The Ghost of Housemates Present

If a housemate moves into the woods, but no one sees her… has she moved in at all?  Or is she just paying an exorbitant amount of money to store her clothes?

Clothes like this wet suit, which fits me perfectly

We recently underwent a changing of the guard at the Cliff, with Marika abandoning ship, and Mandy moving in as her replacement.  Mandy was an excellent choice – easy going, good at sharing and she laughs at my jokes (thus proving conclusively that she has an excellent sense of humour).

There’s just one thing… I can’t actually remember what Mandy looks like.  If you did a line-up of appropriately proportioned blonde girls, I’d struggle to pick her out.

I literally haven’t seen her in almost two months.  There are two clear reasons why this might be the case.

Option A

The grand burden of being in a healthy relationship is that you actually have to spend time with your significant other.  Mandy is so enamoured with said Other that she has no use for a lounge room as cold as a freezer, in a building which now appears to flood annually, on a street where parking has become a bitter, bitter knife fight with that douche who leaves snide notes.  In this scenario it also becomes apparent that she is the first person to live in this house and be in a relationship at the same time.

Option B

Mandy is a spy, and ‘Mandy’ isn’t even her real name.  ‘Mandy’ is her cover identity, and the Cliff is simply one of many safe houses she keeps scattered all around the world.

Option B is clearly the most likely, but let’s just stay open-minded on the topic for now, because none of this is even the real issue.  ‘What’s the real issue?’ asks everyone everywhere (all of them).

The real issue is: What should we use her room for?

1. A part of me instantly blurts out ‘sewing room’ (even though I don’t sew) because I am my mother’s daughter.

2. A second part of me mutters ‘home gym’ (even though I would never use it), because I am still that same daughter, and thus have had it drilled into me that I should probably go for a run because it will somehow make me happier.  And that I really don’t need that second piece of bread because I should still be full from the porridge I had 6 hours ago.

3. An upstairs cellar.  Vastly more practical and likely than a home gym.

4. A Rear Window style set up, featuring a telescope, in order for me to solve crime in the neighbourhood.  The seedy underbelly of the Lower North Shore will be unveiled when I finally unravel the masterminds behind such misdeeds as The Case of the Missing Mop Bucket, The Curious Incident of the Glove Box Thief in the Night-Time, and who the hell owns the cat that shits on our front porch every single day without fail.

5. A dog kennel.  In order to breed the mortal enemy of the cat that shits on our front porch every single day without fail.

6. A craft room – because paper mache feels like something I didn’t fully trial in my youth.

7. Walk-in-wardrobe.  Stop laughing mum, of course I’m joking – my various pairs of jeans fit perfectly where they are.

8. Bo-ho café furnished with ‘found’ objects, featuring only tea and staffed by the street gang of tweens who loiter on the corner and threaten to make people buy their abstract paintings.

9. A warm safe place to hatch baby chickens.  Because of course.

There are some advantages to having a housemate who’s MIA.  For one thing, it saves me from trying to figure out how to tell Mandy not to use my tea cup without sounding like a total knob.

Also we now have a back-up room for our next Annual Plumbing-Based House Flood.  After the last one a few months back Layla had to move everything she owned into the lounge room.  Now I don’t want to say she’s a hoarder or anything, but if the mammoth pile of newspapers which appeared to be older than that soup I made 3 years ago that’s still sitting in the freezer is anything to go by… an Emergency Flood Storage Room might be a thing worth having.

Of course the best laid plans of mice and crime sleuths can be easily over-turned by the Ghost Protocol Housemate herself should she want to use her own room.  So selfish.

Painefull Out

P.S. During the latest Annual Plumbing-Based House Flood one of the tradies casually said “You should write a blog about this.”  I don’t know what’s more concerning, that Deputy Hot Plumber & Co may have discovered my re-telling of their last visit, or the idea that “You should write a blog about this” is now a passing statement that can be made between strangers.

So You Think You’ve Moved In With A Serial Killer…

The trouble with housemates is that you live with them, so you really better get along. The process of housemate selection is historically fraught for everyone involved. Typically it should be more rigorous than your underwear choice and less rigorous than the (utterly vital) selection of your television viewing. The key is to hover somewhere in the middle, avoiding addicts, country music fans and homicidal maniacs, while clinging to those who own fridges. Of course no one has a perfect record (though if I had fulfilled my dream of staging a Bring It On style cheerleading tryout panel I suspect I may have had a better chance).

Don’t get me wrong, Jim and Mick are great, the panel method wasn’t necessary for them. They’ve accepted the random photos of my nephews in the lounge room, telling visitors they’ve fathered one each, and they both know all the incorrect names I’ve inexplicably given the local food outlets, so when I say…

“Let’s get breakfast at that place I call Inferno, that’s not actually called in Inferno.”

… they know what I mean (and no, as I sit here and stare vacantly, I still for the life of me can’t think of what the ‘place I call Inferno, that’s not actually called Inferno’ is actually called). I have accepted that Jim has a weird height fetish that makes him occasionally stand on furniture, we’ve accepted that Mick calls us Big Gay and Harlot, and they’re thoughtful enough to offer warnings when necessary if they suspect I am indulging in some nude time upstairs.

I am not a nudist, but I have been caught out by a housemate before. Back when I lived with Peta, a rather complicated comedy of errors one morning (involving impeccable timing) left me trapped naked and towel-less in the bathroom while she was collapsed in a drunken heap in the corridor blocking my escape.

Peta herself has had some housemate selection issues, which leads me into 3 vital rules that seem applicable to everyone. These aren’t the obvious ones about hygiene or sharing, these are the ones that people often have to learn the hard way.

1. Don’t go looking for a soul mate
When I was moving out, Peta met with a series of replacement applicants. They were all perfectly acceptable, but there was no obvious winner. Then came Dan. She offered it to him on the spot. When he left I quizzed her on his job, previous residence and last name. She didn’t know these, but she had all the information she needed – he was a rugby player. Guess who Peta has a weakness for? 10 points if you said ‘thick-necked men’. Guess how that ended? A further 10 points if you said ‘without a wedding’.

2. Don’t live with someone who is dating someone who is insane
Leah thought she was on to a good thing when she moved in with her old friend James who she’d lived with once before. Unfortunately James had a girlfriend who was as crazy as a loon. And the Loon got herself a house key cut. James and the Loon’s fights were so epic they actually involved the use of diagrams – they used graphic drawings to illustrate what they thought of each other. That household lasted a month and a half.

3. Don’t move in with someone who might be a serial killer
This can be tricky – how does one spot a potential serial killer while searching desperately for accommodation so you can stop commuting for an hour every morning at 2am to your shift job? I was ripe for a horror movie homage.

Of course I had no proof that Bob was homicidal (though so mysterious was he that I briefly theorized he might have been in the witness protection program). All I had was the gradual eerie sensation of slowly realizing I was living in a home that was decorated with framed pieces of wrapping paper, while being assured that there was a 3rd person living in the town house… he was just away on business… all the time. Then there were the barrels in the basement. That sounds like a bad joke, but it’s not. I checked them – they were empty.

I once failed to wash a tea spoon so he left it, still dirty, resting on my handbag. I once walked in my room too loudly, so he requested henceforth I remove my shoes at the bottom of the stairs.

Finally, overwhelmed with dread I decided to ease my mind by doing a highly secretive, politely restrained, yet utterly necessary search of his room to assure myself that Bob was normal. Aside from discovering that Bob had an ensuite (which I didn’t know existed) filled with a supermarket worth of cleaning products, all I found in his wardrobe was 3 crisply ironed shirts, a large collection of neatly stacked DVD’s of a show called Prisoner and a single disc of All Saints. Somehow the All Saints disc is what tipped me into paranoia. Aussie drama is great and all, but surely only psychopaths feel the need to watch it repeatedly.

It’s hard to believe Bob and I haven’t kept in touch.


Painefull Out

The Fake Husband

The break-up isn’t going to be easy, there’s the emotional fallout to consider, not to mention the way the kids are going to react. I know we can still be friends, but that’s easy. It’s because we’ve only ever been friends… it’s my family that seems to be getting confused.

My poor housemate Jim has met my parents one too many times. I suspect they think we’re in the middle of some sort of romantic comedy – the kind where 2 people who’ve known each other for years turn to each other at the end and realize they belong together. We are not those 2 people. We have had several discussions where we have clarified we are not those 2 people. But until we can prove we are not those 2 people, my family may well cling to the idea.

When I received my invite to my brother’s wedding it was addressed to Painefull & Jim. It wasn’t your classic, unconditional ‘plus one’, it was your highly rigid ‘plus Jim’. Some of my nephews refer to him as Uncle Jim (admittedly he did attend one of their birthday parties dressed as a teenage mutant ninja turtle - Rafael I believe - complete with face paint and a washing basket attached to his back). He scores special baked goods from my mother, special shout-outs at family events and the spare bed in my old room has been christened ‘Jim’s bed’.

At a family dinner on Sunday (which Jim attended), I made some quip about my sibling’s kids being further confused by the fact that Jim and I live together. It was as if I had called everyone at the table Parking Inspectors, such was the defensive response. Snorting derision and purposeful mouthfuls of Chinese food abounded in between declarations of ‘no one being serious’, ‘we’re definitely not serious’, ‘no one’s confused’ and ‘we’re certainly not planning your wedding, drawing up a guest list and agreeing Autumn is probably best for an outdoor ceremony’. Maybe not that last one, but the gist was there.

Jim is my Fake Husband – the husband my family has in their head whenever they’re forced to imagine my future. They can’t imagine Colin Firth, Gerard Butler or Justin Bieber (too old, can't act, and who?), and they certainly can’t leave the face blank. Jim is their go-to guy, their bench warmer. I pity the woman Jim eventually does marry – she won’t just have to get through his mother, she’ll probably have to get past mine as well.

If my family ever does realize Jim and I are not star-crossed lovers, then there remains the high possibility that he will simply be adopted and take my place. Mum also spent a great deal of Sunday night introducing him to waiters as her son.

Then again, if they give up on Jim, there’s also my other housemate Mick. Jim will become the red herring, and Mick will Mr Darcy his way into their lives to take up his rightful place. Poor guy, doesn’t stand a chance.


Painefull Out