John Birmingham: He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

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 it. 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 emerged from his stinking sinkhole 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 Canberra, 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.

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.

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.

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 programme 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 power. 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.

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.