Beta Male by Iain Hollingshead Page B

more her than me. We did not agree to stay in touch. We did not resolve to remain friends. We did not assure one another that we looked forward to things being the same as they had been before we’d started going out.
    Tara dumped me. I was dumped by Tara. I have been dumped. I am dumped.
    I know what Sam would say. He would tell me that it is harder to be the dumper than the dumpee. In Sam’s opinion, it is difficult to be the one who ends a relationship as you have all the pain of the loss in addition to the guilt of the act. You miss them; you doubt yourself. You hate the pain you’ve caused and you hate yourself for putting them through that pain. Sam should know: he has had plenty of experience of being the dumper. And yet, with all undue respect, Sam knows fuck-all.
    Right now, would I rather be me, pouring out this adolescent angst, or Tara, happily ensconced in her new lover’s £4m penthouse? I would wager that Tara is feeling a lot of emotions right now – greed, smugness, orgasmic joy – and none of themis guilt. Dumpers move on quickly (she has moved on spectacularly quickly). It is the rest of us who are left crying in their wake.
    Maybe I should have seen it coming. Maybe I should have presented a stronger face to the world and hidden how I felt. But Tara has always known how I’ve felt. She knew it the first time I asked her out, five years ago. And she knew it eight hours ago when I fell on our bedroom floor in shock and begged her not to leave me.
    I know what you’re thinking: it’s not very manly, is it, all this begging and complaining? The girl upgraded. Good luck to her. Why would anyone want to go out with someone who ran off abroad to teach English and now works in a rough inner-city school? Who would want to go out with that loser when they could have a rich, older lawyer?
    I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me. I’ve got myself to do that. But let me, at least, attempt to explain what it feels like to be dumped. I could, of course, say that my heart feels ripped out and chopped into a million pieces, that I no longer care if I wake up alive tomorrow morning, that nothing means anything any more, that I’d sooner she’d killed me than broken up with me, but you would only laugh or call me a ‘twelve-year-old girl’, like Sam did. So let me eschew emotions altogether and attempt to explain it in terms of hard facts: I’ve known Tara for more than five years. I’ve spoken to her every single day. I know the first CD she bought and the name of her brother’s second pet rabbit. Her grandmother sends me birthday cards. I’ve seen her practising writing her first name and my surname together. Her friends joked about us getting married. Even her father joked about us getting married. We own a flat together.
    These facts are incontrovertible, yet she has taken the entire narrative of my life, our life, twisted it, crumpled it and ruined it for ever. Nothing is sacred now. That holiday we enjoyed in Ireland in the spring? She was probably already thinking how to end it. The flat we bought and decorated together? No doubtshe was only wondering which room she would like to screw her new boyfriend in first. The plans we made for the future? They were only sweet nothings and meaningless promises until she could find a convenient moment to break them.
    Of course I’m angry. Of course that anger has made me irrational. But, you see, we had
plans
for the future. Or at least, I had plans. I know it’s only girls who are meant to do soppy things like envisaging themselves as grandparents or imagining their perfect wedding day or thinking up names they might give to their children. Well, slap me in my soppy face and call me the loser that I undoubtedly am, but I did all those things. I planned for the future. I planned for our future. And now that future is a foreign country I can never visit.
    I suppose I could give up on Tara