Free Mr. Commitment by Mike Gayle Page A

I’m truthful I have to say that I’m just absolutely terrified by the thought of being a dad. I’m not ready.”
    “I suppose it’s a bit like how sometimes I don’t feel I’m ready to be a husband,” I added helpfully. I thought about Dan and his denial over Meena and the wedding invitation. “And not altogether dissimilar to how Dan isn’t ready to be a dad, a husband or even a boyfriend.”
    “When do you think we’ll be ready?” said Charlie.
    Simultaneously we looked at each other, shrugged a simple “Dunno” and ran up the hill to catch up with Mel and Vernie.
    For days after my conversation with Charlie I couldn’t shake the feeling that he, Dan and I were some sort of metaphor for every malaise that had ever affected the modern male. It would only be a matter of time before the women in our lives swapped our real names for American Indian ones: He-whose-sperm-is-his-own; He-who-must-be-single; and He-who-loves-his-girlfriend-but-is-scared-of-marriage.
    It really was only a matter of time.

Nice use of light
    I t was the following weekend and I was just coming to the end of a fifteen-minute set at the Giggle Club—aka the downstairs bar of the Amber Tavern in Islington. Even though I’d only been the second comedian on that evening, the crowd had liked my regular material enough for me to experiment with some new stuff that I’d written on the way over on the bus that night.
This,
I thought, as I thanked the crowd for being a wonderful audience and walked offstage,
has been a very good night.
    As the compère came on and announced a ten-minute interval I sat down at the back of the room and caught up on the comedy-circuit gossip with Steve and Alison, the Giggle Club’s promoters, and Craig, Lisa and Jim, the other comedians on tonight’s bill. Still buzzing from the response of the audience, I very nobly offered to get a round in for everyone. Big mistake. They all said yes. So I took their orders, tried not to cry at the thought of how much this was all going to cost me and disappeared to the upstairs bar. Just as I was about to order the first drink, someone tapped me lightly on the shoulder.
    “Ben Duffy?” I turned around to see a woman standing behind me. “I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your set. You were brilliant.”
    Even at this incredibly low level of comedy, it was possible to get the occasional groupie. Not that I’d ever had one. There was no way, however, even in my wildest dreams, that this woman was a groupie. Behind her black oval spectacles—the type hideously beautiful people wear to tone down the effect their visage has on mere mortals—was a pair of deep brown perfectly proportioned eyes. Her waves of thick black hair were tied back from a face so flawlessly perfect it felt rude not to stare. She was dressed casually in jeans, trainers, a cream skinny-rib polo neck and denim jacket. The whole look made her stand out a mile from the pub’s mixture of students and professional Islingtonians. It said, “I know who I am—I am beautiful.”
    “Thanks for the compliment,” I said, offering my hand. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
    “I’m Alexa Wells,” she said, as if it was a name I should know. “I kind of know the music video director, Mark Basset, and his fiancée Julie Watson.”
    “Do you really?” I asked, balking at the fact that Mark had become so successful that he’d joined that selective band of people whose job title preceded their name.
    “I mentioned to Mark last time I went round to theirs for dinner that the program I work on was looking for a comedian. He told me about you and gave me a video of your act a couple of weeks ago. I only got round to watching it yesterday but I really loved it.
Really, really
loved it.” She floundered momentarily, embarrassed by her own enthusiasm. “Erm . . . anyway, when I saw in
Time Out
that you were on the bill here tonight I just grabbed a bunch of the researchers and the assistant