He Died with a Felafel in His Hand Read Online Free PDF

morning Chinese class and snapping back into a room where everybody was speaking Cantonese. I had a major panic attack, thought I’d smoked so much I’d lost the power to comprehend speech.
     
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Tricia
I lived downstairs in a terrace. There were two boys upstairs. I could always hear this scratching. It was driving me mad so I got one of the boys to come outside and try and find what it was. We looked all around but couldn’t find it for ages. It just went on and on. Scritch scritch scritch. Then one day rather than going outside the house we happened to look out of a top floor window and saw this little kid from next door, we called him Naughty David. He was scraping away at the wall with a stick. He’d drilled a hole in the wall outside my room to watch me in the nuddy.
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    Paranoia was a part of my every waking moment in those days. Queensland had some monster drug laws back then. Still does. I once turned the corner to find two cop cars pulled into our driveway, blue lights strobing in the night. I fell into the bush by the side of the road and waited for them to lead my flatmates away to a mandatory life sentence in some gulag out west. The cops pulled out after fifteen minutes. Alone. When I got the courage up to crawl back into the flat, it was smoke-choked as usual but nobody was home. Turned out the gang had gone for pizza. We never found out what those cops were doing there. Warren suggested they may have slipped through a rip in the fabric of the universe, from an alternate reality where we really did get busted. But he was about six cones over the line at the time. They were more likely responding to a noise complaint. The Boulevarde had a trumpet player who just would not give up. And these Vietnamese students who’d sing along with a tape of Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Physical’ at seven o’clock every night.
    That was about the time Warren and Mel totalled my coffee table, moved out and got married. Tom and I wore brown tuxedos with fat lapels to the reception. Andy the med student took their place and you already know most of what there is to know about him. Except that his mother had this habit of sneaking into the flat to clean it while we were away. I caught her once. Came home a day early from a trip to my parents’ place and found the front door wide open, a vacuum cleaner going inside. Neither Tom nor Andy was supposed to be there. And we didn’t own a vacuum cleaner. Clean burglars? Hoovering up the evidence? I tip-toed in and found Andy’s mum had cleaned the entire flat, my room included. I wasn’t too sure I approved of this, but it didn’t happen again. Absent-mindedness ran in their family. Andy’s sister wasted an Ampol station a few weeks later – drove into the restaurant without getting out of the car. Andy had to move home to help pay for the damage. (Just one footnote on him. He married one of the three girls from that outstanding afternoon of passion – the one who arrived with her suitcases and the knitted jumper. She was a nurse. They split up a few years later and both asked for transfers to get as far away from each other as possible. They were both sent to the Cocos Islands.)
    Derek the bank clerk replaced Andy the med student. He didn’t build his tent in that particular flat, he actually had a room there. The tent came later. He was a funny little dude. Went to the toilet about eight or nine times a night. Thought this was normal. Wondered why he never bumped into us the same way he bumped into the members of his family all the time at home. Derek didn’t have much in the way of a life back then. He’d put in eight hours at the bank and come home to arrange his collection of travel brochures. He read travel brochures the way most people watch television. All his money went into saving for the trip he’d take at the end of the year and all his energy went into planning that trip to the smallest detail. So even with Derek in the house there was never too much