Beta Male by Iain Hollingshead Page B

laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s good. Mary told us you were funny.’
    â€˜Mary told you about me?’
    I could see Mary waving her arms frantically and mouthing ‘no’ behind us, but Stock Market Christian ploughed on regardless. ‘Yes, we had a little prayer session last week in whichthe leader suggested we shared the burden of sin weighing on our consciences.’
    â€˜The leader?’
    â€˜Yes, the prayer leader. And Mary had some thoughtprovoking experiences at a wedd – ’
    â€˜What are you guys talking about?’ Mary had given up on her semaphore and bounded over to intervene.
    â€˜The burden of sin,’ I said. ‘It’s fascinating. Although, personally, I must admit that I’ve never found it much of a burden.’
    Stock Market Christian clapped me rather too hard on the back and patted Mary rather too gently on the knee. ‘Oh, Mary,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how you find them.’
    â€˜Find what?’ I was beginning to take an intense, borderline violent, dislike to Stock Market Christian.
    â€˜I’m sorry, Sam,’ said Mary, hastily taking one of my hands in hers. ‘Nothing gets people more excited here than the prospect of a reformed sinner.’
    â€˜Who says I’m reforming?’
    They all laughed again, a little sadly this time, giving me a chance to take a proper look at Mary. She was attractive, certainly – not as stunning as Lisa, but striking, nonetheless. She had a good figure, full, red lips and the kind of glossy blonde mane that posh girls with too much time on their hands are good at cultivating. She was diplomatic, too, if the last few exchanges had been anything to go by. So why hadn’t I called her myself after the wedding? Did I only like her because she had got in touch with me? Could this really work? Wouldn’t her brassy self-assurance drive me mad?
Was it just the surname
?
    â€˜What made you become a Christian?’ I asked my apparent rival. If I was going to make a go of this with Mary, I would have to make some sort of effort with her friends.
    â€˜It’s a long story, Sam,’ said Stock Market Christian. ‘But basically, I had a fifteenth-century house in the country, aPorsche 911 on the drive and a penthouse flat in the Docklands, but still, something was missing.’
    Yeah
, I thought.
Your testicles.
    â€˜So I came to this church,’ he continued, ‘and just felt this really real connection when the Holy Spirit entered me.’
    â€˜And what happened when the Holy Spirit entered you?’ I asked, conscious in a vague, agnostic way that a giggle at this juncture would surely mean eternal damnation.
    â€˜I felt really warm and fell to the floor, twitching,’ he said, smiling at the memory. ‘When I stood up again, I found myself singing out, subconsciously but not against my will,
Ti amo
, which is the Italian for “I love you”. I had no idea why I was doing this. But later that evening, I met Mary, who was also there for the first time. I discovered that Mary had studied Italian at GCSE… ’
    Stock Market Christian left the sentence unfinished as if only a simpleton could fail to grasp the depth of its meaning and declare that he, too, had seen the light thanks to Mary’s secondary-education choices.
    â€˜I don’t get it,’ I said. Maybe I
was
a simpleton.
    â€˜Don’t you see? This was God’s way of showing Mary and me that we were less alone in the room.’
    It was God’s way of showing Stock Market Christian that he was a prick, I thought.
    â€˜And also,’ he continued, ‘there’s the fact I sang in Italian. That’s quite remarkable, don’t you think? I don’t even speak Italian.’
    I was saved from telling him what I really thought – which was that my grandmother’s neutered dog didn’t speak Italian either, but even it could probably guess that
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