Men I've Loved Before Read online

  ‘You’re right. It’s bigger than football and even video games by a long shot,’ Neil agreed with drunken enthusiasm. He nodded his head so vigorously that his eyes disappeared, up and away, somewhere behind his forehead. His smile was slack and accepting but, even through his drunken haze, Neil recognised a prickle of discomfort spike his conscience. By agreeing with Karl he was tactically condoning his illicit affairs, but in fact he didn’t agree with Karl’s behaviour. Besides, Neil knew that Nat would be disgusted if she got so much as a whisper of Karl’s exploits and he knew she’d want him to be dismayed by Karl’s vulgar, careless bragging. And so he was. Appalled by it. Mainly. But the horrible truth was, he was also just a tiny bit curious and a smidgen envious.

  Neil and Natalie had been married five years now and in all that time Neil had been completely and utterly faithful in deed and mostly faithful in thought. Naturally, after years of sex with the same woman (usually in the same bed, at the same time of the week, initiated in the same break between TV programmes) it tended not to be the sort of sex that could be described as everything. Neil found that he often stole some illicit, gratuitous pleasure from listening to Karl’s stories. Neil sneaked a look at Tim, who had been married to Alison for three years. Were they still having the everything sort of sex?

  Tim was trying to look bored with Karl’s conversation; he hadn’t had a drink and so could not find it in him to indulge Karl’s loutish conceit. In the past there had been occasions when he, too, had enjoyed living vicariously through Karl’s escapades but now it all seemed infantile; he was simply irritated by it. He would have liked to tell Karl that he was spouting crap but it was Neil’s birthday and to celebrate the fact they were here at the Bluebird restaurant on the King’s Road in posh Chelsea and so it would seem rude; dissent would hinder the digestion of the gorgeous grilled organic rib-eye steak. Besides, a condemnation of what Karl was saying might reveal that he was not having the everything sort of sex and he’d rather stab himself in the eye with a steak knife than admit as much to Karl.

  Karl and Tim had always been furtively competitive. Tim knew it was something to do with the dynamics of their respective relation­ships with Neil but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what (not without sounding gay) and he’d rather admit to Karl that he wasn’t having the everything sort of sex than say something that might make him sound gay. Neil and Tim were each other’s oldest friend. They’d been buddies since primary school.

  They’d grown up on the same sprawling housing estate, just a few miles south of Nottingham town centre, in identical, modest 1970s semis. Houses that Tim’s mum and Neil’s parents still lived in, although both families had since added a porch and Neil’s parents had gone the whole hog, they’d built an extension which provided a fourth bedroom. They had been able to afford this at just about the time Neil, his brother and sister had left home, rendering the longed-for extension useless except for every other Christmas when Neil and his siblings, their spouses and families visited home for three tense days of overeating and mild squabbling. Neil had once told Tim that he didn’t mind Christmas squabbles; he believed them to be inevitable. He thought of his family as a very close family and he was pretty sure that things like his mother’s continual insistence they all eat just one more mince pie, his sister’s doggedness that they opened their Christmas presents in size order, his father’s resolve that they each discuss (at tedious length) the route they chose to travel home (and then all alternatives!), and his brother’s competitive nature, which sprang like a well throughout charades, monopoly and even when answering the quiz questions in the crackers, were all signs of their closeness. Families were supposed to be comfortingly habitual; that was the point of them.

  Neil and Tim had attended the same small and earnest primary school and the same sprawling and indifferent comprehensive. At both institutions they had frequently stood side by side, silently encouraging and supporting one another whenever they faced their headmaster or mothers (after being caught in the inevitable scrapes that kids are caught in) and then, as teenagers, when they’d faced down Dave-built-like-a-brick-shithouse and his gang of thugs (both of them refusing to hand over their lunch money which was a stand neither could have made alone). They went to separate universities, Tim studied mathematics at Bristol and Neil studied computer graphics at Cardiff, but they called and visited one another frequently throughout those three years and then after graduating they moved to London and shared a dingy flat and numerous cheap curries. For nearly three decades now they’d stood shoulder to shoulder for various team photos, at bars, in ski lifts, before exams and job interviews and at the altars where they’d been each other’s best man. There was no doubt that Tim was Neil’s oldest friend but at the risk of sounding like a girl, Tim could never shake off the nagging feeling that Karl was Neil’s best friend.

  Of course Neil and Karl both worked in video games, they had that in common, Neil as a designer, Karl as a marketer. This instantly transformed them into hipper types than Tim could ever hope to be. Tim was a computer programmer. He liked his job well enough, it paid nicely but it hadn’t been a childhood ambition, he wasn’t passionate about it like Neil was about his work. Neil had always been mad about video games and manga illustrations and superhero comics and all sorts of other cool stuff. Since Neil had been a teenager he’d been determined to become a games designer and he didn’t give a damn that career advisers, teachers and such were forever telling him there was no real money in it.

  Neil and Karl had met twelve years ago at an industry event but cut the seminar to go to a lap-dancing club. Tim had had no idea that Neil had ever wanted to visit a lap-dancing club; he probably hadn’t wanted to until Karl had suggested it. It turned out Neil also wanted to go snowboarding in Le Corbier, quad biking in the Cadiretas Mountains and mud wrestling with naked girls in Bratislava. Everything Karl suggested was fun, enticing and irresistible; everyone found this to be the case. Especially women. Karl was sickeningly successful with women. The mystery was, Karl wasn’t actually that good-looking. He was trendy and had an expensive haircut (artfully sculpted to look as though he’d just got out of bed and never gave styling any thought) but it had long since occurred to Tim that all of Karl’s features just missed being extremely handsome by a smidgen. His eyes were blue and he had thick, long lashes (the type that girls craved) but the eyes were small and too close together, his top lip was disproportionately thin in comparison to the bottom one, he had a fine nose but it was a fraction too long and gave the illusion that it was about to crash into his chin. He was tall, which was a plus, but he hadn’t bulked out in his thirties as most men did and he’d been described as lanky as a teenager and it was just as accurate a description today. And yet, charismatic Karl was and always had been a colossal hit with women, with his bosses, with his mates, with footie refs, even with the men who came to install his cable or read his meter.

  It was sickening, really.

  When he burst into any room or gathering, he radically elevated the mood. There was never any embarrassing hiatus in the conversation, just plenty of hilarious jokes and interesting stories. He was amusing, razor-sharp, poised and he seemed to have a limitless stream of spellbinding anecdotes. He was happy with his lot: his job, his girl­friend, his disposable women and his flat. He didn’t seem to take himself or anyone else too seriously. Many would say he was the perfect twenty-first-century man. The truth was that Karl was more amusing, astounding and controversial than Tim. In short, Karl was more compelling. Tim thought it was hard to keep up.

  ‘Do you know what, if everyone understood and accepted that sex is everything and more, the world would be a far, far happier place to dwell,’ said Karl. ‘There would be less war, less theft, less violence, less lying.’

  Tim wondered if Neil was simply too drunk to notice that the stuff Karl was spouting was just plain old bollocks. The sort of sex that Karl was having (the sort with air hostesses and other strangers he met on business trips) inevitably led to
more lying, not less. Actually, Neil was not paying that much attention to what Karl was saying now; he’d tuned out. Neil was thinking about the fact that he really had quite a good chance of getting laid tonight even though it was Wednesday. After all, it was his birthday and Natalie was not an unreasonable woman. When he’d called Nat this evening and discovered she was at home he had considered going straight there from work, rather than going for a beer with Karl, just in case he caught her in the mood. But then he’d reasoned that she’d probably dashed home from the office to search out some quiet privacy, to prepare for her meeting in the morning, and he didn’t want to get in the way, so he hadn’t suggested it.

  Karl carried on. ‘Sex is the ultimate secret to happiness.’

  ‘What evidence do you have for that?’ asked Tim with an irritated sigh.

  ‘Well, mate, I understand and accept that sex is, you know, massive and I’m a very happy man.’

  ‘You sound like a sex addict,’ Tim said, not bothering to hide his annoyance. Mostly Tim was annoyed because Karl, with his slack morals and careless cruelty, was happy whereas Tim, who had always done his best to be a decent human being, was often barely content, let alone happy. Not recently. Not since he and Ali had been trying for a baby. Trying and failing, that was. It didn’t seem fair. Tim swept his eyes around the restaurant. It was buzzing even though it was midweek. He liked it here. Despite its lofty size, the place felt intimate. If only Karl would stop going on about sex, he’d be really enjoying Neil’s birthday dinner. Natalie had chosen well. The restaurant was decorated with warm chocolate browns and deep, rich reds which subliminally suggested bitter chocolate brownies and ripe raspberries. What else was on the dessert menu? Oh yes, sweet melon jelly with poached pear, walnuts and chocolate sauce. He stared up at the stunning skylight, gilded with glimmering metallic chandeliers, and wished the women would come back from the loo. Not only could he order pudding but they’d put a halt to this infantile conversation. Why did women need to go to the loo in packs anyhow?

  He knew the answer and it was not a comfort. They went in gangs to gossip. Right now, Alison would be issuing the fertility update to Nat and Jen as though she worked for the BBC World Service. She’d be discussing the exact quality of his sperm, or more accurately the lack of quality. She just didn’t see any reason to keep this sort of information to herself. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ she’d insisted when he’d asked if she could possibly be a tad more discreet. ‘It’s just biology.’ She’d be explaining that for most men each millilitre of semen contains literally millions of spermatozoa (technical name for sperm and the one she preferred to use right now), but this was not the case for Tim, his sperm count was ‘significantly below average’. That’s why he wasn’t allowed to get pissed tonight which was making this conversation about filthy, flirty, dirty sex all the harder to endure. Apparently, his sperm had a better chance of hitting the jackpot if it wasn’t pickled in alcohol. It was astounding to Tim that Alison had insisted that they go to a doctor to have that choice piece of information suggested and confirmed. He’d have thought years of living together and seeing how getting lashed affected his ability to aim piss into the pan would have been evidence enough for her, but no, Alison needed to hear it from the men in white coats. It had been a mortifying exercise. Ali wasn’t herself just now. Baby-making had become all-consuming and over a period of about eight months he’d watched his wife change from a happy and intelligent woman to an angry and irrational beast. He really hoped that if (when, he self-corrected; he always had to think positively, Ali insisted on it) when she got pregnant, she’d revert back to her rational and reasonable self. Otherwise any child they might have would certainly end up in therapy. Suddenly Tim felt rebellious.

  ‘How about I get us a bottle of champagne, to go with pudding?’ he asked. ‘I’ll get it from the bar then it won’t go on the bill. My treat.’ Tim stood up abruptly.

  ‘Nice one, pal, very generous of you,’ said Neil with a grin.

  ‘My pleasure.’ Anything rather than listen to Karl’s bragging or at least if he had to listen to it, then he’d rather be slightly numbed. Off he strode in the direction of the bar.

  ‘I wish Tim would just leave his car here and he could pick it up in the morning,’ said Neil the moment he was out of earshot. ‘I think he could do with a real drink. He’s not himself tonight.’ Neil was disappointed this was the case. Birthdays, by necessity, only came round once a year and he wanted all his mates to be in the right mood to celebrate. He knew Nat had put a lot of effort into arranging tonight for him. She’d been coordinating diaries all summer. Tim’s jittery mood and refusal to get wasted wasn’t very celebratory.

  ‘Have you noticed that if you mention the word sex, Tim reacts as though he’s just been snapped by a speed camera,’ commented Karl.

  ‘What?’

  Karl leaned towards Neil conspiratorially. He actually tapped his nose which was only excusable as they were both drunk. ‘The thing is, to him sex and speeding are a bit similar at the moment, a mix between occasional necessity and genuine compulsion, but if you’re caught, you have to cough up big time.’ Karl laughed at his own witty metaphor. Encouraged by a booze-induced belief in his own brilliance and a sneaky, somewhat pleasant, suspicion that he knew more about this subject than Neil, he continued to explain. ‘Tim is drowning in domestic responsibility and being beaten by procreation issues.’

  ‘What?’ repeated Neil. He was none the wiser.

  ‘They’re doing the baby-making thing. He only gets it at certain times of the month now. He’s not even allowed to shake hands with his old fella. Plus, when they do actually get down to it, it’s all a bit perfunctory,’ explained Karl.

  ‘He told you this?’ Neil asked in disbelief. It was generally acknowledged that friendships between boys are sustained (indeed blossom) only if all the concerned parties are careful never to talk about anything too personal which might embarrass any one of them and, besides, if Tim was ever to behave out of type, he’d confide in Neil, not Karl. Neil was pretty sure of that.

  ‘No, you silly sod, of course he didn’t tell me this. Alison told Jen, who told me. Alison must have discussed it with Nat. I’m surprised she hasn’t filled you in. I think this conversation about me getting it up the Dutch bird is reminding Tim of what he’s no longer enjoying.’

  Karl and Neil both turned and watched, with some sadness, as Tim tried and failed to attract the attention of the chic barmaid. Tim used to be quite the man about town although he’d never been aware of it. In the past, he was the one they always sent to the bar because he was the undisputed looker of the gang. Since a pair of red-blooded males noticed and acknowledged he was hot, how could barmaids – mere women – resist him? They’d practically slithered in his direction if he so much as nodded. But that was then, this was now.

  ‘He’s never going to get that fucking champagne,’ said Karl impatiently. ‘You know what the problem is, don’t you? He’s fading. The receding hair, and “dad uniform” of pale chinos, pink shirt, slight paunch mean he’s faded into the background and Alison’s not even up the duff yet. By the time their kid is attending nursery school, he’ll be invisible.’ The phrase ‘poor sucker’ flitted in and out of Karl’s mind. ‘Hell. He might call me a sex addict but I’d say I’m just a normal man and he’s forgotten what being a man is,’ he added.

  Suddenly they were swamped by an anxious, slightly despondent silence. Neil didn’t like it, Karl couldn’t stand it. Despondency was not their thing. Karl made an effort to claw back the former mood of irreverence, a mood more fitting for a birthday celebration. ‘And as a normal man it’s my given right to think about sex every thirty seconds,’ he joked.

  ‘Every thirty seconds, are you sure?’ Neil looked alarmed. Instantly he felt inadequate. Hearing this statistic was a bit like finding out that your best mate understands all aspects of the quantum theory; you feel left behind.

  Karl appreciated the insecurity. Even he considered ev
ery thirty seconds an unsustainable and unlikely goal. ‘Don’t sweat it, mate. This dubious statistic, which has seeped into modern culture as fact, originated from nothing more substantial than a women’s magazine. It’s ironic that it was women who gifted this particular carte blanche to us lads by publishing an article claiming pathetic single-mindedness is true of all men. The article was probably little more than an elaborate joke, initially intended to highlight men’s inability to multitask, or emotionally engage, or some other bollocks. Well, that apple pie backsplattered, didn’t it, mate?’

  ‘Why’s that then?’ asked Neil.

  ‘Well, if a bloke were to think of sex, say, once an hour, he is considered moderate, not deviant or imbecilic,’ Karl explained.

  ‘And do you? Do you think about it once an hour?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ It was Nat who asked this question. Neil and Karl jumped guiltily as they registered that Tim had returned from the bar and was holding a chilled bottle of house champagne and six glasses and the girls had returned from the loo. As the women sat down, they rolled their eyes at one another conspiratorially. They hadn’t caught the conversation but they took an educated guess as to what the blokes would be talking about.

  Football. Again.

  3

  ‘Did you have a fun night?’ Nat asked Neil as she picked up his arm and wrapped it round her shoulders. She rested her head on his chest, he leant his head against the cold taxi window and they both watched headlights and street lights whizz by. The very last whispers of the late summer day had disappeared behind London’s skyline. Nat sighed contentedly; she loved balmy nights such as these.

  Natalie felt around for Neil’s hand. She found it and their fingers automatically entwined. She remembered a period in their lives, years ago, when getting into a taxi guaranteed that they would immediately pull at each other’s clothes eagerly and make urgent, ham-fisted grabs at one another’s flesh. Desperate for each other, they’d been unwilling to exercise any restraint. She didn’t actively miss that time, not as such. It had always been embarrassing paying the cabbie after he’d seen you all but fornicate on the back seat. Yet, being conscious of the fact that that time in her life was over (for ever) was at once a comfort and a challenge for her. She saw that getting older offered all sorts of compensations but she also knew that being young was undoubtedly glittering.