Beta Male (25 page)

But then I realised that much of this could apply equally to Jess and Alan. Who had asked me to get involved with their relationship? Who had asked me to complicate everything by turning Alan's boss against him? The difference was that Jess had never lied to Alan, had never given him a false name, had never two-timed him… If Jess could forgive me for what I'd done, surely I could forgive her for what she'd done? Who had she betrayed, ultimately? She'd been confronted with the
fiancé's friend she'd loathed and an innocent girl he'd been using. It was an open goal. All things considered, she had actually acted quite honourably.

‘I'm very sorry,' said Jess, quietly at last. She had been watching me apprehensively for a while. ‘You really loved Rosie, didn't you?'

‘You needn't be sorry.' I smiled at her – genuinely, I hoped. ‘I would have been found out sooner or later. You probably did the right thing.'

‘I always do the right thing.'

We both laughed.

‘And as I always do the right thing,' she continued, ‘I think I should point out that there is someone else in love with you as well. Someone who actually knows your real name – the real you.' She paused for dramatic effect. There was the sound of banging next door. Jess pointed at the wall with a smile.
What did she mean?
‘You appear to be oblivious to the fact, which is perhaps understandable given everything else on your mind, but two of your best friends are currently simulating wild, consensual sex next door in a bid to make you jealous.'

‘Ed?' I said. ‘Is Ed gay?'

‘Oh, for God's sake, Sam. It's Claire. It's always been Claire. She's been in love with you since the day you met.'

Much like Christianity, Communism and birdwatching, the main problem with my masculinism campaign was that it attracted the wrong sort of people. I needed real men to join me, men who would put the masculine back into masculinity. Ironically, I needed the very people who were least aware of the campaign's importance. Instead, I attracted wimps, misfits and Neanderthals. The Suffragettes were lucky: they had the strongest of their gender on their side. We had the weakest.

Not that ‘we' actually constituted very much. The email from Al in Earls Court, Australia, asking what I was going to do next, had struck a chord but didn't exactly provide any answers. What
was
I going to do next? Al from Earls Court and Ed from Hackney did not constitute a movement. If Al, or any of the others who had sent kind emails, were looking for a leader, I'm not sure they had found one in me. I set up an internet forum for discussion and even, on one disastrous occasion, organised a meeting in the pub. No one would let anyone else buy a round for them, as it was demeaning, so we mainly sat in awkward silence, our grunts occasionally punctuated by an arm wrestle or a rib-eating competition. Then a few people came back to my shoebox and watched porn. It was not a success.

I didn't stop believing what I had written in the article but, ultimately, I was just a dumped teacher with too much time on my hands. The main thing keeping the campaign going was that it was really annoying Tara, which in itself was worth its weight in gold. ‘I wish you'd just come out as gay after I'd broken up with you,' she said, a little harshly, when she came round to collect some of her stuff. ‘
That
, I could have dealt with.
That
would have been much preferable to
this.
My colleagues are teasing me non-stop about what I must have done to you.'

Well, I knew what she meant. One of Matt's exes had become a lesbian after they'd split up, prompting endless mockery from Sam. But it was difficult to feel too much sympathy for Tara's treatment at the hands of her colleagues. Wasn't one of the older, richer ones treating her rather well? Far too well…

‘Oh, come on, Ed,' said Tara, scrabbling the rest of her DVD box sets into a bag. ‘Let's move on, shall we? There's no need to be such a cock about it.'

I gasped. ‘How dare you use such a crude, anatomical term of abuse.' I wiped away a tear as I showed her to the door. ‘I find your gender-specific swearing very offensive.'

‘What? Co– ?'

‘The c-word,' I interrupted. ‘Don't say it. Don't even think it. It's the nuclear swear word. It burns my ears. It offends my soul as a man. I can't believe you would use such language. Away. Go. Just get out.'

And that was the last I saw of Tara for a very long while.

With my ex-girlfriend out of sight, if not out of mind – I saw her everywhere: in a walk, a laugh, a gesture, a favourite top – and plenty of time still on my hands before the start of term, I'd found myself persuaded by the others on the online forum to concentrate a bit more on the campaign. The
Guardian
gave me a small weekly column in the back of one of their unread supplements, in which I was able to expound some of my views at greater length. I wasn't sure I really had any views in addition to the ones I had already shared. ‘Oh, don't worry,' said my friend on the paper who had got me into all this trouble in the first place. ‘Just sit and stare at a blank screen for a few hours and something will come out.' Bizarrely, he was right: in great torrents of bilious prose I found myself espousing all sorts of opinions I'd never known I'd held before. Who would have thought I could be so opinionated? I discovered I had views on
extending paternity leave to two months and allowing men to retire with equal pension rights to women at sixty. I proposed a National Prostate Cancer Month and free hair transplants on the NHS for anyone losing their hair before the age of forty. I even put on record my suggestion to create a Minister for Men, whose first act, I opined, should be to ban anyone without a penis from attending football matches.

‘I thought you wanted me to be controversial?' I said, plaintively, to my friend when he called to complain about the storm unleashed by my football comment.

‘There's controversial and there's controversial,' he explained. ‘You were controversial.'

‘You mean the kind of controversy that alienates half your readers is the wrong kind of controversy?'

‘Precisely.'

The rest of the forum took the news of my sacking very badly. Al wanted to march down Whitehall and hold a rally in Trafalgar Square. I wasn't persuaded. Could a ragamuffin troupe of ten losers really be called a march? No, he argued, but we could burn our boxer shorts outside Downing Street. How would that help, asked someone else. It would be our equivalent of burning our bras, explained Al, provoking an interesting discussion about whether feminists had removed the bras they were wearing in order to torch them or whether they had carried a spare one for the purpose. Their laundry-day bras, perhaps. No one knew. We, of course, would have to carry a pair of boxers with us, as it would be a damned fiddly job taking them off while standing outside Downing Street. We might even get shot by the anti-terrorist police. ‘Not if we wore our boxers outside our trousers,' suggested Al. ‘That would make it easier.'

Needless to say, the great suffragits march never took place – much to my relief and, I think, that of my headmaster, who had been making increasingly anxious noises about my newspaper columns. ‘It just doesn't fit all that well with your
role as a teacher,' he'd told me, calling me into his study and peering at me over the top of the
Guardian
. What he'd really meant, of course, was that the kids would destroy me if they got wind of it. It was bad enough teaching a subject like English in a tough school like mine, but writing for a newspaper which wasn't the
Sun
on a topic that wasn't football… Well, it was a death warrant, if I ever succeeded in teaching any of my pupils to read sufficiently well to find out. I was too young – and too old – to die in a playground.

So I came back after the autumn half-term and gave up my part-time job as a journalist to concentrate on the comforting routine of school – a familiar comfort only marred by feeling the absence of Tara even more keenly now that she was no longer there in the evenings. It was the little things I missed most about being in a relationship. We used to laugh together over the illiteracy of the homework I had to mark. Now, every time something silly or interesting happened during the day I would start composing a text about it, before realising I had no one to send it to. That winter I realised that, deep down, I'd been kidding myself that the summer had just been an aberration, a temporary blip. Maybe, I had persuaded myself, Tara had succumbed to a bout of heatstroke and would see the error of her ways in the cool, calm logic of the months that followed.

But of course Tara did not come crawling back, begging for forgiveness and a chance to sit around again in our shoebox swapping jocular tales from my impoverished day. Tara, in fact, seemed quite happy crawling around her rich lawyer's penthouse on all-fours in his hard-earned lingerie, begging for another spanking (or whatever it is that depraved lawyers get up to in the rare moments they're not billing in six-minute slots).

There I go again: anger. But at least the cycle of denial, bargaining and depression appeared to be over. I had nothing left to deny or bargain over. And that, curiously, I found quite uplifting. So instead of drinking angrily in my new-found free
time, I spent all my spare moments over the winter writing a play – a series of monologues, in fact – about the crisis of masculinity. I didn't need the
Guardian
, I'd decided. Who reads papers any more, anyway? This play would be my ultimate revenge on Tara: a carefully thought-out diatribe on the new breed of superbitch emasculating our menfolk. I didn't want to arm wrestle or hold rib-eating contests with people I didn't know. I didn't want direct action. I wanted revenge. More revenge. Political, academic, erudite, public revenge. Revenge, revenge, revenge. And that was a dish best served up cold on a stage – a medium for which I'd always wanted to write, but had never had the time.

I didn't have to go too far to do my research. There was my own history with Tara, of course, as well as the experiences of the people I'd met since the forum had begun. I'd also taken a keen interest in the activities of Sam, Matt and Alan. For me, all four of us represented different examples of masculinity in crisis. My plight was obvious: led on and ditched en route to the altar, doomed to spend the rest of my life on the shelf. Matt looked destined to become ‘him indoors', the archetypal kept man. Alan, of course, barely had any autonomous decision-making power. Even Sam was unable to behave in the way nature intended, without being universally censured by an increasingly feminised society. I spent most of those long dark winter evenings alone, filling pages and pages with analysis and experience.

It was also during the course of the next few months that I started spending more time with Claire. When she first got in touch after my article came out, I felt a brief, unexpected flutter of excitement that it might be because she fancied me and had heard I was back on the market. Sure, I had vowed to be celibate after Tara left – sex is just another form by which women control men – but still, it's nice to be fancied every now and then. I had always quite fancied Claire. And once you've been single for a while, you begin to wonder if anyone new is ever going to find you attractive.

Sadly, though, Claire's main reason for making contact appeared to be so she could berate me for my deeply-held belief system. ‘How on earth could you write such shit?' was, I think, the exact phrase she used. In her (rather blinkered) opinion, women still had a tougher time than men because they were paid less, aged worse, were less likely to be employed while young for fear they would take maternity leave, less likely to break through the corporate glass ceiling later on, and more likely to be a victim of sexual or domestic abuse. Worst, and most unalterably, of all, they had to suffer the agony of childbirth, menopause and period pains, which MEN COULD NEVER UNDERSTAND.

To our surprise, Claire and I actually understood each other very well the more time we spent together. It felt weird initially, because she was Sam's friend first and foremost, but we just hit it off. She had her opinions, I had mine, but we never let them get in the way of our blossoming friendship. She called me an anachronistic misogynist. I called her an anachronistic man-hater. And then we'd go out and watch plays together, argue about them afterwards and get drunk. I think we both respected the fact that the other actually had opinions, however much we enjoyed misrepresenting them. So when she confessed one evening in the new year that she had always been in love with Sam, I must admit that I had mixed emotions. Part of me was delighted for her; I even felt begrudgingly happy for Sam. She was just the sort of girl who would be good for him. But I also felt a twinge of jealousy. What about me? Why couldn't she fall in love with me? I had a job. I owned half the debt on a shoebox. I'd had a steady relationship in the recent past without assuming a false identity or two-timing a born-again trustafarian.

‘Why Sam?' I asked, a little bluntly.

‘Just because.'

And I knew what she meant. Everyone bloody loved Sam.
Fucker.
Why did he always land on his feet?

The trouble with her and Sam, Claire explained, was that
they were rarely single at the same time. And when it appeared that he was falling for this Rosie girl, Claire decided that this might be her last chance to get together with him before it was too late. Claire and Sam were already firmly in what she called the ‘friend zone'. The downside, she explained, of our generation's fondness for having friends of both sexes was that it put a large number of potential relationships off-limits. Either you got together in the first couple of months of your acquaintance, or not at all. There was no romance in friendship, no sexiness. Claire's rather perverse logic, then, was that the best way of stirring the dormant passion in Sam's cynical alpha breast was to make him jealous. Show him that she had got together with one of his friends – one of her own friends – and he would question whether he, too, wanted the same thing.