Linda Robertson - What Rhymes with Bastard?

The next morning I began to meet my new housemates. Let’s start at the front of the house and work our way back.

Main bedroom

In the bed

Name: Kyle

Age: 25

Appearance: pulled-up knee socks with shorts

Philosophy: evangelical Christian

Source: Texas

Occupation: art student

Manner: silent but creepy

Liked:

picking up short women and throwing them on to soft surfaces.

lube samples.

painting dark splodges evocative of unbearable suffering.

tinned pears.

sniggering about boobs after dark

On the floor

Name: Mike

Age: 42

Appearance: short, fat and hairy

Philosophy: evangelical Christian (same church)

Source: Texas (same town)

Occupation: sound engineer for touring production of Les Misérables

Manner: jovial

Liked:

curry.

snoring.

large boobs

Back bedroom (back half of the double parlour. In auditory terms, the same room)

Name: Jack

Age: 25

Appearance: tall, handsome, etc.

Philosophy: BA/it rains for a reason

Source: Wales and America

Occupation: copywriter/misanthropic poet

Manner: plodding, well-intentioned

Liked:

dogs

British punk music 1978–83.

anal sex (aspirationally).

vodka (liberally).

cigarettes (nostalgically).

me (emphatically)

Bathroom

Well-established conurbations of four billion-plus, devastated by surprise attack of UK origin

Hallway

Name: Tova

Age: 24

Appearance: travelling girl

Philosophy: I want therefore I get

Source: Canada

Occupation: boat-hand/self-promoter

Manner: upfront and annoying

Liked:

sex.

travelling.

talking about sex and travelling.

rice.

yoga.

shouting in Spanish to her boyfriend, (who emerged, cockroach-style, as soon as she’d secured the ‘room’)

Name: Chico

Age: 34

Appearance: small, brown, hardened

Philosophy: Tova wants, therefore I get it for her

Source: Chile

Occupation: boat-hand and burger-flipper

Manner: benign or confused, maybe both

Liked:

sex.

travelling.

rice.

yoga.

his sister (they’d recently ended a long-term, live-in relationship)

Kitchen

Name: The miserable boy who lives in the kitchen

Age: c . 20

Appearance: lank

Philosophy: why?

Source: America

Occupation: lying on the couch reading academic books about torture, death, prostitution

Manner: limp

Liked:

fraternizing with the landlord’s arch enemy, which led to him being punched in the face, thrown out of the kitchen and chased up the street by the landlord, who was driving a truck

Utility nook

Name: Richard

Age: 28

Appearance: fuzz-headed loon with too many teeth

Philosophy: whatever, dude!

Source: Oregon

Occupation: skateboarder, thief

Manner: insane

Liked:

skateboarding

TV

pizza.

a sixteen-year-old girl whom he had to return – drunk, unconscious and splattered with her own vomit – to her grandmother.

yelling inanities

Our ‘landlord’ was also an official resident, and the most interesting of the lot. He was one of many parasitical entrepreneurs shot to power by the dot-com boom. As people fought for space and rents tripled, he moved in with his girlfriend and illegally sublet his dingy flat to the drifters, thieves and unemployed copywriters no one else wanted. It was a sort of for-profit charity. To ward off the usual avalanche of responses, he posted vacancy ads like this:

Small hallway available No Christians

The place was full of his crap, and every so often he popped ‘home’ to fuss about bills and pick up a volume of intellectual erotica. He’d caused a scandal at the art college with a performance piece involving an enema – a quick Google told me he’d found a student volunteer, got him to sign a waiver, tied him up, extracted shit from the volunteer’s backside, and then from his own, exchanged the faecal matter using an enema, fellated the volunteer and exited to a smattering of polite applause. Next he was expelled, and six months later he was still recoiling from the shock.

‘Honestly, Linda,’ he said, out of the blue, ‘he was into it at the time!’

I put down my sandwich. ‘Who was?’

‘That bastard kid!’

‘You mean the one you did the enema stuff to?’

‘Yeah! But when the story went national, they all changed their tune. He lodged a formal complaint against me, coz he was afraid of lookin’ like a pervert! Some sponsor got antsy so they used me as a scapegoat. They banned me from campus! I feel kind of betrayed, you know?’

The affair had turned him to drink, but it was hard to tell, as he claimed to be a professional wine-taster. Surrounded by charts of Italian grape regions, empty wine crates and magazine racks bulging with copies of Connoisseur , he liked to shoogle a huge wine glass, saying, ‘Mmmm …’ In fact, his experience was limited to two months on the till at Quoit Liquors, and he was currently unemployed. His identity in crisis, he made a big deal of his friendship with Steve Labash, a performance artist and high priest in the Church of Satan, whose best-known protest piece involved him being naked with a bottle of whisky:

1 Smash the neck off a whisky bottle.

2 Slash your skin with the raw edge.

3 Pour the rest of the whisky over your wounds.

But all the enemas, devil-worship and lit-porn in the world couldn’t conceal his darkest secret: he was nice.

A card had already arrived from home.

Dear Linda, just your old mum writing to say hello. I found

this postcard from when we were in the Isle of Wight – Dadtripped up in the mud, remember? Look after yourself, mydarling; I’ve got to run to catch the post, lots of love,Mum XXX

Back in the present, things weren’t so sweet. Jack would leave for work every morning, and I’d have a lonely day to fill. By late afternoon, I might have visited the ironmonger’s three times – it’s amazing how many things you don’t realize you need until you’re really bored. I was becoming a familiar face to the strange man behind the counter. ‘Your total is sixteen-oh-nine!’ He beamed. ‘I love your accent. Australia, right?’

I reached for my rubber-footed cheese-grater. ‘England.’

‘Well, close, eh?’

‘Not really.’

‘English, eh? There are some great Irish bars around here. We should go out for a drink some time.’

‘Mm … yeah.’ I looked down into my purse. I wasn’t used to this kind of talk. I’d never been on a date.

‘Yeah,’ he pressed on, ‘like Jimmy Foley’s and the Green Giant. You know them?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, see you!’

As soon as I was out of the door, I broke into a run. This meant I couldn’t go into the hardware shop any more. Damn it. I was so bored it seemed like a loss. This wasn’t how I’d envisaged the Golden State. The laws of gravity still applied: it was just plain old reality, minus my friends. Admittedly, the weather was better, and I found all kinds of reasons to go outside. I walked up and down perilously tilted pavements, each block affording me another fabulous sea-andsky-filled view, buildings tumbling together, nestling in valleys and skimming hilltops as though they were on the crest of a wave. The air was warm and breezy, rich with ions, and its touch on my skin was a pleasure. On cloudy days the locals moaned, while I gasped at the mist – chunks of cloud suspended in the air like scenery in a divine school play. But however beautiful my surroundings, I didn’t belong there.