CHAPTER TWO – Big Brother
There are some moments in my life that I would rather forget. Some afternoons spent arguing with telephone call centres, mornings lost to the snooze alarm and especially those evenings I spent burning witches during the Spanish Inquisition. At times I’ve wished them all into nothingness, but it seems increasingly as if those moments are now the only things that I truly remember.
The afternoon of August 23rd, 1940 is one such blind spot that, regretfully, I do not yet have, although I am drinking regularly to remedy this. As my Sopwith Camel putt-putted gracefully from the clouds high above the English countryside, screaming fuel from a gashed fuselage, I knew that I shouldn’t light the Cuban cigar dangling temptingly from my lips. Johnson, my co-pilot’s head bounced heavily from the body of the plane like a gruesome metronome to counterpoint the rhythmic grinding of the stalled engine, and I am ashamed to say that I got quite caught up in the moment. I threw back my head and blew; a triumphant mouth trumpet solo to the raw backbone of my tortured rhythm section. As I reached my crescendo, I lit the cigar and inhaled deeply in order to blow a roaring smoke elephant star-ward, but the finale came much quicker than I had anticipated. The leaking fuel reached ignition from my sparking smoke sausage and the entire Camel became engulfed with white flame. I could hear Johnson’s screaming and took heart that he was still alive as we plunged, burning and witless, in to a lake.
As I sat there, trapped and drowning, I remembered the time when my brother, Timothy, had fallen overboard into the Thames from our makeshift outrigger. We had begged, borrowed and stolen the necessary wood and ropes and thrown the thing together, and this was to be our maiden voyage, before we set out to discover what lay beyond the Peak District. We packed our hampers full of cucumber sandwiches and ginger ale, and carved cannons from the shins of diseased cattle before we set out, along the great river Thames, and I remember fondly that it seemed a particularly warm shade of brown that day.
Timothy swung from the ropes, hoisting main-braces here and tying things down there, but I remember that I couldn’t be bothered. I sat down on the deck and cracked open an ice-cold ginger ale that was both refreshing and illuminating. As he worked tirelessly around me, I found myself wishing that he wouldn’t. Though I didn’t want to work and he did, and without him we would be floating in circles in some rotten estuary or other, I couldn’t help but feel my resentment towards him grow. His momentum made a mockery of my stationary status and that would not do.
He moved, faster and faster, giggling and tying, until it seemed that he had reached terminal velocity, reversing time which now flowed slowly, backwards.
As his ginger curls and ruddy face flashed past mine, closer and closer like some horrific haunted mirror, some stupid Fucky the Drunk Clown version of me from a parallel universe, I felt black anger and burning hot hatred at his sheer affront. How dare he mock me by allowing us to traverse water in such an effective manner while I simply lay about like some kind of dead beached whale? Did he hate whales?
I decided at that moment that I would rather die than live another day like this.
I stood from my seated position in the luxurious deck chair, making fists of my toes and kicking out hard, hoping he would die and know my glory, but I flopped ineffectively at his feet. He was moving backwards however, and came caterwauling and wide-eyed with surprise over my raised knees and tumbled over me and up and over the side of the ragged schooner. He seemed to float in mid-air for a second, just long enough to open his mouth to scream before he plunged, gob-first into the filth-riddled water of the Thames.
I looked around for something long enough to use as a boom, but the only other thing onboard besides me, the hampers and my very expensive Persian deckchair was a pot of cocktail umbrellas. Perfect, I thought, as I quickly bound four hundred or so of them together with locks of my own hair and fished his gurning, heaving body away from certain death. Unfortunately, as my crude tests later proved, he was already certainly dead.
When I held my pocket mirror against his mouth he did nothing but squeal and fit, so I held his nostrils shut to calm his rigor mortis, before he flopped limply and finally dead beyond doubt in my soothing hands. I am glad that I was there to see him through his final moments, to hold him fondly as I wept, but it has left me somewhat scarred. As my brother died, it seems that his teeth had slipped from the mirror to sink through my thumb, an injury I did not notice until that evening as I sat waiting for my starter to arrive in a hungry animal-based gastro pub.
Of course, the Police had questions for me, the dolts, on such trivialities like my name and why exactly I had felt the need to dropkick my younger brother from the deck of the boat that fateful day, or who had asphyxiated him as he lay unconscious after the incident, but I simply told them my side of the story and despite a frosty reception, I was soon on first name terms with an Officer Jonty Buttreiser, sharing laughs and doughnuts as we remembered some of the dumb broads we had made. We signed the release forms and he told me that if I ever needed some ass in this town to remember to give him a call. I agreed, shook his hand and tipped my hat to him as I left, to Jonty Buttreiser, the last real cop in town.
But of course, the real mystery is this: if Timothy did die that fateful die as I squeezed the air from his fitting body, who was the man that made me a steak dinner last Thursday? Why exactly was it that my dead and burnt up baby brother (we’d had him cremated) had simply come home from work a year to the day after I had strangled him? And why exactly would I ask you a series of questions that you can clearly never answer?
(Answers on a postcard to the usual address, please enclose a cheque to cover our £1.50 a minute premium rate reading fee. Your usual network rates do apply.)
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