a.m. the night before with an underage girl who has crept out of the villa window while her sangria-filled parents slept off their holiday excesses.

These holidays are pink – be they Spain, any of the Greek Islands, the Canaries. The faces are pink, the Lycra is pink, the drinks are pink. It is not a girly pretty shade, it is not baby pink. It’s the holiday bleached out version of hooker red.

And every conversation you have with a stranger is fuelled with having to say a major yes or no at some point, usually NO! to the opportunists, who can’t take a hint. Every conversation is one rather avoided, and brought to as hasty an end as politeness allows. No I don’t want to talk to you, no I don’t want you to rub cream in my back, no I don’t want to see your menu, or your tan line, or come into your bar no
matter how many shots of cheap local shit you are offering. And no, of course I don’t want to have sex with you – do I look that drunk? Are you mad? Is the sun in your eyes? Can you see me? Now remember what you look like – put two and two together and make fuck off. Of course you rarely say it that bluntly. I try to be polite. I say no thanks very much.

There was one holiday that was different. Spring Break of our American year. There were groups of people going everywhere – Florida Keys, Cancun, party resorts. But Charlie and I just wanted to be on our own and experience somewhere distinct together. We booked a cheap-looking hotel over the internet, and two flights to … San Francisco. It was a surprisingly small city, but fantastic, intimate. And we were the golden couple, getting on so well. Charlie laughed and made me feel loved and admired by this gorgeous man, and I listened to him as he flustered his way through thoughts he had never voiced before, trying to make sense of being a child and feeling loved, but alone. Of people never really wanting to listen to what he had to say, of not being needed, just being seen. It was something that had never occurred to me. I knew what it was like to get admiring glances, to feel eyes following me across a room, but I had never entertained that it was the sum of me, or that anybody would ever feel that it was the sum of me. I have always had something to say, and have always had people to listen. Charlie said he hadn’t. It broke my heart. We don’t generally feel sorry for the ones whose lives seem to be too smooth, too blessed, who genetically struck gold, who have an innate charm that wins the world over at a glance. Who would have thought they were desperate for something else, to feel weighty, and deep, and necessary, and valued as something more? Too many people love them, for any of it to count.

We went to Alcatraz, on our one stormy day, and we wandered around the tiny island with headphones on, listening to
the misery of people’s lives like gossip. We wandered around Fisherman’s Wharf, and strolled with the tourists through Haight-Ashbury, wondering how different it had been when it was Love Street, and people believed in things. We didn’t pretend to understand. We passed the greatest preponderance of same-sex couples wandering down the street holding hands that we had ever seen. It was a very personal city.

We took one very special day, and walked our way from Ghirardelli Square to the Golden Gate Bridge, and watched the sun go down over the Pacific. We skimmed stones and ate a picnic; Charlie dragged me up a hill I never thought I could climb. It was just the two of us, walking all day – a dog tried to hump Charlie’s backpack while we took our shoes off and kicked through the sand of the beach. We found what looked like a Roman monument and stood in the shadows and the sun. We smoked and talked and held hands the whole way. It was young love indeed.

‘Sorry?’ I am roused from my dozing by Charlie mumbling.

‘I wonder what happened to us?’ he says, not looking at me, but taking his sunglasses off, shielding red eyes from the sun with his forearm.

I feel a lump in my throat. I am not good at ‘emotional’. If things aren’t going well, if it’s personal. It always makes me want to cry. Especially if the person I am talking to may be about to pay me some misplaced compliment and tell me that they love me. I either feel awkward or suddenly tearful.

I shrug, with my head down, and make a face that I hope says I don’t know, but covers up my quivering chin.

‘We were great to begin with, in the States. We had a great laugh. And we were in love, weren’t we?’ Charlie knows we were. I nod my head.

‘And I know when we left, well, it wasn’t great for a while, but we stayed together, and we came through it, didn’t we?
We were okay for a couple of years, we wanted to be together, so what has happened to us?’ I am shocked that he has brought that up. We had agreed never to talk about it. We have hardly acknowledged it since it happened.

‘Charlie, I think we just drifted apart. People do! You get jobs, you meet different people, you pay bills. It’s not as much fun as it was.’ It sounds lame.

‘But, Nix, I thought we would last, I really did, if we could get past what happened.’

‘Charlie, I really don’t want to talk about that, ok?’ I snap at him. ‘Fine, so you are feeling shitty, and confused and depressed, but don’t drag me down, this is your crisis not mine, I’m here to help.’ I cross my arms, and then uncross them, fearing tan lines.

‘Nix, you know it’s part of the problem. You know it’s part of the reason we’ve ended up hating each other,’ Charlie says.

‘I don’t … hate you,’ I say, upset, confused. All of a sudden this has become about me.

‘I think maybe you do, a little bit. I hate you, a little bit. We’ve never talked about the abortion, just ignored it, and these things build up inside you.’

I get up, grabbing my cigarettes, and walk away. Angry, tears streaming down the side of my face, I storm into the house, and out the back door, into the garden behind the house. It’s much more cultivated than the front, much neater, much more like an old person’s garden, like the Blue Peter garden. It’s not relaxing at all. You feel like all the ants are marching in line, along the rock borders.