Boyfriend in a Dress (8 page)

Charlie just sits there, staring at the floor, clutching onto my hand, lean football muscles that regained some of their polish when he started going to his work gym a couple of years ago, now bursting out of a terrible, cheap blue Lycra dress that I bought last summer when I had split my top in a cab on the way to a barbecue. It is an awful dress that didn’t suit me at the time and that I threw off as soon as I got back to Charlie’s that night and have never worn since. Today, stretched over his chest, his thighs, it is apparent he is wearing nothing underneath. The hem skims his hips, but his flaccid third eye is poking out from underneath, resting on the sofa cushion like some whole other person in the room. It’s a distraction, even though I have obviously seen it countless times before. I have held it in my hands, and my mouth, it has been inside me a thousand times, but it doesn’t look right. It looks like a mistake, something I shouldn’t be seeing. Something about it makes me want to recoil. So does Charlie himself. He is certainly not his recent self; a ridiculous, shagging, supremely good-looking drinking monster, aloof, out with the boys, revelling in the shallow, a million miles away from what he used to be, when I fell in love with him. When he fought that
side of his character, when he was unhappy with the world for loving him just because he looked good, and had a great smile. Charlie is living, breathing proof that people change, or give up fighting at least.

‘Jesus, Charlie, if you won’t tell me, what am I supposed to think? How can I help you?’

We are still holding hands and he starts to cry again, as I gaze out at the city, and the evening heat, and the smog mixing with the last rays of the day, landscaping East London. Charlie squeezes my hand tighter, and carries on resting his wet face against it. I make a decision. It’s just a hunch, but I don’t think now is the time to break up with him.

After about half an hour, I realize I have been watching the world get dark out of the window, and that Charlie has stopped crying. Uncomfortably, I feel my hand in his, and we both sense the tension simultaneously. Suddenly my hand is stiff and unyielding. We never hold hands any more. We have dinner sometimes, I cook, we read the papers, we pretend we don’t know what is going on in the other’s head. But still he holds onto me. The blood has dried on his face, and he reaches up and scrapes it away. He catches my eye, and I smile at him nervously. I’m not sure what to do, but he speaks for us both. I don’t turn the lamp on; I just listen.

‘I want to tell you, I need to tell you, what happened.’

‘Fine, Charlie, tell me. I’m listening.’

‘You don’t understand, it’s important that you be the person to hear this – I need to know you understand, and that you can forgive me. More than anyone.’ He has gone from silence to a strange eloquence in one easy step. I am a little anxious, but he can’t be telling me anything I don’t already know. Unless he is gay – I have never entertained that. I shock myself with the thought, purely because this is Charlie, and he has always been so … straight. He doesn’t have the personality to be gay. Maybe he is just a transvestite. I think I
would find it weird, hard to understand, but not unacceptable in the slightest. Whatever floats your boat these days.

‘Charlie, tell me, it can’t be that bad.’

‘You don’t understand, it is big!’ He widens his eyes, as if whatever he is going to tell me is going to blow me away.

‘Charlie, for God’s sake – just tell me! I just want to know now!’

‘Ok, last night … I slept with someone else last night.’

Is that it? That barely even raises my interest – I could have told him that the odds are on it these days. He must be getting his sex from somewhere, his sex drive is ridiculous, and he sure as hell hasn’t had any from me recently.

‘And?’ I ask him, raising an eyebrow, and shaking off his hand. I don’t particularly want to hear the gory details, no matter how unsurprising I find it.

‘And I was out in town with the boys, at a bar. We’d been drinking all day, and I saw this girl, she was blonde.’ I hear my jaw click. He has mentioned the ‘B’ word. He looks at me, uncertain as to whether to carry on, but I don’t think a freight train could actually stop him now. He wants to confess.

‘I fed her some drinks. She came back here. She left about three a.m. I didn’t want her to stay.’

He looks me straight in the eye.

‘I never want them to stay.’ If I look even remotely shocked it is only because it’s the first time he himself has told me. I’ve heard it from everybody but Charlie.

‘She left and I went out on to the balcony, with a beer. It’s been so hot, I couldn’t go to bed, I couldn’t sleep. The sheets needed changing, so I put them in the machine and came out for a beer. It was still so light out. You know how light it can be, with all the street-lamps, and it was like the sun was already up. It was so hot.’ He looks giddy, and closes his eyes, picturing it in his head. This is turning into some kind of love
story – the sun was beating down, I’ve found somebody else – just get on with it! I cross my arms subconsciously.

‘I leaned on the balcony for a while and just watched her go.’ He pauses. I clear my throat to interrupt, tell him not to bother going on, I know where this is heading – he has found somebody else, somebody permanent, but he talks quickly, to stop me butting in.

‘And I saw her walking down the road. She was swinging her arse, still drunk, strutting, looking like a tart in her bikini top.’ A look of disgust sweeps his face, and I am a little taken aback. Maybe this isn’t going where I thought.

‘And I thought at the time that women shouldn’t walk around on their own like that at night. If she’d have asked me, I would have called her a cab,’ he says, like an apology, ‘but she looked confident.’ Charlie takes a deep breath.

‘I saw the guy, a normal guy, a guy from the City, a guy like me. I saw him grab her from behind, spin her around, and hit her, throw her against the wall.’

My mouth hangs open and I say ‘shit’ involuntarily. His words are like exclamation marks, hanging in the air. He is trying, and managing, to impress on me how serious this is. This poor girl has been attacked, and Charlie feels responsible. So this is why he is so all over the place. I blink deliberately to take it in – the world is not safe any more. But as I take it in, Charlie starts talking again.

‘I saw the rage in his face, as he dragged her into the alley. I saw him hit her, and her eye kind of exploded, and went blue. I didn’t know what to do. She fell back against the wall. He wasn’t holding her, he just hit her. But I didn’t know what he would do if I didn’t stop him.’ Charlie’s pupils dilate as he speaks, and so do mine. This is all getting a bit gruesome. Alarm bells are ringing everywhere.

‘I put my beer down, grabbed my keys. They were in my jacket pocket. I didn’t need the jacket because it was still so
hot outside.’ Charlie’s words quicken, as he talks at the pace of the events he is telling. I don’t want to interrupt now. Has he stopped an attack? Has he become somebody’s hero?

‘I went out and pressed for the lift, and the lifts are good here, you know that, and it came right away.’ His hands gesture, as if he is telling an audience of one hundred, and not just me.

‘It was so quiet going down in the lift, apart from that music – music to watch girls go by. It’s been the same music for weeks. I liked it at first but now it’s just starting to annoy me. And all I could think of were those lyrics, I couldn’t get them out of my head, and the girl in the street.’ He pauses suddenly. I gesture with my eyes for him to carry on, and he whispers, through fresh tears,

‘I don’t even know her name.’ How has he managed to make me feel sorry for him suddenly, as he tells me about last night’s antics with another woman? But I do feel sorry for him, somehow. He looks heartbroken.

‘I could see her lying in the alley. There was blood running from her nose, but her clothes weren’t ripped. She was unconscious. I was in front of her, and I tried to wake her up, but she wouldn’t wake up. The guy was gone. She wasn’t dead, because I checked her pulse. She was breathing, she just wasn’t awake.

‘I had lost my mobile again, left it in a cab going to Lloyds, and then to Deutsche Bank, I had so many meetings that day. We had got the Lloyds deal. Four million. That’s why we’d been out. I walked to the payphone, I had never seen it before, but there’s a payphone right by the newsagent’s.’ He points out of the window to prove his point.

‘And I called the police and said that I needed an ambulance.’

‘Good for you, Charlie – good for you.’ I smile at him, and feel a lump in my throat – I am strangely proud. He stopped
something awful happening. He ignores me, he is in full flow, he doesn’t want my praise yet.

‘But I didn’t think it would do any good to wait with her, I couldn’t make a statement, because what if you found out, and then I’d have to admit that I’d slept with her, and then if they had done tests, well, you know.’ Charlie is pleading with me to understand this bit, the bit that signifies she meant nothing to him. I find it hard to swallow, maybe because of the lump in my throat.

‘I came back up here and watched them arrive, a couple of minutes later. They found her, but then the ambulance blocked my view and I couldn’t see anything after that, so I went to bed.’ His last words are like a full stop to everything. He went to bed? I swallow hard, and the lump in my throat disappears. He went to bed! Charlie isn’t looking at me, and luckily, because he would see the look of disbelief on my face – how can he go from a hero to an insensitive arsehole in the space of ten words?

He obviously doesn’t think anything of this, as he carries on, but I feel my back stiffen and my chest tighten at everything he is going to say to me now.

‘But this morning I felt strange, I felt bad. I felt like it was my fault somehow. I felt nauseous.’ Well, that’s something at least. He realizes it was wrong to just bugger off to bed.

‘I got on the tube, but it was so hot. I don’t know why I got the tube; I should have got a cab. There was this old woman, like an old-fashioned secretary, standing next to me and her perfume was so strong it turned my stomach even more.’ He wrinkles his nose. ‘I only had to stay on for a few stops, but by the time I got off, I felt so hot and sticky, and sweaty and sick, and my head was itching.’

Charlie is talking with his whole body now, animatedly,
reliving it all. He is quietly buzzing, and the room, in darkness, doesn’t seem dark at all.

‘I ran to the toilets in the mainline station, but the door wouldn’t open. I could feel the sickness rising up my throat, and I tried to hold it down, while I barged the door. But I felt so weak and hot. I got it open on the fourth go, but then this terrible smell came out.’ Charlie puts his hand over his mouth and I think he is going to be sick when he gags. I pull away slightly, and move my feet out of firing distance.

But from behind his hand, he continues. ‘I had never smelt anything like it, and there was this guy, just slumped into the dirty sink. He was stiff as a board. His face was blue, and his fingers were all twisted at weird angles.’

‘Jesus,’ I say again, completely involuntarily.

Charlie hangs his head in shame. ‘I threw up all over him.’

The thought of it makes him retch again.

‘Somebody shouted out, and then people started coming, the station attendants, all holding their noses, their eyes watering from the smell of my sick and his death. I had to get away, and I pushed past the guard and up the escalators, and outside.’

We both catch our breath – Charlie has certainly had a terrible day. I rub the back of my neck, and try and unknot the tension that has built in the last twenty minutes listening to Charlie’s story.

‘What happened then?’ I ask, hungry for more dreadful gossip.

‘I thought I felt better – I got to work and had some water, but then some guy, Piers, from the backroom, just some fucking research guy, he made a crack about me having thrown up on my suit. I had been sick on the bottom of my Armani trousers. Sick all over them. They told me to cool off, after I hit him, so I came home.’

‘You hit somebody at work?’ I ask, incredulous. Charlie would never normally do anything to jeopardize his work – he lives for his work.

‘Yeah, I did – I’m not proud of it! Anyway, I tried to change but I couldn’t find anything. Everything needed washing.’ Charlie turns and looks at the kitchen behind him, and then looks back at me, gesturing behind him. ‘I started washing all my clothes.’

He sounds like a child who has been caught doing something they shouldn’t, getting his nice, expensive, dry-clean only work suits all wet. I look towards the kitchen and sure enough the floor is covered with water, and all of Charlie’s suits are spread, sopping wet, across the floor.

‘This dress was the only thing I could find, that didn’t need cleaning. You must have left it here one night. I don’t know, it was here, so I put it on.’

‘Charlie, stop!’ I put a hand up. ‘Charlie, this is all absolutely awful, don’t get me wrong – but the dress? That bit I don’t get – why put on a dress?’ I search his face for an answer, but he looks at me with impatience.

‘I just told you – everything else needed washing!’ He looks at me like I’m the idiot. I am starting to worry. He thinks there is logic there.

‘Anyway, I ran out of soap powder so I went downstairs to the newsagent’s, and the guy told me to get out, that he didn’t want to serve me! I told him he had served me hundreds of times before, but he pushed me out onto the street, and that’s when I fell and banged my eye on the kerb.’ He points to the dried-up slit above his eye. ‘I had the washing powder, though, I just hadn’t paid for it. So I brought it back up. And then, I don’t know, I sat here for a while … and then you came in.’