He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

by John Birmingham

  * * *

  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.

  * * *

  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?’