Impractical Jokes (9 page)

They were greeted by a roly-poly woman who can best be described as looking exactly as you would expect a poodle breeder to look.

‘Pammy. Richard. Please come around into the back garden. I think we have the perfect dog for you.'

They wandered around the back of the house to find Dad standing in the back garden. Bundled up in his arms was Hudar, our poodle, very much alive with a smile on his face that indicated even he was in on the prank and found it hilarious.

‘G'day, Richard!' said my dad with a cheeky smile and faux innocent tone. He looked for all the world like a middle-aged Dennis the Menace. Richard, doing his best impression of a young Mr Wilson went decidedly ape-shit.

‘Bastard!'

‘Come on, Richard. At least the dog's alive.'

‘Bastard!'

‘What? You're angry that the dog's alive? That's not very nice.'

‘Bastard! Bloody! Bastard!'

‘You have to admit it's pretty funny.'

‘Bastard.'

‘By the way, if it's any consolation, Pammy thinks this is all hilarious.' Dad gestured towards my mother who was standing behind Richard, laughing so hard as to cause severe physical discomfort and respiratory difficulty. Richard himself had turned an alarming shade of purple and appeared to be vibrating. Dad continued, ‘So that should make you feel a bit better.'

‘Bastard! This is an act of cowardice. Of temerity. Indicative of a lack of character.'

He was so angry he had become Winston Churchill.

‘This is not over, Pickering. Not by a long shot. It has not even begun to be over. And I say, that by the time that this
is
over, it shall be finished.'

Richard pivoted, stormed past my mother and one fairly confused poodle breeder and crunched his way back up the gravel driveway. He slammed the door of his car and sped off down the road.

Foolishly, my father thought he had won the war. Surely nothing could top this elaborate poodle-based double-cross? There was the minor collateral damage of one poodle breeder who was slightly miffed not to make a sale, but other than that this was a precision strike which would shock and awe Richard into understanding that Ronald Pickering was a significant foe who was not to be trifled with. Dad declared ‘Mission Accomplished' and in what can only be described as a premature celebration of Bushian magnitude, packed up the family for a week away down the coast at Flinders.

On his second four-hour drive of the day, Richard began planning the next phase of the campaign.

2
The Mr T Principle:
In 1996 my friend Colin and I decided to create an urban myth. To qualify it simply had to be a story of our own unique creation that was told back to us by someone whom we hadn't told it to. The story we fabricated was that Emmanuel Lewis, the diminutive star of the eighties television smash
Webster
, had died performing a head-spin at a wrap party after they filmed the last episode. We felt the story was believable as it was set in the mid-eighties when breakdancing had taken the nation's playgrounds by storm and parents were beside themselves about the potential dangers of head-based rotation. However, in practice we found that people were slow to accept the story as fact. After some deliberation we added to the story that at the time of the incident, Mr T had called the ambulance. By combining two eccentric eighties stars with seemingly inexplicable careers, the tale was instantly better received and was eventually told back to me four years later by a member of the Perth street press. For the purposes of clarity, I should add that Emmanuel Lewis is very much alive and well. In 1997 he graduated from Clark Atlanta University and since then has made numerous on-screen appearances, most notably a cameo in 2007's
Kicking It Old Skool
, a movie about a breakdancer who comes out of a twenty-year coma after suffering a head injury while breakdancing. I am not making this up. And if you don't believe me, just ask Mr T.

6

Flinders

N
estled on the coast an hour out of Melbourne, the holiday house at Flinders represents probably my parents' biggest regret. That is really something. These are people who, in the eighties, invested in the artificial insemination of designer goats—a scheme that went so badly that eventually the cost of one of these goats actually dipped below the cost of a .303 bullet to put the goat out of its misery. As a result, there are some very expensive feral goats currently calling the Dandenong Ranges home.

Bought in the early seventies and known to us only as Flinders, the house had a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom that looked dated the moment it was built and an open plan living/dining/kitchen/craft/rumpus room. The TV didn't always work but it looked good sitting on top of a sideboard that housed puzzles, board games, totem-tennis bats, Uno cards and the numerous other things that the law requires you to keep at all holiday houses without exception. Flinders was proudly un-fancy and smelled like the beach twenty-four hours a day. It was the perfect example of a seaside shack, back when such things still existed. Today if you drive through Flinders there are very few shacks. They have been replaced with ‘summer houses' which look remarkably like mansions and give you the feeling that you will never truly understand what it is like to be rich.

The reason Flinders is a regret is that my parents wished they had never sold it at the end of the 80s. Well, that and seagrass matting.

Some time in my early infancy, the floor of the holiday house was dilapidated, but to polish the floorboards would have been costly and there was a chance they wouldn't withstand the buffing. A cheap floor covering was required.

Simultaneously, in a mysterious laboratory in places unknown, significant breakthroughs had been made in seagrass matting. Anyone who played table tennis anywhere near an ocean between 1977 and 1988 knows exactly what I'm talking about. The colour of straw, the consistency of rope, it sits on the floor-covering spectrum between tiles and debris and its price puts it well within reach of the average rumpus room decorator on a budget. Indeed, seagrass matting loves nothing more than rumpus. It is robust enough to withstand whatever level of rumpus you can throw at it, yet delicate enough to consistently fray around the edges. This gives the illusion of character without the hassle of genuine long-term rumpus.

But seagrass matting's true genius is that it is segmented into squares, making bespoke flooring a breeze and giving the purchaser an inflated sense of handiness. This is definitely true of my dad who took the measurements and, once the matting was down, stood back to admire his work. And it was good. Except for the fact that the door to the toilet could not close.

It turned out that the exact level of clearance between the door and the existing floorboards was exactly one quarter of an inch less than the standard thickness of seagrass matting, as dictated by the faceless powerbrokers of the matting industry. This discrepancy was discovered when my father, after admiring his handiwork, headed to the smallest room in the house for a hard-earned wee. With the half-closed door wedged firm, Dad's shoulders slumped and his head bowed. Relief was a long way off.

Now, of all the doors in the house, this is the one you most want to close. You can overlook an exposed pantry or even an ajar spare bedroom. But a toilet with an open door is the least-dignified throne in the world. There is little more demeaning than having to sit on a toilet with passers-by. Your only hope is to pretend to be thoroughly engrossed in
National Geographic
and permanently outraged by pedestrian traffic. But even this act can only be maintained for so long before you realise you're just a person on a toilet with an audience.

This all happened when I was a baby, but according to my mother, a system of toilet warnings was implemented. An orange bicycle flag on a six-foot pole would point into the corridor, warning people that someone was mid-business in a highly exposed fashion. As I was still filling nappies at this stage, I was not party to this demeaning system. In fact, it is the only time ever that being prone to polluting a nappy had more dignity than being toilet trained.

As ingenious as this flag system was, it could not last long term. The agreed solution was that a small portion of the door would need to be removed. About half an inch. Just enough to allow clearance between the seagrass matting and the door. The door was removed from its hinges and placed in a makeshift vice in the back garden and a saw was fetched from the shed. My father is a meticulous man and if he is going to saw half an inch off a door, he is going to do it right. A ruler, a set square, a spirit level and a protractor were all used to rule a perfectly straight line. At around ten in the morning my father and grandfather commenced sawing.

The first difficulty came immediately. The door, it turned out, was solid oak and not easily intimidated by any saw man had yet devised. In fact, the door was so hard as to raise ontological questions about how the door was even sawed into a door in the first place.

To begin with the conversations were jovial. Some mention of recent sporting fixtures; a little talk of what they might do with their afternoon. This lasted approximately eight minutes. At that point they were both too exhausted to talk. Their work had yielded a small depression in the wood. Not quite a groove. But almost.

From there Dad and Grandpa had to work in ten-minute shifts. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the enormity of the challenge seemed to grow. While one was sawing the other would be resting in the shade and taking on fluids. My grandfather, a veteran of a world war, typhoid and open-heart surgery was an energetic worker and therefore a massive health concern to all around him.

After some hours, lunch was served. Cut sandwiches were eaten as the job so far was discussed. There was general consensus that the job was a goddamned pain in the arse and progress decidedly tits up. The saw remained frozen a quarter of the way through the door. It was stuck and couldn't be removed. It was like Excalibur, if Arthur had to saw through solid rock to get his sword back. Destiny be screwed, this was going to take hard work.

Sawing continued through the afternoon and into dusk. A beer was had and sawing went on. The sun went down, the sawing continued. An ad hoc spotlight was erected, sawing continued. Some time around ten-thirty, half an inch of door fell to the ground, as did the saw and my sweat-drenched father. There was a smattering of applause from the patient but altogether over it crowd.

My triumphant father and wheezing grandfather hoisted the conquered door aloft and headed for the toilet.

There was some quiet chat and jokes made as the door was screwed back into place. It is the kind of talk you can imagine at sundown after the taking of Normandy. Too exhausted to speak, too relieved to not. ‘Well, we won't be doing that again anytime soon.'

The final hinge was attached and, with an announcement of, ‘I've been waiting all day for this wee,' my father attempted to close the door. It wouldn't budge. The harder he tried, the harder it wedged on the seagrass matting.

My father swore. My grandfather swore. The door was inspected. They both swore. Loudly.

One initial theory for the door not closing was that they hadn't sawn off enough of the wood. The subsequent and significantly more correct theory was that, over the space of eleven hours, they had sawed a perfectly aligned, expertly measured, half-inch strip of wood off the top of the door, leaving the bottom intact.

An awkward night was had by all; a meal in silence and the then-working television watched without laughter. That night, no matter how funny John Blackman's ripostes, how suggestive Dickie Knee's antics or how abrasive Red Symon's barbs,
Hey Hey It's Saturday
was considered neither light nor entertainment.

It was decided that the men needed some time away from the door, so the following day was spent at the beach.

Day three involved a lot of sawing; very little talking.

By nightfall, the men of the house were the proud owners of one solid oak door and two half-inch strips of solid oak door. One strip was glued back onto the top of the door and the door was re-hinged. It opened. It closed.

My dad opened and closed the door a few times to make sure he wasn't dreaming. And, with a call for privacy, he took one of the most hard-earned wees in history.

The lasting memorial to three days of struggle was a line at the top of the door where the strip had been glued on again. Every time my dad sat on that toilet, it would mock him.

The seagrass matting itself was a short-lived success. At first everyone agreed it had been worth the trouble, but three months later they changed their minds. Suzie, then aged three had woken up at the crack of dawn. Not wanting to wake anyone, she set about occupying her busy mind with household chores. She tidied up toys, folded some linen and then came to check on me in my cot. She noticed that my nappy was full and decided, having seen Mum and Dad change me countless times, she would give it a shot. Mum and Dad walked in to check on us at seven and what they saw when they opened the door was something that will stay with them for life.

It was clear from the state of the room that Suzie had no trouble taking my nappy off. What happened after that was pretty much up for grabs. There were clear signs of a struggle, evidence of confusion and frustration and an overall sense that what had gone on in this room was not the happiest of times. The other conclusion that was drawn from forensic inspection was that while the papered walls had been of little use to my sister for removing nappy contents from her hands, seagrass matting had worked a treat. Not a single swirling gap in the seagrass weave went unfilled. Every square would need to be cut out, removed and, I dare say, incinerated.