He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (9 page)

Share House Artefacts : Number Two

Fish Finger

BIG DINNER PARTY THIS WEEKEND?

Or just some friends who’ve dropped in unannounced.

Surprise them with a Fish Finger recipe.

Fondue, Casseroles or Grills. Nothing impresses like a
Fresh Fish Finger
.

Even YOU can prepare them like a Pro. From the casual sophistication of
Fish Finger Kebabs
to a six course set-piece dinner arranged around the magnificent
Fish Fingers in Aspic
your guests will be as surprised as you were on discovering this culinary Must Have.

FISH FINGERS AHOY?

Enjoy!

5 THE FOSTER-LINDBURGH INCIDENT

The dead man on the ironing board had me rattled so I moved down to Melbourne. Not sure why. When you live in Brisbane, you don’t really think about Melbourne. It’s a long way away, and you have to go through Sydney to get there. Most people don’t make it past Sydney. I did – threw all my stuff in the back of a Greyhound and twenty four hours later I was in the thick of it, soaking up the angst, checking out the trams. I had a bedsit in East Melbourne. Very few possessions. A typewriter. My old Japanese couch, which was actually a sort of black wooden park bench. A chest of drawers I found in the street, my mattress and this great Foster-Lindburgh bar fridge. I loved that fridge. It had rhythm. You’d hear it start and stop all night. About midnight it’d power up –
zhmmmmmmmm
– putting out those CFC’s to chill my beers and cocktail onions. And at seven in the morning it’d switch off – the sudden absence of its warm familiar hum surprising me awake. It was a great little fridge and the best thing about it was the mondo cool badge on its door, half an eagle’s wing like on the Harley Davidson motorcycles and the name Foster-Lindburgh spelt out in 1950’s typography. I loved that fridge and I would have it with me now were it not for my insane neighbours who kidnapped it and took it on an adventure around town.

Andrew

One of the differences between Melbourne and Brisbane is the humble cockroach. It means the fry pan factor doesn’t play as big a role in Melbourne as it does in some of the West End houses in Brisbane. In Brisbane if you leave a plate unwashed, you can go out four hours after everyone has gone to bed and the whole kitchen is moving around. In Melbourne you can leave your dinner scraps on the bench for two or three weeks and Old Mr Rat might have a go at it but that’s about all. In winter it might even freeze, especially if you don’t pay the power bills. Personal hygiene is not such an issue down south because people tend not to stink as much. I mean West End in summer? A house full of hard-core separatist lesbians? They can get bit whiffy.

I was sharing my block of flats with Stacey, a
Melrose
kind of girl with no money whom I’d helped move into a unit directly upstairs from me. This crumbling unit block had been built for the American officers McArthur brought through in the Forties. It was worse than a gathering of former Soviet republics, torn asunder by untenable liaisons and messianic faction leaders. The macrodramatics were recreated in the daily theatre of life with Stacey, who feasted entirely on the exploits of others. She was jacked into a live feed from the Who Weekly Deathstar, so fully briefed on the lives of the world’s fabulous young things that she could talk about them with the familiarity of a best friend from kindergarten. So it would be updates on Madonna, the lowdown on Gaultier, and a round-the-clock six channel datastream burst from the world-wide resources of the Sinead O’Connor bureau. Sinead O’Connor this, Sinead O’Connor that and Sinead O’Connor is very interesting because she shaves her head and has a lot to say. We were completely incompatible. I slept with her twice by mistake.

I tried to set Stacey up with Brendan, my friend the movie guy, in the vain hope that she might spend more time at his unit down the corridor. She resisted momentarily – said, ‘Oh no no no …mmmh okay ’ – then zeroed in on him at an art gallery launch. She said, ‘You’re cute, you make movies, take me home.’ Brendan said ‘Uhm uhm uhm … okay’ and they wandered off together. Good deal. But when I got home I found they hadn’t gone to his place, they were upstairs, thumping around on Stacey’s bedroom floor like a pair of screeching baboons. Lots of moaning. Lots of ‘Ohhhh Gods!’ It went on and on. At that stage, I was just begining to scrape a living writing stories for trucking mags. I had a deadline that night but the bedroom gymnastics were giving me a serious case of mental block. Eventually, the moaning stopped upstairs and I heard the pitter-patter of little feet running down the hall, then a knock at my door. Stacey was standing there all breathless in black socks. Cheeks flushed. Hair a mess. She asked if the noise from upstairs was bothering me. ‘Was it too loud?’ You know, now that we had broken up and all? It wasn’t disturbing my work or anything, was it? ‘No,’ I said. ‘Great!’ she smiled and pitter-pattered back up the hall. And they resumed. Louder and noisier than before. She did this every time I had a deadline. I’d be in my room pulling an all-nighter, the walls would be shaking and pounding, the baboons bellowing. Then silence. Pitter-patter pitter-patter down the hallway. Knock knock knock! ‘Did you hear that?’ Yes. ‘We weren’t disturbing you were we?’ No. ‘We were just having fun you know.’ Yes I know. Please go away now. Pitter-patter pitter-patter and off they’d go again. I had to get out. The whole block of flats was charged with sexual tension – even the neighbours had a wild look in their eyes.

Bradley

The filthiest kitchen I ever saw was in my very first flat. I shared with my mate Kevin. We were the first of our crew to move out which meant that everyone came to our place to hide and eat. We made a big bowl of chilli the first night but didn't eat it all. It just stayed on the stove and grew a big thick green blue carpet of mould.

Because nobody wanted to clean it up we put it in the cupboard with a lid on to see what would happen. Over the weeks it got furrier and thicker and then even the mould started to die and go black. Then when we peeled it back, the chilli underneath still looked like chilli. It had not decayed at all.

The dishes piled up like they do. There were times we’d open the door, throw most of them into the yard and turn the hose on them. Spray everything down with a mixture of bleach and soapy stuff, mop the walls. But it was just an inherently unclean place.

The cockroaches lived behind the hot water system in the kitchen. You’d switch the light out, get the Glen 20 and wait. When you could hear them you’d flick on the light, hold a cigarette lighter up to the spray can and flame the roaches off the wall. It was a lot easier than actually spraying, which didn’t really work anyway. The wall didn’t quite reach the floor between our kitchen and the place next door. There was about half a centimetre gap. Unfortunately we both put our bins there. The accumulation of garbage meant that if they didn’t have maggots we did and because of the gap the little bastards would crawl through from one kitchen to the other. You could never keep control of them. We believed in hot water for maggot strikes. It poaches them, works faster than insecticide and petrol is bit rough inside the house. Bleach turns them into paste which gets into the cracks.

It never resolved itself. We moved out.

I packed everything into the back of a friend’s car, everything but my beautiful black fridge, which wouldn’t fit. That went under the stairwell of the adjacent block of flats where some other friends lived. Another
Melrose
situation. I got my gear to the new house in Fitzroy, crashed there that night and came back for the fridge the following morning. It was gone. Stolen. I was devastated, sitting on the steps with a black heart when Fletcher, this very rural down-to-earth character from the block next door, grabbed me and told me he’d been woken up at four in the morning by all this banging outside. Said he looked out the window and saw the girl upstairs and her bald-headed boyfriend making off with my fridge. They’d loaded it into the back seat of her station wagon and driven away with it. I charged up to her flat and knocked politely on her door. The girl answered.

‘That old Holden wagon outside yours?’ I asked cheerfully.

‘Yes,’ she answered just as brightly.

‘Can I have my fridge back then?’ I asked, my voice shaking with anger.

Her face dropped. ‘Oh no, I knew we’d get into trouble. I’ll phone Ron up and get him to bring it back around.’ I followed her in, we got Baldy on the phone and I asked for my fridge back. He shuffled and fumbled but there was no way out. I was going to get my fridge back – I was prepared to take his girlfriend
in lieu
if the thing wasn’t at my new flat within a day. So I arranged to meet him at his place in the middle of the city, in this old warehouse, three storeys up, and helped him lug my fridge down all these flights of stairs and into his van. Pretty big of me I thought. But when I set it up in my new kitchen, I noticed that the Foster-Lindburgh badge was missing. I said to Baldy, ‘Where’s the badge?’ He shrugged, told me he had seen no badge. I looked at him very carefully. Thought, you are, after all, a fridge thief. But what am I going to do?

I reluctantly let it go, junked the fridge, continued my life without it. A couple of weeks later, I heard that Stacey had given Brendan the flick. (She’d said something like, ‘You know what I like about you Brendan? You’re a filmmaker. Filmmakers are cool.’ And Brendan had sheepishly said something like, ‘Actually, I’m not really a filmmaker, Stacey, I’m just a cameraman.’ Stacey checked, found that cameramen were down pretty low on the credibility scale and Brendan had his marching orders the following day.)

Two years later, I’m back in Brisbane, but a magazine has sent me to Melbourne for a day, to do some story about yachting. I’m walking down Elizabeth Street and my eyes are drawn to this thing that looks exactly like my Foster-Lindburgh fridge badge. Coming towards me. It’s just a glimpse in the crowd, but I follow it and discover it’s attached to the bald fridge-stealer from my past. He’s wearing my fridge badge as a belt buckle. He’s converted my fridge badge into a fashion accessory. I grab Baldy by the shoulder and point down to the offending item. ‘Hello – That’s my fucking fridge badge!’ Baldy stops, blusters and looks like he’s going to have a little seizure on the footpath. And then he runs off. I chase the fridge-stealing bastard and tackle him on the other side of the road. I’m in this red mist, overwhelmed by images of beating him to death right there on the pavement. I must have looked insane because he gave in, undid the belt holding up his trousers and offered my fridge badge back to me. I carried it out of the city in triumph.

The house in Fitzroy was okay for a while. An old terrace I shared with Brian the electrician, Greg the gay school teacher, Agro the complete fool and Serina, a hellwoman from my past. I’d met her at a party and fallen headlong into her green eyes. Not a lot of pupil in those eyes, but it didn’t matter. Her room was knee deep in rubbish and lit by a naked red lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Her mattress was a gangrenous, mil-dewed slab of foam rubber without any sheeting. Pillows without pillow cases. A thin, stained doona with no cover, on to which she’d pile her clothes when it got really cold because she was a pin-eyed loner who made her own rules.

Serina appeared on my doorstep one morning in Melbourne, out of the blue. I hadn’t seen her for the best part of a year. She told me she’d quit her job, had nowhere to go. I picked her bags off the footpath and carried them into my room. From that moment on, the house became great. Greg and Brian hit it off with Serina. She calmed right down, stopped the big drug binges. The sun shined on Melbourne for four solid months – and then it all turned to shit. A guy we knew called Nigel turned up at our door at two in the morning, soaking wet, having walked through the rain after two days on a bus from Darwin. Nigel looked a bit like Nigel Havers, the champagne-drinking hurdle jumper from
Chariots of Fire
, but he also had that slightly disenfranchised manner of the deeply disturbed. He’d walked in on his girlfriend fucking another man in his bed and he snapped – ran away to Darwin for six months. Now here he was, standing in our doorway, a man in need. A happy constellation of events came together. We threw Agro out and I offered Nigel the spare room on the spot. Really pushed the deal for him.