Best Man Read online

  My personal favourite time here is the soap slot, between 7.30 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. on a weekday evening, when West London’s fitness-conscious (or, I suppose, non-television owning) women love to sweat away in front of Coronation Street or EastEnders. Personally, I can’t stand the soaps, and it means that I’m reduced to listening to my personal CD player whilst all the televisions are tuned to one or the other of these programmes, but fortunately the gym scenery usually makes up for what’s on the screens in front.

  I survey the alternative entertainment on offer before deciding which exercise machine I’ll use, workout specificity sacrificed for the best vantage point, of course. Today, however, despite arriving in time for Emmerdale, the selection’s not so great, so I settle for a bike at the back of the room, where at least I can get a good view of the whole gym.

  I plug in my CD player, which I’ve loaded with some fast-beat Ibiza-style mix where all the ‘songs’ seem to blend into one another (it’s a feature of the CD, honestly, and not just me sounding like my dad), select a course on the digital display and start my workout. At the same time, I try and work out what I’m going to do about Nick.

  He and I have been best friends for as long as we both can remember – the kind of friendship where the other person always acts as the reference point for the major events in your life. Stories always start, ‘Nick and I were . . .’ or ‘Nick, do you recall . . .’ or similar. Our parents lived, still live and will probably die next door to each other in Margate, a town so neglected that it shouldn’t be twinned with anywhere. It’s more in need of fostering.

  Like me, Nick was an only child, but we were so close that we didn’t feel it, and perhaps because of that we’ve always looked out for each other. We’d gone to the same schools, been in the same classes even, and when the time came to choose a college Brighton had seemed a good option for both of us – relatively close to our respective homes, and offering a good enough degree course, business studies, which should have led to something positive in terms of potential careers.

  Not that either of us had any idea what we wanted to do with our lives at that time, except work our way through our grant cheques whilst not-working our way through college. It was there that we’d met Mark, having all answered the same ad for a house-share in Albion Terrace, a run-down Victorian street just off the seafront. The three of us had hit it off immediately, mainly because we shared a childish sense of humour.

  Of the three of us, Mark was the only one who seemed to take studying seriously. He was on the accountancy course, and seemed to us to have been born into the profession. I remember one drunken night, one of many drunken nights (but one of the few I actually remember), we’d had that ‘dream careers’ discussion, where we’d all had to decide on our ideal job if qualifications (and talent) were no object. Mine was easy: photographer for Playboy magazine, and Nick soon settled on Ferrari test driver. That same night, Mark admitted, sadly, that he had always wanted to be an accountant. We’ve never let him forget that.

  We stayed in that house for the whole four years, loving the Brighton life. On sunny afternoons we’d skip lectures, pile into Mark’s car and head up on to the cliffs at Beachy Head, where we’d sit for hours, watching the sun set over the horizon and emptying the endless cans of beer that we’d emptied our bank accounts to buy. Nick and I would perch right on the cliff edge, our legs dangling over the crumbling chalk, seeing who dared sit the furthest out. Mark always stayed a few feet back, blaming his vertigo but really just preferring to keep both feet on solid ground.

  Once we’d finished our degrees, lured by the big noise and bigger salaries of the capital, we’d moved to London, where Mark had already got a position with one of the top accountancy firms. Together the three of us had rented a flat in Chelsea, where Nick had taken a job with an IT company and I’d joined an advertising firm. And then, four years ago, while Mark was progressing steadily towards both parenthood and his partnership, Nick and I had set up PleazeYourself. We’ve never really looked back.

  You know that Monty Python sketch where the old guys are sitting around remembering how tough they used to have it? I can see the three of us like that in years to come, sipping piña coladas on the beach, talking nostalgically about life gone by. Oh, except for the fact that we didn’t ever have it tough.

  A harsh bleeping sound signifies the end of both my reminiscence and my exercise programme, but instead of heading for the weights machines I find myself hitting the ‘start’ button again, because just getting on to the bike in front of me is this – at least from behind – gorgeous woman wearing the smallest pair of Lycra shorts. I’m a huge fan of Lycra; I think it must have been a guy who invented it, and whoever he was should be given a medal for services to mankind. I can just imagine him showing his invention off at the annual scientists’ convention:

  ‘Gentlemen, I present my latest discovery – it’s a super-elastane material with high-tensile properties.’

  ‘And how do you think your invention will benefit mankind? In the field of engineering? Or medical science, perhaps?’

  ‘Why, neither. Rather, I forecast that in the future it will be dyed the most garish colours and used to harness all manner of sweaty breasts and buttocks.’

  She’s obviously doing some type of hill workout, because every few minutes she stands up on the pedals for – I count – thirty seconds, affording me a fantastic view of her pert behind.

  A quarter of an hour later, and I’m flicking through the various workout choices on the LED screen in front of me – interval training, fat-burning – frantically searching for one labelled ‘coasting downhill’, when suddenly the gym empties. EastEnders is over, and the only soap being attended to now is in the showers. I’m knackered, but Lycra-lady is showing no signs of stopping, so I consider my options for a moment. I’m too tired to start another session, so instead I walk over to the stretching area, where I do some half-hearted exercises, hoping that she might come over and join me when she finishes her ride.

  By the time I’m in danger of becoming so loose I won’t be able to stand up, she finally gets off her bike. I’ve sat so I can monitor her progress in the mirror without being caught staring, and I congratulate myself on my positioning as she towels herself down in full view and then comes over to where I’m sitting.

  I’d been worried she might be, to use one of Nick’s incredibly sexist terms, a ‘butter face’ – one of those women who looks fantastic from behind but when she turns round she’s really ugly, i.e. great body, ‘but-her-face . . .’ Not so with this one. Short dark hair, a cute nose, a bit like that new BBC news presenter who everyone claimed got the job due to her looks and not her journalistic experience of sitting and reading an autocue.

  There are three mats, and I’ve purposely taken the middle one so she has to come and use one next to me, and I feign indifference as she sits and starts her cool-down. I’m just about managing to touch my toes and can’t help but stare as she effortlessly leans forward and rests her forehead on her knees.

  She looks up and meets my gaze. ‘Hard?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ My eyes widen inadvertently.

  ‘Exercising after a busy week at work. It’s hard.’

  Not having had a busy week at work for a while, I smile back.

  ‘You’re looking good on it, though,’ I say.

  She straightens back up and dabs with her towel at the sweat glinting sexily off her top lip. ‘Thanks,’ she says, blushing slightly.

  ‘Good workout?’ I ask her.

  ‘Not bad,’ she replies, mid stretch. ‘I’m just trying to get back into shape after . . .’ Her voice tails off.

  ‘After?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’ She looks at me for a moment as if considering how much to reveal, and then drops the towel, metaphorically speaking. ‘I’ve just broken up with someone and I’m going through one of those re-focusing times. I’ve only recently moved to London so I thought I’d join a gym, as I don’t really know anybody here.’ />
  Hmm. Newly single? New in town? Has possibilities. ‘Well, now you know one person, at least,’ I say, holding out my hand. ‘Adam, by the way.’

  ‘Samantha,’ she replies, and we shake hands, rather formally seeing as we’re both sat on the stretch mats, sweaty, and not wearing very much.

  We chat for a while, Samantha twisting her body into more and more convoluted positions, me trying to keep not only my interest from growing. Eventually she stops her routine and regards me nervously for a moment, as if she’s running me through some sort of approval process.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I don’t normally do this, but . . .’ she takes a deep breath, ‘would you like to go out for a drink some time?’

  ‘Er, yes, why not. That would be nice,’ I reply, after the briefest of pauses.

  ‘Well, when might you be free?’ she asks. ‘Tonight?’

  I hesitate for a few seconds, wondering whether I should really be trying to sort things out with Nick instead, and for a moment Samantha looks as if she’s worried she might have overstepped the mark, or put me under a little too much pressure.

  ‘That’s if you’re not busy, I mean,’ she adds, unconsciously stretching her leg up behind her ear.

  Nick can wait for this evening, at least. ‘No,’ I say, smiling at her. ‘I mean, no, I’m not busy. Tonight’s good,’ and we arrange to meet in an hour at a bar on the Fulham Road.

  I walk back towards the changing room, wondering whether I’ve got time for a quick Jacuzzi, but when I see that there are already a few people in there I decide against it. That’s the problem with those communal ones – you can never be quite sure where all the bubbles are coming from. Instead, I spend some time in the shower, careful to wash thoroughly in preparation for this evening, and as I get dressed I play back our brief conversation in my head, just to make sure I’ve got the facts straight. Samantha. Sam. One of my rules broken already – women whose names can be shortened into a masculine form. It makes it more difficult down the line to say ‘I love you’ if those three words are followed by something male-sounding. Oh, and while I’m on the subject, never ever go out with a girl with the same name as your mum. Crying it out in bed just doesn’t . . . Well, you get the picture.

  I head out of the gym and walk slowly back to my flat, exhausted from my extended exercise session, and when I get in I notice the answerphone light flashing insistently. It’s Evelyn, my date from the previous Saturday, wondering if I’m interested in a ‘repeat performance’ tonight. Feeling slightly guilty, I delete the message and get ready for my date with Samantha.

  Ever since I was a baby women have been picking me up. I’d been one of those few newborns lucky enough not to exit the womb a dead ringer for Winston Churchill, and my mother was always being stopped in the street so complete strangers could hoist me out of my pram to fuss over me. In my formative years to walk down the street was to run the gauntlet of constant hair-ruffling, cheek-pinching and prickly kisses from old ladies, normally accompanied by an ooh, isn’t he cute, or he’ll break a few hearts when he’s older. All this female attention must have made a big impact, because this is something I’ve worked hard to maintain all my adult life.

  Now, aged thirty-one, that babyish charm is long gone, but through a combination of hard work – admittedly in the gym rather than the office – dressing well and, of course, close attention to personal hygiene, I’ve managed to maintain a respectable level of attractiveness, which means I do pretty well in the competitive dating world. I don’t mean to brag, but just as some people are good at games or have an ear for music, this is my speciality. I’m one of those people for whom the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, and believe me, I work hard on all my parts.

  You know how you occasionally see pictures in the newspaper of brothers or sisters of celebrities, and they share certain facial characteristics with their more famous relative but just don’t quite have that star appeal, or whatever you call it? Well, next time you see one of those pictures, think of a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan (somewhere between the Remington Steele and Mrs Doubtfire years should just about do it), and then, using the same formula, imagine how his younger brother might look, and that’s me.

  I’m just under six feet tall – five eleven and a quarter, in fact. That’s 181 cm in new money. It bugs me slightly that I haven’t made the six foot mark, although I can’t quite see the sense in having this standard. Roll on metrication, then I won’t have to feel miffed at not being a ‘six-footer’. After all, no one’s going to say ‘He’s a shade under one hundred and eighty-three centimetres’, are they? I’m currently tipping the scales at around twelve stone, which apparently is my ‘ideal weight’. Ideal for what? Not being a fat bloke, I guess.

  And here’s my confession: my name’s Adam Bailey, and I’m a date-a-holic. That’s right – I go out with women. Quite a few, Nick and Mark will tell you. Okay, short-term and serially, if you want to define it even further. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid any of this serious ‘relationship’ stuff – quite the opposite, in fact – I don’t have any issue with commitment. It’s just that too often I start seeing a girl and we get on fine, but there’s the rub. We only get on fine. No spark. No violins playing, no fireworks going off overhead, no aching hearts when we’re apart, hoping when the phone rings it’s her, that sort of stuff. There might be nothing at all wrong with the poor girl, but for some reason I just know it’s not going anywhere. I then get hung up on the slightest of issues, which means it’s never going to progress past more than a couple of dates. They might range from the unreasonable – discovering that she has fat ankles – to the very unreasonable – maybe pronouncing ‘espresso’ with an ‘x’, as in ex-presso – but as soon as I notice something like this I’m off. Call me fickle, and I’d agree with you.

  It’s not that I don’t want to settle down. It’s more that I’m not prepared to settle. Compromise. Call it what you like, but only Miss Right is going to become Mrs Bailey. And I don’t mind how many frogs I have to kiss.

  I study my reflection in the hall mirror before I leave. I’m dressed straight from the pages of GQ – untucked, fitted black shirt, a pair of what I guess are called smart-casual trousers, new underwear, black, recently-shined shoes, hair just on the trendy side of unkempt, and I’ve lightly doused myself with Issey Miyake, which (thanks, for once, Cosmo) I believe to be a smell that meets with almost universal female approval. A quick check of the wallet for those two first-date prerequisites – cash and condoms – and I’m off.

  I always arrange to meet first dates at the venue itself, instead of picking them up in the car beforehand, mainly to avoid all those awkward dropping off at home issues afterwards. If I’m not interested in extending the evening, it’s much easier to get into separate cabs outside a bar or restaurant than be sitting outside her house in my car trying to think of excuses not to come in. Plus, if the evening becomes mind-numbingly boring, and trust me, many of them do, I can seek escape in a bottle or two of good wine without worrying about driving home. It’s also because I’m quite strict on this drinking and driving stuff – my policy is that if you drive and then drink, you should drink so much you can’t find your car again at the end of the evening.

  I arrive at the bar early, find a table with a good view of the door, and order my ‘usual’, a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. I drink this for two reasons: firstly because it looks pretty cool, and secondly because I actually like it, and I’m on my second drink by the time Samantha walks in. She’s ten minutes late (not a good sign – I was starting to get a little worried), and I watch her as she stands nervously by the door for a few seconds before I wave her over to where I’m sitting. She looks good – a simple blue but very low-cut dress that means I’ll have to try hard not to stare down her front all night, and I notice with satisfaction that quite a few heads turn, both male and female, as she makes her way over towards me. I ready my best charismatic smile and stand up to greet her with a kiss on the cheek. She smells good
, and reddens slightly as I tell her so.

  We order a bottle of wine and chat for a while about the usual innocuous things: her parents, friends, her work. She tells me that she’s an assistant research technician for a drug company, and then I make the mistake of saying ‘So what exactly does an assistant research technician do?’

  I pride myself on being a good listener, which turns out to be just as well given the amount Samantha’s got to say for herself, as she embarks on an explanation, in minute detail, of the process of bringing a drug to market, the testing procedure, everything down to deciding on the appropriate size and shape for the tablet itself. Maybe it’s because she’s nervous, or more likely I’ve plied her with too much wine, but by the time we’re on our second bottle she just doesn’t stop talking.

  ‘Wow,’ I say, twenty minutes later, stifling a yawn and having gathered enough information to go into competition with Pfizer, ‘I’ll never look at an aspirin in the same way again.’

  And then things take a turn for the worse. ‘So,’ she asks, fixing me with a slightly out-of-focus stare, ‘what star sign are you?’

  Oh NO! Horoscopes. And so soon. This is definitely a conversation I don’t want to get into, and the more interest anyone shows in the subject, the less I’m interested in them. Libra, I always reply, well balanced, in a ‘hilarious’ reference to the scales, although it’s not as if I’d say fishy if I was Pisces of course. So you’re the creative, analytical type, they say, or some such rubbish. No, I reply, it just means I was born at the end of September. But it’s all to do with the tides, they never tire of telling me, and as your body is seventy per cent water . . . , but by that point I’ve already zoned out.