Boyfriend in a Dress. Louise Kean

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