Watching him making love with Jenna was different; we were both in love with her, and she was as much mine as Gerry’s, anyway; Lucy was a different sort of family now, and while the episode with Lucy was her way of thanking Gerry for letting me draw a line under that part of my life with Charlie once and for all, I knew deep in the heart of me that it could never happen again.
My making love to Charlie one last time had been strange and instructive; while it had been very nice, and had finally put all our emotional entanglements back in their proper place, it also pointed-up the fact that I’d finally gotten Charlie out of my system forever.
Somehow, at some deeper level than mere words, we all knew it would never, could never happen again; we were better family than bedmates, and that incident would remain in the past forever. Charlie and Gerry were now the best of friends, brothers in arms, as it were, and we left it like that.
After that whole incident, Lucy begged me to help her work out a way to keep Charlie home; I was more than anxious to help, as was Gerry; from what Charlie had let slip, plus that terrible close shave he’d had, and some of those awful, heart-rending letters he’d never had the nerve to send home, how could we stand by and watch him, our friend and brother, go back to that meat-grinder and be swallowed whole? I was racking my brain, trying to think of a way to keep him home, safe and alive, when fate dropped the solution into my lap.
I was awakened early one morning by my phone ringing. I looked at who was calling me at such an ungodly hour; it was ‘Uncle’ Mike, again, calling me as he did periodically, to whine and beg me to show him a little of the Lorna magic. As it was never going to happen, I made as if to hang-up, then something made me take the call. I slipped out of bed and into the other room, where I could talk without disturbing my sleeping darlings.
“Uncle Mike, what a surprise!” I gritted, being polite because the alternative was to scream accusations at him for being the pervert I knew him to be.
“Lorna, how nice to hear your voice!” he oiled at me, “How is young Gerry; doing well, I hope?”
“He’s fine, he graduated from Cambridge with a Double-First, now he’s working toward his Masters; I’m very proud of him!”
There was a pause, and then that voice, that smarmy, hateful voice said something that shocked me to my core.
“Yes, I heard just how proud you are of him; a little birdie told me how you rewarded him! I know I just got you out of bed with him; please don’t insult my intelligence by bothering to deny it! I hope you two have been having fun! You’re a very naughty girl, Lorna, very, very naughty! Just imagine what people would say if they knew you were doing… that, with your own brother, no less! There are laws against that, my girl, tut-tut, naughty-naughty!”
I felt cold, and a sick, heavy weight dropped into the pit of my stomach; the bastard knew, how could he know? The answer was staring me in the face, and it shocked and scared me; he had someone watching me; someone was following me around and telling him what I was doing; Christ, how long had it been going on? I forced myself to listen to him.
“You really should learn to keep your activities a little more discreet, darling girl; as it is, I probably only have two options here; have you arrested, and that brother of yours as well, or… well, let’s just say I’m open to a little negotiation, a little give and take; you give, and I take. Think it over dear; you and I, somewhere comfortable, enjoying a cosy little ‘meeting of minds’, or you up on charges, your business in ruins, and your brother thrown out of university and held-up on criminal charges. Take your time, darling girl, take all the time you need… Oh, wait a moment, I’ve changed my mind; you have an hour, so think hard!”
He hung up, leaving me feeling cold and very, very angry; how fucking dare he! The day I climb into bed with that fucking maggot is the day they put me to bed with a shovel! Time to wake up Gerry and Jenna…
I woke Gerry and reminded him about ‘Uncle Mike’, how I’d never given him the time of day, and now he was trying to get his revenge. Jenna also woke, and listened in tight-lipped outrage as I told them what that fucker had said, what he’d threatened us with unless I gave him what he wanted, and, predictably, Gerry’s first impulse was to go there and twist his head completely around, so he could stare at his own arse while Gerry hammered a gate-post up it, but cooler heads, i. e. Jenna, prevailed. I was no use; I was getting ready to go find a gate-post and a big mallet.
“Lorna, you’re going about this the wrong way; we have to turn this back on that snake so he’s never ever going to slither out of his hole again; we have to fix him so we own his sorry arse!”
Once Jenna calmed him down, and Gerry was angry in that frightening way that only immensely strong, placid and considerate men can be when their loved ones are threatened, he put that incredible mind of his to work on the problem. After a few minutes thought, he grinned happily.
“Call him, Lor, tell him you agree, agree to anything he wants, let him think he’s going to get to do the wild thing with you. Hold him off as long as you can, though; I need to get some people around here.”
Jenna gasped, instinctively pushing me behind her, protecting me.
“What’s going on, baby, what have you got in mind?”
Gerry smiled that baby-soft, ingenuous smile of his, looking like a cherubic choirboy.
“Character assassination, Jen; blackmail, computer fraud and the destruction of reputations; by the time we’ve finished, a whole catalogue of crimes will be pointing right at his pointy little head, needing only your signal to nail him in jail for the rest of his life. He’ll be your personal flunky ’til the day he dies; when we’ve finished with him, he’ll be lucky if he can take a dump without Intelligence branch, military intelligence, the FBI, MOSSAD, and every police force in the western world sticking a camera up there first; I intend to make him so sick of his life that he’ll just shut-up, go away, and rear sheep in the outer Hebrides. Do you still have that bottle?”
(A few days prior to this, someone at a party had tried to slip Jenna a roofie; Gerry spotted him and dragged him outside, where he rapidly lost interest in Jenna, roofies, eating solid food, or any feeling in his genitals other than a searing pain that wouldn’t go away for several days. Served him right, I thought, no-one drugs and rapes my wife! I’d taken the bottle from him, and I still had it.)
Gerry smiled, still looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, or cheese wouldn’t choke him.
“Good; once you meet up with him, slip him a shot. Call him now, babe, and set up a meeting for… six days from now; that should give me enough time to get my favourite hackers in place; they’ll do a number on him that will be a work of art, believe me! Speaking of which, a sudden thought strikes; Mike works for the Joint Chiefs, doesn’t he? While we’re about it, this would also be a perfect opportunity to get Charlie off the hook. What do you think?”
I looked quizzically at him.
“Hackers, baby? What are they going to be able to do?”
Gerry grinned happily.
“They’re going to fuck his life so completely he’ll never be a problem again. Reserve your judgement, Lor; these guys are the best at what they do; I use them to hack and break the codes we devise at the Computer Lab; so far they have a perfect score; in a very real sense, these guys are designing the next generation of internet security protocols; if anybody can make a complete toilet of someone’s life, it’s these guys. I guarantee you, they’ll have that prick sitting in a corner and gibbering inside 24 hours. Trust me baby!”
I made the call, setting up a meeting at a secluded hotel I knew outside Oxford, then called the owner, an ex-rowing coach at Imperial and shamelessly blackmailed him into giving me a private suite by promising not to reveal to his wife what we used to get up to when she would go off to Chelmsford to see her mother. I wouldn’t have said anything, trust me, but he didn’t know that; judge me later; this was to get Charlie off the hook and permanently out of danger, and to squash a slimy creep so thoroughly he’d never be a problem ever again; it helped if I told myself it was for the greater good…
So now the ball was rolling; I didn’t see much of Gerry that evening, but Jenna and I found a sweet and satisfying way to make the time pass; Gerry had to make a lot of phone calls, and then go to some pretty shady pubs and bars to meet his collection of misfits and cyber-crims. The upshot was that bright and early the next morning a gang of the seediest, most bedraggled, half-starved-looking individuals straggled into the house, all of them with strange names like ‘Mute’, ‘Ratz, ‘Cutter’, ‘Case’, ‘Lupus’, and one girl calling herself ‘Cat Mother’, of all things. I was more than a little concerned; this unwashed collection of scruffs was our secret weapon?
Gerry pulled me to one side and gave me a ‘heads-up’.
“Don’t be too quick to judge, Lor; these guys can out-think the best we have at the Lab; they’re all geniuses, even if they look like unmade beds; just feed them tea and biscuits and let them do their thing; I promise you, on their worst day they’re still better than anything I can do; just trust me, Lor, I know these guys.”
I soon discovered that, apart from the occasional glance or nod at me, they were completely indifferent to my presence or Jenna’s as they mapped-out what they were going to do, a conversation I soon stopped following once it descended into silly techno-jargon. Gerry seemed to be getting happier by the hour, so I assumed all was going well.
Two days of this clandestine esoterica, midnight comings and goings, with the house filling up with more and bigger, more powerful desktop computers, laptops, DSL links and Wi-Fi nodes, and we were all set. My part was easy; all I had to do was dress slutty, haul ‘Uncle’ Mike into the room, give him a drink, and explain the new reality to him when he woke up. My hotel-owning friend was to stay out of the way at all times, as I didn’t want Mike having any sort of handle on him, so all that disgusting little creep would see would be me. And the complete fuck-up we’d make of his life if he didn’t toe the line, of course.