Island Hideaway 8 - The Good Thing About Mo​

The good thing about Mo was that she had a boyfriend, so we could just hang out together, we could go to the cinema, for a meal, spend a long day and night in each other's company and there'd be no implication to it. Mo was great because she was unavailable, which meant that I could turn down my testosterone and behave like a normal human being around her. It meant I could practice being with a woman. Being normal. ​​

​​I'd grown up without much contact with the opposite sex. The kids in my street all happened to be male, including my elder brother, so my spare time and conversational banter was focused entirely on sport, war games and general blokey banter. I'd had female friends at school, of course, but as soon as puberty kicked in I'd found it difficult, every time I'd talk to a girl by newly-arrived sexual awareness would dominate, my eyes would refuse to look away from breasts and buttocks and I found it difficult to talk, not just because my voice had suddenly become a squeaky mad-mouse-nonsense, but because words didn't form, my mind a sudden jumble of emotions. When words did form the old conversations no longer applied, we were no longer children, we were wannabe adults and I no longer knew the script, I was like a humble spear-carrier suddenly recast as Hamlet. Any attractive single girl I fancied I could barely manage to speak to them, there was simply too much going on in my mind, too much going on in my loins.​​

​​By the time I went to university at eighteen I'd had a handful of girlfriends, but none of them had lasted and I still had no close female friends. The whole sexual tension thing would get in the way. Which was why a girl with a boyfriend was perfect, I could just hang out with her. There was no underlying tension. That was the good thing about Mo.​​

​​The good thing about Mo’s boyfriend was that she hardly ever saw him. He was a Physics PhD student and spent nearly every waking moment in the lab and had no interest in the things Mo enjoyed doing, so she could do them with me instead.​​

​​I never understood the relationship, it made no sense, like a T Rex with a pink balloon. They never seemed to talk when they were together. They had nothing in common, he hadn't watched a non-sci-fi film or TV programme in eleven years and Mo was confused by the workings of gravity, let alone particle physics. It's not like they were an all-consuming sexual passion that overcame their other differences, they never seemed overly physical together, nor desperate to get away from everyone else and leap into bed together, they just seemed to stick around each other like they were each other's shadow, connected but neither contributing nothing to the other. ​​

​​They didn't even look like a couple, he a lanking, pale, geeky, skinny nerd and she short, browned through action, fulsome.  Whilst she engaged with the world he lurked at the back calculating the world's physics and deciding it was too complex for more direct engagement. ​​​​

But it meant that I was free to spend lots of time with Mo doing the things she couldn't do with her boyfriend. ​​

​​"Do you fancy seeing a film?" I asked Mo fairly early on in our friendship.​​

​​"Which film?" she said, as people are prone to say in such situations.​​

​​"I don't mind," I said, "I have to see all of them eventually. The good news is free tickets."​​

​​"Free tickets? How do you manage that? Are you sleeping with the cinema manager."​​

​​"The student newspaper. I'm their film reviewer. I get two free tickets for everything I want to see, the downside is I have to watch a lot of films no sane person would go within a hundred miles of."​​

​​"You write the film reviews for the student newspaper. As well as the stuff you do for the radio station. And the arts magazine."​​

​​"And the writers’ group. Don't forget that."​​

"But you never miss a lecture. You get your essay is in on time. How do you do so much, are there a hundred of you?"​​

​​"No there's just me. In fact there's only one of me in the whole wide world."​​

"I wonder if that's true. I mean, there are six billion people in the world, you can only have met a tiny proportion of them, how could you know? There might be half a dozen of you kicking around."​​

"It's true, I said, I've met less than six billion people. But there is only one me. My DNA is unique, and even if I have a secret twin or a clone, only I was raised as me, only I have had my experiences."​​

​​"I wonder," she said, "Anything is possible."​​

​​"So what's it to be I said?", changing the subject. This being the 90s we didn't check our phones, we looked in the local paper (I am writing ancient history you realise).​​

​​"Hercules," Mo said.​​

​​"Hercules? You want to watch Disney?"​​

​​"Of course. We are still children aren't we?" she said. It was a convincing argument.​​

After Hercules, we stayed in the cinema and watched Shooting Fish followed by Nil By Mouth.

​​"There's definitely only one me now," I said at the end of the marathon. "Nobody else has just sat with you watching Hercules, Shooting Fish and Nil By Mouth. Even my shadow left when the lights went down."​​

​​"Yes she said, but what if there are two of me and the other me has just sat through the same three films with you."​​

​​I paused for a second before replying. "I wonder if there's any way of getting the other me to write the reviews." ​​