Boyfriend in a Dress. Louise Kean

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?’