He Died with a Felafel in His Hand by John Birmingham

Author:John Birmingham [Birmingham, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The Yellow Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Voices of the Damned

Jack

TRUST NOBODY.

There are some flatmates who never seem to have the money to pay their bills. There are other flatmates who will use your money to pay their bills. And there are those very special flatmates who will steal your money and leave town, still not having paid their bills.

JACK NOW WORKS FOR THE AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF CRIMINAL INTELLIGENCE WHERE HIS HOBBY IS TRACKING DOWN THIS PREVIOUS FLATMATE.

There were three of us living in Bondi, myself, my girlfriend Ros and Lizzy, a friend of hers. We wanted to let the spare room to bring down the rent because we were saving for our wedding. After interviewing a couple of weirdoes we took this guy who said he was a chef. He was 21, a surfer type, didn’t have much stuff, had just moved from Adelaide. He said he was trying to see the country by working his way around.

He was always late with the rent and we were constantly chasing him up. He said he got paid at a different time from the rest of us so we ended up not paying the rent in one slab. We’d pay ours and he was supposed to put his in later. We only discovered the problem when I went down to pay the rent personally. Usually we just put it in a bank account. He was about $1200 behind. He paid some of that off but slipped behind again, kept making excuses. ‘I’ll get the money. I’ll get the money.’ He was slow chipping in for bills. The electricity was virtually impossible to get out of him. Like pulling teeth. ‘I’m running short right now but I got money coming next week,’ and so on. The whole time he’s buying stuff like a new surf board, a new guitar, he’s on the piss every night of the week. Then I noticed that all the gold coins were disappearing from the phone box. And my girlfriend 'lost' the gold coins from her purse a couple of times.

He was working nights so he’d be going out as we were coming home. We noticed one night that he and one of his mates were talking in his room about moving out together. He didn’t say anything to us and he wasn’t broadcasting this discussion through the house. We just overheard him. We were driving through Bondi shortly afterwards and saw him and this mate checking out the rental boards at a real estate agency.

He finally told us he’d be moving in a couple of weeks. We came home the next day and he was gone. We checked the rent. He owed $1100 there. He hadn’t paid any gas or electricity, they ran to about $300. His share of the phone bill came to $700. I rang a couple of the numbers from the phone bill, thinking they might have an address for him but they didn’t know or didn’t let on. I found his mother and explained that we wanted the money. She said he was somewhere in Queensland but she didn’t know where.

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