A Fishy Tale
We love April Fool's Day in our house. The Barley family are prone to playing pranks at the best of times, but to be actively mandated to do so once a year is an opportunity not to be missed. When the day arrived this year, my son kicked things off by waking his sister and saying, 'Bethany. It's nearly eight o'clock. Shouldn't you be leaving for school by now?'
Cue several rounds of 'Oh my God!' from my daughter, followed by her frantic scrabblings to get washed and dressed before she spotted the wide grin on my son's face and the hands on her wall clock pointing to a quarter to seven. She got her own back on her brother by giving him a particularly painful, 'Pinch and a punch for the first of the month. NO RETURNS.'
Not long after, the phone rang. 'Can someone answer that?' shouted my wife from the bathroom, 'It might be school.'
When she emerged five minutes later and asked who'd called, I said, 'It was your head teacher. Apparently the boiler's broken again and they've had to close the school.' The excited gleam on my wife's face at the prospect of a day off work told me my ruse had been a success. I was tempted to let things ride for a while, but the potential repercussions made me 'fess up and exclaim, 'April Fool!' Her disappointment, closely followed by a Paddington Bear stare of grizzly proportions, made me feel so guilty that I endured her 'Pinch and a punch' without a flinch and didn't even bother with the counter, 'Punch and a kick for being so quick,' when she forgot to say, 'No returns'.
As practical jokes go, those two were tame compared to some I've been involved with in my time. My student days in a college hall of residence were particularly rife with scholarly skullduggery and 'fresher' faced foolery. Like the time a friend naively left his ground floor bedroom window ajar while having lunch in the refectory one Saturday. Five students, who shall remain nameless, promptly removed every object and item of furniture from his room that would fit through the now fully opened window - including his single bed after some screwdriver dis-assembly turned it into a flatpack. We, I mean they, re-assembled everything exactly as it was - even making his bed, a first for students - outside on the grass lawn of the hall's quadrangle. By the time it was finished it was good enough - some would argue bad enough - to win a Turner Prize for alfresco art.
When the victim sauntered back from his lunch he joined the gathering throng of onlookers laughing and taking pictures from the path surrounding the lawn. 'That's brilliant!' he said, 'I've got to get a picture,' before running off to fetch his camera. Everyone else retreated to the safety of the first floor windows to watch the entertainment unfold below. It was a good five minutes before my friend, having managed to combine a red face with a bemused look, emerged to a cheer loud enough to wake the Warden. All credit to my friend, he endured shouts of, 'Do you want the number for Pickford's?' and 'You should have gone to Radio Rentals!' as he carried his belongings back inside item by item. With so many suspects but no willing witnesses, retaliation was out of the question. His only comment in the bar that evening was, 'How the bloody hell did you get my bed through the window? It barely scraped back in through my doorway.'
I won't mention the bucket, brimming with water, balanced on the top of another student's door while he went to use the bathroom at the end of the corridor, or the fact we actually stuck it there with superglue so it wasn't so much balanced as a permanent feature. Nor will I dwell on the kidnapping of another student, who was deemed such a prankster that it was decided collectively that he be punished by being bound, gagged, driven out into the country and abandoned by a riverbank in the middle of nowhere - no offence to the village of Thrumpton, I'm sure it has lots going for it, but on that occasion, in the dark, it did look like the middle of nowhere; especially seeing as I was the one being dumped there.
My 'friends' generously loosened my hands and confiscated my money before they drove off to an out of the way pub to celebrate. After freeing myself and uttering the odd curse or two, I worked out where I was from a parish notice board in the village. Ten miles from campus to be precise. I'd like to say I hitchhiked back, but it was more a case of sweaty jogging with a thumb raised at every passing car that veered wide enough to avoid the lunatic obviously up to no good late on a Saturday night along the country lanes outside Nottingham.
However, all that student tomfoolery pales into insignificance when compared with the fishy foul play I dished up as best man at my good friend, Jim's, wedding. To be fair, he started it. When Gillian and I got married in 1992, Jim was responsible for decorating our car with the usual balloons, shaving cream, trailing tin cans and the not so usual fresh fish placed on the engine manifold by the air conditioning intake. We were halfway to Heathrow, with the car smelling like a Grimsby trawler, before we found the perfectly cooked fish under the bonnet.
Move forward several years and the roles were reversed when Jim came to be married and I was his best man. Aware that Jim would be wary of juvenile jiggery-pokery, I wasn't sure whether the fish trick would work twice until Jim's sister said we had to do it as she'd already been to the fishmonger's to buy two full-sized haddock. What could I do? You don't argue with relatives of the groom. Hence we hid one fish under the passenger seat with its head poking out, and the other well out of sight - curled under the rubber of their securely screwed down spare tyre beneath a boot carpet piled high with honeymoon luggage. With the red herring easily found under the seat and the haddock well hidden in the boot we reckoned it would be a few hours before Jim sniffed out the second fish. We were wrong.
'Hello, is that Steve?'
'Jim? I thought you were on your honeymoon in the States?'
'We are.'
'What's with the phone call, mate? Aren't you supposed to be busy being married, if you know what I mean?'
'We have a problem with our car.'
'Really?'
'Or rather, with the fish in our car.'
'Oh. So you found them both then? It took a while, but revenge is sweet!'
'We found one, but we didn't find the second.'
'But you must have done, otherwise you wouldn't be ringing.'
'We left the car parked at the airport. Only it wasn't our car.'
'I don't understand?'
'My company car was in for repair while we got married. The garage gave us a hire car as a temporary replacement. They agreed to swap the cars at the airport while we were away on our honeymoon.'
'Oh. So I suppose they found the fish when they picked it up?'
'No. They found a car reeking of fish but full of blowflies. The driver refused to touch it.'
'Ah. So..what happened next?'
'It had to be professionally cleaned...'
'Oops.'
'...at a cost of three hundred and twenty pounds.'
'Double oops.'
'I'll speak to you when we return.'
'Er...right.'
Click.
Jim did speak to me on his return - at great length and at great volume - but his wife didn't. Not for some time. She does speak to me now and I like to think we're the best of friends but, for a while back then, you could say I was close to having my chips over the issue with the spare fish.
All I can say is, roll on next year's April the 1st!
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