Impractical Jokes (6 page)

‘Well actually, Richard, Pammy has organised a bit of a dinner party for tonight. So . . .' Richard didn't need to hear the ‘so'.

‘Perfect, Ron! Sounds delightful. I'll grab some wine, be round by seven, let's make a night of it.'

‘Ah . . . no. You see, Richard; there are fairly limited numbers. Pammy's already prepared the meal, so I'm afraid we'll have to give it a miss tonight.'

‘What if I don't eat?'

‘That could become a little awkward.'

‘I'll bring my own meal then. Maybe get some Chinese.'

‘Look, Richard, we can go out next week, but tonight we're going to have to leave it.'

Richard did his best to look hurt by the rejection. In between affected pouts and world standard moping, he threw in some precision martyr work.

‘Oh . . . I see . . . No, that's fine, Ron. I hope you have a lovely evening . . . Don't you worry about your old pal Richard . . . Your best friend . . . he'll just stay home tonight . . . alone . . . reading a particularly lonely novel.'

He may even have managed to squeeze out a solitary tear. All the while in his head he was thinking, ‘Oh you little beauty'.

On the way home from the footy Richard and Ian hatched a plot. Ian was essential to Richard's scheme and not merely because he had ordered two water pistols. You see, Ian was a builder and had done a bit of work on our kitchen and so he knew where the fuse box was.

A Pamela Pickering dinner party is a sight to behold. My mum's passion for food is matched only by her love of meticulous planning and her drive to be a good host.

She would start with the guest list. Four was too few; twelve too many. Eight was ideal but ten was fine. She would carefully consider which friends and couples would complement others. More importantly, she vigilantly kept track of who had had a falling out with whom and could instantly calculate which combinations could turn septic within the first half hour. Her guests could always be confident that if they RSVP'd in the affirmative, they would be perfectly suited to the rest of the people there.

Each meal had one simple responsibility: to be better than the last. And to achieve this, nothing was left to chance. If a dish was served at a Pamela Pickering dinner party, it was never for the first time. On a Saturday night when guests commented that their individual racks of lamb were both crispy and succulent, they had no idea that for the preceding week the Pickerings had eaten nothing but racks of lamb. On Monday night the racks had delivered on succulence, but the crumbs were soggy.

On Tuesday we achieved crispiness of crumb, but the meat was dry. Wednesday had seen an experimental glaze that all had agreed was a mistake never to be spoken of again. On Thursday the crumb to rack ratios had been adjusted to achieve a result that was passable, and on Friday's full dress rehearsal, the lamb was perfect. On the day, Suzie's responsibility was to assist in setting the perfect table. She would polish silver, fold napkins and arrange plates with a care and attention to detail that I could never muster. Accordingly, my job was to not touch anything and put away my damned skateboard.

My dad had three dinner party responsibilities: stay out of the kitchen, serve the perfect wine to match the food and, when people had overstayed their welcome, play Frank Sinatra really loudly and begin cleaning the dishes.

The result of all of this preparation was a well-oiled machine that created a dinner party environment where you simply had to turn up to have the best evening you could recall.

And this particular dinner party was no exception. Cocktails and canapés had seamlessly progressed to a broccoli and pumpkin soup that, it was agreed, all but defied science. The broccoli was contained in a green-coloured soup and the pumpkin in an altogether separate orange-coloured soup and they met exactly in the middle of the bowl along a shared border of cream. The result looked like a pie chart for an election in which the orange party and the green party had run a dead-heat for the Democratic Republic of Soup. And the pundits were unanimous, hung parliament or not, the outcome was delicious.

Through entrée, the diners enjoyed a spirited debate about whether Elvis would have lived longer had he taken the lead role he was offered in
Rebel Without a
Cause
instead of making
Kissing Cousins
and
Girl Crazy
. To wit: did the dreadful mismanagement of Colonel Tom Parker eventually kill Elvis Presley? As complicated as this sounds, it is a conversation my mother could have predicted. She matched a known Elvis buff with a known kitsch film buff, sitting directly opposite a man whose American cousin would ship the latest collectible Sun Session recordings of the King to my dad. The only unknown quantity in the room were the parents of my best friend from school but in all honesty, they just seemed happy to be out.

The main course was served to considerable applause. Each person had an individual trout, baked in paper. The diners celebrated how perfectly tender the fish was without being overcooked. Rest assured I had eaten some disappointing trout that week. Silence was called for, a toast was made and this dinner party was well on track to deliver as the best one yet.

And then, halfway through main course, all the lights went out.

A brief silence followed, but it was soon broken by the occasional tinkle of cutlery on plate or the surreptitious slosh of misdirected wine missing mouths. The dinner party was making a valiant attempt to carry on, confidently expecting power to resume at any moment.

‘What's the matter, Ron? Didn't pay the electricity bill?'

Polite chuckles were stopped in their tracks by the almighty thud of a shoulder being applied at full force to the dining room door.

Richard and Ian burst into the dining room, stockings over their heads, water pistols in their hands, bellowing threats at the diners.

‘Nobody move! This is a stick-up!'

There were five couples seated around the dinner table. Before the assailants even got to the word ‘stick-up' all the men had hit the floor, leaving the women to take the fire. All except for my father, who, my mother is adamant, used her as a human shield.

‘Just do as we say, and nobody gets hurt!'

There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that some guests soiled themselves without a shot being fired. What is for certain, is that panic struck the group with gusto, and people weren't going to calm down any time soon.

‘Oh, god. Please don't hurt us.'

‘Please, take me. Just don't hurt my wife.'

‘Who robs a dinner party?'

‘Who cares, Peter? Just do as they say.'

‘Does anyone else smell urine?'

Ian, one of only two people in the room who knew the machine guns were fake and that the gunmen were close personal friends of the hosts, found the whole situation very amusing. He began to laugh. The harder he tried to hold it in, the harder he laughed. Before long he was out of control and the mood of the room shifted one step closer to despair.

‘What's going on?'

‘Are we going to die?'

‘Please, just tell us what you want!'

‘Come to think of it, I
can
smell urine.'

By now Ian was doing his best impression of a drain but Richard remained silent. He may have been planning his next move. Or perhaps more likely he realised that a machine gun wielding, stocking-faced robber that begins laughing hysterically immediately transitions in the eyes of the hostages from threatening to maniacal. Either way, he decided someone had to break the tension.

‘All right, everyone be quiet!'

Unsurprisingly, this did little to calm anyone. If anything it made things worse. They now had to huddle in silence and just listen to the laughter.

It was around then Richard started to sense that the plan was going awry. What was meant to be a simple retaliation for a harmless joke had rapidly become a full-blown hostage situation. By this point in the prank, people were meant to be laughing. As it was, the only person laughing was a lunatic with a gun, apparently wearing a disguise so that any unlikely survivors couldn't identify him. It had become a bona fide trauma and anyone with even the most entry-level legal training could tell you that the whole situation became pretty much illegal the moment Richard and Ian said ‘this is a stick-up'.

Richard decided it was time to give his joke some kind of punch line and get the hell out before someone called the cops.

‘Is Ronnie Pickering here?'

‘Yes.'

‘You've been giving some people a hard time, haven't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘So is there someone you want to say sorry to?'

My dad desperately tried to figure out who he had crossed that would go to this much trouble to retaliate. I'd like to say he knew instantly that it was Richard but, frankly, the possibilities were endless. It could have been Jeff, the pharmaceutical courier, who almost had a cardiac episode when Dad put a tiger snake skin in a return delivery. It could have been Mary, the shop assistant, who kept finding a very realistic severed hand in her hand bag so often that she stopped bringing a bag to work. Hell, I wouldn't have put it past my mother. After a long think, the penny dropped.

RONALD PICKERING

Pictured showcasing his 1991 collection of FASH ION FOR THE BLIND. This particular ensemble has been known to cause headaches and nausea in the fully sighted.

RICHARD OPIE

Formidable adversary and master of disguise. Seen here at a summer barbecue, he is almost indistinguishable from his surrounds. It took many party-goers the entire afternoon to realise he was even there.