He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (14 page)

Worst-case scenario was this mad hatter called Lucy. No connection to Lucinda the Loon. She used the hat stand to keep her partner in place. He was three times her size but she bent him to her will by picking the hat stand up and bashing him with it, hats and all. You’d come home to an incredibly clean house and know there’d been a domestic, because the hats all had dents in them. She was nice before she moved in. But she turned. If she didn’t get what she wanted, she’d storm around the house slamming doors, waiting for her poor boyfriend to get home. Then she’d scream like a banshee and bash him with the hat stand, the second he walked in through the door.

But on the big scale of things, Lucy the mad hatter was a rank amateur. Had her tagged as nutter within two days.

With Crazy Nina, it took time. It was a constant chafing which rubbed on your nerves, rubbed them raw in the end – little oddities and quirks gathering into a tsunami of obsessions and strangeness. She was a list fascist. It was her first law of share house dynamics. For every action, there had to be a long list of activity, drawn up by Nina. The upshot of it all was generally that everybody got jobs to do and bills to pay, except Nina, who was hard at work drafting the next list. She also experimented on kittens. Raised them inside a locked, airtight, explosively hot house on a diet of soy extract and vegetable gruel. She never cleaned up after them. They crawled inside the pile of clothes I slept under and relieved themselves at least two times a day.

I though about killing them. I’ve done it before. I lived with this girl, Laura. She had a pet guinea pig, called it Chester. It was a surrogate love interest. She let it sleep in a rolled-up jumper on the pillow next to her. Talked to it all of the time. While she was watching television, reading a book, playing the stereo. She even had guinea pig music on CD for Christ’s sake. Debussy, I think. Anyway Laura had a real date one night. Some desperado from the office. Probably the new guy. She was clued in enough to realise the pig was a no-show for the date, and tied herself in knots over whether to go or pike out. She drove me crazy, asking what she should do. I said I’d look after it if she’d just get out of the house, and she reluctantly agreed. Left me two typed pages of instructions. Soon as she was gone, I locked Chester in the bathroom and luxuriated in my first night alone in the house. I fell asleep in front of the teev, woke up about ten o’clock. I figured I’d better let the pig out or it might go a bit shack wacky. She’d notice, believe me. So I opened the door, expecting it to bolt out between my legs, but there’s no activity inside the bathroom. I called out its name. ‘Chester!’ Nothing. My stomach began a slow forward roll. There weren’t too many places for it to hide. Only one really. My heart was really starting to hammer as I walked over and peered in. The toilet bowl. Yep. There he was. Poor little sucker. Probably kept his head above water for a couple of hours. I threw all my shit in an overnight bag and ran for it. Sorry about that Laura.

Bill

I went to a red house-warming party where there was going to be some blackjack played. I was curious because I like to play cards and the people throwing the party knew nothing about cooking. So we all turn up wearing red. We sit down. They had red plates. They brought out this big pot of boiling water with hot dogs in it. Dumped them on a plate with a lot of tomato sauce. Then they slopped out all this beetroot. Then all this red cabbage crap. Three or four of these red horrors, then some crook red wine and red jelly. Then they started playing blackjack. There was a really weird feeling in the air so I left. I found out it had turned into strip blackjack and they all ended up fucking each other. A nightmare. It must have been all the preservatives and red shit they were eating. Drove them crazy and the genitals came out. They were probably red too.

Now where was I? Ah yes, the other loony.

Nina enmeshed the house in this fantastically complicated series of lies and abstractions by which she ordered her daily affairs. She was avoiding an ex-boyfriend who’d lent her a tape recorder and wanted it back, somebody else who’d loaned her some lecture notes and wanted them back, the Hilton Hotel where she worked when she felt like it, and her mother from whom she had inherited her personality. We had different stories for each of them. We had to tell the Hilton that she’d been in a car accident. We had to tell the people from Uni she was in Sydney. We had to tell her mother that she was at her sister’s place. And of course we got it all hopelessly wrong. We told work she was in Sydney and her mother that she was in a car accident and her boyfriend that she was gay. So then we got a list explaining where we had let her down. She pinned photocopies of that one to our bedroom doors. Or the TV set in my case. It started getting way out of hand. Our neighbours, old Ted and Mavis, called Em over to their back verandah one afternoon, and whispered ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nina?’

‘Beg pardon?’ said Em.

‘John, getting her pregnant, forcing her to get an abortion. She’s been crying all day.’

We made one last effort before Crazy Nina crashed and burned us completely. Told her we were going to the beach for a few days, asked her if she wanted to come. She said that sounded like a great idea. Dirk was in the bad books for some reason, so we organised the holiday behind his back. The morning of the trip, everyone had packed and was bouncing off the walls like kids dosed up on red cordial. But Nina was sitting around in her tracksuit, eating buttered toast and looking like she wouldn’t be escaping from the gravitational pull of the bean bag for three months. She has a problem. Doesn’t think it’s a very good idea for people who live together to spend too much time together.

She wouldn’t look at us. Just stared at the TV, really drilled into
Fat Cat and Friends
. We kept at her for a while, but she said the weather would be bad, she had laundry to do, assignments to write. We had to strong-arm her into the car. After all, this was partly for her benefit. To help her chill out. And it wasn’t even a total disaster – there was even one moment when she morphed back into human form for about two hours. We had a picnic up on a headland near a lighthouse. Sat on blankets in the dunes to keep out of the wind. Had beers and fried chicken, fruit, cheese and fresh bread. We were totally disconnected. It seemed to calm Nina right down. A really nice moment. But when we packed up and went back to the car, the wings burst from her back all over again. The following week, we were back at the house and she appeared in the living room, said, ‘I’m just going round the shop,’ walked out, and never came back. We didn’t bother calling the cops. Word eventually filtered down that she had moved in with a girlfriend called Tanya.

At this stage, I’d been pulling a lot of cones with a girl called Joanne. That’s my courtship ritual. Pull so many cones with a girl that we become brain dead and decide to go out together. I pulled so many with Joanne that I damaged my lungs and caught some horrible kind of chest infection. A doctor at the 24hr clinic gave me some tablets for it. I don’t know whether I was allergic to the tablets or whether they reacted against the massive quantities of dope in my bloodstream, but I broke out in these amazing red welts. They were like little mesas and canyons. They started on the insides of my elbows and climbed symmetrically all over my body. Covered my face and lips. I looked like The Thing from
The Fantastic Four
. I was stripped down to my jocks, standing in front of a full length mirror to check out this freak show when there’s a knock at the door and Tanya bursts in, babbling about Nina. Saying she’s crazed, she’s insane. I go yeah, for sure. Then Tanya notices my appearance.

‘What’s up with you?’

‘Allergic reaction.’

And she continues without missing a beat. Crazy Nina had lobbed into her place a few days ago. Said we had thrown her out. Tanya thought that was terrible, insisted that she move in with her. Nina agrees. There are a few adjustments to be made, of course, but they’re minor. Nina has to borrow Tanya’s keys. The pineapple chunks have to be moved to the third shelf. Tanya has been after this very well-known lawyer for ages and Nina is cramping her style. But otherwise, it’s cool. She’s doing her bit for the Sisterhood. But on this particular night, Tanya gets home and the house is dark and locked up. She’s given Nina her keys, and Nina has assured her that she’ll be home to let her in. But she isn’t. Tanya knocks on the door, sits on the front step for half an hour, and finally decides to break in. She ends up climbing the trellis under her window. Tanya is very much a silk scarf and Chanel girl, but she makes the climb, levers herself through the window and crashes to the floor. Then she freezes. There’s someone in her room. This house has been burgled three times in the last two months, and the panic response is rushing through her head like a train crashing off the rails. Then she realises the intruder is in her bed. There are two of them. She turns on the light. It’s crazy Nina and the lawyer. He’s wearing Tanya’s white cowboy boots. Madness. Tanya fled, came over to our place and went to pieces.

We fled too, in the end. The house was mondo disgusto, humming with bad vibes and settling layers of toxic effect. Nina had come back briefly to liberate the kittens, her clothes and Em’s cooking pots. She put the pots into storage and sent a lawyer’s letter disputing ownership. She was like a twister tearing through a trailer park after an earthquake, so we found another house up in the mountains outside town, and prepared to withdraw to a quieter life. But our phased retreat became a panic stricken rout when Crazy Nina’s mother threatened to come around and sort out this cooking pot business once and for all. She had prepared a list. It would explain everything. I think I saw her car pull into the driveway as we disappeared over the hill.

Our new place was the best house I’ve ever lived in – polished wood floors throughout, half-way up a mountain, surrounded by sub-tropical rain forest. Em hung all this coloured cloth and shit from the ceiling, turned the place into a bedouin tent. Very cool. We got this girl in to replace Crazy Nina but she was diagnosed schizo and moved out. I just couldn’t understand it. She was one of the sanest, most reasonable people I’ve ever met. Cooked a damn fine minestrone. Sadly when she left, domestic harmony left with her.

Dirk had been partially rehabilitated by his feud with Crazy Nina. But when the war with her was resolved, we discovered a new Dirk living amongst us. An uptight, suspicious Dirk. Nothing like the fun-loving, oddly haired, dope-smoking Dirk we had previously known. This new Dirk was always alert and on guard, because he had discovered he was gay. He trawled for homophobic intent in all our conversations and domestic arrangements. He put posters of nude, grinning men all over the kitchen because it made him feel comfortable. We took them down because we were fascists. We asked him if he wanted dinner one night and he said no, he was going out. But when he found out we had made his favourite apricot chicken, he said we tricked him into saying no. Said we probably thought being straight was better than being gay. Said we were just like Fred Nile.

Monica

I lived with two merchant bankers. One of them brought this Brazilian girl home and made her stay in the flat for four days. Kept her prisoner really. Tried to get into her pants every night. The girl only spoke French and Spanish and I had to translate. He’d get home about eleven most nights, close the lounge room door and launch another attempt on this poor girl. She came to me one night, absolutely desperate and said ‘Please help me.’ She didn’t want to stay but he was locking her in every day. He used to ring me during the day and say ‘Is that bitch still there’. I let her out and gave her twenty bucks to get to the consulate.

Yes I know. I’m being hard. But I tried, honest I did. While I was in Sydney for some work, Dirk wrote me a note, all cut up because his parents’ minds had imploded and they’d told him never to darken their doorstep again. I could see this was weighing heavily on him. His parents were a couple of Nazi pinheads, but they were his parents. Who else was going to do his laundry? So I write him a note in return, figuring it’s a chance to square the ledger, a chance to strut my credentials as a broadminded guy. You know, straight man–gay man, all brothers under the skin sort of thing. I write Dirk a letter suggesting that if his parents are unable to cope with his sexual orientation, it’s their problem, not his. I said if I was a gay guy, I wouldn’t be worrying about my parents. I’d be getting laid every night. I mean, you’re hitting on guys right? That’s what I wrote him. And it didn’t come easy. There was more empathy and understanding in that note than I’d ever needed in ten years of writing to girlfriends. Dirk broke down when he read it. But not from gratitude. He burst into tears, said it was typical really, and got stuck into my homophobia like a big hot meal.

So I brought Taylor the taxi driver back into my life, into all of our lives really. He’d given up the booze again. Needed a place to stay, so I offered him the spare room. I explained the whole set-up to the house before Taylor moved in, but Dirk went to pieces anyway. Said he didn’t think Taylor would respect his homosexuality. Don’t know why. He’d ditched the camouflage pants after he got off the grog and his main source of happiness now came from baking bread. Hundreds of loaves. You’d get home and he’d be in the kitchen wearing an apron over his Blundstones and King Gees. Hell, Dirk should have taken him on as a role model. But it didn’t work out, and I’ve got to admit, that was kind of the plan. Relations soured and an exchange of notes began between Dirk and Taylor, culminating in Taylor plunging a huge hunting knife through a big piece of butcher’s paper and into the door of Dirk’s room. The message on the paper, finger-painted Charles Manson-style in pig’s blood, said simply, ‘You are dead meat on a hook, mate.’

Game, set and match, Taylor.

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