Beta Male (19 page)

Not that those four months after the Albert Hall were without their complications. For starters, I had to grow used to being Max, even as I tried to kill him off. The first step was to announce after a few weeks that I was shelving his business plan. ‘I just don't think it will work in the current economic climate,' I said one morning over breakfast in Rosie's house in Parsons Green. ‘I think I'll go back to banking.'

‘No worries,' said Rosie, laughing. She was always saying ‘no worries'. ‘Although I'm afraid you'll still owe Taylor Williams for the consultancy fee. My boss is getting a little concerned about it.'

If truth be told, I had been getting more than a little concerned about it myself. It wouldn't be long before interest would start kicking in on the invoice, and I already had more than enough debts accruing interest without worrying about
another one. That £5,000 would be the release fee: the point at which I no longer had to worry about the strange way in which we had met.

But however hard I tried, I realised how difficult it would be to kill off Max altogether. One night, when we were lying in bed, Rosie randomly said: ‘Lunch.'

‘What?'

‘Lunch. We never had that lunch you promised.'

‘Isn't this more fun, though?'

Rosie giggled and pressed herself up close. ‘Yes, Max, it is.'

‘You know, Rosie, I've been thinking,' I said, seizing the moment. If she was being post-coitally whimsical, this was as good a time as any. ‘I've been thinking about my name. Max. It's a bit of stupid name, isn't it?
Max. Pepsi Max. Maxed out. To the Max
. Ridiculous. I thought I might change it to something more sensible. Sam, maybe. That's my middle name.'

Rosie looked at me strangely. ‘Why would you want to do that? No one changes their name in their twenties. Especially to something as stupid as Sam. Anyway, your name is one of the things I like most about you. It's so… it's so manly. Now come here, Max… Oh, Max, Max, MAX.'

For the first couple of weeks, I pretty much lived at Rosie's, pretending I'd taken some old, accrued holiday from the banking job they'd kept open for me. But as time progressed, the deceptions inevitably became more and more complex. Any weekday evening spent at hers I had to remember to turn up in a suit and leave sufficiently early, and in the right direction, for Blackfriars in the morning. On one nerve-wracking occasion, she insisted on accompanying me right up to the door of Goldman Sachs – I cursed myself for not pretending I'd moved to a bank with offices in Canary Wharf, miles away from hers – before kissing me goodbye. Fortunately, her phone rang, and while she was distracted I bolted round the corner and back to Islington, spared the ignominy of Rosie watching me pretend that my swipe card for the bank's doors had broken.

There were other pretences to keep up, too. Most painful was maintaining the illusion of living a banker's lifestyle. Not only did I have debts up to my eyeballs, I also had very little income. The people at the temping agency that had got me the job at Taylor Williams were livid that I had apparently absconded from the placement and were unwilling to find me a job anywhere else. ‘Either you go back and work there and mend our relationship,' they told me, ‘or we don't find you another job ever again.' I said it would have to be the latter; life was stressful enough without working in the same office as Rosie under a different name and a very different job title. Divine junior analyst Rosie had not fallen in love with Sam the temp.

Sam the temp, on the other hand, was in love with Rosie exactly as she was. None of her evident wealth or ambition mattered any more. It was her that I wanted, and damn the consequences. Over the next four months I fell so deeply for her that none of the obvious complications seemed to matter much either. Something would turn up. I would make everything okay again in the end. The deception itself became intoxicating. All my senses were heightened by the possibility of being found out and the determination not to become so.

Yet still the black cloud of money hung over me. I managed to get another couple of credit cards, but the limits became tighter and the demands for the existing ones more aggressive. I worked as many shifts as possible in the same old coffee bar in Camden during the day, but it only made tiny inroads into a debt that spiralled faster than I could pay off even the interest.

So I turned, in desperation, to my friends. But the truth was that I hadn't been a very good friend of late. In fact, I had been spending most of my time with Rosie's friends instead, surprising myself by how much I actually liked them. Normally, girlfriends' friends are a nightmare. The girls are a lose-lose: either they're attractive and you fancy them, or they're ugly, jealous types who resent you for taking their friend away. The
guys, on the other hand, simply can't be trusted, for obvious reasons. Rosie, however, had a nice little group from university which I quickly became part of. Most of the time, I didn't even care what we did, as long as we did it together.

After I'd started spending all my time at Rosie's, Ed had apparently decided to return to the shoebox in Hackney that he and Tara still hadn't sold. Apart from writing a slightly disparaging online comment at the end of his
Guardian
article, I hadn't had any contact with him for ages. Alan seemed to have allowed Matt to stay on at his flat for a while, but Matt wasn't around all that much, either. On the few occasions Rosie had come round to ‘mine', I had asked him to go and stay somewhere else so I could put up a broken but presentable plasma television screen from the local tip and pretend that this two-bedroom flat was a banker's bachelor pad and not a squalid bedsit shared by two unemployed people. Matt had readily agreed, not least because things seemed to be working out very well with the girl – Debbie – he had met at the opera.

Debbie was a north London Jewish princess who ran a successful kitchen business, selling over-priced interior decorations to other rich, successful north London women. Her only flaw was that she appeared to have fallen twice for men who were ‘not the family type' and was bringing up two children under the age of five by herself. Matt, it seemed, exactly fitted the profile of the man she was looking for: a stay-at-home father-figure with excellent first-aid skills. Debbie's widowed mother, who lived next door, had also taken quite a shine to him.

‘A doctor as a potential son-in-law?' I prodded when we met up for lunch one day in the new year. ‘She must be very excited. It's just a shame you're not employed. Or Jewish.'

‘Who said I told her I wasn't Jewish?'

‘Shit, Matt, you're worse than me.'

‘Well, I didn't exactly lie to her,' he continued, grinning sheepishly. ‘Not at first. I just didn't correct her when she
started talking about Jewish things. And well, by then, it was too late. One day she told me she had some Jewish cousins in Norway, so I told her that my granddad was Norwegian, which is true, even though he isn't Jewish, which I didn't mention, and so any doubts she might have had about why my hair is so blond were probably cleared up. Also, in case you were wondering, I don't have a, well, you know,
thingy
… Anyway, before I knew it, one thing led to another and I was swapping stories with her younger brother about our bar mitzvahs.'

‘And how was your bar mitzvah?'

‘Emotional. So emotional, in fact, that I barely remember anything about it.'

We both laughed at ourselves. ‘Just look at us now,' I said, pointing at the Gap Kids carrier bag he was holding, full of clothes for Debbie's children, and smoothing down my father's suit, which I had put on at Rosie's house that morning. ‘We've almost made it, haven't we? Almost fulfilled what we set out to do.'

Matt smiled. ‘Yep, almost. We don't have to work at all.'

‘Well, you don't.'

‘We're in the pub in the middle of the day.'

‘Yep, until you have to go and pick up Debbie's eldest from nursery school.'

‘We're not losing touch with our friends.'

‘Well, not all of them.'

‘All we have to do now is get these two to marry us.'

‘And move them a bit closer together. The same street, ideally.'

Matt clapped me on the back. ‘Thanks, mate, for persuading me to keep going a bit longer. It was all worth it to meet Debbie.'

‘No worries. I'd love to meet her properly. I'd love you to meet Rosie, too, as long as you can remember to call me Max all night.'

He laughed again. Maybe this was the right moment.

‘Matt?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you have five thousand pounds?'

‘No.'

And that was that. No hard feelings. Just a simple, direct ‘no'. He didn't have the money. And why should he ask Debbie to help? He had won her on his own merits, by being himself, or at least a non-Gentile version of himself. I was the one who'd dug myself into an awkward, deceitful hole.

No one else seemed that willing to lend me a shovel, either. Ed had less money than the average sixth-former he taught, and although I'd written Alan a letter of apology which, frankly, grovelled well beyond the call of duty, I thought it probably wasn't wise to ask him for a loan. We were back on speaking terms, but it would take a while to patch up some of those stupid things I'd said. Our friendship meant too much for me to risk blowing it again.

Most disappointing of all was Claire's reaction. She'd been uncharacteristically blunt and unfriendly when I'd called after the opera.

‘Well, that was great fun, thank you,' I'd said. ‘What are we three musketeers going to get up to next?'

‘Nothing,' she'd said.

‘What?'

‘I have to go back to work and stop spending all this money. Anyway, haven't you two got what you wanted?'

And that was that. Claire went back to work in a grump and I didn't see her again for months. A scheme that had begun with the intention of spending more time with each other had ended up driving most of us apart.

Still, there was Rosie – she was my life now. I had actually learned to do everything right in this relationship. I listened, even when she was being boring. I bought her thoughtful presents. I didn't fart in bed. Maybe that's what all the other failed relationships in my twenties had been about – practice for
the one that actually counted. If I could just keep this going, everything else would somehow work itself out. The game of relationship musical chairs I had banged on about at Lisa's wedding appeared to have stopped and I was perfectly happy with where I was sitting. I'd grown bored of the dating game, now that I'd found someone I really liked. I had grown up, despite myself. Frankly, I'd become a little bit like Alan.

I don't say all this to excuse what happened next – there are no excuses for what happened next. There was, however, a very good reason: I had exhausted all other options over those four months to pay that bloody £5,000 invoice. The interest was still mounting and I couldn't stall Rosie and her firm indefinitely. Mary, then, was the only person left who could ‘kill' Max. Thanks to the duplicitous hole into which I'd dug myself, Mary and Rosie had become inextricably entwined.

*

Since the opera Mary and I had stayed in fairly regular contact, often going for a coffee during the day – whenever my busy schedule of making coffee for other people or pretending to be a banker allowed – or meeting up at church, if I felt able to convince Rosie I had to work late. My apparent conversion had spread like wildfire among the Clapham Christians, much to my embarrassment. The closest I came to pulling the plug on the entire charade was the evening the vicar asked me to come to the front and ‘testify' in front of the congregation about my amazing Damascene moment. I'd conducted a serious search of my conscience, but to my mild alarm found it to be almost entirely clear. Anyway, I knew enough about the Bible by then to know that God wasn't that bothered about different grades of sin. Human beings are inherently sinful. This was no worse than the things most people got up to in an average day. The important thing was saying sorry afterwards. And meaning it. In any case, I've always thought God had something of a sense
of humour. Ultimately, I convinced myself with weasel logic, this was all for a good cause. God was love, wasn't he? And anyway, Mr Money-Barings wasn't exactly a textbook example of selfless, tolerant Christianity in action.

So I put in one of the finest performances of my life at the front of that church. The vicar cried; I cried; the congregation cried. Jesus wept. And when the man with the guitar appeared on stage, I sang along with the best of them, often in my own key.
You're altogether lovely / altogether worthy / altogether wonderful to me
. I did the Holy Spirit.
Hooooo, naaaaaaa, widddiiii.
I made snow angels on the floor alongside Mary. I listened attentively while Stock Market Christian told us about his latest multi-million-pound deal. And through it all, I out-Christianed the Christians. If someone made a joke of which I felt Jesus would disapprove, I censured them. Whenever Mary attempted to renew any level of sexual contact beyond kissing, I would point her to the relevant Bible verse. ‘Not before marriage, dear,' I would say. ‘Not again before marriage, at least.'

It made me feel marginally better about Rosie that I wasn't being sexually unfaithful, even if the levels of emotional infidelity and deception were far worse. Mary, meanwhile, grew increasingly frustrated the more fervently religious I became. ‘What's happened to you, Sam?' she demanded one evening. ‘I've never seen the Spirit take someone like this before. Being a Christian doesn't mean you have to be completely boring, you know.' But we were the golden couple of the church, much to Stock Market Christian's annoyance. The beautiful trust-fund girl and her lost-actor convert: it was a happy ending Mary appeared unable, or unwilling, to resist.