Beta Male (9 page)

‘Yes, Sam, but that's a bare minimum not a target.'

‘What about how easy-going and kind they are? Or how prone to moods? There's no point going out with someone who's up and down like a yoyo.'

‘I very much like girls who are up and down like yoyos.'

‘Ayeee.'

And so the discussion continued late into the night until at some ridiculous point someone – I can't remember who now – suggested making up little cards of the girls we knew by taking their pictures off Facebook and playing a version of Top
Trumps using the categories we'd finally decided upon. Claire's personality and Lisa's looks – that appeared to be the perfect, winning combination. Even Ed, who had always had a soft spot for Claire, perked up at that thought. It was just a pity that fit Lisa was mildly annoying and fun Claire slightly plain.

At half past midnight little Alan, who had always been the most lightweight of the group, started to pontificate about what women would say if they walked in on us and promptly fell off the sofa and passed out. Matt ventured that he had overheard female doctors gossiping about men and they were far worse, before going off to be sick in the bath. Just before 1am Ed tried to call Tara so we stole his phone and flushed the battery down the toilet. He went home in a sulk, climbing over a prostrate Alan on his way to the front door and leaving only a newly sober Matt and me vaguely
compos mentis
.

‘You really mean to do this, mate?' asked Matt.

‘Yes,' I said, trying to still the swaying room by concentrating very intently on a point in the middle of his dimpled chin. ‘I know it's all a bit of a joke, but it will be a lot of fun, even if it doesn't work out.'

‘Category one: money?'

‘Category one: money.'

‘With a pleasant sprinkling of other attributes mixed in.'

‘Indeed.'

I didn't say the real reason I wanted to take up the challenge: namely that the last month had made me as terrified of ending up on the shelf as the desperate thirtysomething girls I'd just been mocking. I, too, was entering my fourth decade: too old to be a professional footballer, a pop star or, these days, even a politician. I thought back to my cynical bravado at the wedding; the bluff in front of my friends just now; the bet. The truth was I had been protesting too much. Lisa's wedding, my trip to Edinburgh, Claire's teasing, Jess's proposal to Alan… It had all shaken me to the core. Mr Geoffrey Parker was right: I had to give up the Peter Pan act at some point. I would need
somewhere to live, someone to live with and someone to support me while I threw myself one last time into acting, the only thing I had ever wanted to do with my life.

Matt and I shook solemnly on the bet and then suggested kicking off by going through our mobile address books and finding the richest-sounding girl possible.

‘Here,' he said. ‘Let's swap phones. It will be more fun.'

A few seconds later, just as I was about to send an erotic text to one of Matt's gay friends from his phone, mine beeped in his hands.

‘It's Mary,' he said, waving it in my face.

‘The Christian from the wedding?'

‘I think so.' He studied it more closely. ‘Did you know that her surname was Money-Barings?'

‘Mother of God, give me that blessed phone,' I said.

There are many horrible words in the English language that I teach, but few are more unpleasant than ‘dumped'. Dumping is something you do to unwanted rubbish. It is a one-way process, an assertive, violent act by a subject to an object, a non-reflexive, unequivocal, irretrievable imposition of the will of one person on an unwilling victim.

Our break-up was not ‘mutual'. We did not ‘talk it over and come to an understanding'. We did not ‘drift' or ‘grow apart'. We did not decide that ‘we loved one another, but were not
in
love with one another'. We did not agree that ‘we had become friends instead of lovers'. She did not shake her head sadly and lie that it was more her than me. We did not agree to stay in touch. We did not resolve to remain friends. We did not assure one another that we looked forward to things being the same as they had been before we'd started going out.

Tara dumped me. I was dumped by Tara. I have been dumped. I am dumped.

I know what Sam would say. He would tell me that it is harder to be the dumper than the dumpee. In Sam's opinion, it is difficult to be the one who ends a relationship as you have all the pain of the loss in addition to the guilt of the act. You miss them; you doubt yourself. You hate the pain you've caused and you hate yourself for putting them through that pain. Sam should know: he has had plenty of experience of being the dumper. And yet, with all undue respect, Sam knows fuck-all.

Right now, would I rather be me, pouring out this adolescent angst, or Tara, happily ensconced in her new lover's £4m penthouse? I would wager that Tara is feeling a lot of emotions right now – greed, smugness, orgasmic joy – and none of them
is guilt. Dumpers move on quickly (she has moved on spectacularly quickly). It is the rest of us who are left crying in their wake.

Maybe I should have seen it coming. Maybe I should have presented a stronger face to the world and hidden how I felt. But Tara has always known how I've felt. She knew it the first time I asked her out, five years ago. And she knew it eight hours ago when I fell on our bedroom floor in shock and begged her not to leave me.

I know what you're thinking: it's not very manly, is it, all this begging and complaining? The girl upgraded. Good luck to her. Why would anyone want to go out with someone who ran off abroad to teach English and now works in a rough inner-city school? Who would want to go out with that loser when they could have a rich, older lawyer?

I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me. I've got myself to do that. But let me, at least, attempt to explain what it feels like to be dumped. I could, of course, say that my heart feels ripped out and chopped into a million pieces, that I no longer care if I wake up alive tomorrow morning, that nothing means anything any more, that I'd sooner she'd killed me than broken up with me, but you would only laugh or call me a ‘twelve-year-old girl', like Sam did. So let me eschew emotions altogether and attempt to explain it in terms of hard facts: I've known Tara for more than five years. I've spoken to her every single day. I know the first CD she bought and the name of her brother's second pet rabbit. Her grandmother sends me birthday cards. I've seen her practising writing her first name and my surname together. Her friends joked about us getting married. Even her father joked about us getting married. We own a flat together.

These facts are incontrovertible, yet she has taken the entire narrative of my life, our life, twisted it, crumpled it and ruined it for ever. Nothing is sacred now. That holiday we enjoyed in Ireland in the spring? She was probably already thinking how to end it. The flat we bought and decorated together? No doubt
she was only wondering which room she would like to screw her new boyfriend in first. The plans we made for the future? They were only sweet nothings and meaningless promises until she could find a convenient moment to break them.

Of course I'm angry. Of course that anger has made me irrational. But, you see, we had
plans
for the future. Or at least, I had plans. I know it's only girls who are meant to do soppy things like envisaging themselves as grandparents or imagining their perfect wedding day or thinking up names they might give to their children. Well, slap me in my soppy face and call me the loser that I undoubtedly am, but I did all those things. I planned for the future. I planned for our future. And now that future is a foreign country I can never visit.

I suppose I could give up on Tara altogether. I could pretend that she never meant anything to me anyway. I could move on, or at least pretend to move on, and have a string of meaningless, semi-enjoyable encounters until I have slept her out of my system. Who knows? It might even make her jealous. She might realise she's made a dreadful mistake and ask for me back. If not, at least I will have had some fun in the meantime.

But who am I trying to kid? As far as Tara is concerned, she hasn't made a mistake at all, let alone a dreadful one. In her eyes, she's just made the best decision of her life. She's twenty-eight now, younger than me, in her prime. Five years ago, she was more beautiful but less confident. Five years from now, she'll have begun to lose her looks. Right now she has the perfect balance to snare the sort of man she appears to want to snare. Older, richer men leave their wives for younger, attractive girls all the time. What everyone forgets in that cliché is that those younger, more attractive girls are often leaving somebody as well. In this case, that somebody – that nobody – just happens to be me.

I'd like to be magnanimous. I'd like to be happy for Tara. I'd like to congratulate her on using her small window of opportunity to upgrade to a better long-term prospect. I'd really
like to be able to move on myself. But I can't. I just can't. I can't join in Sam's and Matt's silly bet. I can't adopt their cynicism about romance and marriage. I can't really judge women by categories because there's only one category that counts for me: Tara. I can't do any of this, in truth, because I loved Tara, I still love Tara, and I can't imagine ever loving anyone else.

So what am I supposed to do now? Tell me that, Tara, you fucking cow. Tell me how I'm meant to pick my life up and go back to school in a couple of weeks' time. Tell me where I'm supposed to live. Tell me where and how and when a twenty-nine-year-old English teacher is ever meant to meet someone new. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't shut down my laptop and jump out of the window right now.

Well, there is perhaps one reason, one very good reason, and it is this: I'm going to stay alive until I can win Tara back. So watch this space. Listen to this drunken vow: that fat old lawyer is going down. And if I don't succeed? Well, then Tara will soon discover that hell hath no fury like a man scorned.

Mary Money-Barings turned out to be something of a prolific sender of text messages. The first, sent at 1am on the Friday morning that Alan passed out and Ed returned home single and phoneless, said how much she had enjoyed meeting me at Lisa's wedding and wondered if I'd like to go for a drink some time. It was signed with one kiss. The second, sent at 1.01am, apologised for texting so late; she had meant to send it earlier, but must have saved it in her draft folder and rolled onto her phone by mistake during the night. A third, sent at 1.06am, stated that she had got the wrong number and I was to ignore the previous two missives. It contained no kisses.

Ten minutes later, a fourth text arrived, a gem of its genre: ‘Hello again. Actually, it is me, Mary, after all. We met in Lisa's parents' bed at her wedding. Do you remember? Please ignore the second and third texts. They weren't true. I'm a bit drunk, I was thinking of you and thought it might be fun to catch up again x.'

Matt and I sat in growing amazement as my phone continued to beep excitedly.

‘Jesus!' he exclaimed, appropriately, when a fifth text arrived at 1.30am apologising for the bluntness of the fourth. ‘What did you do to this poor girl?'

‘Do you really want to know what I did to her, Matt?'

‘No.'

‘You're sure you don't want to hear how very,
very
inventive Christian virgins can be in bed?'

‘No.'

Mary, bless her, had undeniably done something for me, though. I actually found her stream of consciousness rather
endearing. Girls think guys are put off by this sort of mad behaviour. The truth is that if we want to go to bed with them – or have some other strange agenda, such as a marriage of financial convenience – nothing puts us off at all. Desperation? I'm all for it. Wild horses cannot stop a man on heat. And, in any case, Mary had rather cleverly kept me interested by not actually allowing me to shag her at the wedding.

I waited a few days to let Mary stew and then called her – somehow, I didn't think text messaging was our medium – on Sunday evening. Generally it is an excellent time to call as most people are feeling depressed and will therefore say yes to anything.

‘Hello,' said an excitable voice. Maybe Mary didn't get Sunday night blues. ‘Who's this?'

‘It's Sam,' I said.

‘Oh! Hello!' she gushed. I could hear the sound of singing in the background. ‘Sorry, I didn't recognise your number. I deleted it in embarrassment after Thursday night.'

‘Don't worry,' I said. ‘I've done much worse things on Thursday nights, believe me.'

She laughed. ‘I do believe you.'

‘And I've thought about much worse things on Sunday evenings, too.'

‘Like what?'

‘You. Me. Champagne. No clothes.'

Mary giggled. ‘Sam, you are very bad.'

‘So are you,' I said. ‘And yet, simultaneously, very good.'

‘Stop it. I've just stepped out of church.'

‘Well, go back inside then and say you're sorry.'

‘I already have, for that weekend at Lisa's wedding.'

‘If you say sorry, aren't you supposed to regret it?'

‘I do regret it.'

‘Did you remember to say sorry three times then?'

‘Sam! You know that's not true.'

‘I'm sorry.'

But I wasn't really. We continued our good-natured conversation, ending it by agreeing to meet up on Wednesday. ‘There's a really good friend of mine I'd like you to meet,' said Mary. ‘You don't mind, do you?'

She wanted to add in a friend as well? Just how sinful was this girl?

I checked my busy schedule of trying to get a temping job, making coffee, hanging out with Matt and failing to get recalls for auditions, and agreed that I could definitely make time for Mary and her friend on Wednesday.