Beta Male (3 page)

I don't deny that he can be a complete tosser. He often is. But as far as Matt, Ed and I are concerned, he's
our
tosser. He's
also very loyal, which counts for a lot. The lynchpin of our little group, it's always Sam who worries the most about losing touch with Matt and Ed; always Sam who goes out of his way to get everyone together. Maybe it stems from losing his mother when he was very young. Sam's not close to his dad – he barely ever mentions him, in fact, and he took an engineering job abroad soon after Sam left home. Sam's an only child, so the rest of us are like a dysfunctional family to him.

Our friendship came about by accident more than anything else, after discovering on our first day at primary school that we lived on the same street in Reading. I remember Matt and Sam pelting me and Ed with pebbles on the walk home. Naturally and temperamentally, we still divide much the same way: Sam and Matt are the outgoing ones; Ed and I more reserved. They do a lot better with women in the short term; Ed and I have had rather more stable relationships. The group isn't without its tensions, of course. Sam is entirely oblivious of the extent to which Ed resents his self-assurance. Matt and I rub along fine together, but don't really share confidences. And yet somehow, we all get on best as a four, everyone complementing everyone else.

Sam and I, who are probably the least similar, are also the closest. He's much cooler than me. He's certainly ‘lived' much more than me. When the four of us shared a flat in a crummy part of Brixton straight after university, Ed brought a large map of London one day and hung it in the kitchen. Soon afterwards drawing pins started appearing in random places on the map.

‘What do they represent?' I asked Ed.

‘Well, the blue ones show where our other friends live.'

‘Nice. And the pink ones?'

‘They mark where Sam has had sex.'

Within five years Sam had colonised most of Brixton, Herne Hill, Clapham, Wandsworth and Fulham with Ed's little pink dots. He pretended to be embarrassed about it, but Ed kept on pinning away, in awe, as ever, of Sam's success. Matt, who's
always been a little bit too competitive for his own good, then started adding red dots of his own. Sam was just starting on Finsbury Park when he met Lisa and the map suddenly vanished into a drawer.

If Ed had kept a similar map for me, I reflected, it would have had just one lonely pink pin, for Jess, in Borough.

Despite our different temperaments, though, Sam has always included me, always stood up for me. Sure, I don't like the way he picks on my name. What's wrong with being called Alan? It's not as if I couldn't make puerile jokes about him being called Sam Hunt. But he's essentially a good person. I wouldn't trust Sam with anyone else's girlfriend, but I'd certainly trust him with mine.

That said, Jess doesn't think much of Sam – a feeling I fear might be reciprocated. She mocks me sometimes for having two lovers, which just shows how little she understands male friendships. Maybe she's just jealous she doesn't have an equivalent Sam of her own. She also thinks he's a talented wastrel, which is probably true, and a misogynist, which is definitely untrue. If anything, Sam likes women too much. Certainly, he's never cheated on anyone. He's never deliberately led anyone on. He actually deludes himself far more than he deludes the willing victims he sleeps with. I've seen him genuinely surprised that he has, yet again, fallen head-over-heels in a fortnight and grown bored a week later.

Sam's problem is simple: he thinks too much. Take his tirade at his ex-girlfriend Lisa's wedding as an example. All I could think was,
Thank God Jess isn't on our table
. Jess is a terrifyingly clever barrister. She would have torn Sam's head off. And mine, too, probably, by association. I mean, sure, you can be all cynical and clever about why people get married. You can shock vicars by using rude words. But where does that get you? Nowhere.

I prefer not to analyse. Analysis can be saved for the spreadsheets in the office. Marriage is just something you do, a
stage you reach, like learning to drive or getting your first job or buying a flat. You get married and then you have to grow up and see a little less of your childhood friends. You certainly have to stop living with them. It's awkward when you earn a lot more than them.

I was planning on buying a flat with Jess soon. She's been nagging me about it for ages, but I'd prefer it if the initiative came from me. Then I thought we'd get engaged – maybe when we went skiing next year – and settle down to start a family. It would make my parents happy, I think, to see their final son married. My mum has never been that keen on Jess but hopefully she's given up holding out for anyone else by now. And, in any case, she's broodier about having more grandchildren than most mothers are the first time round. As for me, I feel quietly content about the prospect – not heart-racing, adrenaline-pumping mad with excitement – but quietly content. And that is much more important.

‘If you marry, you will regret it,' wrote Kierkegaard. ‘If you do not marry, you will also regret it.' But I can't imagine ever regretting getting married because, you see, I
am
a swan, and I think Jess is, too. She is intelligent, beautiful and kind (and not nearly as fat as I know Sam likes to make out). I
want
to spend the rest of my life with one person. I
want
to go out for an evening and not endure the terrible stress of not knowing what will happen. I want never to have to lunge at vacant air again.

Ultimately, then, I have a simple, old-fashioned idea of marriage: I will choose the girl, I will ask her and I will support her.

At least, that is what I thought. That is how I imagined it until, two weeks after Lisa's wedding, I ironed my shirt – my Thursday shirt – picked out a pair of Thursday socks and went to work in the expectation that everything would be the same when I came home again, just as I like it.

But it wasn't. It was all horribly different.

Different people have different criteria by which they judge a successful wedding. When Matt's elder sisters got married a year apart, I'm told his mum simply counted the thank-you letters afterwards and declared that daughter one's wedding had beaten daughter two's by a factor of eighty-nine to fifty-four. His dad preferred daughter two's, though, because it cost £1,237.57 less and he didn't have to prompt that set of in-laws to go halves.

Personally, I like to judge an evening on how much carnage I've caused. On that basis, at least, Lisa's wedding was a roaring success.

‘Are you proud of yourself, Sam?' Alan had asked on a rather awkward journey home.

‘Of course.'

‘I think Alan was being sarcastic,' added Jess, helpfully. I don't think I had risen much in her estimation over the previous twenty-four hours.

But what wasn't there to be proud about? The best man mentioned me in his speech – at least I assume he intended a dig in my direction when he said how glad Lisa's family were that she had,
at last
, found a suitable life-long partner in Timothy. After the speeches had finished, Matt and I embarked on a bet to see who could dance with every woman in the room first; a bet which I celebrated, gloriously, by giving him the finger over the shoulder of Timothy's waltzing 96-year-old grandmother as Matt attempted to make up lost ground by dancing with two toddler bridesmaids at the same time.

Then there was the Christian girl, Mary, with whom I spent an amusingly heathen few hours in Mrs Geoffrey Parker's bed
before Mrs Geoffrey Parker herself decided that she would quite like to sleep in it, although probably rather less acrobatically, with Mr Geoffrey Parker and, understandably, threw us out. This, apparently, was all my fault, so Mary drove off in a self-righteous huff – it was fine for her; all she had to do was say sorry and she'd still go to heaven – to her friend's house nearby, leaving me with dubious mobile reception and precious little battery as I tried to remember which B&B the other three had booked themselves into (I couldn't afford a room so had decided to take my chances at the wedding – I find it helps focus the mind). Matt always sleeps with his phone on silent, Ed had passed out and, when I finally got through to Alan, Jess yanked his mobile away to tell me, rather harshly I thought, that I had got myself into this mess so I could get myself out of it as well. Taking the initiative, then, I settled down in the dog's basket – a rather apt metaphor – until the deceptively docile-looking Labrador padded in from the drawing room and decided he wanted his basket to himself, leaving me to steal half his blankets and settle down in the hammock in the garden instead.

The ‘proud' incident to which I think Alan was referring occurred the following morning when I emerged from the bottom of my ex-girlfriend's parents' garden, still clad in my rented morning dress, its jacket lightly dusted with leaves and dog hair, and found myself in the middle of an apologetic lunch party for all the people in the village who hadn't been invited the evening before. Mrs Geoffrey Parker hastily showed me out, her firm goodbye more of an
adieu
than an
au revoir
.

All in all, then, it was a highly successful wedding. Life is short; you have to chase the anecdote. One day, when you're slowly fermenting in an old people's home, calling the matron by your aunt's name and dribbling liberally into your soup of no identifiable origin, it would be nice to have something amusing to look back on before you lose your memory altogether and
your grubby little grandchildren finally get their hands on your money.

*

The only problem with attending such a fun wedding is that the aftermath always feels so depressing. Timothy James and Lisa Amelia were flying off somewhere warm to have lots of rampant honeymoon sex, while I returned to the dodgier part of Islington, where it was raining, and tried to block out the sound of Alan and Jess shagging on the other side of our flat's thin walls.

Summer, though, is meant to be one of the happier times of year, especially if you are professionally unemployed. And, after this wedding, at least I had an immediate escape route to look forward to: my annual fourteen-hour, £1 Megabus trip to the Edinburgh Fringe, where I hoped to be able to take my mind off things.

The truth was that Lisa's wedding had worried me more than I'd realised. It wasn't just that Mr Geoffrey Parker had reminded me I was turning thirty and still hadn't made anything of my life. I was an optimist. Something would turn up. It wasn't even the obvious reason that my ex had married someone else – that didn't bother me much either. No, it was more what Lisa's marriage symbolised. I'd been to lots of weddings before, but this was the first one involving someone who had actually meant something to me. Was this it, then? The start of the rot? Had the first domino in the line fallen? And if so, who was next? Ed? Matt?
Alan
? I wasn't sure I could cope if Alan got married. I would be moved out of the cheap, subsidised flat owned by his wealthy, childless uncle, the loathsome Jess would be winched in and I would die alone on a street corner, urchins stealing my tattered rags, rats gnawing my face and the police struggling to identify the remains of an unloved soul.

I'm not being melodramatic. I'd seen Jess's face when she caught that bouquet. She was a determined woman and I knew what she wanted. She wanted Alan away from us and there would be nothing he could do about it. I've seen it happen before. Friends get married and then they vanish – however much they protest they won't – into Marriage-Land, a small country like Lichtenstein or Andorra, which no one who isn't married can ever find. You can't get a visa to visit Marriage-Land, even if you want to. They do things differently there. The customs are strange, the language alien. They have ‘dinner parties', ‘weekends in the country' and, eventually, small alien creatures called ‘children'.

I hoped Edinburgh would be a good place to get away from all this. I've always loved the Fringe. During the day you can wander around the city, soaking up the atmosphere created by the street entertainers and resolutely refusing to pay them any money when they embark on their speeches to a crowd of confused Japanese tourists about how they have ‘suffered for their art'. I have suffered for
my
art. No one wants to pay me for it. When any of my friends come to watch my plays, they probably suffer for my art, too.

In the afternoon, if the mood takes you, you can watch someone eat their own penis while standing on their head and playing the ukulele. If you're feeling more serious you can catch the latest production of
Othello
, re-interpreted by an avant-garde company of blind Latvian dwarves. My favourite activity, though, is to wander among the students on the Royal Mile, occasionally approaching the stressed, red-eyed producers and asking them how much money they've lost so far on their festival jaunt.

‘My advice to you is to become a lawyer instead,' I said, only half-jokingly, to one student producer-cum-actor on this trip.

‘Oh, I fully intend to,' he said, entirely seriously. ‘I just thought it would make my CV look more rounded when I apply for my City internship next summer if I could show that I've
worked creatively in a team while managing a limited budget for the benefit of that team. Then, of course, there are the concomitant marketing skills I've added to my skills basket… '

Twats constitute a relatively large sub-species of the performers in Edinburgh, but at least most of the twats at the Fringe are interesting ones. You might not have a great deal in common with someone who eats his own penis while standing on his head and playing the ukulele, but you'll probably have something interesting to talk about. It definitely beats going to Alan's office summer party, as I did earlier this year. Were it not for an intriguing half hour with Amanda, Alan's rather frisky boss, it would have been a total washout.