My brother's call

"I want you to kill someone for me," he said.
"What the fuck are you talking about, Mark?" I said.
"Well, this is a delicate matter, I can't just talk about it on the phone," he complained.
I was playing Jet Grind Radio on the Dreamcast, which is really old school, and Ro (short for Roland) was in the kitchen making popcorn. My phone was on the table with the speaker on, and he knew I loved to talk like this, so it had indeed came as a shock that he had said what he said out loud.
"Can we just meet and have lunch tomorrow?" he asked suddenly.
"No way, man, I'm not killing anyone and you and your friends make me really really paranoid. Besides, I thought you were in fucking Phuket?" I realized then that I had no idea what my brother did, I just knew it involved drugs, guns and the kind of places you see in Hong Kong action films from the nineties. I decided to search for Phuket on Wikipedia and I found it frustrating that it seemed like a normal enough town.
Ro came out and shouted a "Hey, Mark, long time no see!".
My brother became silent for almost a minute as Ro settled down on the couch and I got an A in Shibuya-cho.
"Have you got the fucking speaker phone on?" he asked.
"Sure, I hate getting the phone near my brain, those things give you cancer, Mark, c-a-n-c-e-r." I said. I really enjoyed pissing Mark off, though I knew he was a bastard. I liked the idea that being his brother I was probably the only one in the world that could get away with making fun of him with just a punch instead of an indeterminate number of bullets.
He had hung up by the time I was spelling the second c. I believed he would have gotten the idea. There was no way I was going to get involved in his mafia-like affairs and there was NO. FUCKING. WAY. I was going to kill someone, right? Right.


Oh, poor little naïve me.


So I saved my game and we put on Rival Schools 2, so I could beat Ro's ass over and over while we ate popcorn, this was retro-Monday and we were expected to have a lot of fun with things from the nineties. Retro-Monday had started off a couple years back and we had started playing mostly eighties games, but the fact was that, save from the rare exception, most of them were crap once you took the nostalgia factor from them.
Then, my brother called again and I activated speaker mode with my toe. He didn't even let me talk this time.
"Jay, my funeral will take place next Sunday, please make sure Mum and Dad do not know anything about our conversation. I'll call you ten days from now."
I managed to say "Wh..." before he hung up.
I sat there looking at the phone, until Ro killed my character and said: "Woh, your brother must be so cool."


Fuck that, I was really upset this time. The bastard knew I had a date on Sunday and he had to go and fake his death then?
Screw him, I was still having lunch with Wendy.