Boyfriend in a Dress by Louise Kean

from behind his hand, he continues. ‘I had never smelt anything like it, and there was this guy, just slumped into the dirty sink. He was stiff as a board. His face was blue, and his fingers were all twisted at weird angles.’
    ‘Jesus,’ I say again, completely involuntarily.
    Charlie hangs his head in shame. ‘I threw up all over him.’
    The thought of it makes him retch again.
    ‘Somebody shouted out, and then people started coming, the station attendants, all holding their noses, their eyes watering from the smell of my sick and his death. I had to get away, and I pushed past the guard and up the escalators, and outside.’
    We both catch our breath – Charlie has certainly had a terrible day. I rub the back of my neck, and try and unknot the tension that has built in the last twenty minutes listening to Charlie’s story.
    ‘What happened then?’ I ask, hungry for more dreadful gossip.
    ‘I thought I felt better – I got to work and had some water, but then some guy, Piers, from the backroom, just some fucking research guy, he made a crack about me having thrown up on my suit. I had been sick on the bottom of my Armani trousers. Sick all over them. They told me to cool off, after I hit him, so I came home.’
    ‘You hit somebody at work?’ I ask, incredulous. Charlie would never normally do anything to jeopardize his work – he lives for his work.
    ‘Yeah, I did – I’m not proud of it! Anyway, I tried to change but I couldn’t find anything. Everything needed washing.’ Charlie turns and looks at the kitchen behind him, and then looks back at me, gesturing behind him. ‘I started washing all my clothes.’
    He sounds like a child who has been caught doing something they shouldn’t, getting his nice, expensive, dry-clean only work suits all wet. I look towards the kitchen and sure enough the floor is covered with water, and all of Charlie’s suits are spread, sopping wet, across the floor.
    ‘This dress was the only thing I could find, that didn’t need cleaning. You must have left it here one night. I don’t know, it was here, so I put it on.’
    ‘Charlie, stop!’ I put a hand up. ‘Charlie, this is all absolutely awful, don’t get me wrong – but the dress? That bit I don’t get – why put on a dress?’ I search his face for an answer, but he looks at me with impatience.
    ‘I just told you – everything else needed washing!’ He looks at me like I’m the idiot. I am starting to worry. He thinks there is logic there.
    ‘Anyway, I ran out of soap powder so I went downstairs to the newsagent’s, and the guy told me to get out, that he didn’t want to serve me! I told him he had served me hundreds of times before, but he pushed me out onto the street, and that’s when I fell and banged my eye on the kerb.’ He points to the dried-up slit above his eye. ‘I had the washing powder, though, I just hadn’t paid for it. So I brought it back up. And then, I don’t know, I sat here for a while … and then you came in.’
    I look down and for the first time register that Charlie has a packet of soap powder by his side. It has half spilled out onto the carpet.
    I make my deduction quickly – he has completely lost it. This whole strange sequence of events has made him snap, and he has turned into a dress-wearing, hygiene freak, class ‘A’ nutter. Is this what happens when people go mad? I always thought it would be a steady process and you would notice them changing over a period of months, making occasional bird noises, or claiming to be Mother Teresa, or you’d catch them eating compost. But Charlie appears to have leap-frogged the progressive type of madness, and just gone straight for the looney tunes version of boys in ill-fitting dresses talking gibberish. Nobody would blame me for dumping a mad man, surely? Or would they think me cold? I do a quick mental tot up in my head and draw the conclusion that I would need to look supportive for about three weeks, and then I could