Beta Male (30 page)

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 actually 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.'