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
