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  ‘But why do the rest of us carry on with the charade?’ I continued. ‘We have friends, we have guilt-free sex, occasionally. Some of us have jobs. Why do we kid ourselves that we can really choose a partner for life? We’re not swans, after all. I might be a completely different person by the time I’m forty.’

  ‘I hope you’re a completely different person by the time you’re forty,’ said Ed.

  ‘Forty is a very long way off for me, Ed.’

  ‘How so? You’re twenty-nine, like the rest of us. In fact, you’re a few months older than the rest of us.’

  ‘Age isn’t linear. You, Ed, have a long-term girlfriend and a mortgage. That makes you at least thirty-three. I have neither, so am still twenty-two at heart.’

  ‘Lisa is Sam’s ex-girlfriend,’ Alan informed the rest of the table.

  ‘Ah, that explains it,’ said the trendy vicar.

  ‘That explains what?’

  ‘That explains why you’re rather anti-marriage today.’

  ‘I’m not anti-marriage, today any more than any other day. I rather enjoy other people’s weddings, as it happens. Attending the funeral for their sex lives is often surprisingly entertaining. No, I just think that marriage should be recognised for the convenient sham that it is. You guys think it symbolises some sort of mystical union between Jesus and his Church, which has to be the biggest pile of bollocks I’ve ever heard. “Christ is the bridegroom, the Church is his bride and Christians marry each other to try and get closer to God.” I mean, come on: talk about three in a marriage. And we heathens aren’t much better, either, pretending to be religious for a few months – sorry, vicar, but do you really think you’re going to see Lisa again now the Alpha course you made her go on is over? – so we can get married in church with some of our favourite childhood hymns and a reading from Corinthians.

  ‘Why can’t we just be honest and say that our choice of partner is decided by a crap little game of musical chairs? At some point in our late twenties or early thirties, blokes think that they might as well settle down with the girl they’re with – the better-suited one they were going out with before becomes a victim of unfortunate timing – and have babies before her biological clock starts ticking any faster, the rows turn more violent and she runs off with someone else. After all, that best female friend we respected too much to risk asking out is now engaged, and so are most of our friends. And it would be nice to have children at a similar time to our friends so we can send them to the same school and take them on joint holidays with their agnostic godparents we no longer like, but have to stay in touch with “for the sake of the children”. Plus, Granny would like to attend a wedding of a grandchild before she dies and the parents are getting broody about becoming grandparents themselves, so hell, let’s put a ring on her finger, get her to the church on time and waltz off together into the sunset.’

  Ed cheered sarcastically. ‘Bravo, Sam. A fine little monologue. You should be on the stage, you know.’

  ‘Encore,’ cried Alan. ‘Our lovely dining companions have seldom encountered such a chivalrously attractive catch.’

  ‘With all due respect to our virgin friends, it is not them that I’m trying to catch.’

  ‘Thank God,’ said one.

  ‘Literally,’ said another.

  ‘So who is fisherman Sam after?’ asked the trendy vicar, chuckling contentedly at his piscine pun.

  ‘Fisherman Sam has absolutely no idea,’ I said, untruthfully, for in some dark, dank recess of my brain an irresistible scheme was just beginning to take shape.

  Chapter Two

  It’s not easy living with Sam. Actually, it’s not easy doing anything with Sam – particularly accompanying him to weddings – but we’ll come back to that later. Let’s start with the difficulties of sharing a flat with a work-shy would-be actor. Like most young(ish) people in London, I have a proper job – not a very interesting one, admittedly: I am an accountant – but a proper job nonetheless, with proper gym membership, proper pension, proper colleagues and, above all, proper hours. That means I have to go to bed and get up at a proper time. Every morning I have to wash and shave. Every evening I have to iron a shirt and ensure I have the requisite number of matching socks for the following day. It is a routine that is entirely anathema to Sam.

  Sam, in fact, is opposed to any sort of routine at all. Some days he’s out temping, waitering, tutoring or – rarely these days – auditioning. Others, he just sits morosely in the flat in his pants watching daytime television. You might have thought he’d find time in his busy schedule to tidy up once in a while or perform a few simple, selfless tasks, such as buying more dishwasher tablets or replacing the toothpaste he’s stolen from my sink. You might have hoped to return occasionally to a flat that is not even messier than the one you left. But no: this, too, is beyond him.

  I can often go an entire week in our cramped flat without seeing Sam. In the morning, when I leave, he is normally still asleep, although I do occasionally get to have breakfast with a girl who has stayed over in his bed. Then, in the evenings, I’m often at Jess’s or she’s at mine and Sam vanishes out on the town with his thespian friends, living on British Thespian Time. Sometimes he’s good enough to bring these friends back at 3am – particularly when I have an important meeting the next day – and play loud, naked drinking games in the sitting room. Picking one’s way across the detritus the following morning is like an intriguing game of Cluedo, as you note a discarded belt here, an empty bottle there, and try to work out what crimes have taken place since you went to bed.

  And yet – if I’m honest – I still love the stupid prat. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible not to. Even those girls at Lisa’s wedding forgave him his extraordinarily insensitive rant. Ed might have sneered sarcastically that Sam was a ‘chivalrously attractive catch’, but one of the Christians, at least, thought so. Mary, I think she was called: a holy name for a girl exhibiting distinctly unholy behaviour. Sam spent most of the pudding course telling her about the void in his life, which he sensed could only be filled by religion, or at least by a religious girl, before whisking her off to the dance floor and spending the night with her in Mrs Geoffrey Parker’s marital bed. ‘Rutland’ was not an entirely inappropriate name for our table.

  I wish I knew how he gets away with it. In fact, I do know how he gets away with it: Sam has charm by the bucketload. And not the kind of superficial, smarmy charm that a certain type of insecure, middle-aged secretary finds attractive, or the brown-nosing flattery of an ambitious graduate trainee, but the genuine charisma of someone you can’t help but like. Everyone likes Sam – often despite themselves – because he makes them feel likeable, because they want him to like them back, because he exudes such a Tiggerish enthusiasm for life. Quite simply, he makes life more interesting. He’s fairly good-looking, too, I suppose, in his way – above average height, messy hair, an infectious, lopsided grin – and every woman with a pulse fancies him. Even my mum, who doesn’t seem to like anyone very much, has a secret crush on him.

  I don’t deny that he can be a complete tosser. He often is. But as far as Matt, Ed and I are concerned, he’s our tosser. He’s also very loyal, which counts for a lot. The lynchpin of our little group, it’s always Sam who worries the most about losing touch with Matt and Ed; always Sam who goes out of his way to get everyone together. Maybe it stems from losing his mother when he was very young. Sam’s not close to his dad – he barely ever mentions him, in fact, and he took an engineering job abroad soon after Sam left home. Sam’s an only child, so the rest of us are like a dysfunctional family to him.

  Our friendship came about by accident more than anything else, after discovering on our first day at primary school that we lived on the same street in Reading. I remember Matt and Sam pelting me and Ed with pebbles on the walk home. Naturally and temperamentally, we still divide much the same way: Sam and Matt are the outgoing ones; Ed and I more reserved. They do a lot better with women in the short term; Ed and I have h
ad rather more stable relationships. The group isn’t without its tensions, of course. Sam is entirely oblivious of the extent to which Ed resents his self-assurance. Matt and I rub along fine together, but don’t really share confidences. And yet somehow, we all get on best as a four, everyone complementing everyone else.

  Sam and I, who are probably the least similar, are also the closest. He’s much cooler than me. He’s certainly ‘lived’ much more than me. When the four of us shared a flat in a crummy part of Brixton straight after university, Ed brought a large map of London one day and hung it in the kitchen. Soon afterwards drawing pins started appearing in random places on the map.

  ‘What do they represent?’ I asked Ed.

  ‘Well, the blue ones show where our other friends live.’

  ‘Nice. And the pink ones?’

  ‘They mark where Sam has had sex.’

  Within five years Sam had colonised most of Brixton, Herne Hill, Clapham, Wandsworth and Fulham with Ed’s little pink dots. He pretended to be embarrassed about it, but Ed kept on pinning away, in awe, as ever, of Sam’s success. Matt, who’s always been a little bit too competitive for his own good, then started adding red dots of his own. Sam was just starting on Finsbury Park when he met Lisa and the map suddenly vanished into a drawer.

  If Ed had kept a similar map for me, I reflected, it would have had just one lonely pink pin, for Jess, in Borough.

  Despite our different temperaments, though, Sam has always included me, always stood up for me. Sure, I don’t like the way he picks on my name. What’s wrong with being called Alan? It’s not as if I couldn’t make puerile jokes about him being called Sam Hunt. But he’s essentially a good person. I wouldn’t trust Sam with anyone else’s girlfriend, but I’d certainly trust him with mine.

  That said, Jess doesn’t think much of Sam – a feeling I fear might be reciprocated. She mocks me sometimes for having two lovers, which just shows how little she understands male friendships. Maybe she’s just jealous she doesn’t have an equivalent Sam of her own. She also thinks he’s a talented wastrel, which is probably true, and a misogynist, which is definitely untrue. If anything, Sam likes women too much. Certainly, he’s never cheated on anyone. He’s never deliberately led anyone on. He actually deludes himself far more than he deludes the willing victims he sleeps with. I’ve seen him genuinely surprised that he has, yet again, fallen head-over-heels in a fortnight and grown bored a week later.

  Sam’s problem is simple: he thinks too much. Take his tirade at his ex-girlfriend Lisa’s wedding as an example. All I could think was, Thank God Jess isn’t on our table. Jess is a terrifyingly clever barrister. She would have torn Sam’s head off. And mine, too, probably, by association. I mean, sure, you can be all cynical and clever about why people get married. You can shock vicars by using rude words. But where does that get you? Nowhere.

  I prefer not to analyse. Analysis can be saved for the spreadsheets in the office. Marriage is just something you do, a stage you reach, like learning to drive or getting your first job or buying a flat. You get married and then you have to grow up and see a little less of your childhood friends. You certainly have to stop living with them. It’s awkward when you earn a lot more than them.

  I was planning on buying a flat with Jess soon. She’s been nagging me about it for ages, but I’d prefer it if the initiative came from me. Then I thought we’d get engaged – maybe when we went skiing next year – and settle down to start a family. It would make my parents happy, I think, to see their final son married. My mum has never been that keen on Jess but hopefully she’s given up holding out for anyone else by now. And, in any case, she’s broodier about having more grandchildren than most mothers are the first time round. As for me, I feel quietly content about the prospect – not heart-racing, adrenaline-pumping mad with excitement – but quietly content. And that is much more important.

  ‘If you marry, you will regret it,’ wrote Kierkegaard. ‘If you do not marry, you will also regret it.’ But I can’t imagine ever regretting getting married because, you see, I am a swan, and I think Jess is, too. She is intelligent, beautiful and kind (and not nearly as fat as I know Sam likes to make out). I want to spend the rest of my life with one person. I want to go out for an evening and not endure the terrible stress of not knowing what will happen. I want never to have to lunge at vacant air again.

  Ultimately, then, I have a simple, old-fashioned idea of marriage: I will choose the girl, I will ask her and I will support her.

  At least, that is what I thought. That is how I imagined it until, two weeks after Lisa’s wedding, I ironed my shirt – my Thursday shirt – picked out a pair of Thursday socks and went to work in the expectation that everything would be the same when I came home again, just as I like it.

  But it wasn’t. It was all horribly different.

  Chapter Three

  Different people have different criteria by which they judge a successful wedding. When Matt’s elder sisters got married a year apart, I’m told his mum simply counted the thank-you letters afterwards and declared that daughter one’s wedding had beaten daughter two’s by a factor of eighty-nine to fifty-four. His dad preferred daughter two’s, though, because it cost £1,237.57 less and he didn’t have to prompt that set of in-laws to go halves.

  Personally, I like to judge an evening on how much carnage I’ve caused. On that basis, at least, Lisa’s wedding was a roaring success.

  ‘Are you proud of yourself, Sam?’ Alan had asked on a rather awkward journey home.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I think Alan was being sarcastic,’ added Jess, helpfully. I don’t think I had risen much in her estimation over the previous twenty-four hours.

  But what wasn’t there to be proud about? The best man mentioned me in his speech – at least I assume he intended a dig in my direction when he said how glad Lisa’s family were that she had, at last, found a suitable life-long partner in Timothy. After the speeches had finished, Matt and I embarked on a bet to see who could dance with every woman in the room first; a bet which I celebrated, gloriously, by giving him the finger over the shoulder of Timothy’s waltzing 96-year-old grandmother as Matt attempted to make up lost ground by dancing with two toddler bridesmaids at the same time.

  Then there was the Christian girl, Mary, with whom I spent an amusingly heathen few hours in Mrs Geoffrey Parker’s bed before Mrs Geoffrey Parker herself decided that she would quite like to sleep in it, although probably rather less acrobatically, with Mr Geoffrey Parker and, understandably, threw us out. This, apparently, was all my fault, so Mary drove off in a self-righteous huff – it was fine for her; all she had to do was say sorry and she’d still go to heaven – to her friend’s house nearby, leaving me with dubious mobile reception and precious little battery as I tried to remember which B&B the other three had booked themselves into (I couldn’t afford a room so had decided to take my chances at the wedding – I find it helps focus the mind). Matt always sleeps with his phone on silent, Ed had passed out and, when I finally got through to Alan, Jess yanked his mobile away to tell me, rather harshly I thought, that I had got myself into this mess so I could get myself out of it as well. Taking the initiative, then, I settled down in the dog’s basket – a rather apt metaphor – until the deceptively docile-looking Labrador padded in from the drawing room and decided he wanted his basket to himself, leaving me to steal half his blankets and settle down in the hammock in the garden instead.

  The ‘proud’ incident to which I think Alan was referring occurred the following morning when I emerged from the bottom of my ex-girlfriend’s parents’ garden, still clad in my rented morning dress, its jacket lightly dusted with leaves and dog hair, and found myself in the middle of an apologetic lunch party for all the people in the village who hadn’t been invited the evening before. Mrs Geoffrey Parker hastily showed me out, her firm goodbye more of an adieu than an au revoir.

  All in all, then, it was a highly successful wedding. Life is short; you have to cha
se the anecdote. One day, when you’re slowly fermenting in an old people’s home, calling the matron by your aunt’s name and dribbling liberally into your soup of no identifiable origin, it would be nice to have something amusing to look back on before you lose your memory altogether and your grubby little grandchildren finally get their hands on your money.

  *

  The only problem with attending such a fun wedding is that the aftermath always feels so depressing. Timothy James and Lisa Amelia were flying off somewhere warm to have lots of rampant honeymoon sex, while I returned to the dodgier part of Islington, where it was raining, and tried to block out the sound of Alan and Jess shagging on the other side of our flat’s thin walls.

  Summer, though, is meant to be one of the happier times of year, especially if you are professionally unemployed. And, after this wedding, at least I had an immediate escape route to look forward to: my annual fourteen-hour, £1 Megabus trip to the Edinburgh Fringe, where I hoped to be able to take my mind off things.

  The truth was that Lisa’s wedding had worried me more than I’d realised. It wasn’t just that Mr Geoffrey Parker had reminded me I was turning thirty and still hadn’t made anything of my life. I was an optimist. Something would turn up. It wasn’t even the obvious reason that my ex had married someone else – that didn’t bother me much either. No, it was more what Lisa’s marriage symbolised. I’d been to lots of weddings before, but this was the first one involving someone who had actually meant something to me. Was this it, then? The start of the rot? Had the first domino in the line fallen? And if so, who was next? Ed? Matt? Alan? I wasn’t sure I could cope if Alan got married. I would be moved out of the cheap, subsidised flat owned by his wealthy, childless uncle, the loathsome Jess would be winched in and I would die alone on a street corner, urchins stealing my tattered rags, rats gnawing my face and the police struggling to identify the remains of an unloved soul.