April Fool!

Every month we invite our readers to pitch us articles on a theme revealed in our regular newsletter. Find out what our next theme is by subscribing to our newsletter below. Because there are no flies on us, March’s theme was April Fool and Kerrie Noor, or rather Kerrie’s sister, had us in stitches with this reminiscence.

1977, I was a hip seventeen-year-old in jeans so tight that laughing was dangerous, but not as dangerous as my ten-year-old sister.

She hated me with the sort of venom that would have Dracula shaking in his shoes and just like Dracula she could be seductively appealing, even when ripping the head from a doll…

She claimed it was the cat. 

How a cat can rip a doll’s head without a teeth mark let alone a drop of drool was beyond me, but my mother took one look at my sister’s baby-doll eyes and swallowed it whole.

It was a black doll called Scarlett and dressed just like Scarlett O Hara’s mammy, which in the seventies was as acceptable as the various names we, in Australia, used for Italians. 

It was a gift from mum to me although secretly I think she saw it as hers – we weren’t allowed to touch.

For years Scarlett sat in the corner of our bedroom taunting my sister until one day, mass destruction on a scale of a bird caught in a fan, the head went missing like the proverbial car keys…

It was April Fool’s day when my sister came up with a “your side and my side of the bedroom” idea. 

“You can have the window side with my bed,” she said. “And I’ll have your puny thing here by the door.”

I, having just collared a date with the coolest surfer in town, the sort that would have my mum choking on her tea, agreed.

A border was drawn, a no-fly zone agreed, all detailed on a sheet of foolscap, and I, high on the promise of a good snog signed without reading the fine crayon print. 

I mean what ten-year-old has fine print worth a jot?

“April fool!” she shouted locking me in with her door, leaving me a window the size of a lunch box as my only exit.

The laughter was loud, my mum thought it was hilarious, I felt as cool as a knitted toilet roll cover. 

Being out-witted by a waist-high smart arse with the moves of Putin was bad enough but on the eve of my illicit date of the century, I went from humiliated to enraged.

I emptied her stuff from under the bed, hurling Barbie and her friggin’ camper van across the room, and there it was, propping up a Spirograph like a smiling sideshow clown (without the face paint), the severed head of Scarlett.

Bribery was mine for the taking. 

Of course, my sister remembers it differently, she remembers me bribing her with a year’s supply of “homework helping”.

And my mum, depending on her audience, and what she wanted from whom, swithered between the two.

But you and I know the real truth… I mean really, a ten-year-old outsmarting a cool teenager – like that really happened?