the all-time great prank

It was the all-time great prank. They took her margarine – this was in a shared accommodation – from the fridge, about half-used or maybe slightly more or less, it doesn’t matter, there were a few fingers of vacant space in the tub, Flora or Bertolli or something, maybe Benecol (she spoke at length about her cholesterol, but in the kind of half-hearted way that suggested an adjustment to her choice of butter-alternative spread was about as far as she was prepared to go to remedy her preoccupation, if it was that, which it might not have been, the years have not been kind to the clarity of the weeks preceding it, the all-time great prank), I think the tub was aesthetically vivid is why I suggest these brands, known for just that. Maybe Vitalite. The mood in the shared accommodation had become very low by this wintry point in the year, the socialisation and communality ever unsustainable beyond even the first couple of weeks, and relationships were badly broken if they had ever been otherwise in the first place. She was of well-off stock and sporty and had a stolid and permanent face that looked like it would weigh a tonne to carry as she did, day in, day out, and whilst I had no or at least little problem with her as a person others certainly did, and as a principle she was appalling; with several friends of similar ideology she had quickly formed a sniggering unit within hours of our arrival in the shared accommodation, and their good humour and premium including fresh ingredients and devil-may-care attitude and cultural illiteracy made them immediately repulsive to a particular pocket of inhabitants of the shared accommodation and whose ranks I occasionally straddled (although then as now I prefer to exist quietly, drifting between the expectations and associations of myriad disparate factions), feelings further complicated by the desire felt despite this repulsion by the majority of the largely male opposing pocket of freethinkers to engage in some and/or any form of sexual experimentation with this sniggering unit, a desire resultant primarily of their apparent permissiveness and self-professed wide experience in the fleshy arts, of their frequent use of sexual swear words (at once both, again, suggestive – in the apparent ease with which they discussed such matters – of their own varied experience pertaining to the acts so explicitly described and also profoundly and, I know, ridiculously enticing when originating from the mouth of a female), of their desire for what they termed “casual and fun experiences whilst resident within the shared accommodation” and of their general physical shape and construction which conformed to many of the more predictable measures of what would customarily be considered attractiveness as contemporarily portrayed (i.e. breasts: full and firm; legs: long and strong; rear ends: round and comfortable with a promising declivity to the vaginal locale; faces: well-maintained; etc.). As the days progressed and it became apparent that carnal investigation of any – even minimal – kind was not on the cards, and that their lewdness was an affectation at best, carefully modelled around primarily mainstream filmic and musical appropriations, the mood worsened and conflict increased exponentially, the unit’s near-constant laughter, increasing insularity and allusions to physical love becoming not only overbearing but also somehow foul, and their frequent jovial critiques pertaining to abhorrent kitchen and bathroom habits of the shared accommodation’s other tenants becoming more vindictive and – in their unavoidable truth – personal. Desire was soon replaced by hatred, in the way these things routinely happen. I for one certainly desire what I hate, and I hate almost everything.

In was into this difficult environment that the all-time great prank found form. They took her margarine as discussed from the refrigerator and slid a palette knife carefully around the edges of the block of fat, to loosen it from the plastic casing, and then by a process of gentle squeezes and depression of the tub’s two longer sides managed to free the spread in its totality onto a saucer. To see it there I simply couldn’t believe it wasn’t butter as I knew it not to be, and I imagine this to be much as those of a religious persuasion feel on a near daily basis. The most depraved of the shared accommodation’s assembled free thinkers held the tub between both of his hands as though it were sacrosanct or highly breakable and left the kitchen. They waited for some moments for his return, watching the pleasing dimensions of the spread as they did so, and expecting the imminent arrival of the giggling unit and the subsequent certain failure of the all-time great prank. Time was, however, on their side on this occasion, and the most depraved of all of them soon returned with a very grave expression on his face and thrust the tub to one of the rest. He opened the lid and laid across the base of the tub was a perfectly formed stool, still warm to touch through the thin plastic of the margarine tub. The foulness of its stench was immeasurable. The essence of the prank lay in the assumption that, once cooled to fridge temperature and in effect “sealed” beneath the returned block of spread the stool would remain unnoticed until such time as sufficient margarine had been consumed to reveal the telltale streak of faeces in the final stroke of the butter knife. The psychological damage caused would be major, the knowledge that stool had been consumed by proxy for however many weeks it would take to reach the bottom leaving an awful scarring horror that it would be impossible to wash away. For me, the all-time great prank was fundamentally a step too far, but it was beyond me to step in and put a stop to it this late in the game, and furthermore it would be a waste of my stool to do so. No, I allowed them to proceed, to return the margarine to the tub and the tub to the fridge, and life continued apace.

We watched the giggling unit consume their ‘buttered’ toast slices after a night of Prosecco, or scramble their breakfast eggs in it, or stir it into sauces or pasta, or weigh it out in precise measures for baking, and inside we smirked at the silent misfortune that befell them every single time they did. The tragedy was that none of us witnessed the revelation, if there was such a thing. One third of the giggling unit became romantically involved with one of the other members of the shared accommodation, one who had been vitally involved with the implementation process of the all-time great prank, and we were never able to clarify whether he had tipped them off, so to speak, to prevent the girlfriend whose mouth and lips he – presumably – kissed and explored fully with his own oral apparatus from inadvertently consuming the stool of a male associate, or whether he had simply disposed of the margarine in its entirety, thereby avoiding the no doubt difficult admission that he had been party to the application of a secreted stool to the base of their communal spread. Irrespective of truth the giggling unit were seen less and less frequently in the kitchen area of the shared accommodation. When pressed for information relating to the physiological assets of the his new romantic partner and for vivid verbalisations of their performed acts, he had been amenable initially, and attempted to explain the feel and taste of her key areas with the kind of ambiguity and inarticulacy commonly exhibited by the very young when attempting to describe pain to doctors or other medical professionals; however such requests were soon not only ignored but even aggressively rebutted, and he advised us in no uncertain terms to “get lives”, to “fuck off”, and other similar beacons of intelligent and persuasive argument. I was surprised to hear him say these things, as he more than anyone else was intimately familiar with the all-time great prank and how it, in its conception, its creation, and finally its performance, was perhaps the very essence of the “life” he claimed we should endeavour to get. I said as much to his girlfriend and the giggling unit when I explained the whole thing to them. You must appreciate that this was his idea, I said. He is a persuasive entity. The source of the stool itself is deeply irrelevant.

They’d see the funny side in the end.