Nobody believes in
werewolves.
That's just what
Paul McHew and his friends are counting on.
They and their
kind roam our city streets: a race of people from whom the terrible legend
stems; now living among us invisibly after centuries of persecution through
fear and ignorance. Superficially Caucasian but physiologically very different,
with lunar rhythms so strong that during the three days of the full moon they
are almost completely controlled by their hormonal instincts, you might have
cursed them as just another group of brawling youths or drunken gang-bangers.
Now at the point of extinction, if they are to survive their existence must
remain restricted to mere stories and legend, but, paradoxically, they also
must marry outside their society in order to persist.
The responsibility
for negotiating this knife-edge is given to Paul, who runs the streets with his
friends during the full moon, keeping them out of real trouble and its
resultant difficult questions. Having succeeded for years, he finds his real
test of leadership comes when he meets Susan, a potential life-mate, to whom he
will have to reveal his true identity if he is ever to leave his pack.
The male characters, the werewolves, in Leaving the
Pack have sex with a lot of strangers. It's best just to get that out there.
They are the ultimate pick-up artists. They roam the city for two reasons: to
expend energy, and to find girls. Of course, ultimately, they're looking for
mates, relationships, wives. But they're in no hurry.
So how are they so successful? Pheromones.
There are
many types of pheromones in nature, and most of them usually involve sex -
getting it and making it worthwhile (from an evolutionary perspective). From
chemicals that direct male moths towards receptive females, to the molecules
that make female mice sexually receptive in the presence of a strange male
(including causing pretty drastic changes in her reproductive cycle), these
substances can take over animals' behaviour and make them act differently to
how they would if they never smelt them.
As a zoologist,
the physiology of attraction has always interested me: from the first
explanation of animal behaviour and experiments using photos of handsome people
and cloths soaked in sweat, to my days spent in the field, videotaping deer
mating in harems. The successful bucks seemed to only get more successful, as
does selected the same ones the other females had, milling around and waiting
their turn.
That image might
not turn everyone on - it doesn't turn me on - but it is intriguing. I wonder
what would happen if we could separate that buck, bring him to another group of
does who hadn't watched the previous matings.
Would he still be attractive? What exactly are the does attracted to in joining
his harem?
The step of
translating such animal studies to humans has been taken and research is
ongoing. It makes for fascinating reading, but just one example will suffice
here: photos of men are voted sexier if the voter is told that 80% of previous
respondents consider the man handsome rather than just 20%.
But if you meet
that man in a bar, how do you know that 80% of women consider him handsome?
As I learned on
facebook recently (who says Facebook can't be educational, as long as you
friend learned folk?) Freud said, "How bold one gets when one is sure of
being loved."
Confidence. That's
what's sexy. At least, that's what everybody says, and dating experts are
making money talking about it and teaching people (read men) to emanate
confidence.
Doubtless you can
relate to this (irrespective of your views on deer). We've all had experience
of it: a run of just not getting any action and then suddenly after you find
someone, there are potential partners crawling out of the woodwork looking for
a date.
A friend of mine
used to call it a purple patch, when you just can't go wrong in seducing any
object of affection.
So how is this
confidence projected? Is it in your mannerisms, your body language, your
demeanour, the tenor of your voice? Or is it in your smell?
Dogs (read wolves)
and other animals can smell fear. If they can smell fear, then they can smell
the opposite of fear, which is confidence. If they can it's because we release
such a chemical. And if we release it, why would evolution not have our own
species capable of picking it up?
Is confidence
perhaps just the absence of some kind of fear scent? Doubtful. While people are
probably able to perceive fear as well as confidence, not being afraid is our
default and thus not very sexy, while confidence is. There must be some
separate substance produced, perhaps stimulated by successive conquests - not
just having sex with one's regular partner. This could be why it has been so
difficult to find and isolate the chemical (there are people trying). Its
production is probably erratic.
Not so with the pack.
Inventing a race
of werewolves allowed me free range to imagine what the scientists might find
in the future. The members of the pack are infinitely sexy and have confidence
in buckets, because they produce this pheromone during the full moon without even
thinking about it. They're not infallible, of course. They still have to be
charming, still have to seduce the objects of their affection. It's also a
potential double-edged sword. Apart from the fact that if they're ever
discovered, they might be milked for their pheromones like bears farmed for
their bile, more immediately, not only do they have their own aggression to
control, but they also often disgruntle other men in the city by attracting
their girlfriends. This can make war go hand in hand with love.
The pack wield
this power they have relatively benignly. They treat their ladies with respect
- they don't want a lot of irate women hating them. They're powerful men, but
hell hath no fury... as the saying goes. And they stay away from married women.
They're very family-orientated, for all their casual sex. They don't wish to
damage any long-term relationships by making a spouse guilty when she'd really
less control over her actions than she realised.
We don't see so
much from the ladies' point of view, except Susan's, when she first meets Paul
during a full moon. She's ready to do things she'd never before contemplated
(there's an excerpt of this scene below), but later, when they meet again after
the moon, Paul has to prove himself just as seductive, without the aid of what
he calls his "little chemical friends."
Excerpt
“Ehmm... I was wondering if you would like to dance with me,” he asked,
gazing at the floor as he spoke and then fixing her with a stare that made her
heart quicken and a reply out of her mind's reach.
‘Yes, please!’ a voice yelled inside her. Nevertheless, she knew full
well by now that he was playing with her, and that the game consisted in not
making things too easy for this stranger who was clearly accustomed to getting
what he wanted. She had the will to resist her heart's demands, if only for a
few more moments. Fixing him with an expression that said yes, her voice
eventually replied, “But it's not even a slow song.”
As she said it, however, the music changed tempo to Madonna's ballad: Live
to Tell. Couples began to form as the lyrics began. Susan acknowledged that
she was caught. Still she paused for some time, scrutinizing him as though
trying to peer inside him, before she conceded.
“OK,” she nodded with a smirk.
He smiled wryly and she put her arms around him, considering how he had
manipulated her from the beginning. They danced for what seemed hours to Susan,
as she clung to this beautiful man and let herself drift away, getting lost in
his fragrance. It brought images to her mind of summer days in woods, raw sex
in a meadow, the slight scent of wildflowers and crushed stems, encapsulated in
a ring flattened by bodies rolling on the rough ground, cushioned only by the
grass, feeling its texture on bare skin, the sun pouring into the circle past
its borders of seed heads and the sound of bees.
She wondered about him calling her ‘sex.’ About to ask whether he had
been for real or just taking the piss, she decided it didn’t matter. She
thought that the word, the plain truth, was much more suited to him, and
realized why she was so reluctant to give in easily to his request for a dance.
It was not just a dance she had agreed to. This was not a normal situation,
where she could get to know someone during the night and decide later if she
would take it further. She had already crossed that line and knew that she
would end up having sex with him that night. They would leave the bar and go to
his place, or her place, or his car, or the alley around the side of the
building – it did not matter – and she would have sex like she’d never had
before.
Clinging to him now, she could arouse no resistance to the idea. In
fact, she was ready to do whatever they would do, right then. She felt no need
to know any more about him. His nearness and his smell were enough to make her
want to leave immediately and let him do what he willed with her body.
“What’s your name? Or is it really: 'Interested'?”
She blushed again and replied, asking his before remembering that he had
told her already. His name did not matter to her, either. It was superfluous
information, now that he held her in his arms. He grinned, showing that he knew
she had only asked him automatically.
“Well, I don't seem to have made much of an impression on you, if it
takes three times for you to remember my name!”
“Yes, I'm sorry. It's Paul, isn't it?” she said, staring into his eyes
for the first time since they’d begun dancing. They were so dark they seemed to
be hiding in the shadows. She could not read what he was thinking - a thing she
could often do - but sensed he held a secret behind those ebony orbs. Then she
realized that she had been scrutinizing him for a long time and looked away.
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing much,” she replied, searching for an answer. “Just wondering
how long it is going to be before you make a pass at me.”
“I won't need to,” he whispered in her ear.
Links
10% of the
author's royalties will be donated to WWF, the World Wildlife Fund.
2 comments:
Interesting premise...and it looks like there will be some colloquial phrases to translate, lol. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and the excerpt.
Thanks for the comment. I don't think there are too many colloquial phrases in the book("make a pass" is not international?). I can't say as much for my blog posts, because I only edit them myself. But I spent a few years in Boston and learned to tone them down. I also had a great editor, and though she is English, not American, she would have spotted the difficult Irish-only phrases.
David
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