He Died With a Felafel in His Hand. John Birmingham

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.