Me Moy Men by C G Welles

ME

I was sixteen when I discovered my perversion for women.  “Mine.” That was the perversion. I’d learn that everyone has emotional baggage of some kind and “Mine” was mine. My step mother told me my Dad was the most jealous man she had ever been with—at least there was that. My perversion had been passed down to me—from father to son. Even psychoses can have sentimental value.

My first girlfriend, Penny, was the perfect person to show me what challenges lay ahead.  I can still smell her fragrance now. She hid its allure behind Calvin Klein perfume so I had to get closer to her ear to find it. Penny was from a wealthier family than mine and lived upon the edge of a wide field with sheep that were free to come up to the fences of the garden. She was fifteen, smart, impassioned and gregarious—a horse-rider with the unequivocal shape of a woman.  She courted and won me, not the other way round—romance would happen this way a lot in my life. I was unshakably shy and it took me four evenings of being alone with her to muster the courage for a kiss. But once that had happened, ‘mine’ became ‘and nothing else.’ I cashed out all interest in every other aspect of my life. My French studies dropped by three grades in as many months, and my academic rival at school was left marvelling at the power of women. He should have marvelled at the weakness of men.

Penny was well-known at the pub where I worked in the kitchen at weekends—her easy-going father was a local there.  I remember well the turning heads of men twice or even three times my age and they showed their envy of me by warning her father of the problems a young lad can cause to a young girl’s life—that he should keep an eye on me. Her father nodded wisely and said it wasn’t me he was worried about, it was her. The jealous men laughed loudly over their pints of real ale when they heard this because it fed their imaginations of her sexual potency while also belittling mine. She enjoyed their attentions, I could see—her eyes sparkled in their company and she was conscious of her form. It felt all strange and wrong. I grew more jealous than they were. I could enjoy any part of Penny but she would never be fully mine.

I can’t rationalize some memories of my mother.  When I told her of my perversion for Penny, instead of giving me a pebble, she said my girlfriend was a whore. This was the only time I ever hit my Mum, or any woman. I punched her in the arm but it was still a punch—another stain.

For a time, I loved as fully as any boy could. Over the first few months I was obsessed with Penny’s taste.  If her parents had not come home when they did that one time, we might even have put a peg on her father’s concerns—she was in a frenzy that time and dragged me to her bedroom, staggering with her jeans half way down her thighs.  When her parents found nobody in the living room, just a diminished vodka bottle open by the sofa, they called out through the house with voices that were shrill. We trotted downstairs from up, reddened and dishevelled—she over the top normal, me as sheepish as anything beyond their fence. They asked me to leave.  That was the last time I was allowed alone with Penny at her home.

Everything slowly fell apart.  I wanted the world to disappear and leave me alone with her. But she was the balanced type and loved society more than she did me.  She would bathe in the smiles and laughs of others when we were out. And, as I felt my importance to her dwindle, so did my grip on her tighten—I demanded she stick to me more closely instead of to everyone else. I felt the twist of fear for the first time and began to accuse her of having feelings for other boys. There was no going back from this and it was right that we parted.  After six months, I made my demands—that she give me more attention or we separate. I wanted to own what could not be owned. Mine. She took a whole day to think about it, which flatters me in retrospect, before she chose option two. That was the end of that—I went back to work and she to her Dad and his friends. I heard her laughter down the hall from the bar as I cleaned the dishes in the kitchen.

MOY

“If you learn just one thing from me, Moy, it’s this: always think for yourself.”

My Dad was the only person who called me Moy.  He had no idea it meant ‘Mine’ in the countries I would spend my adult life. I embroidered the M and the O and the Y into my Christmas stocking with pride. Mine.

Like every child, I remember Christmas mornings more than anything, but I have memories too of bird-watching before breakfast on Boxing Day, just Dad and I. He put a dash of whisky in the coffee flask and I learnt how to spot every bird in the British Isles. Except waders—even Dad struggled with waders. I also remember sitting bored in the stalls at low-division football games destined for nil nil. I dissected yellow cigarette butts and waited for soup in a cup at half time.  I watched Dad work in the garden, passing him nails or fetching secateurs. I loved the word secateurs when my Dad said it and only learnt much later he said it wrong.

Occasionally, I would also see him play as a goalkeeper for the village team. Before one game, he practiced in the garden and kicked the ball at me with all his strength, which was a lot. I stopped it but it nearly broke my wrist. He said I should have gotten out of the way for that one—didn’t I hear him say?  I don’t think he said anything, but that might just be how I like to look at pain and those who inflict it. More often than not it’s no accident.

That pebble of wisdom about thinking for myself was the only one Dad gave me; at least it’s the only one I remember.

He left when I was ten for a better life.  Mum blamed everyone but herself.  First she blamed Dad for being unfaithful; she had no problem that he had stopped loving her, it was the infidelity that stuck in her throat. She then blamed ‘that bitch’ whose fault it also was and threatened to throw a brick at her when she waited in Dad’s car outside. I always thought that was quite imaginative as threats go and maybe Dad was impressed too because he didn’t know what to say. Mum punctuated it by breaking a chair on his shoulder.

In the years that followed, Mum turned her blame onto me and my sister, which didn’t sit well with us as that’s where we’d already turned our own. It took a few years before we realized whose fault it really was if anyone’s.

My friends told me I was lucky. Unlike their fathers, mine continued to make an effort after he left. He brought me and my sister to his new home every two weeks so we could see how a happy family lived. We watched how a happy wife was and, after some years more, how two happy children were too; an elder brother and younger sister just like me and mine. We were lucky. On the day he announced his new wife was pregnant with their first child, Dad even broke down in tears of happiness—really, from happiness. That was the only time I ever saw anyone cry from joy. He must have been dourly miserable before.

I held on to that one thing my father told me, the thing about thinking for myself. I ‘thought’ that even kids with asthma can smoke. I ‘thought’ that selling weed was less wrong than banks pushing credit cards. I ‘thought for myself’ that I didn’t need to go to classes to get my degree. And with thinking for myself working out so well, I went on to quit careers, relationships, cities and then whole countries. London offices: I enjoyed quitting them. When I told the CEO I was leaving to teach abroad on the month of my promotion, he replied that people don’t leave jobs like this.  I told him thanks but I was thinking for myself.

In retrospect, I am not sure my Dad ever approved of any of my decisions. I wonder what he expected me to think for myself if not the things I thought. I guess he really meant I should think his thoughts and the clue I missed was my name in another language embroidered on my Christmas stocking.

MEN

It occurred to me at thirty-nine that perhaps I am some kind of military device. Not a bomb—more like a poisonous gas. But a biological weapon, which is worse than a bomb because nobody knows that it’s happening. I should at least be green in colour but I just look like friendly smoke. It didn’t matter whether I was right to end the relationships I ended—what mattered was that I started them at all. And now the women whose homes I seep into are mothers, which means I am not just hurting them but their children too.

Men.

It took a little less than two years before my mother found a new man to love. I had moved on myself too—I was twelve and my new hobbies included smoking, using every means at my disposal to kill the birds I used to watch, and getting drunk at my friends’ parties.  I even exterminated a white dove with a fire extinguisher. It was nesting in the roof of a barn and just sat there as I gassed it with white from a can. I can’t rationalize some memories of myself either.

Mum’s new boyfriend, Gareth, was an artist—and a good one—who also liked jazz. I think I told him to go fuck himself pretty early on.

But he stuck around. I had to admit he was a good sort—kind, intellectual, and as soft in manner as in midriff, but assertive—the kind of self-possession we speak well of. Most of all, though, he was patient. One day I told Mum that her bedroom smelt of fish in the mornings after he stayed. On another she told me and my sister that Gareth had a bigger erection than Dad’s. It took a little while for us to accept Gareth.

But we did. After a couple of years more, by which time we’d moved to a smaller house in a bigger village on an estate where people didn’t read books, I grew to like Gareth. I already had aspirations to be a writer even then and he took an interest in feeding that fire. Novels, art history and jazz. Even holidays to Cornwall he paid for. He asked me if I wanted to drive with him in his beat up funky car—just the boys and his dog—Mum would drive my sister in ours. I said yes and he used the trip to teach me jazz. What I learnt was that I liked him. I realized he was actually more like me than my father. My Dad was a senior exec in the public sector and vocal about disliking his work, but Gareth was an artist who had a passion for his. He was a man who thought for himself, though he never told me I should do the same. Maybe you only tell children to do the things you have trouble doing yourself.

It was a full four years until Gareth stopped coming to our house. I was sixteen. Mum cried, of course, but his leaving was much quieter than Dad’s. I don’t even remember him saying goodbye, which was good, I guess, because there were no bricks or broken chairs this time round. The feeling was the same as when Dad left—I didn’t feel. But this time I understood why he had gone. Mum was just hard work and most men weren’t saints. I certainly wasn’t.

We never heard from Gareth again. Men.

G C Welles is a screenwriter, narrative designer and novelist from Cambridge, UK. He presently resides in central Europe, where he recently completed his debut, autobiographical novel, Parrhesia, which Me Moy Men was taken from.