He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (10 page)

Cheney

I haven’t been in share housing much. I’ve had girlfriends I stayed with so I was the unauthorised long-stay boyfriend. It’s good because you can see how a share house operates while having that safety hatch of being able to walk away. The main thing about share houses is that you’re talking about loud people, when other people are trying to sleep. You’re talking pubic hair in the shower. People can get over that. You’re talking skid marks. You’re talking seat up, seat down dilemmas. All that stuff. But the cause of destruction in most share houses is the fry pan. The humble fry pan. Someone will have a big greasy fry-up and the pan will just be left and left and left. Nobody will wash it up. I’ve seen people wash up everything in a share house. They’ll wash up, they’ll wipe the walls down, vacuum, but they’ll just pretend the fry pan is not there. They work their way around it. I saw someone burst into tears once when they had to confront the fry pan.

Three days later, I had to go to Brisbane for a friend’s wedding. As I was walking out the front door, I bumped into Nigel bundling his stuff in, loading it into Agro’s room, next to Serina’s and mine. It was a good moment in house history, a cheery back slapping interlude, but when I returned to Melbourne, the ambience had changed. Thrash music was pounding from the lounge room. Brian and Greg were on the edge, weirded out. Crazy stuff was happening and they didn’t want to know about it. They’d been marginalised in their own house. So I read Serina’s diary. I am one of those guys who will read your diary if you leave it around, and anyway it was pointless trying to talk to her, you couldn’t get through the smoke screen.

The first entry read,
Went out with Nigel. He put the hard word on me. But I said no because I didn’t want to be unfaithful to John.

Okay. Cool. Three days later.

Nigel put the hard word on me again. I’d better not write any more.

Uh oh.

I didn’t understand. I’d done a mate a favour and a mate had done me wrong in return. I guess I should have taken to Nigel with a baseball bat -– nobody would have thought less of me for it – but no one said anything and the house grew more and more evil. Nigel and Serina got into this conspiracy of drug use. Jacked themselves into the fabulous anti-glamour of it all. Serina was sleeping in my bed, but she didn’t want to be there. And sleeping in a bed with a girl who doesn’t want to be there is the absolute manifestation of Hell as we know it. There is nothing more painful than being next to the babe you love and knowing that if you touch her, she’ll flinch. It’s a fucking knife through your ribs.

The house collapsed during a hopeless night out when they insisted I score some speed for them. They shot it up. Shared the needle. Asked if I wanted some. I staggered off in horror, dis-appeared into the night. When I got home Serina’s stuff had been moved out of my room and into Nigel’s. He had been in the house for a total of two weeks. Greg and Brian were completely traumatised. Greg moved out. Brian went into shock. A great house had been fucked. And I had to find somewhere else to live in Melbourne. Fast.

I rang a number out of
The Age
share house section, got this guy out of bed at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. Ernie in Carlton. He had a room going upstairs in a five bedroom terrace, but was thinking of renting out the living room too. It had a fire place and some big windows overlooking a leafy street. It was $45 a week, half a block to all the shops, but the best part was I said, ‘I’ll take it,’ and he groggily goes, ‘Oh, oh, oh, okay.’

There were some minor problems. The toilet was provincially located outside the house and they didn’t have a fridge. But we overcame. We advertised to fill the last room with a hidden agenda that if someone mentioned they had a fridge they were in. We had the best ad on the window at Readings in Carlton. We had no problems with eating habits, sexual preference, race or gender. We just wanted a reasonable human being with a big fridge. We weren’t fussy. It was a major error.

Within twenty-four hours of David moving in, the house was filling with smoke, ash trays and butts. This was a very nonconfrontational house. It took about two weeks for somebody, me I think, to point out to this guy that it had been a non-smoking place before he arrived and while we could bear him smoking in his room, it would actually be a lot cooler if he poisoned himself outside. After that, he’d light up just outside the kitchen but leave the door open and all the smoke would come through anyway. We gradually gave in, passively decided to become a smoking household because it was happening anyway. Then his girlfriend moved in. The girlfriend with a laundry fetish. Had to do it at least twice a day, every day. Sometimes more. Three in the morning, she’d be washing clothes in this old twin tub that had a high screaming whine when you ran the spin dryer.

Everybody except this idiot and his girl friend disappeared for Christmas – we all left to get away from them. The obscure PhD guy from the room in the roof went as far as Canada. He agreed to change rooms in his absence, because David’s girlfriend was pissed off with having to live downstairs or something. I came back from a few days away and was going to do the right thing, give his room a quick vacuum. But I discovered there were four guys called Dave living in there. Another one, not called Dave, had squeezed in with David and his girlfriend, the mad washerwoman. One even brought his own telephone with him. Plugged it in and had it going the whole time. I tried to be diplomatic. Casually took David aside and said ‘Martin’s a pretty laid back guy. But I really think he’d be a bit concerned that four guys called Dave are living in his room while he’s in Canada.’ This presented no problem to David. He just moved all seven people into his own room.

Joey

How do you avoid people you don’t want to see? There’s always plenty of them. I lived in a huge terrace in Footscray where the bedrooms were let separately, so you’d never know who your housemates were going to be. I was studying Russian and this fitted the atmosphere. Very bleak. Very Dostoyevski. There was a wizened, alcoholic old man who’d start up about eleven every night. You’d hear the ring-pulls coming off his cans of beer and then he’d start growling ‘fucking cunt,’ working himself into these drunken rages. There was a woman who liked to stand by the door waiting for someone to talk to. She’d tell you stories about being a prostitute, really horrific stuff. If you’d had a hard day, you’d walk in and get these stories about the negro sailor who fucked her so hard she had to get a hysterectomy. You’d be pretty well traumatised by the time you got away from her. I had to work out how to get into the house upon the sly. If she heard a creak she’d race out and get you. I had a month of tip-toeing around the back, coming in through the neighbour’s yard, climbing the fence. It was petrifying. You’d stand on a creaky board and she’d get you. I knew every fucking floor board in the place.

It took about two weeks. Everyone complained in their own little groups, but nobody would actually challenge him. Then the phone bill came in with a five hundred dollar excess for the month and I fronted the guy, said ‘Look, we’ve sort of decided you’re going to have to move out.’ It was an abhorrent thing to say because we’d been so cool about the way we ran the house. This guy was stunned. His jaw dropped. He was like, ‘How can you do this? You utter bastard! What’s the problem? We can talk about it.’ I got really hardline. We couldn’t talk about it because as soon as we did, the salami tactics would start. One person might move out and there would only be six in the room. A negotiating move you know. This is a house that had six people on the lease, plus his girl friend, plus four Daves and a spare from Perth. It was pushing our rather minor facilities.

Somebody tried to alleviate the situation by saying, ‘The problem is just that you don’t clean, you don’t pay bills and you’re smoking the house out.’ He said, ‘Well I could start smoking outside again.’ I said, ‘No we really can’t talk about this. You’re going to have to move.’ It was getting very tense. He said, ‘Well, I’m not going to stay here if everybody doesn’t want me to be here.’ Two of my housemates, Mandy and Luke were passive people. They’d hide in their rooms, pull the shutters down while this whole thing was going on. Ernie had simply run away to Darwin, and I’m sitting there thinking, ‘God, would anybody else like to solve this situation?’

In the end, I simply decided to disconnect the electricity, the gas and the telephone in a bid to freeze this turd out of the house.

I’m a survivor. I’ve lived without gas and electricity before. I can get by without the phone. Trouble is, the five Daves, the washerwoman and the spare from Perth really dug themselves in for a winter campaign. The house was freezing, but their cigarette smoke and body heat kept David’s room at a bearable temperature. They never came out. They were like the peasants, burning their cottages on the Russian front, and I’m like Napoleon watching my troops go down in the snow. Ernie never came back from Darwin. Mandy and Luke fell in love – drawn together by adversity – and found themselves a little loveshack in Prahran. I remember sitting in the living room, in the freezing cold, alone. It was my first Melbourne winter. I really understood the Leunig cartoons – all the black smoke and despair – and I suddenly snapped. ‘Okay you bastards!’ I started screaming. ‘You win! It’s yours!’ I had the flu by this point, and moved out in a state of delirium. Threw most of my stuff away. Borrowed a mate’s phone and took the first place that would have me.

A loft in Fitzroy.

A great building, but it wasn’t so much a home as a dormitory. I never got to know everyone in the house. It had seven bedrooms, so at any one time there were at least ten people there, most of them mad, with one or two unclaimed mystery figures drifting around. Strangest of all was Benny the Londoner. He was thickset with short hair and gappy teeth and he had a really high-pitched voice. It was another house full of dope smokers but Benny didn’t seem to do any drugs. He was on some weird hormonal trip. He was evil. I figured that out on the second or third night, while a few of us were watching
Blade Runner
on video – there’s this scene where Harrison Ford shoots an android girl in the back and she crashes through a bunch of plate glass windows in slow motion, wearing nothing but a see-through plastic raincoat. Great big holes in her back. Lots of blood. I looked across at Benny and he had the horn. Right there in his pants – and a really big grin frozen on his face. In his quiet, high-pitched voice, he said, ‘I love to see a bitch go down.’ Scared the hell out of me. A few nights later everyone was bagging some girl who used to live there. Benny got the same big grin. Said his fantasy was to give her a thousand paper cuts. ‘All over her body.’ It just came out of the blue. Creepy.

Brendan

There were four of us living in St Kilda. A student, a chef, a doley and Leo, whose parents owned restaurants. Leo drove the delivery van and had a lucrative sideline in black market food. Seeing as Scott was a chef he’d pinch mountains of stuff on Fridays for our regular Saturday night feasts. We’d have these incredible dinners even though we were broke. Atlantic salmon. Smoked venison. Bottles of Krug and Grange Hermitage. You’d wake up on Sunday morning there’d be a dozen people crashed out on the floor of this awful flophouse.

I decided to suss out his room while he was away for a day. It was neat. Minimalist. Clothes folded and tucked under the bed. Nothing on his shelves. Cupboards locked. A cheap cane table beside his bed. Resting on that, an old photograph of man in naval uniform, which I took to be of his Dad, and a pair of handcuffs.

I had the room next to this guy. The wall between us was a fibro sheet, nailed up at some stage in the past. I could hear him breathing sometimes. Cherie his horror girlfriend brought another girl home late one night. I saw Benny, Cherie and this other girl disappear into his room. I got into bed and lay awake for an hour waiting for the sex noises or even the sound of them leaving. But not a sound came from that room. It was absolutely quiet. Like, David Lynch
Blue Velvet
quiet.

We had a house dinner the following evening. Steve set it up. He had the lease on the house or owned it or something. The arrangements were nonspecific. Whatever. By sheer mismanagement, he’d let these weirdoes move in and run the place down. He finally insisted on this pot luck curry as a bonding experience, so we all sat round at the big dining room table: Steve; his lumpy live-in girl friend; the go-getting babe from Warrnambool; some roadie for The Mutant Shitbags; the two pot-smoking feral girls; Angie, the stringy-haired girl who really liked an awful cover band called Snailz Trailz and always wore their tee shirts; myself; and Benny.

It was a dismal failure. We had nothing to bond over. Frequent and cramped silences strangled any fellow feeling. Out of sheer nervousness, I had a few drinks and starting handing a bit of shit about. I had a bit of a lend of Benny and he went very quiet. After five or six drinks, I had to go to the toilet which was on the top floor. I walked up the first flight of stairs, the second, the third, the fourth, went into the bathroom and had a piss. While I’m standing there Benny slipped in behind me and shut the door. In his high-pitched voice this short Londoner said, ‘I tell you Johnny if you ever do that again I’ll kill you.’ He meant it too. It was all in the eyes. Everything you needed to know right there. Had those flat, reptilian eyes. I stammered a heart-felt apology and moved out three days later.