Boyfriend in a Dress (27 page)

The funeral is packed with young boys in black suits – Phil’s two football teams, and his cricket team. A couple of boys have slings and scratches. They were in the car with him apparently. He was driving, but a van had lost control and just ploughed into the driver’s side, Phil’s side, so unprotected by the thin metal car door between him and the hurtling tonnes of metal throwing themselves fatefully towards him. He had died in the hospital an hour later. His granddad had been there in time. I give him a kiss hello, and he thanks me for coming. All the wreaths are shaped like footballs, and I wear my sunglasses throughout. I see his mother’s shoulders shaking softly in the front row, and I clutch Amy’s hand tightly.

It is so long since I have been in a church, I have forgotten how much the atmosphere overwhelms me, how my current beliefs and my rational objection to everything that it stands for cannot combat the reverential way I behave within its walls. The priest didn’t know Phil, but he is peculiarly appropriate nonetheless, in the face of this outpouring of grief, the kind of grief that overwhelms you completely. I didn’t realize that Phil was the real man in my life, the
one I spent the most time with, relied on, who made me laugh, and who I argued with on a regular basis, without it mattering. The fact that I worked with him now seems secondary to the fact that he had become a friend. I couldn’t fully understand the massive depth of my emotion until I admitted this to myself. The candles burn by the altar, and the procession comes. Neither my sister nor I take communion, even though we have done a thousand times in the past, in our youth. It would feel completely fraudulent. People use their tear stained tissues to wipe the sweat from their foreheads, and the back of their necks. The footballers all shift uncomfortably in their heavy suits, as the incense lingers over our heads and mixes with the heat that is already there, to suffocate us. By the time the doors are opened at the end of the service, and everybody spills out into the glaring sunshine, we all have to adjust our eyes, a congregation of young boys throwing on designer sunglasses to hide rare tears.

We make our way in Amy’s car to the subdued reception at Phil’s grandfather’s house. It is clean and old, and I can picture Phil with his feet up on the coffee table, eating his dinner off his lap, watching the footie, and shouting at the television. I can’t imagine he ever sneaked any girls back here. We find a corner of the room, and sip on lemonade. We are surrounded by all these boys who spend their time getting pissed, going on tour, joking and laughing, now standing solemnly, on their best behaviour, in their best suits, munching on prawn sandwiches.

I don’t talk to Phil’s family, apart from the obligatory hellos and goodbyes. Their loss is so much greater than mine, and yet I feel cheated somehow. It would have been nice to see Phil with a girlfriend, growing up finally, settling down. He always let me talk for him, let me say what he was going to say, because he knew that I would. Eventually he would
have been great at being somebody’s other half. It would have made him.

We leave after a couple of hours, and Amy drives me home, through the sunshine-soaked streets. It feels incredibly lonely to be this sad, to have come from such a muted occasion, and pass people lying out in the sun, radios blaring out music. You almost feel deprived, knowing that you can’t enjoy something that is usually such a blessing, this bizarre London summer sun that seems to have infiltrated my life, and scorched everything, scarring it forever. Because now everything has really changed, and there is no turning back. I cannot feel somebody slip out of my life for good, completely, and not act upon it. It would be insulting. So today I’ll sort myself out.

Growing up, we dream of our life ahead, and what we’ll do. Sometimes we cling onto those dreams when they are already lost, until they become all that we are. We become bitter as they pinch at our eyes, fire our brains, and crease our clothes. We project our young dreams onto seemingly unfulfilled lives, and label ourselves a ‘failure’ in a life we’ve yet to live.

It takes something huge to move us on. Sometimes, unfortunately, huge things happen. But we should thank God that they do. It’s just different to the way we thought it would be.

We pull up outside my flat, and Amy turns off the engine.

‘Are you going to be okay?’ she asks me quietly.

‘Yeah, I’ll be fine. Honestly.’ I give her hand a squeeze.

‘You can always come and stay with me and Andrew, you know that, don’t you.’ And she means it.

‘Honestly, hon, I’ll be okay. I just need to … I don’t know what I’m going to do. I finish work in a couple of weeks, and I’ve done nothing.’ I sit back against the seat and close my eyes, and fight the tears this time.

‘What about Charlie?’ she ventures.

‘What about him?’ I ask quietly. I have thought of him. I
have thought of asking him to come over, to lay next to me in bed, to come with me to the funeral. But somehow none of it seemed fair.

‘He’s called me a few times – he called Jake, and he told him about Phil. He sounds really worried about you.’

‘I know, I know. But, Amy, I was so horrible to him.’

‘Well, he was horrible to you too,’ she says quietly, not angrily, ‘but people change. Maybe he has. He called me for God’s sake, and he knows what I think of him; he must be desperate to talk. It’s up to you, of course. But if you call him … you might feel better.’

‘I know, I will. Kiss the baby for me, I’ll be over one night this week.’ I kiss her goodbye, and climb out of the car.

I go up to the flat, and pick up all the cards lying on the mat. I change into a vest top and shorts and make myself a large Martini and lemonade, and sit down at the kitchen table, light a cigarette, and start to sift my way through them. There are a few words in each one, from the girls, telling me they are there if I need them. I think they feel I need prompting to lean on them. But I’m okay, I’m working through it. I don’t want to talk about Phil any more, say what a waste it is again. Everybody knows it; I don’t need to tell them. I spot Charlie’s handwriting on one of the cards, and leave it until last. I’m worried what it might say. I don’t think I will be able to understand any begs or pleas for contact at the moment. I tear the envelope and pull out a card – it has a picture of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the front. I open it, and brace myself for what it says, and mentally warn myself not to get angry at anything he has written, preying on me when I need a shoulder, the way Charlie is. But I smile as I read it.

‘You know where I am if you need me, Charlie’. That’s it, no sentimental words, no tugging on my heartstrings. Just a note to say he’s around. Nothing I can take badly, nothing
that can be misconstrued, not telling me I need him now, or how much he loves me. I walk through the flat with my phone in my hand. I lean on the balcony, glass in the other hand, and feel the sun on my face. I feel a hundred. I look at my phone, look away, and call Naomi.

‘Nim, it’s me.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m okay. What are you doing tomorrow night?’

‘Whatever we’re doing.’

‘Can we go out, have a few drinks, see how it goes?’

‘Absolutely. I’ll call Jules.’

‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’ I press a button on the phone and lean back on the balcony. I don’t have time to play games any more, to second guess what’s out there that I’m missing out on, to mess anybody around. If I want something, I just have to admit it. I put on my Van Morrison CD – Phil hated Van Morrison – and it makes me laugh, and I brush away today’s last tear. I run myself a bath.

I watch TV on my own until it’s dark, and when I wake up on the sofa it is eight o’clock in the morning. The sky is cloudy, and I can hear the rain scratching the windows. I turn on the radio just as the newscaster tells us all that the summer is over, and London breathes an internal sigh of relief. The heat was fucking with everybody’s minds. Another month of sunshine and the city wouldn’t have been the city any more. It would have been an industrial Ibiza. And you can’t live like that … that’s just for holidays.

I walk towards the bar, desperately trying to keep my umbrella from blowing inside out, and ruining my freshly dried and straightened hair. My feet, naked in strappy sandals, are freezing, my toes wet and glistening, as I try to dodge the puddles that have been spreading across the pavements since this morning, since the rain started to pour down. My jeans protect my legs from what is now driving rain, but I am still clammy inside my coat: the heat hasn’t vacated with the sun.

Tonight I need to drink and dance and laugh, and be a fully paid up member of the strappy sandal army, and forget my problems, drowning in a shallow puddle of how life could be if only this was all it took to really make me happy. I have powdered over the imperfections for the night. It’s part of moving on. For Christ’s sake, it’s only for a few hours, I haven’t emotionally dodged anything for weeks, and tonight, well tonight, I just need to revert to type, just for a little while.

Jules and Nim are already in the bar on Wardour Street, sipping on cocktails, chatting and laughing. I am met with hugs and kisses, slightly anxious looks shared between the
two of them which I catch, and I assure them that for tonight I just want to relax, and not think, and not get upset about anybody or anything. Nim starts talking straight away,

‘I don’t think people should be allowed to die.’ Jules practically spits out her drink and glares at her, and I laugh, it is her way of dealing with it.

‘Jules, honestly, it’s fine, I’m fine.’ I rub her arm as she continues to look at me anxiously, and Nim looks at her as if she’s making a fuss.

‘Nim, go on,’ I say, sucking on my straw.

‘What I meant is that we should live in some benevolent science-fiction type arrangement, some
Logan’s Run/Brave New World
place, and that you just get moved on to another stage, instead of dying; another planet every now and then, so you can’t really miss anybody, because you know you are going to see them still.’

‘Have you been playing Dungeons and Dragons again?’ I ask, and Naomi laughs with us.

‘No, I’m not being geeky, I’m talking about relationships, and grief and not having to deal with people leaving you behind.’

‘So you think they just move onto another stage of life somewhere else, and we’ll meet up with them again at some point? But isn’t that supposed to be Heaven?’ I ask.

‘Yes, but we should be able to phone them, conference them in or something, so we all believe it.’ Nim is not religious in the slightest, her parents might have been Protestant, even they can’t remember.

‘Go away,’ Jules says over her shoulder to some drunken twenty-year-old boy who is trying to buy her a drink.

‘So in Nim’s new world, if people don’t die, they just “move on” to some kind of big boardroom. I think love should be different too. I want to have a fantastic boyfriend in Nim’s world!’ Jules finishes her sentence, and swears at the bloke
behind her who moves his hand off her back quickly and walks off.

‘Yes, but meeting people would be entirely different,’ I say. ‘Some weird night would be compulsory date night – Tuesday night would be compulsory date night, so you wouldn’t be able to opt out and be too bloody scared to meet somebody new. And it would all be organized through sci-fi personal columns. It would be the only place to meet people, and if you met somebody any other way you’d be ashamed to admit it, it would be too sad. Because you wouldn’t know if you matched or not. Everybody would think you were really desperate if you went out with somebody you met in a bar, for instance, because it would be looks that attracted you, and that would be really sad.’ They nod their heads in agreement, and I flatten my hair. Naomi grabs her bag and heads to the toilets to sort out her lipstick.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Jules asks as Naomi clicks away in three-inch heels.

‘I’m okay, I just … it’s just funny when somebody at work dies, you know? You make a list in your head of the people that mean something to you, that you care about, that you are scared about losing, and work people don’t even figure on your list. But then something happens, and you realize how much some of them mean to you … I don’t know. But I don’t want to talk about it tonight anyway.’

Jules rubs my arm, and I look away quickly, and then back again, composed.

Nim clicks back, and throws her bag down. Jules goes to the bar to get more drinks, and Nim and I both light cigarettes.

‘Have you spoken to Charlie?’ she asks.

‘No … I got a card, it was sweet, but I don’t know, Nim, it doesn’t seem right, or worth it, or something.’

‘Well, it’s up to you,’ she says, and sucks on her straw.

‘Don’t touch me,’ I say to a bloke who has just propped his chin on my shoulder, and shrug him off, and carry on talking to Nim. ‘I tell you another thing, in “Nim’s world”, I wouldn’t bloody cry as much. It’s a joke. My eyes are permanently red, my throat hurts, I’m going through mascara like water.’

‘Yes, but sometimes you just feel like a really good cry,’ she says.

‘I know, but you could have, like valves, in your neck or something, to control all your emotions. And if you fancied a cry you could just turn your valve on, get it out of your system, and then turn it off again. Controlled emotions, that’s the way forward.’ Nim looks at me strangely, and Jules, with her purse tucked under her chin, balances three glasses on the table.

‘Where did we get to? Cheers!’ Jules says as we clink glasses.

‘Nix wants a valve in her neck to make her stop crying,’ Nim says.

‘Oh Nix.’ Jules holds my hand.

‘I’m not crying now, Jules, it’s fine. I’m just saying it would be nice not to be at the mercy of my emotions, not to be so sodding up and down all the time. And not just when … you know, when something huge happens. But all the time, all the bloody tears, all the anger, the frustration. It would be nice just to turn it off for a while, just bob along evenly. It would be a break.’

‘It’s called being single,’ Jules says, raising her eyes to heaven.

I laugh, but then Jules qualifies,

‘Actually that’s a lie. I’m quite happy. I’m happy on my own, happier than I would be with somebody awful anyway. I’m independent, I’m in control, I don’t have to take anybody’s shit, I rely on myself completely. It’s only at night
that I really miss somebody, and even then, you get the bed to yourself.’

‘I know,’ I say, nodding.

‘Falling in love, getting hurt, being mucked around, being confused, having to commit, being scared you’re going to change your mind, it’s just not worth it. Any of it. We should just be on our own, it’s much more sensible. It’s not just sensible, it’s preferable.’ I am adamant.

‘Nix, I didn’t say that.’ Jules looks at me sadly, as if I am suddenly without hope, and I could not be more wrong. She talks as quietly as she can over the music pumping from speakers at either side of the bar,

‘The day goes much quicker if you have somebody to daydream about, or focus on, or think about. Somebody to think about before you fall asleep. It is worth it.’

‘It just has to be with somebody who is worth it.’ Jules reaches out to rub my arm again, and I feel like a fool.

‘It’s better to be on your own than to be with somebody who isn’t worth it, but if they are, then …’ Nim trails off. I have been simplistic. I have tried to smile my problems off and Nim and Jules won’t let me, because that means I am brushing theirs off too.

‘Well, what if you don’t know if they are worth it or not?’ I ask, trying to recover my cool, trying to look less naive.

‘I think you always know,’ Jules says, and refuses to break eye contact with me, so I look at Nim, and she is nodding her head and sucking up the last of her Pimms from the bottom of her glass, hidden behind the mint leaves.

I look away, and Jules must feel bad, because she changes the subject.

‘So, are you still going to go away? I mean, are you still resigning?’

‘Hell yes,’ I say, relieved to be right about something. ‘I can’t do that any more, stupid films, sodding
Evil Ghost 2
–
The Revenge
should not be a source of stress for me. Nobody is going to see it, and even if they do, it is just not important enough to stress me out as much as it does. And work is going to feel weird now anyway …’ I don’t have to explain.

‘So what are you going to do?’ Nim asks.

Silence. I want to answer, I just don’t know. I sit and shake my head for a while, and eventually laugh.

‘I haven’t got a fucking clue,’ I say.

Everybody cheers as a song comes on, an old song, a song that reminds everybody in the bar of being young, and we collectively wish we were nineteen again.

‘Shall we dance?’ Jules asks.

‘Absolutely,’ I say, and Nim nods her head. As I stand up, the cocktails in my bloodstream bubble towards my head, and we dance for the rest of the night. At one point I am laughing uncontrollably when a very short guy wearing white socks and slip-on shoes that glare out with the effect of the strobe won’t leave Jules alone, and she tries to run away from him on the dance floor. A few more cocktails, and everything gets pushed to one side, just for the night.