Impractical Jokes (2 page)

Mr Ayre was the local SP bookie. SP stands for ‘starting price', which pretty much means you can bet on any race anywhere. At the time, concepts like phone betting and TAB internet accounts were a long way off and it was against the law to take racing bets anywhere but at the track. Which is to say that Mr Ayre's business was completely illegal. Which is to say, business was booming.

After applying to be the keeper of the clipboard, and being successful, Dad walked into Mr Ayre's place with a proposition.

‘I want to talk to you about Sodality Sunday, Mr Ayre.'

‘What about it, young Ron? It's a dead bloody day for me. I may as well be in church myself.'

‘What if it was busier, Mr Ayre?'

‘How is it going to get busier, Ron? Everyone's busy getting ticked off the list.'

‘Well, I run the roll now at St Monica's. And I was thinking that for a shilling or two I could get people's Saturday winnings to them on a Sunday morning. And if they had that money with them then, they might even want to place a bet with you Sunday after mass.'

‘That is the best idea I've heard since getting little men to jump on horses and race around a track.'

And with that, my ten-year-old father began running the Sodality Sunday book out of St Monica's. And by not telling any of the fold that he was on Mr Ayre's payroll, Dad would earn an extra few shillings in tips when someone won big. His mum didn't have a problem with it because it was bringing in more money. His grandma didn't have a problem with it because she could now place bets on Sodality Sunday. And Mr Ayre was ecstatic.

‘How did you think of this, young Ron?'

‘Wherever you find gambling, you'll find Cath'licks, Mr Ayre.'

My father worked in his first pharmacy in his early twenties. It was as a trainee at Roger James' shop in the suburb of Sunshine. When Dad joined the staff, the store was new and still building its clientele. That is to say the only staff on duty were Roger and my dad and their day was only interrupted by a customer about once every three hours. Sometimes these customers would buy something, other times they were just asking for directions to the train station. Dad had the theory that if they put up a sign in the front of the shop with directions to the station, they could cut down their interruptions by half. It was an idea he kept to himself. He figured that if he brought any unnecessary attention to the shop's lack of traffic Roger may come to his senses and realise there was no commercial justification for having an assistant. Dad stuck, instead, to making sure they had plenty of activities to fill the customerless hours.

I don't know many things in life to be absolutely true, however there is one certainty in this world of which I am sure: two men when left alone for any length of time will invent a game. It's just what they are programmed to do. I once walked into an all-night bottle shop at one in the morning to find the two guys who worked there standing at either end of the wine aisle, frozen as though they had been sprung in the middle of some nefarious act. One of them held a piece of paper that had been scrunched up into a ball and wrapped in sellotape. The other had his hand on his hip in a pose best described as ‘half a teapot'. I took one look at the situation and knew instantly what was going on. I let the awkward silence hang just a second longer than necessary before I broke the tension.

‘Shooting hoops?'

‘Yep.'

‘What's the score?'

‘7–6'

‘Wow, it's close.'

‘Yep.'

‘Carry on.'

Three years later I walked into an off-licence in Dublin. Two men were standing in exactly the same stunned positions. This time, while one held a paper ball, the other stood looking at the floor between them. There in the aisle was a large black marker standing on its end, clearly the target.

‘What's the score?'

‘Nil all.'

‘Low score.'

‘Yeah, it's bloody hard to hit.'

‘Have you thought of just making a hoop?'

The rule of game invention was true of Roger James and my dad, and for them it involved playing Combat!

Combat! was the name of a popular World War Two television drama in the sixties. It followed a band of US soldiers fighting their way through France giving Germans hell. Rick Jason and Vic Morrow were likeable roustabout leads and the show's action credentials were made very clear in the opening credits, where the exclamation mark in the title was in the shape of a bayonet.

Around the height of the show's popularity, my dad came into work one morning brandishing a slug gun, capable of shooting ball-bearings at high speeds at the crows and magpies that had been terrorising his mother and grandmother. Roger inspected the weapon, commented on its sturdiness and construction, before resuming his regular position of serving absolutely no customers whatsoever. Four transaction-free hours later, Dad, Roger and the slug gun were out the back of the shop. They'd lined up six faulty cans of L'Amour hairspray, a locally manufactured hair lacquer whose quality control procedures were about as legitimate as its French heritage—about one in four cans failed to work. This would have been a great inconvenience had they not made such outstanding targets for Combat! (or had there actually been anyone wanting to buy them).

Still dressed in their white pharmacist jackets, Roger and Dad would take turns leaping out into the alleyway and yelling, ‘Take that you lousy kraut!' before blazing away at the tins. Combat! rapidly became their time-waster of choice and it would be played every day without fail. The only tricky part of the whole game was when Bruce Green, the L'Amour rep, would come around to collect the faulty cans which were then peppered with bullet holes.

A few doors down from Roger's chemist was Bradman's department store, owned by the then Lord Mayor of Melbourne. He would occasionally check on his investment, parking behind the store in his black Jag, registration LM1, and, flanked by two security guards, entering via the tradesman's entrance. Most people in the neighbourhood thought that the lord mayor having his own secret service detail was a bit of overkill, given that nobody in history had ever made an attempt on the life of a lord mayor. Or at least that's what they thought until one afternoon when, just as the mayor was getting out of his Jag, Roger leapt around the corner brandishing a pistol.

‘Take that you lousy kraut!'

‘Don't shoot!'

‘Shit! Sorry!'

The security snapped into action. They bundled the lord mayor into the car and sped away, collecting a few rubbish bins as they screeched around the corner. Within an hour, the local constabulary were making their way door to door, canvassing for witnesses to the bungled assassination attempt. They walked into the pharmacy, where Dad and Roger were busy pretending to file receipts.

‘Did you see anyone around here with a gun?'

‘Nope. Haven't seen anything,' said Roger. My dad backed him up.

‘We've been too flat out with customers.'

After graduating, Dad bought a small pharmacy in partnership with Peter, another pharmacist he had met in the final year of college. The men didn't know each other that well. In fact, all they really knew of each other was that they were both pharmacists and both had exactly half the money needed to go into business with the other.

The partnership began well for Peter and Dad. The novelty of a new colleague and the pride of owning their own business made the first few days exciting and fun. This initial momentum was helped along by a procession of eccentric local customers who provided no end of entertainment. There was old Mrs Stevens who never bought a thing but would come in at eleven-thirty on the dot to sit down and have a rest on her way to bingo. Then there was Mr Pappas, perpetually complaining about the ‘blardy garment', but when pushed for specifics was unable to name which party or level of ‘blardy garment' he was talking about. And then there was the dynamic duo of Mrs Mackilroy and her mature-aged, developmentally-challenged son, Maurice. She had a short-term memory that would make goldfish look gifted, while he found it infinitely funny that his mum was utterly incapable of getting Dad's name right.

‘Thank you, Mr Partridge.'

‘Hehehehehe.'

‘Maurice. Don't laugh at Mr Pilkington. It's very rude.'

‘Hehehehe. It's not Pilkington, Mum. It's Pickering.'

‘Don't be so ridiculous, Maurice. I'm terribly sorry, Mr Picknelli. He's a little touched, you see.'

‘That's quite all right, Mrs Mackilroy. I totally understand.'

‘That's very understanding of you, Mr Pettingill.'

‘It's Pickering, Mum. Hehehehe.'

‘That's it, Maurice, I'm taking you home. I'm so sorry, Mr Pankhurst.'

‘That's quite all right, Mrs Mackilroy.'

And with that they would make their exit. The last thing Dad would hear as Mrs Mackilroy ushered Maurice out the door was his name, followed by a high pitched giggle fading into the distance.

But after four days of the theatre company of Stevens, Pappas, Mackilroy and Son (with a dozen or so supporting cast members) staging the same play in his small pharmacy, Dad became a little bored with the shop's predictable cadence. He decided he needed to spice things up a bit.

At the time of this story, which was the seventies, two important things were true of pharmacies. First, all pregnancy tests were performed by pharmacists. You would submit a small jar of urine and the chemist would send it away to a lab. Some time later, the jar would come back and the pharmacist had the unenviable job of telling you if you were pregnant or not. I say unenviable because this is a piece of information with only a fifty per cent chance of being what the recipient wants to hear. While it's possible that you are pregnant and want to be or aren't pregnant and don't want to be, it is equally possible that you are pregnant and don't want to be or not pregnant but wanting to be. There are very few other pieces of information in the world that have such binary success rates—a doctor telling someone they are fit to serve in the army comes to mind; as does an occupational advisor telling someone they are well-suited to a career as a rodeo clown.

The second important quirk of 1970s pharmacies was that they sold two flavours of the effervescent vitamin supplement and hangover mainstay Berocca. They were the highly popular red flavour and the distinctly less popular tropical flavour. People would debate the tropical flavour's poor sales for years—some put its failure down to insufficient marketing; others would blame its taste. But most would agree that it wasn't helped by the fact that when dissolved, it turned water an unnerving, all-too-familiar yellow.

So on day five of his fledgling pharmacy's existence, Dad was up at the crack of dawn to head into work. As he raised the shutters on the shop and waved at the fruiterer across the road, the fruiterer checked his watch and wondered why the chemist was in so early. And it was particularly early. The other shops were a long way from opening and it would be a while yet before the wonderful world of retail groaned into life for another day. But that suited Dad just fine. He wanted a clear hour to himself in the shop before Peter arrived.

Closing the shutters behind him, Dad stopped by one of the shelves before heading to the dispensary. He then meticulously dissolved a tropical Berocca in a pregnancy test sample jar, labelled it with a fake name and added it to the box of samples waiting to be sent for testing.