The Birthday Favour
Thanks go to Little_Sister and tangentjoker for helping me edit this story.
Any mistakes that remain are my own. [MyGuiltySecret]
It was the morning of May 19th, my brother's birthday. He was 20 and at university. I was 18 and studying for my A-levels. We both still lived at home; him because the rent in London is so expensive, and me because I'm still in school.
Neither of us realised it on that bright Thursday morning, but he was going to get a birthday present he would never forget.
I knocked on the door to his bedroom.
"Yeah?" My brother's voice sounded distracted, as if he was in the middle of something.
I went in. I saw him dropping a towel into his sport bag, glimpsed shorts and T-shirt under it.
"Happy birthday, big brother." He turned to face me and I handed him the envelope.
He smiled as he took it from me. "Thanks, sis." He tore open the envelope. "You shouldn't have," he said as he took the card out. It was just a cheap card, bought from the corner shop, so I didn't blame him for sounding a little disappointed. I couldn't help it. I was just a student and I didn't have a lot of money. Still, I hoped he would be pleased with what he found inside it.
He opened the card and found my real present to him. I may not have much actual cash, but I can be inventive.
He took out the token I'd put inside it, examining it.
If you added up all the hours I'd spent on it, it must have taken me a good few days to make. I'd done everything I could to make it look like an actual banknote, something valuable.
I'd gone to the trouble of hand-making the paper, so it wouldn't just feel like something that had been pulled out of a photocopier. I'd used the finest Rotring pen I could find, and drawn lots of tiny, thin lines to look like engraving on the background. I'd done a watercolour wash across it, so the background shaded from green to blue. The foreground had a picture of a present on it, done in acrylics to really make it stand out, the pale blue ribbon on it as detailed as I could get it. The big bow atop it had light and shade and highlights all delicately painted in. At the top left it said, in elegant calligraphy:
"I promise to pay the bearer
ONE FAVOUR"
The capital letters on the second line were big bold copperplate, done with a technique called
impasto
- I'd used enough paint to actually give them some depth. At the bottom right I had signed it, big and swoopy and exaggerated, and underneath it was written something like a job title in much smaller letters, so it looked like something on a note that could have been issued by a real bank:
"Angie
YOUR LITTLE SISTER"
And where real notes nowadays had a copyright notice, I'd written in smaller letters, running vertically up the right hand side:
HAPPY 20th BIRTHDAY JACK, WITH LOVE FROM YOUR KID SISTER
It even had a serial number - today's date.
"Wow," he said, almost speechless. As he admired my handiwork, I rushed to fill in the silence.
"Just like it says, I'm giving you a favour for your birthday. Completely unrestricted. It can be as big as you want, or as small as you want. You can use it right now, or save it for twenty years. You can hold onto it until you're married with three kids and need a babysitter, or just send me round the corner to get you a pizza one night when you just can't be bothered."
"Anything?" he asked, smiling.
"Well, almost anything. I don't have much cash, remember, so anything that costs money is probably out. But other than that... yeah, anything."
"Even help me tidy up this pigsty?"
I looked around at his room. It was a state. Books everywhere. Huge thick textbooks, the science fiction paperbacks he loved reading so much. Binders with notes spilling out of them. Letters from the bank about his student loan. Discarded flyers about one event or another. Magazines about football. Dirty clothes and dirty dishes that hadn't made their way downstairs by themselves. Sweaty sports kit that needed a wash, and football boots that he hadn't even scraped the mud off yet. Things festering. A couple of mugs growing mould. The computer on his desk was barely visible because of the piles of stuff around it.
"Um... I wasn't thinking of such a big job, but yeah. If you want."
"Nah, don't worry, I wouldn't ask you to do that. There's some stuff in here I probably wouldn't want you finding, anyway."
"What, like those old porn mags under your bed? I found them ages ago. Yeah, I know you figured out how to get smut on your phone, but those pornographic magazines are still there, right?
"How did you...? Never mind. Anyway, there's other stuff. Personal stuff."
"Like what? Have you been stealing my panties or something?"
"No! Of course not!"
He denied it, but only after a hesitation. And was he blushing? Oh my god. Had my brother been stealing my underwear?
He stepped closer to me. Looking me right in the eyes, his eyes green like my own, so close that I could see the little light and dark flecks in the iris, the pupils as black as my hair. He continued talking, his voice lower and quieter now. Conspiratorial, as if we were sharing a secret.
"What if I asked you for some other kind of services? What if I asked you to set me up with one of those hot school friends of yours? Holly has a particularly fine figure, if I recall."