Читать книгу Boyfriend in a Dress - Louise Kean - Страница 8

I was at university in America for a year, the autumn of 1995 to the summer of 1996, and so was Charlie, but we were from different universities back home in Britain. I had to walk through the quad to get to most of my lectures – a huge rectangle of grass and crossing paths, of students with backpacks, and haggy-sac games, flicking tiny bean bags off their feet and ankles and heads and shoulders, and smelling of illegal substances and youth. Massive trees spotlighting the season, framing buildings that seemed older than everything else in town. The library was at one end and the theatre at the other, where I had seen a particularly gratuitous performance of Hair, students making a big deal of being naked, to prove that being naked wasn’t a big deal. On either side were the humanities buildings – the science buildings were off to one side, supposedly in case of explosions, but mostly because science students don’t mesh well with other students, and there would be too much bullying between lectures.

The day Charlie and I met had been eventful. It was November, and freezing outside. The weather in Urbana-Champaign was a curious set of extremes; ninety percent humidity in the summer – asthmatics didn’t make it through July – and minus forty in the winter, when the wind chill could freeze up the water in your eyes given two minutes. And either side, in spring and fall, were the tornadoes – green silent skies before a killer wind whipped through town. I strongly believe in the effect of the weather. It makes you do things you normally wouldn’t, it’s the backdrop to all our greatest dramas. More than anything it affects the moods. Bad things shouldn’t happen on sunny days, it’s confusing.

It was an exchange year, with an American student who got to be conscientious in England while I pissed it up in Illinois for three terms. The only downside was that I had to stay in university accommodation, which meant sharing a room with a complete stranger.

And my roommate was trained to kill. This was the thought most prevalent in my mind early on the day I met Charlie. Her face, contorting with rage, her mouth screaming random obscenities, and she was trained to kill: not just chickens after two days of starvation in some mosquito swarm of a jungle, but real people, actual humans, in battle. She had spent two years in the American Army Reserves, and they let her have a knife, and probably a gun, which she had no doubt stolen and kept. She was trained to kill, and in the process of throwing my stuff around the room, beating my bed with her pillow, twisting and snarling at me, and screaming abuse. This was not the first time, but certainly I had never actually feared for my life before. Trained in the art of slitting a man’s throat in the dead of night, and she was very much pissed off with me. I knew for a fact that she was seeing a counsellor. My roommate, Joleen, mentally, medically unstable, able to slit my throat, and barely two feet away from me. The last time she was mad, which wasn’t even this mad, I had been nearer to the door. But on this particular day, I was practically pinned against my debunked bunk bed, while she held the sides of her head, palms wide, pressing her temples, as if the pain wouldn’t stop, as if the voices wouldn’t stop. Did she hear voices? I’m not sure, but I would never bet against it. J. Edgar Hoover? Probably. He was a psychopath in women’s clothing as well. Like attracts like they say.

Joleen turned to face me, and started screaming. I was petrified.

‘You fucking bitch, you are like a dog on the street, I have less respect for you than a fucking dog on the street, you fucking piece of shit, you fucking bitch.’

She was pretty much repeating this over and over. I don’t know what the voices in her head were telling her, but they were anti-me, that much I deduced.

‘Joleen, simmer down and at least tell me what I have done!’

I tried desperately to keep the situation reasonably calm – no rising to the bait and feeding her fury. I felt it was important not to make direct eye contact with a psychotic, so I looked at her forehead with one eye, while sizing up the door with the other.

‘You can’t use my fridge, it’s my fucking fridge, don’t put your stuff in there, you bitch!’ she screamed back, her face turning a yellowy red, the colour of serious illness.

‘Oh, right.’

At least now I knew why she was angry. She hadn’t said anything before. And it was only some beers to drink while I got ready that night, and an eye mask.

‘Don’t you think you’re blowing this all out of proportion, Joleen? It’s a couple of beers, for a couple of hours. Let’s talk about what this is really about. It’s Dale, right?’

The last time Joleen had actually tried to do me harm was because of Dale. Dale was her friend, her only friend. She loved him, I knew that much. You could tell from every sideways glance, every admiring beam in his direction, every distracted glazed daydream of what they could be together. But he did not love her. He used her. He used her car, used her soap powder, used her phone. He had a room in our dorm, not two hundred feet away, yet he was never there. He wore Bryan Ferry suits. He quiffed his hair, but rarely washed it. He was a five feet six, nine-stone weasel of a man. He wore second-hand winkle-pickers, which were so badly scuffed at the front it looked like he kicked dustbins for a living. He chain-smoked Marlboro Reds, and he wrote poetry on a bashed-up old typewriter with keys missing. None of his poems contained the letter J, he said, through choice. He was a womanizer, of sorts. He preyed on the insecure; he lured the weak ones with romantic ramblings, and implied sensitivity, and had sex with them when nobody else would. Or else he lucked out and got a cheerleader who was looking for something ‘deeper’ and ‘darker’ and ultimately dirtier. And if Dale looked one thing, it was dirty.

Dale had five women on the go at any one time. They left messages for him on Joleen’s answerphone. The messages weren’t just ‘meet me at six o’clock in the coffee house’. They were nearly always sexual, mostly bordering on the perverse. ‘I want to lick you from the tips of your toes to the tip of your …’ or ‘I want you to dip your fingers in honey and push them up my …’ The challenge was always stopping the message before anything truly disgusting was disclosed. I could make it from one side of the room to the other in a quarter of a second. He enjoyed both sides of the coin – getting them to say things to a machine they would never say to somebody’s face, and having Joleen listen to them after a hard day of lectures and taking the bus because Dale had her car. Sometimes he even had the luck to see her face drop, and witness first hand any dismal light in her fade.

But Joleen loved him anyway. She saw how he treated these women, saw them fall in love with him as he kissed parts of their body that had never been kissed, whispered things to them that they longed to be true, and then he turned on them. One day he was their hero, the next their only hope, as he told them nobody else would want them, told them how fucked-up they were, how neurotic, how stupid, how insecure, how pathetic, how boring, how unintelligent, how unworthy. Joleen thought he did this for sport, for some Machiavellian fun: in the mixed-up world that was her mind, Dale was some twentieth-century Marquis de Sade, playing games with whores and handmaidens who somehow deserved it.

Joleen looked at me in sheer horror at the audacity of my even saying his name in her presence. Seconds lapsed but time stood still, and then she hit me with the full verbal force of her startling originality: ‘You fucking bitch.’

She glared at me, and I half-expected to see venom fly from the sides of her mouth. This was all a real shame, as despite the hate campaign waged against me since day three, I didn’t dislike her … that much. I felt sorry for her, I wished she’d go out more, I wished she’d see Dale for what he was, but I didn’t hate her. How can you hate somebody that fucked up? Everything she did to me, every perverse stab in my direction, was fuelled by jealousy, and jealousy is a terrible affliction. It hurts its victim most, and I was getting the easy bit compared to what must have been going on in her head. The room was quiet, but the silence itself seemed loud. The threat of impending noise seemed to hang everywhere, in the air around the two desks, our beds, our book-filled shelves, the wardrobes on either side of the door, my shoes kicked off under my bed, the papers on my desk, the photos of her naked scrambling up a tree (I know!) on her desk, everywhere.

The phone began to ring, and we both jumped a little. She was nearest, with her back to it. I didn’t move to answer it. Joleen stared at me, daring me to grab for it, so in one swift movement she could get me in a head lock and flash her blade in front of my dying eyes while blood oozed from the slit in my throat; she’d claim it was self-defence because I ‘lunged’ towards her. I decided not to move, and let the answerphone get it. It was, after all, exactly this kind of situation that answerphones were created for. The phone kept ringing. We both waited for the sixth ring and the click. We stared at each other and mentally counted, although I swear I saw her fingers folding in one by one, and her lips moving. At last, the answerphone kicked in. A male voice, young but gruff. It was Big John from the dorm upstairs.

‘Dale, if you leave one more death threat on my answerphone, I swear to God I will kick your ass. Get a fucking life!’

Joleen and I both turned and stared at the answerphone incredulously for a moment, before she turned back to face me, but a little less angry, a little more concerned. She was worried for Dale and rightly so. I don’t know what the sick little shit had been up to but, by the sounds of it, it was no good. And more frightening still, for Joleen and Dale at least, Big John’s nickname was not ironic.

‘Don’t do it again,’ Joleen hissed at me, turned and grabbed her keys. I flinched and covered my face – oh the vanity! – but I don’t think she even noticed. She snatched her coat and goose-stepped out the door.

Joleen believed that deep down Dale loved her too. She would come up behind him and hug him, the only real outlet of affection I ever saw her indulge in, at which point he would push her away with absolute disgust. It takes real love to keep coming back for more of that kind of treatment. She saw a twisted black prince – I saw a pretender, intent on making everybody feel as bad as he did about his failed notions of poetic greatness, about rejection from a father who wanted a son with a crew cut and a football in his hand.

And despite his sexual indifference towards her, Dale had long since convinced Joleen that she needed him like oxygen. Every time it started to dawn on her that he was a destructive force in her life, and in fact scaring away any new friends she seemed on the verge of making, he sensed it, and offered her some weak branch of hope that he might actually feel something for her too. She was hooked again. The previous year he had changed his surname from Woodfood to Curse for the devilish connotations. I don’t need to say ‘wanker’, but I will.

I shared my room with Joleen, not through choice, but through a complete lack thereof. I had requested a smoking room, and I had got hers. This was America, after all; they weren’t all lighting up down the corridor. We were a grim novelty at the end of the hall, hippies or beatniks or freaks or arseholes, depending on who you asked. Smoking was our badge, and we wore it like a cloud of smoke around our heads at all times. Nobody had a single room; they were like gold-dust. I was obliged to stay in halls of residence and I had nowhere else to go. It was a battle of wills, mostly. I didn’t realize she was a fruitcake on day one. Maybe day three, when all my pictures got mysteriously smashed during dinner. It was about the same time that Dale started to make advances towards me. He was in our room twenty hours a day and I literally had to ask him to step outside while I changed my clothes, which he found amusing more than inconvenient. I broached it with Joleen.

‘Dale’s here a lot, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s his roommate like? Don’t they get on?’

‘He’s a moron.’

‘Who, Dale or his roommate?’ I laughed, but Joleen didn’t get the joke.

‘His roommate of course.’

‘So do you think he might mind not coming round if neither of us is here – I don’t know, it just makes me feel uncomfortable if you’re not here and I come back, and he’s already hanging out here.’

Joleen stopped sorting her socks, and was completely still. I seriously thought she had slipped into a coma. Or was suffering some minor epileptic fit at least.

‘Joleen?’ I edged forward.

‘He’s got nowhere else to go.’

‘What about his room? He could hang out there, I mean, until you got back at least.’

The conversation was starting to make me fell uncomfortable. Joleen was not being as receptive to my feelings as I anticipated.

‘Joleen?’ I asked again, as she fell silent.

‘Dale stays.’

‘Oh come on, don’t you think you’re being just a little unreasonable?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Sorry?’

I heard her the first time. I shouldn’t have asked her to repeat it.

She leapt up from her bed, dumped the basket of freshly washed clothes on the floor, screamed ‘Fuck off’ at me again, and left the room. I was a little shocked if I’m honest.

I stayed, because it was my room too. In this land of democracy, I wasn’t about to surrender my rights. But mostly, and despite my political high-mindedness, I stayed to prove I could. I should have asked for a transfer in week one, but some weird sense of determination and fairness kicked in, and I decided that I would not be driven out by a fruit loop and her twisted sidekick – Batmad and Dobin.

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.

‘Oh, you’re back, are you?’ he said, with a trace of irritation – he wasn’t nearly as nice to me if Joleen wasn’t in the room.

‘Yep, and I’ve just had a shower, so can you leave, please, while I get ready?’

‘Going anywhere nice? Another frat party, is it? You’re such a joiner,’ he said, without a hint of interest. I had only been to two fraternity parties in the four months since I had arrived – pathetic affairs full of seventeen-year-old girls not used to drinking, and a house full of frat boys all lashed on keg beer, and a makeshift jacuzzi out front for concealed groping. The University of Illinois, my home for that year, had the largest Greek system in the States, meaning it had the most fraternities and sororities. It’s a quaint little system, whereby you get to buy your friends for four years because you’re too damn scared to make them on your own, but it’s all dressed up as tradition and fun. It’s a system that reeks of the ‘American Dream’, rotting. One girl in my dorm, a gorgeous looking, athletic, popular, intelligent freshman named Joanna discussed the ins and outs of trying to get into one of the sororities, over bagels one day in the canteen. Joanna had a shortlist of three. The one she most wanted to get into, Pi Kappa whatever, was her favourite, the top of her list, but she was a little nervous. She didn’t think she would get in, the reason being she was Jewish, and Pi Krappy whatever didn’t usually take Jewish girls. I practically threw my lunch up all over her. She was desperate to get into some mock Tudor shit-hole of a house with a bunch of tight arsed wasps who wouldn’t like her anyway because she was Jewish. I told her you would never get it in Britain. We make our own friends when we get to college I explained, trying hard not to sound like her rabbi. We go down to the pub and have a legal drink at a sensible age, and make friends that way, half cut. We don’t discuss how much our parents earn. What about the class system in England she had said? I told her I had a lecture to go to, and she was too bright a girl to be doing something so stupid as join a sorority.

I wasn’t going to a fraternity party, therefore, that evening, but to the pub, Henry’s, where all the ‘foreigners’ went – Aussies, Brits, Kiwis, Paddies – for the birthday of one of the guys from university back home. You see I hadn’t braved this new world on my own – there were at least fifteen students from my university with me, and that’s not even counting all those from the other British universities. What with not actually having to pass any courses, it was more like a multicultural holiday camp with racial tension and inadequate air conditioning, than work. It was Jon’s birthday, and we all congregated in the pub, which we did most nights anyway. It wasn’t like all the other bars – the ‘sports bars’ – with their neon lights and blonde-haired waitresses, and TV screens and dozens of pool tables. It was dirtier, dingier – all the bar staff looked slightly tortured and, if not unattractive, they all had tattoos at least. The tables were made of old battered wood and engraved with fifty years’ worth of drunken etchings by students missing lectures. It reminded us of home. On these occasions, we would drink until the birthday boy or girl threw up. This was generally about ten p.m., as they had invariably been in the pub all day. I don’t know why I told Dale this, but I did.

‘No actually, Dale, I am not going to a fraternity party, I’m just not in that date-rape mood tonight. And besides, I’m always scared I’ll spot you hiding in the bushes, weeping in loneliness and wanking over bikini-clad freshers – and that’s just the boys.’

Dale swore at me under his breath.

‘I am actually going to the pub.’ I continued to stand and stare expectantly at him, waiting for him to leave, nodding towards the door, holding up my towel, wet hair dripping all over the floor, as I needed him to go before I could put the towel covering my body on my head.

‘I don’t see why I have to leave. I won’t look; I’m working.’ Dale stared down at the letters on his typewriter, supposedly in concentration.

‘Oh Dale, just get out, will you – I shouldn’t have to walk on eggshells to get a little fucking privacy in my own room. Joleen’s not even here,’ and with that, Joleen walked in and practically had a seizure at the sight of me in my towel, standing in front of Dale, begging him for something, even if the something was his speedy exit.

She turned on me straight away. ‘What the fuck are you doing – can’t you put some fucking clothes on?’ She spat the words at me, which she pretty much did whenever she talked anyway.

Joleen’s sudden appearance in the room meant Dale’s attitude towards me changed completely.

‘Nicola, can’t I stay for a little while? I yearn to kiss your milky white shoulders.’ He looked at me, looked at Joleen, and then back at me again, a smile playing on his lips.

‘They are not milky white. Get out.’

And for once, Joleen agreed with me.

‘Yeah, Dale, leave while she gets dressed for God’s sake, she’s just a prick tease.’

Dale grabbed his Marlboros from the desk and pushed past me, his proximity immediately making me want to get straight back in the shower.

‘Thank you, Jesus, at last!’ I muttered as he left.

‘What was that? What did you say?’ He spun around and, for a moment, he was a froth of anger and spite, but almost instantly he recovered himself, and forced a smile. ‘Oh Nicola, remember, you’ll never meet an American who loves you like I do. They don’t get how ironic you are – they’re all assholes. They think you’re just some uptight Brit who wouldn’t know her ass from her elbow in bed, but I know you’d go like a greyhound.’

And with that, Dale stalked off down the hall to sit in his room for the rest of the evening, watching sci-fi shit on TV.