Warning: Contains graphic violence. More fiction, about an angry grieving sibling who takes revenge against the tormentors that drove his brother to degradation and death. Not for the faint-hearted.

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“Hey, you!!!” I closed the distance between the startled, grim-faced figure dragging the unwilling small boy along forcibly, and punched him in the stomach. His specs went flying as he doubled over, and I poleaxed his back, bringing my knee up, shattering the teeth in his mouth, then slammed him repeatedly against the wall. As he fell to the concrete with a cracked skull,  I whispered to the unconscious child: “Remember.”

Oh, and when the Police visited Canadian Prairie Boy’s place to see if they could find any reason for the ‘inexplicable’ assault, they found some disgusting out of focus photos of him and some little girls from his previous job at an Alberta orphanage.

Phase two. Only, I decided to let Johanna have a go at her. Yes, there she was, pinch-faced, the hint of whiskey on her breath suppressed by the mints, as she closed on the project that it’d taken him a week to complete, about to rip it up. Then a furious, duster-coated brunette stalked into the classroom and jerked her around, then slapped her before her hands and tongue could reach their target:
“That’s quite enough of that, missy…”

And she didn’t let up, frogmarching the struggling woman across to her desk and throwing her into her chair:

“They must really have scraped the bottom of the barrel when you got into teachers college. Was it nepotism, or was it just Christian croneyism? Oh yeah, I’ll bet that was it. And by the way, ” Jojo fished out her half-empty whiskey bottle from her purse, “shouldn’t they have done a background check on you, because I don’t think you should be teaching impressionable high school kids with a hangover. Or is it to deal with the moodswings you didn’t tell the interview panel about? Sure, that’s it. Praise the Lord, huh? All happy clappies together. Or is it that you’re incapable of forming close personal relationships with anyone, and daddy was a major contributor to the school, and hey,  one of your cousins was already teaching here-”

Oh, she was absolutely brilliant. And at the end of it, Bleached Blonde ran screaming. Sure enough, three years later, we spotted her ridiculous little blue mini, burning, an empty gin bottle by the car. Strike two.

One more to go. I stepped into the music room, and this time, I didn’t even have to lift a finger. Right on time, the school inspector’s car had drawn up, and he was waiting hidden in the adjacent study room next door, as the third quarry lapsed into a paroxysm of rage, screaming the place down, lashing repeatedly with his rattan cane. The inspector shook free from the Vice Principal, who was trying her best to restrain him, and gave the barest hint of a nod. Still ranting and screaming, he was taken away by men in white coats.

When the papers called his first wife, she was only too glad to tell them why she’d left him in the first place. Never could control that temper. And he was still employed as a teacher there, when no one else would have him.

1980. Checkmate.

I stepped through the broken, graffiti-tagged brick wall, with the imprint of the former school crest, and surveyed my handiwork. The wind whistled through the skeletal, burn out remains of one former classroom block, as it swept up eddies of dirt and dust, blowing through the deserted prefab buildings. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? They’d gone bankrupt back in ‘78, when their overambitious previous building plans collided with the cumulative revelations of paedophilia, alcoholism and past domestic violence.

Twenty six years later, I shakily stepped out of the time cage, and opened the history books. I’d done it for entirely different reasons, not ideological ones. Homosexual law reform had ended sooner in 1985, with no significant opposition. When the anti-abortionists went feral in the late nineties, Parliament decriminalised abortion. Lange won a third term in 1990, and then a fourth in 1993. When he finally stepped down in ‘96, Palmer introduced the full gamut of constitutional reforms.

History now records that a wild-eyed, bewigged young woman tried to assassinate Helen Clark in Hamilton, back in ‘99. Her would-be killer was felled by the security services before she could even draw her gun. And of course, the anti-proselytisation laws followed.  Johanna left me a newspaper article about the detention camps for ‘christofascists’, as they’re now commonly called.  Overseas agitators are sent back to their blighted homelands if they try to disembark here to cause trouble.

And. Frank, my brother, you are alive and well. You never had your nervous breakdown as a result of those bullying bastards due to your stutter and hand-eye co-ordination problems, never dropped out of school early as a result of the electroshock and lithium that you were exposed to, never took up that syringe full of tainted heroin and shot it into your arm. I never found you, string-haired, pale and lifeless, contorted into a fetal ball.  You are fulfilled, you married Jojo, although it’s a shame she had to end her career as a gymnast due to her leg going bad.

Here’s the big joke. They thought you were the gay one, kid brother. Not me, the big butch, broad-shouldered prop forward for the school First XV. 

And by the time you find me, the cancer will have done its cumulative work as a result of repeated physiological exposure to tachyonic distortion and stress, because humans were never meant to travel across time, into the past.  I’ll probably be dead by the time you read this.

As the Pet Shop Boys once sung, “For the love that we have/and the love that we hide/who will bury us/when we die?”