He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (6 page)

McGann had done the figures at the end of a twelve month period when he’d had no sex at all. He went out on a lot of dates, bought a lot of dinners and flowers, sat through plays and gallery openings, expressed his feelings, told all the right lies, but at the end of the year, there’d been no action down south. After the final unsuccessful date went home in a taxi, he sat down and worked out that he’d spent $4300 on these women. He caught a cab into the red light district, walked into a brothel, pulled out $120 and a girl had sex with him. From that moment on, he was a convert. A believer.

What did we care? As long as people pay the rent and stay out of your room, you can’t be too sniffy about their private lives. We’d come home every now and then, there’d be a strange car parked in front of the house and the driver would nod to us as we walked in. Letting us know he was there. Ten, fifteen minutes later, a woman would emerge from McGann’s room and pick her way through the piles of sports equipment blocking our hallway. Later, McGann would emerge in his sarong, looking very relaxed. That was kind of horrible actually – the idea that he’d just been having sex and now he was wearing this loose sarong, his wet wedding tackle liable to spill out at any moment – but otherwise, we didn’t care. We’d have a drink with the drivers on hot afternoons, invite them in to watch the cricket. Sometimes if McGann finished early, we’d fix the girl and her pimp a cup of tea and some biscuits. We didn’t want the girl to assume we thought any less of her for having sex with our flatmate.

A few months after McGann had settled in, we hosted a party for some babes who were taking off on a round-the-world trip to avoid looming career decisions. Things went downhill fast after the ceremonial spearing of the keg in the back yard. As it got dark, my furniture went into the maw of a huge burning pit beside the Hills Hoist. We had excavated this thing as a barbecue. The furniture was Milo’s decision alone. He wasn’t into the share house consultancy thing. People were cold, so in went the brown couch. I was kind of down on him for that, but he forgot to remove his stash from one of the cushions, so it evened out. The way these things always seem to.

Terry

A bunch of us were at King Street one night. There was a plate of green stuff festering on the coffee table. It may have been bacon at one time - but that’s just a guess, nobody could really tell. Sandra made her usual remarks about ‘you boys’living in a pigsty. She had asked for a cup of coffee but been made a bowl of one because of the clean cup shortage. Meanwhile, I was sitting in the single lounge chair. I let my left hand drop onto the carpet looking for my beer but fumbled upon something I thought was a shoelace. When I picked it up to have a closer look at it I realised it was the major portion of a rat’s tail.

Milo and I sat in the living room later that night, surrounded by the debris, sunburned and hopelessly drunk, knowing in our hearts that we would not clean up for at least three months. McGann, however, was bouncing off the walls. A long day of drinking with pneumatic wonderbabes had touched off some elemental drive within him, jacked his soul into some giant black generator and cranked it up to critical mass. He was raving about his student grant, $6000 which had just gone into his account. We found him on the phone working his way through the Yellow Pages. E for Escort. We started ringing them back, cancelling orders. But we weren’t dealing with drunken bravado here, we had a case of rutting madness in the house. While Milo and I consulted in the kitchen, McGann tried to place an order for a dozen Asian girls and a gram of speed from some dodgey escort agency. We could see him getting bilked out of every cent he had. The house did not need the hassle. It would very definitely not be
cool
. We cancelled the girls and put the soothers on McGann by telling him he could take us to a strip club for a drink, and if there were any hookers about, we’d sit around and watch him get laid. But he’d be paying for everything. We stressed that, shouted it at him as he called us a taxi. Milo had five bucks to his name and I had $1.38 in phone jar change. We planned to drive McGann into town, get him so drunk he passed out, or in the final extreme, knock him unconscious. Total cost: about $150, all down to him.

We cabbed it to the Valley, to this pre-Fitzgerald strip club which had a brothel attached to it. Risky, but we had to string him along. Two hours later, McGann was still conscious and a big whack of his student grant had been poured down our throats in the form of tequila laybacks administered by topless barmaids. Our table had become the centre of attention, the terminal point for an unceasing stream of bouncers, hookers and waitresses. There was shouting and singing and the sound of smashing glass. At other tables, businessmen hunkered down sullenly over their drinks. A well-known Marxist university lecturer, a politically correct hatchet man who’d been trapped at his table when we came in, tried to sneak out during a round of laybacks. Milo spotted him and started a commotion, scrambling towards the guy with a cigarette lighter, mumbling something about marking him ‘as of the Beast.’ McGann chose that exact moment to make his move on The Fabulous Tina. He launched himself from a paralytic stupor into full flight across the top of our table, sending beer bottles and shot glasses everywhere as he dived. He didn’t make it, drastically misjudging the distance and his ability to take it in a blur of fluid action. His chin hit the stage and he managed to get out a scream before the bouncers descended for the last time and threw us out.

We were hoping that McGann might have folded by this stage, but he picked himself up from the footpath and said this was the best night he’d had in ages. That black wave of despair, unknown outside the desperate wee hours, swept down on me. We tried to get into an illegal casino, where the alcohol is free as long as you’re losing – the economics seem feasible when you’re drunk –but they wouldn’t have us because we weren’t wearing ties. The casino people referred us to an address up the street, a white stucco palace with a lot of friendly women hanging out of the windows. We thundered up the stairs, ran past the receptionist and settled in at the bar. Two hours later, the bar was dry and nobody had made any bookings. Men in tuxedos began to block the exits. Our plan was falling to pieces. We had to throw McGann to them or they would have executed us out on the footpath. I woke up on the floor next to Milo with the sun slanting in on me, mouth like a dry turd and heavy peak-hour traffic roaring by outside. McGann had taken four girls, spent all of his grant, lifted Milo’s Bankcard and whacked another grand’s worth of whoopee on the plastic before the sun came up.

McGann left a few weeks later. He didn’t have any trouble paying Milo back. Got the money to him within a couple of days. But like I said, we never really got round to cleaning up after that party. The disorder which had been lurking at the edge of things took dominion and McGann couldn’t handle it. As the piles of dishes and scraps of food took root in the kitchen, the KFC and Hungry Jacks flotsam which had been quiescent since Victor the Rasta’s departure reappeared through the house. Most of the containers were empty, crumpled and spent, but here and there, a half eaten Whopper or Chicken Speciality perched on the arm of a chair, slowly melting and growing into the fabric. Beer cans and stubbies sprouted from within the shifting dunes of discarded junk food artefacts –only one or two to begin with, establishing a tentative hold, testing the atmosphere, then erupting in fantastic promiscuous discharges of lagers and ales and dark malty stouts, torn cardboard cartons and unknowable numbers of plastic six pack rings. Porn mags, junk mail, newspapers, sports supplements, comic books, text books, lecture notes, tissues, paper plates, napkins, pizza boxes, plastic bags, pie tins, flavoured milks, tee shirts, socks and rotting vegetable matter were churned, shredded, ground down, chewed up, digested, crushed, pulped, torpedoed, bombed, burned and eviscerated into layers and hillocks of generic land fill. We chose to ignore the sounds of rummaging rats and skittering roaches, to cope with the blue-green algal bloom spreading out of the kitchen sink and to shrug when the black oily toxins began leaking from the vegetable crisper. However, the trails of fat white maggots, headed from the kitchen to our bedrooms like ships of the line, brought a response. Milo and I bought a couple of silly hats, some high-powered water pistols, filled them with kerosene and went hunting. McGann, on the other hand, had been cooking in the back yard for a week, heating Milo’s Army Reserve surplus ration packs over the fire pit by the Hills Hoist. When he finished the last of those and was faced with coming down to our level – sucking the jelly directly out of the green tubes of army jam for sustenance – he moved out.

‘I just can’t stand it,’ he said.

Des

We had a cleaning lady. Gail. A western suburbs middle-aged cleaning lady with a shrieking voice. She’d start the morning with a bourbon and coke at our place. She’d come in and clean around us in our bedrooms, even when we had someone in there. The dishes piled up once when she was away. It got so bad in the end that we just dumped the whole thing in the bathtub and filled that up. But then we left it for a week. The water was just rancid. Lucky John got pissed one night, we heard all this splashing and crashing and clashing in the bathroom. We ran in there and he’d gotten naked, crawled in with the dishes and the toxic water.

With the house in such a state, the only replacement we could get was my friend Taylor, the taxi driver. He was coming out of a doomed relationship with a bikie chick and was knocking back two or three bottles of overproof rum every day. There were some dark forces at work inside him, manifesting themselves in the black Special Forces tee shirt, jungle camouflage pants and white running shoes which he never took off. We told people the white running shoes were the last vestiges of his human personality trying to hang on. When they were replaced by army boots it would be random sniper time.

Taylor was usually out of his tree by mid-morning. By lunch time he’d be unbearable, crashing around the house, headbutting the fridge, roaring like a bull elk. He was very much the man in pain. I’d lock myself in my room, but he’d pound on the door, demanding to be let in for a drink. Most days, he’d give up after five minutes, but on one occasion he was determined enough to climb onto the roof and rappel down through my bedroom window with a bottle of Brandavino stuck in his web belt. He plopped on the floor, legs splayed out in front on him and started drinking and talking as though this was the most normal thing in the world. He later ambushed us on the way back from a paddlepop expedition. We’d gone looking to see if he wanted any, but couldn’t find him. When we came back he attacked us with a plastic pistol. Must have been hiding for three quarters of an hour. Told us if the pistol had been real we’d be dead.

Milo

I remember that we all chose to ignore the life forms growing in the carpet, and to ignore the food and rotting matter in the fridge and the oven. We watched the knives and forks grow mould, and watched the garden grow up over the Hills Hoist. It was the maggots which finally got us to move. I don’t remember how long I spent on the cleaning frenzy. I didn’t know where to start. I thought I could start at the edges and chip away to the heart. Then I thought fuck it if I drive a stake through the heart it’ll die and wither. I alternated between the two, but nothing seemed to work, bagging and vacuuming methodically inwards, or just diving into the middle with a shovel and tossing it all out the windows. Days went by and days started and finished without any difference except that I was losing weight. We were doing it to get the bond back but in hindsight I should have just accepted the money wasn’t worth it and moved out.

Time to move on.

Which meant cleaning up to reclaim the bond. We set aside two weeks for the job, but I got some temp work in a typing pool and Taylor just disappeared. Milo ended up doing most of the work. I’d come home at night and the poor bastard would have this drawn look around his eyes. He’d have been at it for eight hours straight, but you couldn’t see a damn bit of difference. He gave up after a week. I had to finish the job. I was on the case, when my friend Tim reappeared after a year in Asia. He’d been imprisoned in a Hong Kong asylum after a vodka binge. Woke up strapped to a bed in this enormous nut house surrounded by about seven thousand Chinese mental patients. The doctors had him full of lithium for the first week because he kept trying to escape. When he calmed down, they let him wander around, pretty much unsupervised. He got a phone call through to a friend in Canberra, also called Tim, who worked for Defence Intelligence. Tim Number Two flew straight up to Hong Kong and blustered his way into the hospital, putting the frighteners on the staff with his Australian security passes. He busted Tim out of there and they fled the colony with the law on their tails. The other Tim dropped my friend Tim off in Brisbane, and he made his way to my house at one in the morning.

I was sitting up, pulling cones, watching some woeful sitcom on the teev when he came through the door. I didn’t recognise him straight off – he was cadaverous and looked authentically mad. But I eventually worked it out and told him to crash in my room. I looked after him for three days. When he wasn’t comatose on Valium, he was setting little fires in the kitchen. Eventually I waited until he passed out, ran around the house collecting my stuff, and split. I closed the door and left him in there on the carpet. He must have been okay because I moved in with him and some other guys a week later.