He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

by John Birmingham

  * * *

  Scot

  My friend Reg moved in with a scrupulously tidy guy, a real nice guy too. Reg was a real smoker, a stick-a-day man. The cops came around during Operation Noah. Say they’ve received information and they want to search the place. They go to Reg’s room, it’s like a black hole. They can’t even get in because of this cupboard pushed up against the door. Reg had to climb over it to get in and out, and beyond that it’s just chaos. The cops say, ‘You could have a plantation in there mate and we’d never find it.’So they go to Steven’s bedroom, which is scrupulously tidy of course, and they tear it apart. And at the back of his underwear draw they found fifty seeds. They weren’t even his. They were left-overs from some previous tenant. That’s how he got his conviction. And Reg of course did have half an ounce stashed away at the time, but they were never going to find it in that room.

  * * *

  The hailstorm passed. Steam rose from the bitumen. Soil and plants and even the boards of the house exuded a rich smell of rot and genesis, as juicy and tactile as the syrup seeping from the fissures in the fat, over-ripe mangoes which lay at the foot of the tree in the farthest reaches of the backyard. One of those curiously suspended moments had overtaken the verandah. So we talked a bit – me, a vague acquaintance, and two complete strangers. Beyond a certain level of personal hygiene and financial probity, one of the most sought-after qualities in a potential flatmate is the ability to hold up their end of a conversation. Nobody likes to have a silent, brooding presence on the brown couch when visitors call or the bong is passed round. Still, you’d be amazed at the number of angry loners you find bunking down in share accommodation. Would those Gun Lobby types be so gung-ho if they’d spent some time backed up against a bedroom wall, watching a two dollar latch buckling under the shoulder charges of a savagely drunk taxi driver in camouflage pants and a Death Before Dishonour tee shirt? I don’t think so.

  Danny’s nickname was Decoy. He was a nice guy, one of the best, but terrible things kept happening to him. He used to live in this really big house with only one sane person in it – himself. All the others were in various degraded phases of alcoholism and drug addiction. They ranged in severity from being into their second week on the grog and going at it straight because it was still so much fun, through to the stage where you didn’t want to know where their rent money came from. When you took it off them you handled it with gloves, put it into a plastic evidence bag. His room was a little island in this sea of madness. It was a nice room. Looked out over the front street in Highgate Hill. Great views. The house itself had faulty wiring, broken windows and a toilet that backed up all the time. The run-off seeped through the floor and flowed through the backyard. His junkie flatmates had stolen a little bridge from a park, thrown it over this flow, and put a sign up: Cholera Creek.

  Cholera Creek was an infamous house around those parts. On top of being addicted to various drugs, the residents were very unwisely involved in lots of radical political groups. Expo ’88 was bearing down upon Brisbane at that time. There was a lot of opposition to it around that part of town. Before Danny’s house was raided, there had been stories about other houses in the neighbourhood being torched. The inference was that the cops were involved. The links were never made clear, it was just one of those Brisbane things.

  * * *

  Cameron

  I resigned from a job in Toowoomba, broke up with a girl, piled everything I owned into a car and drove down to Sydney. I arrived with $110 on me. I rang a name I knew and asked for a job. He got me on as a shift manager with this chain restaurant in Pitt Street. I lived in my car for the first few weeks, parked it up near Mrs Macquarie’s Chair. The first person I met at this food joint was an employee who dragged me over to a table, sat me down and got me something to eat. His name was Gerald. I soon realised this guy had just been sacked, but I sat there and finished my sandwich.

  About two weeks went by with me living in this car before Gerald came by and asked if I wanted to move out. He’d got a job as a kitchen-hand in some swish restaurant. I was pretty keen to get out of the car so we took a flat in Cronulla.

  I was working two jobs at this stage, so when Gerald asked what I wanted for dinner in the morning I said groggily, ‘Well I’m thinking Veal Cordon Bleu.’ He said, ‘Well fuck, that sounds all right to me’. I came back after work and our fridge was full. I mean it was just full of wine, fruit, sweets, and meat. This stuff was obviously hot, pinched from his workplace, and I tried to discourage him. But the fridge just got fuller and fuller. We were starting to throw out the smoked salmon and French pate. He was compulsive. There was nothing I could do so I ate the evidence.The crunch came when I realised that he was seriously klepto. We went into a Shell servo to get some change and when we pulled out I couldn’t see with the rear vision mirror. In the time I’d taken to change my money he’d shovelled anything within arm’s length onto the back seat. Soccer balls. Crates of Coke. Rolls of paper. And these pine trees. Three of them. I asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing and he said ‘Don’t worry I got you some oil for your car’. I fled before the cops turned up.

  * * *

  Anyway Danny’s sitting in his room one day. He looks out the window and there are six or seven cops on the front stairs. He runs out to warn everyone in the house, but it’s too late. Another half dozen cops have gone around the back and are swarming in through the kitchen. They were mostly uniformed, but they had a couple of suits with them. Miraculously, nobody had any drugs in the house. The cops claimed they were looking for guns. Said the neighbours had reported hearing gunfire in the area. They gave a big speech about the guns and said, ‘Do you have any guns on the premises?’ Then they took away some address books, some posters and stuff. They loved the posters. These militant things from the UK with aggressive slogans on them about killing cops and smashing the State. A few days later, Danny’s walking around town when this car pulls up. Two suits jump out, grab him and wrestle him into the car. He recognises one of these plain clothes guys as this infamous character who’d been under suspicion for the murder of an Aboriginal girl. They called him the lady killer. He grabs Danny’s wrist and holds it up for his mate to see. He says to his mate, ‘Look at this Terry, he’s got the tremors. I reckon he’s on something. What do you think?.’ And Terry replies, ‘I reckon we’d better search his house, mate. Looks like there could be drugs there.’

  Danny tells them he’s not going anywhere unless he’s formally arrested and charged, you know, the usual spiel. But the cops seem to know everything about him. They’re saying, ‘That’s a pity Francis, because it’d be a bit rough wouldn’t it? A chap like you spending the weekend in the watchhouse. With your medical condition? Anything could happen in there.’ And Danny’s eyes have gone wide, because the cops are calling him Francis – only his parents know his christian name, everyone else calls him Danny – and they’re talking about his allergy to an epilepsy drug which could kill him if administered by mistake. ‘Friday afternoon?’ the lady killer is saying. ‘Court doesn’t come up until Monday. You’d have a whole weekend in the watchhouse.’ He’s saying this in a genuinely concerned voice. ‘It’s a long time until Monday. Anything could happen. And let’s face it Francis. It probably will. Won’t it?’

  So Danny agrees to take them to the house. Before he gets out of the car, he suggests that he’d better go first, because someone in the house had a Doberman and the dog was quite vicious. If it saw strangers it might attack them. ‘No worries,’ says the lady killer and pulls a firearm out of a holster. But not dramatically, you understand. Not like on TV or anything. He just pulls it out the same way we’d get a cheese stick from the fridge, and leads Danny around the side of the house. It was one of those houses where the front door had been boarded up and the verandah converted into a long skinny sleepout. You can’t lock the back door, so they go into the house and start looking around. One of them radios for back-up, asks for the dog squad as well. Danny’s really sweating at
this stage, and turns on Four Triple Zed, the local left-field public radio station, to mask his panic. And he can hear one of his flatmates on the air. She’s hosting Prisoners Hour. Very ironic. The girl’s on the radio, and then in this typical bumbling public radio way, she says she’s left one of her records at home, ‘I’ll just call to see if anyone can bring it around to the studio.’ Danny freezes. And the phone rings. The cops are preoccupied, they don’t attend to the radio. They just nod to Danny to answer the phone. He snatches it up and blurts into it that the police are raiding the house. ‘Broadcast it!’ he cries ‘Ring my solicitor. Get help fast.’ The cops come over in this quiet fury, just as Danny’s flatmate comes back on the radio in a gust of excitement – ‘Hey everybody! My house is being raided! We’ll bring it to you live!’

  When the phone rings again it’s Danny’s solicitor. Danny is feeling a little cockier now and he answers, ‘West End Police Station?’

  ‘Ah don’t mate. Don’t make a joke of it. You’re in deep shit,’ says the brief. She asks to talk to a cop. Danny hands the phone over. The killer’s talking and nodding and going ‘Yes, yes, no, no, yes. That’s correct.’ Then he starts arguing, saying, ‘We have every right to be here.’And then there’s the sound of feet thundering up the back stairs – Danny thinks it’s the dog squad, but it’s six spaced-out people with tape recorders who’ve run half way across the suburb. They say they’re from Triple Zed and hit the record buttons of their machines. There are microphones everywhere. Terry, the rookie, doesn’t know what to do, so he says, ‘I’m arresting you all.’ A guy with a tape recorder says, ‘He’s arresting us all,’ and the lady killer gets off the phone, gets on his radio and says, ‘Negate that request for dog squad and back up.’ There are witnesses and live microphones everywhere so the cops leave. But as they walk out the door, the lady killer taps Danny on the chest and whispers into his face – ‘You made a big mistake Francis.’

  Danny sees out the rest of the day at that house in a fairly blank state – another twenty people with tape recorders turn up, and when they see there are no police around, they decide to break out the drugs and have a party. The party goes on all night – but at the crack of dawn, Danny throws all his gear into the back of his clapped-out Combi, and drives down to the Gold Coast, where he hides out for a couple of months.

  * * *

  Darryl

  I moved into a house which had a bed that killed people. The other people living there said some girl had inherited it after her grandmother died in her sleep. She was strangled to death in it about six months later. After the guy that replaced her overdosed in the bed, they wanted to throw it away, but one of the other guys twisted his ankle trying to manoeuvre it down the stairs. That bed wasn’t going anywhere. It had tasted human flesh.

  * * *

  Margot wound up at the house on account of Lucinda the loon. She’d been living over in St Lucia in a place with a spare room, which the household had decided to advertise through Triple Zed’s accommodation notices. Used all the codewords. ‘Green leafy suburb’, ‘Open minded’. But they had a brutally straight-forward ‘No Junkie’ embargo on the place. Well, Lucinda drops in for an interview and seems okay. She’s no junkie. She’s been living with her mother for three months. They found out later that she’d actually been locked up in a mental hospital for smack addiction and schizophrenia.

  Being a complete loon and addicted to both theatrics and heroin, Lucinda would play out these schizodramas on a day-to-day basis. One morning, Margot wakes up to this unholy screaming in the bathroom. She runs in to find Lucinda in tears, shaking uncontrollably because someone had spat in the bath. Margot tells her it’s okay, reassures her, strokes her hair, turns on the taps and washes it away. That afternoon the phone rings, a call for Lucinda. Margot goes into her room – ‘Lucy. Phone for you’ – but Lucinda is on the floor, groaning about ‘too many pills’. Her little white arm snakes out from under her doona and knocks over a half empty bottle of Melarol. Margot hits panic mode, calls a friend in drug counselling and asks what these Melarol tablets are supposed to do. The drug counselling guy says they won’t kill her but the house would have to look after her for about twenty-fours hours. So the whole house goes on Lucinda Watch.

  Now, Lucinda was a champagne lesbian – it was more fashion statement than sexual thing – but she had a lovely girlfriend who would occasionally disappear up north. When this happened, Lucinda would go into depression overdrive and start bringing home strangers to share her bed. Man, woman or beast, she didn’t care. Then one day Margot’s flatmate Andrew is knocking on her door, and says Lucinda has been in the bathroom for a very long time. He’s starting to worry. So they check it out. There’s steam coming out under the door, they know she’s in there, but it’s really quiet. She’s not responding when they call. Doesn’t even splash. In the end, Andrew kicks the door off its hinges and they burst in.

  Lucinda is lying in the bath. The bath is full of blood. The first thought that rockets through Margot’s mind is that she’s slashed her wrists. But she hasn’t. Andrew pulls her arms out of the water and they’re uncut. They drain the bath and discover the truth. Lucinda had gotten herself pregnant to some Maori bouncer and decided to give herself a home abortion. She’d taken five or six packets of the pill all at once, and had a miscarriage in the bath. So Andrew drags Lucinda out of the bathroom and into an ambulance and leaves Margot to clean up the mess. There’s some residue clogging up the plughole, so Margot puts her hand in a plastic garbage bag and fishes around in the bloody water. Her fingers close around a handful of pulpy matter and she pulls it out and looks at it. It’s been ripped to pieces by the end of a coathanger. And that’s it for Margot and the house – every time she tries to take a bath, the torn thing is in there with her. She lasted three weeks without washing, and then she hit the road.

  * * *

  Voices of the Damned

  Mark

  HEROIN. ALL THE ANSWERS!

  Apart from Scientologists and born-again Christians, junkies are probably the worst people in the world to live with. Even other junkies will tell you that.

  Mark is still alive. He now edits a major fashion magazine.

  * * *

  I’m the dickhead in this story. Despite maintaining a terrible drug habit I liked a tidy house. It was probably my method of pretending everything was all right when I was fucked on the drugs. But it would cause tension when I was living with other junkies who didn’t give a shit.

  I went mad over this kitchen in Kings Cross. Domestic things were just instinctive to me. Cooking and cleaning and so on. But nobody else got into it because they were all young and drug-fucked. I went completely insane. It was a butter and milk impasse which got to me. It drove me insane that I could never have soft butter. I liked to keep the butter out of the fridge and the milk in the fridge. I finally put this huge notice in the kitchen: PUT THE FUCKING MILK BACK IN THE FRIDGE. LEAVE THE FUCKING BUTTER OUT OF THE FRIDGE. Very, very uncool. I suffered a lot of harassment over that. I became the laughing-stock of the house.

  Years later when my life and drug habits had degenerated in tandem I was living in Roslyn Gardens, where Paul Keating has a place now. This was with a bunch of girls. I mostly tended to live with girls. It was one of those things. The stereotype of men being totally unhouse-trained is so often accurate. All-male households are usually frat house beer dens, which is pretty unendurable for a guy who puts up signs about the milk and butter. As a young bloke I looked at that slob archetype lifestyle, which was supposedly so rebellious, and I just wanted to tidy up the kitchen.

  There were two of us maintaining covert habits in this house. One of the girls, let’s call her Alice, started to screw the dealer. I then figured she had lots of smack and I had an excuse to steal it. I’d hang around when she went out. Wait a while. And as people tend to hide these things in pretty obvious and consistent places I’d then find her smack and take it. It was like a welfare supplement for my own habit. I lived for
a long time like that.

  I had to skip on that place because a couple of fraud jobs caught up with me. If you’re going to get into the smack and you don’’t want to get into mugging or break-and-enter it virtually ensures that you will become involved in credit fraud. And fraud inevitably involves skipping on share house arrangements. I had recently skipped on a place and they traced me because I took everything but a bag of garbage which contained a letter with a return address for my brother. The cops showed up and took me away. They had a huge file on me but they couldn’t make it add up exactly so they let me go.

  I drifted for a while. Just took couches and temporary beds with friends. Then I moved into a friend’s house in Nimrod St. Kings Cross with a couple of noted thespian types. It was another terrible drug saga. These were bacchanalian thespians. They loved to smoke joints, eat cheese and drink red wine. I was into heroin, leather pants and rock and roll. I guess they thought this was a touch of glamour and danger under their roof. Then the reality hit them.

  They were all sitting around one night smoking and throwing back the plonk and the King Island brie. I came home with Michael and Sonya, some guys from my band. We’d had a really good gig so Michael and I had gone out and scored. Sonya was quite mild-mannered, didn’t do smack at all. But Michael and I disappeared into my room, took this dope and were completely flattened by it. Michael just dropped, all but dead on the floor. I could see he had overdosed and wasn’t breathing but I was so out of it I honestly didn’t give a shit. I shambled into the living room to find Sonya, who was like the bridge between us and the thespians, and mumbled, ‘Eh Sonya.. come ’ere.’ I pointed to Michael and turned my back on him, walked out into the living room, into this collection of polite people and flopped in a chair, a drooling, drop-lidded vision of horror. I had a cigarette burning down to my fingers and picked up the nearest bottle of whatever was going. Sonya bolted out ... ‘Fuck fuck fuck!!! Michael’s dead!’