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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 oftheir 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 swiftmovement 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