Best Man Read online

  ‘Well, you’re bound to feel a little jealous . . .’

  I don’t follow. ‘Jealous? Why?’

  Julia clears her throat. ‘Well, for the last few years it’s just been you and Nick, right? And now Sandra’s come along and—’

  ‘And?’ I interrupt, bristling slightly.

  ‘Well, I remember when my best friend got married. I was really pleased for her and everything, but there was a part of me that almost resented their happiness, because I knew that things would never be the same between us again.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ I ask, incredulously. ‘That I’m,’ I almost choke on the words, ‘jealous of Sandra?’

  ‘Don’t feel bad, Adam. It’s only natural.’ She gives me what I’m sure she thinks is a reassuring smile. ‘Anyway, it’s bound to be your turn soon.’

  I exhale loudly. ‘Why do weddings always make people want to talk about your turn? You never hear that same thing said at a funeral.’

  She ignores me. ‘Seriously, though,’ she continues, ‘haven’t you ever felt close to proposing . . .’ she pauses, as if debating whether to complete the question ‘. . . again?’

  ‘Julia, if you recall, last time I got down on one knee it took me a long time to get back up on my feet again.’

  She frowns. ‘No, I mean apart from . . .’ I look up sharply, and she stops mid-sentence, and turns back to the sink. ‘It’s just that you’ve gone out with all these women in the last few years,’ she continues. ‘Have you never thought that you might have a future with one of the others? Or anyone before?’

  I’m worried that she’s fishing for compliments and referring back to the brief period that we dated, before she started going out with Mark. We’d had a fling at college, after I’d been to see Sting in concert and brought her back a poster as a present signed ‘To Julia, love Sting’. This, while quite impressive enough to get her to jump into bed with me in gratitude, would have been all the more remarkable had it actually been signed by Sting himself, and not one of my more inspired forgeries. I think about my answer carefully, wanting to do it justice, and then reply.

  ‘Nope.’

  Julia stops washing up for a moment and glances at me over her shoulder. ‘And do you know why that might be?’ she asks.

  I shrug. ‘Still looking for “the one”, I suppose.’

  ‘The next one, you mean,’ says Julia, a little acidly. ‘Mark says you’ve got so many notches on your bedpost it’s in danger of collapsing.’

  ‘Oh, he does, does he?’

  Julia looks at me sheepishly, as she considers her next sentence. ‘I have a theory,’ she says. ‘Do you want to hear it?’

  Everyone’s got one, I sigh to myself, resuming my search of the kitchen cupboards. ‘Go on then.’

  Julia attempts to balance a glass on top of the already precarious pile of crockery on the draining board. ‘Well, it’s like this. Everybody starts off searching for their own Miss or Mister Perfect – their ten out of ten, if you like. Some people go through life constantly looking for this and always end up being disappointed, because they never find it. Some people wise up early on and realize when they meet a six or, if they’re lucky, a seven, they should grab it with both hands because they might not get anything better. Some other people meet and marry a four or a five and supplement this with a series of affairs to bring their average up.’

  ‘I must ask Mark what score he gives you.’

  Julia sticks her tongue out at me and carries on. ‘And the problem with this search for perfection, this ten score, is this. It doesn’t exist. Well, let me clarify that – it might exist but chances are, unless you’re very lucky, you’ll never find it.’

  Like Mark’s scotch, I think, opening the oven door and peering inside. As a last resort, I check behind the microwave and then just give up and help myself to another beer from the fridge.

  ‘You see!’ exclaims Julia. ‘Eventually you just can’t be bothered to keep looking any more, and so you end up having to compromise.’

  Ah-ha. The dreaded c-word. I really don’t want to have one of these serious in-the-kitchen-at-parties type discussions, so try and introduce a light-hearted note.

  ‘But what if you still enjoy looking? The thrill of the chase, and all that.’

  Julia folds her arms and looks at me levelly. ‘Adam, you seem to forget that you’re dealing with people’s emotions here. You might be content to go along and “sample the wares” without getting emotionally involved, but what about them? Your innocent . . . victims? One or two dates might be enough for you to discount them because—’

  ‘They’ve got funny toes?’ I suggest.

  Julia scowls at me. ‘Whatever. But from their point of view, they might be starting to fall in love, however little. You then dash their hopes and you’re not giving them any feedback.’

  I really don’t like where this conversation is leading. I keep waiting for her to ask ‘What was wrong with us, for example?’, which I’m sure she’ll say just as Mark walks into the room, so I decide to go on the attack.

  ‘Feedback? But what could I say – “I’m sorry, but I’m dumping you because . . .”’ I search my memory for another recent example ‘“ . . . your canine teeth are slightly too long”? That’s hardly constructive criticism. It’s not as if she’ll go away, have the offending fangs reduced at the dentist, and then expect me to take her back. And, anyway, that’s never the real reason. My picking on things like her teeth is really just a front for that missing thing – the spark. I’m sure if that’s there, then these little things won’t seem such a big issue for me. I mean, I can’t just say “I’m sorry but you just don’t do it for me”, can I? Surely that’s more damaging than a remark about her physical appearance? There’s nothing she can go away and do about that, is there?’

  Julia looks a little stunned. ‘Erm . . .’

  ‘What’s best? I lie, and say “It’s not you, it’s me”, or I tell the truth, and say “It’s not me, it is actually you”?’

  I can almost hear Julia’s brain ticking. ‘So you haven’t ever met up with an ex-girlfriend who’s lost weight and thought “Wow – she looks great – perhaps I’ll ask her out again”?’

  I shake my head. ‘Never.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Nope. Although that’s probably because I wouldn’t have gone out with a fat girl in the first place!’

  Julia punches me on the arm, hard enough to make me question Mark’s earlier black eye excuse, leaving a soggy fist-print on my sleeve. ‘See!’

  No, I don’t. ‘See what?’ I try not to rub my throbbing bicep.

  ‘Your whole approach is too shallow in the first place. You spend all day looking at these perfect, airbrushed images of surgically enhanced women on this website of yours and then wonder why you can’t ever meet anybody in the real world who matches up to this.’

  I look at her incredulously. ‘That’s rubbish. And do you really want to know why?’

  Julia smiles and nods. I take a deep breath and try and construct my answer.

  ‘My . . . serial monogamy isn’t because I’m looking for perfection. I’m just an old romantic and want to feel something special with that special someone. Somebody who brings out the best in me. Inspires me, if you like.’ I suddenly remember that this is a conversation I had with Mark on the eve of his wedding, when he’d told me how he knew he was doing the right thing. I try and put it into my own words, as much for my sake as Julia’s. ‘That’s it in a nutshell,’ I continue. ‘I just want to be inspired. What’s wrong with that?’

  Julia stares at me for a moment, mouth slightly agape. ‘That’s beautiful,’ she says.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘I’m hardly leaving a trail of broken hearts behind me, am I? It’s not as if once I’ve chucked these women they become emotional cripples and go and live in a convent somewhere. In fact, many of them have gone on and got married soon after they went out with me. Or in some cases,’ I nod towards Julia, ‘married the next p
erson they went out with.’

  ‘Hmph!’ says Julia, in that annoyingly smug way women have when they are convinced that they’ve just proved a point, whereas you have absolutely no idea they were even trying to make one. ‘Exactly! And how many of your exes are you friendly with?’

  ‘I’m friendly with them all.’ And that’s nearly the truth. I’m more than happy to remain civil to my exes. In actual fact, it’s more than inconvenient not to, seeing as I still bump into many of them on a regular basis in the gym, at the bar and so on.

  ‘Okay, let me rephrase that. How many are you friends with?’

  ‘Including you? Er . . . one. Maybe two.’

  She’s right. I don’t think that I’ve ever ended up as ‘friends’ with any of them – not in the true sense of the word. Every relationship I’ve ever had has ended badly, I suppose. It would have, wouldn’t it? Otherwise it wouldn’t have finished. After all, there are very few happy ‘endings’.

  ‘There you go,’ she says, gesturing towards me with the washing-up brush, and spilling some soap suds on my shoes in the process. ‘I rest my case.’

  ‘No – there you go. That proves my point. If I’ve never met anyone that I’ve wanted to stay friends with then that proves they haven’t been the right one for me, because, and I quote a number of sickly relationship counsellors, “Your partner should also be your best friend”, or some such bollocks.’

  ‘Well, that means you should marry Nick then,’ says Julia, peeling off her rubber gloves.

  I shake my head slowly. ‘But there’s another problem. I don’t want my partner to be my best friend. I already have a best friend. I want my partner to be something different. Why did you marry Mark, for example?’

  I regret asking the question as soon as I’ve finished the sentence, suddenly feeling as if I’m being disloyal to Mark, but Julia seems to be happy to tell me. And, scarily, she doesn’t have to think about her answer.

  ‘Because I wanted security. More importantly, I wanted kids. And given the choice between someone like Mark and someone like you . . .’ She looks me up and down. ‘Children need a role model for a father. Not a male model.’

  I’m struggling to work out whether this is a criticism or a compliment when Julia speaks again. ‘And besides,’ she continues, ‘Mark is—’

  ‘Mark is what?’ slurs a drunken Mark, as he lurches through the kitchen doorway, perfectly on cue.

  ‘Mark is a selfish bastard for hiding his whisky,’ I tell him, and his eyes flick briefly towards the cupboard under the sink.

  I march across the kitchen, open the cupboard door and triumphantly remove the bottle of scotch.

  ‘Ah-ha!’ I cry. ‘Saved by the Bells!’

  Chapter 5

  Our company, PleazeYourself, is one of the most popular Internet sites in Britain – not that you’ll hear anyone admit to using it, though. Say you’re in the office one afternoon, searching perhaps for ‘flowers for mother’s day’ on the world wide web but instead, and completely by accident, your fingers slip and type in ‘naked Swedish nurses’. . . Well, you just might, if Nick’s done his job properly, be directed to our home page. We’re a link site, a directory of the pornographic pages that litter cyberspace – log on to PleazeYourself.com and you’ll be presented with more naked nurses than you can shake a big stick at.

  The directory is compiled by a team of ‘researchers’, students mainly, whom we employ to sit in a darkened room all day and surf the net on our behalf. Ours is the only company where employees are rewarded for looking at porn on the Internet during office hours – once they find somewhere that looks interesting we email the site to explain what PleazeYourself does, and, if they’re agreeable, add their name to a link page under whatever classification, or flavour, if you like, of pornography they happen to feature. For example, as of today, if you look under ‘voyeurism’ on our site we can direct you to three hundred and fifty-seven different sites for your viewing pleasure.

  And how do we make our money? Well, whenever someone joins a site they’ve found by clicking through from PleazeYourself, we cream off a small profit. Admittedly, these commissions are pretty tiny, but, fortunately for us, of the millions of people who log on to the information superhighway every day, many of them simply want to get off. Alternatively – Why make it hard for yourself? is our innovative catchphrase – you can choose to pay a monthly subscription to become a PleazeYourself ‘member’. Tell us your particular preference – nothing illegal or arrestable, of course – and we’ll email you whenever we find a new site that features your fetish of choice.

  Either way, Nick and I do very well out of doing very little. We don’t have to spend any money on advertising, either (surprisingly, our recently adopted monkey hasn’t produced an upsurge in revenues – a fact which I take great pleasure in constantly reminding Nick of), as most of our success has been due to word of mouse.

  Nick’s the technology guru. His job is to make sure that every time somebody searches for a particular word on the Internet our site comes up as one of the top answers. If curiosity then gets the better of them, and they start to explore PleazeYourself, well, kerching. So, if someone is searching for the word ‘beaver’, for example, Nick’s skill is in making sure that we also appear in a list of other classifications about those lovable dam-building aquatic mammals – and you’d be surprised how far some nature lovers get before they realize they’ve made a ‘mistake’. He even wrote Thomas – which is what we call the software program that manages the database technology behind the site. Why ‘Thomas’? Well, it’s a search engine used primarily for masturbation, so Thomas the Wank Engine it became.

  And what do I do in this sordid but successful operation? Well, I’m responsible for the copywriting. Fortunately, our researchers provide me with a brief description of what it is they’ve found, which saves me having to look at every single site – not something I ever thought I’d admit, but sometimes you can see too much porn – and then it’s up to me to write some enticing little phrase to encourage the surfer to visit. After all, how otherwise would you be able to make an informed choice between Luscious Lesbians or Sapphic Sweethearts?

  We’ve told our parents that PleazeYourself is an Internet introduction agency, which is sort of true, and the site almost runs itself, which means that Nick and I can pick and choose our work hours, usually only a few days each week, and still get to earn something approaching a six-figure salary. It’s all cleverly disguised by Mark as dividends and expenses, and his skill in fiddling the Inland Revenue, or, as he prefers to put it, exploiting the UK tax laws to our advantage, means that both Nick and I are, to use more of Mark’s jargon, quids in. Unlike crime, pornography pays.

  The business centre where we’re based is a ten-minute walk (or twenty minutes by car) from our respective flats, but Nick still pays extra for a parking space, simply so he can drive the Ferrari to and from work. We don’t really need an office – the team of researchers can fortunately sit in their own darkened rooms so we don’t have to house them, but I suppose it gives us the impression of being a respectable company with a Chelsea address rather than some seedy little backroom operation. On the front desk sits a full-time receptionist, Becky, who serves all the companies in the building. Nick and I share a large suite on the first floor, outside which Nick’s three-days-a-week assistant used to sit, handling all those administrative things that he couldn’t, or, more accurately, couldn’t be bothered, to do.

  It’s Monday morning, and, as usual, I’m on my own in the office. Nick rarely makes an appearance before midday anyway, still living up to his college nickname of ‘The Lie-in King’, and, besides, he’d muttered something about ‘wedding stuff’ on the phone yesterday. I’m staring hard at my computer screen, my right hand aching, although from nothing more depraved than trying to beat my best Solitaire score, when my phone rings. It’s Becky.

  ‘Adam, your ten o’clock is here.’

  ‘Thanks, gorgeous,’ I reply. Becky has a crush
on me, which I exploit mercilessly, thus guaranteeing I get the best biscuits (chocolate chip shortbread cookies, which are normally only for visiting heads of state) whenever I order coffee or tea in one of the meeting rooms. Minor details like these are important.

  I get up and check my reflection in the mirror, straightening my tie as I walk down the stairs towards the front desk. I’m wearing a suit today because we’re interviewing for a new PA, although why Nick needs an assistant in the first place I don’t really know. I think he bears the expense simply for the pleasure of telling people approximately once a month that they should ‘call his PA’ to set up a meeting.

  His previous dogsbody, Suzanne, had decided that since Nick hardly spent any time in the office then neither would she, and had started diverting all the office calls to her mobile whilst out shopping, having long lunches or going to the hairdressers. Nick wouldn’t have found out about this if he hadn’t been skiving himself, of course, but he’d been strolling through Harrods one morning whilst talking to her on his mobile phone, assuming that she was hard at work back in the office, when he walked round the corner in the foods department and found her there doing her weekly shop.

  Nick finds it difficult to be tough. Unlike me, he doesn’t have a lot of experience of breaking bad news to women, and he’d found the sacking meeting particularly hard.

  ‘But what are you supposed to say?’ he’d asked me beforehand.

  ‘Try this,’ I’d said, as he unsheathed his Montblanc pen. ‘You tell her: “Suzanne, I don’t know how I’d manage without you”’ – I’d watched as he’d scribbled furiously – ‘“but I’m going to try.”’ I swear he was halfway through writing the word ‘going’ before he’d looked up at me.

  ‘Bastard,’ he’d said.

  Anyway, he’s decided to hire some temporary help until he can get someone new on board full-time, so I’ve volunteered to interview some candidates from a local agency for him, and standing with her back to me at reception is the girl who I guess must be my ‘ten o’clock’ – Charlotte Evans. I wink at Becky and clear my throat.