Boyfriend in a Dress

Stripped Bare (#ulink_85ba6179-81cb-5a93-991a-3b365efe6073)

January is always a depressing month, I never manage to save money over Christmas for the sales, which is the only thing that January has going for it. I blow it all on champagne parties through Advent, and a hugely extravagant New Year trip, so I can get back to work on the second day of a fresh year and tell everybody that I was somewhere other than London for 31

of December. 00.01 on New Year’s Day isn’t even an anti-climax, as most people will say, it’s just a fucking relief. As soon as Big Ben has chimed, you feel a nation of people relax – they have their story, their setting for those fateful twelve gongs, and now they can go to bed, or carry on getting drunk. But whatever they do, they don’t have to worry about how much fun they are having for one particular minute for another year. It’s a night when you actually question yourself, your friends, your relationships, your ability to enjoy yourself. Staying in just doesn’t cut it, no matter how ‘chilled’ it supposedly is, it will always sound pathetic until New Year’s Eve itself is banned. You can opt out of Christmas Day without seeming pathetic – on religious grounds, on practical grounds, it can almost seem cool not to sit around and eat poultry and pull crackers with your parents. But New Year is just about ‘having fun’. There is no credible reason to opt out. Unless you simply don’t have any friends, or don’t know how to enjoy yourself, which makes you feel like a failure. There are parties all over the world that night, and you aren’t at any of them.

So last January, five months ago now, my friends and I did what we always do and put at least three nights in the diary that wouldn’t break the bank, but would enable us to look forward to the following weekend.

Which is how we ended up in Shivers, a lap-dancing club on the Edgware Road at one o’clock in the morning, whooping at the women on the stage, and trying to persuade Jake to have a lap-dance. He was having none of it. The room itself was strange – stages like catwalks with, sticking up from them, poles which looked kind of smudged and grubby and greasy in the pinkish neon lights that shone from above. Around the stages were tables and chairs, not exactly tatty, but not stylish either. The bar was very pink, very neon, with a vase at one end holding what looked like plastic lilies. It wasn’t seedy, it just looked cheap. But we were drunk, so what the hell did we care – I hadn’t expected it to be something out of Elle Deco. All that glass, however, looking slightly grubby, slightly smeared, reflected the core business of the place back at me a little too much. It was essentially a sex club, but I didn’t want to have it spelt out for me. I wanted to convince myself that it was really very innocent, and fun, and frivolous, and that no bodily juices were actually involved. Initially, we didn’t think the doormen were going to let us in, until Nim convinced them that we were all bisexual, apart from Jake, who was a red-blooded male, and that we would all be chucking around a lot of money. If it hadn’t been January, a quiet month for lap-dancing clubs apparently, I don’t think they would have let us in. They could tell we were just there to giggle, and would be spending hardly any cash, but they needed anything we were prepared to give.

Jake was the most uncomfortable from the start. He couldn’t look at any of the women parading around in their underwear, or sliding down poles, while we were there. Somehow our presence made him feel sleazy, we knew that, and he couldn’t leer at women with his female friends around. But we adjourned to the bar, and just whistled from a distance, paying for extortionately priced drinks on our credit cards. We were playing some stupid game that Jules had got from a guy she’d been seeing – you have to name somebody you would have sex with, and then the next person has to name somebody they would have sex with, but their first name has to begin with the first letter of the surname of the person you have said you will have sex with. I started with ‘Jeremy Paxman’ – I would – and Jules, who always panics, because you have to drink as you think, said,

‘Pope John Paul.’

‘You disgust me,’ Nim said, weeping with laughter and wiping the tears from her eyes, while I tried to stop my drink coming out of my nose.

‘Is it me? Is it “P”?’ Amy, my big sister, asked – she had loosened up since earlier, relaxed with my friends and not hers.

‘Yep – let’s try and stay away from leaders of world religions from now on though,’ Nim said, and Jules apologized again.

‘Paul Newman,’ Amy said after a gulp of drink. She was clever, and married, and measured. She was what I hoped I would be in a couple of years’ time, but I knew I never actually would. She didn’t take shit from people, but she was lovely as well. I took shit from some people and not others, but lost my temper a lot more often. It’s like she left all the bad genes in my mum’s womb for me to suck up when it was my turn two years later to burst out into the world.

Nim started to drink and think, but was still laughing about the Pope exclamation, and sputtered out her drink as she said,

‘Nigel Lawson.’ We laughed again, and then fell into a quick silence, as the mental image refused to dislodge itself from all of our brains. We all seemed to neck our drinks quickly, at the same time.

I turned to the bar to order more drinks from a topless smiling woman, who stopped smiling when she saw us in our work clothes. Instantly I felt bad, like I was ridiculing her place of work, her work itself. I knew she thought we were smug and patronizing, and I avoided her stern eye as I handed over another forty quid for five drinks. Jake came back from the toilet, looking concerned.

He whispered something in Amy’s ear, and I saw her jaw lock slightly, in anger, and she nodded. I turned to pick up the drinks and pass them around, and caught Jake mouthing something to Jules, but they both stopped guiltily when they saw me looking.

‘Hey, I’m tired, shall we go?’ Jules said suddenly, smiling at me, and picking up her bag.

‘I’ve just got another round of drinks in!’ I said, feeling confused.

‘I don’t think I can drink any more,’ Jake said quickly, grabbing his coat.

‘Well, you could have told me that before I paid out forty quid,’ I snapped, starting to lose my temper, as an uneasy feeling crept up my back and tension spread across my shoulders, stiffening my neck.

‘What?’ I said to them all, suddenly feeling sober.

Nim looked from me to them, confused, and Jake and Jules gave each other ‘meaningful’ looks. It was Amy who spoke.

‘Jake thinks he saw Charlie over there, with some guys.’ She pointed in the direction of a large group of noisy men on the other side of the room, barely visible through the smoke and the neon.

I heard my jaw click, as I reached to massage the tension in my neck, and looked down at the floor, not wanting to meet any of their gazes. I wasn’t surprised, just mortified. I knew damn well that nothing was past Charlie now, but I had never shared it with my friends. I didn’t want them feeling sorry for me. I didn’t feel sorry for me, why should they? But I wanted to see for myself, some morbid curiosity wanted to at least see his face, see who he was with. He had told me he was seeing his brother tonight, and I wanted to see if it was true. Earlier in the day, when he had told me that, I wondered why he had felt the need to pass the information on – I had started to lose track of Charlie’s movements, and didn’t care to be told. I had heard whispers from various people, that they didn’t think he was ‘happy’, asking me if we were, as a couple, ‘ok?’ Asking indirect questions to which they didn’t want an answer, fulfilling an obligation to somehow alert me to what was going on, without having to get actually involved in what was at the end of the day a ‘domestic’ issue, somebody else’s relationship. Amy looked shocked. I felt slapped in the face – I don’t care how ironic it was that we were in this sleazy hole, which now looked rotten to the core, old and haggard and flabby and bruised. He shouldn’t be here, in front of my friends, making me look like an idiot.

Nim, Jules and Jake had picked up their coats and bags, as well as mine, and were trying to usher me to the door. Amy was staring at me, trying to work out what she could reasonably say about my boyfriend, who she at first really quite liked, but had recently come to almost despise. I could tell from her eyes that she was framing sentences in her head that wouldn’t upset me, but which would get her point across as well – I could also tell it wasn’t easy.

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, and marched towards where Charlie was supposed to be, hearing Jules whispering to the others behind me, ‘he really has changed, hasn’t he. Poor Nix.’ I shuddered at the pity of it all.

As I got closer to the group of guys, I could hear a laugh coming from within their circle. His laugh had always been too loud. I was five feet away when I saw one of the guys he worked with clock me coming towards them, and shove the guy sitting in front of him, obscured by one of the others. I could see notes flying towards a girl on the stage, who was kneeling close to the guys, massaging her plastic tits, and licking her lips, and pulling at her G-string as if she might take it off. She looked … hairless. Suddenly, an arm sprang into view, waving a fifty pound note at the stripper, and then the crowd seemed to clear, and I could see the note was attached to a hand, to a suited arm, to a man with spiky hair and sideburns, with the top button of his shirt undone, and his tie, knotted around his head like an idiot. The man was leering at the kneeling woman, and it was a smile I didn’t recognize – it was seedy and sordid and desperate and arrogant and awful. It was still Charlie, though.

All the other boys were staring at me now, not the stripper, and one of them was nudging Charlie hard on the arm, but his attention couldn’t be dragged from the bare breasts in front of him, pushed together to receive his fifty pound note. I stood and watched his mates desperately try and get his attention, with my hands on my hips, just waiting. Finally one of them said ‘Charlie’ loudly, and he turned quickly.

‘I’m fucking busy, what?’ and then he looked past his comrade, and saw me, his girlfriend, standing a few feet away.

I didn’t say anything, I just looked at him, his hand still outstretched, holding the note. The stripper moved away quickly to another group of guys, glancing back over her shoulder at me once, in sympathy. Charlie seemed to click into life suddenly, and stood up, stuffing the note into his pocket, pulling his tie off his head, and throwing it on the chair behind him. He looked at me, ran his hand through his hair, ashamed, but not guilty. I looked back at him, and almost cried. His hair was blonder now than it had ever been. His suit was bespoke. He looked ten years older than he ever had before. I could see sweaty patches on his shirt, where the cotton stuck to his body.

‘Alright?’ I said. The rest of the boys looked terribly uncomfortable. I heard one of them whisper to another ‘it’s his old lady,’ but I ignored it. I saw him flinch slightly as he heard it.

‘I was out with the girls, I don’t know how we ended up here. But I’m going now.’ I carried on looking at him, and he stared back, and then looked down, hands on hips, with nothing to say. I turned to go, and then spun around quickly. ‘Is your brother with you?’

‘No.’ Charlie shook his head slowly as he answered.

‘Okay, I’ll see you later.’ I turned and walked away, and didn’t look around until I was outside. They were all waiting for me at the top of the stairs, looking concerned.

‘It’s fine, he’s just out with some clients.’ I laughed and looked away, and we started to walk down the road towards a cab. Amy tried to hold my hand, but I shook it off.

I didn’t see Charlie for a week after that, and I began to wonder if we had somehow called it quits, without even speaking about it. But then he phoned, the following week, to check that I was still coming with him to his boss’s birthday party and, for whatever reason, I said I was. We didn’t mention it again. We both just knew.

Some people get married, have kids, are divorced in six years. Charlie and I have been through a lot, although appearing to have been through nothing at all. Our start was promising and, God knows, we’ve stuck it out. It seemed more sensible to stay together than be apart. We have both hung in there. But we’ve driven each other quietly mad, despite never admitting it. It never seemed that important at the time.

My Green-Eyed Monster (#ulink_73bfb846-4ff2-500a-a2be-e519709d3f91)

Vittorio De Sica was an Italian film director who said ‘moral indignation is in most cases two percent moral, forty-eight percent indignation, and fifty percent envy.’ I want to have Charlie’s laidback attitude to fucking about, fucking around, acting like an overgrown boy. I envy his ability not to care more than anything. I just can’t help myself caring, in some small part, about everything. I like to call it passion, a passion that seeps through me and won’t be silenced on so many topics.

Phil has it too, the ability not to care about the little things, to take life easily, and let the troubles fall away from him as he strolls through his years. I pretend that I am shocked, but in truth I am only angry that I can’t do the same. Phil’s easiness doesn’t seem quite so mindless, or destructive, mostly because I am not having a relationship with him, and his actions can’t hurt me. Charlie’s still do.

But sexual envy is, of course, not the only kind. We envy other people’s lives, mostly the lives with more money in them, that seem less like hard work. The general populace spends most of its time envying one small band of break-out characters, who are managing to escape the humdrum existence of the rest of us with our money worries and failed relationships. We envy them, and criticize them, and throw abuse in their general direction, and are repelled at their sexual shenanigans, while secretly, and not so secretly, we all want what they’ve got. We all seem to want to be famous. Is it just the money that we want, or the ability to make ourselves look prettier with the cosmetic surgery that they can afford? Being famous seems to me to be a lot of hard work, so it isn’t their schedule that we want – how many of us have to work a twenty-hour day on a regular basis? Our moral outrage when another one of them is arrested for mucking about with fully-grown adults at midnight on Hampstead Heath when there are honestly no kids about is in most parts envy, and that’s what we have to understand. These most beautiful powerful creatures that move about in a world we glimpse but can never touch have a different set of rules to us, rules that apply once you have got past the celebrity gates, and not been blackballed for wanting it too much, or being undeserving. They don’t have to worry about what their boss will think, or their friends. They don’t have to worry about the norms of our society, they are not applicable to them. They move in a world of the most beautiful, desirable creatures on earth, all of whom offer themselves up for the taking. And they dip their fingers in whichever pies suit for the day. A man here, a woman there, they are not the ugly Joes we pass on the street, they look like angels. Given a world where nothing is frowned upon, where you are powerful enough to move from person to person without fear or shame or recrimination, where your sexuality, in private at least, is not an issue, wouldn’t you do the same? If you truly had the ability to sleep with all of these angels, would you turn them down based on the fact that you couldn’t have kids together, or some ancient book says you can’t? I don’t think so.

Of course as we envy their lives, and their cash and their cars, we never stop to think that they envy us. They envy us our freedom to move from our front door to our car door without having a camera stuck in our face, but in some way their huge amounts of cash are supposed to compensate for this. They lusted for fame and therefore they deserve to have the flashlight of our envy in their faces every minute of their waking lives. I’m not sure, when you actually think long and hard about it, what is more valuable – the cars, or the privacy. I’d like a Ferrari and a holiday home on the Med, but I don’t want my sexual moves to be plastered all over the papers for my mother to read. We can only stop our insane jealousy dressed up as outrage when we decide that we are happy with what we are, that we are where we want to be, and doing all the things we want to do. But who is? Just those famous elusive souls. And maybe they aren’t so happy after all, because whenever they slip up, everybody gets to hear about it.

Dressed to Kill (#ulink_5668af29-d6fd-5a26-aff6-d1a8af8975ba)

The sun burns down on me as I walk along Charlie’s road, swinging my bag full of vegetables and Martini. Maybe, if the sun goes down, I will talk to him about it. It’s time to end it.

I turn the key in the door, holding my purse in my mouth, and juggling bags. I shove the door with my shoulder, and kick it closed behind me. But I am stopped in my tracks by the sight in front of me. I drop everything, and the Martini bottle clinks on the floorboards, mercifully not breaking, when I see Charlie sitting on the sofa, staring off into space. As the light from the window catches his face, I can see tear stains on his cheeks, damp red eyes, glazed. I see his hands and feet, twitching slightly, and hear the almost imperceptible noise of teeth chattering, as Charlie shakes, slightly, without control. My mind does immediate grotesque calculations. It can only be drugs. The only time I have ever seen Charlie in this state was after a really bad pill a couple of years ago in Brighton. He had moaned and shook and plummeted from deliriousness to despair in seconds and back again. I don’t remember him crying though, even then. He doesn’t acknowledge my entrance, or the bags crashing to the floor. He doesn’t even realize I am here. A splinter of me entertains an impulse, for whatever reason, to grab the Martini and run back out of the room as quickly as I entered it. But my feet are stuck to the spot. It is one of those few occasions when fatigue instantly takes you, and your body is already aware that the emotional effort needed for the next half an hour at least is going to leave you spent.

The good me, the moral me, rushes to the surface before the real me grabs the chance to leg it, and I whisper, ‘Charlie, what have you taken?’ This room does not need noise – it might crack something vital and the whole building will collapse. I don’t want to disturb anything that isn’t already quite clearly disturbed.

I see a flicker in Charlie’s eyes, fear, I think, behind the tears. I don’t know what to think, or do. I feel suddenly helpless, faced with a stranger in a bad way, equipped only with my alcoholic beverage of choice to handle the situation. But it would be rude of me to swig straight from the bottle lying on the floor, and I certainly don’t think I should offer anything to Charlie. I have never seen him actually afraid, but there is no doubt that he is scared. I am too. I can’t move towards him, I have no idea how he will react. My veins feel taut, about to snap.

‘Charlie, is it coke? A trip? How much have you done? Should I call a doctor?’ I say, still whispering.

‘Charlie? Charlie!’ I raise my voice slightly. ‘Charlie, can you hear me?’

I take a step towards him, and then stop in my tracks as I see his lips moving, mouthing words neither of us can hear.

‘What?’ I ask quietly.