Beta Male

by Iain Hollingshead

  Alan smiled as if deep in thought and then reached for the BlackBerry he carried around in his jacket pocket like a yappy, Pekingese puppy in need of constant love and attention.

  ‘Come on, Alan,’ said Matt. ‘Put your phone away. This is just getting interesting. Don’t go back to the office now and pump a few more grams of iron. And definitely don’t call Jess.’

  But then Alan did something very unpredictable and un-Alan-like. ‘I’m doing neither,’ he said. ‘I’m texting Jess to tell her that I’m still stuck in the office.’

  ‘And why would you do that?’ I asked.

  ‘So I can take my mind off everything and hang out with you guys,’ said Alan. ‘Matt’s right: this is just getting interesting.’

  It is possible that I gave a small whoop of pleasure at this juncture. Maybe Jess would think this a dumpable offence and we’d have our Alan back. Matt took his expression of delight one step further and started swinging his arms round in the most bizarre fashion and chanting, ‘You go, boy, you go, boy,’ until Alan asked him if he had anything he wanted to share with us.

  ‘Like what?’ said Matt.

  ‘Like the fact you appear to have turned into a raving homosexual,’ said Alan.

  ‘Better gay than married,’ said Ed, laughing.

  ‘And on what experience are you basing that analysis?’ asked Alan.

  ‘The unimpeachable armchair wisdom of never being likely to try either.’

  We all laughed. This was good, I thought, this was fun. We still ‘had it’, we could still ‘hang’ together, we could still have conversations as immature as the ones twenty-five years ago, only with longer words.

  ‘For the sake of fuck, Alan, would you please put your cunting BlackBerry away?’

  I returned to the room with a jolt. You can always rely on Ed to ruin your nostalgic musings with an Anglo-Saxon interjection.

  ‘Actually, Ed,’ said Alan, peering over his BlackBerry and looking slightly wounded, ‘I was trying to help you guys out. I am devising a spreadsheet.’

  ‘Oh great,’ said Matt, sarcastically. ‘My life lacks spreadsheets.’

  ‘Then it is all the poorer for it,’ said Alan in what might, or might not, have been a joke. ‘This, however, is not any normal spreadsheet. It’s to help you guys out with your “kept man” scheme.’

  ‘I thought you said it was a ridiculous scheme,’ I said.

  ‘It is,’ said Alan. ‘So you will need all the help you can get.’

  We gathered round while Alan tapped away fluently on the tiny device, sending great blocks of text flying around the screen to reappear in other blocks, everything neatly arranged and colour-coded.

  ‘Why do I have to be pink?’ complained Ed.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Alan. ‘This isn’t Reservoir Dogs.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to be part of this, anyway, Ed,’ said Matt.

  As Alan typed and tapped and computed, he explained that the sheets represented our ‘strengths and weaknesses’, our ‘threats and opportunities’, our individual chances of success. He jabbed a finger at a blue patch of the tiny screen, obscuring most of it. ‘Take Sam, for example. My “model” shows that acting is one of the strengths by which he will achieve his goals. His weakness is that he is very unlikely to be able to convince rich, successful women that he is an attractive catch on his own merits. But if he pretended to be something he isn’t… Well, it might just work.’

  ‘Wow, Alan. Thanks for that insight.’

  Alan twiddled a button and Matt’s spreadsheet appeared, highlighted in yellow. ‘Matt’s unique selling point, or USP, on the other hand, is that he is, or was, a doctor, and is therefore a caring, noble soul who can look after the children when they have colds and his wife is stuck in a board meeting.’

  ‘You’re not making this sound like much fun, are you?’ I complained.

  ‘My point is that Matt’s best bet is to play the game straight,’ said Alan. ‘Career women looking for a suitable mate will love him. He’s got charm candy written all over him. Just look at the spreadsheet. Excel never lies.’

  He twiddled another button and the screen turned briefly pink for Ed, flickered three times and faded into nothing. ‘Bloody battery,’ said Alan, stuffing the machine back in his pocket.

  ‘Oh, what a shame,’ sneered Ed. ‘I’ll never get to find out what the oracle of Orange had in store for me.’

  ‘All I was trying to illustrate,’ said Alan, pushing his glasses back up his nose, ‘is that you’re going to need a proper plan for it to come off. You can’t just waltz along and hope something falls into your laps.’

  ‘It did for you,’ said Matt.

  ‘Well, I’m lucky, I suppose,’ said Alan, looking bashful. ‘And I don’t hold out for perfection.’

  ‘I’d love Jess to hear you say that,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think she’d be all that shocked,’ said Alan. ‘She’d probably say the same thing about me. We’re both settlers, not fantasists. You know that stupid card metaphor you’re always banging on about, Sam?’

  ‘The blackjack one?’ said Ed and Matt, almost simultaneously.

  I frowned. Was I really that predictable?

  ‘Exactly,’ said Alan. ‘In that daft metaphor, Jess is a twenty out of twenty-one. Or a nineteen, at least. So why torture myself looking for an improvement that doesn’t exist? If I were to plot a graph representing my relationship with Jess, it might have fun on one axis and sacrifice on the other – ’

  ‘Ooooh, a graph,’ sneered Matt. ‘That’s almost as much fun as a spreadsheet.’

  ‘I could plot that graph,’ continued Alan, ‘and the fun would far outweigh the sacrifice. As long as that’s the case, I think a relationship is healthy.’

  Bollocks, I thought. You’re only saying that to make yourself feel better about being trapped and having to make so many sacrifices.

  ‘But as for the rest of you,’ continued Alan, ‘well, I support the institution of marriage. So I’m in favour of the fact you’re taking a few proactive steps to find the right sort of partner, even if you are only doing it to take the piss out of me.’ He held up a hand to stop our half-hearted protests. ‘You’re right: why leave such an important thing to chance? Why not devote as much time and resources to finding your lifelong partner as you do to your careers? On reflection, however, I wonder if you’ve properly thought through the way in which you’re narrowing down your selection criteria.’

  ‘On the basis of money, you mean?’ asked Matt.

  ‘It’s not everything,’ said Alan.

  ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ said Matt, getting up and making his unsteady way to the kitchen to fetch some more beers. ‘You’ve got it.’ There was a crash as he slipped on the floor. ‘And the rest of us don’t,’ he added from a prostrate position.

  ‘Marry for money and you’ll pay for it, every penny,’ said Alan.

  ‘And what the hell is that supposed to mean?’ called out Matt, picking himself off the kitchen floor.

  ‘It’s what my grandfather always used to say.’

  ‘And was he happy?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he was poor and miserable.’

  ‘Then, with all due respect to his memory, your grandfather was an arse.’

  ‘But what about “the one”?’ said Ed, taking a beer from Matt and spilling it all over his trousers. ‘It’s not exactly a romantic scheme, is it?’

  Matt put his large, handsome head in his hands. ‘Dear God, Ed, you still believe in the concept of “the one”? After what Tara’s done to you?’

  ‘She is the one,’ said Ed, dribbling a little. ‘Well, was, anyway. Tara was my plus-one, my one-plus-one, which still equalled one, indivisible, wholly and eternally one – ’

  ‘Ed,’ said Alan, kindly but firmly. ‘You need to stop talking now.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ed, pulling himself together. ‘It’s just that – ’

  ‘I know,’ said Alan, desperately hoping along with the rest of
us that Ed wasn’t going to start crying. ‘We all know,’ he continued, soothingly. ‘But if you go around thinking like that you’ll never get anywhere. Look at me: I’m sure I could have been happy with someone other than Jess. She happens to be my one but, if the worst came to the worst, someone else could make me happy as well.’

  Please let something happen to her, I thought. Nothing too bad. Just something.

  ‘You’re so strong, Alan,’ said Ed, looking at him adoringly.

  ‘You’re so gay, Ed,’ said Matt.

  ‘You’re all such tossers,’ I said, a little worked up at the direction the conversation had been taking without my input. ‘Of course there’s no such thing as the one. What are you, Ed? A twelve-year-old girl? This is my entire point. Bring back arranged marriages, I say. Convert to Islam and get your parents to sort it out for you. Become a Jane Austen character. Marry your friends, for all I care. Choose someone from the phone book. Anyone can rub along just fine with anyone else, as long as you approach the arrangement with the correct degree of cynicism.’

  ‘Would you like to marry me, Sam?’ asked Matt.

  ‘Sure. If I get to thirty-five and I’m single and start going bald like Ed, I’m all yours.’

  ‘And you’re all mine,’ said Matt, doing something with his beer bottle which I would blush to describe in full.

  ‘Rank!’ protested Ed. ‘Anyway, Sam, aren’t you promised to Claire at thirty-five?’

  ‘Yes, but it looks like she’s about to be made redundant, so a fat lot of use she’ll be to me then.’

  ‘Sam only makes that sort of joke when he really likes someone,’ said Alan.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Claire’s perfect for you, Sam,’ persisted Alan. ‘Why does it all have to come back to money with you?’

  ‘Because we don’t have any. Because we’re in the middle of the worst recession for decades. That’s why. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like money. Not one little bit. Numbers. Figures. Equations. Spreadsheets. It’s boring. People who work with money are boring. You, my friend, are boring. Money itself is boring.’ I fumbled around in my pocket in an attempt to make my point. All I could find was a two-pence coin. It was symbolic, in a way. ‘I mean, look at this. It’s a grubby piece of shit, isn’t it? Think how many hands it’s been through. No, for me, it comes down to what one can do with money. And that’s the problem with this country. All the wrong people have the money. What do bankers and lawyers and footballers do with theirs? They buy disgusting houses and two-bit whores, that’s what. I would spend it properly. Money would liberate me to do what I want to do.’

  ‘Which is what?’ asked Ed.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Act. Relax. Keep seeing you guys. Appreciate the good things. Live simply but well. Do a bit for charity.’ Ed feigned a yawn. I turned on him. ‘Have you ever worked in an office, Ed?’ He shook his head; Ed had only ever been a teacher. ‘Let me tell you what working in an office is like, then. It is wank. You have to get up when you don’t want to, you have to iron collared shirts you’d never normally wear, you have to be polite to people you’d have bullied at school and you have to sit at a desk that is the wrong height, underneath lights that are too bright, near a radiator that is too hot, doing tasks that are boring and pointless. Your superiors are less intelligent than you, your inferiors are more ambitious than you and the only attractive girl in the office is already married and having an affair with the boss. So believe me when I say it’s wank. Wank is what it undoubtedly is. Wank, wankity wank wank.’ Ed still looked unmoved by the Ciceronian force of my rhetoric. I continued: ‘So that is why money is important. Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life chained to an office chair earning a pittance in order to support my ungrateful children and a wife who’s knocking off one of the neighbours. I don’t want to be a breadwinner, whatever that means. I don’t want to win bread. I want to win Oscars.’ Ed wasn’t the only one to guffaw at this point. ‘So let’s go out there and marry these rich, ambitious women. Let’s hang out where the rich hang out. Let’s go to City bars and art auctions and ski resorts. Let’s help ourselves to these rich pickings. Let’s snare these walking wallets. Let’s marry money. Let’s, in the immortal words of Al Green, stay together. Let’s stay close together. And then we can live long and happily and well instead of short and miserably and emasculated-ly.’

  My peroration was greeted with a quizzical eyebrow by Alan, a frown by Ed and a small cheer and a raised beer by Matt. Frankly, I think it deserved a little better. It was a good peroration.

  We sat in contented silence for a while and then Matt suddenly got down on the floor and started tearing bits of paper out of one of Alan’s notepads and scribbling excitedly on them. ‘I have an idea,’ he explained. ‘I have a much better way of narrowing down the decision-making process. It’s based on something I said earlier, about Jess’s cooking abilities, intelligence and the attractiveness of her mother.’

  ‘Categories?’ said Alan, perking up from his drunken slumber at the mention of his forceful fiancée’s name.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Matt. ‘Now, let’s say that the score for the perfect girl adds up to a hundred.’

  ‘What’s wrong with twenty-one?’ I said.

  ‘Or forty-three and a half,’ sneered Ed. He’d lost interest in this game.

  ‘A hundred,’ said Matt, firmly. ‘It’s simpler. But how do we get to that hundred? Of what components is that one hundred formed? Categories, that’s what. Attractiveness. Likeability of her siblings. Likeability of her friends. Intelligence. Kindness. Fun quotient. Ability to fit in with existing friendship group. Ability to make friends jealous. Suitability as a mother – ’

  ‘I really like this,’ interrupted Alan. ‘It’s a quantifiable formalisation of the subconscious process by which all of us rate girls in any case.’

  Not you, I thought. You’ve never cared how much Jess fits into your existing friendship group.

  ‘Oh, whatever,’ said Ed. ‘You guys are so immature.’

  ‘And all the categories have sub-categories, of course,’ continued Matt. ‘Attractiveness can be divided into beauty and sex appeal. In fact, sexual abilities should probably have a category of their own – ’

  ‘Tara was very good at sex,’ said Ed.

  ‘It’s not an uninteresting scheme,’ I said. ‘But the really interesting thing is what weight you give to each of the categories. What does the balance look like?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Matt. ‘So let me kick the discussion off by suggesting a maximum of forty points for looks, ten for abilities in bed, ten for how her mother has turned out, twenty for intelligence and twenty for personality. Based on these scores, the perfect girl would add up to a hundred.’

  ‘Why is it so important what her mother looks like?’ asked Alan.

  ‘Because all girls turn into their mothers,’ I said. ‘Fortunately for you, Alan, few boys do.’

  ‘Doesn’t personality include intelligence?’ asked Matt.

  ‘What’s the point of them scoring forty for looks now, if they get zero for how they’re going to look in twenty years’ time when they turn into their mothers?’ asked Alan. ‘On that basis, a short-term fittie scores much better than a long-term beauty.’

  ‘Then you keep on choosing short-term fitties,’ I said.

  ‘Do they get minus points if they’re too intelligent?’

  ‘What’s the point of going out with someone who scores ninety out of ninety, but is absolutely dreadful in bed?’

  ‘Under this system, a delightful minger would score sixty, but a boring supermodel only forty.’

  ‘Well, I’d rather marry a delightful minger than a boring supermodel.’

  ‘What about compatibility, then?’

  ‘That’s too subjective.’

  ‘Surely any relationship is subjective.’

  ‘Then what’s the point of scoring them objectively?’

  ‘What about how old they are?’

  ‘You know you’
re getting old when you think someone’s attractive just because they’re younger than you.’

  ‘Half your age plus seven, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Sam, but that’s a bare minimum not a target.’

  ‘What about how easy-going and kind they are? Or how prone to moods? There’s no point going out with someone who’s up and down like a yoyo.’

  ‘I very much like girls who are up and down like yoyos.’

  ‘Ayeee.’

  And so the discussion continued late into the night until at some ridiculous point someone – I can’t remember who now – suggested making up little cards of the girls we knew by taking their pictures off Facebook and playing a version of Top Trumps using the categories we’d finally decided upon. Claire’s personality and Lisa’s looks – that appeared to be the perfect, winning combination. Even Ed, who had always had a soft spot for Claire, perked up at that thought. It was just a pity that fit Lisa was mildly annoying and fun Claire slightly plain.

  At half past midnight little Alan, who had always been the most lightweight of the group, started to pontificate about what women would say if they walked in on us and promptly fell off the sofa and passed out. Matt ventured that he had overheard female doctors gossiping about men and they were far worse, before going off to be sick in the bath. Just before 1am Ed tried to call Tara so we stole his phone and flushed the battery down the toilet. He went home in a sulk, climbing over a prostrate Alan on his way to the front door and leaving only a newly sober Matt and me vaguely compos mentis.