I was never an alpha-male, always a beta, apart from those odd Saturday nights after four glasses of Chardonnay when suddenly a surge of alpha-ness would kick in and I’d arm wrestle with the best of them. This usually lasted a full fifteen minutes until I hurled up onto the carpet. No, I was a beta — self-confessed, unashamed, willing to sing it from the rooftops if only I could pluck up the courage to scale the ladder.
She — that is, Clarissa — was my polar Greek-letter opposite. What do they call it for women? Gamma, Zeta? I’m not too sure. And I’m not saying she was butch or a he-man or anything like that. Clarissa was feminine, independent, self-assured, blazingly intelligent, gym-junkingly healthy and as sexy as hell. She was a hotshot corporate lawyer and moved as effortlessly through the corporate world as I did through the municipal library while setting up the chairs for Wednesday morning’s children’s book club.
Why she was attracted to me was a great mystery — perhaps one of the greater mysteries of modern-day life. A mystery that would have stumped Agatha Christie, my favourite author. Clarissa was plain-talking. She didn’t hand out compliments lightly. That was one of the things I loved about her. I remember after a particularly intense love making session she lent on her elbow and looked at me with her brilliant blue blinking eyes and said, ‘Kyle, nobody sucks my toes like you can.’
That was one of the nicest things Clarissa had ever said to me and I intend one day to go to a trophy store and get them to knock something up for me, perhaps with a stylised bronze toe/toes as a central feature and her compliment engraved on a heart-shaped shield affixed to the plinth.
For all Clarissa’s strength and independence and wit and charm and strikingly sharp philosophical insights she had one debilitating weakness — the alpha-male. She was attracted to them like a butterfly to a flower, a deer to a meadow, a blow-fly to a dog turd.
The more alpha the male the better. Clarissa’s various affairs with jet setters and bigwigs and geek freaks and deadhead revheads never lasted. Like a roman candle they offered a short period of fizz and sparkle before burning out — leaving her a smoking, hollow ruin. Then she would turn up on my doorstep, and I would let her in and next thing I would be on my knees begging her never to leave me again, and, taking advantage of my near-floor position, I would find myself kissing the dainty phalanges of her halluxes, sending her into such a paroxysm of desire she would practically drag me into my (feng shui certified) bedroom for a night of vigorous erotic acrobatics.
One morning she woke up and said, ‘I don’t know why the fuck I love you — I mean, you are so opposite to me in every way. It annoys me that I love you, it really does.’
No amount of toe-sucking, armpit licking (another talent that she had passed favourable comment on), or earlobe chewing (not sure about that but I’d practised diligently on dried apricots) could lift her out of her melancholy. I knocked up a simple breakfast of avocado smash with slightly runny poached eggs, chia seed jus, honeyed carrots, seared mango in a banana leaf with a matcha and goji berry paste (copied from the Master Chef finale.)
She put down her knife and fork with finality, wiped her luscious lips on my best white linen napkin leaving a lipstick/avocado smear on it (no, I won’t be washing that, ever) and said, ‘That was a beautiful breakfast, Kyle. How is it you seem to know everything I want; my innermost desires, the secrets hidden in the deepest recesses of my heart? Yet, I’m afraid that this must be our last supper. I’m sick of not being able to fathom my love for you or to understand how I still think of you despite all these alpha males demanding my attention. To be truthful Kyle, you’re not even that hot. There’s just some stupid thing about you that’s got me kind of hooked. But I’m wriggling free, I’m no longer a fish at the end of your line. I’m cutting off your hook and sinker and leaving your estuary for the open ocean.’ (The fishing metaphor was word for word from the latest self-help book she was reading, which I purchased and read the day after she showed it to me.) ‘I’ll never love anyone like you again but that’s not the point. From now on I’m in control. It’s over Kyle.’
Holding back tears that could have made an estuary of my apartment, I convinced her to stay a little longer while we both hopped online and did some research. For all her sharp intellect she was shockingly bad at matters of the heart. She went to pieces every time chatGPT came back with an answer she disapproved of (which was every time). I think the love-processing component of her brain had been ‘loaned out permanently’ as we say at the library. It was me who came up with a list of places that she could hook up with hotshot alphas who had brains to go along with their six packs and their un-librarian salaries. She even thanked me as she left. I felt the zephyr from her swooshing ponytail as she turned to go to her car. She walked off in that confident way of hers, a Louis Vuitton clutch bag in one hand and a shovel in the other to cast dirt over my dead heart’s open grave, which I had obligingly dug myself.
Life sucks. I know it. I withdrew into my own little world. Books, my lifelong companions, brought me no joy. None of the women characters were a patch on Clarissa. I even read Clarissa but Clarissa Harlowe was not a patch on Clarissa. Food lost its taste to me. Sometimes I found myself chewing on cardboard. I went back to my university days of living on two-minute noodles and even then I skipped more meals than I ate.
Social media became the cave I would creep into after a day’s labour at the library. Strangely, Clarissa had not ghosted me, and I would often find myself going through her gallery, just to get some idea of what she was up to.
The inevitable happened. On one of her posts there appeared an alpha-male, dark-haired with a neatly trimmed beard. He was square-jawed and tanned and had teeth like piano keys (the white ones). His chiselled body looked like an AI parody photo, except that the way Clarissa draped herself over him like a wet towel was proof that it was real. The alpha came with a name, again suspiciously AI like. Hark Ove Travis. Initials: H-O-T. Is Hark a real name? Sounds more like a Christmas carol if you ask me.
The photos chewed me up inside. But what did it matter? She was over Kyle and was now with Hark. I worked hard to get over my obsession with Calrissa — see, I even spell it wrong now. It looks like I really am starting to forget. That’s got to be a good sign.
As part of my de-Clarissafication therapy I decided to write down the names of all the girls I had had meaningful conversations with in my entire pathetic life. It just may be possible to trace them on the internet these days. After a while I erased ‘meaningful’ and just honed in on ‘conversations’. My list contained just the one name — Laura Atkins. The first time I’d spoken to her was after she dobbed me in during Scripture in primary school. ‘Miss Watkins, Kyle had his eyes open while we were saying prayers.’
Miss Watkins reply was impressively logical: ‘In that case you can both pick up papers in the playground at lunchtime.’
Illogically, Laura was pissed off and refused to talk to me during our lunchtime hard labour. When the bell went she said, ‘This is all your fault, you little shit.’ And that’s how her name ended up on my list.
I did a bit of high-tech searching. I figured she’d be a Facebook user so I searched for Laura Atkins, Lower Bogong Primary School and voila, there she was. Apparently, she lived in the same deadbeat town and get this — she married George Barry. He was the guy that always wore a change of shorts in the afternoons because of ‘accidents’ in the classroom. Her status said single so I presume they’d since divorced.
I DM’d Laura and waited impatiently for a reply.
Oh, I remember you. You’re a naughty boy.
I wasn’t sure whether naughty was meant to be taken literally or kinkily, so I went with the latter and replied that I deserved a spanking and she came back with:
Don’t get fresh with me, you creep. Open your eyes, Kyle. I’ve seen your profile and you’re not even that hot. I still haven’t forgiven you for that day in the playground. Now piss off.
I came to realise that it was Clarissa or bust. I found myself looking at social media posts of her adventures with Hark, wishing that Zuckerberg would bring back the thumbs down option.
I eyed Hark’s muscular physique with asperity. A thought penetrated my skull like a Bogong moth entering through an open window at night. I let it circle the lounge room light. And I let it circle. And circle. Eventually that Bogong-moth-thought revealed itself in stark clarity. It was if a light was switched on (potentially attracting more moths) inside my brain. I resolved on a course of action in relation to Hark Ove Travis that any self-respecting librarian would take: I was going to kill the cunt.
But how to do it? I researched potential murder weapons from my Agatha Christie collection. Ropes were ruled out as I’d never been to Boy Scouts and could barely tie up my own shoelaces. Sharp knives showed promise but I made a bloody mess of my own finger rather than the sacrificial turnip that I had laid out on the chopping board to practise on. Guns seemed the most effective — how I wished I lived in America where I could buy one at Wal-Mart on my way home from work — but alas, in Australia the whole licensing thing seemed overly complicated.
All these methods were far too alpha for me. What about poison? Arsenic, Strychnine, Wolfsbane, Monk’s Hood? They all involved a level of chemical or botanical knowledge that I just didn’t possess. For one foolish moment I considered incorporating some foraged poisonous mushrooms into a Beef Wellington that I could cook for Hark but the idea seemed so ridiculous that I gave it up as a sick joke.
No, I was better off just scrolling through social media with a sheet of Glad Wrap stretched over the keyboard just in case one of my salty tears dripped into the innards of my laptop, ruining my last link to Clarissa.
Ping!
Another post. Ooh, this one has her not so dainty finger (after her live-streamed accident with the cheese grater when she was cooking macaroni cheese for Hark) with a rock the size of a small bird, the diamonds glittering under the artistically-placed side lighting. I read the words ‘celebrate their engagement’ and gagged and coughed and ran to the bedroom and wept bitter tears on my pillow as I (gently) punched the goose-down doona on my cold and lonely bed.
I took all the framed photos of Clarissa off my desk, where I had set them up in a kind of limbo/purgatory, and packed them into old shoe boxes, now serving as memory-coffins. I then went to throw them in the bin but couldn’t decide if they were normal rubbish or recyclable. In typical beta fashion I returned them to that barely accessible area at the top of the walk-in robe.
Now that I’d got that out of the way, and my mind was less like a shaken Christmas snow globe I went back to the computer to view the frivolous details of Calrissa’s engagement post: Celebrate…blah, blah, blah…tandem…blah, blah…skydiving…blah, blah, blah…parachutes?
My beta brain clicked into gear. The details were there for the world to see. Clarissa and Hark were going to celebrate their engagement with a tandem skydive from a plane in the south west of Sydney this weekend. I’d known for some time that Clarissa was a highly experienced skydiver — in fact part of the distance between us was down to my steadfast refusal to jump from a plane with her despite the obvious upside of having her harnessed to my back (we can do that at ground level, without the need for an aircraft, I’d told her.)
That’s how I came to be at the little airstrip not far from Camden on a bright sunny spring day, kitted out in my jumpsuit and helmet with a parachute at the ready. I tapped at my back pocket and was reassured by the feel of the pair of scissors I had there. Who knew the perfect murder weapon was in my sewing kit all this time? I put on my goggles and kept my head down so Clarissa wouldn’t recognise me. I was standing beside Rudy, my tandem partner, a rugged war veteran with a permanent leer who exuded an extreme dislike of males of the beta variety.
The last couple stepped out onto the tarmac to applause from our little group. ‘Happy engagement,’ an attractive woman (a friend of Clarissa’s for sure) near the nose of the plane said. ‘You make a wonderful couple,’ said a broad-shouldered brute near me (clearly a friend of Hark’s). Clarissa shook her head in glee, her hair rippling like a fine Arabian horse’s mane that was performing dressage for a Sultan. In the spring sunshine her lips were like coral and her eyes as blue as the sky we were about to jump from.
Hark was quite the eyeful. His overalls were a size or two too small, his pecs, biceps, triceps, quadriceps and quinteceps bulging like mutant walnuts in a sack. Everything about him made my skin crawl. The swagger in the walk, the unzipped top of the jump suit allowing a few chest hairs on his chest to peek out provocatively, the ridiculously over-manicured beard and the stupid surgically enhanced grin. My right hand instinctively reached into my pocket and I chuckled silently as I felt the scissors again.
Despite tripping twice up the stairs, earning the ire of Rudy, I settled into the cramped cabin of the single-engine Cessna, close to Clarissa and Hark. It was when the engine sputtered into life and the plane started taxiing down the runway that I became acutely aware of the thumping of my heart in my chest that threatened to drown out the sound of said engine. I gripped a strut of the aircraft so hard my knuckles turned white. The plane crept into the air. The thought of jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane suddenly filled me with terror. Holy fuck, what am I doing here? The fields, trees and bovines I could see through the side window grew ever more minute.
’Five minutes until jump time,’ the lead instructor said.
I had manoeuvred myself and Rudy to a position right behind Clarissa and Hark. I admired the contours of her back and gave thanks to whichever Divine Being was responsible for allowing me to have once run my hands over them.
She turned to Hark and said in a gentle tone, ‘You look pale, Hark. Are you nervous?’
‘Ha, ha! Me, nervous?’ there was a pause while he swallowed, ‘N-no chance of that. All I need is for my little shnookie-wookie to give me a little kissy-wissy on the lippy-wippies to make me feel better.’
I involuntary groaned.
‘You right mate?’ said Rudy in my ear.
I had to endure the humiliation of Clarissa kissing her dumb tandem partner on the lippy-wippies. I really wished to do Hark harm. I let go of my vice-like grip on the strut and took out the scissors. I positioned them near the harness of Hark’s parachute and cut. Damn! The pilot swerved and there was a sharp pain in the index finger of my non-scissoring hand. ‘Holy shit!’ I said, sucking the blood from my fingertip.
‘Chin up, mate,’ Rudy said, clapping me on the back. ‘No need to be frightened when you’re jumping with me.’
‘Two minutes to the jump,’ the instructor called out.
The plane levelled out. It was now or never. I took out the scissors again, and cut right into the rope of Hark’s parachute. What the hell? This rope must be made of steel. My sewing scissors made no impression on the tightly-twisted synthetic fibre. I tried again, drawing on all my beta strength. Why…won’t…cut…stupid…fucking…scissors.
We hit some turbulence and the instrument of Hark’s impending doom dropped from my hand.
‘One minute!’
I had to work fast. I reached down to get the scissors and I felt liquid. What was this, a fuel leak? Bloody hell, we’re all going to die. I sniffed my fingers. This wasn’t aviation fuel, it was piss.
From in front, Hark was babbling in a squeaky voice. ‘Clarissa, I can’t go through with it. I don’t want to jump. I want my mummy. Waa-waah…’ Truly, it was pathetic.
‘Hark,’ Clarissa said. ‘You’re a big baby and are spoiling my engagement celebration.’ She unclipped her harness from Hark and pointed to me, ‘You there. Don’t just stare. You’re coming tandem with me.’
I didn’t have time to protest. And anyhow I was trying hard not to wet myself like Hark. It happened all so quick. Clarissa strapped herself to me and we took a few paces and we were out the door and hurtling at terminal velocity to the ground 10,000 feet below.
What a rush. We spun 360 degrees, twisted, rolled and flew like birds. When we landed my knees were trembling so much I could barely stand up straight. The last time I’d felt like this was two months ago, the night of the Master Chef finale, where we sorted out our differences over the judges’ decision in the bedroom.
I took off my goggles as she took off hers. I can’t describe the thrill I felt as her expression changed from startled shock to a sensitive smile. ‘Darling, it’s you,’ she said, throwing her arms around me. ‘I’m so proud of you for making that jump. You’re not a complete beta after all. I’ve made some dumb decisions in my life and now I realise you’re the only one for me. I hope you can forgive me and can see it in yourself to take me back. I love you darling.’
‘Hmm…let me think it over,’ I said, studying my fingernails nonchalantly. I wanted the doubt to gnaw at her for a while. But I caved in after about five seconds. ‘Clarissa, let’s make this engagement celebration for us instead.’
‘Oh yes, let’s,’ she said, wrapping her arms around me and pulling in the parachute so it covered us like a tent. ‘You’ve heard of the mile-high club? It’s such a cliché. Welcome to the ground-zero club, Kyle.’
Photo by Kamil Pietrzak on Unsplash
