Beta Male

by Iain Hollingshead

  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.

  The most fun thing about the Fringe is, of course, the evening, when all the best partying takes place in a series of large, interconnected marquees called the Spiegeltent. I can still remember clearly the first time I went there, as an eighteen-year-old; it was as if I had wandered out of the normal, mundane world into something magical. Swing bands played on raised, misty stages. Girls in bright dresses twirled below. Champagne corks popped. Cigarettes, or something stronger, flickered like glow worms in the dark. Everywhere there were beautiful, smiling people; the gentle, murmured undercurrent of a festive atmosphere which occasionally burst into louder, more raucous approval when a band started a song we recognised or finished a set we’d particularly enjoyed; the sights, the sounds, the smells, even, of people having a good time.

  This, I thought, is where I belong.

  That, at least, was how I felt the first eleven times I went there. This year – exactly a week after Lisa’s wedding – was very different indeed.

  It was the final day of my trip and I’d spent a pleasant enough afternoon torturing students before meeting up with my old friend Claire in the evening and taking her out for dinner – or, to be more accurate, letting her take me out for dinner. Claire is something called a management consultant, although she appears neither to manage nor consult anything or anyone. Still, she has more chance of her credit card being accepted than I do. Her dad used to play football with my dad so we first met when I was ten and she was eight, lost touch, met again at drama school (which she came to briefly after studying finance at university) and have been good friends ever since. She gets on very well with the others, too.

  Claire and I had ‘a moment’ once, of course. Which male and female friends haven’t had a moment? But ours was mercifully brief and almost entirely without consequence. It lasted about thirty seconds; a lustless half-minute of drunken snogging at our drama school’s Christmas party before collapsing into giggles, each telling the other that their technique was dreadful. It was about as romantic as I’d imagine (not that I have imagined it) kissing Alan or Matt or Ed would be.

  If anything, Claire and I became even better friends afterwards because we’d got that awkward will-we-won’t-we? moment out of the way early on. We’d try to set each other up with our friends while always joking that we’d marry one another if we hadn’t found anyone else by thirty-five. Our friendship often felt like a proper relationship, but without the responsibility, the angst, the guilt trips, the phone calls, the annoying friends, the expensive presents and the sex which starts disappointingly, becomes briefly exciting and then fades into infrequent, bored familiarity. And before I’m accused of misogyny, that point about the boring, familiar sex was first made by Claire, not me. She’s a realist – an amusing, filthy, cynical, kind-hearted realist – and that’s why we hit it off.

  This particular evening we were getting on well as usual, catching up on the gossip from Lisa’s wedding (Lisa had never liked Claire, whom she’d viewed as a threat, so hadn’t invited her) and discussing which one of our friends would be next. Claire, who had always had something of a soft spot for Ed, thought he and Tara would be engaged and married within a year. My money was on Alan.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘When are you going to vanish, never to be seen again?’

  Claire laughed. She looked pretty when she laughed – her round face flushing slightly, her dark blonde, now sensibly-styled hair bobbing around as she threw her head back. I still didn’t fancy her, though.

  ‘I’m a young career woman, Sam,’ she replied. ‘Why would I want to settle down now?’

  ‘Because you’re twenty-seven,’ I said, pouring her another glass of wine. ‘Therefore you’re a rapidly declining asset who should cash in now before gravity takes its toll, no one fancies you any more and you’re too old and barren to have any children.’

  An elderly couple at the neighbouring table looked a little shocked and motioned to the waiter to bring their bill. They didn’t know that it would take far more than this to upset Claire. She leaned closer and whispered, loudly, so that most of the restaurant had no choice but to listen: ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Sam. As a modern woman of twenty-seven, I’ll be in the prime of my life for at least the next five years. I can go out with younger, more virile men or I can enjoy being the plaything of a rich, bald and charming sugar-daddy in his fifties. Or I can simply choose to be single. Either way, I have at least another half-decade of living selfishly, dangerously, and doing exactly what I please. Only later, much later, will I start thinking about finding a suitable lifelong partner – someone kind who’s good father material; a nice beta male who won’t stray, after all the wild but unsuitable alpha types I’ve been having my fun with – and we’ll settle down and live happily ever after.’

  I patted her patronisingly on the hand. ‘Well done, my dear. Well done. You are in the vanguard of the new wave of feminism. Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir would be proud of you. Right now they’re eating chocolate in heaven together, watching Sex and the City and quietly high-fiving each other’s podgy palms. You should indeed have your cake and eat it.’ I pulled her pudding towards me and took a bite. ‘Although not too much, or the rich, bald and charming sugar daddies might trade you in for a younger, slimmer model.’

  Claire pulled her pudding back. There was a brief tug-of-war, which she won. ‘You can be as patronising as you like,’ sh
e said. ‘But if I were you, I’d worry about yourself, not me.’

  I looked at her quizzically. I rarely worried about myself for long.

  ‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘I suppose you can be charming when you make an effort. And I admit I’ve sat opposite uglier people at the dinner table. You’ve worked your way through most of my friends, the less discreet of whom report back favourably. And I have no doubt that, on the rare occasions you are involved in a play, you have a decent chance with whichever gullible, insecure actress has just left drama school and is filling the “fit girl” slot in the cast. But what do you really have to offer any of these people long-term? You’re not a nubile twenty-one-year-old any more. You’re almost thirty. And even if you do age well, as men tend to, you won’t have that gravitas which is the main attraction of powerful, older men. You will just be a nice-looking fiftysomething with a not very good job who was once an attractive but fairly unmemorable actor. Someone with potential is very attractive. Someone who wasted it, well… ’ She shook her head, mock-sadly. ‘Not so much.’ She leant forward and took her opportunity to return the patronising hand-pat. ‘My dear Sam, you fall between two stools: the wild and the dependable. You are stuck in the middle. You’re going nowhere faster than you realise. And my advice to you is to cash in now before gravity takes its toll, no one fancies you any more, and you’re too poor, tired and infertile to have any children.’

  Claire leant back triumphantly in her seat, knowing full well that she had just added to her pudding tug-of-war victory. It wasn’t much of a surprise, to be honest. Claire always won these play arguments because she was prepared to go one step further than you would dare. Her conversation rarely played by the rules.

  Not that I minded. Or not that I pretended to mind. I could take a joke – our entire friendship was based on jokes at each other’s expense – but the problem was that I couldn’t help becoming increasingly sensitive about my acting. However much anyone tries to pretend the opposite, the truth is that if you haven’t made it in acting by thirty, you are unlikely ever to make it. And when I say make it, I don’t necessarily mean becoming the latest sub-Bourne action hero or playing the lead giraffe in The Lion King. I mean merely making a decent, honest living as a jobbing actor. Acting is a young person’s game – you need to be young to put up with the travelling, the strange hours and the assistant director’s STDs – and few make it to the top of the career pyramid. Decent parts only exist for a tiny number of stars; there are thousands of people coming out of drama schools every year eager to foist their talent on the world. Ten years later most of them are foisting their talents on a photocopier.

  So it was all very well for Claire to mock me for my lack of work. She had fallen off at the very bottom of the pyramid. She had flunked out of drama school after only a year. She had taken the easy option of a secure job. What did she know about anything, anyway?

  Help, I thought, as Claire paid the bill. First my worries about losing my friends, and now this. What has happened to happy-go-lucky Sam?

  My poor mood wasn’t improved when, during our walk to the Spiegeltent, Claire mentioned in passing that one of our friends from drama school, Chris Peck, had just been accepted to play the lead in the Old Vic’s touring production of Hamlet. Chris was a good guy – we’d acted together, got drunk together, even slept with the same girl twenty-four hours apart without knowing it – but in that moment I could have murdered the little fuck. Of all the lies spouted backstage – and there are many – the biggest one is: ‘I’m so pleased for you.’ No one is ever pleased for anyone else in acting. You’re jealous, you’re bitter and, quite frankly, you’d like them to fall over during rehearsals and break their neck so you can go on and break a leg.

  Your tutors warn you about rejection at drama school. Actors get told ‘no’ as often as naughty toddlers. Acting, they tell you, is like going to four interviews per week for a job for which you’re entirely unsuited before you even walk in the door. But you can’t get too sensitive about it or you’d start to question your looks, your abilities, your personality – your entire self – until you crumbled into a mess of insecurities. So you console yourself that you didn’t have ‘the right look’; that they were looking for someone a bit younger, a bit stronger, a bit more intense. You’d never tell yourself the truth, which is that they were looking for someone a bit better.

  Jealousy. That’s what they should really warn you about at drama school. Chris? He and I had exactly the same ‘look’. And now he was playing Hamlet? I could fucking play Hamlet, too. I can do tortured and moody and suicidal. I was born to play Hamlet. Worse, I had auditioned to play the little fuck of a Dane. And the fatuous fuck of a casting director hadn’t even fucking recalled me. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  I was in a fairly atomic mood, then, by the time Claire and I finally arrived at the Spiegeltent around midnight. I was too old for this rubbish; too old to be wandering around the Fringe with a bunch of student pricks who treated acting like hobby. This was meant to be my career, my life, but everything that was once beautiful seemed fake. The bands were still wreathed in mist, but the effect looked as tacky as their dreadful cover versions sounded. Corks still popped, but they came from bottles of stale, fizzy white wine. Girls twirled around in cheap dresses from charity shops. A cigarette burnt the back of my hand as we pushed through the crowds. This was a fake world full of fake people faking it for a shadow of a living. Not a new revelation, but, for the first time, I really hated it; all of it. I hated it because I wanted it so much and couldn’t get it. I hated it because I had failed and it was easier to hate the acting world itself than my own failure within it.

  Claire went off with some other friends and I could feel myself spiralling helplessly downwards into a dark, dangerous place I didn’t want to be. I made a half-hearted attempt to talk to an attractive BBC comedy producer from Leeds called Vicki, or maybe Vicky, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I kept on making darker and darker jokes until she started to shift uncomfortably and glance over my shoulder for an escape route. There’s always an escape route when you hang out with thesps. There’s always something else that glitters.

  Vicki, or Vicky, eventually managed to escape and I meandered aimlessly through the crowds, ignoring the curses and stares as I knocked over a drink or pushed my way through the middle of a group. What were all these people doing here, anyway? What crap were they talking? Who did they think they were? I felt old and pointless and drunk and angry. I needed a target.

  I walked around a corner, clutching a plastic glass of lukewarm Guinness, and spotted Claire talking to the annoying student actor with the bulging skill basket I had wound up a few days previously. She rolled her eyes at me over his shoulder. My spirits lifted. Perhaps we could have a bit of fun.

  ‘Jeremy,’ I said, offering a hand. ‘How nice to see you again.’

  He took it, warily. I held it for a little longer than was strictly necessary.

  ‘I see you’ve met my girlfriend.’ I gave his hand a little stroke with my thumb. ‘We’re always interested in meeting new people.’

  Claire slipped her arm around my back. ‘Oh, yes,’ she purred, playing along. ‘We’re very open minded, Sam and I.’

  Jeremy withdrew his hand rapidly, his face an ominous mixture of embarrassment and anger. He was a big bloke. ‘Why would you want to do a thing like that?’

  ‘I was joking,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why was I joking? Oh, I don’t know, Jeremy. Maybe because life can be a little boring and it’s fun to jazz it up a little. Maybe I was just doing a bit of acting. Or perhaps I just thought you’d be easy to wind up.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. Jeremy was easy to wind up. He pushed me roughly in the chest. I staggered backwards a few steps.

  Claire tried to intervene. ‘Now, come on, guys. Let’s not be stupid. We’re sorry about the joke, okay? We were only messing around.’

  Jeremy rounded on her. ‘You’re sorry? Not as sorry as he
’ll be when I’ve messed around with him. I thought you and I were getting somewhere. Is he really your boyfriend? Or was that made up, too? You’re not all that, you know, but you could still do a lot better than – ’

  I swung a punch – the first punch of my life – at Jeremy. It connected with his broad, stupid jaw, making a satisfying clunk. ‘Never speak to her like that again,’ I said.

  He roared, like a wounded public-school bear, and shaped up to come back at me.

  ‘Before we start, it’s only fair I warn you,’ I said, desperately looking around for an escape route. ‘During my time at drama school, I passed my diploma in armed and unarmed stage combat with distinction. I can carry a plastic gun in a convincing James Bond pose. I am well versed in swordplay and jousting. And I have mastered a series of intricate and gymnastic hand-to-hand combat moves which will only result in your defeat.’

  Jeremy guffawed. ‘Maybe, dickhead. But I bet they didn’t teach you this at drama school.’ He swung his foot forward, his hard, right boot heading towards my nether regions. He fought like Claire debated. But I’d seen it coming and leapt gymnastically to one side in the tuck position. I rose to my feet again, my face muddied by the puddle I’d landed in.

  ‘You fight like a girl,’ I said.

  By now a little crowd had formed, intrigued by the real-life drama unfolding in front of their eyes. I played to them. ‘What’s it going to be, Jezzer? Are you going to kick and scratch and bite and squeal, or are you going to fight properly? Are you going to run away or are you going to stand up to me like a man?’

  Secretly, I hoped he would run away.

  The crowd, on the other hand, knew what they wanted. ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ they chorused. Never underestimate the savage stupidity of a group of drunken Brits.

  Jeremy looked fairly savage, too, standing there in his stripy pink shirt with his nostrils flared and his shoulders heaving. Then he suddenly slumped, attempted a half-smile and offered a hand to shake. ‘Let’s forget it,’ he said.