He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (18 page)

Downstairs wore a beret and goatee, but not during his interview or we’d have set the dogs on him. He told us he was a physio, which was odd because he was a actually a successful restaurateur. He’d established a very famous bistro in Double Bay and sold it for elephant bucks a few months before he moved into our place. This raised some interesting questions in my mind – like, why lie about the physio? Why move into a dump like Kippax Street when you’ve got all that money? Why sit around all day in a white dressing gown watching video replays of boxing matches? Why the goatee and the beret?

Doug

We didn’t have a laundry basket so we acquired a rogue shopping trolley. We put it on the verandah and lobbed clothes in for a few weeks. Nobody washed them of course. Then the cat moved into it. Some drunks fell asleep in it. It was there with the same load of laundry for a year. When we moved we took it down the back yard, soaked it in metho and burned the lot.

Uptight Martin came in the same time as Downstairs Ivan and left within a week of his departure. Downstairs once asked me if I thought Uptight might be uptight because he was a little bit gay and didn’t know it yet. It was pretty perceptive of Downstairs, who wasn’t otherwise noted for his sensitivity in these matters. Uptight was a very fit man. Swam two hundred miles a week, did karate four nights, weight training the remaining three. Uptight was burning up an awful lot of nervous energy with his relentless fitness regimen, but there was not a lot of action on the babe front for a guy who was pretty good-looking and so very, very fit. I guess that could be explained by the fact that he was kind of uptight, a bit of a dick, and the babes would run a mile the first time he opened his mouth. But he’d follow Downstairs around like an abandoned puppy the whole time he lived there. And he never once complained about his own abysmal record with the ladies. Suspicious? I thought so. The only thing to do was take matters into my own hands.

Julia

I lived with a couple of gay boys who went a bit crazy over cleaning. This is my place right. I have the lease. These guys were always on my case saying that there were scuff marks on the floor in the kitchen and so on. One of them flipped once and was digging his finger like virtually into my throat screeching about some mark on the sink and how there were no scratchy clean towels in the house. They liked rough scratchy clean bath towels. Had to have them. They would never take me on individually. They’d take a corner each and yell at me. When I threw them out they pinched all of my Weetbix and toothpaste and scratchy clean towels.

I was managing an office for a couple of gay guys up on Oxford Street about that time, so when Mardi Gras came around, I made sure Uptight got a good window seat in our room to watch the parade. He thought that was just great. Kept remarking excitedly that you had to admit the guys were, you know, very fit. You just had to admit that, didn’t you. I figured to score myself some brownie points by turning him over to Henner, my unattached gay boss, but before I could get this cunning plan into place, Downstairs Ivan was steamrollered by Gina and Veronica’s Kippax Street bitchkrieg and moved out. Uptight followed him three days later. A great loss to Oxford Street.

Downstairs and Uptight were replaced by Paul the quiet journalist and Homer the air traffic controller. Paul was completely unremarkable, except for an ability to drink beer and play snooker for three and a half days without sleep. A credit to the profession. Homer the air traffic controller was a throwback to Derek the bank clerk, a man so tight with a dollar he had to be surgically separated from it come bill-paying time. Homer’s portion of the bills was always calculated to the third decimal place, factored through some complicated algorithm which pro-rated Homer’s share against whether he bought any toilet paper during the week and then how many sheets on average each person used per wipe and whether they left their bedroom lights on all night or bought any milk, and if they did buy milk did they drink only their fair share of it or were they secretly sneaking into the kitchen after bedtime for unauthorised Milo raids? And so on and so on until your head fell to pieces, like a chocolate orange. If I’d had the money I would have paid all his bills to avoid the fortnightly mathematics.

After coming to terms with the massive telephone bill Downstairs left us, we decided to cram a foreigner into the small room out the back. Yoko San. Everybody had heard my Satomi Tiger stories and thought it might be interesting to live with someone who didn’t speak the language, understand the customs, eat the food or comprehend the finances of the house. That and the whole Keating push into Asia thing. Thought we’d better have a piece of that. Yoko San lasted about three weeks. She vacuumed her room three times a day. She just didn’t belong.

My old school friend Matthew was passing through Sydney about that time and I made the mistake of letting him take up the spare room. Trouble was, Matthew had a fatal character flaw. He became a floundering idiot within ten feet of any available woman. One moment you’d be talking to Matthew the rakish, devil-may-care kind of guy, and the next he’d be struck dumb because a girl had walked into the room. I spent the best part of that summer organising cocktail parties at the house in the vague hope that he might stumble across some girl, cheer up and fuck off.

Eventually he did. Her name was Fiona, and she was the painfully shy younger sister of Tracy, an old girlfriend who cut my clothes to bits the day we broke up. It was an awkward thing – I was still quite scared of Tracy when Matthew got together with her little sister at one of our costume parties. They both came as ghosts and ended up pashing off under a tangle of white sheets on the road in front of the house. It got worse. They fell hopelessly in love and Fiona then came to visit three, maybe four times a day. She and Matthew would sit on the brown couch when the rest of us were trying to watch teev, holding hands and staring into each others’eyes.

‘I love you Matthew.’

‘I love you Fiona.’

‘I really love you Matthew.’

‘Oh, I really love you Fiona.’

So I threw him out. My old school friend and everything. There is no sentiment in share housing, only mercenary self interest. And if only my self interest had been running a little stronger we might never have taken in our next flatmate. Jeffrey the junkie.

Share House Artefacts : Number Four

Milk Crate

HAVING TROUBLE WITH CUPBOARD SPACE?

Bottom fallen out of your shopping bag? Stairs fallen off the back of your house? Annoying isn’t it.

YOU NEED TO STEAL SOME PLASTIC MILK CRATES.

These Versatile by-products of the Space Program convert easily to a Bookshelf, Laundry Hamper, Futon Base, Coffee Table, Bong Stand, Foot Rest or Filing Cabinet.

PLASTIC MILK CRATES. A THOUSAND PRACTICAL USES.

COMING FROM A FOOTPATH NEAR YOU.

10 MOVING ON

It’s funny how everyone seems to work in the sex industry these days. A couple of years ago you could guarantee that anyone in a share house was scamming social security or working a restaurant or both. But now it's the sex trade. My friend Brett has lived with two table-top dancers, a prostitute and a guy who drives prostitutes to their clients. All in the last eighteen months. Reckons it'll cost you a hundred bucks just to have a girl driven to your front door, but I don’t know about that. Sounds a bit much to me.

It could be a Melbourne thing. My friend Roscoe shared a house with a B&D mistress while he was living in Melbourne. Said she and her driver Stan came home one day, weeping with laughter. They’d been doing a job at the home of a very prominent MP. The guy’s bag was to get down to handcuffs and rubber nappies and be locked in a cupboard. No sex, no contact. Just that dark, musty cupboard. He always booked for Sunday morning when the family were at church. Anyway on this particular morning one of the kids takes sick and they come home early. When Miss Donna raps on the cupboard door and tells this guy, he starts bouncing around inside, desperate to get out. They’re yelling at him to calm down, they can’t get the key in the lock with him thrashing about and shaking the cupboard, but that just makes it worse and after three massive thuds the cupboard rocks and teeters on the edge of balance, then falls forward, crashing face down on the carpet. Uh oh. Stan thinks quickly, stomps an air hole in the back and then flees with Miss Donna, passing the stunned family members on the front steps.

You can see this guy every now and then making a speech about the importance of supporting the traditional family.

I guess it’s got something to do with Melbourne being a very English sort of town, a lot of private boarding schools inculcating a fondness for cold showers and birch-bark floggings amongst the ruling classes. It’s an uptight place, incredibly constipated on issues of form. As a general rule in any city you wouldn’t want to move in with somebody who actually owns the house. Chances are they won’t appreciate you playing corridor golf or stripping down your hog in the lounge room. But that general injunction becomes an iron law in Melbourne.

Always be wary of phrases like, ‘My house is your house. Feel comfortable. Feel free to use all the facilities. Just treat it like your home.’ If you hear those phrases, run, don’t look back, don’t stop or turn, just run. What happens is that people buy these houses and can’t make the payments so they get someone in. This woman I know, this older woman, let’s call her Celine, went through a very exclusive agency and found this nice place in East Melbourne. The owner was an older guy doing the place up, needed someone to share.

If she’d sussed the garage when she first moved in she might have had an idea of what was in store. It was all there. His whole personality. Screws, nails, hammers, chisels, saws, everything hanging up or put away in little containers, all carefully graded and marked and arranged. Everything labelled and in its place and if you moved anything out of its place the fragile, crystalline lattice-work of his personality would shatter under the stress, spraying a wide area with a million shards of razor glass.

The first warning sign came with the newspapers. This guy had them delivered in the morning. Celine was up before him so she’d collect them to read over breakfast. After a fortnight he presented her with a bill for half the newspapers. Said she’d been reading them, she’d be paying for them. Now Celine didn’t care whether they had papers or not. They were there and he wasn’t reading them so she had. It degenerated to the point where he’d set his alarm five minutes before hers, run down, grab the newspapers and run back up into his room with them. When he’d finished he’d tie them up in bags and put them in the garbage.

Madness. When she’d invite people over he’d get her out of the room and ask, ‘Who are these people in my house? Why are they sitting on my lounge? Why are they watching my television?’ He’d go ballistic if she had people over for dinner and he wasn’t notified well before. He liked a good five weeks notice. In the depths of winter she’d turn the heater on. He’d turn it off. She’d leave a light on in the hallway. He’d turn it off. These things would eat away at him. The relationship deteriorated. She started leaving on the lights, moving things around, inviting people over. On purpose. Finally, she realised she was becoming as mad as him and she moved out.

There are common elements to share housing everywhere. Like the shopping basket overburdened by detergent, rice and pasta. But the detergent never gets used. And the rice and pasta never get eaten because nobody remembers to get anything to go with them and if you do buy some good food for a dinner party and you turn your back on it for five minutes it will disappear and you will serve up the only stuff left, the rotting week-old salad refuse at the bottom of the fridge.

I have trawled through three states and a swarm of human strangeness and I have to say, I’ve seen some weird things: flatmates who like to put trips in your beer; flatmates who only ever eat expired stocks of packet pasta; flatmates who like to hide in the bathroom and watch you take a piss. Actually one guy did all of these things. Kelvin. Liked to lie in the bath in the dark late at night. I’m in there one night, tackle out, taking care of business when I look to my left and seize up in horror because Kelvin is lying in the bath with a big lurid grin on his dial. Been in there for ages. Lets out this really sick giggle. I had to piss outside after that.