A slightly longer short story in this series than normal, and one which reflects my mood today, I guess.

Enjoy – or not.

“Hey Dad, you have a minute?”

I looked at my son, and felt that flash of pride that always went through me when I saw him. James Alex Foreau was now almost nineteen, and growing into a fine figure of a man. Smart, kind, passionate about the ills of the world and prepared to stand up and try to do something about them. On the other hand, he was a first-year student at University and trying to come to grips with the concept of balance – such as balancing the need to get pissed with his friends as often as possible, with the need to pass the year with good grades.

He was tall and rangy, somewhat like me, but a whole lot better looking than I ever was. His mother’s genes had seen to that. Genetics – you have to love it when it works for you.

“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

We were in my workshop. Well, I call it my workshop, but it’s really just a space at the back of the garage where I keep a workbench and my tools. In front of me on the bench was a disassembled clock, the parts carefully laid out on a white cloth to give me some small hope that I wouldn’t lose them.

He looked a little embarrassed and somewhat shifty. He’d come to talk to me about something and wasn’t sure where to start.

“Dad,” he tried. Then he stalled.

I knew what he wanted to talk about, and it would be a tough conversation, but he needed to be adult enough to start, continue and finish. He’d had the courage to come and ask, and I was confident he would make me proud, despite...

“It’s about Mum,” he said, trying again.

“Yes?”

He looked at the floor, kicking at the leg of the bench distractedly.

“Dad, she cheated on you.”

“Yes.”

“And you kicked her out.”

“Yes. You think I did the wrong thing?”

“No, I totally understand why you did that. I would have done the same.”

There was a long silence.

“So how come she’s back living with us again?” he asked.

“You’re not happy with that?”

“I am ... sort of. Half yes and half no, I guess. I mean she’s my mum and no matter what she does I’m going to love her. So I am glad that she’s here. But at the same time, I’m so damned angry at her all the time. And with you I guess.”

“You don’t think four months away from her family and having to live with friends is enough?” I asked. Again, I wanted him to learn, to understand through his own thought processes, not through a lecture from me.

“It seems kind of wimpy to let her come back,” he said, a light of defiance in his eyes.

“Ah ... wimpy.” I said. “You think I’m a wimp to just roll over and take it.”

“No, not you! I didn’t mean you were a wimp,” he said hurriedly. “But you forgave her so quickly. How could you do that? You’re her husband, and she had an affair with another man.”

“Yes, she did,” I conceded, and sighed. “Okay, let’s work through this. What would you have done?”

“I would have thrown her out, and left her out.”

“So no forgiveness then.”

“Not for that! Not for cheating!”

I looked towards the house. My wife was at the kitchen window, washing the dishes. Normally she would hum while she did that, never really trusting the dishwasher to do a good enough job. She wouldn’t be humming now, not with the sadness and guilt in her. Before this shit had blown up she was so perfectly beautiful – but now she was thin to the point of being gaunt and the fine lines around her eyes and mouth had deepened very slightly. For the first time since we had met when we were both nineteen at university, she didn’t look younger than her age. She was punishing herself, eating away at herself from the inside as the whole thing went around and around in her head. I hoped my plan would divert those thoughts into something positive, so that she could get back to the happier woman she used to be. I wasn’t sure, but I was hoping.

“Look through that window,” I said, pointing. “You see that woman in there?”

“Mom, yes.”

“Now tell me how much misery you want her to be in. You want her to commit suicide maybe?”

“No! God no!” He looked at me in alarm.

“You don’t think what she did deserves that?”

“No!”

“But she cheated on me, and that means us, you and me. She took her love, time and money from us and gave it to someone else. She broke a promise to me and wrecked our trust.”

“How did she take money from us?” he asked, trying to take in what I was saying.

“She bought clothes for her assignations, used some of that expensive perfume I bought her, used up fuel in the car, bought expensive coffee and snacks at the coffee house nearby. That’s money from all of us. Two thirds of that was ours – yours and mine. That’s stealing.”

“I guess that’s true,” he admitted reluctantly. I could see it on his face. He didn’t like to think of his mother as a thief. Especially not as someone who would steal from her own family. Somehow that felt almost worse than her being a cheat.

“You do the crime, you do the time, yes? What I should have done was take all our money and hide it away and then divorce her. That way I’d know I’d stolen that money right back. Fair’s fair, right?

“I mean there are shelters she could have slept in, food she could have got from handouts if her friends had refused to take her in. Hell, if she sold all the shit she had in her wardrobes, that would keep her fed for a couple of months, even if second hand clothes aren’t worth more than a few coins. Doesn’t matter. We’d have got back what was ours.”

He looked even more uneasy. His mother – as a bag lady?

“So let’s look at the time she stole,” I continued. “Mum used to work at the local surgery before she fell pregnant with you. Man, those were the best and the worst of times. You made her ... us ... so happy, and yet you made her sick as a dog for months. It didn’t make any difference. We just couldn’t wait to meet you.

“You were born and she stayed home to raise you, get you to school, take you to your after-school stuff, cheer you on at sport, clap for you in school plays, make those outfits for Roman day, or Space day or whatever other shit your teachers dreamed up. That’s her time that she spent on you. And she loved every moment of it. So I guess we owe her some time – a lot more than the time she stole from us. So it evens up a little.

“And then you were in high school and she didn’t have that anymore. So she went back to work. Unfortunately, the place she chose happened to have a horndog cunt working in the same department as her.”

James’ eyes opened wide. I rarely swore, and almost never in front of him.

“It took him three years to get through her defences, but he got there in the end. And on three successive Wednesdays she spent an hour with him at that fleabag hotel.”

He knew the one I meant. It was the one the kids used after Prom night each year. I knew he’d planned to take Serena there after his Prom. It didn’t work out that way.

“How is Serena, by the way?” I asked. He put the two thoughts together and knew what I was inferring.

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “She’s okay, I guess.”

“I know you two aren’t together any more. She step out on you?”

To his credit, he took the time to think about it.

“I don’t think she did. We just drifted apart.”

“How long until she had another man?” I asked.

“A couple of months I think. I didn’t ask.”

“Didn’t want to know?”

He shook his head.

“Residual feelings,” I sighed. “You have something good in your life and then someone else has it. It never feels good.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he said. “I mean, I was going out with Roxy by then, so it shouldn’t have bothered me, but there was a twinge in there every now and again.”

“It’s okay to feel that way,” I said, patting his shoulder. “We don’t like sharing our toys. It’s genetically programmed into us. As men, we can only bring in so many resources for our family, and the imperative is to get our genes into the next generation. If the woman sleeps around with other men, there’s a chance that those resources are going to be used to bring up someone else’s kid, and someone else’s genes.

“For the woman, if the man sleeps around then she might lose his protection and the resources for her offspring, her genes. It’s all about survival of the fittest in the wild. Darwin was spot on, no matter how religion may try to fudge it.”

I blew a layer of dust off the clockwork mechanism and gave it a quick polish.

“When humanity managed to get together and create society, we had changed and become rational enough to find ways to create weapons. That levelled the score some and it was no longer all about who was biggest and strongest any more. It was more about who was sneaky and nasty enough to use the first rock, stab with the first flint, throw the first spear, loose the first arrow, pull the first trigger. Which meant that a lot of men died or were crippled – which in those days meant dead anyway. Think Game of Thrones with a lot more attitude.

“Humanity was wiping itself out.”

“Hasn’t changed much,” James said gloomily.

“Well, it did change – to a point. We gradually developed the idea of monogamous marriage – a social contract where the two parties agreed not to spend each and every day trying to fuck other people and each other over. Religion wasn’t involved in marriage until some 800 years or so ago. Oh, religion was around, but before that marriage was simply a contract between a man and a woman and their families. No man wanted the wealth he had accumulated to go to some other man’s bastard offspring when he died. Same with women – they wanted all the wealth to only go to their offspring. Genetics again. And even in modern times, it still comes back to that genetic contract we all sign at birth.”

I picked up a cog and checked how it fit with the clockwork.

“I get that,” he said. “And I suppose it makes sense in a very inhumane way. But what about gays and lesbians and all the other degrees of sexuality?”

“For some it’s a choice. For others, well I guess genetics does what it always does, mutate and create off-pattern people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking who they are or their life choices, but on a purely evolutionary basis, being gay is a genetic dead end, a cul-de-sac – and therefore an evolutionary mistake. Sure, science and society can help lesbians, and gays can have a contract with a surrogate, but that’s limited by funds and opportunity.

“The thing is the sun up there sends out massive radiation, and there’s always some shit in the atmosphere from the idiots testing out their latest toys. Genes are very susceptible to being knocked around and having chunks blown out of them by radiation. That’s why it takes male and female genes to get together to produce offspring, so that each can try and repair holes in the other...

I sorted through the bits on the bench, searching for the cog that matched with the first one.

“Look, I think we’ve drifted off the subject here. You can look that stuff up on the net. I wanted to ask you something. You used the word ‘wimp’.”

“I didn’t mean you, Dad,” he protested. “You know I didn’t. I know you better than that.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t think it came from you. Probably one of your friends, yeah?”

His shoulders slumped. “Yeah. We were all messing about in the pub, and Nigel just suddenly said he never suspected you were a cuck.”

“A cuck. A cuckold, from the cuckoo which lays its eggs in another bird’s nest and then leaves it to be raised by the nest builders - a wife raising another man’s child. I get it. But it’s taken on other contexts as well.”

His face was red, and his fists clenched. “Dad, I know what those are and that bastard deserved everything he got, even if I had to take a few punches in the process. He said Mum was a slut and you probably got off on watching Mum ... with someone else.”

“What do you think?”

“Hell no! I saw what you were like when you found out.”

“Yes, at first I really did want to kill both of them. I was so far from wanting to see it that I felt I was going to vomit every time I even thought about it. Not really sexy when it makes you want to puke.”

“So why...”

“Apparently there are men who need to be humiliated so badly that it’s the only way they can operate,” I said. “I don’t understand it at all, and in fact even the very idea itself is repellent. But then, I don’t get people who need pain to feel pleasure either. How badly do you have to be wired for that to happen? I mean your mum and I have played spanky spanky now and again...”

“Jeez Dad! Too much information!”

“Hey, it is what it is. This is an adult conversation and I’m not going to censor either of us. That would probably leave at least one of us in the dark and wondering what was behind the redactions.”

“And by one of us, you mean me!” he grumbled.

“I didn’t raise no fools,” I said, grinning at him. “The point is, we played the game, and in my understanding, it’s as much about the anticipation of each spank as anything else. Then there’s the caressing and the playing...

“Ahem, sorry about that,” I said after a reflective pause on moments of days past. “I got lost in memory for a moment there. Anyway, I don’t understand it, and definitely don’t want to do humiliation or pain or peeing on someone or anything else I consider weird. But who am I to judge their lives, their backgrounds and their histories? It works for them, so I leave them to it. Their sex lives don’t affect me in any way, so I don’t have a dog in that fight.

“Some people are cheated on, and their pain is so bad that they automatically call anyone else in that position a cuck, to spread the load and try and make it more bearable, I guess. Others wouldn’t make the minimum requirement to apply for the post of village idiot, and just throw the term out everywhere.

I was pointing a screwdriver at him, and decided to put it down before someone got prodded.

“But have you ever stopped to consider why everyone was calling everyone and everything gay a few years ago? It was a trend, and a hurtful trend for those who actually were gay. It was basically using their whole life as an insult. Personally, I think it was just a lazy way of trying to insult someone without actually engaging the brain first. And I think this cuck thing is pretty much the same. It’s the automatic go-to for those people who have no clue about what lies behind something. Someone who has no clue is ignorant by its very definition and I don’t want to deal with ignorant people. Those who can’t be bothered to think or find out are wilfully ignorant. And that’s a sin! It’s not in any bible, but it damn well should be. It should be in every bible and every other book, starting with school books.”

“Dad, calm down,” said James. “Get off your hobby-horse. I know how you feel about wilful ignorance. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. Although I don’t know the actual number, and I can’t be bothered to find out.”

He was teasing me.

“Little shit!” I responded. “Too snarky for your own good sometimes. Should be outlawed.”

I was playing the grumpy dad, and he laughed delightedly that his shaft had gone through.

“So no,” I continued when his laughter died down. “I’m not a cuck or a wimp. Yes I was cuckolded by my wife, but that wasn’t down to me. I didn’t know about it and there was nothing I could have done about it. I know, because I asked her.”

“You believe her?”

“Yes, she didn’t ... doesn’t lie to me.” I stated. “I’m not a total fool, James. You’re going to find that the older you get, the more I seem to know. It happened to me with your granddad and it probably happened to him with his dad. It’s the way of the world. When you’re a teenager your parents are so stupid, you don’t know how they remember to keep breathing. Then, every year that goes past, you’re amazed to discover how much they’ve learned in that year. But don’t forget, everything that you’ve done, I’ve done first.”

“That’s a bit heavy to lay on me,” he grumbled. “You don’t know...”

“The time you paid that homeless guy to get a bottle of tequila for you, and then drank it with your buddies and ended up puking all over Mark’s room? With me it was bourbon and the back of Al’s truck. Luckily we passed out and didn’t try to drive home. Even so, the trip home at noon the next day was very hairy and very, very painful.”

His mouth had dropped open. He had no idea I knew about that little episode.

“You knew? Then why didn’t you... ?”

“What did you learn? You learned not to drink neat alcohol when you have no idea what it can do to you. You learned not to have a big fish supper before you go out drinking. You learned you need to get to the porcelain telephone a lot faster than you expected. And you learned that pain is the price of overdoing alcohol. What else could I have taught you? I could have told you of my experience, but that’s just words. I can’t give you my experience. You need to have your own experiences to really understand.

“And the same goes for girls. I know about you and Sam with Robin and Casey and Josie, playing twos-up and swap-swap at the hotel. With me it was just Betty and Sally and I out at Far Point at the lake. It was a lot of fun, but there was very little emotion involved. We hadn’t promised each other anything, and none of us was in a relationship.”

James looked uncomfortable, almost hopping from foot to foot.

“But Josie was in a relationship though, wasn’t she?” I remarked. “How did that turn out?”

He was deeply embarrassed that I knew about Prom night. “Nothing, I guess. Nigel never found out.”

“You think so?”

He nodded.

“Actually you’re wrong. He saw you guys leaving in your car and followed you, trying to catch up. He actually climbed the side of the hotel like fucking Spiderman and saw what you were up to. Then he went home and cried all weekend.”

James’ face was white. “Jesus Dad! That ... It’s...”

“Yeah, it’s pretty fucked up. Especially as he never said a word to Josie or you about it. His mother heard him – and what he was saying to himself as he beat himself up over it – and she was so bewildered and worried about him, that she came to us, told us everything and then grilled us about you. What’s interesting is that he never told Josie or anyone else. Are they still together?”

“Yes, but he treats her like shit.”

“That’s why. In his mind he thinks he’s forgiven her. But he hasn’t. I’m betting he hasn’t forgiven you or Sam either, so I’d be careful about dark alleys for quite a while.”

“You think that’s why he calls you a cuck, because he’s one?”

I nodded. “Possibly, at least partly why, and partly because he wants a legit reason to hurt you without all that mess spilling out. I think he’s desperate to keep it quiet, because if anyone says anything, he’ll be forced to do something he doesn’t want to do. He loves her and wants her with him, but doesn’t love her enough to forgive her. He’s in a confused world of hurt.”

“Shit, if I’d known, I would never have...” he trailed off into miserable silence.

“James, I want you to be honest with me. Did you know she was Nigel’s girl?”

He nodded again, even more miserably.

“Was she difficult to talk round, into going with the four of you?”

“Not really. It wasn’t as tough as I’d expected.”

“You’d been around Nigel a lot. Heard what he’d said about her, her likes and dislikes.”

The nod came again as he realised where I was going with this.

“Hell, it must have been like shooting fish in a barrel! The dancing, and I know what dancing at the Prom is like – it’s pretty much fucking while standing up. Somebody spiked the punch – somebody always spikes the punch. Was it you this time?”

He shook his head vehemently.

“Good. Even so, there was alcohol loosening things up, and you whispering in her ear all the things you knew she wanted to hear. Easy target.”

He stared at me, tears in his eyes.

“James, I’m not blaming you for anything. I get it. You’re a horny teenager and you did what you had to in order to get into her panties. And she probably enjoyed the evening. After all, she’s just about an adult – and is, at least legally, old enough to be responsible for her own conduct. She isn’t a child that has to be marshalled everywhere, kept out of danger and away from doing stupid stuff that might hurt her. If she loves Nigel, she’s probably in a world of guilt right now. And she thinks he doesn’t know about her and is treating her like shit because that’s just what guys do.”

“I’m sorry,” whispered James. “I never wanted that for her.”

I gave him a hug and he clung to me for a moment like he had when he was a child. “I’m so sorry.”

“I know you are,” I said, keeping my voice soft as well. “And I know you are going to do the right thing now that you realise you’ve done wrong. Don’t ask me what it is. But you’re very intelligent and you’ll figure it out. I’ll help you.

“So back to the subject of cucks and wimps. Who else was in the hue and cry?”

“Johnny. I didn’t expect that from him, but he was saying it loud and proud and clear.”

“Johnny ... you talking about Goofy? The geeky guy with glasses like beer glass bottoms?”

“We don’t call him that anymore, and he wears contacts now.”

“Okay. Let’s call him Johnny. Johnny bust up with Luanne, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he caught her fucking around with another guy and wouldn’t stand for it. Made that loud and clear.”

“Wow. So he’s definitely not a cuck or a wimp. He’s certainly a man – a big, strong alpha man! She was fucking another guy?”

He paused for a moment in thought. “I don’t know, he just said she was fucking around. I presumed he meant sex.”

“Presumed is based on evidence. Assumed is guesswork. Which is it?”

“Assumed then.”

“Okay. What do you know about Luanne?”

He shook his head. “Not much, she only transferred here last year.”

“What does she look like, I can’t picture her.”

He thought about it. I liked that he did that. I wished he would do it more. A lot more.

“Sort of small and geeky, with black hair and glasses.”

“That’s it? What colour are her eyes? Does she have broad shoulders? How big are her tits?”

He recoiled from me. “Jesus, Dad. Why do you want to know about her tits? She’s just out of school and you’re really old.”

“I’m forty two. That’s only old when you’re under twenty. Besides I don’t care about her tits. I just wanted to know what you thought.”

“Honestly, now that you mention it, I’ve never thought about them. I couldn’t identify them even in a line-up, and I could do that with most of the girls at school and get a ninety percent score. Her eyes? Maybe grey or blue. I have no idea what size shoulders she has. She just one of those girls...”

“Who disappears into the background, I’m guessing,” I finished for him.

He shrugged.

“Okay, let me tell you about Luanne. At two years old, she was dumped on her grandmother when her mother ran out on her. Her mum was the usual story, a bit stupid and a bit slutty, pregnant by eighteen and nothing to look forward to in life. So she simply dumped the baby on her mother and moved on. Luanne was then raised by the bitch from hell. She could never do anything right for her grandmother, whom she thought of as her own mother. She was never good enough.

“It turns out that your grandmother knows her grandmother. Your gran can’t stand her and thinks she’s a walking advert for why abortion should sometimes be mandatory – even on adults. And Luanne’s gran doesn’t like to be touched, by anyone. So Luanne grew up a loser – never good enough to even be touched. Shit, that’s one of the most basic human needs.

“This invisible girl transferred to your school when her good old gran decided to downsize and have Luanne sleep in the lounge. Why have a house with a whole bedroom for a worthless girl when you can sell the house at a nice profit, get a smaller house and just make her bed down in the lounge. Nobody acknowledges her at home, and at school nobody can even remember what she looks like. Fuck it, James! She’s the walking, breathing equivalent of Harry Potter, for Christ’s sake. Dumped on time and time again by everyone in the whole fucking world!”

James drew back, his eyes huge, aghast and all too aware of how upset I was getting at telling this story. Fuck! I hate when kids get abused, and this was abuse all the way. That fucking old woman should have been locked in a kennel with starving dogs!

After a moment, I managed to get a little control back.

“But then she met good old Johnny and they fell in love. I can understand that, she was the mirror image of him – both of them geeky and forgettable. He became her whole world, you know that?

“And then she did the hideous crime of letting a guy hold her hand for a couple of minutes. She didn’t even know that wasn’t supposed to happen. All she knew was that a human touch was pleasant. And then good old Johnny – that nasty fucking dickless little cunt – dumped her in the worst possible way, ambushing her and proclaiming in front of everyone, including the few friends that she had started to make, that she was a two-timing, no-good whore and a filthy slut and he wasn’t willing to be seen even in the same room as her.

“I was on call that night when her grandmother finally dialled emergency and got us out there. She was eighteen ... eighteen! And she’d taken an overdose because she could no longer live with discovering she was a whore who wasn’t worthy of having a life.”

I was so angry, I could feel tears on my cheeks.

“Luckily, she puked most of the pills up, and after her stomach was pumped, the doctors managed to pull her through it. Then she was up to the psych ward to be evaluated and treated.”

“Shit Dad, Johnny dumped her just two weeks ago,” he whispered. “All that happened since then? We all thought she was just laying low.”

I got myself under control with difficulty, covering it by shifting the clock components around on the cloth.

“So, three different situations, three different cheats. Who gets burned and who gets forgiven? First of all, do any of them get forgiven? How about Luanne?”

He struggled to get his thoughts together. I’m a paramedic and have seen some of the most awful things in life and death and learned to be cool about it. When I can’t, I talk to the right people to get myself back to a place where I can be human once again. So I think seeing me lose it over Luanne had shaken him.

His forehead was furrowed for a while and then cleared.

“Luanne is ... I feel so sad for her. If all she was doing was holding hands then Johnny way overreacted in doing what he did. If it bothered him that much he could have just broken it off and walked away.”

“Why do you think he did it the way he did,” I queried. I’d given up fiddling with the clock and we were standing face to face, almost at attention. “According to my information, he invited her to join you guys and then denounced her in front of everyone, without ever saying quite what she’d done wrong.”

“Actually, when you put it that way I think it was a complete dick move. He didn’t give her any chance at all, and just burned her for holding a guys hand. Hell, when we went to dances, guys would try and get their hands all over Serena during the slow dances. I had to peel them off with threats of violence sometimes when she couldn’t stop them. I would have been delighted if they’d just held hands with her. Fuck, Johnny’s a complete dickwad.”

His language had broadened as much as mine. As I’d said, this was an adult conversation.

“So why did he do that? Wasn’t she his first girlfriend?”

“Yeah – he was such a nerd that no girl ever wanted to be near him – even the geek girls.”

“But then Luanne should have been perfect for him. Together they could have discovered love and everything that goes with it. And by it I’m talking about sex.”

“Yes I know,” James said, still distracted by his thoughts. “You know, when he got his contacts, he got his parents to stump up for a new wardrobe and actually started to look good. Well, not good – halfways decent perhaps.”

“Ah, I think you might be on the right track. So what was his nasty little ambush in front of all of you about?”

He thought for a moment, then his eyes widened. “No, it can’t be that. I mean, why ... You think he did it to fit in with the rest of us? So we wouldn’t think of him as Goofy any more. Jesus, that’s no reason to...”

“I think it was to him,” I said. “I think he was so afraid of being thought of as a wimp that he went looking for trouble, and when he found even the faintest scent, he launched his pre-emptive attack. He threw her to the wolves to try and be seen as a wolf.”

“Dad, that’s the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard of.”

“You think I’m wrong?”

“ ... No.”

“Okay, now Josie. I mean she was a slut, right? After all, she fucked the both of you and even had a little dabble with the other girls if my information is right.”