The Boy in the Dress Read online

  “It’s Vogue magazine, Dad.”

  “I can see it’s Vogue magazine.”

  Dennis fell silent. He had bought the magazine from the newsagent’s a few days before. Dennis liked the picture on the cover. It was of a very pretty girl in an even prettier yellow dress with what looked like roses sewn on the front, and it really reminded him of the dress his mum was wearing in the photograph he’d kept. He just had to buy it, even though the magazine was £3.80, and he only got £5 a week pocket money.

  ONLY 17 SCHOOLCHILDREN ALLOWED IN AT ONE TIME read the sign in the newsagent’s shop window. The shop was run by a very jolly man called Raj, who laughed even when nothing funny was happening. He laughed when he said your name as you walked through the door – and that was just what he did when Dennis went into the shop.

  “Dennis! Ha ha!”

  Seeing Raj laugh it was impossible not to laugh too. Dennis visited Raj’s shop most days on his way to or from school, sometimes just to chat to Raj, and after he picked up the copy of Vogue he felt a twinge of embarrassment. He knew it was usually women who bought it, so he also picked up a copy of Shoot on the way to the counter, hoping to hide the Vogue underneath it. But after ringing up the Shoot magazine on the till, Raj paused.

  He looked at the Vogue magazine, then at Dennis.

  Dennis gulped.

  “Are you sure you want this, Dennis?” asked Raj. “Vogue is mainly read by ladies, and your drama teacher Mr Howerd.”

  “Umm…” Dennis hesitated. “It’s a present for a friend, Raj. It’s her birthday.”

  “Oh, I see! Maybe you’d like some wrapping paper to go with it?”

  “Um, OK.” Dennis smiled. Raj was a wonderful businessman and very skilled at getting you to buy things you didn’t really want.

  “All the wrapping paper is over there by the greetings cards.”

  Dennis reluctantly wandered over.

  “Oh!” said Raj, excited. “Maybe you need a card to go with it too! Let me help.”

  Raj bounded out from behind the counter and began to proudly show Dennis his range of cards. “These are very popular with the ladies. Flowers. Ladies love flowers.” He pointed out another. “Kittens! Look at these lovely kittens. And PUPPIES!” Raj was really excited now. “Look at those lovely puppies! They’re so beautiful, Dennis, that they make me want to cry.”

  “Er…” said Dennis, looking at the card with puppies on it, trying to understand why it might make someone shed actual tears.

  “Does this lady friend of yours prefer kittens or puppies?” Raj asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Dennis, unable to think what this ‘lady friend’ of his might like, if she existed. “Puppies, I think, Raj.”

  “Puppies it is! These puppies are so beautiful I want to kiss them all over!”

  Dennis tried to nod his head in agreement, but his head wouldn’t move.

  “Is this wrapping paper OK?” asked Raj, as he pulled out a roll of what looked suspiciously like unsold Christmas wrapping paper.

  “It’s got Father Christmas on it, Raj.”

  “Yes, Dennis, and he’s wishing you a very happy birthday!” said Raj confidently.

  “I think I’ll just leave it, thanks.”

  “Buy one extra roll, I’ll give you a third free,” said Raj.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Three rolls for the price of two! That’s a very good offer!”

  “No, thanks,” said Dennis again.

  “Seven rolls for the price of five?”

  Dennis only got Ds in maths, so wasn’t sure if that was a better offer or not. But he didn’t want seven rolls of Father Christmas wrapping paper, especially in March, so again he said, “No, thanks.”

  “Eleven rolls for the price of eight?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You’re a madman, Dennis! That’s three rolls free!”

  “But I really don’t need eleven rolls of wrapping paper,” said Dennis.

  “OK, OK,” said Raj. “Let me just put these through the till for you.”

  Dennis followed Raj to the till. He glanced briefly at the sweets on the counter.

  “Vogue magazine, Shoot magazine, card, and now you’re eyeing up my Yorkie bars, aren’t you?” said Raj, laughing.

  “Well, I was just…”

  “Take one.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Take one,” insisted Raj.

  “It’s OK.”

  “Please, Dennis, I want you to have a Yorkie bar.”

  “I don’t really like Yorkie bars…”

  “Everyone likes Yorkie bars! Please take one.”

  Dennis smiled and picked up a Yorkie.

  “One Yorkie bar, sixty pence,” said Raj.

  Dennis’s face dropped.

  “So that’s five pounds in total please,” continued the shopkeeper.

  Dennis rummaged in his pocket and pulled out some coins.

  “As my favourite customer,” said Raj, “I give you a discount.”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Dennis.

  “Four pounds and ninety-nine pence, please.”

  Dennis had walked halfway up the street before he heard a voice shout, “Sellotape!”

  He looked round. Raj was holding a large box of Sellotape. “You need Sellotape to wrap the present!”

  “No, thanks,” said Dennis politely. “We’ve got some at home.”

  “Fifteen rolls for the price of thirteen!” Raj shouted.

  Dennis smiled and carried on walking. He felt a sudden surge of excitement. He couldn’t wait to get home and open the magazine, and gaze at its hundreds of glossy, colourful pages. He walked faster, then started jogging, and when he really couldn’t contain his excitement any more he started running.

  When he got home, Dennis bounded upstairs. He closed the bedroom door, lay down on his bed and turned the first page.

  Like a treasure box from an old film, the magazine seemed to shine a golden light on his face. The first hundred pages were all adverts, but in a way they were the best bit – pages and pages of glorious photographs of beautiful women in beautiful clothes and make-up and jewellery and shoes and bags and sunglasses. Names like Yves Saint-Laurent, Christian Dior, Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, and Stella McCartney ran underneath the images. Dennis didn’t know who any of them were, but he loved the way their names looked on the page.

  The adverts were followed by a few pages of writing – they looked boring so he didn’t read them – then pages and pages of fashion shoots. These were not very different from the adverts, featuring more beautiful women in photographs that were moody and fabulous. The magazine even smelled exotic, as it had special pages where you pulled open a flap to have a sniff of the newest perfume. Dennis pored over every page, mesmerised by the dresses – their colour, their length, their cut. He could lose himself in the pages forever.

  The glamour.

  The beauty.

  The perfection.

  Suddenly he heard a key in the door. “Dennis? Oi, bro? Where are you?”

  It was John.

  Dennis quickly hid the magazine under his mattress. He knew somehow that he didn’t want his brother to see it.

  He opened the bedroom door and called down as innocently as he could from the top of the stairs. “I’m just up here.”

  “What are you doing?” asked John as he leaped up the stairs, a Jaffa cake in his mouth.

  “Nothing. Just got home.”

  “Do you wanna have a kick about in the garden?”

  “Yeah, OK.”

  But all the time they played, Dennis couldn’t help thinking about the magazine. It was as if it was glowing like gold from under the mattress. That night when his brother was in the bath he quietly lifted the copy of Vogue from under the mattress and silently turned the pages, studying every hem, every stitch, every fabric.

  Every moment he could, Dennis returned to this glorious world. It was his Narnia, only without the talking lion that�
��s supposed to be Jesus.

  But Dennis’s escape to that magical world of glamour ended the day his dad discovered the magazine.

  “I can see it’s Vogue. What I want to know is why a son of mine wants to look at a fashion magazine?”

  It sounded like a question, but there was such anger and force in Dad’s voice Dennis wasn’t sure if he really wanted an answer. Not that Dennis could think of one anyway.

  “I just like it. It’s only pictures and things about dresses and that.”

  “I can see that,” said Dad, looking at the magazine.

  And that was when he paused and a funny look crossed his face. He studied the cover for a moment – the girl in the flowery frock. “That dress. It’s like the one your m – ”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “Nothing, Dennis. Nothing.”

  Dad looked for a moment like he was going to cry.

  “It’s OK, Dad,” said Dennis softly, and he slowly moved his hand and placed it over his dad’s. He remembered doing the same with his mum once when Dad had made her cry. He remembered how strange it felt too, a little boy comforting a grown-up.

  Dad let Dennis hold his hand for a moment, before moving it away, embarrassed. He raised his voice again. “No, son, it’s just not right. Dresses. It’s weird.”

  “Well, Dad, what are you doing looking under my mattress in the first place?”

  In truth Dennis knew exactly why his dad was looking under his mattress. Dad owned a copy of a rude magazine like the ones on the top shelf at Raj’s shop. Sometimes John would sneak into their dad’s room and smuggle it out and look at it. Dennis looked at it too, sometimes, but didn’t find it all that exciting. He was disappointed when the ladies took their clothes off – he preferred looking at what they were wearing.

  Anyway, when John ‘borrowed’ his father’s magazine, it wasn’t really like when you borrow a book from the library. There wasn’t an inlay card that would have to be stamped by a bespectacled librarian, and you didn’t incur fines if you returned it late.

  So John usually just kept it.

  Dennis guessed his dad’s magazine had gone missing again, and he had been looking for it when he found the copy of Vogue.

  “Well, I was just looking under your mattress because…” Dad looked uncomfortable, and then angry. “It doesn’t matter why I was looking under your mattress. I’m your dad. I can look under your mattress any time I like!” He finished his speech with the tone of triumph grown-ups sometimes use when they are talking nonsense and they know it.

  Dennis’s dad brandished the magazine. “This is going in the dustbin, son.”

  “But Dad…” Dennis protested.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just not right. A boy your age reading Vogue magazine.” He said ‘Vogue magazine’ as if he was talking a foreign language he didn’t understand. “It’s just not right,” he muttered over and over as he left the room.

  Dennis sat on the edge of his bed. He listened as his dad clumped his way down the stairs, and then lifted the dustbin lid. Finally he heard a clanging thud as the magazine hit the bottom of the bin.

  ∨ The Boy in the Dress ∧

  4

  Wanting to Disappear

  “Morning, Dennis, or should I say Denise!” said John, laughing cruelly.

  “I told you not to mention it,” said Dad sternly, as he coated his white toast with an inch thick layer of butter. When Mum was around she’d have made him have margarine.

  And brown bread.

  Dennis slumped down at the kitchen table in silence, not even looking at his brother. He poured himself some Rice Krispies.

  “Seen any nice dresses recently?” taunted John. He laughed again.

  “I told you to leave it alone!” said Dad, even louder than before.

  “Magazines like that are for girls! And woofters!”

  “SHUT UP!” said Dad.

  Dennis suddenly didn’t feel hungry any more, and picked up his bag and walked out of the door. He slammed it behind him. He could still hear Dad, saying, “What did I say, John? It’s over, OK? It’s in the bin.”

  Dennis walked unwillingly to school. He didn’t want to be at home or at school. He was afraid his brother would tell somebody and he’d be laughed at. He just wanted to disappear. When he was much younger he used to believe that if he closed his eyes, no one else could see him.

  Right now he wished it was true.

  The first lesson of the day was history. Dennis liked history – they were studying the Tudor dynasty, and he loved looking at the pictures of the kings and queens in all their finery. Especially Elizabeth I, who really knew how to ‘power dress’, an expression he had read in Vogue next to a shoot of a model in a beautifully cut business suit. But Dennis always found chemistry – the next lesson – mind-numbingly boring. He spent most of the lesson staring at the periodic table, trying to fathom what it was.

  When break-time came, Dennis played football as usual in the playground with his friends. He was having fun until he saw John with a group of his mates, the bad boys with short hair who the careers’ advisors would probably advise to become nightclub bouncers or criminals. They ambled through the middle of the makeshift pitch.

  Dennis held his breath.

  John nodded at his brother, but said nothing.

  Dennis let out a sigh of relief.

  He was pretty sure his brother couldn’t have told anyone that he’d bought a women’s fashion magazine. After all, Darvesh was playing football with him as he always did. They played with an old tennis ball that Darvesh’s dog Odd-Bod had chewed. It was a school rule that footballs weren’t allowed in the playground in case a window got broken. Darvesh set Dennis up to score with a daring cross.

  Then Dennis headed the ball and it flew too high up past what was meant to be the goal…and through the window of the headmaster’s office.

  John and his friends stared, mouths open. The playground fell silent.

  You could have heard a pin drop, in the unlikely event that someone had dropped a pin at that exact moment.

  “Oops,” said Darvesh.

  “Yes, oops,” said Dennis.

  ‘Oops’ was really an understatement. The headmaster, Mr Hawtrey, hated children. Actually, he hated everybody, probably even himself. He wore an immaculate three-piece grey suit, with a charcoal-coloured tie and dark-framed glasses. His hair was meticulously combed and parted, and he had a thin, black moustache. It was if he actively wanted to look sinister. And he had a face that someone who has spent their whole life grimacing ends up with.

  A permanently grimacing one.

  “He might not be in his office,” ventured Darvesh hopefully.

  “Maybe,” said Dennis, gulping.

  At that moment the headmaster’s face peered out of the window. “SCHOOL!” he bellowed. The playground fell silent. “Who kicked this ball?” He held the tennis ball between his fingers with the same sense of disgust that dog owners do when they are forced to pick up their dog’s doo-doo.

  Dennis was too scared to say anything.

  “I asked a question. WHO KICKED IT?”

  Dennis gulped. “I didn’t kick it, Sir,” he offered tentatively. “But I did header it.”

  “Detention today, boy. Four o’clock.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” said Dennis, not sure what else to say.

  “Because of your behaviour all ball games in the playground are banned for today,” added Mr Hawtrey before disappearing back into his study. A sigh of angry disappointment echoed around the playground. Dennis hated it when teachers did that, when they made everyone suffer to make you unpopular with your classmates. It was a cheap trick.

  “Don’t worry, Dennis,” said Darvesh. “Everyone knows Mr Hawtrey’s a total…”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  They sat on their bags by the wall of the science block and opened their lunch boxes, devouring the sandwiches that were meant for lunch.

  Dennis hadn’t told Darvesh about buying Vogue – but he
wanted to find out what his friend thought about it – in a roundabout way.

  Darvesh was Sikh. As he was in the same year as Dennis and only twelve he didn’t wear a turban yet. He wore a patka, a bobble-hat-type thing that kept his hair out of his face. That’s because Sikh men aren’t supposed to cut their hair. There were lots of different types of kids at the school, but Darvesh was the only one who wore a patka.

  “Do you feel different Darvesh?” asked Dennis.

  “In what way?”

  “Well, just, you know, you’re the only boy in school who has to wear one of those things on your head.”

  “Oh, that, yeah. Well, with my family of course I don’t. And when mum took me to India at Christmas to visit Grandma I didn’t at all. All the Sikh boys were wearing them.”

  “But at school?”

  “At first I did, yes. I felt a bit embarrassed ‘cos I knew I looked different to everyone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then I suppose as people got to know me they realised I wasn’t really that different. I just wear this funny thing on my head!” He laughed.

  Dennis laughed too.

  “Yeah, you’re just my mate, Darvesh. I don’t really think about the thing on your head at all. In fact, I’d quite like one.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. It itches like hell! But you know, it would be boring if we were all the same wouldn’t it?”

  “It certainly would.” Dennis smiled.

  ∨ The Boy in the Dress ∧

  5

  Just Doodling

  Dennis had never had a detention before, so in a way he was quite looking forward to it. When he turned up at classroom 4C to report to the French teacher Miss Windsor, he noticed there was only one other person who had been sentenced to an hour’s incarceration. It was Lisa.

  Lisa James.

  Only the most beautiful girl in the school.

  She was super-cool too, and somehow she always made her school uniform look like it was a costume in a pop video. Even though they had never spoken Dennis had a really big crush on Lisa.

  Not that anything would ever happen though – her being two years older and six inches taller made her literally out of reach.