Free Boyfriend in a Dress by Louise Kean Page B

stuffing the note into his pocket, pulling his tie off his head, and throwing it on the chair behind him. He looked at me, ran his hand through his hair, ashamed, but not guilty. I looked back at him, and almost cried. His hair was blonder now than it had ever been. His suit was bespoke. He looked ten years older than he ever had before. I could see sweaty patches on his shirt, where the cotton stuck to his body.
    ‘Alright?’ I said. The rest of the boys looked terribly uncomfortable. I heard one of them whisper to another ‘it’s his old lady,’ but I ignored it. I saw him flinch slightly as he heard it.
    ‘I was out with the girls, I don’t know how we ended up here. But I’m going now.’ I carried on looking at him, and he stared back, and then looked down, hands on hips, with nothing to say. I turned to go, and then spun around quickly. ‘Is your brother with you?’
    ‘No.’ Charlie shook his head slowly as he answered.
    ‘Okay, I’ll see you later.’ I turned and walked away, and didn’t look around until I was outside. They were all waiting for me at the top of the stairs, looking concerned.
    ‘It’s fine, he’s just out with some clients.’ I laughed and looked away, and we started to walk down the road towards a cab. Amy tried to hold my hand, but I shook it off.
    I didn’t see Charlie for a week after that, and I began to wonder if we had somehow called it quits, without even speaking about it. But then he phoned, the following week, to check that I was still coming with him to his boss’s birthday party and, for whatever reason, I said I was. We didn’t mention it again. We both just knew.
    Some people get married, have kids, are divorced in six years. Charlie and I have been through a lot, although appearing tohave been through nothing at all. Our start was promising and, God knows, we’ve stuck it out. It seemed more sensible to stay together than be apart. We have both hung in there. But we’ve driven each other quietly mad, despite never admitting it. It never seemed that important at the time.

My Green-Eyed Monster
    Vittorio De Sica was an Italian film director who said ‘moral indignation is in most cases two percent moral, forty-eight percent indignation, and fifty percent envy.’ I want to have Charlie’s laidback attitude to fucking about, fucking around, acting like an overgrown boy. I envy his ability not to care more than anything. I just can’t help myself caring, in some small part, about everything. I like to call it passion, a passion that seeps through me and won’t be silenced on so many topics.
    Phil has it too, the ability not to care about the little things, to take life easily, and let the troubles fall away from him as he strolls through his years. I pretend that I am shocked, but in truth I am only angry that I can’t do the same. Phil’s easiness doesn’t seem quite so mindless, or destructive, mostly because I am not having a relationship with him, and his actions can’t hurt me. Charlie’s still do.
    But sexual envy is, of course, not the only kind. We envy other people’s lives, mostly the lives with more money in them, that seem less like hard work. The general populace spends most of its time envying one small band of break-out characters, who are managing to escape the humdrum existence ofthe rest of us with our money worries and failed relationships. We envy them, and criticize them, and throw abuse in their general direction, and are repelled at their sexual shenanigans, while secretly, and not so secretly, we all want what they’ve got. We all seem to want to be famous. Is it just the money that we want, or the ability to make ourselves look prettier with the cosmetic surgery that they can afford? Being famous seems to me to be a lot of hard work, so it isn’t their schedule that we want – how many of us have to work a twenty-hour day on a regular basis? Our moral outrage when another one of them is arrested for mucking about with