Aaron, Nathan & Zachery
Chapter 3
[“He Ain’t Heavy…”]
“When you next wake up you’ll feel totally refreshed, relaxed and motivated to continue your revision for the mock GCSE Geography paper due on Monday. Nothing will distract you, not your musical instruments, not your recording equipment, nor your phone or tablet; no Twitter, no Facebook, no social-media of any kind, no Youtube, and most certainly no porn. Your absolute one hundred percent concentration will be on your revision and your revision only. You will set your iPhone timer forty-five minutes revision time followed by fifteen minutes break-time. All your break-times before supper will consist only of you lying on your bed, falling into a deep, restful and satisfying trance, while your unconscious mind goes about processing and retaining what you’ve just revised, so that you can recall the information easily on Monday during the test. And when your phone timer goes off after fifteen minutes, you’ll open your eyes feeling totally energised again, as if you had a two-hour power nap. You’ll return to your forty-five minute revision, feeling upbeat and very positive. And so this revision-and-rest cycle repeats itself until you hear me or daddy call you down for supper. Nod your head twice if you understand fully what you just heard.”
Zachery’s double-nods indicated that he fully accepted and understood the very specific and elaborate post-hypnotic instructions I devised for him. I placed his phone on his right hand, and went on,
“Before you wake up from your trance, just want to say a big thank you for keeping your cool during mummy’s funeral earlier today. I am so crazy proud of you, Zac. You are a star and I love you loads.”
The last bit was an impromptu but heartfelt ‘confession’ to my beloved brother. Ironically, both Zac and I are now at an age (he’s sixteen, and I’m seventeen) where expressing our true affections for and to each other quite so openly would be akin to us streaking across the High Street stark naked. So I reckoned a confession of sort directly into Zac’s unconscious mind would have to suffice.
To my utter amazement, while still deeply under hypnosis, Zac responded, “Love you bro.”
Typically, when subjects are under hypnosis, their mind is in a receptive but passive dream-like state, meaning they only reply verbally when they were specifically told to do so. Fighting back tears I gave him a bear hug and a peck his right cheek before counting him out…
[Chalk and Cheese]
Zac and I couldn’t be more different. When I first saw him, he was tiny compared to me. He was six and I was seven, but if you want to be pedantic, then we are fifteen months apart.
Zac was a quarter Chinese. His late mum, Nichola, was half-Chinese-half-Italian. He inherited his jet black hair from her and those hazel eyes from his dad. He was an introvert and I reckoned not having a mother figure around in his formative years probably deepened his innate shyness still further.
When Aaron and Nichola were both sixteen, they had unprotected sex once too many and Zac was conceived consequently. Thankfully, they both decided to keep the baby and got married soon after. At eighteen, about a year after Zac was born, Aaron joined the Royal Marines. Unbeknownst to Aaron, Nichola began suffering from post natal depression soon after Zac was born and this affliction was to haunt her till the end of her all-too-short life.
When they were both nineteen, one night Aaron discovered to his abject horror that Nichola was about to smother Zac in his sleep with a pillow. Things went even bleaker after this horrific incident. Aaron’s grandmother, Pamela, came to live with Nichola whenever he was deployed overseas. But by then her mental condition progressively worsened. Finally she was diagnosed with ‘acute post-natal induced schizophrenia’ and was deemed unsafe to be around Zac. She was sectioned in a psychiatric institution in Scotland and was supposedly under constant supervision. Tragically, shortly after Nichola turned twenty-one (when Zac was only four), she was found hung in an isolation ward.
Not wanting his seventy-five-year-old grandma Pam to be constantly burdened with a young child, Aaron made a difficult decision to quit the Marines in order to take care of Zac, struggling immensely to square the circle all by himself as a single parent. By the time mummy and I met them for the first time they had only just moved down to from Scotland to Manchester in Christmas of 2004.
While I enjoyed outdoor activities such as camping, rock climbing and wild swimming, Zac took no interest in them (though to be fair he wasn’t half bad at them when he occasionally decided to ‘give it a go’). That was not to say he was a lazy bum by any means. He loved more solitary sports like long-distance running and was an active member of the cross-country team in our school for several years.
But his main love was undoubtedly music. Apparently he got this ‘musical gene’ from his mother (whom Aaron often extolled was a naturally-gifted singer). At the tender age of nine, all Zac needed was to hear a song played once on the radio or TV and he could perfectly recall the lyrics by heart (even if he didn’t always know what they meant) and rendered a pitch-perfect vocal performance.
On his twelfth birthday, he was given a harmonica from mummy and an ukulele from Aaron. Within a year, he mastered the two instruments like he had been playing them all his life. In fact, he was SO good that Mr Turnbull (his music teacher) somehow managed to coax him to agree to a solo performance during school assembly on Teacher’s Day. With just the ukulele as his accompaniment, he did a Susan Boyle and stunned the entire school with his unique delivery of the song “What Makes You Beautiful”, a vocal tour de force that made One Direction sound positively insipid.
Unbeknownst to the astounded audience, on our way to school that day Zac was overwhelmed by the prospect of his debut performance. Thankfully I had already been hypnotising him (the whys and hows would be revealed in due course) several times, so with mummy’s permission, it took me merely a car’s journey (fifteen minutes or thereabouts?) to assuage his pre-show meltdown.
His street-cred went through the roof after that scintillating performance. Even girls several years his senior (who prided themselves as hardcore ‘Directioners’) were smitten by Zac’s musical talent and his ‘exotic’ good looks. While Zac appeared utterly fearless as if he owned the stage when he sang, off stage up till this day he remains quiet and shy.
This apparent dichotomy in his on-and-off stage personalities did not dampen his popularity in school whatsoever. On a contrary it seemed to have worked in his favour. “It intensifies his rock star mystics”, as Nathan once succinctly and aptly surmised.
[Confidence Building]
Following my success at hypnotising Nathan for the first time, a couple of months later both Nathan and I managed to trick the school bully Sebastian Patel into getting hypnotised as well. Seb is half-Indian and half-Welsh. He was an adopted and only child of one of the school’s most prominent and vocal Trustee Members. He clearly thought he was some kind of a big shot, as evidenced by his bratty and boorish behaviours in school. Being a coward that most bullies were, he tended to pick on those physically smaller than him.
I really didn’t take much notice of him as we weren’t from the same class. Though I was quite a bit shorter than Seb (he was easily half a head taller than me, which was a big deal then when we were just twelve), I was never really in his radar until I brought my iPad to school in 2010 after the summer break. Perhaps it was the little green monster in him that caused him to single me out?
In any case, it really didn’t help that his name-calling also started around the time I discovered that I had a major crush on my best mate. Imagine how spooked and mortified I was when Seb started labelling me ‘gay boy’ in front of other people. Worse, he even tried to annoy Nathan by branding him my ‘boy toy’.
One day, Nathan couldn’t bear the incessant verbal insults from Seb any longer and boldly confronted him face to face.
“Oi there, monkey-boy, what is your deal?”, Nathan challenged him with a steely stare.
“Pfft, do I need to spell that out loud? That nancy boy there fancies you, can’t you tell?” Seb sneered as he threw a furtive glance in my direction. Gosh, how I wished the ground would swallow me up there and then. How did Seb know, if he knew?
“And that’s your problem, how? Why, maybe you are jealous because you fancy Mikey too?” Nathan threw a curve ball and completely hit Seb for six.
“I… No way! You… you are sick!” he stammered a little and appeared indignant and flustered all of a sudden.
“So what if he’s ‘gay’, I’m ‘gay’ too. We are both so very jovial, so very gleeful, so very, very happy. Say, you want to join us in our gaiety?” Nathan taunted provocatively.
Seb’s face turned crimson and for once he was lost for words. This was the first time someone publicly stood up to him. He quickly bid a hasty retreat, scurrying away with his tail between his legs.
A group of girls from our class saw the confrontation, sniggered at Seb’s hang-dog reaction and applauded, chanting. “Go Nate! Go Nate!...”
“That’ll show that pompous skinny pimple-face,” Nathan turned around and winked at me triumphantly. I wasn’t paying much attention to what he said next, because all I could see in my mind’s eye was him in shinning armour with a red shield, on a horseback galloping gallantly towards me…
So how WAS Seb hypnotised then, you wondered? Well, it happened a few days later when Nathan and I saw him cruelly mocking and mimicking Billy’s (Zac’s classmate) slight limp as he was born with unequal leg length.
“Yo, you there, pimple-face,” Nathan called out to Seb, which afforded Billy time to sneak away quickly. Distracted and slightly annoyed, he turned and shot daggers at us.
“Mikey has a really cool game on his iPad he wants to show you,” he lied. I never had any games on my iPad, mummy would have never allowed it. But that was part of Nathan’s prank on Seb.
“You know you can put him under your spell like you did to me the other day,” Nathan conspired quietly with me at the school assembly earlier that day.
“Best still, make him hoot and chatter and whoop like a monkey he is! Together, we can stop that bully by giving him a taste of his own medicine. So what say you?” he proposed earnestly.
I was sold. To be perfectly honest, after Nathan’s chivalry rescuing me from a potentially humiliating public ‘outing’ by Seb, I would have agreed to do anything he asked of me without a question.
“Oh yes, but first, before we show you this exciting new game, we want to see whether you are clever enough to figure out how Mikey performs his new magic trick,” Nathan explained glibly as the three of us walked to the back of the library building, away from the lunch crowd for some privacy.
“Get on with it then,” Seb smirked, and looked at me in anticipation, ready for the challenge.
“Very simple, I will use telepathy to read your mind using just my eyes, so I want you think of a word, any word, and then whisper to Nate that word. After that, you look into my eyes while repeating the word silently in your mind. In order for this to work however, you must try to push your palms down on mine while you send me the signal with your eyes,” I explained.
Seb pondered for a while and once he picked a word he turned to Nathan and spoke into his right ear with his hand over his mouth.
I supposed there isn’t a need to elaborate further how Seb was led down the garden path now, is it?
After I repeatedly woke him from and re-induced him back into trance several times, he was primed and ready for the main action.
“Seb, after you next wake up from your trance, you’ll not remember how and why we are at the back of the library building, and we will just part ways like nothing had happened here,” I instructed,
“But on today and today only, whenever you hear Nathan and him alone calling you ‘monkey-boy’, you will stop whatever you are doing, and immediately squat down like a monkey does. You will make the sounds that monkey makes, the hooting and whooping, the whole shebang. In fact, you ARE a real monkey for ten full seconds. After ten seconds of monkeying around, you’ll be back to your human self again without a trace of any monkey-ness. You will wonder but have absolutely no idea why you were behaving like a monkey for that ten seconds prior. Nod twice if you understand what you just heard.”
After Seb double-nodded, I began to test him, “So what sounds does a monkey make, Seb?”
Sure enough, he began to hoot, chatter and whoop passively but pretty convincingly like a chimpanzee (his monkey of choice, not mine, nor Nathan’s) while still in his trance. Nathan nearly burst his gut trying but failing to suppress his snigger with both his hands over his mouth.
The table was well and truly turned. That day, and that day alone, Nathan had Seb ‘under his spell’ FIVE times. And without fail, every single time Sebastian, the big-shot son of the school Trustee Member, hooted, chattered, whooped and prance around like an adorable little juvenile chimpanzee at those magic words for ten full seconds.
“Sebastian Patel! Stop that nonsense! Right! Now!” Ms Woodhouse hollered behind us as his classmates guffawed noisily after Nathan strolled into Seb’s class just when his English lesson was about to begin and whispered the trigger words into his ear.
“Revenge is sweet,” Nathan winked cheekily and high-five’d me as we walked to our Science class…