He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (17 page)

Neville got away with it though. He married her.

9 DON’T COME ANY CLOSER FRANKIE, WE HAVE A GUN

Dylan was a telecommunications engineer who liked to load up on acid and walk around Kings Cross taking photographs. When I met him Dylan had lived at Kippax Street for three and a half years, and had eaten at home only once in that time. His bedroom was a bat cave, completely black. He’d taped thick black cardboard over the windows and covered the walls and ceiling with Beasts of Bourbon, and Bauhaus posters. That room was a fortress of solitude. He pulled at least six cones in there every day. He’d saved twenty thousand dollars to travel around the world, but had a lot of trouble overcoming the natural inertia of all bat cave dwellers. So his other plan for spending the money was to waste an entire year getting stoned and lying on the brown couch at Kippax St. In the end it was only the promise of new and exotic drugs in Amsterdam which pulled him up off the torn cushions and out the front door. His departure set off a series of share house explosions, both conventional and nuclear, which culminated in Jeffrey the junkie turning up his toes on my green bean bag. The fate of most places I’ve lived tended to be tied to a core of flatmates who set up the house, defined its character, then crashed and burned as a single unit. But for two years at Kippax Street I bore witness to an unceasing procession of share house flotsam and jetsam, randomly washed up then borne away by the shifting tides of the inner city.

Rachel

I lived with a very strange girl whose job was abolished but she simply refused to leave. I didn’t know this. I had to meet her in town once and she said, “Meet me at my office.’ So I get there and she’s sitting at the desk where she’d always sat. It’s six o’clock, everyone had gone home. I said something about her job and she said, ‘I haven’t worked here since December.’ About five months before. She just kept turning up. They didn’t pay her, didn’t try to keep her out. She just turned up and worked. When she finally tried to claim unemployment benefits the dole fascists turned up in her office and asked what she was playing at. She tried to explain that she came to work but didn’t get paid. They had a lot of trouble coming to terms with that and wouldn’t give her the money. She couldn’t pay the rent anymore and had to move home. She’s still at that office.

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 her 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.