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.
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