Beta Male

by Iain Hollingshead

  The line went dead. I tried again, via the same operator, who wearily put me through.

  ‘Listen, Alan,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve spent the night on a park bench, I’m delirious, I’m hypothermic, I’m nervous, I’m talking shit. But please don’t hang up. None of what was said last night is true.’

  His voice was flat, expressionless. ‘It doesn’t matter much if it’s true or not, does it, because my life is ruined. Jess thinks I’ve slept with Amanda. She’s left me. Whether she’s with you or not, I don’t know… ’

  The operator interrupted: ‘Look, this is all very interesting, but this isn’t a free call. If you don’t accept to pay the cost, I’m going to have you cut you off.’

  Alan laughed hollowly. ‘Cut him off, then. After all, that’s exactly what I intend to do. I’m sorry, Sam, I don’t know what to believe any more. However, I have been thinking a lot all night and have come to the one conclusion I can be sure of: namely, you’re a complete cunt and I never want to see you again.’

  And with that, he hung up, leaving me to smash the receiver back onto its cradle and stomp angrily out of the booth. So that was what Alan thought. What a prick. Maybe he really had slept with Amanda. Ha! Well, then, this served him right. This served him bloody right. He had tried to have his cake and eat it, and now he was going to end up miserable and alone with no friends…

  I stopped myself, suddenly aware of the irony. It was not for me to judge my friends. It was for me to forgive them, to understand them, even. Whatever Alan had or had not done – and I had always trusted him before – it was clear that he was happiest with Jess. It was fairly clear that he made her happy, too, however she chose to show that. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that Alan and Jess were the one constant I’d actually had over the last few years. Ultimately, I liked consistency, however much I tried to struggle against it. Girlfriends came and went. Friends, too. Matt moved in with Jewish princesses. Ed started kissing Claire at engagement parties. Lisa got married and became depressed. But through it all, Alan and Jess loved and endured. My mission of atonement slowly became clear. It was to make amends for ruining their engagement party by making sure they got back – and stayed – together.

  *

  Not that I had the first idea how I was meant to go about doing this. Until I had proved my innocence – or at least exonerated myself from a few of the more serious charges – no one appeared particularly keen to be seen dead with me. So much for a friend in need. Alan, of course, was out of bounds. Claire had probably joined the feminine chorus of disapproval. Even Matt found his loyalties to two of his best friends torn when I turned up at Debbie’s house around lunchtime. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, opening the door with a baby in one arm and a bottle of milk in the other. ‘But I just don’t think it’s fair to Alan for me to see you at the moment. Plus, Debbie doesn’t seem to think all that much of you, either.’

  So it was that I found myself, at 3.30pm the same afternoon, hanging outside the rough secondary school at which Ed taught, feeling like something of a paedophile.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ demanded Ed when he finally emerged from his classroom, looking fraught after a day of confiscating phones containing happy-slapping videos and trying not to get stabbed in the back with a kitchen knife while writing on the whiteboard.

  ‘I’m grooming your pupils.’

  He recoiled sharply before realising I was joking. God, just how bad was my reputation?

  Pretty bad, I discovered, after I’d persuaded Ed to take me back to his shoebox for a shower and a bite to eat. The engagement party had, I learned, come to a fairly abrupt end after I’d departed for my open-air hotel. Amanda had slunk away, her moonlighting completed. A tearful Jess had exited quickly afterwards, pursued by distinctly un-teacherly shouts from Alan’s mother. Meanwhile, Rosie had decided to suspend her non-aggression pact with Mary and poured a gin and tonic over her rival’s head. Alan stepped in to check Mary was okay, at which point Stock Market Christian had lamped him one, prompting Matt to lamp him one back and a second near-riot had ensued. Apparently, it had been quite difficult to get back into the party mood after that.

  Worse revelations were to follow when Ed logged on to Facebook and showed me a new group that had been created that morning called ‘Sam Hunt is a cunt’. It was difficult to argue with the sentiment, but did it really have to have 372 members already? The group’s description contained a rather inaccurate, badly written account of my recent adventures. Its creator, I noticed, was Alan Muir. Its two ‘officers’ were Rosie and Mary, united again in anger. As for the rest of the members, I didn’t even recognise half of them. There was someone from Nepal on there, for fuck’s sake. Was this the global village everyone kept on banging on about? The United Nations of Sam’s cuntdom.

  ‘Hang on, Ed,’ I said, scrolling down a bit further. ‘You’re a member of this group as well. So why are you not being horrible to me, like everyone else?’

  ‘Well, you are a cunt, Sam. But you’re my cunt.’ He laughed. It did sound a bit anatomically ridiculous put like that. ‘Plus, you were good to me when I was in trouble. And I don’t believe you slept with Jess. But most of all, we brothers have to look after one another when the chips are down, the claws are out and violent women are attacking us, objectifying us and using us for our bodies.’

  ‘Hang on. You think that I was being used?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even though I lied to two women for their money, assumed a false identity, pretended to be a born-again Christian in order to get my hands on an elderly man’s money and slept with an older, attached woman I later ignored… I was being used?’

  ‘Yes. They were all using you to get what they wanted as well. Amanda wanted attention. Rosie wanted affection. Mary wanted to get married so she could have a good shag at last. The fact that you had to lie to get what you wanted shows exactly how society uses men. We are expected to fulfil a certain stereotype – to project a rich, successful, macho image – in order to attract women.’

  ‘I thought we weren’t macho enough, according to your ridiculous newspaper article.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You weren’t, anyway. But when you became what all men actually are – the shits that women secretly want us to be – you were punished for it. And that, my friend, is the problem with modern gender politics. No one knows how they’re meant to act so you’re screwed either way.’

  ‘Ed, I’m really not sure you can portray me as the victim. I’m the cunt here, remember.’

  Before Ed could share more of his illogical wisdom, we were interrupted by the doorbell. He went to answer it while I waited in his front room, straining my ears in an attempt to pick up the faint murmur of hushed, urgent conversation. Eventually it fell quiet, the door was shut again and I went out into the corridor to see what was going on. There, only a few feet away, stood Jess, the real victim in all of this. We both stopped and stared, a no-man’s land of recriminations and history between us. And then, with slow steps, as if effecting an exchange of hostages, we walked towards each other until we were within touching distance, and she raised a hand as if to slap me before dissolving into violent, shuddering tears. I held her, awkwardly at first, then tighter, weeping too, apologising over and over again.

  ‘I had no idea it would turn out like this,’ I said, after we had cleared Ed out of the way and sat down on the sofa together. ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t think sometimes… I don’t think most of the time… and well, this really was the last thing I wanted.’

  ‘Me, too.’ She sniffed and blew her nose again. ‘Thank you for saying that. But I came to tell you that I’m sorry as well.’

  ‘You’re sorry?’

  ‘I’m sorry for trying to take your friend away from you.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m not being ridiculous,’ Jess snapped. It was good to see her old temper return. ‘I was trying to take Alan away. I was trying to take him away because
I loved him and I worried he wouldn’t love me back. I was trying to compete with the rest of you the whole time. And that’s what I’ve now realised was ridiculous.’

  I laughed encouragingly, which was a mistake as she rounded on me again. ‘Anyway, you guys think you have it so hard, don’t you? There’s too much choice to settle down just yet. My girlfriend traps me. I’m going to lose touch with my friends. I’ll never be able to sleep with anyone else again.’ She reverted to her normal voice. ‘Yes, I know what you talk about among yourselves. But please, don’t think it’s all that easy for women, either. We fall for someone, and we fall for them hard, but then we spend the whole time scared that they’re going to string us along for eight years before running off with someone else once they’ve found their feet a bit more in the world. Because you can, can’t you? Growing older is easy for you. You get better with age while twenty-five-year-old girls just stay the same. And meanwhile we’re getting older, too, which means less attractive, as well as more familiar to you and therefore even less attractive in your eyes. No, don’t shake your head. That’s the fundamental difference between guys and girls, isn’t it? The more we like and know you, the more we want to settle with you. The more you like and know us, the more you think, To hell with this, I’ve nabbed her now, and if she likes me, I bet lots of other women will, too, so I’ll go and get myself an upgrade until I get bored with her as well.’

  I stared at Jess open-mouthed. No woman had insight like this into a man. Was she a hermaphrodite? Had she tortured Alan to give up the inner workings of our psyche?

  Jess took advantage of my surprise to continue: ‘You know what the real problem is with men, Sam? You think a relationship is like a job interview – a one-off assessment at the beginning, after which you either get the girl or you don’t. And once you think you’ve got us, you relax and don’t make an effort any more. A long-term relationship for a woman, on the other hand, is a never-ending, performance-related, 360-degree appraisal. And it’s one you often fail.’

  Jess heaved a huge sigh, as if trying to shift the weight of the world from her shoulders. It didn’t seem to work. She continued: ‘Those are some of the stereotypes about men and women, anyway. The truth is that we think a lot like you as well. Has Alan been freaking out about getting engaged? Probably. But I can tell you that I’ve had a little freak-out of my own. I’m also worried about losing touch with my friends. I’m also worried about never sleeping with anyone else again. One day, if I forgive him for what he’s done, and he forgives me for what I haven’t done, we’ll probably have children together. And how much do you think that will trap me? How much do you think that terrifies me? More to the point, how much do you think it annoys me that I’m going to have to spend most of the rest of my life competing with his bloody mother for his affections?’

  ‘None of us exactly fits the male stereotype, either, do we?’ I said, eventually finding my voice. ‘Ed the suffragit. Matt the unmarried house-husband. Me… well, me. And in Alan you could not find more of a rock. You will never find anyone who loves you more than him.’

  ‘Alan fits the male stereotype perfectly. He cheated on me with Amanda – a woman who is better-looking, more successful and a great deal thinner than I am.’

  ‘Why are you so sure he cheated on you with Amanda?’

  ‘I read the letter you sent Alan, and it all makes sense, doesn’t it? Amanda blackmails Alan with his career and he’s too weak to stand up to her. He also gets a final fling into the bargain. You heard what Amanda said at our engagement party.’

  ‘It meant nothing,’ I said. ‘She’s manipulative and a bit of a drunk. She was just winding him up.’

  ‘I saw Alan’s face,’ said Jess. ‘I know that look of guilty terror.’

  ‘And I know that that look is just terror. Nothing more.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  I shook my head vigorously. Jess continued: ‘There’s something else, too. After reading your letter to Alan, I wrote to Amanda and told her to leave him alone. As you know, I’m not the kind of person to let this sort of thing lie. Well, it was a fairly stupid thing to do, all things considered. After you’d been bundled out of my engagement party, Amanda passed me on her way out and whispered in my ear, “You must be Jess. Never think you can get one over me by writing such slanderous drivel. Oh, and by the way, your fiancé is a dreadful shag.”’

  ‘Well, there you go,’ I said. ‘You wound up Amanda and she decided to take it out on you.’

  ‘She took it out on me because it’s true: she’s shagged Alan and wants to steal him from me.’

  ‘Rubbish. I trust Alan. I always have done, always will. I know him better than you.’

  Jess started to protest, but I continued: ‘Anyway, this is more about me than him. Amanda is just a psycho trying to get back at me.’

  Jess listened patiently while I told her the full story of what had happened at Alan’s office party in the summer. When I got to the end, she gave a half-smile and said, ‘So this actually is your fault, then, whichever way you look at it?’

  I didn’t have it in me to smile back. ‘Yes. But I’m trying to make amends. Just tell me what I have to do to put things right and I’ll do it.’

  ‘The way I see it,’ she said, authoritatively, ‘is that the two of us finally have something in common: the fact that everyone hates us right now. But if we can work together to convince Alan we didn’t sleep together then he might be persuaded to have the balls to convince me that he didn’t sleep with Amanda. Then no one loses face and we all waltz off happily into the sunset.’

  We stayed up most of the night on Ed’s sofa – discussing how we would go about doing this, as well as talking about normal stuff: jobs, families, friends. It was a conversation we should have had years ago – eight years ago, to be precise. I had never got to know Jess, I had only got to know ‘Alan’s girlfriend’: Alan’s girlfriend who had taken him away from his friends; Alan’s girlfriend who had kept him under the thumb; Alan’s girlfriend who had never made much effort with us. I hadn’t liked ‘Alan’s girlfriend’ much. Alan’s girlfriend hadn’t liked me that much, either. But Jess? Jess, when I finally met her eight long years later, was very likeable indeed. She was a little bit brash for me – a bit brash, a bit fat, a bit posh, very much not my type – but she was funny and bright and so evidently perfect for Alan. Earlier that morning I had resolved to get Alan and Jess back together because I felt horrendously guilty, because it felt like the right thing to do to atone for all the wrong things I had done. By the early hours of the following morning, I had resolved to do it because I wanted to.

  I used to be jealous of Jess having Alan to herself. A tiny bit of me that night grew jealous of Alan for having Jess to himself. If I’m honest – because no one would believe me if I didn’t share this – my final, half-smiling thought before losing consciousness was how ironic it would be if, after all this, we had ended up shagging, right there and then, ‘victims’ both, on Ed the suffragit’s second-hand sofa.

  *

  Somehow we managed to resist the irony, although it amused me that when Ed came downstairs for breakfast and saw the two of us wrapped up for warmth, and lack of anywhere else to go, on the same sofa, he sneered: ‘No, Sam, you didn’t, did you?’

  I didn’t reply for a moment, enjoying his look of shock.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve let another woman use you,’ he continued. ‘Have some self-respect, man.’

  Fortunately, Jess laughed. ‘It would be a pretty effective revenge, wouldn’t it, if Alan had cheated on me with Amanda?’

  Ed and I laughed, too, desperately hoping Alan hadn’t.

  ‘Would you?’ I asked Jess, smiling.

  ‘If you were the last man in the world, yes.’

  I jumped off the sofa, stealing the covers, and performed a little victory dance.

  ‘It doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you yet,’ laughed Jess, her teeth chattering in the cold.

  Still, it was a start and I was
glad of the horseplay, for it was the last bit of entertainment I was to have for a while. The highlights of that Saturday morning included a further 587 people joining the Facebook group in my honour, three of them in Honolulu, and a phone call from the director of Richard II to sack me because another cast member had alerted her to the group and she was so horrified by my actions that she couldn’t bring herself to work with someone like me.

  ‘Aren’t second spear-carriers allowed to be cunts?’ asked Ed, sympathetically.

  ‘Evidently not,’ I said. ‘Although I bet it was the third spear-carrier who shopped me.’

  I didn’t tell Ed how disappointed I really was. That job had meant a lot to me. It also felt like my one of my last surviving links with Rosie. Had it not been for Rosie’s encouragement, I would never have come within an inch of being second spear-carrier.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon desperately trying to get hold of Rosie on my freshly charged phone, but she clearly didn’t want to talk. Mary wouldn’t answer her mobile, either. ‘I don’t care about Mary, but you really have to get hold of Rosie,’ urged Jess. ‘We can’t carry out our plan if you don’t.’

  All I actually wanted to do was to write a cowardly apology letter to both of them. A letter had worked with Alan. But no, Jess was right. The time for cowardice was over. I resolved to start with Mary, despite what Jess had said. Mary would be easier. Mary could start the ball rolling. I didn’t care that much about her, but I did at least owe her an explanation. So I showed up outside the church in Clapham on Sunday in hope of forgiveness.

  It came readily, but not in the way I had expected.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about all that,’ said Mary, taking my arm and unleashing a stream of consciousness as we strolled around the church grounds. ‘I was fairly sure you were faking it, but Lisa said you were quite a laugh so I was willing to go along for the ride to see where it ended up. Not all of us want to get married straight away, you know. Some of us girls just want to enjoy ourselves and have a fling. Plus, you’re the kind of guy who would get on well with Daddy so I thought, hell, if I have to marry a Christian eventually to please him then this one is more fun than the rest of them and looks like he might be some use in bed. But then you got all dreary and overly zealous, and so I was going to end it myself.’ She broke off to wave at Stock Market Christian, who was revving his Porsche on the other side of the car park. ‘Anyway, I’m with Jason now. It’s a win-win, really. Either Daddy likes him and he gives up his job to live happily ever after with rich little me, or I give up my job and live happily ever after with fairly rich little him.’