He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

by John Birmingham

  * * *

  I say ‘my house’ because I stayed there – I was exhausted and out of gas. It was that same sort of movement had fucked me. Coming in and going out it made no difference at all. It all went through you like a bad wind, leaving you bare and dry and exposed. I moved into the small room at Kippax and sat out the turn of the decade; a non-contributor with eyes of glass and the heart of a tape recorder archiving the lives of those people who drifted on the tides and those who went down with the undertow.

  People like Harry the doctor, who worked at the hospital up the road and had the keys to the medicine cabinet. The house was awash with terrible drugs while he lived there but he took off on a world trip three weeks after I arrived, and I don’t actually remember what he looks like, because that whole period is just a narcotic blur.

  Or Kim the vet, who took Harry’s room, and brought home a baby possum, which had lost its mother and fallen out of a tree. It was supposed to be cute, but it looked like a little rat and had razor-sharp claws. It tore around the house, jumping from armchair to armchair at Warp Factor 5, which really freaked out the acid heads.

  Or Meredith, the cellist with the Sydney Symphony, who only had her room for a week and never actually moved in, deciding after a few days of not being there that she hated the place anyway, so she took off, leaving the room to Melissa, the big-breasted doe-eyed smack slut who loved to bellow along with Barbara Streisand records. We didn’t know about the smack when we took her in, didn’t actually figure it out until long after she’d left and we had to clean out her room. At first we thought all the bent spoons came from too many tubs of frozen Homer Hudson, but the 1ml syringes with the bright orange caps sealed the deal.

  Melissa put herself through university by wholesaling tabs of acid and ecstacy. She sub-contracted various flatmates as distributors, giving them one freebie tab for each ten sold. We had so much acid in our freezer that when it froze over, as it invariably did, the Legend of the Lost Tab took hold with enough force to inspire expeditions deep into the freezer, eighteen months after she had left.

  ‘I’m telling you Johnny, it’s in there, I’ve seen a map.’

  And Melissa, of course, ran The Great Credit Scam out of Kippax Street. Her first week in, she asked us if we’d mind her friend plugging a phone into our spare outlet. He wanted to move his business down from Brisbane and needed the answering machine for a week or two. Said he’d give us a television if we helped out.

  Greed triumphed over suspicion, as it will, and we let him have the connection for a week before I ripped the machine out of the wall, acting on a gut instinct that something else was at work behind the bland message on the tape recorder. We never saw our TV, and never heard of the guy again, but it was too late. Melissa and her sports-jacketed American drug buddy, Carlisle, had established an ID through the phone account and used it to broker a line of credit which snaked back on us a year later when the repo men came knocking. Pretty far-sighted for a junkie, I reckon. They’d set the scam up so well, we never even suspected Melissa was behind it. One of her dopey blonde friends let the truth slip at a party, abruptly accounting for two years of confused aggravation and subterfuge.

  * * *

  Kevin

  I moved into this big house with a guy who moved all of his stuff into his bedroom by simply throwing it through the bedroom door. At intervals he’d straighten his room up by opening the door and throwing everything out into the lounge room. Then he’d get tired of it all and forget about it. So for two days we’d have his bedroom all over the lounge room. Then everyone would get tired of that so we’d throw it back in. He never complained. We never complained. Nothing ever happened. It just went on.

  * * *

  It was kind of uncool for Melissa to pull that stunt, but she wasn’t a bad girl. Even when we tumbled to the scam we couldn’t forget that she’d stolen food for us and always contributed generously to the house stash, which is beyond rare in junkies. It’s completely unknown. If Melissa had one black mark on her flatmate report card it was her horror boyfriend, Frankie. You might remember Frankie as the guy who made off with my CD’s and fed me a line about some nightclubbing Japanese photographer at Kinselas having them. After he cleaned out my desk I rang his mother to say I was looking for him, and she asked, in this real tired voice, what had he done this time. I told her. She said she was sorry, but I’d never see those discs again. Said he’d cleaned out her Elvis collection years ago.

  Before he met Melissa, Frankie went out with a girl called Ingrid, whom I vaguely knew through the Brisbane scene. He went out with her for two or three years, never letting on that he was a junkie. She moved down to Sydney with him, into this little flat at Bondi. They were both on the dole and he sold her this great story – ‘Let’s live on your dole, pay the rent and buy food with it, and we’ll save up all of my dole and go back to South Africa where my parents are rich, and we’ll have a great time,’ – and she believed him. He lived off her for months, shooting his dole money up his arm. Ingrid didn’t tumble to his habit, until she was wearing his leather jacket one day and found all these dirty fits in the pocket. She freaked. He gave her a line about them being someone else’s – he was just getting rid of them – and she believed him. They finally broke up after she walked in on him receiving a blow job in the kitchen from this transsexual who lived next door.

  Frankie’s name varied a bit. It was Frankie, or it was George, or maybe Anthony. And his surname was Mallory or it was Leigh or it was Jones. He’d pluck a random combination of assumed names out of the air when he introduced himself to a stranger, and if you called him the wrong name in front of them, he’d glare at you with these cold, dead eyes.

  The girls all hated him. I was the only guy there at that time, and when I was away, he’d start roaming the house. The girls would be napping in their bedrooms and wake up to find Frankie grinning wetly at the end of the bed. We lost Amy the wonderbabe that way. She was a Kiwi and one of the best flatmates I ever had at Kippax. Baked great biscuits and occasionally brought home food from the restaurant where she worked – not to the same extent as Melissa, but enough to keep us away from the Krishnas. She just got tired of waking up and finding Frankie drooling at her from the end of her bed, so she moved out.

  He had powerful magic. You could tell when he was in the house. His presence would settle over you about four metres from the front door, like an evil invisible mist seeping out of a crack in the footpath. We’d be interviewing potential flatmates to replace the ones he’d frightened away, when he’d appear in the lounge room, wearing only a towel. He’d be running on weird chemicals, showing off the violent tattoos and track marks on his arms, staring blankly at the newcomers and asking questions like, ‘Have you ever been a communist?’ Or sometimes he’d just head them off at the front patio by sitting out there in his towel, drinking beer from the bottle and burping loudly at anyone who ventured in through the front gate. My CD col-lection disappeared because Melissa pissed off to the States with Carlisle, and Frankie had to raise the price of a bus fare back to the Gold Coast. I was pissed off at the time, but looking back, I think the loss was acceptable – it got Frankie out of the house and out of our lives forever.

  Melissa was replaced by Duffy, a computer programmer, who loved to cook fried eggs. Seemed to live on them. He worked nights, got home about three in the morning, and started wolf-ing down fried eggs and drugs. He’d been taking acid since he was twelve. He had a rough head but a good heart, and a babe for a girlfriend – Wendy, the lead singer with a terrible northern beaches band called Wet Leather. Wendy would bring the band back to our place sometimes. They looked like off-duty police constables. Short hair and thick necks poured into short-sleeved patterned shirts and acid-wash denim.

  Wendy fell in love with the bass player of the band – as the script required her to – sending Duffy off on a three week drug binge. She came back and all was forgiven, but she lost a lot of credibility a bit later when we discovered a picture of h
er in People magazine, sitting on a bed next to Ignatius Jones, a couple of lamb chops and T-bones strategically positioned over her rude bits. It was very odd. Perplexed as we were, we just couldn’t quite bring ourselves to broach the subject with either Wendy or Duffy, and in the end we lost our chance. They moved into a little Glebe love shack together. Never saw them again.

  We had some trouble getting people in for a while, had one of those slack periods on the flow chart. We eventually took in this Dutch guy, who turned up for an interview and pretty much refused to leave. We caved in and gave him a room, but he moved out after a few weeks, because he was dating some barmaid from the Royal Hotel and it got complicated. Or something. We covered his rent by taking in Giovanna, the young sister of a friend who wanted to see what share housing was like. She came, she saw and she moved straight home again, to be replaced by some guy known only as Mosman. I never actually met him, and nobody remembers his name. He was just some North Shore mother’s boy – moved in for three days, couldn’t hack it, and moved out in the dead of night. We turned his room over to Jimbo.

  Jimbo came from the bush. He was, like most country boys, a full disclosure man. Couldn’t wait to get back from a date to tell the whole house about it in exacting gynaecological detail. He was an alleged handyman who destroyed everything he touched. Two months after we let him fix the bathroom, the pipes burst and the chipboard flooring he put in under this bath he installed simply rotted away. Incredibly, Jimbo didn’t move out after that. He stayed and he fixed things. I ended up moving into the master bedroom with one of the girls and we put the small room on the market to help pay for the damage.

  Veronica the proto-hippy took the room. She was about thirty-three, and thus too young to be an actual hippy, but she tried hard. Only cooked in earthenware pots. Stacked a lot of leaves and twigs and foul-smelling herbal teas around the kitchen. Her friends were all dream analysts and numerologists and the boys who followed her home and sat on the brown couch staring lust-eyed at her all had this wet, kind of limp look about them. Veronica, on the other hand, was the house Woman of Iron, an Aiki-jutsu black belt. Whenever we had any trouble, we’d deploy her to maintain peace through superior firepower. If only she’d been there when Frankie was around. She would have expelled him from the foot of her bed with the shattered bones of his forearms jutting out through ripped skin and muscle fibre. Don’t exactly recall why Veronica moved out. Maybe she’d just done her tour of duty, got the points up, was flying back to the real world.

  Jonathan, who moved in around about then, was a very beautiful, androgynous Eurasian guy who fooled everyone during his interview. His precise way of speaking and polished manners masked an intellectual shortfall, which manifested itself in a limited conversational range: hair care products and models he had slept with. Jonathan was a totally het pork-swordsman, but he worked in a gay cafe and after he arrived we found ourselves fending off phone calls from a gaggle of increasingly desperate and ticked-off homosexuals. One even offered to fly him to New York and set him up in a photographic studio. Jonathan moved on after disgracing himself with Sara the teenage sculptor who moved in downstairs and slept through her clock radio every fucking morning. The noise blasted the whole house awake but you couldn’t get her to turn it down. In the end, the only thing to do was beat the clock, get up first, sit in the living room and check out the grey-lipped horror on the faces of the hungover boys who’d stagger out of her room with their hands pressed over their bleeding ear drums. After Jonathan staggered out of her room one morning, their cred rating dipped, they moved out and Downstairs Ivan moved in.

  Downstairs wore a beret and goatee, but not during his interview or we’d have set the dogs on him. He told us he was a physio, which was odd because he was a actually a successful restaurateur. He’d established a very famous bistro in Double Bay and sold it for elephant bucks a few months before he moved into our place. This raised some interesting questions in my mind – like, why lie about the physio? Why move into a dump like Kippax Street when you’ve got all that money? Why sit around all day in a white dressing gown watching video replays of boxing matches? Why the goatee and the beret?

  * * *

  Doug

  We didn’t have a laundry basket so we acquired a rogue shopping trolley. We put it on the verandah and lobbed clothes in for a few weeks. Nobody washed them of course. Then the cat moved into it. Some drunks fell asleep in it. It was there with the same load of laundry for a year. When we moved we took it down the back yard, soaked it in metho and burned the lot.

  * * *

  Uptight Martin came in the same time as Downstairs Ivan and left within a week of his departure. Downstairs once asked me if I thought Uptight might be uptight because he was a little bit gay and didn’t know it yet. It was pretty perceptive of Downstairs, who wasn’t otherwise noted for his sensitivity in these matters. Uptight was a very fit man. Swam two hundred miles a week, did karate four nights, weight training the remaining three. Uptight was burning up an awful lot of nervous energy with his relentless fitness regimen, but there was not a lot of action on the babe front for a guy who was pretty good-looking and so very, very fit. I guess that could be explained by the fact that he was kind of uptight, a bit of a dick, and the babes would run a mile the first time he opened his mouth. But he’d follow Downstairs around like an abandoned puppy the whole time he lived there. And he never once complained about his own abysmal record with the ladies. Suspicious? I thought so. The only thing to do was take matters into my own hands.

  * * *

  Julia

  I lived with a couple of gay boys who went a bit crazy over cleaning. This is my place right. I have the lease. These guys were always on my case saying that there were scuff marks on the floor in the kitchen and so on. One of them flipped once and was digging his finger like virtually into my throat screeching about some mark on the sink and how there were no scratchy clean towels in the house. They liked rough scratchy clean bath towels. Had to have them. They would never take me on individually. They’d take a corner each and yell at me. When I threw them out they pinched all of my Weetbix and toothpaste and scratchy clean towels.

  * * *

  I was managing an office for a couple of gay guys up on Oxford Street about that time, so when Mardi Gras came around, I made sure Uptight got a good window seat in our room to watch the parade. He thought that was just great. Kept remarking excitedly that you had to admit the guys were, you know, very fit. You just had to admit that, didn’t you. I figured to score myself some brownie points by turning him over to Henner, my unattached gay boss, but before I could get this cunning plan into place, Downstairs Ivan was steamrollered by Gina and Veronica’s Kippax Street bitchkrieg and moved out. Uptight followed him three days later. A great loss to Oxford Street.

  Downstairs and Uptight were replaced by Paul the quiet journalist and Homer the air traffic controller. Paul was completely unremarkable, except for an ability to drink beer and play snooker for three and a half days without sleep. A credit to the profession. Homer the air traffic controller was a throwback to Derek the bank clerk, a man so tight with a dollar he had to be surgically separated from it come bill-paying time. Homer’s portion of the bills was always calculated to the third decimal place, factored through some complicated algorithm which pro-rated Homer’s share against whether he bought any toilet paper during the week and then how many sheets on average each person used per wipe and whether they left their bedroom lights on all night or bought any milk, and if they did buy milk did they drink only their fair share of it or were they secretly sneaking into the kitchen after bedtime for unauthorised Milo raids? And so on and so on until your head fell to pieces, like a chocolate orange. If I’d had the money I would have paid all his bills to avoid the fortnightly mathematics.

  After coming to terms with the massive telephone bill Downstairs left us, we decided to cram a foreigner into the small room out the back. Yoko San. Everybody had heard my Satomi Tiger stories and thought it mig
ht be interesting to live with someone who didn’t speak the language, understand the customs, eat the food or comprehend the finances of the house. That and the whole Keating push into Asia thing. Thought we’d better have a piece of that. Yoko San lasted about three weeks. She vacuumed her room three times a day. She just didn’t belong.

  My old school friend Matthew was passing through Sydney about that time and I made the mistake of letting him take up the spare room. Trouble was, Matthew had a fatal character flaw. He became a floundering idiot within ten feet of any available woman. One moment you’d be talking to Matthew the rakish, devil-may-care kind of guy, and the next he’d be struck dumb because a girl had walked into the room. I spent the best part of that summer organising cocktail parties at the house in the vague hope that he might stumble across some girl, cheer up and fuck off.

  Eventually he did. Her name was Fiona, and she was the painfully shy younger sister of Tracy, an old girlfriend who cut my clothes to bits the day we broke up. It was an awkward thing – I was still quite scared of Tracy when Matthew got together with her little sister at one of our costume parties. They both came as ghosts and ended up pashing off under a tangle of white sheets on the road in front of the house. It got worse. They fell hopelessly in love and Fiona then came to visit three, maybe four times a day. She and Matthew would sit on the brown couch when the rest of us were trying to watch teev, holding hands and staring into each others’eyes.