He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (4 page)

Anyway, we have a spare room. Michael moves in and Zoe goes on the make for him. Michael is a mover, a man with money and cred and she falls for him. Nothing is too much trouble. Michael couldn’t clean. Didn’t even consider it. Wasn’t on his agenda. So Zoe looked after that. In the nine months he lived there, he never once washed his towels. But he emer-ged from his stinking sink hole of a bedroom every morning, perfectly clean.

Zoe’s first shock came early. One morning, a week after he moved in, a strange woman emerged from the sinkhole behind him. She was explained away as a lost friend from out of town. Nowhere to stay. She looked kind of lost when she surfaced after eight hours of Mme Butterfly, but that hiccup aside, Zoe set about the wooing of Michael. He was new to Can-berra, and Zoe was throwing her cards on the table, showing him round, inviting friends over to ease him into the scene. She organised candle-lit dinners with the Spinsters Club –her friends Katerina and Vicky – with Michael on the menu. The plan was for Zoe to finally put the word on Michael during a big night on the town. His mates were even invited along as dates for the Spinsters Club. Unfortunately, at the last moment, Michael couldn’t make it. And then Katerina cancelled. And the next morning, Katerina crawls out of Michael’s bedroom after a night of the Butterfly. Trouble is, the whole time, Zoe’s room is right next door to Michael’s – their beds are wall to wall with only half an inch of wood between them, and Zoe’s listening to everything. And it’s more than she can bear. She’s tearing down the hallway, hammering on Michael’s door screaming ‘Turn it down. I’m trying to get some sleep,’ and I’m somewhere out there in the dark, my head thumping with tension and the knowledge that the days of this house are numbered.

So Katerina was out of the Spinsters Club. Little alliances formed and reformed. Michael would ask, ‘John, what goes on? What’s happened?’ And I’d explain that he was stepping out with Zoe’s best friend. And Michael would go ‘My God, you know it’s got nothing to do with her.’ Then Zoe would appear in my room and whisper that Michael was a bastard and a prick and what did I think, what were we going to do? Could I do something? Speak to him maybe? Make him move out? I thought I might turn all of this to my advantage; get Michael to clean up, make Zoe deep six the Simon and Garfunkel tapes, but in the end, Michael moved out and Zoe took up gardening.

I should have got the hell out myself, but as usual, I hung around. I always hang around – I’m always there, living below my means for any number of reasons, be it finishing my pointless degree in Queensland, or working a dumb job in Canberra to pay off that degree. But between Canberra and my house in Kippax Street, Darlinghurst – which is like the definitive, King Hell, Thousand Year Reich of share house experience – things got interesting.

I led a dissolute, basically itinerant life. Not an eating-out-of-dumpsters, sleeping-under-bridges sort of life, you understand. More of a daytime TV, skipping out on phone bills, deep fried home-brand fish finger sandwiches sort of life. I lived in a lot of places and racked up a lot of flatmates in those three or four years. A dozen houses, sixty people, something like that. The figures are inflated by one place I stayed in for less than a week before doing a runner after a couple of Goths painted the living room black and hung an old goat’s head over the fireplace. Said it was for a sacrifice that night.

Sharon

I didn’t know anyone when I first got to Melbourne so I stayed with my boyfriend. I really needed some space so I moved in with this girl, Brooke. The flat was cramped but it was cheap and it had a view of the beach. I’d been there four or five days, no hassles, when I went out with my boyfriend one night. He came back and stayed over. The next day I get home from work and Brooke says ‘Your boyfriend stayed last night.’ I apologised for not introducing her, but said she’d been in bed. She just stared at me and said ‘You go to Hell for that sort of thing. I don’t want to live with a sinner’. And then she went apeshit, screaming, ‘Don’t you know what you’re doing is wrong? The Lord has a special place in Hell for the fornicators. I couldn’t bear the guilt of having a fornicator under the roof of the House of the Lord.’ I spun out, struck dumb. She was psychotic for a few minutes, yelling all this fire and brimstone stuff and how there was no hope for me. And then she switched totally, went dead calm and said, ‘But if you change your ways I’m willing to let you stay.’ I moved out the next day. I’d been there less than a week but she kept a month’s rent.

Gothic design tip: dead things are so cool they just have to be nailed to the wall. The freshly rendered goat’s head actually replaced a pressed duck which had been there for two years. Somebody had found it in Chinatown, semi-cooked and semi-glazed, then pressure-sealed in a vacuum bag. This duck was already rotten, twisted, half burned and bereft of feathers when they nailed it over the fireplace. Over the years the bag lost its seal and the duck started coming out and making its way down the wall.

I’d thought about cutting out earlier when I woke to the sound of this pair of Goths having sex on the floor next to me, and again when I discovered that although the water was connected, the kitchen sink wasn’t – you pulled the plug and it just spilled out onto the floor. But Satan’s living room did it for me.

You get these moments, these Satan’s lounge room, goat’s head moments, and you wonder what forces delivered you to this place at this time. It’s as though your life travels through this complex grid where stuff happens, like you date this girl or you go to that movie or you come home to find a goat’s head nailed to the wall, and a little point of light plots the event on the grid. All the points are woven together by this weird mathematical program that determines the course of your life and the future – each little moment, each point of light, driven along by the falling numbers of some impenetrable logarithm.

Hmmm. Guess I’d better get back to it.

The Boulevarde was advertised as a top floor three bedroom apartment. The third bedroom was actually down in the basement garage. Mel and I took the two rooms upstairs and banished Tom, the quiet engineering student, to the carpark. He didn’t mind it down there. He pulled apart a security light switch and tapped into the unit block’s power supply. After that, our power bills were paid by the body corporate and we ran every light and appliance we owned twenty-four hours a day. Tom, who is a vice president with an international airline nowadays, seemed to live off the land back then. His success in making jam from the blackberries he collected down by the river led us to plant a choko vine down there. We managed one harvest, but nobody in the house ate chokos and they rotted under the kitchen sink. His favourite meal was fish finger pie. (Roll six fish fingers and two cheese sticks into a lot of dough. Bake.) On special occasions, he’d make raspberry pudding, a poisonous blend of red cordial and custard powder. It looked like blood soup and tasted like a bowl full of water with human hair soaking in it.

I learned something about the value of people in that flat. Mel’s boyfriend Warren was just a carpenter’s apprentice from Cloncurry. He was never going to read any Foucault, and seeing as I had a crush on his girlfriend, we were probably never going to get along. But we did. Warren had a good soul and he pulled cones like a trooper – our relationship was based around these intangible moments of stoned camaraderie, where we would talk … sort of. And if the conversation became a little stilted, we could always stimulate it artificially – a cone before breakfast, a few cones at lunch, a joint with dinner, two or three more cones with MASH. I had to cut back on the smoke after fading out during an early morning Chinese class and snapping back into a room where everybody was speaking Cantonese. I had a major panic attack, thought I’d smoked so much I’d lost the power to comprehend speech.

Tricia

I lived downstairs in a terrace. There were two boys upstairs. I could always hear this scratching. It was driving me mad so I got one of the boys to come outside and try and find what it was. We looked all around but couldn’t find it for ages. It just went on and on. Scritch scritch scritch. Then one day rather than going outside the house we happened to look out of a top floor window and saw this little kid from next door, we called him Naughty David. He was scraping away at the wall with a stick. He’d drilled a hole in the wall outside my room to watch me in the nuddy.

Paranoia was a part of my every waking moment in those days. Queensland had some monster drug laws back then. Still does. I once turned the corner to find two cop cars pulled into our driveway, blue lights strobing in the night. I fell into the bush by the side of the road and waited for them to lead my flatmates away to a mandatory life sentence in some gulag out west. The cops pulled out after fifteen minutes. Alone. When I got the courage up to crawl back into the flat, it was smoke-choked as usual but nobody was home. Turned out the gang had gone for pizza. We never found out what those cops were doing there. Warren suggested they may have slipped through a rip in the fabric of the universe, from an alternate reality where we really did get busted. But he was about six cones over the line at the time. They were more likely responding to a noise complaint. The Boulevarde had a trumpet player who just would not give up. And these Vietnamese students who’d sing along with a tape of Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Physical’ at seven o’clock every night.

That was about the time Warren and Mel totalled my coffee table, moved out and got married. Tom and I wore brown tuxedos with fat lapels to the reception. Andy the med student took their place and you already know most of what there is to know about him. Except that his mother had this habit of sneaking into the flat to clean it while we were away. I caught her once. Came home a day early from a trip to my parents’ place and found the front door wide open, a vacuum cleaner going inside. Neither Tom nor Andy was supposed to be there. And we didn’t own a vacuum cleaner. Clean burglars? Hoovering up the evidence? I tip-toed in and found Andy’s mum had cleaned the entire flat, my room included. I wasn’t too sure I approved of this, but it didn’t happen again. Absent-mindedness ran in their family. Andy’s sister wasted an Ampol station a few weeks later – drove into the restaurant without getting out of the car. Andy had to move home to help pay for the damage. (Just one footnote on him. He married one of the three girls from that outstanding afternoon of passion – the one who arrived with her suitcases and the knitted jumper. She was a nurse. They split up a few years later and both asked for transfers to get as far away from each other as possible. They were both sent to the Cocos Islands.)

Derek the bank clerk replaced Andy the med student. He didn’t build his tent in that particular flat, he actually had a room there. The tent came later. He was a funny little dude. Went to the toilet about eight or nine times a night. Thought this was normal. Wondered why he never bumped into us the same way he bumped into the members of his family all the time at home. Derek didn’t have much in the way of a life back then. He’d put in eight hours at the bank and come home to arrange his collection of travel brochures. He read travel brochures the way most people watch television. All his money went into saving for the trip he’d take at the end of the year and all his energy went into planning that trip to the smallest detail. So even with Derek in the house there was never too much money around. We seemed to survive week to week, but there were plenty of moments when the bills outstripped our income by an impossible margin. One week we had twenty dollars between the three of us, so we bought two family-sized jumbo cans of Spam, a bag of onions and some beer. We fried up the Spam and onion, made this big ugly mess and ate every mouthful because we were so hungry. I investigated a rumour that IVF programs paid twenty dollars a pop for semen donations but found it to be baseless.

Keiran

I once shared with some guys and this very, very strange woman. She had this really violent, ongoing and intermittent affair with a truckie. She used to beat the crap out of him after drunken nights out. Took to him with whatever came to hand. A chair, a claw hammer, anything. That was, of course, in between one night stands. You’d be watching the Sunday program on TV and the bleary-eyed Beast (as we called her) would wander out to vomit off the verandah. Then, about ten minutes later she’d boot out the latest guy in her clutches - a different guy every weekend. We tried to warn them but they wouldn’t listen. They’d ring constantly and turn up with flowers.

We split from that flat in December. Derek the bank clerk was off to Japan for a month. Tom and I were off to minimum wage holiday jobs and our parents’ homes to save the thousand dollars we were allowed to earn before the government cut off our $37 a week Austudy grant. And our yearly $2.10 travel allowance. The flat we took the following February was, as I mentioned, a two room affair. Hence Derek’s tent in the living room. When the bank transferred him he asked me if I could arrange to move his miniature Indian village. I said sure, and threw it off our third storey patio an hour after he’d driven away.

Martin the paranoid wargamer replaced Derek the bank clerk, but only for two weeks. Martin would ask you to play wargames with him four or five times an hour, becoming increasingly moodier as the refusals mounted up. He was also a pig. Tom caught him messing up the lounge room just after it had been cleaned. Scattering Mars bar wrappers and soiled underwear about like fertiliser pods in a promising garden. When we hinted that he wasn’t welcome anymore, he accused us of trying to poison him, just like his previous flatmates. We actually did consider poisoning him, but he was a runty little specimen and it proved easier to frog-march him out the door and toss his stuff off the patio, where it joined the pile of mouldering tent debris.

Taylor the taxi driver dropped his swag in the space left vacant by Martin’s sudden exit. It was kind of cool having our own cabbie. He had an account at a strip club in the Valley, a basement firetrap with cracked mirror balls and one slightly hunch-backed topless waitress whom Taylor was courting with the few lines of Shakespeare he remembered from high school English. They served meals in this place and he’d drive us into town at three in the morning for video games and greasy food binges. Things ran smoothly until the landlady came around for an inspection. We knew she was coming and had hidden Taylor’s stuff away as there was only supposed to be two of us living there. But she was a sharp-eyed old biddy and when she saw the three neatly lined-up pairs of differently sized shoes she tumbled to our scam. She was pretty cool about it. Said we could stay, but we’d have to pay full rent for three people. That was never going to happen so we loaded our minimal gear into Taylor’s cab and split for that old reliable share house bolthole. Our parents.