Beta Male

by Iain Hollingshead

  ‘Fling your options wide open and then narrow them down again according to your own criteria,’ explained Matt with a grin. ‘A rich, grateful patient of mine got me onto the site. It’s invitation-only. If you can’t beat them, join them, eh?’

  ‘I’ve always preferred, “If you can’t join them, beat them”.’

  ‘Well, good luck with that, mate. And have fun at work today. I’m sure the glamorous city sharks will be falling over themselves to sleep with and marry the guy doing their photocopying.’

  With what I hoped was a suitably supercilious snort, I left Matt to his sad online games and ventured into the Square Mile to do an honest day’s work. Pah, I thought, as I crammed in with the rest of the commuters on the Tube. If that’s the way he wanted to do it, then good for him. I knew my strengths and weaknesses. Both lay in the real world.

  After thirty minutes of inhaling eau d’underground, I was in a slightly less upbeat mood. I didn’t like the real world much, I concluded, as I trudged wearily up the long escalator at Bank station. It looked as though my fantasy restoration of the way things used to be would be short-lived. Alan had disappeared to an unknown location, Ed had vanished into himself and his memories, and Matt had swapped the normal world for a shadowy online existence where the only thing that mattered was the size of your trust fund. So much for us all seeing more of each other.

  Still, in times like these I had Claire, my reserve bloke. Her permanent office was very close to my temporary one so I rang and arranged to meet for as early a lunch as possible. She was looking well – suspiciously well. In my experience girls only look that happy when they’re having a great deal of sex with someone they actually like. It’s a cruel trick of nature that women should look the most appealing when they’re the least desirous of your attentions. Why can’t they look their best when they’re sad and lonely and haven’t slept with anyone for six months?

  ‘You’re looking well, too,’ lied Claire after I’d complimented her. I looked distinctly green, having just spent ninety per cent of my morning wage, before tax, on a sandwich. ‘What are you up to?’

  I explained that I had taken the advice she had given me in Edinburgh to heart and was attempting to find a suitable lifelong partner before gravity took its toll, no one fancied me any more and I was too poor and infertile to have any children.

  ‘Oh, Sam,’ she laughed. ‘I was only joking.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘So how are you going about doing it?’ she asked.

  I explained my scheme, but it only made her laugh more and more uncontrollably until our lunch resembled the restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally. Other customers stopped and stared at us, wondering perhaps who this comic genius could be. Claire, however, was most definitely laughing at me.

  ‘Sam, you are without doubt the most ridiculous person I know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, graciously. If the only compliments you receive are unintentional, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t still take them.

  ‘And if you ever need a helping hand, you know where I am.’

  ‘How kind. But why would I want help from you? I have it all sewn up already.’

  *

  Wednesday arrived, as Wednesdays do, and I met Mary after work as arranged. Work for her turned out to be a part-time job, which curiously she had never mentioned before, in the bookshop of an evangelical church in a posh, leafy part of Clapham. Perhaps I should have smelt a rat when she texted during the afternoon to ask if I could meet her there.

  ‘So,’ she enthused, greeting me with an enthusiastic kiss on both cheeks. Mary was always enthusing about something. ‘Are you ready to come and meet my friend?’

  I looked in the direction in which she was nodding. Jesus. She was nodding towards the church. Did she want me to come and meet Jesus?

  She did.

  ‘I know it might seem bizarre,’ she guessed, accurately, noting the look of sheer blasphemous horror on my face. ‘But you and I got off to such a strange start and I need to be honest with you. This is part of me, a really important part of me. And it is important to me that you understand that. Do you understand?’

  ‘No’ would have been the simple, honest answer. But she was such a sweet, enthusiastic, pretty, filthy, confusing girl that I really did want to understand her. Wouldn’t anyone be intrigued by an otherwise rational person wanting someone they’d met at a wedding to meet their dead, Middle Eastern friend? Plus, there was the money. Or the Money-Barings, to be precise. That’s what I really wanted to understand. Had the Money come first or the Barings? Had Mr Money met Miss Barings and declared it a match made in financial heaven? Had Barings married into money? Or were the Barings simply sitting around one day thinking, Fuck me, our name doesn’t sound nearly posh enough as it is, let’s add ‘Money’ in front of it so that no one is in any doubt just how rich we are.

  Maybe I would get a chance to ask her during the evening, just after a sermon about the rich man and the camel trying to get through the eye of a needle.

  We linked chaste hands and ventured inside.

  The church was old and echoing, with vast pillars stretching up to a high wooden ceiling. The evening light slanted through a giant stained glass window above the altar, catching an antique silver crucifix. Yet an effort had clearly been made to make everything feel as modern as possible. The chairs were arranged in small groups, facing inwards towards a stage. Plasma screens were attached to the pillars. There was a hum of anticipation among a well-dressed, mainly young, congregation of about two hundred. U2 blared out from the hi-tech sound system.

  Mary introduced me to a small group, most of whom had the beatific smiles and put-upon demeanours of long-term Christians and therefore had to be kind. Everyone took an intense, apologetic interest in me, explaining how they met every Wednesday evening (‘a bonus bit of worship’) as well as on Sundays. I joined in as well as I could, listening politely as the guy on my left – a confusing mixture of wide-boy City trader and wide-eyed evangelist – explained how he liked to ‘say a little prayer’ at work before embarking on each multi-million-pound deal. I wondered, silently, how such a little prayer might go: ‘Dear Lord, who was born in a stable and worked as a carpenter, who befriended fishermen and threw money lenders out of the temple Dear, dear saviour, please give me the courage to screw over this small company in this deal I’m about to make, for your compassionate name’s sake, amen.’

  ‘It’s a pithy description of the Trinity, isn’t it?’ I said instead, aloud.

  ‘What?’

  I gestured at the speakers. ‘Bono’s lyrics: “You’re one, but you’re not the same”.’

  Stock Market Christian laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s good. Mary told us you were funny.’

  ‘Mary told you about me?’

  I could see Mary waving her arms frantically and mouthing ‘no’ behind us, but Stock Market Christian ploughed on regardless. ‘Yes, we had a little prayer session last week in which the leader suggested we shared the burden of sin weighing on our consciences.’

  ‘The leader?’

  ‘Yes, the prayer leader. And Mary had some thoughtprovoking experiences at a wedd – ’

  ‘What are you guys talking about?’ Mary had given up on her semaphore and bounded over to intervene.

  ‘The burden of sin,’ I said. ‘It’s fascinating. Although, personally, I must admit that I’ve never found it much of a burden.’

  Stock Market Christian clapped me rather too hard on the back and patted Mary rather too gently on the knee. ‘Oh, Mary,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how you find them.’

  ‘Find what?’ I was beginning to take an intense, borderline violent, dislike to Stock Market Christian.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ said Mary, hastily taking one of my hands in hers. ‘Nothing gets people more excited here than the prospect of a reformed sinner.’

  ‘Who says I’m reforming?’

  They all laughed again, a little sadly this time, giving me a chance
to take a proper look at Mary. She was attractive, certainly – not as stunning as Lisa, but striking, nonetheless. She had a good figure, full, red lips and the kind of glossy blonde mane that posh girls with too much time on their hands are good at cultivating. She was diplomatic, too, if the last few exchanges had been anything to go by. So why hadn’t I called her myself after the wedding? Did I only like her because she had got in touch with me? Could this really work? Wouldn’t her brassy self-assurance drive me mad? Was it just the surname?

  ‘What made you become a Christian?’ I asked my apparent rival. If I was going to make a go of this with Mary, I would have to make some sort of effort with her friends.

  ‘It’s a long story, Sam,’ said Stock Market Christian. ‘But basically, I had a fifteenth-century house in the country, a Porsche 911 on the drive and a penthouse flat in the Docklands, but still, something was missing.’

  Yeah, I thought. Your testicles.

  ‘So I came to this church,’ he continued, ‘and just felt this really real connection when the Holy Spirit entered me.’

  ‘And what happened when the Holy Spirit entered you?’ I asked, conscious in a vague, agnostic way that a giggle at this juncture would surely mean eternal damnation.

  ‘I felt really warm and fell to the floor, twitching,’ he said, smiling at the memory. ‘When I stood up again, I found myself singing out, subconsciously but not against my will, Ti amo, which is the Italian for “I love you”. I had no idea why I was doing this. But later that evening, I met Mary, who was also there for the first time. I discovered that Mary had studied Italian at GCSE… ’

  Stock Market Christian left the sentence unfinished as if only a simpleton could fail to grasp the depth of its meaning and declare that he, too, had seen the light thanks to Mary’s secondary-education choices.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. Maybe I was a simpleton.

  ‘Don’t you see? This was God’s way of showing Mary and me that we were less alone in the room.’

  It was God’s way of showing Stock Market Christian that he was a prick, I thought.

  ‘And also,’ he continued, ‘there’s the fact I sang in Italian. That’s quite remarkable, don’t you think? I don’t even speak Italian.’

  I was saved from telling him what I really thought – which was that my grandmother’s neutered dog didn’t speak Italian either, but even it could probably guess that ti amo meant ‘I love you’ – by the sound of applause which signalled the beginning of the service.

  ‘You’ve come at a good moment,’ whispered Stock Market Christian in my ear. ‘We’re doing the Holy Spirit this week.’

  Before I’d had a chance to ask him what this enigmatic phrase meant, a man in a T-shirt approached the microphone on the stage, greeted the regulars and welcomed any newcomers.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m your worst nightmare,’ he quipped. ‘A Christian with a guitar.’

  He closed his eyes and proved he had been telling the truth by launching into a modern hymn I had never heard before. Two hundred people stood and sang heartily, some of them nodding vigorously, others raising their hands in orgasmic prayer: You’re altogether lovely / altogether worthy / altogether wonderful to me. I looked across at Mary, who smiled back. But she wasn’t singing about me. I wasn’t altogether lovely or worthy. I wasn’t wonderful. I was trying to get laid in church.

  There were a few more excruciating verses, an almost amusingly trite sermon, and then it was time to ‘do the Holy Spirit’. A posh young vicar called Rupert appeared on the stage and showed us a series of images of weeping children to get us in the mood, overlaid with a soundtrack of ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay. Did Chris Martin know, I wondered? Wasn’t the song written for his wife?

  The wailing Chris and the crying children worked their magic. Half the adults started crying, too. Thus warmed up, we began to pray together.

  ‘Come, Spirit, come,’ said Rupert, his voice shaking into the microphone.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Now we have to wait on God for a bit,’ said Rupert, as if God might be on hold on another call.

  ‘Hooooo, naaaaaaa, widddiiii.’

  God had clearly answered, for a white-haired woman in the front row was singing in tongues. It sounded surprisingly beautiful. Someone next to her broke down, weeping wildly. Others joined in. A few rows back, a man began to shake.

  ‘Hooooo, naaaaaaa, widddiiii.’

  Two women walked around handing out Kleenex for those overcome by the Spirit. Then Stock Market Christian came to the front and said that the Spirit had told him over breakfast that ‘someone here called Iva – or maybe Eva, the Spirit wasn’t that clear – had a sister who forgave her.’

  So that was that how Stock Market Christian did so well on the trading floor. Still, no one came forward.

  ‘Hooooo, naaaaaaa, widddiiii.’

  Stock Market Christian returned triumphantly to our little group where I was sitting quietly, trying to avoid Mary’s eye. ‘Hey, man,’ he whispered. ‘Can I pray for you?’

  ‘Hooooo, naaaaaaa, widddiiii.’

  I finally turned to Mary for support, to explain, or at least to ask for an explanation, but she had lain on her back on the floor and was making small snow-angel patterns with her arms and legs while mumbling something at the ceiling. ‘Mary,’ I said, in my own native English tongue. Still she mumbled on. ‘Mary, I’m sorry, I have to go.’

  ‘Hooooo, naaaaaaa, widddiiii.’

  I got up and ran down the central aisle, not caring who saw me, not caring what they thought. I only stopped to breathe when I was outside in the crisp late-summer air, underneath a huge banner that asked, ‘Is there anything more to life than this?’

  Yes, I thought, as I took a deep breath and walked more calmly towards the nearest Tube station.There is a hell of a lot more to life than this. And with that life-affirming thought, I took out my mobile and called my married ex-girlfriend, Lisa.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘You just can’t compete with Jesus. Surely you understand that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he’s bigger than you, older than you, cleverer than you and a whole lot more like the Son of God than you. Plus, his dad would definitely have your dad in a fight.’

  ‘But Jesus is dead.’

  ‘Not to Mary, he’s not. And not to a lot of other people, either.’

  I never really had Matt down as a Christian. But, as Matt put it, there are Christians and then there are ‘Christians’. Matt was a Christian, in the way people used to describe themselves as non-thinking, vaguely agnostic, Church of England Christians in a Christian country, and he didn’t care much for some ‘Christians’.

  ‘I went to a church like that once,’ he said. ‘It seriously freaked me out.’

  ‘Me, too. And I wasn’t really trying to compete with Jesus. I just thought we might all be able to get along together – on our own, admittedly unequal, terms.’

  Matt laughed. ‘So you’re not going to go out with a born-again, drunk-texting maniac for a frustrating year of sexual abstinence and guilt-laden encounters before settling down to a lifelong marriage of twice-weekly church attendance, grace before breakfast and the missionary position?’

  I thought for a moment.

  ‘No.’

  Matt sighed with visible relief. ‘Phew. I thought I might lose you there. I’ve seen it happen before and it’s not pretty.’

  It was still Wednesday evening and Matt had taken a break from his War Room to greet my return from church. Mary might not have chosen the ideal first date, we concluded, but at least I had found out earlier rather than later that she was a complete nut-job. Often you have to wait until the third month of a relationship before discovering this, or at least until you first go on holiday together. Perhaps, we debated, all potential couples should be thrown into an uncomfortable situation early on – an airline disaster, perhaps, or dinner with all of each other’s close friends and extended family – to see if you sink or swim. It wou
ld save a lot of time, heartache and money.

  ‘And what about the money?’ asked Matt.

  ‘The money?’

  ‘The Money-Barings. Is she not worth the Money-Barings?’

  ‘Now here’s the funny thing,’ I explained. ‘I called Lisa on my way home – ’

  ‘You called Lisa?’ shouted Matt. ‘As in your married ex-girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes. And – ’

  ‘God, how many more mobiles am I going to have to confiscate this week?’

  Matt lunged for my pocket, but I saw him coming and jumped on the sofa, holding my phone, dangling, above his head so he couldn’t flush it down the toilet. I couldn’t afford another one. ‘Just listen for a moment, will you? I didn’t call Lisa because I missed her, or because I was having some sort of existential crisis thanks to twenty minutes in church. I called her about Mary. Her friend.’

  ‘Oh.’ Matt sat down again, barely hiding his disappointment at being denied his mobile-confiscating responsibilities. I recognised the face he’d once pulled as a six-year-old when Alan’s mum had relieved him of his milk-monitor duties. ‘So what did she say?’

  ‘Well, it’s quite a funny story, actually. I thought Mary was just a friend of Lisa’s younger sister from university. But actually, Lisa and Mary also met on the same course the vicar forced Lisa and Timothy to go on. According to Lisa, everyone in their group seemed to have some sort of ulterior motive for being there. Lisa and Timothy, of course, just wanted to get married in a church. There were two other couples in the same boat. Stock Market Christian was there, too. Lisa remembered him with as little fondness as I will. And then there was young Money-Barings, who had been sent by her ridiculously wealthy father – ’

  ‘Sent there by her father?’ Matt looked as confused as I had been.