COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Australia by The Yellow Press 1994

Published by Flamingo 1997

Copyright © John Birmingham 1994

John Birmingham asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006388579

Ebook Edition © MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780008192136

Version: 2016-05-12

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

One: White Niggers

Two: The Wild Thing

Three: The Beast

Four: The Horny London Babes Fiasco

Five: The Foster-Lindburgh Incident

Six: No Junkies

Seven: Northern Gothic

Eight: The Yellow Underpants of Rock ’N’ Roll

Nine: Don’t Come Any Closer Frankie, We have a Gun

Ten: Moving On

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

One
WHITE NIGGERS

He died with a felafel in his hand. We found him on a bean bag with his chin resting on the top button of a favourite flannelette shirt. He’d worn the shirt when we’d interviewed him for the empty room a week or so before. We were having one of those bad runs, where you seem to interview about thirty people every day and they are all total zipper heads. We really took this guy in desperation. He wasn’t A-list, didn’t have a microwave or anything like that, and now both he and the felafel roll were cold. Our first dead housemate. At least we got some bond off him.

We had no idea he was a junkie, otherwise we would never have given him the room. You let one junkie in the house and you may as well let them all in. We had another secret junkie live with us once. Melissa. She was okay, but her boyfriend stole all of my CDs. Told me some Jap guy, a photographer, took them and if I went to Kinselas on Wednesday nights I could probably find him there. Yeah right.

Melissa, on the other hand, ran a credit scam out of the same house. Months after she’d left, a couple of debt collectors came round looking for Rowan Corcoran. That was the identity she’d set up, but we didn’t know that. We were very helpful, because bills had been turning up for this Corcoran prick for months. We didn’t know who he was, just some mystery guy racking up thousands of dollars in debt and sending the bills to our place. We sat the debt collectors down in the living room with a cup of tea. Showed them all the other bills that had been arriving for Mr Corcoran. When they saw that the last bill was for two Qantas tickets to America their shoulders sort of slumped. I’ve still got those bills. $35,000 worth.

Paul

When I first got to Melbourne I was working about sixty hours a week in a new job. I had enough money to carry the rent on my two bedroom flat but after a few weeks I interviewed for someone to take the spare room. I offered it to this guy, Phil. He said he worked in the bond markets and had a heavy schedule so he’d move over a couple of evenings. First night, he cleaned the flat and dumped some gear in his room. I offered to help but he said he was okay. He crashed on the couch and I gave him a lift into the city next morning. He came round late that night and said he was going to be up past midnight. Said for me to give him a yell if he woke me up. Fine with me, I went to bed. I heard him once or twice after that but he was pretty quiet. Next morning I get up and look for Phil to see if he needs a lift. But the flat was empty. I mean empty. My stereo was gone, along with my TV, my wallet, my car keys, my car and my flatmate, Phil.

But Melissa was okay. In fact she was a real babe. She used to steal food for the house from this restaurant she worked in. (If you’re reading this, Melissa, we really appreciated the food.) There were four or five of us living at Kippax Street at that stage. Everyone was on the dole or Austudy or minimum wage. The house was typical Darlinghurst, this huge, dark, damp terrace with yellowed ceilings, green carpet, cigarette burns and brown, torn-up furniture.

We’d sit around on Tuesday night waiting for Melissa to get home with our stolen dinner. She usually walked through the door just before Twin Peaks came on, so there was this nice warm feeling in the house as we all sat in front of the teev scarfing down the free stuff. On a good night, when someone’s cheque had come through, we’d have a couple of beers to share round. And on a great night when someone, usually Melissa, had scored, we’d pull out the bucket bong and get completely whacked. On those nights, that nice warm feeling was really close. It wrapped you up like your Dad’s old jumper, kept you safe. On those nights, you could delude yourself that share housing, which is all about deprivation and economic necessity, was really about something else: a friendly sort of half-sensible descendant of the communal ideal. But it never lasts. Never holds together. Somebody always moves on, or loses their mind, or dies with a felafel in his hand and you’re on the road again.

Jeffrey!

Harry

Ken moved out of home without understanding laundry. He’d never done any. He didn’t understand the importance of rinsing. He’d give his clothes a good soaping then hang them out. I caught him trying to break his jeans across his knees once so he could get into them.

That was the dead guy’s name. It got away from me for a minute there, but I knew it started with a ‘J’. He died watching Rage with the sound turned down. One of the hip young inner-city cops who turned up to investigate said he probably snuffed it half way through the hot one hundred. Just like a junkie. There was a nightclub stamp on his wrist, bruises up and down his arm. The felafel’s chilli and yoghurt sauce had leaked from the roll and run down his hand in little white rivulets. For a brief, perverse moment it seemed to me that he himself had sprung a leak, a delicate stream of liquid heroin escaping from the seams of his fingers.

I’ve seen a hundred lives pass through the bleary kind of sleep-deprived landscape of a dozen different share houses, but Jeffrey’s was the only one that ever fetched up and died on a bean bag. The others all moved along on their own weird trajectories. They were never still. Everybody was constantly mobile or wanting to be – moving targets, random drifters and people whose lives rested on nothing more stable than inertia. White niggers every one. Some of them now work for gigantic weapons corporations or drug cartels. They’ve got these incredible lives. Jet travel. Credit cards. Respect, even fear, from those top-hatted guys who stand in front of the Hyatt. But if they were housemates of mine, I’ve seen them bludging meals from the Krishnas. Or sitting on the lounge room floor in home-brand underwear with all the windows blacked out and hundreds of candles pushing back the dark. Not doing much. Just sitting there. Or smashing five hundred empty beer bottles into a million jagged pieces on the kitchen floor while greying mincemeat patties slowly peel away from the ceiling … slowly, slowly, slowly … then plop — impaled on the waiting fangs of glass below. Or sitting in front of the television for two days straight, with giant frilled lizards clinging to their shoulders, a bowl of magic mushrooms by their feet, their weeping bloodshot eyes the shape of little rectangles.

Madness, as one flatmate of mine used to say with just a hint of satisfaction in his voice. Things get out of control all the time in share houses. It’s not just a matter of the rent slipping behind, or the washing piling up. People flip over the line. Way over. I know about this. Been there myself a couple of times. One place, Duke Street – home of the smashed stubbies and falling patties – was nothing but a madhouse. A huge rambling kind of place, an ex-brothel, we all thought, because there were so many rooms in there. A lot of them looked like they had been jerry-built at some stage. Bedrooms where bedrooms shouldn’t ought to be and so on. We were paying $11 a week each between the ten or eleven of us living there.

Maria

Never move into a house with someone who plays The Smiths all the time. Don’t do it. I never liked The Smiths and now I loathe them because it’s all I hear. Three in the morning they’ll come home and play The Smiths at full volume and wonder why you get into a bad mood. Three in the morning is the time of choice for Smiths fans to play their albums. The suicide hour. Like, “I’ve been out I’ve been rejected I’m coming home to my damp little flat to play The Smiths and be depressed and kill myself”.

We were never completely sure of the number because of the continual drop-ins and disappearances and the strange case of Satomi Tiger.

I just know you’re thinking – what the hell is a Satomi Tiger? Well, we’re sitting on the lino floor of the living room one night – actually we had two living rooms in this weird house, but we turned the other one into a basketball court – and we’re watching teev, as usual. And this Japanese girl walks in wearing these audacious tiger-striped pants and a poo-brown imitation dead fur thing. “Good Ev-en-ing,” she says. “I move in now.” And that was all. She had no other English. She drops a wad of cash on the teev and wanders off to find a room. We’re all just sitting there thinking “What the hell is this?” But then again, she’s dropped this wad on the teev so who cares?

We found out later that Satomi Tiger had met our invisible flatmate Tim on his last trip to Asia, the one which ended up with him being investigated for espionage and committed to an insane asylum in Hong Kong. You can see Tim in the mini-series Bangkok Hilton. He plays three different bit parts, most notably that of a drunken buffoon in a boat. A frighteningly accurate performance. Tim escaped from the asylum with the help of a friend, also called Tim, but he was always a little elsewhere afterwards. He’d met Satomi Tiger in Japan and invited her to visit him in Queensland. She took him up on the offer. Only thing was, we never really knew where Tim was at any given moment. When Satomi Tiger arrived, rumour had him cutting cane in the north. Whatever. It didn’t bother her, and it didn’t really bother us. It was that kind of house. The set-up with the rent, for instance, was mondo suspicious. We’d send a cash cheque every two or three weeks to this post office box in the western suburbs, deep in serial killer territory. We’d never get any receipts but we never got any hassles either. There was a phone number to call in emergencies, which we used when the bathroom looked like it was going to fall off the end of the house one time, but there would only be this spooky message at the other end.

SAVE MONEY. EAT LESS

“There’s no one here,” click, brrrrrrrrrr ……………

At that stage, I’d quit my job in Canberra and was kicking around Brisbane, wasting my life again. Duke Street seemed the perfect place for it. The floating population, the lack of furniture, the crazy tilting floors, the freight train line which ran through the back yard, the hallucinogenic mushrooms in the front yard, the tree which grew through the bedroom window, the constant low grade harassment by the Department of Social Security, the week long drinking binges, the horror, the horror.

Early in my stay there, I took a four week job as a typist with the Department of Primary Industry. They had these reports that were seven years overdue. I’m not joking. They stressed this point to me. Seven years. Probably dog years too. So I’m bashing away on a word processor, getting into the Zen of typing because it’s so dull if I actually stop to think what I’m doing, my head will implode and I’ll be this sultana-headed guy walking around town. Anyway, after a while I look around the typing pool and I get this huge Fear. This Fear grabs me by the heart and squeezes like a bastard for three days straight. It’s saying This Is Your Life. So I enrol in Law at Queensland University.

Karen

Living with other people you start off in that nice accommodating phase. “Okay we’re going to get on.” You try really hard. It’s all going to be great. You buy stuff together, you talk, you share, you bond over instant coffee in the kitchen late at night. And then it starts to get a little cramped, becomes too much. Your dope’s getting smoked. Your car is always getting borrowed. The phone kitty never makes it above a handful of coins even though you keep filling it with change. You don’t want to put the effort in anymore. It’s almost like an ill-considered marriage. All this shit comes up like a marriage like, “You’re supposed to be loyal to me because I live with you.” Even if they’re wrong. So you start thinking divorce. You’re not talking. You’re knifing each other to your mutual friends, trying to entangle them in a complicated network of alliances to suit your ends. Then you’re not even thinking divorce, you’re thinking preemptive strike. Who’s going to run up a thousand bucks on the phone and skip town at midnight leaving the other holding the bill.

God, I hated it. A few weeks into semester the first assignment is due. I’ve already missed a few classes and my notes aren’t that great. I’m surrounded by these carnivorous teenagers, fresh smelling, label wearing, beady-eyed little ratbastards who never lend me their notes. On the day I’ve set aside to do this assignment, I can’t find anything, not even the question sheet and I flip over the line. I start screaming. It sounds like something from the jungle or a subterranean prison for the criminally insane where all the inmates have devolved into these lower forms. They don’t even look human any more and they’re taking messages straight from the brain stem, primitive reptilian urgings. I’ve got this working through me. I kick a hole in the wall and pick up a golf club and charge into the living room and start laying about me and letting go with more of the monster screeches. Well the other guys in the house, they’ve been there. They sort of hang back and watch the show. Get a beer from the fridge, that sort of thing. And eventually I do calm down. I’m not that fit, and my arms go tired and I deflate like an old balloon. I realise everybody is watching me, grinning hugely. I shrug. Means nothing. An hour later we found Satomi Tiger hiding in a cupboard. She’d never stay in the same room as me after that.

Jane

I had a hairdressing flatmate who had a tribe of dumb hairdressing friends. Every Friday and Saturday night they’d come around to tease and spray each other before going out. I came home early one Saturday from a horror date which I’d mainly gone on to avoid the hairdressers. My other flatmate had taken the TV into her bedroom and I went in there to tell her about the date. While we’re talking we notice this funny smell. We both thought “Oh that’s really weird. It must be coming in the windows or something.” We started watching a movie. But this smell just got stronger and stronger. It was like burning chemical smell, it really got into the nostrils. We’re going around checking all the points and electricals. Finally we went into her room. There was a cord going into her bed. When I pulled the doona back I briefly recognised a plastic curling iron before the oxygen got it and – whoof! fucking fire. We grabbed the burning doona and ran into the kitchen which was tiled, started stemping on it, throwing water and so on. Totally spun out. The hairdresser got home at three in the morning, pissed off her face, woke us up and accused us of setting fire to her bed.

Madness, you see. Things getting out of control. It’s one of the constants of share housing. Now I’ll allow that most of the time it doesn’t get to the stage of kicking out walls and terrifying obscure tiger-suited Japanese girls, but it’s always there, a sort of chaotic potential snaking about under the surface of things, rearing its head only briefly in the course of arguments over phone bills or cleaning up.

Like, I used to share a flat with a bank clerk called Derek. Derek the bank clerk pitched a tent, literally, on the living room floor. The house budget needed one more rent payer but had no more rooms, and Derek the bank clerk needed a place to stay but was kind of a tight-arse about money. So he builds this tent thing in the corner of the living room and pays half-rent. Crawls into this thing at night. Crawls out of it in the morning. A real fringe-dwelling bank clerk. It worked for a while. But Derek was very territorial. Used to gradually creep that tent across the floor into the television-watching area. Liked to poke his head out of the flaps and watch the ABC. During the day, when he was gone, I’d push it back. At night, he’d creep it out again. It started small at first, a few inches one way, a few inches back. But the confrontation went on. He’d jump his border out a whole foot. I’d push it back a metre. He’d take two metres. I’d break a tent pole. And the whole time, never a word was spoken. It was a lucky thing we didn’t keep guns in the house. You could feel it moving towards a bloody climax, but fortunately the bank transferred him and this taxi driver moved in. We said, “No tents taxi driver, just throw a mattress here on the floor.” That was cool with him. He liked being in the centre of things. But it raised another problem, made it difficult to keep the flat tidy.

I have to jump a couple of houses here and tell you that the worst place I ever lived, absolutely the dirtiest filthiest place, was King Street. A rat died in the living room at King Street and we didn’t know. There was at least six inches of compacted crap between our feet and the floor. Old Ratty must have crawled in there and died of pleasure. A visitor uncovered him while groping about for a beer. I don’t want to go into detail on King Street yet, but remind me later to tell you about the open door policy in the toilet, and the pubic hair competition and how the kitchen got so bad we had to do all of our cooking in the back yard.

Susan

An English girl whom I didn’t get on with very well put some dead fish up the chimney in my bedroom and then went out for the night with some of the other girls who lived there. While they were out she had a fight with one of them. She came home steaming, marched into my room, while I was there, took the fish out of my chimney and put it in the other girl’s bed.

You shouldn’t get the idea that all share houses are like that though. I’ve lived in some beautiful places. Really I have. Mostly they stayed that way because women lived there too. Not always, but mostly. I don’t want to be sexist about this, but there’s something about men living together that unleashes the Beast.

Gay guys are okay to live with on that score. They’re hyper-clean. Problem is, they’re also hypersensitive about the gay thing. I had a housemate come out on me once. This guy, Dirk, appeared in the living room at one or two in the morning when I was putting the moves on this girl Nina, who also lived there. There were tear tracks on his face as he stood there staring at us. I was giving this Nina a foot massage at the time, I mean, really giving her the works so I didn’t notice him at first. But he starts snuffling and kind of whimpering and we spin around. I’ve got this girl’s foot in my lap and there’s old Dirk, sort of staring and snuffling and of course I think, uh oh, old Dirk’s got a thing for Nina. The moment’s destroyed as you can imagine, and then Dirk says, “I’m gay.”

Whew! What a relief.

Now I can see old Dirk is doing it tough. And I like to think myself a broad-minded sort of guy. So I say to him, “Hey. Always thought you were.” At the time, it passes for male sensitivity. Anyway Nina sits through the horrors of the night with him and I get to go to bed dreaming of her soft, milky white feet. I ask you, who got the raw end of the deal? Funny thing is, Nina and Dirk hated each other. They were always having these knock-down drag-out scream-o-ramas about stuff like whether the tuna chunks went in the cupboard or the fridge.

Nina moved out shortly after that, so this other girl Emma and I got to live with Dirk while he was coming to terms with his sexuality. The trouble wasn’t with him being gay (we did pass a house by-law that banned kissing and fondling on the lounge room couch, but it applied to all sexual orientations). The trouble was that we didn’t care he was gay. So we’d say these brutal things which he’d pick up on his sophisticated gay radar. We’d say, “How about cleaning the shower, Dirk?” and he’d decode it as, “You filthy little arse-bandits should all be nailed to a tree.”

Do you think we could get old Dirk to clean that bathroom? No way. He wasn’t buying into any heterofascist sterility conspiracy. “Gay men are dying,” he’d screech at a bemopped Em on cleaning day. He eventually inherited half a million dollars and moved out to set up a gay men’s retreat in northern Queensland. Hope his gay brothers put him straight about the cleaning thing.

Don’t know how Dirk would have coped with finding Jeffrey the junkie all cold and blue and sprawled over the bean bag. An actual dead guy as opposed to the rhetorical gay ones which littered his post-closet conversation. Seeing as Dirk never surfaced before Donahue, I guess it would have been academic even if he and Jeffrey had lived under the same roof. One thing’s for sure. He wouldn’t have cleaned up the mess, so he wouldn’t have found the thousand dollars Jeffrey had stashed away in his room. The cops told us to stay out of there until the science guys had come around to check it out properly but we snuck in about ten minutes after they left. It didn’t take very long to find the cash rolled up and hidden away in the battery compartment of his ghetto blaster and since he’d lied to us about being a junkie and brought a world of hassles down on our home we figured it was only fair that Jeffrey make this posthumous contribution to the kitty.

a modern aesthetic

Voices of the Damned

Ted

ON LIVING WITH MARXISTS

My friend Ted says Marxists are worse than junkies. You know, you let one in, you let the whole anarcho-syndicalist commune in, and then your little home isn’t the warm and friendly place you escape to at day’s end.

It’s a brave challenge to the dominant paradigm of crypto-fascist domestic enslavement. Until the washing has to be done. Then it always seems to be Ted’s turn.

TED NOW WORKS FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ADMINISTRATIVE AFFAIRS.

Adam was a full-on Marxist, originally from Broken Hill. He’s probably lecturing in English now. While I was living with him he would interpret everything according to a Marxist line. When we went shopping you’d get a little diatribe on each product. If this were a Marxist society, for instance, one-litre bottles of Spring Valley orange juice would be just the right height to hold dry fettucine. But because this is a capitalist society they make the Spring Valley bottle two and a half centimetres too short to store your dry fettucine. They do this on purpose.

Adam said he wouldn’t read a book if it did not have the word Marxism in the index. He fucked every woman he could get his hands on whilst professing to be a liberated feminist man. Big, flabby, white-bodied old Adam would wander about in a sarong with his willy hanging out because he wasn’t part of any sexually oppressive state mechanism or anything.

He had a big mouldy chair in the corner which he would sit in half-naked, overseeing the room. There was a reading light carefully arranged behind the chair to put him into an enigmatic perspective for anybody who walked into the room. He bought Freddy the tabby cat to sit on the arm of this chair and complete the illusion. Blofeld with his cat, but in a sarong.

Freddy was meant to be an aloof cat, sort of a guardian. But sadly Freddy was very affectionate and he’d interrupt Adam’s reading by purring and headbutting him all the time. He’d also bring grasshoppers into the house to terrify Rodney the gay guy. We came home one night and found Rodney pinned to the door, screaming, with Freddy sitting a few feet in front of him crunching away on a grasshopper.

The cat had no idea Rodney didn’t want it. He must have taken Rodney’s theatrics for excitement, because he followed him around with this twitching corpse until we got home and rescued him.

Rodney was also on the Left but he was in the drug-taking, campy gay faction. Rodney had just come from a house in Taringa where they had set aside one day a week as Nude Day. Even visitors had to get their gear off and leave it at the door. One Nude Day they got stoned and decided that it would be completely cool to watch a glass fall off the balcony onto the path below. They dropped this glass, got really excited when it shattered. So the house s entire crockery collection went over after it and was left in a pile in the driveway. The next morning they didn’t have any bowls for breakfast.

Rodney and Adam didn’t get on too well because Adam was very much into being a bloke. He thought Rodney a little frivolous. Whereas Rodney was all for fighting the revolution aided by copious quantities of drugs and condoms. He thought Adam a little uptight. These two factions then contended for control of the house. The serious young stick insects’ Stalinist discussion group and the drug-fucked, dick-sucking, no-hopers’ collective.

Rodney won in the end. Adam moved out because he just couldn’t hack it. The telling blow came when Rodney brought home about seven or eight of his gay drug buddies and they all piled into the bathroom, which was next to Adam’s bedroom. They lit dozens of candles, filled up the bathtub, got naked and got into it. They were stoned out of their heads, yelling and singing awful Billy Bragg songs while Rodney played along on his piano. He’d play for a while then go back to cavorting in the tub. About three in the morning Adam came out of his room to yell at them to shut the fuck up and start acting their age. He bawled them out for a good ten minutes but when he got back to his room three of them were fucking in his bed.

Two
THE WILD THING

I can listen to my flatmates have sex for ever. I once lurked in a lounge room for a whole weekend on the slim chance that two flatmates were holed up in the front bedroom, and that if I waited long enough, I might hear them at it. They were young and desperately trying to be cool about it, but the signs had been there for a week – meaningful glances, late night teev, foot massages, the standard routine. And there was no way I was letting them off without some heavy duty, gargoyle-style voyeurism on my part. When you’re young and blameworthy, there’s this circuit in your brain that’s always pushing you to go for the end zone, and I did – made a quick trek to the 7–11, bought both the weekend papers, a fruit loaf, a litre of V8, and camped out in the living room, directly downstairs from the point of maximum creaking and moaning.

Melissa, you remember her, the credit scam queen, she was a great one for bringing home these rough-headed bastards with tattoos and biker boots and the stench of failure about them. She was a safe sex girl. You’d hear her through the bedroom door and all the way down the hall – “Just put it on, you fucking dickhead” – and these guys would grudgingly comply, slap on the latex and wake up in the morning to discover that Melissa spends the best part of her daylight hours asleep. Sleep is her natural state of being. These hellmen would wake up, take in her chainsaw snores and figure they could slip away, sneak out of the house and avoid those always awkward post-coital negotiations. So they’d pull on their gear in careful silence and pad downstairs to where I’m waiting in the lounge room, pretending to read the papers because it is absolutely my favourite thing to catch these guys out. The good-mannered ones might throw a grunt at me, but mostly they’d steam through the lounge, heading for the front door and freedom. They’d fling it open. And freeze. Because the house has got these heavy cast iron security gates over all the windows and doors. There’s this great pause as the hellmen realise they are locked in with me, the dog and the girl upstairs. There’s always a few seconds while these ugly bastards stare at the bars. I’m biting my cheeks to keep a straight face when they come back into the lounge. They always say something like “Uh, you got a key … man?”

“Sorry. Lost mine. Melissa’s got one though.”

Stella

I walked in on a flatmate one day. His girlfriend was sitting naked on his desk with her legs spread wide apart. I reversed out at top speed really embarrassed. He came and knocked on my door later. He said “It’s not what it looks at all. I’m actually a virgin. I’ve had this girlfriend for two years but we don’t do anything. She just comes around once a week, sits herself up on the desk and shows me what I can’t have.”

I got a taste for this sort of thing in the first place I ever lived out of home – the Boulevarde, an old off-campus unit block in Brisbane. The place had light blue walls which used to sweat at night and shake whenever a truck drove past. I moved in with Warren and Mel, a young couple I knew from my high school days. It was pretty exciting for all of us. They had never been able to sleep together at their parents’ homes, and I’d never been under the same roof as two people I knew, for a fact, were having sex. Parents don’t count, unless you’re a pervert.

It wasn’t all fruit loaf and voyeurism though. I came home one day and found the flat deserted but feeling odd. Things seemed out of place but not in any identifiable way. It took a few minutes before I realised my coffee table had disappeared. When I asked Mel about it, she blushed, muttered something about Warren, and disappeared into her room. The table had always been wobbly, and as Warren was a carpenter’s apprentice I thought he might have taken it off to be fixed. In fact, he had taken it off to the dump. My flatmates had been coupling on my cheap chip-board coffee table that afternoon, and it had collapsed under the onslaught. I privately thought it was kind of cool, but they moved out shortly after. Said something about privacy. Andy, the med student who took over their room, had no such hang-ups. He was happy to let you perch outside his door while he worked his magic inside. He was a handsome cad, but kind of dopey for a future surgeon. He liked to walk around with his food, but would forget he was holding it. You’d watch him tip a plate of spaghetti towards the floor, tipping it and tipping it, and you’d think – “Surely he’s going to tip it back the other way soon.” But no. It’d slide off and hit the carpet and his shoes. Plop. His eyes would go wide, and then after a pause, he’d chuckle just like Goofy. The other med students called him Dr Death. Once, over the course of a fortnight, he invited three different girls to a college ball and only realised what he had done on the day of the event. He cancelled one date, but thought he could keep the others apart. He couldn’t of course, and the third girl turned up anyway. It was a disaster. A few weeks later he bedded all three of them, one after the other. The first girl turned up at three. He was rid of her by four. Then the second arrived, unannounced, with a couple of suitcases and a pure wool sweater she’d knitted for him. I answered the door and she brushed straight past me. “I’m moving in,” she said. Andy had her and the suitcases out of the flat by six. He kept the sweater and gave it to the last girl who showed up just after dinner.

Only ever lived with one other guy like that. Downstairs Ivan. He kept a string of girls going, but apart from roaring like a bear when he took them in the shower, he was a very private kind of guy. The Sisterhood did for him in the end. He was cheating on Sally, his steady girl, a stunning babe. I didn’t understand him at all. She was only allowed around to the house on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights. The other nights were reserved for study, he told her. In fact, they were reserved for noisy, vertical sex in our bathroom with a succession of nameless nightclubbing bimbos who used their ankles for earrings and left before dawn.

Gina and Veronica, the girls of the house, put Sally straight on the whole deal when she came around one afternoon. She was in a state. She’d heard things around town. The three of them fronted Downstairs Ivan that night. Said they had a few bones to pick with him. I backed off straight away, thinking, “Uh oh, here it comes,” and it did – Sally and the house girls nailed Downstairs in the hallway and unleashed the most frightening bitchkrieg I’ve ever seen in ten years of share housing. It went on all night, like the bombing of Dresden. I almost felt sorry for the poor bastard when they finished with him. They worked over him so badly that Sally had no choice but to clear her stuff out of his room and refuse to speak to him ever again, despite the fact she adored him like the girl-with-a-mind-of-her-own in all of the Elvis Presley films. There was no resisting the power of the Sisterhood – Gina and Veronica told her about the bimbos, the bathroom, the moaning at 3.00am. They told her she was too good for him, she could have any man, she should teach him a lesson, she should cut up his clothes, get a new boyfriend, move interstate and put it about that he was a dud root. All of which she did. She had no choice really.

SUPERB LIVING

The whole time, I was sitting in the cramped little airing cupboard I used for a writing room. Downstairs would occasionally appear at my door shaking his head and scratching his Judd Nelson goatee. “She dropped me,” he’d say. He couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t come at the idea. She didn’t even want to hear his side of the story. “Why?” he asked. “Why?” Who was to say? Not me, that’s for sure. He moved out a week or two later. He shook my hand before he left, but pointedly ignored Gina and Veronica. They didn’t care. There was real loathing between them. Actually, there was some real loathing from me too when we totalled the prick’s contribution to our phone bill. One thousand dollars. Most of it in desperate, crazed, late night interstate phonecalls, the last three days he was there.

Sharon

I didn’t know anyone when I first got to Melbourne so I stayed with my boyfriend. I really needed some space so I moved in with this girl, Brooke. The flat was cramped but it was cheap and it had a view of the beach. I’d been there four or five days, no hassles, when I went out with my boyfriend one night. He came back and stayed over. The next day I get home from work and Brooke says “Your boyfriend stayed last night.” I apologised for not introducing her, but said she’d been in bed. She just stared at me and said “You go to Hell for that sort of thing. I don’t want to live with a sinner.” And then she went apeshit, screaming, “Don’t you know what you’re doing is wrong? The Lord has a special place in Hell for the fornicators. I couldn’t bear the guilt of having a fornicator under the roof of the House of the Lord.”

I spun out, struck dumb. She was psychotic for a few minutes, yelling all this fire and brimstone stuff and how there was no hope for me. And then she switched totally, went dead calm and said “But if you change your ways I’m willing to let you stay.” I moved out the next day. I’d been there less than a week but she kept a month’s rent.

Other than Warren and Mel getting married, and me being entertained, I can’t think of anything good that has ever come of the sex lives of my numerous flatmates. Friendships crash and burn all the time because of sex, so it’s not surprising that the tenuous equilibrium of a share house can be disturbed by it. I lost a great house in Canberra when one flatmate developed a case of unrequited love for another. Michael and Zoe.

By day, Michael was a salaryman, a marketing manager with General Dynamics. He favoured the Country Road catalogue. Little glasses, the tweed jacket, the tie just right, the clouds of after-shave trailing behind him, killing insects like napalm. Michael was an instant taste guy. He moved in, needed some furniture, went to Ikea and whacked down the Visa. Bought the big black cupboard, the big potted plant – which died from lack of water – and the big, big, big black bed for entertaining. Ladies were enticed into the lotus trap by the lilting strains of Madame Butterfly on his big black stereo.

Zoe had an ex-boyfriend who used to beat up on her. She missed him terribly. Don’t ask me why. She’d get distressed over this loser and bring out the Simon and Garfunkel tapes. She’d drop a couple of Panadol, take her ghetto blaster into the living room about three in the morning, lie down and sing along with Bridge Over Troubled Water while I was four feet away in the next room, trying to sleep. After a fistful of sleepless nights I resolved that if I ever got to meet this ex-boyfriend, this tragic, hapless, girl-beating oaf, I was going to kick his teeth in, if only for the tapes and the sound of Zoe snoring on the floor.

Anyway, we have a spare room. Michael moves in and Zoe goes on the make for him. Michael is a mover, a man with money and cred and she falls for it. Nothing is too much trouble. Michael couldn’t clean. Didn’t even consider it. Wasn’t on his agenda. So Zoe looked after that. In the nine months he lived there, he never once washed his towels. But he emerged from his stinking sinkhole of a bedroom every morning, perfectly clean.

Zoe’s first shock came early. One morning, a week after he moved in, a strange woman emerged from the sinkhole behind him. She was explained away as a lost friend from out of town. Nowhere to stay. She looked kind of lost when she surfaced after eight hours of Mme. Butterfly, but that hiccup aside, Zoe set about the wooing of Michael. He was new to Canberra, and Zoe was throwing her cards on the table, showing him round, inviting friends over to ease him into the scene. She organised candle-lit dinners with the Spinsters Club – her friends Katerina and Vicky – with Michael on the menu. The plan was for Zoe to finally put the word on Michael during a big night on the town. His mates were even invited along as dates for the Spinsters Club. Unfortunately, at the last moment, Michael couldn’t make it. And then Katerina cancelled. And the next morning, Katerina crawls out of Michael’s bedroom after a night of the Butterfly. Trouble is, the whole time, Zoe’s room is right next door to Michael’s – their beds are wall to wall with only half an inch of wood between them, and Zoe’s listening to everything. And it’s more than she can bear. She’s tearing down the hallway, hammering on Michael’s door screaming “Turn it down. I’m trying to get some sleep,” and I’m somewhere out there in the dark, my head thumping with tension and the knowledge that the days of this house are numbered.

Tricia

I lived downstairs in a terrace. There were two boys upstairs. I could always hear this scratching. It was driving me mad so I got one of the boys to come outside and try and find what it was. We looked all around but couldn’t find it for ages. It just went on and on. Scritch scritch scritch. Then one day rather than going outside the house we happened to look out of a top floor window and saw this little kid from next door, we called him Naughty David. He was scraping away at the wall with a stick. He’d drilled a hole in the wall outside my room to watch me in the nuddy.

So Katerina was out of the Spinsters Club. Little alliances formed and reformed. Michael would ask, “John, what goes on? What’s happened?” And I’d explain that he was stepping out with Zoe’s best friend. And Michael would go “My God, you know it’s got nothing to do with her.” Then Zoe would appear in my room and whisper that Michael was a bastard and a prick and what did I think, what were we going to do? Could I do something? Speak to him maybe? Make him move out? I thought I might turn all of this to my advantage; get Michael to clean up, make Zoe deep six the Simon and Garfunkel tapes, but in the end, Michael moved out and Zoe took up gardening.

I should have got the hell out myself, but as usual, I hung around. I always hang around – I’m always there, living below my means for any number of reasons, be it finishing my pointless degree in Queensland, or working a dumb job in Canberra to pay off that degree. But between Canberra and my house in Kippax Street, Darlinghurst – which is like the definitive, King Hell, Thousand Year Reich of share house experience – things got interesting.

I led a dissolute, basically itinerant life. Not an eating-out-of-dumpsters, sleeping-under-bridges sort of life, you understand. More of a daytime TV, skipping out on phone bills, deep fried home-brand fish finger sandwiches sort of life. I lived in a lot of places and racked up a lot of flatmates in those three or four years. A dozen houses, sixty people, something like that. The figures are Inflated by one place I stayed in for less than a week before doing a runner after a couple of Goths painted the living room black and hung an old goat’s head over the fireplace. Said it was for a sacrifice that night.

Gothic design tip: dead things are so cool they just have to be nailed to the wall. The freshly rendered goat’s head actually replaced a pressed duck which had been there for two years. Somebody had found it in Chinatown, semi-cooked and semi-glazed, then pressure sealed in a vacuum bag. This duck was already rotten, twisted, half burned and bereft of feathers when they nailed it over the fireplace. Over the years the bag lost its seal and the duck started coming out and making its way down the wall.

I’d thought about cutting out earlier when I woke to the sound of this pair of Goths having sex on the floor next to me, and again when I discovered that although the water was connected, the kitchen sink wasn’t – you pulled the plug and it just spilled out onto the floor. But Satan’s living room did it for me.

You get these moments, these Satan’s lounge room, goat’s head moments, and you wonder what forces delivered you to this place at this time. It’s as though your life travels through this complex grid where stuff happens, like you date this girl or you go to that movie or you come home to find a goat’s head nailed to the wall, and a little point of light plots the event on the grid. All the points are woven together by this weird mathematical programme that determines the course of your life and the future – each little moment, each point of light, driven along by the falling numbers of some impenetrable logarithm.

Hmmm. Guess I’d better get back to it.

The Boulevarde was advertised as a top floor three bedroom apartment. The third bedroom was actually down in the basement garage. Mel and I took the two rooms upstairs and banished Tom, the quiet engineering student, to the carpark. He didn’t mind it down there. He pulled apart a security light switch and tapped into the unit block’s power supply. After that, our power bills were paid by the body corporate and we ran every light and appliance we owned twenty-four hours a day. Tom, who is a vice president with an international airline nowadays, seemed to live off the land back then. His success in making jam from the blackberries he collected down by the river led us to plant a choko vine down there. We managed one harvest, but nobody in the house ate chokos and they rotted under the kitchen sink. His favourite meal was fish finger pie. (Roll six fish fingers and two cheese sticks into a lot of dough. Bake.) On special occasions, he’d make raspberry pudding, a poisonous blend of red cordial and custard power. It looked like blood soup and tasted like a bowl full of water with human hair soaking in it.

I learned something about the value of people in that flat. Mel’s boyfriend Warren was just a carpenter’s apprentice from Cloncurry. He was never going to read any Foucault, and seeing as I had a crush on his girlfriend, we were probably never going to get along. But we did. Warren had a good soul and he pulled cones like a trooper – our relationship was based around these intangible moments of stoned camaraderie, where we would talk … sort of. And if the conversation became a little stilted, we could always stimulate it artificially – a cone before breakfast, a few cones at lunch, a joint with dinner, two or three more cones with MASH. I had to cut back on the smoke after fading out during an early morning Chinese class and snapping back into a room where everybody was speaking Cantonese. I had a major panic attack, thought I’d smoked so much I’d lost the power to comprehend speech.

Paranoia was a part of my every waking moment in those days. Queensland had some monster drug laws back then. Still does. I once turned the corner to find two cop cars pulled into our driveway, blue lights strobing in the night. I fell into the bush by the side of the road and waited for them to lead my flatmates away to a mandatory life sentence in some gulag out west. The cops pulled out after fifteen minutes. Alone. When I got the courage up to crawl back into the flat, it was smoke-choked as usual but nobody was home. Turned out the gang had gone for pizza. We never found out what those cops were doing there. Warren suggested they may have slipped through a rip in the fabric of the universe, from an alternate reality where we really did get busted. But he was about six cones over the line at the time. They were more likely responding to a noise complaint. The Boulevarde had a trumpet player who just would not give up. And these Vietnamese students who’d sing along with a tape of Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Physical’ at seven o’clock every night.

That was about the time Warren and Mel totalled my coffee table, moved out and got married. Tom and I wore brown tuxedos with fat lapels to the reception. Andy the med student took their place and you already know most of what there is to know about him. Except that his mother had this habit of sneaking into the flat to clean it while we were away. I caught her once. Came home a day early from a trip to my parents’ place and found the front door wide open, a vacuum cleaner going inside. Neither Tom nor Andy was supposed to be there. And we didn’t own a vacuum cleaner. Clean burglars? Hoovering up the evidence? I tip-toed in and found Andy’s mum had cleaned the entire flat, my room included. I wasn’t too sure I approved of this, but it didn’t happen again. Absent-mindedness ran in their family. Andy’s sister wasted an Ampol station a few weeks later – drove into the restaurant without getting out of the car. Andy had to move home to help pay for the damage. (Just one footnote on him. He married one of the three girls from that outstanding afternoon of passion – the one who arrived with her suitcases and the knitted jumper. She was a nurse. They split up a few years later and both asked for transfers to get as far away from each other as possible. They were both sent to the Cocos Islands.)

Keiran

I once shared with some guys and this very, very strange woman. She had this really violent, ongoing and intermittent affair with a truckie. She used to beat the crap out of him after drunken nights out. Took to him with whatever came to hand. A chair, a claw hammer, anything. That was, of course, in between one night stands. You’d be watching the Sunday program on TV and the bleary-eyed Beast (as we called her) would wander out to vomit off the verandah. Then, about ten minutes later she’d boot out the latest guy in her clutches - a different guy every weekend. We tried to warn them but they wouldn’t listen. They’d ring constantly and turn up with flowers.

Derek the bank clerk replaced Andy the med student. He didn’t build his tent in that particular flat, he actually had a room there. The tent came later. He was a funny little dude. Went to the toilet about eight or nine times a night. Thought this was normal. Wondered why he never bumped into us the same way he bumped into the members of his family all the time at home. Derek didn’t have much in the way of a life back then. He’d put in eight hours at the bank and come home to arrange his collection of travel brochures. He read travel brochures the way most people watch television. All his money went into saving for the trip he’d take at the end of the year and all his energy went into planning that trip to the smallest detail. So even with Derek in the house there was never too much money around. We seemed to survive week to week, but there were plenty of moments when the bills outstripped our income by an impossible margin. One week we had twenty dollars between the three of us, so we bought two family-sized jumbo cans of Spam, a bag of onions and some beer. We fried up the spam and onion, made this big ugly mess and ate every mouthful because we were so hungry. I investigated a rumour that IVF programs paid twenty dollars a pop for semen donations but found it to be baseless.

We split from that flat in December. Derek the bank clerk was off to Japan for a month. Tom and I were off to minimum wage holiday jobs and our parents’ homes to save the thousand dollars we were allowed to earn before the government cut off our $37 a week Austudy grant. And our yearly $2.10 travel allowance. The flat we took the following February was, as I mentioned, a two room affair. Hence Derek’s tent in the living room. When the bank transferred him he asked me if I could arrange to move his miniature Indian village. I said sure, and threw it off our third storey patio an hour after he’d driven away.

Martin the paranoid wargamer replaced Derek the bank clerk, but only for two weeks. Martin would ask you to play wargames with him four or five times an hour, becoming increasingly moodier as the refusals mounted up. He was also a pig. Tom caught him messing up the lounge room just after it had been cleaned. Scattering Mars bar wrappers and soiled underwear about like fertiliser pods in a promising garden. When we hinted that he wasn’t welcome anymore, he accused us of trying to poison him, just like his previous flatmates. We actually did consider poisoning him, but he was a runty little specimen and it proved easier to frog-march him out the door and toss his stuff off the patio, where it joined the pile of mouldering tent debris.

Taylor the taxi driver dropped his swag in the space left vacant by Martin’s sudden exit. It was kind of cool having our own cabbie. He had an account at a strip club in the Valley, a basement firetrap with cracked mirror balls and one slightly hunch-backed topless waitress whom Taylor was courting with the few lines of Shakespeare he remembered from high school English. They served meals in this place and he’d drive us into town at three in the morning for video games and greasy food binges. Things ran smoothly until the landlady came around for an inspection. We knew she was coming and had hidden Taylor’s stuff away as there was only supposed to be two of us living there. But she was a sharp-eyed old biddy and when she saw the three neatly lined-up pairs of differently sized shoes she tumbled to our scam. She was pretty cool about it. Said we could stay, but we’d have to pay full rent for three people. That was never going to happen so we loaded our minimal gear into Taylor’s cab and split for that old reliable share house bolthole. Our parents.

STUNNING

DECOR

CHOICE

Share House Artefacts : Number One

Brown Couch

AAAH, LEISURE!

Trip to the snow this year?

A little snerkelling around the Reef? Maybe some time on a genuine homestead?

Yes these are all fine ideas.

But have you ever considered the Brown Couch?

Our special four seater model comes with a complimentary set of Paisley Pillows, an Old Newspaper and a Remote Control for the TV.*

Why waste valuable time and money when everything you ever wanted in a holiday is available in the LUXURY and CONVENIENCE of your own living room.

THE BROWN COUCH.

FIRST CHOICE OF THE CHOOSEY.

* TV sold separately.

Three
THE BEAST

PJ’s life revolved around Cold Chisel, karate, beer and babes. He was a country boy. Loved his fish fingers. Favourite recipe: three deep-fried fish fingers on fried bread with fried cheese and two fried eggs, still runny, forked open and covered with tomato sauce. You could eat three of those suckers and stay within the tightest budget. Of course if you did get through three, your heart would explode and you’d die.

Milo’s life revolved around his car, his mum, beer and the Buzzcocks. He had a weakness for generic brand meat pies. You couldn’t trust the bastard with shopping duty because he’d come back with twenty of these family size Woolies Own bowel-cramping horrors. Milo won the house competition for not changing out of his jeans. PJ and I dropped out at four and five weeks respectively, but Milo, who liked the feel of rotting denim – “It’s like a second skin!” – was pronounced the champion at ten weeks and told to have a bath or leave.

It was an all-male house.

A house where I claimed as my own a gorilla pube I found on the soap in the shower. Must have been at least thirteen inches long. The guys were impressed but insisted they could do better so we nailed a board to the wall and mounted our curlies for a couple of weeks. I seem to recall this as a time when even fewer women than usual graced our happy home. We were deeply into the ‘men without babes’ thing, which is a terrible thing. Maybe the worst. It’s like living on the Planet of the Dogs without leashes or rolled-up newspapers, a sanction-free zone, where you can go deep and really find your own hostile imbalances. You want to know what living in Dogworld is like? You can see it fully realised in redneck wonderlands like Townsville, where PJ came from. He loved to get drunk and curse off that place. An abbatoir town with a really bad vibe. A masculine vibe. A lot of death and sadness. They kill a lot of beasts up there. Some mornings you can hear the low moaning of the cattle before they’re taken up into the food chain. I can strip it back now, see a thematic unity there, a ripeness of the male spirit, like time in the wilderness or the smell of raw pollen. The strong will consume the weak and they won’t bother cleaning up after themselves. The thing about guys, the only thing really, is that guys just don’t care. It’s our little secret. Ask any girl who’s ever lived with a herd of us. We’ll never wash up, we fart in polite company, and there is absolutely no point in dumping your problems on us because all we want is a regular feeding time and someone to play with. Want another secret? There isn’t a guy alive who hasn’t at least tried to lick his own balls. And just as with a dog pack the truly serious rivalry was reserved for mating season.

Pete

One day someone in our house used the washing-up brush to clean the toilet and then put it back in the sink. We found out about it six months later – we thought it was gross but as the brush had been through the sink about two hundred times since then, we didn’t figure there was much we could do. Not Mick however, he went and bought a whole new dinner setting and cutlery as well and never ate off any of the house crockery again.

PJ and I met her at a B&S Ball. To be fair, he beat me to her. I spied him putting the moves on two girls in the dark recesses of the lobby and decided to ruin his chances. It was a little game we played, popping up at the other’s elbow at the worst possible moment to raise the subject of girlfriends, boyfriends, AIDS tests, whatever. But when I cut in, I found one of these girls was a stunning Italian babe with thick dark hair, white skin, eyes you could drown in. A woman to inspire murder. PJ and I circled each other like caged wolves all night.

PJ asked me what I thought of the Italian girl over chocolate milk and cheeseburgers at the traditional post-ball Hungry Jacks breakfast. I said I loved her. He said I loved the girl he was going to marry. A coyote howled somewhere in the distance. We turned one of the paper puzzle mats upside down and drew up the rules of engagement. Total sharing of intelligence. No holding back. No lying. No back stabbing. No chicanery. Guy who gets the first date gets a clear run. The loser retires from the field and runs around the house three times with his underpants on his head. No problemo.

I signed off on this program and immediately set about cheating. My younger brother had helped organise the Ball and possessed the only ticket list, which I quickly obtained and destroyed after a quick scan for Mediterranean female names. PJ and I had both been so drunk we had no idea who we were hunting, but when I saw ‘Sophia Gennaro’ on the list, it all came flooding back to me. I found her home number in the white pages but her mother answered. After twenty-five minutes of cross-cultural diplomacy I found out that Sophia had gone to work. When this happened three or four times I started to panic. I knew PJ would have his finders out in the field:

In fact, he came at me two days later and asked flatly if I had Sophia’s phone number. I lied, said no. He smiled. “Well I guess I win mate because I got her number and I called her up and I sent her a dozen roses and we’re going on a date this Friday.” I kicked the cat twelve, maybe thirteen feet across the room when he left. Went into a black funk for two days. Friday afternoon, I couldn’t take it anymore. I borrowed twenty dollars off Milo and trundled off to the pub to mooch about in the Happy Hour. When I got to the bar, PJ was sitting there, and my heart contracted. I was thinking She had to be there but the joint was empty and I went over and fronted him. “What’s the problem,” I asked. “What happened to the big date?” He looked at me blankly for a second. “Oh right. Sorry, JB. That was just bullshit to throw you off. I only spoke to her today. She’s got an Italian boyfriend. Mario.” He rolled the name ‘Mario’ out around a mouthful of cheap scotch and party ice. There was nothing for it but to get pissed together and bitch about poofters. I only saw Sophia once again after that. Sprawled over the bonnet of a Jaguar wearing a sash which read Miss Motor Show.

Shortly afterwards, PJ got engaged at the student Rec Club and moved out. He stood on the bar to make the announcement and, since he was up there, flopped out his chopper for everyone to admire. We had a succession of dud flatmates through PJ’s old room. First up, we had the closeted, colour-blind, seven foot male nurse who’d eat a kilo of chips and Twisties while dinner was cooking. He’d have a few bites of Milo’s Home Brand meat pie and throw the rest away. But if you didn’t cook he’d get shitty. We replaced him with a council worker called Ray who lived on lentils and boiled offal and shed his hair in huge, fist-sized clumps. He built model tanks and little soldiers. He was a fool for the things, would spend months painting each little figure. Visitors would be introduced to his little men before being treated to the matted clots of his hair in the sanitary areas. Ray made way for Malcolm, who couldn’t get it together to rinse the sugary bran crap out of his personal set of Charlie Brown breakfast bowls. God, that really bugged me for some reason. Don’t know why. I tried everything – returning the bowls to the cupboard unwashed, leaving them in his bed under the doona – he moved on after I brainsnapped and smashed one on the road in front of the house.

Milo

One morning I heard yelling at the door and dragged myself out of bed. By the time I got to the front door you were closing it and standing there in your dirty stained Y-fronts. Nothing else. You hadn’t shaved for three or four days. Your hair was everywhere, you hadn’t had it cut for months. These Mormons knocked long enough to disturb your sleep but you didn’t bother to put anything else on. And you’d sent them on their way with a prolonged blast of un-Christian language. It’s one of the great disappointments of my life I didn’t get up in time to see their faces.

JB: I don’t remember that.

The next freak in this carnival side show was Victor the Rasta. I have no idea what possessed us to take him in, some misguided liberal sympathies most likely. Victor liked to carry these big joints of meat round the house, ripping the flesh from the bone with his teeth and leaning into visitors’ faces with gobbets of ham trailing out of his mouth. He had no respect for the already tenuous grip of our all-male household on domestic order and hygiene. You’d wake up in the morning to find the house littered with empty pizza trays, old spare ribs, chicken carcasses, beer bottles and salami rind. You could clean them away, but they’d be back the next morning. He’d play the stereo all night and bring friends around for nitrous oxide binges. They were dentists. They once bought a tank of the stuff, figuring that at a hundred bucks for the tank and fifty for a refill it was a bargain. They got this thing at midday and had sucked it dry by four o’clock. They’d fight over who got the hose, punching each other to get at it then sucking on the tube till they passed out. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll get into a binge as quickly as the next man, but there is such a thing as dignity. And flaking out under a blanket of old pizza boxes isn’t even close.

After tossing Victor out and passing his details on to Immigration, we interviewed an angry woman, who fled upon finding the Champion Pube Board hidden behind the shower curtain, a Haitian girl on the run from a mad flatmate – she kept her used toilet paper in a bucket. Said the sewer people wanted it to control her thoughts – and a muscular Christian, who assured us that knuckle push-ups were an excellent way of avoiding temptation.

We still thought of the empty room as PJ’s at this point. Nobody had stayed long enough, or lodged in our affections firmly enough to displace him as its spiritual owner. Share house veterans will be familiar with this, but the rest of you can think of it as the Dead Beagle Syndrome – the tendency for subsequent pets to suffer in comparison with the original and best. Outstanding flatmates can place a spiritual lock on a bedroom for up to a year after everyone who knew them has moved out.

“Oh I don’t know about putting your Liberty print chair in there. That used to be Damien’s room … No, I never met him but … you know … he dabbled in the black arts.”

We finally offered PJ’s room to McGann, a travelling American in his mid-forties. He was one of the fittest men I’ve ever lived with, in much better shape than Milo and I, who were at least twenty years his junior. He canoed three hundred miles every week. We wondered what possible excuse he had at his age for living with the likes of us. I took him for one of those guys you meet in share housing, one of those guys who’s a bit older, done far too many drugs, very untrustworthy, kind of dangerous around naive young women, able to project a certain mystique and play, within his limitations, the ageing rock star of the share house circuit. He claimed to be on the run from a bad divorce in the US. Said he’d come to Australia to complete his education while doing some travel. His story moved about a bit under fire. Some days he’d be studying English Lit, on others a PhD in American History. He was studying something and getting all sorts of grants for it, but you could never pin him down on the details. Suspicious? We thought so. But who cares? It was plausible, we’d had enough interviewing for one year, so we took him on spec. We wanted the bills paid. McGann wanted a place that was ‘cool’, and didn’t come with any ‘hassles’. He hinted that his last house had been very ‘uncool’ and the flatmates were very fond of ‘hassling’ him. We shrugged, not realising that he was coding a message for us. If you’re seriously looking at doing the share housing thing, you’ve got to learn to decipher the codes. In Sydney for instance, a ‘broad-minded’ house is either gay or gay friendly. In Brisbane, houses located in ‘green, leafy suburbs’ will have a bucket bong pretty much continually fired up in the living room. For McGann, a cool house with no hassles was one that didn’t look sideways at his huge appetite for commercial sex, and didn’t mention it around his fat girlfriend, Amanda.

Wayne

The Decoy lived in this West End house that was pretty rank. They were always smoking cones and getting the munchies. They loved the Decoy because he’d make popcorn to a special American recipe with heaps of salt and butter. A friend stayed over one night, smoking cones and stuffing his face with this popcorn. He crashed on the couch with this big moustache of butter all round his mouth. When Decoy came down in the morning this guy was still asleep but clustered in a big black beard around his mouth were all these cockroaches, eating the butter.

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