Boyfriend in a Dress (4 page)

Whether Dale was actually attracted to me was up for debate, but he feigned it regularly and I admired his persistence at least. I could see it was about Joleen and not me, but this was unfortunately only clear to the sane. He just delighted in pushing her to the edge, and she hated me for it. As is often the case, instead of naming her enemy ‘man’ she named it ‘woman’. On the third day of my stay at the University of Illinois, about an hour before dinner, as the sun sank like an American football behind our halls, Dale sat in a chair in the corner of our ten-foot by fifteen-foot room, and Joleen sprawled across her bottom bunk. They were both seemingly transfixed by a re-run of
The X-Files
on TV, as I attempted to put the cover on my duvet. Is something really out there? They were hoping it was their mother race. But I noticed Dale staring at me, giving me sideways, strange, twisted smiles, and pointing his winkle-pickers in my direction. I pretended not to notice. But Joleen noticed. Eventually, as Mulder and Scully took a break for the adverts, he piped up,

‘Nicola, can I do that for you?’ Dale gave me a nonchalant sneer accompanied by a nasty twinkle in his eye that he labelled ‘mischievous’.

‘No, I’m fine thanks,’ I replied, attempting to deflect his attention back to the TV, and simultaneously ignore the scowl that was threatening to make Joleen the ugliest woman I had ever seen, as opposed to just one of the top ten. She was scrawny, and ratty-looking, with dyed black hair and brown roots, curling and kinking in the strangest, driest places, and with a front tooth significantly more brown than the rest. She was pale in that unwashed way: she looked like she needed to be taken outside and hosed down with disinfectant.

‘Nicola, I’d really like to do that for you though.’ Dale continued to leer and Joleen’s face morphed into rage.

‘Why, Dale?’ I asked, feigning innocence.

‘So that I can say I’ve at least done
something
in your bed.’

‘Funny guy.’

I looked away and carried on struggling with my duvet, Dale turned back to the TV with a grin, and Joleen broke a cigarette in half. After another ten minutes had lapsed, and I had finally dealt with my bedding, I jumped down and admired my handiwork. I was wearing battered old Levis that I had triumphantly paid thirty dollars for and an old T-shirt that said ‘Cuba’ across my chest – I was dressing the part of an American student. I turned to pick up the discarded packaging and Dale muttered, just loudly enough for us all to hear,

‘Hmmm, Cuba, I’d like to go
there.
’

I ignored it, but Joleen couldn’t manage the same restraint, and kicked over her Coke can with a scream. The room went silent, and then we all carried on as normal. I headed for dinner in the canteen pretty much straight away, and it was only when I returned to our room that I found my pictures, previously hanging innocently on the wall, smashed on the floor with glass everywhere. Joleen and Dale were top and toeing on the bottom bunk, seemingly asleep. There had been no effort made to clear up – my mum and dad, my sisters, my friends, all covered in shards of glass on the floor.

It got steadily worse from then on. I tried to talk to Joleen about the fact that his advances towards me, which went so far as trying to lick my shoulder after I’d had a shower, were not genuine affection, but a twisted theatre on her behalf. But again she would hear none of it.

And her fury only grew.

The room itself was the usual testament to the authorities who believed that if they treated us like kids we’d act like them and not have sex. We had bunk beds.

The beds were ‘debunked’ upon my request – they were too high to jump down from, particularly if, like me, you
have weak netball ankles caused by a thousand sprains from the ages of eight to eighteen. Besides, I just don’t think bunk beds are dignified at twenty-one, especially if you have an overnight guest. The likelihood of serious injury during any kind of sexual experimentation is increased at least tenfold. Joleen grudgingly agreed. My bed was still higher than hers, as it was the top bunk, the one with the longer legs, the one that would have suspended me six feet in the air given the chance. Now I could jump easily down to the floor by putting my foot on the wood of the end of her bed. This was the piece of wood where the metal rod would slot in a hole in the centre to connect the two beds when they were in their naturally ‘bunked’ state. This was the hole I stepped on nearly every day with bare feet as I climbed out of bed. This was the hole that Joleen chose to put an upright compass in, without my knowledge, which I missed by a fraction, and at the very last minute, one day while she was at lectures. I don’t need to say the word ‘freak’, but I will.

I tried to talk to Dale about it as well. One afternoon, early in my stay, I arrived back at the room to find Dale lying seemingly asleep on Joleen’s bed. I tip-toed across the room, annoyed at myself for not confronting the situation, for being quiet on his behalf, and in truth I just couldn’t be arsed to wake him. But he wasn’t asleep.

‘Hmmm, you’re back, I knew I could smell you.’

‘Dale, it’s not Joleen, it’s me,’ I laughed, pretending he’d made a mistake.

I saw his lids open slightly.

‘Joleen doesn’t smell like vanilla and baby moisturizer.’ He was speaking so quietly that the air in the room was suddenly saturated with an intimacy I didn’t like.

‘Oh right. Sorry.’ I was becoming increasingly cross with myself for not telling him to stop, but I didn’t want an argument.

Dale’s half-open eyes closed again, and I kicked off my boots. I decided to go straight back out, to my friend Jake’s room, and reached under my bed for my slippers.

‘I can’t think of anything more wonderful right now than if you just curled up here with me, pressed yourself into my chest.’

He was testing my limits. I took a deliberate step towards the door, to put a decent amount of distance between us, and turned to fiddle with something on my desk.

‘Look, Dale, I don’t really appreciate you saying stuff like that.’ It sounded half-hearted, but I still barely knew him, and you don’t shout at people you barely know. I was interrupted.

‘I bet your neck tastes like ice cream.’

‘Dale, enough!’ I turned to face him, but he kept his eyes closed. ‘I’m serious, stop it! You’re being a prick. I don’t want to have to get you banned from the hall, but I will.’

‘I’ve stopped. I’m just trying to get some sleep.’ And somehow he made me feel like the fool.

‘Oh whatever.’ I dumped the contents of my bag onto the bed to find my keys and cigarettes. The room was quiet now.

He mumbled and I ignored it. But then I heard it again, a little louder, and I distinctly heard the word ‘nipple’.

‘Jesus, when do you stop?’

‘Can I help it if I talk in my sleep?’ His eyes were still closed, but there was a smile creeping across his face.

‘Who says they talk in their sleep, in their sleep?’

‘Touché.’ He smiled. And I erupted.

‘I will never be interested in you, you tiny little man! You’re making me feel uncomfortable in my own room, and that’s not fair! Why are you being such an arsehole?’ I stared at him until he was eventually forced to open one eye.

‘Because, Nicola, Nix,’ he propped himself up on one
elbow, and spat my name out like a joke, ‘other men just don’t understand you like I do.’ He stared at me intently. It occurred to me for the first time that he might seriously want to add me to the menagerie of feather-brains that fell for his routine.

‘You don’t even know me, for God’s sake. You don’t know anything about me. I’m not bloody interested. Get it through your head.’

‘Nobody gets your sense of humour, how much passion you have.’

‘How would you know?’ His flattery meant nothing given that he couldn’t possibly know after such a short amount of time and no decent conversation how funny and passionate I considered myself to be.

‘I don’t think you understand how beautiful you are, Nicola.’

He stared at me, and I finally lost it.

‘Don’t try your twisted shit on me, Dale, I’m secure enough, thanks. I don’t need your nasty little routine, I’m not Joleen!’

Something in his face hardened as I said the words. I wasn’t scared, but nervous maybe.

When he spoke, it was quietly, but with a controlled anger:

‘Other men might think your ass is too big, but I can see its merits.’

‘Oh, touched a nerve have I, Dale? Well, merits or not, if I see you looking at my arse again, I will report you to the Resident Tutor and have you banned from the hall. And I’ll get Jake to kick your skinny arse, an arse that, by the way, I see no merit in whatsoever.’

I stormed out of the room, shaking, and slammed the door behind me. I went straight to Jake’s room, and forced him to stop snogging his new girlfriend and listen to what a dick Dale
was. He offered to do the arse kicking straight away, mostly to impress his new girlfriend, but I decided not to take him up on it just yet.

But Dale didn’t stop, and Jake never got round to kicking his arse. If he was in the room when I got there, I would sigh and swear under my breath, and he would just sneer, turn back to his battered old typewriter, and start typing furiously. Sometimes he cried out, as if in pain, and then scrambled for a piece of paper to note down some thought or other. Sometimes it was just a word on a page that I’d find lying around the floor, discarded. ‘Brambles’ was one, ‘Pigmy’ another. I accidentally found and looked at (purely by mistake) some of his poetry, while he and Joleen were, for once, both elsewhere. I accidentally found it in his plastic bag that he carried with him, which I happened upon, purely by coincidence, at the back of Joleen’s wardrobe where he always stashed it.

In Autumn,

We dance around the leaves,

Until she comes.

Not exactly Wordsworth. And given how long he had been working on it, not exactly a masterpiece. I asked him after some petty jibe in my direction if his poetry ever rhymed, and how could it be poetry if it
didn’t
rhyme? He looked at me like I was the fool. I asked if he ever wrote any limericks, at which point he pretended not to hear.

Despite her almost fatal self-esteem issues, maybe because of them, Joleen didn’t seem to realize that in the twisted world that was her and Dale, she had the power. He relied on her completely. If he left, she’d be sad for a couple of weeks, maybe even months. Maybe she’d muster a half-arsed attempt
at suicide, but only then with pills, and eventually she’d be fine. But Dale would be the one out on a ledge, with nothing to cling to, nobody to validate him, nobody to assure him that he was the thing that he wanted so badly to be – a poetic, sexually liberated soul: a ‘character’. If Joleen left and he didn’t have her adoring looks and unfaltering declarations of his massive talent supporting his ego, reality would slap him so hard in the face he’d be bruised for life. And he’d look in the mirror and see what the rest of the world saw – a guy who was a disappointment to his father, a guy who had never fitted in, who had been bullied at school. In short, a guy who felt unloved. Dale was so desperate to prove how he could never have been that thing that his father wanted, that he persisted in acting out a fantasy that didn’t even make him Happy. He had enough intelligence to know he’d been hurt, yet he had spent the last ten years hurting other people because of it. Joleen would eventually be fine. Dale, on the other hand, would fall apart at the seams of his replica Bryan Ferry suits.

Look back and back and you can always see where the hurt comes from. For some it’s more recent than others, just over the horizon, barely out of sight, but you can always trace anybody’s pain back to the actions of another. Somebody hurt you once. Somebody always does. Whether you choose to hurt other people because of it is a whole different story. Is it a choice, or can’t we help ourselves? Answers on a postcard. But I have Dale to thank for something at least. He was my first living, breathing example of a man who hurts a woman, not because he particularly wants to, but merely because he can.

I took a shower in the communal bathroom after Joleen had gone. I got back to my room and Dale, who hadn’t been there when I left, had since arrived. He was staring off into space, looking out the window of our little room, through the mosquito mesh, at the trees and the dorm rooms
opposite, with his winkle-pickers squarely on Joleen’s desk. He was wearing a shiny green suit with an ironed-on dirty glaze that I just knew somebody had died in. Even from the doorway, I could see the flecks of last week’s gel in his hair and on his shoulders. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds played from Joleen’s battered old tape machine: a small courtesy, at least, was that Dale never disturbed my newly acquired American CD player. I don’t think he owned any CDs anyway – Dale made it a point to fight technology like a matador fights a bull: all suited and booted, but looking small and stupid in the process. Every time I suggested he get a laptop, instead of banging away on his archaic typewriter and disturbing us all, he informed me that a laptop could ‘have no character’, and thus whatever he wrote would ‘have no soul’. I said I doubted anybody would notice, given that as far as I could see he had no character and no soul, and they would just attribute it to that. He had laughed in a way that implied I loved him really. I really didn’t.

I coughed and broke his daydream – probably of being well adjusted – and he acknowledged me with a glance over his shoulder.