Chapter 1

Jerry is my best friend at school, not just my best gay friend; my best friend end of. We talk the same language – science, more specifically biology. We both live, breath and sleep it. I did my A-levels in England at the age most kids do their GCSEs, so two years early. I’d polished off the GCSEs at 14. I’m not showing off, I’m bright. As a biologist I recognise that there is a massive inheritance factor in intelligence, so I’m just lucky. My parents aren’t exceptionally bright, just a bit more than normal; but it looks like it all came together for me. So now I’m over here staying with Aunty Jean and doing some US exams to aim for a scholarship to a US university.

Why not Oxford or Cambridge I hear you say? Well, the plan, my plan (validated by parents and teachers alike) is to do a degree over here and then go back and do a PhD at Oxford in “Biological indicators as a means of detecting flaws in stressed metal structures”. I’m already in communication with a professor there. The advantage of a US connection is funding, sponsorship. But enough of me. No, there will be more, enough of me for the moment. Back to Jerry.

Jerry is what Alicia Smythe-Corden called ‘white trash’. She was a stuck up bitch of the highest order; and there was plenty of competition at Stratford High. Jerry was like me, a bit of an aberration, but more so. His father once admitted that he insisted on a paternity test when Jerry was five (and already reading Robert Frost and playing the violin and reading Origin of Species); he knew Jerry was so much brighter than he was, he was half-convinced he couldn’t be the father. His mother took it surprisingly well. At first the neighbourhood was suspicious of this kid who, at eleven, told the Republican Congressional Candidate that his grasp of economics was flawed and then explained why, and then all but told the Democrat he was a moron. Later, even the local gang kind of adopted him as a mascot. I met them when I went on a visit; it hadn’t occurred to Jerry that large thugs with knives were threatening, it occurred to me; but they were nice as pie because I was Jerry’s friend. They got to be proud of him (it may have helped that he inadvertently gave them a new recreational drug by adding a sodium salt ... no, too much information).

Jerry is even brighter than me at biology. He’s also gay. When we started to get on really well he assumed I was and put his arm round me and tried to kiss me. When he realised I wasn’t he was grateful I hadn’t hit him – he’d had that experience before; he may be very slightly on the autism scale; he seems to have trouble interpreting people sometimes. Anyway I’m easy going, I liked him so I set him straight and we stayed friends.

Ms Carnforth Van Damm, our biology teacher, at Stratford High realised early on that we knew more than she did. What was it? The description Jerry gave of the cell surface changes in an egg to prevent multiple fertilisation; a description that went way further than she could and included the up to the minute research by Mack, Dammen and Nebumo on fast and slow blocking mechanisms and how to stop them to encourage semi-natural clones? Or my ecological model of the Mid-West plains which accurately predicted the changes resulting from loss of Passenger Pigeon flocks? Who knows? I think she realised we were keen and would be her star pupils with little help from her (just some syllabus direction to make sure we covered the right areas); she was even pleased when we pointed out a statistical flaw in one of the past papers she showed us. That got her (and us) a mention in the local paper because the national board had to re-mark a load of papers in the light of the fact that the test they were suggesting was not properly relevant to the problem.

So she let us get on with our stuff at the back of the class and occasionally called on us to help study groups. I liked helping the girls (Mandy, Harriet, Jo) who are pretty but not that scientific. They needed to pass and Ms Carnforth wants them to, but they need help. They wanted to do nursing and needed biology. Why? Because they do. That’s the kind of thinking that I get all the time. ‘Well, you obviously need biology to be a doctor, so it makes sense you need it for nursing’. Actually they both probably need a good bedside manner; and Jo, especially, would help me get well just by sitting on the bed with me and leaning over in that loose blouse of hers. I’m digressing in a most unscientific way aren’t I? But as you start to tell, I’m a normal, hormone infused boy lusting after girls.

I helped them and they helped me by letting me take them to a film or a dance or something sometimes. My standing went up because I had a pretty girl on my arm, theirs went up because they got a pass in an exam. Win-win. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the hunchback of Notre Dame High. I look okay, I may not be Captain Football or whatever, but I could get a girlfriend. It’s just easier when a sexy, tight-jumper, short-skirt girl decided you can help her with her homework and take her to the flicks (movies to you).

The story really starts getting interesting when Jerry decided to start looking into pheromones. Small, often airborne molecules that many animals use to attract the opposite sex. Some female moths for example let off a pheromone when they are ready to mate, the males can detect it from miles away and it draws them like a magnet. Of course some parasites went and spoilt it by replicating the pheromone and laying eggs in the poor besotted males. Some mammals use it too, some males do it; some produce it in their urine. They even piss on the female which really turns her on; makes her receptive for mating. Pissing on a girl doesn’t work for humans I don’t think. Not surprisingly the idea of a human pheromone has been a lodestone for biological alchemists for years (probably with a different transmission system than peeing on the female though). No-one has found one. Of course there’s always some bugger to mess with things, some insects make a similar chemical to attract another species ... and then eat it. That’s like turning up at a girl’s flat on a promise, and then getting the shit kicked out of you by her boyfriend. A bit of a downer.

Anyway, Jerry wanted to go one better “if we could identify which hormones attract the male to the female than maybe I could use it to attract Mike” Mike was a cool dresser; he looked great, even I could see that, he was calm, big and unaggressive; except when he laid out the football captain 3 years ago, I believe. Though Andy had goaded him. He was also gay but didn’t realise it. He was, is. He wasn’t in the least attracted to girls, he walked, talked and acted ‘gay’. Okay, you say, how do you act gay? I know, I know, deeply sexist or homo-something, but some people just fit the part, they do! He did! He does! Jerry had the hots for him; but if he didn’t know he was gay, sidling up to Mike and saying “Do you want to go out” was probably not going to work. I actually think Mike would be okay with that, he’d just say “No thanks.” Unlike a couple of the other jocks who would beat you to a pulp for even thinking it.

So Jerry’s solution was a typical geek one, develop something no-one has solved and then use that in the mundane world of attracting a mate. I told him he had a snowball’s chance in hell, he told me that a snowball packed into a vacuum flask with liquid nitrogen would survive in hell for ages. We set to work. The background reading was interesting in any case, whether anything came of it or not.

Jerry made all the running in this project; I’m more into large scale ecological biology rather than small scale biochemistry; but it’s all good, so we worked on. I don’t know when he made the break through, I’m not sure he does. He just decided to try a different approach to others. Most had looked for pheromone producing glands in or near the sex organs; which obviously meant that for most of us most of the time they were covered up by layers of clothing. He looked elsewhere, reasoning that the brain was the responding organ, not the genitals. He found some trace compounds that might offer some interest.

He also worked out a different activation mode. The general assumption was that pheromones and love potions work by passing the chemical from the male to the female (‘drink this and the first person she sees, she will fall in love with’ says the old priest or something and hilarity ensues; you know the kind of thing). Jerry came up with a more complex theory. What if the woman produces a receptor chemical and then, when she finds a mate she likes, she binds his ‘factor X’ to her pheromone receptor? Kind of similar to the normal assumption, but it meant that the male factor was not a pheromone but could be just his smell. He worked and teased at this. Subsequent research has found that the gland in humans is almost non-existent. Seems we have evolved away from this. But that is just unplugging the fire from the wall, doesn’t mean the electricity isn’t there. What I mean is, even women with no ‘Love Gland’ (as Jerry called it) will react if they get that chemical into their blood stream.

You have got to understand how this works. Humans, those with the gland, wait until they have chosen a mate, then they produce the chemical and bind the male smell to it and that’s it, mated for life. They are the ones who stick together through thick and thin. The rest of the female race are biologically tuned to switch to any better suited male they may come across. Males are meant to spread their seed; no one has found why some men are monogamously faithful yet. Even in the women with the gland, it is smaller than a pin head, produces miniscule amounts, and has been overlooked for ever. Apes have it too, monkeys don’t as far as is known. So it is a more recent evolution to account for the need to have a long childhood development (need to tie to a male to support the group long enough to let the young grow up).

Got it? Well, Jerry reasoned that if we artificially produced the pheromone (if that is what it is), and bound the smell of a male to the receptor site, and then introduced it to the female ... job done, they would be conditioned or programmed to choose that male.

The trip to the zoo was a good chance to test his ideas in a non-threatening environment.

“Hey, Billy. Fancy being a test subject for a scientific experiment” Jerry is, as I may have said, not good with communication. He has problems with subtlety. Billy looked at him and told him to fuck off.

“Now, Billy!” I said “You don’t need to be rude. Here, fancy some chocolate? It’s British” I always say British rather than English, “My mum seems to think there is not chocolate over here” It’s true, she sends me boxes of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, Galaxy, Fry’s Chocolate Cream. All of which I can buy in “The English Shop” in Stratford Main Street (along with Marmite, Bovril and PG Tips), but then it’s cheaper for me if she sends it. I know the way to Billy’s head is through his stomach. He takes some squares and smiles.

“That’s good! Really nice. Thanks. Now what was the dickwad talking about?”

“Well, you see. We have a theory about sexual attraction. We reckon it involves pheromones”

“Oh, come on. Not that old idea” Billy was fat, but not stupid. Not the genius that Jerry was, not the very bright geek that was me, but he wasn’t stupid “People have tried to find that for ages, we’re just too complex. We use our eyes too much. It’s a pipe dream.”

Jerry spoke, “But the reason it hasn’t worked is that they’ve all been looking in the wrong place. Dogs and monkeys go round smelling each other’s butts, but we don’t. What’s the point of a gland near our balls?”

“Jerry, you saying that you know better than Professor Claus Hoftater? He was on TV a few days ago and he said sexual selection was almost entirely based on physical attributes, which is why models are attracted to sportsmen,...”

“And Mandy would never look at you?” I added “Suppose that’s wrong. Hoftater is a psychologist, not a biochemist.”

“Mandy! Mandy will only shag the captain of the football team, Johnny, or Max” these were captains of hockey and baseball, respectively. She was blonde, six foot, busty, long legged and, just a big bit racist; which was why Jonas, the black captain of basketball stood no chance. She never said anything, she didn’t need to; you could tell. But he was right, she wouldn’t stop to scrape Billy off her shoe.

“So ... so ... Listen!” I said “So if we could conduct a stressfree and painfree experiment to get her attracted to you it would be –”

“Because I’m the fat kid that no-one wants? Fuck the fucking hell away from me you fucking dweebs!”

“Billy, I can see you’re annoyed.” Jerry said, even he could tell! He didn’t give up though “Tell you what. Suppose we test it on John first?” What? When did I volunteer? “It’s easy, I just collect his sweat and then mix it in some of this liquid. That extracts the required chemicals and concentrates their receptability. Look, I’ll show you.”

It seemed I had little choice, so graciously accepted him pushing swabs under my armpits. If anyone saw this, I’d be toast! No-one did, or if the family that passed by did notice, they pretended not to. What you don’t see, you don’t have to be shocked by. The swabs were put into a small bottle of fluid. I was curious to know what it was.

“This? Oh it’s a mixture of sodium benzohydaphyalate and a hormone I call Extractalase. I found it in my mum’s urine first, then in Suki’s” Suki was his sister. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any more “but the best source seems to be faeces” I really wish I hadn’t asked. “It must be excreted into the digestive canal I suppose, and some seeps into the bladder, but most comes out of the bowel” Yes! Shut up! “Interestingly I found it in my mum’s as well” Ahhhh! Enough! I wanted to shout, but he was a true scientist. He never said, and I never asked, how he came to be analysing his mother’s shit, or her piss come to that. “The Extractalase seems to have a concentrating or duplicating effect on the pheromone chemical. I’m sure it’s right, I tried this on the dog and the neighbour’s dog was very receptive, even though she wasn’t on heat.” That, of course raises interesting questions on where the reception evolved, but that isn’t what you are interested in.

It seemed that he reckoned the pheromone had to be sprayed onto the female, and that would potentiate the female to then be attracted to that male. Perhaps, Jerry, hypothesised, the benzohydrophyalate overcame female selection options and made the receptors sensitive to any pheromone. Since this one was in high doses, the nose receptors clicked in loud and clear when they smelt the pheromone again. Perhaps the high dose overwhelmed everything else, he thought.

He loaded the liquid into a little perfume dispenser, the type that had a small rubber bulb that you squeezed to spray the liquid. Who to test it on, and how? As if by magic, we saw Linda LaPage go into the Ladies’. All we had to do was loiter round the outside of the Ladies’ Toilets until she came out. What could go wrong?

Actually the obvious – being viewed as perverts and beaten senseless by adults that their sacred young females weren’t free to go and have a piss without being lusted after – didn’t happen. We waited, and waited, and waited. And then she started to walk out of the door. Jerry sprayed so she walked through the droplets. She looked at us like we were perverts. I barely noticed the nine year old walking in as Linda walked out.

Linda was the kind of girl that a boy could wank over (or at least over his imagination of her), she had the brains of a subnormal pea and the body of a demi-goddess. Seems evolution liked to spread good things around. She was also a strict Baptist in a family of Strict Baptists. In other words she was the ultimate look but don’t touch. She probably wouldn’t even sleep with her husband on their wedding night! She was so religious that she actually once said that she hadn’t done her weekend assignment because they had to go to a christening on Saturday. Why, she was asked, had she not done it on Sunday? She looked at the teacher like he was stupid (in fairness to him he was more like the Antichrist, but either way he didn’t know that Sunday was a day of rest when no, and I mean NO work was done. They even had cold food from the day before apparently. Why was the teacher the Antichrist? Well the look in his eyes when she bent over to tie her shoe lace was not the look of a caring mentor, it was more the look of ‘I would fuck that sweet arse if I could get away with it’) Five minutes after the spray, she was holding my arm and asking what I thought of the monkeys copulating in the trees above us. Five minutes after that she was pulling me behind the lion house and kissing me in a way that left my tonsils twisted out of shape. She slid my hands from her waist TO her bottom, and murmured gratitude when I squeezed her tight muscles and pushed a finger into the crack between. Such a goose would have had even Megan (‘Megan the PennyFarthing’ she was nicknamed by a more historical student ... because you could ride her for very little cost) screaming assault ten minutes into a date.

I jumped, behind me a nine year old girl was stroking my bum! She had been walking into the toilets as Linda had been walking out, and she was hot for me! She had tracked me down and was keen to offer her dainty and delicate body to me. I’m not some high minded, morally secure aesthete (I happily watched an eight year old getting changed behind a rock on the beach once, I was behind her, behind another rock; not deliberately of course), but I’m not a demonic paedophile so there was no way I’d do anything to this girl. She did kind of undermine the moment. Out of sight, Jerry and Billy were pissing themselves laughing – whilst also being very impressed with the efficacy of this stuff.

Billy was up for testing now. I was wondering how long the effect would last. “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that” said Jerry. For the rest of the day the nine year old kept wandering off from her group and following me. For the rest of the day Linda made it abundantly clear that she was mine – not that I was hers. The nice thing about this pheromone was it seemed to make the girl attracted to one, but not expect exclusive ownership. But she still clung to me like a limpet and took several opportunities to kiss me, slide her hand into my jeans “Woooo, no, Linda, not here!” and let me slide my hand up the inside of her legs “Oh, yes, John, can’t we find somewhere where you could do that inside my panties?”