John Birmingham: He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

Jeffrey!

Harry

Ken moved out of home without understanding laundry. He’d never done any. He didn’t understand the importance of rinsing. He’d give his clothes a good soaping then hang them out. I caught him trying to break his jeans across his knees once so he could get into them.

That was the dead guy’s name. It got away from me for a minute there, but I knew it started with a ‘J’. He died watching Rage with the sound turned down. One of the hip young inner-city cops who turned up to investigate said he probably snuffed it half way through the hot one hundred. Just like a junkie. There was a nightclub stamp on his wrist, bruises up and down his arm. The felafel’s chilli and yoghurt sauce had leaked from the roll and run down his hand in little white rivulets. For a brief, perverse moment it seemed to me that he himself had sprung a leak, a delicate stream of liquid heroin escaping from the seams of his fingers.

I’ve seen a hundred lives pass through the bleary kind of sleep-deprived landscape of a dozen different share houses, but Jeffrey’s was the only one that ever fetched up and died on a bean bag. The others all moved along on their own weird trajectories. They were never still. Everybody was constantly mobile or wanting to be – moving targets, random drifters and people whose lives rested on nothing more stable than inertia. White niggers every one. Some of them now work for gigantic weapons corporations or drug cartels. They’ve got these incredible lives. Jet travel. Credit cards. Respect, even fear, from those top-hatted guys who stand in front of the Hyatt. But if they were housemates of mine, I’ve seen them bludging meals from the Krishnas. Or sitting on the lounge room floor in home-brand underwear with all the windows blacked out and hundreds of candles pushing back the dark. Not doing much. Just sitting there. Or smashing five hundred empty beer bottles into a million jagged pieces on the kitchen floor while greying mincemeat patties slowly peel away from the ceiling … slowly, slowly, slowly … then plop — impaled on the waiting fangs of glass below. Or sitting in front of the television for two days straight, with giant frilled lizards clinging to their shoulders, a bowl of magic mushrooms by their feet, their weeping bloodshot eyes the shape of little rectangles.

Madness, as one flatmate of mine used to say with just a hint of satisfaction in his voice. Things get out of control all the time in share houses. It’s not just a matter of the rent slipping behind, or the washing piling up. People flip over the line. Way over. I know about this. Been there myself a couple of times. One place, Duke Street – home of the smashed stubbies and falling patties – was nothing but a madhouse. A huge rambling kind of place, an ex-brothel, we all thought, because there were so many rooms in there. A lot of them looked like they had been jerry-built at some stage. Bedrooms where bedrooms shouldn’t ought to be and so on. We were paying $11 a week each between the ten or eleven of us living there.

Maria

Never move into a house with someone who plays The Smiths all the time. Don’t do it. I never liked The Smiths and now I loathe them because it’s all I hear. Three in the morning they’ll come home and play The Smiths at full volume and wonder why you get into a bad mood. Three in the morning is the time of choice for Smiths fans to play their albums. The suicide hour. Like, “I’ve been out I’ve been rejected I’m coming home to my damp little flat to play The Smiths and be depressed and kill myself”.

We were never completely sure of the number because of the continual drop-ins and disappearances and the strange case of Satomi Tiger.

I just know you’re thinking – what the hell is a Satomi Tiger? Well, we’re sitting on the lino floor of the living room one night – actually we had two living rooms in this weird house, but we turned the other one into a basketball court – and we’re watching teev, as usual. And this Japanese girl walks in wearing these audacious tiger-striped pants and a poo-brown imitation dead fur thing. “Good Ev-en-ing,” she says. “I move in now.” And that was all. She had no other English. She drops a wad of cash on the teev and wanders off to find a room. We’re all just sitting there thinking “What the hell is this?” But then again, she’s dropped this wad on the teev so who cares?

We found out later that Satomi Tiger had met our invisible flatmate Tim on his last trip to Asia, the one which ended up with him being investigated for espionage and committed to an insane asylum in Hong Kong. You can see Tim in the mini-series Bangkok Hilton. He plays three different bit parts, most notably that of a drunken buffoon in a boat. A frighteningly accurate performance. Tim escaped from the asylum with the help of a friend, also called Tim, but he was always a little elsewhere afterwards. He’d met Satomi Tiger in Japan and invited her to visit him in Queensland. She took him up on the offer. Only thing was, we never really knew where Tim was at any given moment. When Satomi Tiger arrived, rumour had him cutting cane in the north. Whatever. It didn’t bother her, and it didn’t really bother us. It was that kind of house. The set-up with the rent, for instance, was mondo suspicious. We’d send a cash cheque every two or three weeks to this post office box in the western suburbs, deep in serial killer territory. We’d never get any receipts but we never got any hassles either. There was a phone number to call in emergencies, which we used when the bathroom looked like it was going to fall off the end of the house one time, but there would only be this spooky message at the other end.

SAVE MONEY. EAT LESS

“There’s no one here,” click, brrrrrrrrrr ……………

At that stage, I’d quit my job in Canberra and was kicking around Brisbane, wasting my life again. Duke Street seemed the perfect place for it. The floating population, the lack of furniture, the crazy tilting floors, the freight train line which ran through the back yard, the hallucinogenic mushrooms in the front yard, the tree which grew through the bedroom window, the constant low grade harassment by the Department of Social Security, the week long drinking binges, the horror, the horror.

Early in my stay there, I took a four week job as a typist with the Department of Primary Industry. They had these reports that were seven years overdue. I’m not joking. They stressed this point to me. Seven years. Probably dog years too. So I’m bashing away on a word processor, getting into the Zen of typing because it’s so dull if I actually stop to think what I’m doing, my head will implode and I’ll be this sultana-headed guy walking around town. Anyway, after a while I look around the typing pool and I get this huge Fear. This Fear grabs me by the heart and squeezes like a bastard for three days straight. It’s saying This Is Your Life. So I enrol in Law at Queensland University.

Karen

Living with other people you start off in that nice accommodating phase. “Okay we’re going to get on.” You try really hard. It’s all going to be great. You buy stuff together, you talk, you share, you bond over instant coffee in the kitchen late at night. And then it starts to get a little cramped, becomes too much. Your dope’s getting smoked. Your car is always getting borrowed. The phone kitty never makes it above a handful of coins even though you keep filling it with change. You don’t want to put the effort in anymore. It’s almost like an ill-considered marriage. All this shit comes up like a marriage like, “You’re supposed to be loyal to me because I live with you.” Even if they’re wrong. So you start thinking divorce. You’re not talking. You’re knifing each other to your mutual friends, trying to entangle them in a complicated network of alliances to suit your ends. Then you’re not even thinking divorce, you’re thinking preemptive strike. Who’s going to run up a thousand bucks on the phone and skip town at midnight leaving the other holding the bill.