Beta Male Read Online Free Page B

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.
    I’m not being melodramatic. I’d seen Jess’s face when she caught that bouquet. She was a determined woman and I knew what she wanted. She wanted Alan away from us and there would be nothing he could do about it. I’ve seen it happen before. Friends get married and then they vanish – however much they protest they won’t – into Marriage-Land, a small country like Lichtenstein or Andorra, which no one who isn’t married can ever find. You can’t get a visa to visit Marriage-Land, even if you want to. They do things differently there. The customs are strange, the language alien. They have ‘dinner parties’, ‘weekends in the country’ and, eventually, small alien creatures called ‘children’.
    I hoped Edinburgh would be a good place to get away from all this. I’ve always loved the Fringe. During the day you can wander around the city, soaking up the atmosphere created by the street entertainers and resolutely refusing to pay them any money when they embark on their speeches to a crowd of confused Japanese tourists about how they have ‘suffered for their art’. I have suffered for
my
art. No one wants to pay me for it. When any of my friends come to watch my plays, they probably suffer for my art, too.
    In the afternoon, if the mood takes you, you can watch someone eat their own penis while standing on their head and playing the ukulele. If you’re feeling more serious you can catch the latest production of
Othello
, re-interpreted by an avant-garde company of blind Latvian dwarves. My favourite activity, though, is to wander among the students on the Royal Mile, occasionally approaching the stressed, red-eyed producers and asking them how much money they’ve lost so far on their festival jaunt.
    â€˜My advice to you is to become a lawyer instead,’ I said, only half-jokingly, to one student producer-cum-actor on this trip.
    â€˜Oh, I fully intend to,’ he said, entirely seriously. ‘I just thought it would make my CV look more rounded when I apply for my City internship next summer if I could show that I’veworked creatively in a team while managing a limited budget for the benefit of that team. Then, of course, there are the concomitant marketing skills I’ve added to my skills basket… ’
    Twats constitute a relatively