Draw the Veil

I. Foreword

To look at me, you would never think I was a monster. Monsters are large, ugly, and inhuman. According to muggle cinema, monsters terrorise hapless teenage lovers snogging in the woods.

I was a normal child with a reasonably normal family. I was bright, I was friendly, I was even a little cute. There was no reason why I should not have continued to be just as successful, popular, and normal as any other child in my class in school. But I guess God, or whoever is up there, if anyone, had different plans for me because instead I became a werewolf.

I cannot help but find it ironic that I was never allowed to have a dog as a pet but ended up having dogs become such a huge part of my life. Life is funny like that sometimes.

Several years ago, I came across an old American muggle dictionary in a used book shop in Diagon Alley. Webster's, it was called. I thought that perhaps there could be nothing so entertaining as to see how muggles defined the world around them, so I paid the money and lugged the heavy book back to my flat with all my other purchases, intending to look through it that evening. But what with one thing and another_specifically, a surprise snog session with my lover_it ended up forgotten.

I found it on my desk when I sat down to write this foreword several minutes ago and thought it might be interesting to look up that four-letter word, wolf. I quote an abridged version of that entry below:

a: any of various large predatory canids (genus Canis) that live and hunt in packs and resemble the related dogs; 2a1: a fierce, rapacious, or destructive person (2): a man forward, direct, and zealous in amatory attentions to women b: dire poverty: starvation

A fierce, rapacious, or destructive person: Both accurate and inaccurate_as a person, I am certainly not destructive. In my other form, however, that definition is all too true. A man forward, direct, and zealous in amatory attentions to women is nothing short of amusing. My amatory attentions to women are more accurately classified as nonexistent. And dire poverty: starvation? Well, if you could see my clothes right now, you would see that these muggles have remarkable insight sometimes. As for keep the wolf from the door, all I can say is that if you are worried about it, just pray I have remembered to securely fasten all the locks.

My parents were always overprotective of me_I suppose a lot of parents are overprotective of their children. It did not help that I was an only child, their one hope to carry on the Lupin family name.

But after I was attacked by a werewolf, my mother became even more neurotic. When I was 8, shortly after the attack, she said to me, 'Remus, your father and I just don't want you going to a muggle school anymore. Not in your, you know, condition.' Shit, she had made it sound like I was pregnant.

'The incident' is what my family and I used to call the attack. My parents never wanted it discussed. In the 1960s, the term dysfunctional family did not exist, and wizards have never been interested in psychology at all. Magic spells and wondrous creatures are a part of our daily lives, and they define and direct our behaviour, but the inner workings of the human brain are uninteresting to most wizards_'most' meaning 'sane and normal,' anyway. I have always found it interesting.

Muggles have a clever way of describing what my family experienced: 'the elephant in the living room.' Everyone knows it is there, but no one wants to acknowledge it. I have always thought of it as a white elephant_a gift no one wants. My parents and I did not want the 'gift' of lycanthropy, and we did not acknowledge its presence.

These days, I acknowledge what I am, at least to myself. But really, the elephant is still there: I just pushed him into one corner and threw a blanket over him.

My lycanthropy made the other elephant in my life, a rainbow-coloured elephant, both easier and harder to deal with. Was lycanthropy all that werewolf's bite caused? I've always joked, 'The only thing worse than being a werewolf is being a gay werewolf.' My homosexuality is similar to my lycanthropy in that it is something disapproved of and forced on me, but it is also quite different_contrary to what some think and unlike lycanthropy, homosexuality is not a threat.

I picked up another book while I was in that shop, a book the muggles call a self-help book. It suggests that one of the best ways of dealing with what eats at us is to get it out of our systems. So even though I normally strive to keep the wolf from my door, I shall let him in, for now.