Beta Male (28 page)

‘Do you love her?' I asked.

‘No.'

‘Can you imagine that you might love her?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Then get out,' I said. ‘Get out while you still can.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes.
Physician, heal thyself.
You don't owe this woman anything. And you owe it to the children not to get too attached to you.'

Matt laughed bitterly. ‘That doesn't seem to be a particular danger with David. But still, he's a pretty cool little guy. I'd feel guilty leaving him.'

‘Listen, mate. You can't stay with someone you don't love just because you're a nice guy. Maybe you once liked Debbie, but you clearly don't any more. The bet's over. It was a stupid idea. Let's get on with our lives. Anyway, you'd be doing her a
favour. Believe me: prolonging the inevitable only makes it worse.'

‘I believe you. You're the expert at screwing up relationships.'

I laughed. It was good to know that there were times when it was okay to speak out honestly to your friends. Perhaps Matt and Debbie were still in the window-of-opportunity phase.

‘What about you?' he asked.

‘Me?'

‘Yes. You and Rosie.'

‘Sadly, there is no me and Rosie. There was only “Max” and Rosie.'

‘She won't forgive you?'

‘Nope. I think there are some things you learn to tolerate, forgive even, in a relationship: flatulence, nose-picking, infidelity – '

‘You're right, there are worse crimes than infidelity,' agreed Matt. ‘Indifference, for example.'

‘Yep. I'd rather a girlfriend slept with someone else than didn't bother to make an effort with me. But pretending to be someone else in order to get into a girl's pants? No, I think we've passed the point of no return.' I shrugged. ‘Anyway, there's someone else… '

Matt listened while I shared the conclusions I'd reached about Claire: that it was worth giving it a shot, that it was the easy, logical solution to my troubled, wandering heart. He listened carefully, without interrupting, and then told me, very directly, very bluntly, that I was making the biggest mistake of my life. ‘You were honest about Debbie,' he said. ‘So I'm going to be honest about Claire. You can't just turn a friendship into a relationship at the drop of a hat, especially when you don't even fancy the person in question.'

‘I think I might fancy her after all,' I said. ‘Anyway, nothing ventured, nothing gained.'

‘This is one venture you should not attempt.'

‘But now's the perfect moment,' I said. ‘Claire's been made redundant so she's going to direct me in
The Cock Monologues.
If I don't mention it to her now, I'll spend the rest of my life thinking of her as the one that got away.'

‘Don't say I didn't warn you… ' Matt started to say. But before he could share any more of his dire warnings, his mobile rang and he was summoned to fetch a high-maintenance single mother and her baby from the swimming baths.

*

Ed's play was obviously a rip-off of
The Vagina Monologues
. Or at least it was meant to be. Sadly, it fell between two stools – neither particularly insightful nor particularly funny.

Apart from my evident suitability for the title role, I don't think I was Ed's first choice, to be honest. Of our little group, we've probably been the least close. Plus, I think he mainly wrote it so he could spend more time with Claire. The two of them had become good friends and he wanted to give her something to do while she lived off her redundancy pay and looked around for another way to earn a living. Every other actor had sensibly turned down the script, even the desperate ones who hadn't worked for years. Yes, they would be ‘the star' – the only star of a one-man show in an unconfirmed venue with a script penned by an emasculated, campaigning madman… So no, on balance, they'd probably be better off sticking to their day jobs in WH Smith.

I think Ed had only asked me, then, out of polite desperation, and probably in the expectation that I too would say no. If so, he had grossly underestimated my own desperation.

In the end, four things made me accept the part. One was the opportunity to spend time with Claire. To a lesser extent, I also wanted to help out Ed. Another was that I had signed on to a new temping agency, which had reminded me just how
horrible office life was. And the fourth? Well, bizarrely, it had something to do with a combination of Mr Money-Barings and Rosie.

Rosie had been surprisingly kind since the day she'd helped me get Alan and Jess back together. We hadn't seen each other again – her promise had stood firm – but she had been generous enough to close down the ‘Sam Hunt is a cunt' Facebook group before it gathered any more members from Nepal or Nebraska. She'd also said she'd spoken to her company's accountant who'd agreed to return half the fee for the Max House account, given that the work hadn't actually been carried out for me. They would chase Max for the rest – wherever he was now – and pocket my remaining £2,500 in return for dropping any legal charges against me. What legal charges, I had asked. Don't worry, we'd think of something, Rosie had replied. Like what, I had said. Like impersonating someone richer than oneself and being a dick, Rosie had replied. Oh, I had said.

The upshot was that I still owed Mr Money-Barings £2,500, in addition to my other credit card debts of five times that amount. Mary had kindly forwarded me several of her father's letters, which had left me in no doubt that he was not about to forget his loan. I had written back to apologise, beg even, but sadly his favourite part of Old Testament scripture did indeed appear to be the bit about an eye for an eye, and not the verses in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy that aren't so hot on money-lending. That money was going to have to be repaid somehow, and the only way I could think of raising any extra cash in a short period of time was to take on Ed's play. A musical about The Prodigal Son it wasn't, but it would have to do. Mr Money-Barings wrote again, agreeing to give me another couple of months.

I had a contact who ran a shabby pub theatre in Islington. I'd helped him get a part in a fairly sought-after production in Edinburgh a few years back and he still owed me a favour; he
agreed to rent out his theatre at a slightly reduced rate. If we sold out for three weeks, and Ed was feeling generous, I could just about afford to pay Mr Money-Barings back.

So it was that I found myself sitting in a rehearsal room with Claire on our first read-through of the script of
The Cock Monologues
. I'd got about as far as page four before flinging it down on the floor.

‘It's a bit rubbish, isn't it?' agreed Claire.

I nodded glumly. It was a bit hurtful as well. On reading it more closely, I noticed that a lot of the scenes contained thinly veiled references to some of my recent antics. It was as if the author had deliberately tried to make me look bad.

‘Hang on,' I said. ‘Why did you agree to direct this, if you thought it was rubbish?'

Claire blushed and tried to stutter something about having time on her hands. But I had rumbled her. However much she went on about ‘helping Ed out with something he cared about' and – her biggest lie of all – ‘feeling guilty after ending their little fling', this was the point at which I knew Jess had been right about Claire's feelings. It certainly explained why she had been so off with me ever since that glorious night at the opera.

‘I just thought it would be fun to spend some time working with you,' she said simply. ‘Just like the old days.'

And then I had the decency to blush as well.

Claire was right, though: it was a lot of fun, especially after we'd decided that the only way to make the play work was to take the piss out of it. Somewhat stupidly, Ed had left the rehearsal period entirely in our hands. Normally you can't keep writers away from rehearsals. I've worked on a few productions in which the director has deliberately given the writer false times and venues in a bid to stop them making a nuisance of themselves. Ed, however, spouted some rubbish about not wanting to spoil the creative link between the star and the fourth wall, assured us he was looking forward to the first night and went back to school, leaving us to it.

‘It', in this instance, turned out to be putting a slightly more comic twist on everything poor Ed had written.
The Cock Monologues
(his working title was
The Penis Monologues
, but that had already been staged, apparently) was meant to be a serious reflection on the state of masculinity today, each monologue mirroring the original vagina-oriented version. So we kicked off with ‘My angry cock', in which I was supposed to rant ‘humorously' about the injustices wrought against my penis, and indeed ‘penii worldwide' (Ed was a finicky teacher and, in this case, a wrong one, as
penis
is a third-declension noun, like
tigris
, and therefore the plural, if you want to be a pedantic cock, is
penes
), such as condoms and the tools used in STD check-ups. Another shamelessly plagiarised monologue was called: ‘I was twelve and a half, my big brother caught me at it because I forgot to lock the bathroom door' and was supposed to refer to that charming adolescent moment when you first realise that the function of this strange organ between your legs isn't limited to urination.

It didn't require too much imagination to turn any of this nonsense into something a little more entertaining. The thin line between satire and seriousness is only a question of tone, and Claire and I have never been very good at serious.

While we did indeed have a great deal of fun in those rehearsals, it could never be ‘just like the old days', as Claire had promised. The old days were gone for good. These days, Claire banged golf clubs on the wall while simulating sex with Ed in a bid to make me jealous. These days, I told all our mutual friends that I wanted to go out with her and they – and especially Jess – spent the whole time trying to nudge us together. There is nothing like the pressure of trying to live up to the vicarious expectations of your friends.

The new days often conspired to make things very awkward indeed. There would be a moment, an awkward pause in conversation, a flirty comment or glance which, in the old days, Claire and I would have laughed off or ignored, but now had to
consider in the new light of what we both knew the other one knew we knew but hadn't yet expressed, either verbally or physically. If Claire had been a new person I'd just met, it would have been easy. We would have gone on a date and it would have been obvious that we were crossing into new territory. But how do you cross into new territory with someone when you have already visited most of the territories together beforehand? Maybe Matt was right: you can't date a friend. You can't leave the friend zone once you're in it. Dinner with Claire wasn't a dinner date. It was a way of replenishing lost calories. Neither could I – or more accurately, neither did I feel I could – simply take her hand one afternoon in the middle of a professional conversation about spot-positioning and stage-left exits and say, ‘Sod this. Kiss me now, Claire, or a bit of my soul dies for ever.'

No. What we needed to do was to get uproariously drunk and just ‘do it'. Then we'd wake up the next morning like a happy, familiar couple in the eighth year of their relationship, but still with all the exciting novelty value of new sex.

Simple.

In retrospect, I can see that sharing this plan of action with Claire might not have been the most romantic gesture.

Jess, my new sounding board on all things girl-related, was completely against it. ‘Do you not understand women at all?' she demanded, somewhat unnecessarily.

At the time, however, my plan made perfect sense – to me, at least. I was frustrated at the rate of change, frustrated by the frustration, to be honest. Claire was my friend. We could talk about this like grown-ups, couldn't we? A conversation would be the catalyst.

So, in the final week of rehearsals, I finally summed up the courage to ask her where we stood.

‘Clairewheredowestand?'

‘What?'

I didn't normally gabble when I was asking a girl out. I repeated myself, so slowly that I sounded like the talking clock: ‘C l a i r e, w h e r e d o w e s t a n d?'

‘I know you're the star of this show, but there's no need to start using the royal “we”,' she replied in her new director's voice. ‘But if you're asking about the first line of the third monologue, then the answer is that you should be standing in the second spot, downstage right.'

‘No, no. Where do we stand in general?'

She laughed, nervously. ‘Well, if you're on the escalator, you stand on the right. If you're on the platform edge, you stand behind the yellow line. If you're at the post office, you stand in line. If you're – '

‘No.' I cut her off. She was gabbling far worse than me. I suppose she must have seen where this was going. ‘I mean, where do we stand, you and me?'

‘Oh.'

I studied her face for clues, but it betrayed nothing. She said nothing. She wasn't planning on making this easy for me. I took a deep breath and continued: ‘Because obviously we've known each other a long time and we get on really well and I like you a lot and I think you're pretty and stuff and maybe you like me too, I don't know I think you do, but there's this great big wall of sexual tension between us making things awkward and neither of us wants to bring it up or spoil it by talking about it and you're probably waiting for me because I'm the man, but the whole friend thing is making me unexpectedly nervous and we're both thinking what if it didn't work out would we still be friends and I think we would and, anyway, it will work out as we get on so well… '

I stopped for another breath and then tried again more slowly: ‘What I'm trying to say is that the best thing is probably just to get really drunk one night and see where it takes us.'