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.
