Beta Male (31 page)

At the end of the previous year, I'd thought that a relationship was between two people, not an entire group. On that sunny July weekend in Paris, I realised again that I'd been wrong. A relationship is always about more than the two people at the centre of it. It's about the relationships you form with others, as individuals and as a couple, the friends you bring together around you, the whole more than the sum of its parts.

So, yes
, I thought that evening, as I surveyed three of my best four friends in one of Paris's filthiest strip clubs,
I am manning-up, I am enjoying myself. My plan will work. And they are in for one heck of a surprise in my wedding speech.

It all finished, appropriately enough, at a wedding.

Like most people between the age of twenty-eight and thirty-five, the rhythm of my calendar year is ruled by the predictability of the marrying classes. In late summer, the girl tends to get down on one knee in front of her boyfriend's boss and emasculate him by proffering a hideously naff male engagement ring. Over the winter, they generally fall out because the girl accuses the guy of sleeping with his boss and he accuses her of sleeping with his best friend she's always disliked, and then the following summer… But no, not this time. Alan's wedding wouldn't be the same as all the rest. This time, I was going to suspend my cynicism. These two actually
were
meant to be together.

Some things, however, didn't change. I still had to use the hastily assembled Hotmail address to reply to the invitation – surely they knew I was coming?
I
was the best man – because I didn't have any writing paper. The traditional row about the date still took place, in all its filthy glory, because it clashed with Alan's mum's niece's wedding, and Jess's staggeringly posh mum had already booked an expensive marquee. Various peripheral friends still lobbied transparently for an invitation. And to my shame, I still had to resort to the traditional set of £3.99 tablemats from the list because I was too slow off the mark and all the better presents had gone.

There was even a certain symmetry to the way in which Alan's wedding day itself started.

‘Wake up, you dozy tosser.'

‘Go away, fuck face.'

‘Big day today.'

I groaned and pulled the duvet a little higher. ‘Not as big as your big, disappointed mother, who's about to lose you for ever.'

But it was a big day, for me as well as Alan, not least because I was allowed to drive him to the ceremony in his new sports car: the one luxury he had allowed himself since the record-breaking payout from his old firm for sexual harassment. It had been an extraordinary three months, all things considered. We'd guessed that Alan might take voluntary redundancy and move on to a new job he preferred. Matt had even wondered whether he might use the dirt he had on Amanda to secure a slightly better severance package. But none of us had expected him to take the company to an employment tribunal, sue them for sexual harassment and win a landmark out-of-court settlement that made the front pages of most newspapers.

Alan had been hailed as a pathetic loser and derided as a pioneering hero in fairly equal measures. ‘What red-blooded male wouldn't want to be sexually harassed by this woman?' demanded one tabloid above an attractive picture of Amanda. ‘A new hero for men's rights,' declared an opinion piece by the familiar-sounding Ed O'Brien, jumping back on the broadsheet bandwagon for one last bit of extra holiday money.

For his part, Alan didn't seem to care that much. ‘It was just the right thing to do,' he said, and none of us had any real response except to marvel privately at his courage. It was one thing to be bullied by a woman in the workplace. It was quite another to turn it so magnificently to one's advantage. He had painstakingly collected evidence – emails, eye-witness accounts from colleagues, my testimony, even the footage taken by his dad with an old camcorder at his engagement party – and given Amanda the shock of her life that she had always deserved. We all knew who the real alpha of our group was.

Not that you would have known it to observe Alan on the morning of his wedding. Once fully conscious, I was the only one capable of thinking straight. Having helped him find his
clothes, I had to help him get dressed. Having helped him get dressed, I had to help him find his car keys. Having found his car keys, he couldn't remember where he had parked the car. All the while he babbled incomprehensibly, fretting about everything from last-minute changes in the seating plan to how rude I was planning on being in my speech.

‘Shut up!' I yelled, my patience finally exhausted as he started to drone on about the organist's choice of music. I banged my head against the kitchen door until the drone stopped. ‘Just shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut – '

‘Sorry.' He fell quiet at last, surprised by my outburst. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper. ‘It's just that I'm not sure if I can go through with this.'

We sat down on the sofa while Alan stared at the floor in agonised silence. Eventually he continued, his gaze barely rising above his freshly polished shoes: ‘It's just that it's all so scary. So grown-up. I mean, look at me, Sam. I'm about to be a married man, but most of the time I still feel like the nervous five-year-old you threw pebbles at all those years ago. Maybe you were right when you said that growing-up was overrated, because a large bit of me just wants to crawl back under the covers and not face today.' He ran his hand over his tidy hair and turned to look at me directly. ‘I'm about to make a public promise to stay with one woman for the rest of my life. And although Jess is the woman I love, the only woman I've ever loved or ever will, and although I don't want to be with anyone else, I know that, when I'm there in that church, about to say that vow, there's going to be a voice in the back of my head whispering: “Don't do it, Alan. Don't trap yourself. This is not what you want. Be free. Be selfish. Be a man.”'

Alan took his expensive new handkerchief out of his button-hole and blew his nose, loudly and messily. I offered him mine as a replacement and looked again at my friend. There was no doubt that I knew what he meant. I was well acquainted with that voice in the back of one's head, even if mine tended
to shout instead of whisper. It was another good reason why I was unlikely ever to get married. I could, therefore, have indulged Alan. I could easily have said that I shared his concerns, that he was right to panic, that it was only natural for bridegrooms to have last-minute doubts. But something told me that, after almost nine years of dating Jess, Alan would respond better to a bit of tough love. So I read him the riot act, toughly and lovingly. I told him he was being a tit – a great big sexually harassed tit of a former accountant – and that Jess was the best thing that had ever happened to him. If he didn't pull himself together, I concluded, I would go and marry her myself.

‘Thanks, Sam,' said Alan, at last, getting up from the sofa and brushing himself down. ‘That was just what I needed to hear.'

We hugged – a good, solid hug without any awkwardness – while I looked over the top of his head at the flat that had been my home for so many years. Alan had said he'd have a word with his uncle about my staying on there. But it wouldn't be the same, would it? Alan wouldn't be there; he'd be living somewhere else with Jess. And when would we get to see him, anyway? Friends get married and then they vanish, however much they protest they won't, into Marriage-Land, a small country like Lichtenstein or Andorra, which no one who isn't married can ever find. I stifled a small sob of my own – so small that Alan wouldn't have noticed. This was his day and I was there to make it go smoothly. I led him to his new car.

For once, it appeared that the course of true love would run smooth. All the things that have to happen at church passed without mishap. Alan choked just enough on his vows for the women in the congregation to think he was sweet but not so much that the men would think him a wimp. Jess looked prettier and thinner than usual, and didn't fall over her dress, while her bridesmaids were sufficiently attractive to give the
relatives a bit of eye candy, but not so beautiful that they upstaged the bride. Amanda didn't turn up and demand to be screwed sideways before Alan got married. The vicar didn't even bother to allude to God, but did manage a weak joke when no one said anything after the ‘hold your peace' bit. I fumbled with the ring, but caught it before it hit the floor. Alan's mother managed a fixed smile when she congratulated Jess outside. Claire dropped the bouquet.

After the service, we walked along well-tended Home Counties hedgerows to the huge marquee provided by Jess's parents and I started to get nervous. Everyone assumes that actors are great at giving speeches. They forget that the words are normally provided for us. Even that is nerve-wracking enough.

‘I'm on top table.' I turned to Ed, who was also studying the seating plan and looked pleased to have been placed next to Claire.

‘Of course you're on the bloody top table. You're best bloody man.'

‘Yes, mate, I know.' I patted him on the shoulder. ‘Bad luck.'

However, life on the top table, I soon discovered, was a great deal less fun than on the lower rungs of the wedding pecking order. No one drank properly. Everyone faced outwards. And the only person to flirt with was Jess's ninety-three-year-old grandmother.

The first course came and went, mainly untouched by me. Pudding. Coffee. Unidentifiable chocolates. And then, just as the shadows were beginning to lengthen outside, someone tapped a glass and Jess's father, ‘unaccustomed as he was to public speaking', was on his feet. He stayed there for half an hour, a feat of heroic, epic dullness which he started with a somnolent anecdote about where he was when Jess's mother went into labour (work, I think), continued through Jess's first words (‘I want', probably), her Grade 2 cello exam (in which she achieved a merit) and her GCSE results (‘more A-stars than
I could count'), and ended, tearfully, by welcoming Alan (‘my new son') into the family.

As this was Jess's wedding, she decided that the traditional mute role of the bride was not for her. She followed her father and spoke eloquently, briefly and from the heart, leaving no one in any doubt of her love for Alan. I admonished myself, quietly and for the final time, for ever having doubted that fact.

It was a tough act to follow such a sweet speech with a string of puerile jokes about Alan's boyhood and early adult life, but I think I rose acceptably to the occasion. Once I was on my feet and the first laugh had tumbled out, I actually began to enjoy myself. When I got to the nice part at the end about how much I had always loved Alan, and how I had grown to love Jess as well, I noticed a rather pretty girl on a distant table wiping a tear from her eye. I wiped away an imaginary tear of my own and made a mental note to share my top-table magic with her as soon as my duties were over.

‘And so,' I concluded, ‘I used to be a little cynical about marriage. I used to think it was what you did when you turned thirty and the music stopped. I used to think weddings were simply an endless round of 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. I used to think all that applied to everyone. And I was wrong. It was Alan and Jess who made me realise I was wrong. They're perfect for each other. They're perfect for marriage. Always have been. Always will be. And I will always be a friend to both of them.'

I sat down again, to enthusiastic, smiling applause, making way for Alan. ‘On behalf of his wife and himself' – to a huge and predictable roar of approval – he thanked the bridesmaids, the organist, the friends of Jess's mother who had arranged the church flowers, the ushers, the designer who had helped with the Order of Service, the vicar, the choir, the caterers, the
waitresses, everyone who'd come, from far and wide, near and narrow, everyone who hadn't been able to come… By the time he'd showered the entire room, many of them twice over, with heartfelt gratitude, I was starting to fidget impatiently. This was why I'd always thought weddings were one big sham. What had we learned about Alan and Jess as a couple?

Get a bloody move on, mate, so I can go and chat up pretty, weepy girl on Table 11.

But then Alan put down his notes, took off his glasses and started talking about Jess. I stopped fidgeting and everyone else woke up as he described how they'd met, how he'd felt when he'd first seen her, how he hadn't slept for a week between asking her out and their first date. ‘And you know what?' he added. ‘I still feel that sense of excitement every day.'

And if I really thought about it, I think I did know that. It was obvious in the way he spoke about her, the way he acted around her. It had always been obvious. I had just chosen to ignore it because I was jealous. Alan could have inconsequential last-minute doubts like any normal man, but his love for Jess was evident to everyone. I'd said it in my speech, but now I actually believed it. Maybe soulmates did exist after all. Maybe some people were actually lucky enough to find them. And keep them.

I looked across at Ed and Claire, as he performed a nervous cinema-yawn and draped his arm over her shoulder. She gave him a half-smile and allowed him to leave it there. Matt, who was sitting on the same table, caught my eye and gave a thumbs-up. I returned it. We were one-down then – maybe even one or two more on the way – two to go. Matt and I would be all right, though. We were copers. Maybe we were still too immature to find someone for life. Or perhaps we never would. Matt had finally ditched Debbie. Claire wasn't my soulmate, nor Lisa nor Mary Money-Barings nor Christine. And if Rosie was,
I didn't deserve her. But we still had our mates, didn't we? Just as long as I didn't end up like Amanda.