Beta Male (6 page)

‘Excellent!' I cried. ‘Tara has missed out on quite a catch with you, Ed. You are every inch the enlightened modern man.'

‘I'm serious, Sam. I'm going to become a masculinist.'

‘What the hell is that?'

‘I don't know. I've just invented the word. But I'm going to be the male equivalent of a feminist. You'll see. All of 'em will see. I'm going to stand up for male rights.' Ed rose to his feet, as if about to address a grateful nation. ‘I'll campaign to become the first Minister for Men. I'll write a book called
The Flat-Chested Eunuch
. I'll pitch a short and punchy column to
GQ
magazine – '

‘Ed, aren't you becoming a little emotional?'

‘No, leave him, Sam,' said Matt. ‘He's got a point. An exaggerated point, admittedly, but a valid one. I've lost out on my last two jobs to female doctors. They're much better at the caring side of medicine. And Alan has to put up with Amanda, that dragon of a female boss who's a thousand times better at office politics than any of the men. He's always telling us how manipulative she is.' Matt broke off to take another swig of his beer and looked across at me. ‘What's up, Sam? You're smiling inanely.'

The partial truth was that I had been experiencing a pleasant flashback to my encounter with the dragoneous Amanda at Alan's summer party. But that wasn't the only thing making me smile. ‘I was just thinking how nice it is to have the three of us in the same room at the same time,' I told them. ‘All of us together. Nearly all of us together, anyway. Talking rubbish. It feels like old times.'

‘Yeah,' said Matt. ‘You're right. It is nice.'

‘So why does this have to end as we grow up?' I said. ‘Why do I only get to see you two when something shit has happened? Or at weddings? Soon we'll be seeing each other once a year, or once every five years, or we'll just send Christmas presents to each other's children and never actually meet up at all. Tell me: why do we all end up vanishing into tiny, tight-knit family groups as we get older? Aren't friends supposed to be the new family for our generation? Even for men?
Especially
for men? Women have always had time to see their friends; men never have. But just look at how many people we stay in touch with now compared to our dads. They don't have four hundred friends online. They don't really keep up with people from their pasts. And it's their loss because you guys provide me with far more support than any girlfriend ever has. And more fun. And more freedom. So why would we want that to end? Why would we ever think that two people are enough these days for the rest of our lives? Or two plus two, two of whom are entirely dependent on the other two? Why does it have to be like that?'

‘
Does
it have to be like that?' asked Matt.

I put my beer down. This was serious. ‘Maybe not,' I said. ‘You see, I've been thinking a little.'

The other two groaned.

I continued: ‘You remember my views on holy matrimony, which I shared with you at Lisa's wedding?'

‘Yes,' said Matt. ‘They were very enlightening.'

‘And enlightened,' said Ed.

‘Don't take the piss,' I said. ‘I mean this. Sharing those deeply held opinions about marriage helped seed an idea in my mind. I've been thinking about it ever since and have finally come to two conclusions, which I am ready to share with you.' I held up a finger to aid my demonstration. ‘One. If we agree that marriage is a cynical sham, one logical option would be to have nothing to do with it. But although such a route might be
fun and liberating for a while, the fun would never last. Friends will still vanish. Opportunities will slip away. Twentysomething girls won't want to sleep with you for ever. Neither, eventually, will thirtysomethings. You'll start going on holiday at Christmas to avoid being alone. You will never have children. You will die alone, prematurely, unloved and unfed. Therefore, I reject that option.'

‘Great,' said Ed. ‘What about the second option?'

‘The alternative is to embrace the cynicism. If you reject the first logical conclusion, you're going to want to end up married anyway. You just have to do it on the right terms. My theory is that the reason we find it so difficult to settle down is that there is just too much choice out there for the modern man. You might hold a perfectly good blackjack hand with cards that add up to twenty. But it's still not perfect. She has a bit of hair on her upper lip. She's high-maintenance. The last one you went out with was more intelligent. So do you stick or twist? You're a man. You're competitive. You don't want twenty, you want the top prize. You want twenty-one, dammit. So you twist. Perhaps you'll be dealt an ace. Or maybe you'll fold and lose everything. But if you don't try another card, you'll always have to live with the niggling doubt that you could have done that little bit better.'

‘Even if you think you have a twenty-one, she'll just run off with someone else,' said Ed, morosely.

‘Or you'll want to re-invent the rules of the game and get another twenty-one because you're bored with the first one,' said Matt.

‘Exactly,' I said, no longer sure that the metaphor still worked, but willing to gloss over it for the sake of making my point. I tried another one. ‘Or imagine you're sitting at one of those sushi bars, watching the colour-coded dishes go round the conveyor belt. That conveyor belt is the dating scene. So do you gorge on lots of the cheap ones? Or wait for just one of the expensive ones?'

‘The cheap ones, every time,' said Matt. ‘I'm all about piling up the £1.20 “orange” girls.'

‘I'd rather wait for a £5 grey,' said Ed.

‘Okay,' I said. ‘But what if someone steals your grey while you're waiting, Ed? Or Matt, what if you've over-gorged on oranges and don't have any space left for the perfect grey when it finally comes along? You see, there's no right answer because there's too much choice. We're doomed to be restless and unhappy either way. So what do we do? I'll tell you. We narrow down the decision-making process to a single criterion.'

‘And what would that be?' asked Ed.

‘Money,' I said.

‘Why?' said Matt.

‘Because, my slow-witted friends, money liberates. And if you're going to be trapped by marriage anyway, you might as well be trapped in the most liberated fashion. There are plenty of women now who have money, who earn it, who want to earn more of it. You guys have sat here all afternoon and prattled away about women running the world. Well, fine, they're welcome to the world. They're welcome to the world of work, at least. It's rubbish. But let's play them at their own game. As modern men, let's play the game that they have been playing against us for centuries. Let's find three girls who are ambitious, successful and, above all, very, very rich. And then let's marry them and become house-husbands. Just think – '

‘We'll never have to do another day's work in our lives,' interrupted Matt, excitedly.

‘Exactly! And I can act in my spare time without worrying about money.'

‘We'll live on the same street.'

‘We'll go to the pub during the day.'

‘We won't have to lose touch with our friends.'

‘I'll never have to look for a job I don't want.'

‘I'll actually get to know my own kids.'

‘I'll coach my son to play football for England.'

‘All our friends will be jealous.'

Ed was just about to tell us what he thought of our scheme when a key turned in the front door and Alan walked in, as wet and as shaken as Ed had been four hours previously.

It was me who leapt forward first. ‘Alan. What is it? What's happened?'

‘Jess,' he said. ‘It's Jess. We're getting married, I think.'

His face wasn't exactly the picture of a happy groom-to-be.

‘What do you mean, “you think”?'

Alan surveyed the room of his drunk, oldest friends. ‘Jess got down on one knee in front of my boss and asked me,' he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a hideously tacky piece of jewellery which we later discovered was called a ‘male engagement ring'. ‘It was the most emasculating moment of my whole bloody life.'

For some reason you never really feel what you're supposed to when the big events in life happen. When my dad told me that my much-loved grandfather had died, my first thought was,
Will my parents get the nice table in the drawing room or will it go down my aunt's side of the family?
When I turned over my A-level economics paper, all I could think about was how easily I could screw up the rest of my life by writing ‘Bollocks! Bollocks! Bollocks!' all over my essay. And when Jess got down on one knee and proposed outside the front door of my accountancy office, my knee-jerk reaction was that her cleavage looked very nice in that red top and that, whatever my answer, it might be the last time I ever saw her on her knees in front of me.

It was 6.30pm on a blustery Thursday in August in Embankment in central London. The sun was beginning to lose its warmth as storm clouds moved in from the south. Tourists ambled towards musicals in the West End. Commuters jostled to get to the Tube, or into the wine bars. Opposite my office a tramp was attempting to play a harmonica, sell the
Big Issue
and control his randy dog, all at the same time. A traffic helicopter buzzed overheard, competing with a constipated siren attempting to force its way through the rush-hour traffic on the Strand. But it was as if all this came to a stop. It was as if all this mass of machinery and humanity
knew
that something dreadful and embarrassing was about to take place. It was as if they were only there as extras in Jess's big scene, called upon to bear witness as she approached with a quiet, determined smile on her face and a box in her hands. As she sank to her knees and thrust it towards me, my brain pushed my initial, inappropriate
thoughts to one side and my mouth began to form a silent, strangulated, prolonged, ‘No'.

It was at that moment that I heard my boss behind me.

‘Well, screw me sideways, Alan Muir, if this isn't what I think it is,' she bellowed. Amanda is in her mid-forties, a fading – if not faded – beauty, divorced, bitter, nosy, interfering, clever, terrifying, psychotic and always asking people to ‘screw her sideways' or ‘fuck her backwards' as a throwaway turn of phrase. Personally, I find the constant swearing a little offensive. The bellow continued: ‘Are you really about to become Mr Jessica Gallagher in front of my very eyes?'

Inside an office Amanda's voice can break windows. Outside, well, the helicopter and the police car had competition. A little crowd gathered.

To her credit, Jess smiled her determined little smile and resolved to see it through. ‘Alan Michael Muir,' she said, ‘will you do me the honour of becoming my husband?'

I have never heard of any trusted authority – not a men's magazine, Nick Hornby,
Top Gear
,
The SAS Survival Handbook
– which tells you what to do in this sort of situation. I was on my own. Or at least, I wished I were on my own.

‘Grow a pair of fucking balls, Alan, and say yes,' bellowed Amanda, evidently enjoying herself.

I wanted to say yes, of course. I looked down at my beautiful girlfriend, whom I certainly loved and probably wanted to marry, and thought just how much I wanted to say yes and make her happy. I looked around at the eager faces of the passers-by and thought how nice it would be to say yes and give them a pleasant vignette to share and remember in an otherwise forgettable Thursday. And I sensed Amanda behind me and thought how satisfying it would be to say yes and stop her constant, and somewhat crude, jibes in the office about ‘popping the bloody question before my sperm count got any lower and Jessica Gallagher ended up barren'.

I really
wanted
to say yes. But more than that, I really wanted Jess to be answering yes to a question
I
had formulated, pondered and popped. That was the correct way to go about it.

So, instead of doing the right thing, swallowing my pride and nodding a straightforward affirmative, I attempted a clumsy compromise and fell to my knees in front of Jess, so that we looked like two amputees congratulating each other at the finish line of the five-metre Paralympic shuffle, and asked, in a meek, alien voice which sounded higher than hers, and certainly higher than Amanda's, ‘Jessica Sarah, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?'

It was meant to be romantic. Amanda guffawed, partly because my own knee-lunge had landed me in a muddy patch on the pavement. Someone in the crowd muttered audibly that Jess had asked first and therefore deserved an answer. Another siren made its way down the Strand.

Jess's face fell and I knew I'd done the wrong thing. ‘Do you have a ring?' she asked, her jaw set a little more determinedly than before.

‘Can't we go somewhere else to discuss this?'

‘No,' said the crowd. Jess shook her head, agreeing with them, disagreeing with me.

‘Well, as a matter of fact, I do have a ring.' I felt around in my back pocket and closed my thumb and forefinger around my car keyring. That would not do. ‘But I've had it commissioned especially and it's not ready yet.'

Jess's stern face turned into a full-blown grin. With perfect timing, and a deft flick that made it look as though she had been practising, she opened the box with her thumb and proffered something I now know is called a male engagement ring. It was hideous: the gold too yellow; the pattern too ornate. Had she actually spent a barrister's monthly salary on this? It winked at me, mockingly, as it caught the light.

‘Then, my lovely Alan, I think it only right that I should ask
you
if you would like to be my husband.'

‘Yes,' I said, simply, for there was nothing else left to say. She had won.