Getting Over Mr. Right (27 page)

My resolution to be nicer to Lucas did not last long.

A couple of days later I dragged myself to the Jobcentre for the humiliation of my fortnightly job seeker’s interview. It was a horrible thing to have to do. Personally, I found it so awful to be told off about my job-hunting success (or rather lack of it) by a woman who always had her cardigan buttoned up wrongly that I found it very hard to believe anyone would contrive to stay on benefits deliberately, which was what her every question seemed to imply.

Anyway, it never put me in a great mood. It was just another thing serving to remind me that my life was officially rubbish and there was no particular reason to hope that the status quo would be changing anytime soon. After the Jobcentre, I ran a few errands for Mum. I returned a couple of books to the library for Dad. While I was in the library, I browsed the self-help section to see if they had anything new. Nothing except a book on making the most of menopause, which was, thankfully, just about the only problem I didn’t have right then.

While I was at the library, I also took the opportunity to check my email. It was much more relaxing than checking it on Mum’s laptop. Though Mum knew that there was no limit to the amount of time she could spend on the Internet for her twelve pounds a month with BT Broadband, it didn’t stop her from hovering anxiously while I checked my mail. She couldn’t quite shake the memory of the time when she and Dad still had
a dial-up connection and Lucas ran up a four-figure bill playing Warcraft when he was supposed to be studying.

There was little of interest in my email account that day. Some spam asking me if I wanted to improve the length/girth/hardness and/or general appearance of my penis. A couple of fund-raising requests from people I knew only vaguely. I deleted those straightaway, before I could read what they were fund-raising for and start to feel guilty that I didn’t have the money to help out.

And then there was an email from YouTube, informing me that someone I knew had just posted a new item. My little brother, Lucas.

I clicked on through. The little video window opened on a view I knew well. It was the view of my bedroom window from outside my parents’ house. I felt a rising sense of dread as I wondered what on earth Lucas had been filming. Did he have some shot of me mooning out over the street like a latter-day Rapunzel, waiting for a prince who would never turn up, no matter how long my hair got? No. The camera pulled in closer. I wasn’t in the shot. But there was something in the window. Something that had been posed as though looking out like a prisoner. I squinted at the screen.

“Oh, my God.”

It was Mini-Michael.

The computer had finished buffering and now the full horror of Lucas’s latest creative endeavor began to unfold. The shot changed so that the camera was looking out from inside my room, from Mini-Michael’s point of view. No wonder my brother had been so quiet for the past few days. The time and effort involved in this little stop-motion animation was obvious. It looked very slick. I had to give him that. But the content …

There was Mini-Michael, plucky as a paratrooper and prickly as a hedgehog with sewing pins as he shimmied his way
down from the windowsill using a curtain as a rope. Lucas, with the skills he had learned at art college, had somehow even animated the little doll’s face, so that he could convey his despair and panic as he tried to escape from my bedroom, which he managed, at last, only to run straight into the jaws of Ben the dog.

The fact that Lucas had been into my room was bad enough, but it was the commentary beneath the clip that really pushed me over the edge. It was a conversation between Lucas and his art-school friends.

“Cool doll,” said one. “Where did you get it?”

“Under my sister’s bed. I think she made it. It’s supposed to be her ex-boyfriend.”

“That boring accountant bloke you hated?”

“Yeah,” wrote Lucas. “That’s the one. He dumped her and went off with a Brazilian.”

“Can’t say I blame him,” said Lucas’s friend. “Brazilians are hot. So, is this like some kind of weird voodoo shit or what? Your sister is
out there
.”

“I certainly wouldn’t cross her,” my brother wrote.

Lucas had only one sister. It didn’t take Inspector Poirot to work out that I was the voodoo knitter and Michael was my intended victim. Now I was really panicking. Just who had seen the clip? If that idiot Lucas hadn’t thought to take my email address off his circulation list, then it was possible, indeed quite probable, that he had forwarded the clip to our entire extended family. And perhaps even to Michael himself if Lucas had also copied in the addresses from my contacts list, which I had allowed him to do when he was flogging his handmade Christmas cards to supplement his beer money. The ramifications were just too terrible.

“I’ll kill him,” I said, jumping to my feet. “I’ll bloody kill him.”

By the time I logged out of YouTube I was foaming at the
mouth. No one batted an eyelid, of course. I was, after all, in a public library. Threats of grievous bodily harm were commonplace from the weirdos who used the library as a place to keep out of the cold while the hostel was shut.

When I got back to Mum and Dad’s, I was white-hot with rage.

“Where is he?” I roared as I pushed open the kitchen door so roughly that it slammed against the wall behind. The dog ran under the kitchen table for cover. “Where’s Lucas? I’m going to rip his head off.”

“Watch the paintwork,” said Mum, “or I’ll rip your head off, too. Whatever’s the matter with you?”

“Ask your son,” I said.

I headed on upstairs to his bedroom. Lucas had a guest. He was trying to impress some art-school girl with his indie vinyl collection (most of which had once belonged to me). As I burst into the room, they were sitting side by side on the bed. Lucas was pushing the girl’s lank fringe out of her eyes. They jumped apart. I could tell that I had interrupted Lucas’s killer seductive move.

“What the …? Piss off,” Lucas told me.

“I will not,” I said.

“What the hell’s gotten into you?”

“How about YouTube,” I snarled. “A certain epic-escape adventure filmed inside my bedroom.”

“Oh, that,” said Lucas, trying to stay cool in front of his intended conquest.

“That really cool voodoo-doll thing?” asked the girl adoringly.

“It wasn’t cool,” I told her. “It was cruel. And I reckon you want to think twice about getting involved with such a dishonest, sweaty little creep as the infant who made it.”

“Oh, I …” The girl looked a little scared now.

“Yes, infant,” I said to Lucas. Turning back to the girl, I added, “Did he tell you that he wet the bed until he turned fifteen?”

“Hey!” Lucas interrupted. “That’s not fair.”

“And filming my personal private property is? Making me a laughingstock for the amusement of your art-school friends is perfectly fine, right? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“You didn’t think I’d find out, more like.”

“How did you find out?” Lucas seemed confused.

“I’m on your mailing list, you muppet.”

“You are? I thought I took you off it. Shit.”

“Indeed. Now what are you going to do about it? I want you to sort it out immediately.”

“But I’m in the middle of …” Lucas indicated the girl, who was sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up to her chin like a fearful child.

“I should probably be going anyway,” she said, unfolding herself and sprinting for the door. “I can see myself out.”

“Lucy!” Lucas called after her. “I’ll call you.”

“Yeah. Whatever. That’d be great,” she said without looking back.

I continued to stand over Lucas with my hands on my hips, waiting for his response.

“I was nearly in there,” Lucas whined.

“She had a lucky escape. What are you going to do about that film? You’ve got to destroy it.”

“I can’t destroy it. I made it for my course work. Look, Ashleigh, I can understand why you’re angry, but really … I thought it would cheer you up about that idiot of an ex-boyfriend. I thought you would find it funny.”

“Nothing about my relationship with Michael is funny,” I wailed. Then I threw myself down on Lucas’s beanbag and wept into my hands.

Lucas promised that he would sort the matter out, but of course it was too late. By the time he’d logged back on to YouTube, some two and a half thousand people had seen the clip. One of those sites that rounds up the best of the blogs tagged Mini-Michael as the funniest YouTube video of the day. After that happened, there was no stopping the damn thing. It went viral. I soon lost count of the number of times the link to the clip reappeared in my in-box, forwarded by someone who had no idea (I prayed) what agony they were heaping on me. It was just a matter of time before Michael got to see the clip and guessed exactly who was behind the grimacing doll.

It was devastating. Any little shred of self-respect I had was ripped away. I told my brother that as far as I was concerned, he was dead to me.

“You have to talk to Lucas,” said Mum the following week. “He’s your brother. I can’t stand this atmosphere around the house. You can’t just keep ignoring him.”

Mum had no idea. As far as I was concerned, I never had to talk to my brother ever again. Lucas had sparked a lifelong feud. It was perfectly possible that I could go for the rest of my days without addressing a single word in his direction. When I’d gotten back on my feet jobwise, which was more urgent than ever now, I would move out of Mum and Dad’s, and once Lucas and I were no longer sharing a bathroom, I wouldn’t ever have to see his face again. I no longer had a brother.

I could tell that Mum was very distressed. She hated the frosty atmosphere in what had been her happy family home. She hated the way that every time Lucas walked into a room, I would get up and walk straight out. But she couldn’t seem to understand the depth of my brother’s betrayal. There were now people all over the world who knew how badly I had reacted to my breakup with Michael. I fell asleep at night to the sound of laughter in a hundred languages as my Mini-Michael danced across computer screens in Texas, Taipei, and Teignmouth. My friends had seen it. My former colleagues must have seen it, too. The only way on earth that Michael hadn’t seen it was if he had spent the past week holidaying in a closed order of monks. And there was fat chance of that while Miss Well-Sprung was around.

“I have no brother anymore,” I insisted.

Though I have to admit that Lucas was making an enormous effort to patch things up. Since I wouldn’t speak to him, he sent a hundred apologies by email, text, and hand-drawn postcards covered in careful calligraphy, which he poked under my bedroom door. But my heart was frozen. I poked the postcards back under his door with “Return to sender” scribbled above my name. I was going to keep up the big freeze forever.

But then the unexpected happened. Or rather, the long-expected happened. Ben the ancient spaniel went walkies for the very last time.

I was unfortunate enough to be the one to find him. It was a Sunday morning. For once I was first up. I knew that something was wrong as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. I looked down to see Ben’s familiar brown body stretched out like a draft excluder along the bottom step. But all was not as normal. Ordinarily, the moment I set foot on the creaky board on the top step, Ben would lift his head and look up at me. Then he would thump his thick tail on the floor in greeting. That morning it didn’t happen. It occurred to me for a second that perhaps Ben was giving me the cold shoulder on Lucas’s behalf, but of course the stupid old dog wasn’t that clever. Something was definitely wrong.

By the time I got to the fourth stair from the bottom, I was sure.

“Ben?” I whispered. “Ben?”—a little louder. “Come on, boy. Time for breakfast.”

He lay as still as the sheepskin rug beneath him. I crouched down on the step and peered at him. I dared not get closer, but I was close enough to see that there was no rise and fall of the barrel chest that always longed to be tickled. I stretched out a hand and gave him a poke in the side.

Nothing.

I put my hand to my mouth.

“Oh, Ben,” I sighed. “Oh, no.”

I didn’t wake Lucas. Fortunately, he had been out late the night before and would have slept through the “1812 Overture” played by a full orchestra at the end of his bed. With cannon. I got up Dad instead.

“I think Ben’s dead,” I told him.

Dad’s face crumpled like a tissue when he saw that I was right. Though Ben had often smelled like the wrong end of a donkey, he had been dear to everyone.

“What should we do?” Dad asked.

“I was hoping that you would know,” I told him.

“I’ve never touched a dead body before.”

“Not even a goldfish?”

“It was your mum who always flushed them down the loo.”

“Ben’s not going to fit around the U-bend,” I said.

Together we wrapped the dog’s corpse in a blanket and carried him into the conservatory, which was cooler than the rest of the house. Neither Dad nor I had any idea how long we had before Ben started to smell worse even than he had in life. Dad thought that perhaps we should put Ben into the chest freezer while we considered our next move. I told him that I thought Mum would file for divorce if he pulled that stunt. Mum confirmed my view when she came downstairs in her pink dressing gown.