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

Our plan was falling to pieces. We had to throw McGann to them or they would have executed us out on the footpath. I woke up on the floor next to Milo with the sun slanting in on me, mouth like a dry turd and heavy peak-hour traffic roaring by outside. McGann had taken four girls, spent all of his grant, lifted Milo’s Bankcard and whacked another grand’s worth of whoopee on the plastic before the sun came up.
    McGann left a few weeks later. He didn’t have any trouble paying Milo back. Got the money to him within a couple of days. But like I said, we never really got round to cleaning up after that party. The disorder which had been lurking at the edge of things took dominion and McGann couldn’t handle it. As the piles of dishes and scraps of food took root in the kitchen, the KFC and Hungry Jacks flotsam which had been quiescent since Victor the Rasta’s departure reappeared through the house. Most of the containers were empty, crumpled and spent, but here and there, a half eaten Whopper or Chicken Speciality perched on the arm of a chair, slowly melting and growing into the fabric. Beer cans and stubbies sprouted from within the shifting dunes of discarded junk food artefacts –only one or two to begin with, establishing a tentative hold, testing the atmosphere, then erupting in fantastic promiscuous discharges of lagers and ales and dark malty stouts, torn cardboard cartons and unknowable numbers of plastic six pack rings. Porn mags, junk mail, newspapers, sports supplements, comic books, text books, lecture notes, tissues, paper plates, napkins, pizza boxes, plastic bags, pie tins, flavoured milks, tee shirts, socks and rotting vegetable matter were churned, shredded, ground down, chewed up, digested, crushed, pulped, torpedoed, bombed, burned and eviscerated into layers and hillocks of generic land fill. We chose to ignore the sounds of rummaging rats and skittering roaches, to cope with the blue-green algal bloom spreading out of the kitchen sink and to shrug when the black oily toxins began leaking from the vegetable crisper. However, the trails of fat white maggots, headed from the kitchen to our bedrooms like ships of the line, brought a response. Milo and I bought a couple of silly hats, some high-powered water pistols, filled them with kerosene and went hunting. McGann, on the other hand, had been cooking in the back yard for a week, heating Milo’s Army Reserve surplus ration packs over the fire pit by the Hills Hoist. When he finished the last of those and was faced with coming down to our level – sucking the jelly directly out of the green tubes of army jam for sustenance – he moved out.
    ‘I just can’t stand it,’ he said.
     
----
Des
We had a cleaning lady. Gail. A western suburbs middle-aged cleaning lady with a shrieking voice. She’d start the morning with a bourbon and coke at our place. She’d come in and clean around us in our bedrooms, even when we had someone in there. The dishes piled up once when she was away. It got so bad in the end that we just dumped the whole thing in the bathtub and filled that up. But then we left it for a week. The water was just rancid. Lucky John got pissed one night, we heard all this splashing and crashing and clashing in the bathroom. We ran in there and he’d gotten naked, crawled in with the dishes and the toxic water.
----
     
    With the house in such a state, the only replacement we could get was my friend Taylor, the taxi driver. He was coming out of a doomed relationship with a bikie chick and was knocking back two or three bottles of overproof rum every day. There were some dark forces at work inside him, manifesting themselves in the black Special Forces tee shirt, jungle camouflage pants and white running shoes which he never took off. We told people the white running shoes were the last vestiges of his human personality trying to hang on. When they were replaced by army boots it would be random sniper time.
    Taylor was usually out of his