Beta Male (23 page)

As for what anyone else was thinking, I'm really not sure because the rule of the mob had taken over. Drinks rained
down liberally on my head. A few people shoved me. One tried to trip me up. ‘Slag,' called out someone. Other shouts rhymed with my surname. ‘I fucking hate you!' screamed Rosie, looking as though she meant it. ‘You've got a tiny cock,' added Lisa for good measure, her face contorted with rage. If they could have buried me in the sand and stoned me to death, I think they would have.

Well, screw this
, I thought.
Screw all of this. I'm done. I'm out of here.
And so I flailed and jostled and shoved my way out of that basement hellhole, out into the street above and past the astute gorilla on the door, who smiled apologetically, perhaps for failing so spectacularly to do his job, and asked if the people who desperately didn't want me to be at the party had won.

‘Yes,' I said, ruefully. ‘They appeared to be in the majority.'

He waved down a cab for me to take home. I climbed into it gratefully, before realising I had neither money nor home. The driver threw me out at the end of the street and I spent the night on a park bench, as remorseful as I was angry, as cold as I was completely and utterly alone.

I've had some long, dark nights of the soul before, but nothing that compared to that wintry park bench. By 3am I was worried that I might actually die. By 4am I was worried that I might not die. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see Alan's shocked, white face. The distant rumble of traffic became Amanda's low, mocking laugh. And whenever I remembered Rosie's look of righteous betrayal, I wept warm, uncontrollable tears of loss and self-loathing.

By the time dawn broke, cold, grey and forbidding, I had resolved to do whatever was necessary to sort out the mess I had created. This was not about my happiness any more, I realised. I'd tried to make myself happy, and look where that had got me. My happiness could go hang, for all I cared. No, this was about everyone else's. It was about righting wrongs. It was about apologising – to Alan, Jess, Amanda, Rosie, Mary, Lisa, Mr Money-Barings. There were so many apologies. And once I had said sorry – and meant it – to everyone I had ever met, I would give the clothes on my back to charity and go and live in a monastery somewhere for the rest of my days.

But it's all very well having good intentions – I've spent my entire life having good intentions – it's quite another thing to carry them out. I slumped back down into a frozen ball on the bench. Was this where it all ended, then? I had no money, no job, no home and, it seemed, precious few friends. My phone had beeped incessantly throughout the night with messages of foul abuse – much of it warranted – which provided me with a small, unexpected token of comfort. The more everyone chastised me for the way I'd behaved, the more I realised just how indefensible my behaviour had been. I bathed in their
loathing and my self-loathing. I heaped their opprobrium on my own head and used it to subject myself to the fiercest of cross-examinations. What
had
I been thinking? Had I really believed such a deceit was sustainable? In what possible way was my behaviour morally justifiable? What had started out as a prank – a bet – had come to a disastrous end, hurting real people with real emotions. I'd once told Ed that it was all one big game; I was wrong.
This isn't a fucking play any more, Sam
, I remonstrated with myself.
This is real fucking life.

On a selfish note, it hadn't worked out particularly well for me either, had it?

I could deal with the warranted abuse, then. They couldn't match me for that. What I couldn't bear was the torrent of bile for something I hadn't done. It offended me to the core that anyone – least of all my friends – could believe I'd slept with Jess. It offended me because she wasn't very attractive. But most of all, it offended me because I would never do that to Alan. I haven't even slept with any of my mate's exes (even when one of Matt's, who was a definite nine and a half out of ten, asked me to). I have strict rules about this sort of thing. Friends come first.

I got off my bench and started to jog around the park to thaw myself out.
What did Alan think?
That was the important thing. That was the crux of the matter. Did he believe what Amanda had said?
Surely he didn't believe a word of anything she said
, I thought, perking up as my brain started to thaw. She was an inveterate liar and manipulator. And if it wasn't true about his sleeping with Amanda, then he
must
realise that what she'd said about my sleeping with Jess wasn't true either. Surely he would see reason. Yes! I took out my mobile to call Alan. No! The abuse had overloaded the battery and it had given up the ghost. So I jogged for a solid twenty minutes until I managed to find a public phone box. Like the tramp that I was, I reversed the charges to Alan's mobile, the one number I knew by heart.

To my surprise, he accepted the operator's request.

‘Sam?' said Alan. ‘Where are you calling from?'

‘My mobile's dead so I had to go to a phone box.'

Alan grunted.

‘Actually, mate, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a phone box these days,' I babbled, skirting a little around the main issue. ‘Everyone's got mobiles, I suppose. But at least you can still reverse the charges. I didn't know you could still do that, did you? After we've finished chatting, I'm going to try and get some Polish lessons, a part-time job in IT and a sensual massage with a happy ending.'

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.'