Boyfriend in a Dress. Louise Kean

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       What Charlie Has to Say for Himself

      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.