Beta Male

by Iain Hollingshead

  ‘Oh, yes, you should have seen his scared little face.’ Amanda smiled – unpleasantly – at the memory.

  I laughed encouragingly. Keep going, I thought, just keep her going. ‘I can’t believe he resisted you, though. What did you do to the poor kid?’

  ‘Oh, you know, silly stuff. I’d pinch his arse in client meetings or stare provocatively at his crotch when he got up to go to the toilet.’

  I roared with fake laughter. ‘Brilliant!’

  ‘And whenever we’ve been away on business, I’ve pretended there’s been an overbooking and we’ve had to share a room. We even made him dress up as a Chippendale at the Christmas party.’

  ‘A Chippendale! Priceless!’

  Amanda sighed. ‘The only shame is that Alan never really rose to the bait. He’s too boring, I suppose, to do anything interesting, and I eventually got bored of the game as well. But then I heard him tell someone that his engagement party was just over the road so I thought I’d drop in and call a truce. I thought you might be there, too, and we might even have a little repeat performance to see if you’d improved at all in the meantime. But I didn’t expect to find quite so many other women after you… Anyway, I was never going to say anything scandalous and then suddenly Alan started denying everything when there was no need and it all got out of hand… Hang on. Sam? Sam? Where are you going? Shall we do lunch? Am I going to see you again?’

  ‘I’ll see you in court’ was the answer I wanted to give. I’d been waiting to say a line that good most of my adult life. But most of all, I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. I tore out of Amanda’s office, past Alan’s startled colleagues, past the photocopier, down the corridor and into the lift. Once the doors were safely closed, I took my phone out to call Jess but there was no need. She had trusted me enough to pre-empt news of the successful completion of stages three and four. As the doors opened into the lobby, I looked through the glass walls of the office, out into the street, and saw Alan on one knee in front of Jess, as Rosie looked on at a discreet distance, smiling faintly. I ran towards them, but Rosie had vanished by the time I’d got there, skidding onto my knees beside Alan and asking Jess if she would, please, for the love of God, marry my best friend.

  At some point in the laughing, crying, undignified hug that followed, I caught sight of Amanda, standing in what I later discovered was the same place as, six months previously, she had glimpsed Jess about to propose to the employee she had been harassing ever since. This time, however, we were all on our knees, all asking, all saying yes.

  ‘Just one more thing,’ I said to Alan, taking my mobile out of my pocket again and stopping the recording. ‘You might find this useful.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  For the next few weeks, I bathed in a glow of self-righteous happiness. So this was what it felt like to be a good person. This was what it felt like to do good. Good things happened to good people. Although Alan was back with Jess, they had both decided it would be better to live apart until they got married, which meant I could live with Alan again in the meantime. It was just like old times, only better in one key respect: I no longer felt the need to vanish every time Jess came round (which was often) to leaf through wedding brochures and argue over which variety of dove to release at the reception. Now Jess and I could barely get enough of each other. We had in-jokes which even Alan didn’t get. A lesser man might have minded; Alan just beamed from ear to ear whenever Jess and I made each other laugh, happy that his two best friends had finally hit it off. ‘My barrister and my barista’ – as he referred to us in one of his wittier moments.

  I didn’t even feel particularly guilty about duping Amanda in her own office. She had played on Alan’s insecurities for her own amusement and almost destroyed him in the process. She had bullied Jess and wrecked their engagement party. Worst of all, she was on record as being under the mistaken impression that I was a below-average lover. So, frankly, she deserved whatever she got – whatever that might end up being. Alan still seemed unsure of his next steps. He had played the recording through a dozen times, chuckling and frowning to himself in equal measures. But that seemed as far as he wanted to take it for the time being. Amanda left him in peace now at the office. Jess had the evidence she needed to believe him. Maybe that was all he had ever wanted.

  In any case, it wasn’t my business any more. There was a sense of relief that I hadn’t been the root cause of all the trouble, but I still blamed myself for being the catalyst. It was big of Alan to forgive me – once again – and I didn’t want to push him to take any further action. It was his career, not mine.

  Talking of which, I felt it was time to address my own non-existent prospects, which took a peculiar turn one day in March when Ed approached me with the script of a one-man play he had written called The Cock Monologues.

  ‘The Cock Monologues?’ asked Matt when I met up with him at Debbie’s for the first time in what seemed like ages to share this disquieting news.

  ‘Yes, it’s all part of Ed’s masculinism nonsense.’

  ‘Ah. And there I was thinking that it was because you’re a cock.’

  I laughed, almost convincingly. It was good to see my friend – especially as Debbie was out with her youngest, Sarah – and hear his dreadful jokes again. Matt hadn’t completely vanished from the radar since the engagement party fiasco, but he’d made his disapproval fairly clear. We had a bit of patching up to do. We also had a lot of catching up to do, especially on the Debbie front, where it appeared that the unemployed doctor who had beaten me on the bet to ‘live the dream’ was actually stuck in the middle of a waking nightmare.

  ‘Where do I start?’ he said, leaning back against Debbie’s kitchen counter and wiping a fleck of child vomit off his shirt. ‘Where can I possibly start to explain the sheer tedium of being a kept-man house-husband to a working woman you’re not married to and a pseudo-father to two young children who are not yours?’

  Once he’d got over the difficulty of starting, Matt found it equally difficult to stop his list of complaints. Many of them focused on Debbie herself – I knew I was right about her – but it was the more systematic ones that really stuck with me: the sense of shame he felt as the only man waiting outside Tumble Tots; the boredom of having no one to talk to during the day; the guilt of fancying the Ukrainian cleaner who came round twice a week; the loneliness of knowing no one else in a similar position. Most of all, his lack of tangible achievement made him feel entirely useless. He was a man, dammit. He needed something to measure success by. Frankly, I told him, he needed a job.

  ‘Speak for yourself, mate,’ said Matt with a snort.

  I didn’t really have an answer to that. I’ve always given expert advice; rarely taken it.

  ‘I mean, where’s my sense of worth?’ Matt continued. ‘On a good day in medicine, I’d send a few people home alive. Some were happier than when they came in.’ He rubbed the stubborn vomit stain on his shirt again, making it worse. ‘On a good day now, I get through to the evening without changing my clothes more than once. Or opening more than one bottle of wine while doing the ironing.’

  There was a sudden piercing scream from next door, where David, Debbie’s four-year-old, had been quietly watching cartoons. Matt ran through to see what was the matter. I followed at a discreet distance and observed him valiantly attempting to comfort a howling, terrified little boy, who seemed to have been scared by something he’d just seen on television. Matt was a natural – not that David seemed to appreciate it.

  ‘I hate you,’ he wailed. ‘Not my daddy. Want Mummy. Hate you. Want Mummy. Not my daddy. Hate you.’

  I beat a tactical retreat to the kitchen and waited for Matt to quieten him down. Pre-school nightmares were not my forte.

  ‘Actually, mate, I could do with some help,’ called Matt, summoning me back next door.

  Between the two of us, we managed to divert David with magic tricks, war games and an indoor game of football, which cracked a window, until
he decided he wanted to watch some more cartoons and promptly fell asleep. Quite frankly, I could have done with a sleep myself after all that.

  ‘Jesus, mate, do you do this every day?’ I asked, when we flopped back into the kitchen and made another cup of tea.

  ‘Quite a few days, yes. It takes its toll.’

  I looked at Matt more closely. He didn’t look his best, it was true. His handsome face had lost some of its confidence. He looked bowed, beaten even. ‘What about Debbie?’ I asked. ‘How’s it going with her?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. She’s seriously high maintenance.’

  I nodded. All blokes know what high maintenance is. High maintenance is bad. We want low maintenance. Low maintenance but high performance. A high maintenance girl is like owning an expensive sports car. She looks great but she knows she looks great. She goes like greased lightning, but you have to polish her ego constantly. She regularly blows a gasket if you don’t handle her with care. Leave her out in the cold for too long and she won’t even start. Stay with her long-term and her value starts decreasing exponentially. Plus, there’s a high chance some other poor sod will come along and nick her without realising just how high maintenance she is.

  ‘Do you love her?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you imagine that you might love her?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then get out,’ I said. ‘Get out while you still can.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Physician, heal thyself. You don’t owe this woman anything. And you owe it to the children not to get too attached to you.’

  Matt laughed bitterly. ‘That doesn’t seem to be a particular danger with David. But still, he’s a pretty cool little guy. I’d feel guilty leaving him.’

  ‘Listen, mate. You can’t stay with someone you don’t love just because you’re a nice guy. Maybe you once liked Debbie, but you clearly don’t any more. The bet’s over. It was a stupid idea. Let’s get on with our lives. Anyway, you’d be doing her a favour. Believe me: prolonging the inevitable only makes it worse.’

  ‘I believe you. You’re the expert at screwing up relationships.’

  I laughed. It was good to know that there were times when it was okay to speak out honestly to your friends. Perhaps Matt and Debbie were still in the window-of-opportunity phase.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. You and Rosie.’

  ‘Sadly, there is no me and Rosie. There was only “Max” and Rosie.’

  ‘She won’t forgive you?’

  ‘Nope. I think there are some things you learn to tolerate, forgive even, in a relationship: flatulence, nose-picking, infidelity – ’

  ‘You’re right, there are worse crimes than infidelity,’ agreed Matt. ‘Indifference, for example.’

  ‘Yep. I’d rather a girlfriend slept with someone else than didn’t bother to make an effort with me. But pretending to be someone else in order to get into a girl’s pants? No, I think we’ve passed the point of no return.’ I shrugged. ‘Anyway, there’s someone else… ’

  Matt listened while I shared the conclusions I’d reached about Claire: that it was worth giving it a shot, that it was the easy, logical solution to my troubled, wandering heart. He listened carefully, without interrupting, and then told me, very directly, very bluntly, that I was making the biggest mistake of my life. ‘You were honest about Debbie,’ he said. ‘So I’m going to be honest about Claire. You can’t just turn a friendship into a relationship at the drop of a hat, especially when you don’t even fancy the person in question.’

  ‘I think I might fancy her after all,’ I said. ‘Anyway, nothing ventured, nothing gained.’

  ‘This is one venture you should not attempt.’

  ‘But now’s the perfect moment,’ I said. ‘Claire’s been made redundant so she’s going to direct me in The Cock Monologues. If I don’t mention it to her now, I’ll spend the rest of my life thinking of her as the one that got away.’

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you… ’ Matt started to say. But before he could share any more of his dire warnings, his mobile rang and he was summoned to fetch a high-maintenance single mother and her baby from the swimming baths.

  *

  Ed’s play was obviously a rip-off of The Vagina Monologues. Or at least it was meant to be. Sadly, it fell between two stools – neither particularly insightful nor particularly funny.

  Apart from my evident suitability for the title role, I don’t think I was Ed’s first choice, to be honest. Of our little group, we’ve probably been the least close. Plus, I think he mainly wrote it so he could spend more time with Claire. The two of them had become good friends and he wanted to give her something to do while she lived off her redundancy pay and looked around for another way to earn a living. Every other actor had sensibly turned down the script, even the desperate ones who hadn’t worked for years. Yes, they would be ‘the star’ – the only star of a one-man show in an unconfirmed venue with a script penned by an emasculated, campaigning madman… So no, on balance, they’d probably be better off sticking to their day jobs in WH Smith.

  I think Ed had only asked me, then, out of polite desperation, and probably in the expectation that I too would say no. If so, he had grossly underestimated my own desperation.

  In the end, four things made me accept the part. One was the opportunity to spend time with Claire. To a lesser extent, I also wanted to help out Ed. Another was that I had signed on to a new temping agency, which had reminded me just how horrible office life was. And the fourth? Well, bizarrely, it had something to do with a combination of Mr Money-Barings and Rosie.

  Rosie had been surprisingly kind since the day she’d helped me get Alan and Jess back together. We hadn’t seen each other again – her promise had stood firm – but she had been generous enough to close down the ‘Sam Hunt is a cunt’ Facebook group before it gathered any more members from Nepal or Nebraska. She’d also said she’d spoken to her company’s accountant who’d agreed to return half the fee for the Max House account, given that the work hadn’t actually been carried out for me. They would chase Max for the rest – wherever he was now – and pocket my remaining £2,500 in return for dropping any legal charges against me. What legal charges, I had asked. Don’t worry, we’d think of something, Rosie had replied. Like what, I had said. Like impersonating someone richer than oneself and being a dick, Rosie had replied. Oh, I had said.

  The upshot was that I still owed Mr Money-Barings £2,500, in addition to my other credit card debts of five times that amount. Mary had kindly forwarded me several of her father’s letters, which had left me in no doubt that he was not about to forget his loan. I had written back to apologise, beg even, but sadly his favourite part of Old Testament scripture did indeed appear to be the bit about an eye for an eye, and not the verses in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy that aren’t so hot on money-lending. That money was going to have to be repaid somehow, and the only way I could think of raising any extra cash in a short period of time was to take on Ed’s play. A musical about The Prodigal Son it wasn’t, but it would have to do. Mr Money-Barings wrote again, agreeing to give me another couple of months.

  I had a contact who ran a shabby pub theatre in Islington. I’d helped him get a part in a fairly sought-after production in Edinburgh a few years back and he still owed me a favour; he agreed to rent out his theatre at a slightly reduced rate. If we sold out for three weeks, and Ed was feeling generous, I could just about afford to pay Mr Money-Barings back.

  So it was that I found myself sitting in a rehearsal room with Claire on our first read-through of the script of The Cock Monologues. I’d got about as far as page four before flinging it down on the floor.

  ‘It’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it?’ agreed Claire.

  I nodded glumly. It was a bit hurtful as well. On reading it more closely, I noticed that a lot of the scenes contained thinly veiled references to some of my recent antics. It
was as if the author had deliberately tried to make me look bad.

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘Why did you agree to direct this, if you thought it was rubbish?’

  Claire blushed and tried to stutter something about having time on her hands. But I had rumbled her. However much she went on about ‘helping Ed out with something he cared about’ and – her biggest lie of all – ‘feeling guilty after ending their little fling’, this was the point at which I knew Jess had been right about Claire’s feelings. It certainly explained why she had been so off with me ever since that glorious night at the opera.

  ‘I just thought it would be fun to spend some time working with you,’ she said simply. ‘Just like the old days.’

  And then I had the decency to blush as well.

  Claire was right, though: it was a lot of fun, especially after we’d decided that the only way to make the play work was to take the piss out of it. Somewhat stupidly, Ed had left the rehearsal period entirely in our hands. Normally you can’t keep writers away from rehearsals. I’ve worked on a few productions in which the director has deliberately given the writer false times and venues in a bid to stop them making a nuisance of themselves. Ed, however, spouted some rubbish about not wanting to spoil the creative link between the star and the fourth wall, assured us he was looking forward to the first night and went back to school, leaving us to it.

  ‘It’, in this instance, turned out to be putting a slightly more comic twist on everything poor Ed had written. The Cock Monologues (his working title was The Penis Monologues, but that had already been staged, apparently) was meant to be a serious reflection on the state of masculinity today, each monologue mirroring the original vagina-oriented version. So we kicked off with ‘My angry cock’, in which I was supposed to rant ‘humorously’ about the injustices wrought against my penis, and indeed ‘penii worldwide’ (Ed was a finicky teacher and, in this case, a wrong one, as penis is a third-declension noun, like tigris, and therefore the plural, if you want to be a pedantic cock, is penes), such as condoms and the tools used in STD check-ups. Another shamelessly plagiarised monologue was called: ‘I was twelve and a half, my big brother caught me at it because I forgot to lock the bathroom door’ and was supposed to refer to that charming adolescent moment when you first realise that the function of this strange organ between your legs isn’t limited to urination.