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.
* * *
Voices of the Damned
Jack
TRUST NOBODY
There are some flatmates who never seem to have the money to pay their bills. There are other flatmates who will use your money to pay their bills. And there are those very special flatmates who will steal your money and leave town, still not having paid their bills.
JACK NOW WORKS FOR THE AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF CRIMINAL INTELLIGENCE WHERE HIS HOBBY IS TRACKING DOWN THIS PREVIOUS FLATMATE.
* * *
There were three of us living in Bondi, myself, my girlfriend Ros and Lizzy, a friend of hers. We wanted to let the spare room to bring down the rent because we were saving for our wedding. After interviewing a couple of weirdoes we took this guy who said he was a chef. He was 21, a surfer type, didn’t have much stuff, had just moved from Adelaide. He said he was trying to see the country by working his way around.
He was always late with the rent and we were constantly chasing him up. He said he got paid at a different time from the rest of us so we ended up not paying the rent in one slab. We’d pay ours and he was supposed to put his in later. We only discovered the problem when I went down to pay the rent personally. Usually we just put it in a bank account. He was about $1200 behind. He paid some of that off but slipped behind again, kept making excuses. ‘I’ll get the money. I’ll get the money.’ He was slow chipping in for bills. The electricity was virtually impossible to get out of him. Like pulling teeth. ‘I’m running short right now but I got money coming next week,’ and so on. The whole time he’s buying stuff like a new surf board, a new guitar, he’s on the piss every night of the week. Then I noticed that all the gold coins were disappearing from the phone box. And my girlfriend ‘lost’ the gold coins from her purse a couple of times.
He was working nights so he’d be going out as we were coming home. We noticed one night that he and one of his mates were talking in his room about moving out together. He didn’t say anything to us and he wasn’t broadcasting this discussion through the house. We just overheard him. We were driving through Bondi shortly afterwards and saw him and this mate checking out the rental boards at a real estate agency.
He finally told us he’d be moving in a couple of weeks. We came home the next day and he was gone. We checked the rent. He owed $1100 there. He hadn’t paid any gas or electricity, they ran to about $300. His share of the phone bill came to $700. I rang a couple of the numbers from the phone bill, thinking they might have an address for him but they didn’t know or didn’t let on. I found his mother and explained that we wanted the money. She said he was somewhere in Queensland but she didn’t know where. We traced him to Noosa, and then to a caravan park outside Cooktown but the trail went cold. He left us a stained futon mattress and a couple of old sandshoes.
6 NO JUNKIES
Some truths are self evident. You’re never going to measure up in the sack with a girl whose first name is Sweden. And the arrival of a junkie spells certain death, even for th
e most liberal household. A junkie it was went belly up on my favourite green bean bag. A junkie it was ran a huge credit scam out of my house. Unpaid bills? Missing teaspoons? Stolen CD’s? I think we all know who’s responsible.
I did the lounge room floor circuit after Melbourne. Eventually wound up back in Brisbane, in the front room of a huge place, high up on stumps in Birdwood Tce, Auchenflower. This was the house where we pulled a dozen cones and planted a fresh vegie patch in the backyard, wearing goldfish-bowl space helmets. (We awoke the following morning, and discovered we had planted three perfectly symmetrical rows of lettuce and spinach.) This was the house of the Kinky Sex house-warming party – dozens of people scarfing up $50 ecstacy tabs like Smarties and fanging around in G-strings and dog collars, while two gay boys from the country in leather jocks and Spartacus sandals held a whip-cracking competition out on the road. This was the house of the winter solstice blue moon party, when we set fire to the Hills Hoist and performed a slow-motion Satanic Mass in the backyard. (My friend Wayne, who dabbled in the black arts as an adjunct to his veterinary practice, cast a spell on the Hoist, which we’d wrapped in metho and detergent-soaked rags. When we set it alight and spun it around, the whole thing went up like a burning blue firewheel, dripping and spitting little meteors of flame.) This was the house where you had to sit directly in front of the teev, because we’d collected dozens of cardboard tubes from the inside of toilet rolls and stuck them onto the screen to break the picture down into a fantastic swirling kaleidoscope of tiny TV circles. (It makes a lot of sense when you’re ripped.) And this was the house where we consumed inhuman amounts of hashish and mescal, went on the mother of all adventures and ended up getting busted by the cops for making off with the pot plants outside Bjelke-Petersen House. (We were charged with stealing two maidenhair ferns to the value of not more than fifteen dollars.) This was not a house which was down on drugs. But we did have one rule.
No junkies.
* * *
Margi
We had a flatmate who loved to go clubbing on Oxford Street. One night he was walking home, snorting amyl, and he tripped. The amyl went right up the back of his nose, so when he got home he was walking very oddly. He crashed to the kitchen floor. I got up to find him on the tiles, thought he was having a bad acid trip and I’d have to see him through. I’m patting his hand, saying you’ll be all right, you’ll be fine. He looked me in the eyes, said ‘Tell my mother I’m sorry’ and turned blue. We had a first-year nursing student living there so I started screaming for her and rang the ambulance. We had no idea what he was on. The ambulance guys are going ‘Is he smacked out’ and we’re saying ‘No no he doesn't use smack’. So they took him away and pumped his stomach. He swore later that two orderlies at the hospital had a play with his thing while he was non compos. We picked him up about six in the morning. Brought him home. We’re all sitting in the kitchen, feeling awful and he said ‘Fuck I had great time last night’. And he went out clubbing the next night.
* * *
I moved into this house during a hail storm. Vaguely knew Danny, one of the guys there. Friend of a friend sort of thing. Wound up on my first night sitting on the verandah with Danny and his housemates Margot and Wayne, drinking hot sweet tea and passing a joint around, nobody talking, as we watched the storm build up way out over the western ranges, raising a dark, monstrous anvil in the sky, filling the air with crackling ozone and static and a weird green light that rendered things flatter and harder than they really were. As it closed down on us, we could see the lowest tiers were boiling and swirling and carrying the whole storm system along on a fast running stream of mottled sick yellow sky. I reached for the Tim Tams as the first hail stones began bouncing off our corrugated iron roof. Trees bent. The wind briefly whipped up a dusty twister of leaves and old chip packets and a sheet of newspaper, sent them whirling across our front path just before the sky cracked open and fell in on our house.
‘Hope the bitch is out in it,’ said Margot.
The bitch was Wayne’s ex-girlfriend. She had moved into his room, refusing to pay any rent or bills. It wasn’t like she was still going out with him or anything. She’d bring home other guys and fuck them in his bed. She’d be in there thrashing around under the sheets, and poor old Wayne would be jackknifed on the two seater lounge outside, listening to the whole thing.
Her name was Kristin.
When she went off to work, Kristin was Anya. She ran a schizoidal relay between the two identities. It was Anya who dressed up and went off to the whorehouse, Kristin who came home and jacked herself up a few spoons of smack. She had a very English demeanour, very Sloane Square, Wimbledon, strawberries and cream, but it was twisted. She fucked strange men for money. She liked to brag about making $1600 on a Friday night. She was like – ‘I make all of this money’ and Wayne and Danny and Margot were like, ‘Well why don’t you buy some groceries?’ She was bludging off an Austudy house full of dishwashers and mop jockeys. They found out later she’d just been tossed out of a flat in Toowong, because some of her drug buddies had turned the place over.
* * *
Dave
Pat, his mate Raj and a couple of guys from McDonald’s where he worked liked to come home and get into heaps of buckets. After three or four quick buckets each they’d then knock down about fifty bulbs of nitrous. There were always hundreds of nitrous bulbs scattered around our house. The guys’d be totally fucked. Muted. Once, Pat was standing by the French windows when he took in this bulb and started staggering backwards. He crashed through the doors, still going backwards, couldn’t get his balance and fell off the verandah. His legs whipped through air and the last thing we saw of him were the soles of his shoes as he went down like Wile E. Coyote. He hit the driveway and lay there doing spasms but because he was totally wasted he was also totally relaxed so he survived.
* * *
Like I said, the house didn’t have many rules. Only one really. No junkies. No intravenous drugs in the house. That lasted about two days. Then Kristin went on a five week smack binge. She was on a methadone program, which meant she was doubly out of it, doubly awful, all the time. She’d come up for air every couple of days – ‘Oh I’ve given up now’ – never cooked, never cleaned, had these oily baths. Left the tub full of cold, grey, greasy water. Came home all hours, cranked the stereo up when everyone was trying to sleep. Full bore. Courtney Love and Hole.
She’d bring her smack friends around to shoot her up. Said it was more fun than doing it yourself. So this circus came to the living room. They’d fix themselves up while Danny, Margot and Wayne are trying to have dinner. Typical junkies. Laying the implements out on the coffee table. Asking if you could hold their arms for them. You’d roll your eyes in weary contempt. But Kristin would breathe, ‘When I’m on heroin I know all the answers.’ She sounded like an ad campaign.
Heroin. All the Answers!
And the drama of hanging out for it. Obsessing about it for hours, getting worked up, stressed out, ringing up, hanging out, waiting for it waiting for it waiting for it waitingforitwaitingforit …Aaaah! It’s here! ‘I know all the answers.’ And then coming down and being even more unbearable. Then she started fucking a dealer, and the next thing they know, there’s a pipeline of pure shit pouring straight into their living room.
It wasn’t just her. It was her whole family. They were always coming around. Her brother, the young yuppie try-hard. Brown leather jacket, blue chambray shirt. Fancied himself a bit of an operator.
‘I can get five thousand eccies at two bucks a pop.’
Her father was a cop, deep into reality denial about his little girl. He was on duty when Kristin turned up in Casualty with a gutful of pills. He kept the CPR team working on her. Fuck it, they said, what’s the point? But Kristin’s dad insisted they bring his daughter back from the dead.
The house finally gave her a week’s notice. At the end of that week there’s an empty suitcase on the lounge room floor, but no movement on the Departures B
oard. So they started throwing her stuff in. Figured she’d come home from the brothel and get the message. But no. She got home, turned the stereo up, made herself a double cheese omelette. Margot lost it in her room across the hallway, reefed back the bed sheets, stomped into the living room and went her like a pit bull terrier. Sharp teeth. Bad scene.
Kristin tried to get a word in, you know, tell her side of the story but Margot was off, screeching like a six foot tall vampire bat in fluffy slippers, reaching into the bottomless pit of Kristin’s crimes and outrages. Her selfishness. Her laziness. Her three hours showers. Her totally tragic, regularly scheduled, pantomime suicide vanity trips. Her telling Wayne, the dish-washing ex-boyfriend whose bed she had annexed, that his life was insignificant compared with hers and that looking at him made her want to throw up. Wayne, Margot screamed, was a hundred times the person she’d ever be, she was, ‘a … a … a … slut … junkie …bushpig!’ Before Kristin could do or say anything in reply, Margot picked up her suitcase, tore down the hallway and launched it off the front steps. The house was set high. The suitcase arced through the air for a good ten seconds before it hit the ground, long enough for Kristin to disappear through the back door and out into the night. When Margot stormed back into the house, she was gone. I moved in the following day.
He Died with a Felafel in His Hand Page 8
