Beta Male

by Iain Hollingshead

  Matt slumped down in his chair, apparently shocked to the core that people might twist the truth to present a better image of themselves online.

  ‘You need to get out more,’ I said, gesturing at the low ceiling and limited light in the War Room. ‘This is not healthy.’

  ‘And what you’re doing is?’ he retorted.

  ‘At least I’m keeping my acting skills honed.’

  ‘I’m sure your next casting director will be delighted to hear all about your latest production.’

  ‘Science versus art. I think we’re quickly learning which seduction technique is more successful.’

  Matt stared vacantly at his laptop and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Having said that,’ I continued, ‘there is one vaguely scientific thing this artist could use a little help on.’ I scribbled down an email address on a scrap of paper. ‘Can you make it so that any messages sent to this address are forwarded to my Hotmail?’

  ‘max@maxhouse.co.uk? You actually are depraved, Sam. You can’t really be serious about taking this further?’

  ‘I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life,’ I said.

  ‘Even though you realise it will end in tears when she inevitably finds out?’

  ‘Tears of happiness, mate. I spoke to Claire on the way home in the cab – ’

  ‘When are you just going to marry her?’

  ‘I spoke to Claire on the way home in the cab because I hadn’t seen her for a while and thought she would be amused by what had just taken place. Well, she was, as it happened. All the more so because she’d heard people talk about this Max character before. Until fairly recently, he used to go out with one of her colleagues who remembers him mentioning his business idea. Max Anderson-Bickley, chief executive of the Max House… Well, you don’t forget a name or a company like that. Claire made a few enquiries and rang back to tell me that Max left the country recently at short notice – partly because he’s under investigation for tax evasion, partly because he’s just got a job advising a Russian oligarch in Abu Dhabi. So on that account, at least, it looks like I might be off scot-free.’

  ‘And what about his business, which you now appear to be running?’

  ‘I’ll quietly tell Rosie that I’ve reconsidered the idea and have decided it’s the sack of shit which she already knows it to be. Then I’ll pretend to go back to my old banking firm, feign redundancy within a couple of months and tell Rosie I’ve decided to become the actor I’ve actually been all along. By that point it won’t matter because she will have already fallen deeply and irretrievably in love with me.’

  ‘Genius,’ said Matt. ‘Why don’t you just tell her the truth now?’

  ‘Because, my slow-witted friend, it’s both too late and too early: too late to own up because I’ve already gone too far down the Max route; too early to tell her I’m becoming the actor I already am because she hasn’t yet fallen in love with me. We’ve started on a lie. I just need to work her slowly back towards the truth.’

  ‘And what makes you think she’ll fall in love with you?’

  ‘We have a connection. Plus, she’s after my “money”.’

  ‘And you’re after hers. What a delightful couple.’

  ‘She’s well-bred, charming, ambitious, intelligent and beautiful. She’s clearly going to make as much money as she will no doubt inherit. What’s not to like?’

  ‘And by the time you end up penniless, or rather admit to her that you’re penniless, you think she won’t mind because she’ll never be able to leave you?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Sam, you’re the most arrogant man I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Not arrogant, Matt. Just desperate. And I like a challenge.’

  Matt smiled and swivelled back to face his monitor. ‘Okay, last thing I do in my War Room before I go and join the real world again.’

  ‘You’re giving up on this bet?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ he replied, enigmatically.

  After a couple of minutes of what Matt assured me was relatively simple computer wizardry, I had a new email address. ‘Let’s check it out, shall we?’ he said, sending an email from his own account to max@maxhouse.co.uk. ‘Now, log on to your Hotmail.’

  I logged on and duly found the empty test email from Matt with the subject line: ‘Cock’. We went for a celebratory pint. An hour later we returned and found a new email above the ‘Cock’ one, from rosie.morris@taylorwilliams.com, with the rather more sober subject line: ‘Invoice’. Matt’s technical wizardry had come just in time.

  ‘Dear Max,’ read the sober email. ‘It was great to meet you finally this morning. Esbern has also asked me to pass on his best wishes. I hope you don’t mind my sending an invoice so quickly, but our accounts department is very rigorous about this sort of thing at the moment. We’re very much looking forward to continuing our working relationship with all relevant stakeholders going forward. Best wishes, Rosie.’

  ‘Fucksticks!’ I buried my head in my hands. ‘An invoice! A working relationship! Best wishes! Fuckity fucksticks!’

  ‘Well, don’t pay it,’ said Matt, failing to hide his smugness that Rosie clearly didn’t fancy me. ‘You don’t owe them anything. Get out while you can.’

  I nodded. But just as I was about to log off I noticed that the genial Dane had been cc’d into this formal email. Above it had popped up another one, also from Rosie, but with the rather more interesting subject line: ‘Lunch II’.

  ‘Max, hello!’ it started, which seemed to me an excellent way of formulating a greeting. ‘So good to meet you earlier. Esbern has just told me to send you a boring email about the invoice, but I wanted to drop you a quick personal line as well. Very sorry about our lunch. I’m holding you to a repeat. Hope your friend is okay. Rosie x.’

  ‘Matt,’ I said quietly. ‘Let’s open that invoice and see how much it comes to.’

  ‘No,’ he said, attempting to delete it.

  I pushed him out of the way and opened it. ‘Five thousand! For that poxy little presentation! Who has five thousand pounds?’

  ‘Max probably does.’

  ‘Bully for Max. I certainly don’t.’

  I had no money at all, in fact, I thought, slumping down in the spare chair. No money, no prospects, no career. Just a lot of debt. But I did have Rosie – or at least it looked as if I might be able to have Rosie. What if Rosie was my saviour? And if her price was five thousand, so be it. It was a small price to pay for salvation.

  ‘A small price, if it works,’ said Matt. ‘For the record, I repeat that I really do think this will end in tears.’

  ‘Tears of happiness and liquid gold. You have to spend money to make money.’

  ‘And how do you know that?’

  ‘From my former high-flying career at Goldman Sachs.’

  ‘And where exactly are you going to get the money from?’

  ‘Now that is an excellent question.’

  It was indeed an excellent question – and a weighty one, too, with which I bored Matt and myself rigid for the rest of the afternoon. If Ed hadn’t still been passed out, I would probably have bored him as well, until he passed out all over again. Could I just delay payment and let the interest rack up while hoping for a miracle? Or maybe I should get on to my useless agent and get her to land me another well-paid advert? Then again, she hadn’t got me so much as an audition for months. So perhaps I should sack her and get a new one? Or set up Max’s business myself? Or a better one?

  ‘For the love of God, please just give up on the invoice,’ snapped Matt at last. ‘Or go back to Christian Mary.’

  ‘Christian Mary is not Perfect Rosie.’

  We were just thinking of heading back out to the pub when my mobile rang.

  ‘Hello, Alan,’ I said, answering it. ‘Do you have five thousand pounds you’d like to lend me?’

  ‘No, Sam, I don’t. But I do have one hell of a problem at work.’

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘So are you go
ing to fuck Amanda backwards or is she going to screw you sideways?’

  ‘That’s really not funny, Sam,’ said Alan.

  But it was funny. It was one of the funniest stories I had ever heard. Of all the people to be sexually harassed in the workplace, Alan was by far the least likely candidate. Why couldn’t I have a job with an attractive fortysomething boss preying on me? Life was unfair.

  ‘I reckon you report her to an employment tribunal,’ said Ed, who was sitting on the sofa, dressed in Alan’s pyjamas and clutching a bottle of headache pills.

  ‘I reckon you call her bluff and do nothing,’ suggested Matt.

  ‘And I reckon you screw her.’

  ‘Sam! This is serious.’

  Alan was right, of course. This was serious – certainly serious enough to warrant cancelling our Friday night plans and holding a four-way summit in the living room. But what was the poor guy supposed to do? Sleep with Amanda and ruin his relationship with Jess? Or turn down Amanda and ruin his career? Personally, I thought a great deal more of Alan’s career than I did of his relationship with Jess. If I were in his situation, it would be a no-brainer. But you can’t really say that to a best mate – especially when he’s been with his girlfriend for eight years and has just got engaged. There is a small window of opportunity in the first three months of a friend’s new relationship in which you can give your truthful, negative opinion. And they either thank you for helping them see the light and move on, or they ignore you, stay together and your own friendship is never quite the same again. Either way, I had missed that window.

  ‘More to the point,’ said Alan, calling the meeting to order again, ‘why on earth does Amanda want to sleep with me?’

  ‘Now, that,’ I said, ‘is the unspoken question on all our lips, and one to which I believe we have no answer. What the hell have you done to the poor woman? Is your office so starved of male eye candy that you actually constitute a catch? Are you Messrs January, February and March in the accountants’ pin-up calendar?’

  ‘Maybe Amanda is one of those sex addicts you read about in magazines.’

  ‘What kind of magazines do you read, Ed?’

  ‘Ones that help me to understand the incomprehensible, rapacious creatures that women are.’

  ‘Amanda is simply a bitter and disturbed misanthrope,’ explained Matt, the unemployed doctor turned amateur psychologist. ‘She would rather see other people miserable than be happy herself.’

  Alan nodded vigorously. This seemed to fit his experience of Amanda. ‘You’re right, Matt: she’s probably jealous of my stable relationship, given that hers have always been so screwed-up.’ A brief smile flickered across his face at the thought of his boring, happy, stable relationship. The smile quickly turned to a frown: ‘On the other hand, maybe she just wants me to sleep with her because I’m one of the few people left in the office who haven’t.’

  ‘Really?’ said Ed. ‘She’s even more of a player than Sam.’

  ‘Then again,’ continued Alan, a worried frown now permanently fixed on his face, ‘it might just be her way of getting back at me because I stood up to her the other day. I was really quite rude.’

  ‘Oooh,’ said Matt. ‘Stand up to her, did you? I bet that turned her on.’

  The others droned on with their teasing and their theories, but there was a missing dimension that no one else knew about, and that I didn’t mention because I was too ashamed. It came to me in a sudden shock of recollection during Matt’s amateur diagnosis of Amanda’s mental health problems. Could this be it, then? Was this Amanda’s revenge?

  Earlier that year, I had been a plus-one at Alan’s firm’s summer party, which Jess had been unable to attend, and I’d met Amanda for the first time. She’d struck me as a fairly fun person to spend an evening with: borderline psychotic, admittedly, even on a first meeting, but otherwise attractive, flirty and unbelievably direct. I’d never slept with an older woman before so thought I’d give it a whirl when she suggested it. Unfortunately, she forgot to tell me that her boyfriend was also there that evening. Taking an untimely break from the party downstairs, he had caught us in flagrante on her desk, whereupon he’d screamed blue murder, picked up a knife (one that was meant for opening letters, fortunately, not arteries) and chased me, my trousers flapping helplessly around my ankles, the length and breadth of the office. I’d eventually holed up behind a photocopier in Human Resources while Amanda went to call security, leaving her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend hurling a torrent of expletives in my general direction.

  I’d finally got out of the party with everything except my dignity intact and thought that was the end of it. However, I’d stupidly given Amanda my number earlier in the evening and was bombarded with text messages over the next few days, each one more extraordinary than the last. Her boyfriend had dumped her, which was understandable, and she blamed me for it, which was not. I’d felt bad for the guy, of course, but it was hardly my fault, was it? Amanda hadn’t even mentioned his existence, let alone the fact he was at the same party. How was I meant to know that some coked-up, cuckolded banker was going to appear with a letter-knife mid-coitus and force me to hide behind a photocopier?

  I’d rung Amanda to apologise, in any case, which was another mistake because she told me I could make up for it by taking her out for dinner. I recognised an arch manipulator when I saw one and offered lunch instead, if only to placate her. It was not a success. After paying the bill, she said that if I didn’t go to a hotel room with her right then, she’d get back at me by making Alan’s life hell. I assumed she was joking and politely declined. We’d parted fairly amicably.

  And that, I thought, was finally that. She’d find someone else to push around. I’d go back to playing with people my own age. I’d kept the whole thing a secret for so long that I’d almost forgotten about it myself. And now, several months later, as these drunken and half-forgotten scenes swam hazily into focus, it appeared that she wasn’t joking after all. She really did mean to get back at me by punishing Alan. The sins of the actor would be visited upon his flatmate. If so, Matt’s psychological appraisal had been far too generous: she wasn’t a misanthrope; she was a bloody nutcase.

  Of course, I should have owned up straight away. I should have told Alan that this was probably all my fault and had little to do with Amanda’s jealousy of his stable relationship with Jess, or her apparent desire to complete a full house by copulating with the entire office. Alan would have been understanding, in the quietly forgiving way he always is. But by the time I had weakly joined the others in recommending prevarication and prudence – print out all her emails, said Ed; carry a recording device next time she asks you into her office, suggested Matt – it was far too late to come clean. The only consolation was that I appeared to have at least a few months to make everything all right again. Amanda’s deadline for the fulfilment of her indecent proposal was Alan’s wedding day itself.

  ‘And when exactly is the happy day?’ asked Matt,

  ‘I’m not sure. Next summer, maybe. You’ll have to ask Jess,’ said Alan, entirely seriously.

  ‘Wow, you really are under her thumb,’ said Ed.

  ‘Yep, under her thumb and wrapped around her little finger.’ Alan laughed. Perhaps he didn’t mind being trapped under one of her podgy digits. ‘There’s something else, too; another reason why I came round tonight. Jess appears to have decided that we’re going to live together. In her flat.’

  I jumped.

  ‘But it’s not all bad,’ continued Alan, hastily. ‘I think I’m going to be allowed a small corner of the spare room for my PlayStation.’

  ‘You fight that good fight, mate,’ said Matt.

  ‘So that’s where you’ve been,’ I said. ‘You’ve moved in with your fiancée without telling us.’

  ‘She’s not my fiancée yet. Until I propose to her, she’s just my flatmate.’

  ‘I’d like to see you say that to her face,’ said Ed.

  ‘She is not your bloody flatmate,’ I said
, surprised at my own anger. ‘I’m your flatmate. We are your mates. And don’t you forget it.’

  ‘I’m not forgetting it,’ said Alan, gently.

  ‘Yes, you bloody are,’ I said, not so gently. ‘This is the beginning of the end, I tell you. First you move in with her, then you get married, then you knock her up and then we never see you again.’

  ‘We’ll get you round for dinner,’ said Alan.

  ‘I don’t want to come round for fucking dinner, Alan. I don’t want Classic FM and seating plans. I don’t want to “bring a bottle” and “something for pudding”. I don’t want to ask how the kids are getting on or fantasise about swapping wives over coffee and After Eights. I want to go out and get drunk with you, like the good old days.’

  ‘And when were those good old days, Sam?’ Alan’s voice was reasoned, measured, as if talking to a recalcitrant toddler. ‘When did we last go out together on a whim in London and get drunk? Three years ago? Four? They’re old days, mate. And how good were they, anyway? Time’s moved on. We’ve moved on.’

  ‘I don’t want to move on. I want things to stay the way they are.’

  Ed and Alan exchanged looks across the room – looks which, roughly translated, said: Why is Sam being such a dickhead?

  ‘Why are you being so weird about this?’ said Alan, at last.

  ‘I’m not being weird about it,’ I shouted, knowing full well I was. The guilt of my Amanda secret was making me aggressive, but it was the news that Alan was definitely and finally moving out that had really got me. Here it was, at last, in all its stark reality. I’d feared it long enough, of course, but always refused to prepare for it. A small part of me had even convinced myself that this day would never come. I didn’t want to grow up. For all my talk of settling down, there was no way that I was ready, no way that I was sufficiently mature. Alan, Matt, Ed, well… They were like my family. I didn’t want a divorce.

  At least that’s what I should have said. Again, Alan would probably have understood. He might even have felt similarly himself. But instead, like the fool that I am and the dick than I can be, I started to insinuate that Jess was to blame for taking our friend away from us. Alan, by nature averse to any unnecessary confrontation, became increasingly irritable. Eventually he snapped.