Beta Male (27 page)

I bit my tongue. It was vital I kept my cool.

‘Now, now, Sam,' she continued. ‘I'm sorry it got a bit out of hand. I didn't mean it to end like that. But I did warn you last summer not to mess around with me. I warned Alan, too, when
he answered back in front of the rest of my team. I warned that fat fiancée of his when she wrote me a threatening letter a few months back. You don't screw with Amanda. I'll always win.'

I threw my arms open in a gesture of surrender. ‘Fine, we give up.'

Amanda smiled. I smiled back and decided to take a punt in the dark. ‘You know, Amanda, I really wish I'd seen you again after last summer.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes. It was quite an experience. I'm not sure anything has come close since.'

Amanda leant back in her chair and allowed another self-congratulatory smile to play around the corners of her lips. ‘I knew you'd see sense eventually.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘No one ever sleeps with me just once without trying it again.'

‘Even Alan?'

She laughed. ‘Alan? Hell, no. He wouldn't even sleep with me once, poor lamb. His loss.'

‘Indeed.' I checked again that no one could see us and moved closer. I had the first confession, but I needed more. ‘Well, Amanda, to the victor, the spoils. I'll give you what you want, if you promise to stop being nasty to him.'

‘I don't get it,' she said.

‘No,' I said, within touching distance now. ‘But you're about to.'

She laughed raucously. It was not a nice laugh. ‘Oh, Sam, you ridiculous little man. Do you really think you can just walk into my office in the middle of the day and seduce me?'

I recoiled, blushing a little. It had been going quite well until then.

Amanda continued: ‘You don't really think I was that bothered about you, do you? It was just a fuck at an office party, for God's sake. And not a particularly good one, if I'm honest.'

I pretended to look crestfallen. I didn't have to pretend too hard. It's not very nice being told you're a below-average lover by an Amazonian fortysomething with enough experience to know what below-average means.

Amanda softened a little. ‘Oh, Sam, don't look so sad. It wasn't that bad. I mean, I've had worse.' She thought for a moment. ‘I don't know when, but I'm sure I have at some point. And if you'd like to give it another go some time, then it might be fun. Maybe don't drink so much this time… You're a nice enough boy, and I suppose you did me a favour by getting rid of my ex for me.'

I stammered: ‘So you weren't punishing Alan at work because I hadn't got in touch?'

‘Is that what you've been torturing yourself about?' Amanda laughed. ‘God, you've got a big ego. And has he really been complaining to you about me being “nasty” to him?
Pathetic.
' Her laugh suddenly turned into a frown. ‘Anyway, even if I had been a little harsh on him, why would you want me to stop? Alan hates you, doesn't he? Thanks to me, he thinks you've shagged his fiancée. Why would you want to do something nice for him?'

‘Old time's sake. Anyway, I imagine you've been running rings around him, haven't you? Give the poor guy a break.'

Amanda chuckled to herself. ‘Well, I admit it has been a lot of fun. And he deserved it. Most of it, anyway. He was getting cocky and needed putting in his place.'

‘I'm sure he did. So what kind of things have you been doing to him?'

‘Oh, just winding him up, really.'

‘Like what?'

She looked at me suspiciously. ‘I don't know why you're so interested.'

‘Go on, tell me. I like a good, humiliating story as much as the next person. Especially now that you've humiliated me. And it's not as if there's much love lost between me and Alan these
days. I'd feel guilty if you were punishing him because of me. But now that I know you're not, it would amuse me to know what you've been doing to him. Alan and I have as good as fallen out over that fat fiancée of his. They hate me even more than they hate you.'

Amanda relaxed back in her seat. ‘Well, I suppose there's no harm in telling you, given that you're no longer proper friends. I told him he would get sacked if he didn't sleep with me before his wedding.'

‘Sacked?'

‘I never really meant it, of course, but it's kept me amused on slow days.'

‘Hilarious.' I focused hard on keeping the sarcasm out of my voice. ‘It must have been quite a laugh.'

‘Oh, yes, you should have seen his scared little face.' Amanda smiled – unpleasantly – at the memory.

I laughed encouragingly.
Keep going
, I thought,
just keep her going.
‘I can't believe he resisted you, though. What did you do to the poor kid?'

‘Oh, you know, silly stuff. I'd pinch his arse in client meetings or stare provocatively at his crotch when he got up to go to the toilet.'

I roared with fake laughter. ‘Brilliant!'

‘And whenever we've been away on business, I've pretended there's been an overbooking and we've had to share a room. We even made him dress up as a Chippendale at the Christmas party.'

‘A Chippendale! Priceless!'

Amanda sighed. ‘The only shame is that Alan never really rose to the bait. He's too boring, I suppose, to do anything interesting, and I eventually got bored of the game as well. But then I heard him tell someone that his engagement party was just over the road so I thought I'd drop in and call a truce. I thought you might be there, too, and we might even have a little repeat performance to see if you'd improved at all in the
meantime. But I didn't expect to find quite so many other women after you… Anyway, I was never going to say anything scandalous and then suddenly Alan started denying everything when there was no need and it all got out of hand… Hang on. Sam? Sam? Where are you going? Shall we do lunch? Am I going to see you again?'

‘I'll see you in court' was the answer I wanted to give. I'd been waiting to say a line that good most of my adult life. But most of all, I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. I tore out of Amanda's office, past Alan's startled colleagues, past the photocopier, down the corridor and into the lift. Once the doors were safely closed, I took my phone out to call Jess but there was no need. She had trusted me enough to pre-empt news of the successful completion of stages three and four. As the doors opened into the lobby, I looked through the glass walls of the office, out into the street, and saw Alan on one knee in front of Jess, as Rosie looked on at a discreet distance, smiling faintly. I ran towards them, but Rosie had vanished by the time I'd got there, skidding onto my knees beside Alan and asking Jess if she would, please, for the love of God, marry my best friend.

At some point in the laughing, crying, undignified hug that followed, I caught sight of Amanda, standing in what I later discovered was the same place as, six months previously, she had glimpsed Jess about to propose to the employee she had been harassing ever since. This time, however, we were all on our knees, all asking, all saying yes.

‘Just one more thing,' I said to Alan, taking my mobile out of my pocket again and stopping the recording. ‘You might find this useful.'

For the next few weeks, I bathed in a glow of self-righteous happiness. So
this
was what it felt like to be a good person.
This
was what it felt like to do good. Good things happened to good people. Although Alan was back with Jess, they had both decided it would be better to live apart until they got married, which meant I could live with Alan again in the meantime. It was just like old times, only better in one key respect: I no longer felt the need to vanish every time Jess came round (which was often) to leaf through wedding brochures and argue over which variety of dove to release at the reception. Now Jess and I could barely get enough of each other. We had in-jokes which even Alan didn't get. A lesser man might have minded; Alan just beamed from ear to ear whenever Jess and I made each other laugh, happy that his two best friends had finally hit it off. ‘My barrister and my barista' – as he referred to us in one of his wittier moments.

I didn't even feel particularly guilty about duping Amanda in her own office. She had played on Alan's insecurities for her own amusement and almost destroyed him in the process. She had bullied Jess and wrecked their engagement party. Worst of all, she was on record as being under the mistaken impression that I was a below-average lover. So, frankly, she deserved whatever she got – whatever that might end up being. Alan still seemed unsure of his next steps. He had played the recording through a dozen times, chuckling and frowning to himself in equal measures. But that seemed as far as he wanted to take it for the time being. Amanda left him in peace now at the office. Jess had the evidence she needed to believe him. Maybe that was all he had ever wanted.

In any case, it wasn't my business any more. There was a sense of relief that I hadn't been the root cause of
all
the trouble, but I still blamed myself for being the catalyst. It was big of Alan to forgive me – once again – and I didn't want to push him to take any further action. It was his career, not mine.

Talking of which, I felt it was time to address my own non-existent prospects, which took a peculiar turn one day in March when Ed approached me with the script of a one-man play he had written called
The Cock Monologues.

‘
The Cock Monologues
?' asked Matt when I met up with him at Debbie's for the first time in what seemed like ages to share this disquieting news.

‘Yes, it's all part of Ed's masculinism nonsense.'

‘Ah. And there I was thinking that it was because you're a cock.'

I laughed, almost convincingly. It was good to see my friend – especially as Debbie was out with her youngest, Sarah – and hear his dreadful jokes again. Matt hadn't completely vanished from the radar since the engagement party fiasco, but he'd made his disapproval fairly clear. We had a bit of patching up to do. We also had a lot of catching up to do, especially on the Debbie front, where it appeared that the unemployed doctor who had beaten me on the bet to ‘live the dream' was actually stuck in the middle of a waking nightmare.

‘Where do I start?' he said, leaning back against Debbie's kitchen counter and wiping a fleck of child vomit off his shirt. ‘Where can I possibly start to explain the sheer tedium of being a kept-man house-husband to a working woman you're not married to and a pseudo-father to two young children who are not yours?'

Once he'd got over the difficulty of starting, Matt found it equally difficult to stop his list of complaints. Many of them focused on Debbie herself – I
knew
I was right about her – but it was the more systematic ones that really stuck with me: the sense of shame he felt as the only man waiting outside Tumble
Tots; the boredom of having no one to talk to during the day; the guilt of fancying the Ukrainian cleaner who came round twice a week; the loneliness of knowing no one else in a similar position. Most of all, his lack of tangible achievement made him feel entirely useless. He was a man, dammit. He needed something to measure success by. Frankly, I told him, he needed a job.

‘Speak for yourself, mate,' said Matt with a snort.

I didn't really have an answer to that. I've always given expert advice; rarely taken it.

‘I mean, where's my sense of worth?' Matt continued. ‘On a good day in medicine, I'd send a few people home alive. Some were happier than when they came in.' He rubbed the stubborn vomit stain on his shirt again, making it worse. ‘On a good day now, I get through to the evening without changing my clothes more than once. Or opening more than one bottle of wine while doing the ironing.'

There was a sudden piercing scream from next door, where David, Debbie's four-year-old, had been quietly watching cartoons. Matt ran through to see what was the matter. I followed at a discreet distance and observed him valiantly attempting to comfort a howling, terrified little boy, who seemed to have been scared by something he'd just seen on television. Matt was a natural – not that David seemed to appreciate it.

‘I hate you,' he wailed. ‘Not my daddy. Want Mummy. Hate you. Want Mummy. Not my daddy. Hate you.'

I beat a tactical retreat to the kitchen and waited for Matt to quieten him down. Pre-school nightmares were not my forte.

‘Actually, mate, I could do with some help,' called Matt, summoning me back next door.

Between the two of us, we managed to divert David with magic tricks, war games and an indoor game of football, which cracked a window, until he decided he wanted to watch some more cartoons and promptly fell asleep. Quite frankly, I could have done with a sleep myself after all that.

‘Jesus, mate, do you do this every day?' I asked, when we flopped back into the kitchen and made another cup of tea.

‘Quite a few days, yes. It takes its toll.'

I looked at Matt more closely. He didn't look his best, it was true. His handsome face had lost some of its confidence. He looked bowed, beaten even. ‘What about Debbie?' I asked. ‘How's it going with her?'

‘Oh, I don't know. She's seriously high maintenance.'

I nodded. All blokes know what high maintenance is. High maintenance is bad. We want low maintenance. Low maintenance but high performance. A high maintenance girl is like owning an expensive sports car. She looks great but she knows she looks great. She goes like greased lightning, but you have to polish her ego constantly. She regularly blows a gasket if you don't handle her with care. Leave her out in the cold for too long and she won't even start. Stay with her long-term and her value starts decreasing exponentially. Plus, there's a high chance some other poor sod will come along and nick her without realising just how high maintenance she is.