PART 4

My eyes found the Happy Families game left on my night table, and I immediately knew what I was going to do. I pointed at the picture-holding tree on the chest of drawers behind my brother:

– Your stupid face must be in one of these pictures somewhere. Bring me the picture.

My brother did as he was told, and, while he had his back turned, I sneakily grabbed one of the Happy Families cards. The game’s theme was our cousins the primates. Nearly every ape or monkey was accounted for, from the seriously huge ones, like gorillas, to the little half-pints, like macaques and marmosets.

As fate would have it, the card I picked was a little dazed-looking grimacing macaque: my brother’s spitting image. I quickly slipped it into the wallet’s secret pocket.

My brother found what he was looking for and came to see me, with his usual little hypocritical face. He made no comment, but I felt that at the slightest mistake he would burst out laughing and do his usual antics. He was in for a long wait…

I took the photo out of his hands, breathed in deeply, and began:

– Here, you see your picture, and here is a totally normal wallet. There is only one pocket inside, as you can s…

– The wallet trick! my brother exclaimed. This is going to end badly again!

Here we went again. I felt myself get fired up as I always did, but I took another deep breath, and was able to keep calm:

– As I was saying, here is a totally normal wallet.

Alright, fine. I knew what Barnabé meant. Sometime earlier, this moron had tried to grab my wallet (the one made of pasteboard), screaming that he knew the trick. As I tried to stop him, my arm had hit our grandmother’s nose, breaking her glasses and sending the wallet flying across the table only to land in the tomato soup with a splash! Everyone had got splashed, and I wasn’t very popular. This time however, I would show my brother. I continued:

– Now, I am putting your photo in the pocket. I am closing the wallet and placing this scarf over it. There. And now for magic to do its work: Hocus Pocus, show us - and I'm dead serious - the true colours of this ignoramus…

My intention was of course to make the Happy Families card hidden in the other pocket appear. I would have waved it under my brother’s nose while triumphantly exclaiming: There! Look at your true nature: a filthy little insufferable macaque! It would have taken him down a peg or twelve, no?

I never got the chance. There was a puff of smoke, and Barnabé suddenly disappeared.

The smoke cleared, revealing instead a real little macaque in pyjamas much too large for him. The slippers and the helmet he was wearing were also too big. He angrily shook himself to get rid of them, then jumped onto the wardrobe, looked at me with nasty yellow eyes, and screamed at the top of his lungs:

SPRING-LOADED TUBERCLE! CURLY-HAIRED AMPHETAMINE! GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S BICYCLE!

He had the exact same intonations as my brother.

Then, in a single bound, he hung onto the ceiling lamp’s shade and screamed again:

PISTON! PISTON! PISTON-OPERATED WATER SPRINKLER!

All this only took a few seconds. At first, I had no reaction. My eyes saw, but my brain refused to understand. In my boiling skull, the little voice of reason argued: It’s only your imagination. Get a grip. Come on!

But the little voice had nothing to say when the creature leapt onto the wall shelves, got a hold of my Dynamo DVDs and threw them at my head one by one.

I didn’t take the time to think. I grabbed the comforter folded at the foot of my bed, opened it, and threw it on my aggressor. He let out a muffled scream before falling and getting tangled in the blanket. I had the reflex to let myself fall on it, thus preventing any attempted escape, and let my prisoner screech and fight back in vain. After a while, he calmed down and I was able to think straight.

I had to face the facts: my trick had – rather uniquely – worked beyond any of my expectations. Whether I liked it or not, the creature struggling under me was well and truly my little brother; a little brother changed into a macaque for some mysterious reason, an angry macaque what’s more. What other explanation could there be? None. I was already imagining my mother’s face when she would see my brother’s new look. And to think she complained when he forgot to comb his hair… I had to act, and quickly. I wasn’t going to spend Christmas lying on the bedside rug, clinging to my comforter. There had to be a solution. But what?

(Go to PART 5)