Writing for Fun
February 2018
It Happened Last Summer - Jan Norman
I thought back to when the stupidity between us had started. It must have been at Henry’s 40th birthday bash. He ran a highly successful, avant garde picture gallery in the Portobello Road. He was empty headed and cared for nothing but having a good time. Heaven knows how but the dear sweet blockhead brother of mine had become somewhat of a celebrity and his friends numbered many of the London so called ‘in crowd’.
I was I suppose the exact opposite; I was highly intelligent had three degrees and boasted a research post in advanced genetics and presently worked in a facility genetically engineering bacteria. I had no social skills and loathed social gatherings. Generally people found me at best a bore and at worst a laughing stock, even my brother.
I usually avoided my brother and his friends like the plague but Henry suddenly became very sentimental at the approach of his fortieth birthday and begged me to come to his party in his gallery; he assured me it would be a very select soiree. God, how I wished I had said no.
The gallery was packed, not the small gathering I had been led to expect; drink was flowing like water and spirits were high.
Someone began a game of forfeits and I shrunk into the corner but it was not long before Henry and his best friend Claude coerced me into joining in the so called fun. The final straw came when they made me the laughing stock of the evening by forcing me to act out being a baby in a crib. Some hooray Henry dragged off my trousers and made an impromptu nappy out of a towel and someone, for God’s sake, had found a dummy. My humiliation was complete. I thought the party goers would die laughing.
At that moment I vowed that I would pay back Henry for this outrage. What could I do to him?
Back in my laboratory, as I introduced bioluminescent particles as a marker to modified, now cancer resistant, bacteria an idea came to me – a really devilish idea.
Henry had always been afraid of the occult and had believed implicitly in the Devil since childhood. My idea was that I would secretly manufacture harmless bacteria to be bioluminescent and using specially mixed agar plates on which to grow these organisms smuggle them out of the lab. In Henry’s gallery I would write ‘messages’ from the Devil on selected pictures in agar and seed them with the bacteria. As the culture grew a message would appear in demonic Day-Glo. In time as the bacteria ate the entire agar it would die and no trace would be left. Perfect.
Inoculating the pictures in Henry’s gallery a day before flying off to America was just the cover I needed.
When I returned I found Henry in a real state. I was ecstatic. What revenge. I kept this campaign up for six months until I thought Henry would have a nervous breakdown.
What I did not anticipate was that he would turn to occult worship to try and placate the Devil.
I did not know then but he started satanic rituals, using drugs until his mind became unhinged and he had to be sectioned in February this year.
I wish to God that I had never plotted this stupid revenge but I never imagined, even in my most vengeful state, that I would be instrument in destroying Henry’s mind.
When all is said and done I love my brother and jealousy and self pride had brought me to my knees and left Henry a burbling wreck.
How I long to go back to last summer and undo the hurt but that is my nemesis to be carried until the day I die.