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

money around. We seemed to survive week to week, but there were plenty of moments when the bills outstripped our income by an impossible margin. One week we had twenty dollars between the three of us, so we bought two family-sized jumbo cans of Spam, a bag of onions and some beer. We fried up the Spam and onion, made this big ugly mess and ate every mouthful because we were so hungry. I investigated a rumour that IVF programs paid twenty dollars a pop for semen donations but found it to be baseless.
     
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Keiran
I once shared with some guys and this very, very strange woman. She had this really violent, ongoing and intermittent affair with a truckie. She used to beat the crap out of him after drunken nights out. Took to him with whatever came to hand. A chair, a claw hammer, anything. That was, of course, in between one night stands. You’d be watching the Sunday program on TV and the bleary-eyed Beast (as we called her) would wander out to vomit off the verandah. Then, about ten minutes later she’d boot out the latest guy in her clutches - a different guy every weekend. We tried to warn them but they wouldn’t listen. They’d ring constantly and turn up with flowers.
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    We split from that flat in December. Derek the bank clerk was off to Japan for a month. Tom and I were off to minimum wage holiday jobs and our parents’ homes to save the thousand dollars we were allowed to earn before the government cut off our $37 a week Austudy grant. And our yearly $2.10 travel allowance. The flat we took the following February was, as I mentioned, a two room affair. Hence Derek’s tent in the living room. When the bank transferred him he asked me if I could arrange to move his miniature Indian village. I said sure, and threw it off our third storey patio an hour after he’d driven away.
    Martin the paranoid wargamer replaced Derek the bank clerk, but only for two weeks. Martin would ask you to play wargames with him four or five times an hour, becoming increasingly moodier as the refusals mounted up. He was also a pig. Tom caught him messing up the lounge room just after it had been cleaned. Scattering Mars bar wrappers and soiled underwear about like fertiliser pods in a promising garden. When we hinted that he wasn’t welcome anymore, he accused us of trying to poison him, just like his previous flatmates. We actually did consider poisoning him, but he was a runty little specimen and it proved easier to frog-march him out the door and toss his stuff off the patio, where it joined the pile of mouldering tent debris.
    Taylor the taxi driver dropped his swag in the space left vacant by Martin’s sudden exit. It was kind of cool having our own cabbie. He had an account at a strip club in the Valley, a basement firetrap with cracked mirror balls and one slightly hunch-backed topless waitress whom Taylor was courting with the few lines of Shakespeare he remembered from high school English. They served meals in this place and he’d drive us into town at three in the morning for video games and greasy food binges. Things ran smoothly until the landlady came around for an inspection. We knew she was coming and had hidden Taylor’s stuff away as there was only supposed to be two of us living there. But she was a sharp-eyed old biddy and when she saw the three neatly lined-up pairs of differently sized shoes she tumbled to our scam. She was pretty cool about it. Said we could stay, but we’d have to pay full rent for three people. That was never going to happen so we loaded our minimal gear into Taylor’s cab and split for that old reliable share house bolthole. Our parents.

     
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    Share House Artefacts : Number One
    Brown Couch
    AAAH. LEISURE!
    Trip to the snow this year? A little snorkelling around the Reef? Maybe some time on a genuine homestead?
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