‘Get the car,’ he commanded, picking up the pills with his spare hand and checking the label. I had never seen anyone so completely in their element. ‘We’ve got about fifteen minutes to get him to a hospital.’
The next day, when Ed felt well enough to talk a little about what had happened, he confided that he had no idea why he’d called me. His mind had been made up; the note written; the pills taken.
‘I suppose there must have been a bigger part of my subconscious wanting me to live than wanting me to die,’ he reasoned.
But I’m not really sure how much reason came into it. Ed had been trying too hard to reason everything. He’d tried to reason how Tara had dumped him; tried to reason how she’d moved on. He’d searched for meaning in Sam and Matt’s silly little games and attempted to rationalise everything in a play. But, in truth, there was neither rhyme nor reason in what he had experienced, merely emotions, some understandable, many not. Ed was an emotional man, not a rational one. He had been through a break-up that, for him, had been worse than a divorce, even a bereavement. He needed time to let these emotions run their course. Then he would understand.
He smiled at me as I stuttered my way through some of these thoughts. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said for the thousandth time. ‘I really am. I’m still not sure why I called you, but I’m glad I did.’
But was that enough? Would he still be glad the next week or the week after? We were all very shaken, especially Sam, who was in a terrible state, blaming himself for everything. However much we tried to cheer him up, he knew as well as the rest of us that the catalyst for what had happened was his ill-advised night with Claire. Out of respect, none of us ever read Ed’s note, but we knew what it would have said. It was Tara who had destroyed Ed; Sam and Claire, however unwittingly, who had reminded him of just how much damage she’d done. Ed could neither move on, nor backwards, which was where he actually wanted to go.
I was there when Sam and Claire arrived, ashen-faced, at Ed’s bedside at 4am the first morning. They were still there three days later, taking it in turns to keep vigil. On the fourth day, I visited after work, interrupting a conversation that appeared to have been a competition over who could apologise the most.
‘It was so selfish of me,’ said Ed.
‘So selfish of me,’ protested Sam.
There was an awkward silence while I hovered by the door, unsure whether or not to join them.
‘So, how’s the play?’ asked Ed at last.
‘The play? We’re hardly going to carry on with that while you’re… ’ Sam trailed off, lamely, gesturing at Ed: the hospital bed; the drip still in his arm; the nurse who popped in every twenty minutes to check he wasn’t about to do himself any more harm.
Ed sat up bolt upright, pulling one of the drips out of his arm. ‘Sam, if you and Claire don’t keep on doing that play, I’ll bloody well try to kill myself again.’
‘Ed – ’
‘No, don’t “Ed” me. You two can’t just stop because of this. Listen, I’m going to be all right, okay? I promise. Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself, and what will happen to you if you don’t worry about yourself. You’ve got talent in abundance. We all saw it that night.’
‘I thought you hated what we did to it.’
‘I was just jealous. Anyway, I barely believe a word of what I wrote any more. Masculinism isn’t really in crisis; just some men. A lot of men, perhaps. Me, in particular. But not all of them. You and Claire… Well, you actually turned my drivel into something quite good. Something amusing, occasionally even thought-provoking. So, for God’s sake, grab this chance and make something of your fucking life.’
It took a suicidal teacher whom he’d never really liked that much to finally put a stick up Sam Hunt’s arse. After a hiatus of five days, The Cock Monologues re-opened to triumphant reviews. ‘Hilarious’, thundered The Times. ‘Seriously amusing’, roared the Daily Telegraph. ‘Very funny… ’, said the Independent, although the quote emblazoned across the publicity material forgot to mention that the dot, dot, dot stood for the omitted qualifier: ‘if you have an IQ of room temperature and a mental age in single figures.’
Regardless, the play transferred to a bigger theatre and helped make Sam’s name, and to a lesser extent, those of Ed and Claire. Sam earned enough to pay back Mr Money-Barings and rediscovered his old belief that happiness had very little to do with money and a lot to do with finding something you enjoyed and doing it well.
Ed, meanwhile, pretended not to mind being upstaged by Sam yet again. ‘You can’t get much more beta male than this,’ he said to me on the night The Cock Monologues opened in the West End. ‘I write a play to get the girl, and then my friend steals both the girl and the play.’
‘Ed, you do realise that the girl at least is still up for grabs?’
He stopped re-reading the programme and swung round to face me. ‘Then why the hell didn’t someone tell me?’
‘Dunno.’ I shrugged. ‘We thought – ’
‘You thought I was still hung up on Tara and preoccupied with trying to kill myself?’
I shrugged again. That was exactly what we’d all thought. It was exactly what we all continued to think, to be honest, however much Ed protested that he was all right and we shouldn’t fret about him. He seemed to cheer up as the days got longer and warmer, but of course we still worried as he continued to live alone in the flat he’d bought with Tara, and which she refused to let him sell because of its rapidly mounting negative equity. We worried about him because he was our friend. And if we didn’t, who else would?
In the end, it was Ed’s continuing instability that gave me the idea to revisit the situation with Amanda. My first instinct had been to let sleeping dogs lie. I’d enjoyed her comeuppance as much as Sam had appeared to (her amusingly withering critique of his technique aside). It certainly gave me useful leverage over her in the office, as she had been nothing but cordial to me ever since. But most of all, the incident made me happy because it meant I had Jess back. I didn’t want to dredge up a miserable period of my life.
But then in April my company announced that there would be another round of redundancies in our department and Amanda turned vicious, back-stabbing anyone and everyone in a bid to shore up her own position. The rumour was that she would keep her job while the other two directors – one male, one female, both with children and both a great deal more able, and more pleasant, than her – would lose theirs. They didn’t deserve that, and I wasn’t enjoying my own job very much any more. Suddenly, I had a plan.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Jess, after explaining it over breakfast one morning. I sat back and braced myself for the response.
‘What do I think?’ she replied, disarmingly softly. ‘I think it’s a very brave decision. And if it’s what you really want, I will support you every step of the way.’
I choked on my cornflakes. I wasn’t sure when I had last made a decision, let alone a brave decision, or one that Jess had actually supported. That morning I walked to work for the final time with my head held as high as a prizefighter.
*
Three remarkable, stressful, glorious months later, I eventually got what I wanted out of Amanda and my old firm. Thus emboldened, I summoned up the courage to discuss with Jess the rest of the idea I’d been slowly formulating. Again, I had been expecting a huge row, but she was surprisingly supportive, all things considered, and only queried a few of the details. My life had become a whole lot easier, I reflected, since Jess had come round to my friends, a date had been set for our wedding and I had finally found the right moment to present her with an engagement ring of her own, on a holiday in Istanbul in May. I suppose she thought she’d got me now, not that she’d ever not had me. A ring. A date. A dress. A pliant best man. A boss who’s no longer sexually harassing you. It’s funny the little details it can take to convince some women.
Just one thing, then, still left me in any doubt: would this crazy notion actually work? Would the four of us actu
ally get on after all these years? I decided that my stag weekend would be the test.
‘I just want to do something simple,’ I told Sam, whom Jess had finally agreed could be my best man – slightly to Ed’s disappointment, I think. ‘Not too many people. Nothing too expensive. No strippers. No shaving. No paintballing. No go-karting. No forced drinking. No nightclubs with hen parties. No Easyjet flights. No kidnapping. No shooting sheep with grenade launchers. No elaborate games. No video evidence. And absolutely no karaoke.’
‘Don’t worry, Mr Yes-Man,’ said Sam. ‘I’m sure you’ll like it.’
‘You better look after him,’ Jess warned him. ‘Or I’ll hunt you down and kill you.’
Sam laughed. He knew Jess had forgiven him long ago. ‘Don’t worry,’ he retorted. ‘I’m sure we’ll be much better behaved than your hen weekend.’
‘That’s what worries me,’ said Jess. She turned to me. ‘And, darling, if they do take you to a strip club, for God’s sake, man-up and enjoy yourself.’
Not every groom takes well to being told to ‘man-up’ by his fiancée, but it was nice to know Jess had my back.
In the end, we didn’t take an Easyjet flight anywhere. Sam’s organisation was a great deal more imaginative than that. I was woken by three masked men in dinner jackets at 6am, dressed, blindfolded and bundled into a taxi. When I was allowed to look, I found myself at St Pancras station, about to board the Eurostar to Paris for a weekend loosely themed around James Bond. After checking in to the most central hotel we could afford, we spent one hour in the Louvre and fourteen hours in nightclubs and casinos. We drank and partied and laughed and argued. We ate good food and drank good wine; we hired fast cars and argued and laughed all over again, twenty-five years of history behind us and, I believed, for the first time in a while, a fairly good future ahead of us, too. I was getting married to a girl I loved. Matt was retraining as an A&E nurse while working locum shifts. Sam and Ed were beginning to find their feet, if not their hearts. A new chapter, then, was opening in all our lives, but we didn’t need to close the old ones quite yet, either.
The second day of our long weekend also happened to be Sam’s thirtieth birthday – a landmark he had been dreading reaching before the rest of us. Yet the day itself found him in remarkably good humour, bouncing fresh-faced into the hotel breakfast room, full of wise saws and modern instances.
‘Thank you, children,’ he said after we had finished our hungover chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’. ‘In view of my new-found maturity, I’d be grateful if you could address me as Mr Hunt from now on.’
‘What a cunt, more like,’ said Ed, pouring him some coffee. ‘That’s what we call you behind your back, anyway.’
‘No one ever calls me Dr Lewis,’ complained Matt.
‘That’s because you’re only twenty-nine,’ said Sam. ‘And also because you’re now a big gay nurse.’
Matt threw a burnt sausage at him, which Sam caught and stuffed in his mouth.
‘Mr Hunt,’ I said, taking advantage of the lull. ‘Didn’t you tell us at Lisa’s wedding last summer that age wasn’t linear? Yes, I distinctly remember you saying that Ed had a long-term girlfriend and a mortgage, making him at least thirty-three.’
‘True,’ replied Sam, spooning more food onto his plate. ‘But now Ed has neither, making him twenty-three once again. On the other hand, he is balding worse than ever, which puts him back up at twenty-nine. I, by contrast, have the physique of a twenty-five-year-old, the liver of a forty-year-old, the wisdom of a tribal elder and the let’s-pretend job of a toddler, all of which averages out at a nice, round, contented thirty.’ He pointed at me. ‘Although on reflection, Mr Muir, that is approximately half your actual age, now that you’re on the verge of getting married and therefore never having sex again in your life.’
‘And when did you last have any action, Sam?’ I said.
Sam blushed momentarily. I tried not to show how much I enjoyed noticing it. It was rare for me to get one over him.
‘Last night,’ he blustered, regaining his composure.
‘Liar. Who with?’
‘Christine. The waitress in the last bar we went to.’ He took out his mobile and showed us a picture of him with his arm around a girl who looked like a Gallic version of Rosie. ‘La fille est belle, n’est-ce pas? Comme les fraises des champs.’
‘Is that actually what you said to her?’ asked Ed scornfully.
‘Nope.’
‘So what did you say?’ asked Matt.
‘I said, Je voudrais un Barcardi and Coke.’
‘And what did she say?’ I asked.
‘Dix euros, s’il vous plait.’
‘And that was it?’
‘No, then Ed took a picture of us.’
‘And then?’
‘She went to serve someone else.’
‘And is her name Christine?’
‘I’m not sure.’
I let the silence hang for a moment, savouring the victory.
‘Not exactly what I’d call action,’ I concluded.
‘No.’
‘There’s probably no need for Ed to buy a new map of the world and stick a big, pink Sam-action pin in the middle of Paris.’
‘No.’
‘Anyway, happy thirtieth birthday, mate.’
And then we all burst out laughing, and Sam laughed, too, clapping me just a little bit too hard on the back. What I like – love – about Sam is that he always enjoys laughing at himself more than at other people. There are few greater qualities in a friend.
‘So anyway, children, and Alan,’ he said, retaking control of the group. ‘What are we doing tonight?’
‘Anything except a strip club,’ I said.
‘Come on,’ implored Sam. ‘What would Bond do?’
‘Bond would kill you several times over.’
‘But it’s my birthday.’
‘It’s my stag.’
‘I’m organising it.’
‘I’m paying for it.’
‘But I’m the best man.’
‘And I’m the groom.’
‘The groom’s outvoted,’ said Ed.
‘Yes,’ agreed Matt.
‘Three to one,’ said Sam. ‘Four to one, if we count Jess’s advice. So do man-up and have a good time.’
At the end of the previous year, I’d thought that a relationship was between two people, not an entire group. On that sunny July weekend in Paris, I realised again that I’d been wrong. A relationship is always about more than the two people at the centre of it. It’s about the relationships you form with others, as individuals and as a couple, the friends you bring together around you, the whole more than the sum of its parts.
So, yes, I thought that evening, as I surveyed three of my best four friends in one of Paris’s filthiest strip clubs, I am manning-up, I am enjoying myself. My plan will work. And they are in for one heck of a surprise in my wedding speech.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It all finished, appropriately enough, at a wedding.
Like most people between the age of twenty-eight and thirty-five, the rhythm of my calendar year is ruled by the predictability of the marrying classes. In late summer, the girl tends to get down on one knee in front of her boyfriend’s boss and emasculate him by proffering a hideously naff male engagement ring. Over the winter, they generally fall out because the girl accuses the guy of sleeping with his boss and he accuses her of sleeping with his best friend she’s always disliked, and then the following summer… But no, not this time. Alan’s wedding wouldn’t be the same as all the rest. This time, I was going to suspend my cynicism. These two actually were meant to be together.
Some things, however, didn’t change. I still had to use the hastily assembled Hotmail address to reply to the invitation – surely they knew I was coming? I was the best man – because I didn’t have any writing paper. The traditional row about the date still took place, in all its filthy glory, because it clashed with Alan’s mum’s niece’s wedding, and J
ess’s staggeringly posh mum had already booked an expensive marquee. Various peripheral friends still lobbied transparently for an invitation. And to my shame, I still had to resort to the traditional set of £3.99 tablemats from the list because I was too slow off the mark and all the better presents had gone.
There was even a certain symmetry to the way in which Alan’s wedding day itself started.
‘Wake up, you dozy tosser.’
‘Go away, fuck face.’
‘Big day today.’
I groaned and pulled the duvet a little higher. ‘Not as big as your big, disappointed mother, who’s about to lose you for ever.’
But it was a big day, for me as well as Alan, not least because I was allowed to drive him to the ceremony in his new sports car: the one luxury he had allowed himself since the record-breaking payout from his old firm for sexual harassment. It had been an extraordinary three months, all things considered. We’d guessed that Alan might take voluntary redundancy and move on to a new job he preferred. Matt had even wondered whether he might use the dirt he had on Amanda to secure a slightly better severance package. But none of us had expected him to take the company to an employment tribunal, sue them for sexual harassment and win a landmark out-of-court settlement that made the front pages of most newspapers.
Alan had been hailed as a pathetic loser and derided as a pioneering hero in fairly equal measures. ‘What red-blooded male wouldn’t want to be sexually harassed by this woman?’ demanded one tabloid above an attractive picture of Amanda. ‘A new hero for men’s rights,’ declared an opinion piece by the familiar-sounding Ed O’Brien, jumping back on the broadsheet bandwagon for one last bit of extra holiday money.
For his part, Alan didn’t seem to care that much. ‘It was just the right thing to do,’ he said, and none of us had any real response except to marvel privately at his courage. It was one thing to be bullied by a woman in the workplace. It was quite another to turn it so magnificently to one’s advantage. He had painstakingly collected evidence – emails, eye-witness accounts from colleagues, my testimony, even the footage taken by his dad with an old camcorder at his engagement party – and given Amanda the shock of her life that she had always deserved. We all knew who the real alpha of our group was.
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