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,
