Beta Male (2 page)

The beginning of the reception was ‘just fine', too. I smiled graciously when Lisa thanked me in her absent-minded way for the generous wedding present, recalling the set of £3.99 tablemats that Alan and I had rushed to buy online the moment the list was announced. I made friends with the waitresses and persuaded them it would be easier for them just to leave the bottle with me. I even had an enjoyable catch-up with Lisa's father, Geoffrey, in which he did his best to put me at my ease.

‘Hello, Sam. How is the acting going?'

‘Oh, you know. Bit quiet at the moment. Thinking about sacking my agent. Holding out for the next Bond vacancy. That sort of thing.'

He laughed. ‘Will I have seen you in anything recently?'

‘Not unless you've watched Greek television on holiday at 3am and were particularly taken by a credit card advert.'

Geoffrey smiled sadly. ‘Oh, dear, Sam. It doesn't sound like much of a way to make a living. Maybe you should settle down yourself some time. Give up the Peter Pan act.' He turned to intercept someone making his way across the lawn in tails – his own, to judge by the cut. ‘Oh, now, have you met Timothy, my new son-in-law? Works with Lisa in her bank.'

‘Worked
for
Lisa, actually,' corrected Timothy. ‘I married the boss. And then I quit and went back to university. Good timing, really. Bankers aren't exactly flavour of the decade. Haw haw.'

Timothy and I made inconsequential small talk until ‘breakfast' was announced at 5pm, giving me plenty of time for an important internal debate about whether or not I'd be able to beat him in a fight (conclusion: yes, he had a weak chin). But
in retrospect – in as far as you can be sure of anything in retrospect – this was probably the moment that the idea first took root in my subconscious. Lisa now worked in a bank? Lisa was filthy rich? Her husband had worked
for
her? He'd left to do what he wanted to do?

We'll come back to that later. More important at that precise moment was the seating plan. To avoid the embarrassment of numbering the tables – and thereby creating the impression of some sort of hierarchy – the geometrically entwined Lisa and Timothy had taken the considerably more embarrassing decision to give the tables names of English counties instead. My table, ‘Rutland', was, I noted, the furthest from the top table in the marquee and comprised ten people: my three oldest friends, Alan, Matt and Ed; the achingly trendy young vicar (I think he was called something like David, or
Dave
) who'd married the couple; his dull, plain wife; and four other born-again Christian girls who apparently knew Lisa's younger sister from university.

Lisa had obviously decided that if I was going to be stubborn enough to come to her wedding, then she could at least ensure I wouldn't get laid.

Sitting on a table with religious people at a wedding does, however, have its advantages, as I soon found out. Even if Jesus can't pop up to turn the water into wine, you can be sure that there will be more for the rest of you to get stuck into. And stuck in the four of us got, talking, perhaps a little rudely, over the heads of the others, who were too polite to say if they thought it strange for four people in their late twenties to have stayed in touch since primary school.

We'd never made any new friends since, Matt used to joke. It's a dangerous world of strangers out there, Ed would say. I'm too old to make new friends now, Alan liked to quip. But the truth was we liked each other; we knew each other – better than we knew our own families, even. Some unmarried people find themselves stuck with their leftover friends. We were lucky
enough to have stayed in touch with the ones we actually liked. We felt like brothers who would never fall out, who could always pick up where we left off, who would never lose touch even if we didn't see each other for a while. And these days we didn't get to see each other nearly as much as we wanted. Work got in the way – for the others at least. Girlfriends, distance, travel – all created obstacles. Matt was a not-very-good doctor who kept getting placements he didn't want in crap parts of the country. Ed had quit his inner-city school due to stress and gone off to TEFL abroad for a while, before coming back to teach in London and moving in with his girlfriend, Tara. Meanwhile, Alan and I kept the home fires burning in our tiny north London flat, which the others would come and trash whenever they could (and whenever Jess, who didn't seem to like any of us very much, wasn't around).

But still, it wasn't the same; it wasn't the same as it used to be – at the same series of small schools in Reading, at university together in Manchester, and then in London, predictably, like the rest of the graduate world, in the glory days when all four of us had shared a cheap house next to a drug den in Brixton. It wasn't how we'd imagined. And now we were almost thirty and hangovers took two days to clear and our parents were retiring and growing old and our other friends were marrying and breeding and getting fixed-rate mortgages and promotions at work and going on smug holidays with other smug couples.

Now was the end of the beginning of our adult lives and I, for one, was terrified.

‘Are you thinking of getting married, Sam?' asked the trendy vicar, pouncing on the tiniest of pauses in conversation. Given that I'd just finished telling Matt about the casting director I'd attempted, and failed, to seduce in a desperate bid to get a part in a fringe musical on £50 per week, it was a somewhat naïve question to ask.

‘I don't know,' I said, even though I did. ‘It's just that I've been to so many bloody weddings that it can be difficult to get
excited about them any more. White weddings, black-tie weddings, Scottish weddings, second weddings, winter weddings, Catholic weddings, happy-clappy weddings, Jewish weddings, civil weddings, gay weddings, Hindu weddings that go on for several weeks, weddings in hotels, weddings in people's gardens, weddings abroad, weddings on beaches… ' I broke off to take a swig of wine and stroke the knee of a girl called Mary sitting next to me. ‘I mean, all those hymns and in-laws and seating plans and first dances and speeches and cakes and bands that think they can play The Beatles and “champagne” that's not quite champagne… Seriously, why are people so keen on getting married? Why does our generation even bother any more? You'd have thought that, in the twenty-first century, we'd have grown out of it, along with black and white television, slavery and religion.'

The vicar and the born-agains winced. I ignored them. I had an audience for the first time in months and I was on something of a roll.

‘Honestly,' I continued, ‘what's the big appeal? Years ago, people got married because it was the done thing to do. You chose a girl who didn't look like the back end of a bus, wooed her, said polite things to her father and then settled down to raise children together. It was the only way to get on in life –'

‘It was the only way to have sex,' interrupted Matt.

‘It still is, for us,' said Mary, removing my hand from her knee.

‘But why do the rest of us carry on with the charade?' I continued. ‘We have friends, we have guilt-free sex, occasionally. Some of us have jobs. Why do we kid ourselves that we can really choose a partner for life? We're not swans, after all. I might be a completely different person by the time I'm forty.'

‘I hope you're a completely different person by the time you're forty,' said Ed.

‘Forty is a very long way off for me, Ed.'

‘How so? You're twenty-nine, like the rest of us. In fact, you're a few months older than the rest of us.'

‘Age isn't linear. You, Ed, have a long-term girlfriend and a mortgage. That makes you at least thirty-three. I have neither, so am still twenty-two at heart.'

‘Lisa is Sam's ex-girlfriend,' Alan informed the rest of the table.

‘Ah, that explains it,' said the trendy vicar.

‘That explains what?'

‘That explains why you're rather anti-marriage today.'

‘I'm not anti-marriage, today any more than any other day. I rather enjoy other people's weddings, as it happens. Attending the funeral for their sex lives is often surprisingly entertaining. No, I just think that marriage should be recognised for the convenient sham that it is. You guys think it symbolises some sort of mystical union between Jesus and his Church, which has to be the biggest pile of bollocks I've ever heard. “Christ is the bridegroom, the Church is his bride and Christians marry each other to try and get closer to God.” I mean, come on: talk about three in a marriage. And we heathens aren't much better, either, pretending to be religious for a few months – sorry, vicar, but do you really think you're going to see Lisa again now the Alpha course you made her go on is over? – so we can get married in church with some of our favourite childhood hymns and a reading from Corinthians.

‘Why can't we just be honest and say that our choice of partner is decided by a crap little game of musical chairs? At some point in our late twenties or early thirties, blokes think that they might as well settle down with the girl they're with – the better-suited one they were going out with before becomes a victim of unfortunate timing – and have babies before her biological clock starts ticking any faster, the rows turn more violent and she runs off with someone else. After all, that best female friend we respected too much to risk asking out is now engaged, and so are most of our friends. And it would be nice
to have children at a similar time to our friends so we can send them to the same school and take them on joint holidays with their agnostic godparents we no longer like, but have to stay in touch with “for the sake of the children”. Plus, Granny would like to attend a wedding of a grandchild before she dies and the parents are getting broody about becoming grandparents themselves, so hell, let's put a ring on her finger, get her to the church on time and waltz off together into the sunset.'

Ed cheered sarcastically. ‘Bravo, Sam. A fine little monologue. You should be on the stage, you know.'

‘Encore,' cried Alan. ‘Our lovely dining companions have seldom encountered such a chivalrously attractive catch.'

‘With all due respect to our virgin friends, it is not them that I'm trying to catch.'

‘Thank God,' said one.

‘Literally,' said another.

‘So who is fisherman Sam after?' asked the trendy vicar, chuckling contentedly at his piscine pun.

‘Fisherman Sam has absolutely no idea,' I said, untruthfully, for in some dark, dank recess of my brain an irresistible scheme was just beginning to take shape.

It's not easy living with Sam. Actually, it's not easy doing anything with Sam – particularly accompanying him to weddings – but we'll come back to that later. Let's start with the difficulties of sharing a flat with a work-shy would-be actor. Like most young(ish) people in London, I have a proper job – not a very interesting one, admittedly: I am an accountant – but a proper job nonetheless, with proper gym membership, proper pension, proper colleagues and, above all, proper hours. That means I have to go to bed and get up at a proper time. Every morning I have to wash and shave. Every evening I have to iron a shirt and ensure I have the requisite number of matching socks for the following day. It is a routine that is entirely anathema to Sam.

Sam, in fact, is opposed to any sort of routine at all. Some days he's out temping, waitering, tutoring or – rarely these days – auditioning. Others, he just sits morosely in the flat in his pants watching daytime television. You might have thought he'd find time in his busy schedule to tidy up once in a while or perform a few simple, selfless tasks, such as buying more dishwasher tablets or replacing the toothpaste he's stolen from my sink. You might have hoped to return occasionally to a flat that is not even messier than the one you left. But no: this, too, is beyond him.

I can often go an entire week in our cramped flat without seeing Sam. In the morning, when I leave, he is normally still asleep, although I do occasionally get to have breakfast with a girl who has stayed over in his bed. Then, in the evenings, I'm often at Jess's or she's at mine and Sam vanishes out on the town with his thespian friends, living on British Thespian Time.
Sometimes he's good enough to bring these friends back at 3am – particularly when I have an important meeting the next day – and play loud, naked drinking games in the sitting room. Picking one's way across the detritus the following morning is like an intriguing game of Cluedo, as you note a discarded belt here, an empty bottle there, and try to work out what crimes have taken place since you went to bed.

And yet – if I'm honest – I still love the stupid prat. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible not to. Even those girls at Lisa's wedding forgave him his extraordinarily insensitive rant. Ed might have sneered sarcastically that Sam was a ‘chivalrously attractive catch', but one of the Christians, at least, thought so. Mary, I think she was called: a holy name for a girl exhibiting distinctly unholy behaviour. Sam spent most of the pudding course telling her about the void in his life, which he sensed could only be filled by religion, or at least by a religious girl, before whisking her off to the dance floor and spending the night with her in Mrs Geoffrey Parker's marital bed. ‘Rutland' was not an entirely inappropriate name for our table.

I wish I knew how he gets away with it. In fact, I do know how he gets away with it: Sam has charm by the bucketload. And not the kind of superficial, smarmy charm that a certain type of insecure, middle-aged secretary finds attractive, or the brown-nosing flattery of an ambitious graduate trainee, but the genuine charisma of someone you can't help but like. Everyone likes Sam – often despite themselves – because he makes them feel likeable, because they want him to like them back, because he exudes such a Tiggerish enthusiasm for life. Quite simply, he makes life more interesting. He's fairly good-looking, too, I suppose, in his way – above average height, messy hair, an infectious, lopsided grin – and every woman with a pulse fancies him. Even my mum, who doesn't seem to like anyone very much, has a secret crush on him.