Beta Male

  Iain Hollingshead is a journalist at the Daily Telegraph, and has also written for the Guardian, the Sunday Times and GQ. In 2007 he co-authored a musical, Blair on Broadway, which transferred to the West End the following year. He is also the editor of Am I Alone in Thinking…?, a bestselling collection of unpublished letters to the Daily Telegraph. He is 29 years old and lives in London. Beta Male is his second novel.

  www.iainhollingshead.co.uk

  BETA MALE

  Iain Hollingshead

  This ebook edition 2011

  First published in 2010 by

  Duckworth Overlook

  90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF

  Tel: 020 7490 7300

  Fax: 020 7490 0080

  info@duckworth-publishers.co.uk

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  © 2010 by Iain Hollingshead

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Mobipocket ISBN: 978-0-7156-4118-7

  ePub ISBN: 978-0-7156-4117-0

  Adobe PDF ISBN: 978-0-7156-4116-3

  To Phil, James, Fez, Rick and Tom

  Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

  H. L. Mencken

  Chapter One

  It all started, appropriately enough, at a wedding.

  Like most people between the age of twenty-eight and thirty-five, the rhythm of my calendar year is ruled by the predictability of the marrying classes. In January, people get engaged, the less imaginative among them on New Year’s Eve, encouraged by the dictatorial timekeeping of a sixteenth-century Pope to make the ultimate, timely resolution: this year, they slur, I shall lose weight, drink less, give up smoking, change jobs and yes, marry that girl I took out the joint mortgage with a few years back. Others wait until they go skiing later in the month, sufficiently taken, perhaps, by the panda eyes, peeling nose and balaclava-clad beauty of their beloved to decide to spend every other skiing holiday together for the rest of their lives. The laggards leave it until the middle of February, so horrified by the prospect of trying to get through another Valentine’s Day of hints and significant looks without a serious row that they too throw in the towel and pledge to make an honest woman of their scowling girlfriend.

  Then Facebook statuses can be updated, walls congratulated, groups created. Former lovers finally give up ‘poking’ someone else’s fiancée. Back in the real world, everyone scrambles over the guest list and the all-important ‘save the date’ fridge magnet. Are we first round or first refusal? Bride, groom or maybes? Suddenly, we show a frantic interest in getting the future Colvilles round for dinner. Such a nice couple. They never make you feel like a gooseberry. I’ve always fancied his sister. Sometimes – in a roundabout way, for we are British, after all – we even try to get the information from the horse’s mouth. Have you set a date yet? Where are you going to have it? Or, most shamelessly and transparently indirect of all: Are you planning a big wedding? Arguments over the date itself can turn violent, especially if you’ve chosen a bumper year. Keep the date free, we’re told. That date? No, this one. Sally’s got that date already. She reserved it as soon as she got engaged last year and her mother has ALREADY BOOKED THE MARQUEE.

  There then follows a few months of peace and quiet, punctuated only by unseasonable March nuptials of surprised-looking girls with five-month bumps and highly traditional fathers.

  The real fun, however, doesn’t start until the stag and hen season, the John the Baptist of the wedding season itself. Some people enjoy being lectured by a little toe-rag on his gap year, brandishing a paintball gun as if it were part of his anatomy. Others get a genuine kick out of an expensive holiday they can’t remember, doing things they hate, accompanied by people they wouldn’t like even if they did know them. I am not one of those people.

  And then, finally, it’s the summer: the sound of leather on willow, the smell of freshly cut grass and the rumbustious clatter of £20,000 parties that have a forty per cent chance of ending in divorce. My favourite time of year. As you may have guessed, I am an old-fashioned romantic and there’s nothing I like more than a good wedding.

  *

  On the ‘day it all started’, right in the middle of the wedding season, I was woken by Alan, which is a fairly unpromising way for anyone to start a day. Alan is, by some margin, the youngest of three brothers – it is widely assumed that Alan’s rather forceful mother desperately wanted a daughter and either tricked or bullied Alan’s father into trying one last time. Alan was the result: an unfortunate name bestowed in the throes of revenge on an unfortunate boy who had the misfortune not to be a girl. Worse still, Alan looks like an Alan. If he had been particularly good at sport, he could have been Al. Big Al. Al man. If he had been artistic or creative, he might have got away with branding himself Ali. But as it happened, Alan was no good at sport or art. He grew up to be a short, slight, malco-ordinated philistine, who was quite good with numbers. So he became an accountant instead. Alan the accountant. Poor sod. And, perhaps worst of all, he also had the misfortune to be my flatmate.

  ‘Wake up, you dozy tosser.’

  ‘Go away, fuckface.’

  ‘Big day today.’

  I groaned and pulled the duvet a little higher. ‘Not as big as your mum.’

  Alan and I have known each other since we were five (his stick-thin mother was our primary school teacher), which is long enough to get away with affectionate abuse. I suppose it’s our substitute for hugging and crying and giggling and eating chocolate and arguing over boys and stealing each other’s clothes and synchronising menstrual cycles and competing over who can eat the fewest Ryvitas, then hugging and crying and giggling all over again, which is what girls who share flats do. Alan’s long-term girlfriend – Jess, who actually is huge – just thinks we’ve never grown up. She might have a point, but it doesn’t make me dislike her any less.

  We got up, breakfasted on cold pizza left over from the previous evening, and took Alan’s rusty old car – partly because I don’t own one, partly because Lisa’s parents live in the arse end of Arseville. And on the way, Alan attempted to ‘talk’.

  ‘So, how are you feeling?’

  ‘I am feeling too hot,’ I said, turning on the car’s air conditioning.

  ‘No, how are you feeling?’ he repeated.

  ‘Oh, how I am feeling? I’m feeling you should shut up and concentrate on the driving.’

  Alan looked momentarily hurt, making me feel momentarily bad. Then he caught Jess’s eye in the rear view mirror and ploughed on regardless. When you catch Jess’s eye, you tend to do what it tells you to do.

  ‘I mean, Lisa… ’

  ‘Lisa what?’

  ‘Lisa, you know… ’

  ‘Yes, I know Lisa.’

  Alan tried, and failed, not to look exasperated. Poor little Alan; he was always looking slightly exasperated by something: by me, by his mother, by his overweight girlfriend, by his job, by his bullying boss Amanda, by life in general. He pushed his glasses back up his nose, sat up straighter so he could peer more convincingly over the steering wheel and let out a long-suffering sigh. ‘All I’m trying to say, Sam, is that it was a relatively long time for you guys so I know how you must be feeling. I mean, I remember what it was like with Matt and Sophie when… ’

  Alan droned on in his good-intentioned way, but I didn’t really care what he was trying to say, or just how empathetically he attempted to say it. The truth was that today my ex-girlfr
iend was getting married to some rich bastard she’d met at work and, on reflection, I probably shouldn’t have accepted the invitation. Alan and I had had an intense debate about it the moment the thick, expensive card had landed on the doorstep six Saturdays previously, its every detail – from the calligraphed address on the envelope (‘Sam Hunt Esq.’), to its precise timing, to the embossed third-person wording of the invitation itself – cloyingly correct.

  She’d only invited me to be polite, Alan had said. I couldn’t possibly go. I’d only been asked in the expectation that I would say no. To avoid any awkwardness, I would be expected to make an excuse about a prior engagement, a family summer holiday perhaps, and politely decline. This was the done thing. Well, perhaps this was the done thing, I’d told Alan, scrawling on a sheet of Basildon Bond and thrusting it under his nose. He’d read it out loud: ‘Sam Hunt thanks Mrs Geoffrey Parker for her kind invitation to the marriage of her daughter. Incidentally, while he’s at it, he’d also like to thank Mrs Geoffrey Parker for letting him sleep with said daughter for eight of the last forty-eight months, even though Mrs Geoffrey Parker never thought Sam Hunt was good enough for said daughter. Unfortunately, due to this latter point, Sam Hunt feels it would be the done thing for him to decline the invitation due to a prior engagement he is just about to invent.’

  ‘You’re a tosser,’ Alan had said, accurately, screwing up my last sheet of writing paper, which meant I had to send an electronic reply instead to lisawedding1@hotmail.co.uk, a nod to modernity which was certainly not the done thing. It would have had Mrs Geoffrey Parker writhing in agony (although not as much, I suppose, as if she’d had to choose lisawedding2@hotmail.co.uk).

  But I’d accepted, all the same – partly out of sheer perversity, partly because I was still friends with Lisa and thought I could handle it, partly because my best mates would be there and I didn’t want to miss out. Anyway, as I’ve already said, I like weddings. The difference between a cynic and a sentimentalist is measured only by success.

  ‘You going to be okay?’ asked Alan as we finally pulled up in front of the church after a torturous twenty minutes getting lost in country lanes and attempting to read the tiny Google map on the back of the invitation while Jess shrieked at us from the back.

  ‘Yes.’ I smiled at him. ‘I’m going to be just fine.’

  And I was just fine, at first. I managed not to snort when we entered the church and an usher I’d never met accosted me with an Order of Service on which the letters ‘L’ and ‘T’ had been unattractively entwined to resemble some sort of GCSE geometry question. I held my peace when Alan stamped jocularly on my foot during the bit where the vicar asked if anyone knew of any lawful impediment why Lisa Amelia should not be joined to Timothy James. I even succeeded in keeping a straight face while Lisa’s elder sister – a harlot of a girl, if ever there was one – read a Bible passage about chastity. At least we were spared Khalil Gibran. And immediately after the service, I was greatly cheered by the look on Alan’s face as Jess successfully jostled for the bouquet.

  The beginning of the reception was ‘just fine’, too. I smiled graciously when Lisa thanked me in her absent-minded way for the generous wedding present, recalling the set of £3.99 tablemats that Alan and I had rushed to buy online the moment the list was announced. I made friends with the waitresses and persuaded them it would be easier for them just to leave the bottle with me. I even had an enjoyable catch-up with Lisa’s father, Geoffrey, in which he did his best to put me at my ease.

  ‘Hello, Sam. How is the acting going?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Bit quiet at the moment. Thinking about sacking my agent. Holding out for the next Bond vacancy. That sort of thing.’

  He laughed. ‘Will I have seen you in anything recently?’

  ‘Not unless you’ve watched Greek television on holiday at 3am and were particularly taken by a credit card advert.’

  Geoffrey smiled sadly. ‘Oh, dear, Sam. It doesn’t sound like much of a way to make a living. Maybe you should settle down yourself some time. Give up the Peter Pan act.’ He turned to intercept someone making his way across the lawn in tails – his own, to judge by the cut. ‘Oh, now, have you met Timothy, my new son-in-law? Works with Lisa in her bank.’

  ‘Worked for Lisa, actually,’ corrected Timothy. ‘I married the boss. And then I quit and went back to university. Good timing, really. Bankers aren’t exactly flavour of the decade. Haw haw.’

  Timothy and I made inconsequential small talk until ‘breakfast’ was announced at 5pm, giving me plenty of time for an important internal debate about whether or not I’d be able to beat him in a fight (conclusion: yes, he had a weak chin). But in retrospect – in as far as you can be sure of anything in retrospect – this was probably the moment that the idea first took root in my subconscious. Lisa now worked in a bank? Lisa was filthy rich? Her husband had worked for her? He’d left to do what he wanted to do?

  We’ll come back to that later. More important at that precise moment was the seating plan. To avoid the embarrassment of numbering the tables – and thereby creating the impression of some sort of hierarchy – the geometrically entwined Lisa and Timothy had taken the considerably more embarrassing decision to give the tables names of English counties instead. My table, ‘Rutland’, was, I noted, the furthest from the top table in the marquee and comprised ten people: my three oldest friends, Alan, Matt and Ed; the achingly trendy young vicar (I think he was called something like David, or Dave) who’d married the couple; his dull, plain wife; and four other born-again Christian girls who apparently knew Lisa’s younger sister from university.

  Lisa had obviously decided that if I was going to be stubborn enough to come to her wedding, then she could at least ensure I wouldn’t get laid.

  Sitting on a table with religious people at a wedding does, however, have its advantages, as I soon found out. Even if Jesus can’t pop up to turn the water into wine, you can be sure that there will be more for the rest of you to get stuck into. And stuck in the four of us got, talking, perhaps a little rudely, over the heads of the others, who were too polite to say if they thought it strange for four people in their late twenties to have stayed in touch since primary school.

  We’d never made any new friends since, Matt used to joke. It’s a dangerous world of strangers out there, Ed would say. I’m too old to make new friends now, Alan liked to quip. But the truth was we liked each other; we knew each other – better than we knew our own families, even. Some unmarried people find themselves stuck with their leftover friends. We were lucky enough to have stayed in touch with the ones we actually liked. We felt like brothers who would never fall out, who could always pick up where we left off, who would never lose touch even if we didn’t see each other for a while. And these days we didn’t get to see each other nearly as much as we wanted. Work got in the way – for the others at least. Girlfriends, distance, travel – all created obstacles. Matt was a not-very-good doctor who kept getting placements he didn’t want in crap parts of the country. Ed had quit his inner-city school due to stress and gone off to TEFL abroad for a while, before coming back to teach in London and moving in with his girlfriend, Tara. Meanwhile, Alan and I kept the home fires burning in our tiny north London flat, which the others would come and trash whenever they could (and whenever Jess, who didn’t seem to like any of us very much, wasn’t around).

  But still, it wasn’t the same; it wasn’t the same as it used to be – at the same series of small schools in Reading, at university together in Manchester, and then in London, predictably, like the rest of the graduate world, in the glory days when all four of us had shared a cheap house next to a drug den in Brixton. It wasn’t how we’d imagined. And now we were almost thirty and hangovers took two days to clear and our parents were retiring and growing old and our other friends were marrying and breeding and getting fixed-rate mortgages and promotions at work and going on smug holidays with other smug couples.

  Now was the end of the beginning of our adult
lives and I, for one, was terrified.

  ‘Are you thinking of getting married, Sam?’ asked the trendy vicar, pouncing on the tiniest of pauses in conversation. Given that I’d just finished telling Matt about the casting director I’d attempted, and failed, to seduce in a desperate bid to get a part in a fringe musical on £50 per week, it was a somewhat naïve question to ask.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, even though I did. ‘It’s just that I’ve been to so many bloody weddings that it can be difficult to get excited about them any more. White weddings, black-tie weddings, Scottish weddings, second weddings, winter weddings, Catholic weddings, happy-clappy weddings, Jewish weddings, civil weddings, gay weddings, Hindu weddings that go on for several weeks, weddings in hotels, weddings in people’s gardens, weddings abroad, weddings on beaches… ’ I broke off to take a swig of wine and stroke the knee of a girl called Mary sitting next to me. ‘I mean, all those hymns and in-laws and seating plans and first dances and speeches and cakes and bands that think they can play The Beatles and “champagne” that’s not quite champagne… Seriously, why are people so keen on getting married? Why does our generation even bother any more? You’d have thought that, in the twenty-first century, we’d have grown out of it, along with black and white television, slavery and religion.’

  The vicar and the born-agains winced. I ignored them. I had an audience for the first time in months and I was on something of a roll.

  ‘Honestly,’ I continued, ‘what’s the big appeal? Years ago, people got married because it was the done thing to do. You chose a girl who didn’t look like the back end of a bus, wooed her, said polite things to her father and then settled down to raise children together. It was the only way to get on in life –’

  ‘It was the only way to have sex,’ interrupted Matt.

  ‘It still is, for us,’ said Mary, removing my hand from her knee.