‘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.
Chapter Seven
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.
Chapter Eight
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.
*
The next three days dragged a little bit, to be honest, especially after the excitement of Lisa’s wedding and Edinburgh, not to mention the multifarious events of Thursday night, which had combined to give me a three-day hangover. Not for the first time I had failed to reconcile the thirst of a teenager with the liver of a twenty-nine-year-old actor. Alan vanished from view from Friday morning onwards, leaving for work long before we woke up and not returning for days. Maybe his nasty boss Amanda was punishing him for saying yes to Jess in public, or maybe Jess was punishing him for not saying yes quickly enough, or perhaps his father was giving him grief for not asking her first, or his Mum, who had never liked Jess much, was telling him to find someone else, or maybe Alan was punishing himself for all of the above. None of us really knew, although it was almost certain, ventured Matt, that he was being punished for something.
In Alan’s absence, Matt took it upon himself to move into his room and dress in Alan’s remaining accountantweekend-wear which Ed hadn’t already taken home with him for his new hermit-like existence. Matt called Ed repeatedly, increasingly worried by the lack of response, until we finally remembered that Ed’s mobile battery was making its slow journey through the London sewage system back to our taps as drinking water. So on Sunday evening, after I’d finished speaking to Mary, Matt and I went round to Ed’s miniscule flat in Hackney and found him sitting in his pyjamas amid a mountain of Tara’s discarded clothes and watching Sex and the City.
‘I’m planning an elaborate revenge,’ he declared, idly pinging a bra across the lounge. ‘Hell hath no fury like a man scorned.’
‘Do you want some company?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, pausing Sex and the City to scribble down a few notes on a pad resting on the arm of the sofa. ‘I am researching how women think so I can plan my elaborate revenge.’
We left him in peace, if peace was what you’d call it, and returned to Alan’s, where Matt installed himself in his ‘war room’, the name he’d given the small cupboard in the corridor containing a computer which Alan, in turn, liked to refer to as his ‘home office’. This, explained Matt, would be the base from where he would conduct his campaign to snare a rich wife.
Ever the conscientious armchair general, he was already in place on Monday morning as I was leaving for a temping job that had become available through the agency last thing on Friday evening.
‘You know what the most embarrassing thing about your house-husband scheme is, Sam?’ said Matt, swivelling on Alan’s expensive leather chair to face me.
‘The fact that it’s so embarrassingly simple that Ed and Alan will hate us for not having done it themselves?’
‘No. What’s really embarrassing is the fact that you’ve thought of it but I’m going to be so much better at it than you.’
‘What do you mean, failed medic boy?’
‘What I mean is, “most gifted actor of his generation currently heading out to a minimum-wage filing job”… ’ Matt lowered the fingers he had raised like bunny ears, then lifted them again to continue, ‘“Heading out, that is, in one of his flatmate’s borrowed shirts over which he’s already spilled his coffee.”’ I looked down at Alan’s stripy, stained shirt. Matt was right, the bastard. He continued: ‘What I mean, Sam, is that you have to haul yourself into the twenty-first century. What are your tactics? How are you going about this? You’re attempting to hook up with a born-again trustafarian on the basis of her rich-sounding surname. It’s not a very scientific approach, is it?’
‘I don’t like science,’ I said. ‘Anyway, seduction is an art.’
‘Not this sort of seduction. This is definitely a science.’ Matt swivelled back to face his screen and tapped ferociously on the keyboard. ‘Your problem, Sam, is that you’re limiting yourself by sticking to people you’ve actually met in the flesh. How many is that over a lifetime? A few thousand at most? And how many of those are going to be even vaguely suitable? A hundred, if you’re lucky? Less, if you apply the rigorous criteria you’ve chosen.’ He jiggled the mouse around and clicked a few times. ‘You wouldn’t choose a job on the same basis, would you? Or somewhere to live? So what I’m doing is opening up the search to the entire world. Or the entire worldwide web, to be precise.’
‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re a complete gimp?’ I said.
‘Often,’ replied Matt. ‘But a gimp who’s about to beat you.’ He tapped a few more keys, pressed ‘return’ with a flourish and pointed at the screen. ‘Here, look at this.’
I looked. On the screen was a picture of Matt, looking effortlessly tanned and handsome on holiday the previous summer. Below was a short biography which mentioned the word ‘doctor’ at least three times and the more truthful word ‘unemployed’ not once. The website was called something like www.obnoxiouslytinyworlddating.com or www.weonlyshagotherrichpeople.net. Clicking through the other profiles, Matt treated me to a cascade of square-jawed private equity directors and glossy-maned blondes who all seemed to have ‘boutique fashion’ businesses and first names ending in ‘a’. The advertising was expertly tailored for Amelia, Olivia, Antonia, Alexandra and their friends. Chat forums included such pressing topics as the best new luxury car dealers in Knightsbridge, the tastiest caterers for weddings in Wiltshire and the most trustworthy heli-skiing guides in Courchevel. The recession clearly hadn’t hit this part of the web yet. There were more Russians and Arabs than you could shake a mouse at.
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