He Died with a Felafel in His Hand by John Birmingham Read Free Book Online

play within his limitations, the ageing rock star of the share house circuit. He claimed to be on the run from a bad divorce in the US. Said he’d come to Australia to complete his education while doing some travel. His story moved about a bit under fire. Some days he’d be studying English Lit, on others a PhD in American History. He was studying something and getting all sort of grants for it, but you could never pin him down on the details. Suspicious? We thought so. But who cares? It was plausible, we’d had enough interviewing for one year, so we took him on spec. We wanted the bills paid. McGann wanted a place that was ‘cool’, and didn’t come with any ‘hassles’. He hinted that his last house had been very ‘uncool’ and the flatmates were very fond of ‘hassling’ him. We shrugged, not realising that he was coding a message for us. If you’re seriously looking at doing the share housing thing, you’ve got to learn to decipher the codes. In Sydney for instance, a ‘broad-minded’ house is either gay or gay friendly. In Brisbane, houses located in ‘green, leafy suburbs’ will have a bucket bong pretty much continually fired up in the living room. For McGann, a cool house with no hassles was one that didn’t look sideways at his huge appetite for commercial sex, and didn’t mention it around his fat girlfriend, Amanda.
    McGann had done the figures at the end of a twelve month period when he’d had no sex at all. He went out on a lot of dates, bought a lot of dinners and flowers, sat through plays and gallery openings, expressed his feelings, told all the right lies, but at the end of the year, there’d been no action down south. After the final unsuccessful date went home in a taxi, he sat down and worked out that he’d spent $4300 on these women. He caught a cab into the red light district, walked into a brothel, pulled out $120 and a girl had sex with him. From that moment on, he was a convert. A believer.
    What did we care? As long as people pay the rent and stay out of your room, you can’t be too sniffy about their private lives. We’d come home every now and then, there’d be a strange car parked in front of the house and the driver would nod to us as we walked in. Letting us know he was there. Ten, fifteen minutes later, a woman would emerge from McGann’s room and pick her way through the piles of sports equipment blocking our hallway. Later, McGann would emerge in his sarong, looking very relaxed. That was kind of horrible actually – the idea that he’d just been having sex and now he was wearing this loose sarong, his wet wedding tackle liable to spill out at any moment – but otherwise, we didn’t care. We’d have a drink with the drivers on hot afternoons, invite them in to watch the cricket. Sometimes if McGann finished early, we’d fix the girl and her pimp a cup of tea and some biscuits. We didn’t want the girl to assume we thought any less of her for having sex with our flatmate.
    A few months after McGann had settled in, we hosted a party for some babes who were taking off on a round-the-world trip to avoid looming career decisions. Things went downhill fast after the ceremonial spearing of the keg in the back yard. As it got dark, my furniture went into the maw of a huge burning pit beside the Hills Hoist. We had excavated this thing as a barbecue. The furniture was Milo’s decision alone. He wasn’t into the share house consultancy thing. People were cold, so in went the brown couch. I was kind of down on him for that, but he forgot to remove his stash from one of the cushions, so it evened out. The way these things always seem to.
     
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Terry
A bunch of us were at King Street one night. There was a plate of green stuff festering on the coffee table. It may have been bacon at one time - but that’s just a guess, nobody could really tell. Sandra made her usual remarks about ‘you boys’living in a pigsty. She had asked for a cup of coffee but been made a