This is the first fascicle of a four part story set during my second crack at an Arts degree in 2017. The stories are pretty much all true; the only thing I’ve played with is time. Because this is the first part of a larger story, the emphasis is on introducing people and place, not bringing all narrative threads and themes to denouement, so bear with details if they aren’t fully explained yet. Without wanting to give the end away, I’m not trying to paint myself in a glorious light here. An essay on hospitality will follow; parts will be released monthly.

The Brodyssey

1st fascicle

– In which Brodysseus returns home

The rat had been decomposing for a while. Its fermented death-juice had mixed with the mouldy moussaka into a many-coloured syrup the same colour and odour as the Cooks River after rain.^[1] It was an eyesore, a heartache and a nostrilburner, all neatly contained in a large Tupperware container that had been left in the Manor garden courtyard.^[2]

Why? How did it get here?

My trigger finger started to itch, twitch, with the machined precision and PTSD tremors of a war vet reaching for his rifle.

I wanted to point it at someone. Whose fault is this?

Some of the rat juice dripped onto my toes.

I need to know now.

The container slipped out of my hands and onto the courtyard floor, spilling its syrupy slurry into a spiderwebbed network of streams, cutting through the grime and down into the drain.

What. The. Flop.

How did the rat get in there? How come it couldn’t get out? How did it die? When did it die – it couldn’t have been today because I could see its skeletal face looking at me toothily under concentric rings of fat, flesh and fur, like tree rings but munted, indicating a prolonged decomposition.

Maybe Maddy – our resident taxidermist – would know. But I’ve got no tether left for my housemates – I want to blame someone, so I should start knocking off suspects one by one: motive, means, opportunity, all that. Firstly though, how the heck did I get here? Why am I looking at a dead rat in my old cereal container – perhaps my blame quest can start there –

My train of thought got derailed by a hideous vapour, shimmering blue, coming from the drain. That poor drain has copped a hammering – drain, train, train of thought – train! I caught the train home from uni an hour ago – let’s start the blame quest there.

***

‘Doors opening. Please stand clear. Blaap blaap blaap blaap…’

Marrickville got off the train but not their phones as everyone began the great head-down migration upstairs to the Illawarra road exit, the dawdlers somehow arriving at the stairs before the fast-walkers. They push by a couple steps at a time up to the card reader gates and flash their Opal cards without breaking stride. I summit the stairs just as the dawdlers are fossicking in handbags and pockets for their cards. I take the moment to breathe in the serenity. The serenity felt like beautiful mid-Autumn, mid-arvo sun, but unfortunately smelt like pigeon poo and half eaten pork roll. Other unsavoury wafts came up from the gutter and joined the southerly blowing from the Cooks’s river up past the station and towards Petersham. Lovely. I’m almost home.

Everyone, Marrickville new and old^[3], kind of atomises from the train station, having in common only the tacit agreement to keep to their patch of the pavement on the way home. Some hektik lads in a white commodore emblazoned with a fat red P plate hoon by and throw their Coke slushies at one of the effete fast-walkers on his way up to Woolies, one of the eshays landing a direct hit on his suede purple leather jacket. The victim stopped to contemplate the intersecting threads of life that led him to this fate while the lads in the commodore sped off laughing to their own. The casualness of this douchebaggery snapped me out of the trancelike threshold amnesia trains give me, and sure enough with my head now clear, my three major responsibilities reared their hydra heads in descending order of importance: the house party-gig-fundraiser thing we were hosting on Saturday (which She might be attending); the house meeting and (therefore house cleanup) necessitated by the event; and my uni essay, I suppose.

Salient in my mind’s eye and deepest in my heart’s hankering, however, was for the precious giver and sustainer of my life: the fridge. I again forgot to bring lunch to uni, and alas today there hadn’t been a mate or one of those catered student events to scab off, so I was starving.

I broke into my own fast-walk towards home and even snuck in a jaywalk in front of the grim government housing while traffic was sparse. Illawarra road was a lumpy one stretching across Marrickville north to south, a W shape in terms of elevation. Its middle point was the bridge over the trainline where I now stood; its southern peak Woolies; its northern peak where it intersected Marrickville road, the corner of which featured Marrickville Pork Roll on one side and Centrelink on the other, the lines often bleeding into each other giving locals the vexed question of getting dole or roll first.

I was heading north but downhill from the station towards a little V-fork (horizontally speaking now) where Illawarra splits into Petersham road, my literal home stretch. At the centre of the inflection point for both the W uphill and the V-fork crossways was Cornersmith, the aptly named cafe at the heart of trendy Marrickville life. At this hour it was mostly populated by dolebludging dandies on the inside and sunwrinkled mums on the outside, often thronging around it with an impassable wall of designer prams and yappy cavoodles (the cavoodles often being in the prams).^[4]

As I got in eyeshot of discount David Foster Wallace, bandana and all, rabidly typing away on his stained and dented MacBook at the Cornersmith counter, something caught my eye around the corner.

I saw them. I’d met them on Marrickville road, which they’d sidle down most days, occasionally getting a coffee from one of the Greek cafes towards Sydenham, though they mostly seemed out and about to be out and about. The strutted instep, husband always slightly ahead of wife, him dressed like a pimp at the snow, her like the Grinch in drag. ‘How are you? He’d grunt at every passerby, his timbre somewhere between Tom Waits and a woodchipper. Given I have the same propensity to try to meet and greet every passing soul, I thought it best to deny my instincts and leave the enigmatic couple for now and instead focus on curing my gutache by getting home posthaste.

I quickened my fast-walk to the point my backpack was slapping my bum like a jockey’s whip, giving me the tortoiseshelled look of a primary school kid haring after their bus. I passed the grim government housing next to the pro-bono legal centre and saw the ladies who worked at the $10 Vietnamese hairdressers punching darts with the same rhythmic efficiency with which they punched through haircuts. As I was about to pass them and veer up Petersham Road, I saw water whirlpooling in a dent in the road right before the drain in front of the hairdressers. It was proper streaming down: water coming quick and thick enough to keep pork roll wrappers afloat as they raced each other and what looked like tufts of foam into the whirlpool. The hairdressers showed their appreciation of the novelty before them by chucking their lipstick-smeared durries into the thick of it. I took this as a cue to move on and headed uphill opposite the sketchy neon-lit massage parlour behind Cornersmith, its door yawning open with about the same sex appeal as the pancaked rat carcass being fought over by some bin chooks up the sidestreet to the left.

The water seemed to gush harder the further I got uphill. As I passed the Nicaraguan family that loved to play cards out the front all day, I wondered where all the water was coming from – maybe our neighbour Costa left the hose on after washing his car – actually nah Costa was a tightarse with water, he only used his hose to apply the coup de grace to his concrete, his bins and the firetruck red Audi he’d won at the RSL Christmas raffle, but who knows, no one’s perfect, particularly not Costa. The darling of the street, the Nicaraguans’ dog Betty,^[5] wagged her tail as I passed, while her owner and the Don of the casa said at a volume loud enough to imply he had fairly but incorrectly assumed I couldn’t speak Spanish:

‘Ai, madre mia, por qué hay un rio en la calle – o mira ese extraño pa alla – probablamente otro maldito gringo que quiere sacar Betty a pasear.’

I nodded at him and said ‘hola Betty’ before instinctively sidestepping Stavros as he came bearing down out of the next door driveway. He was ridin dirty on his mobility scooter while blaring Stelios out his stereo, the Greek flag attached to his bonnet bouncing to the rhythm of the road. I passed Stavros’ Ethnic Homes and Gardens^[6] famous bungalow, at least two thirds of which was concrete and balustrade, then saw the UFO top of the Petersham water tower poke over the crest of the hill, sitting in wait for God to use it as a golf tee. Seeing the water tower meant I was nearly home, and sure enough, I heard home before I saw it. Miriam was sawing away at the catgut to prepare for her folk fiddle gig down at Gaspo^[7] on Friday night, and half of Marrickville could hear it coz, understandably given we didn’t have aircon, she loved to do it with the lovely southerlies coming in through her balcony doors.^[8]

I was close enough home to catch Costa in the act, hosing off his beloved Audi, but also have the disorienting realisation that his hose wasn’t the source of the impromptu Rio Petersham. It was us. I splashed across the road to take in the full spectacle. The Manor, christened so because of its Victorian stateliness and the fact that it alliterated with Marrickville, was chucking its guts up^[9]. A galumphing current was belching out the side gate, over the carport ledge and onto the street. Yikes.

Looking up from the street level waterfall, the Manor rose and kept rising: easily the tallest house on the street. It was unkempt enough to look like an abandoned castle, but kempt enough to look like squatters had moved in. The foundations had eroded somewhat, giving its townhouse-tallness a decided tilt. It was footed on enormous sandstone bricks which rose up into a bottlegreen facade wrapped with white cornices and red woodwork, all lightly stained by car smoke and grime. Some parts were crying out for some tradie TLC: Miriam’s second floor balcony was held up by just thoughts and prayers, and the front iron gate dangled dangerously onto the footpath off one overachieving hinge that was haemorrhaging rust. The garden was overgrown: the wrought iron fence poking through the hedge engulfing it like braces through a beard. All these quirks contributed to an image of total grunginess, giving the Manor the unmistakable vibe of an Inner West student sharehouse, but nevertheless retaining an echo of regal eminence due to its Victorian bulk and flowery detailing. Just discernible through the garden beds and palm tree drapery was the tiled path up to the broad red steps and the broad red door headed by the name ‘GLENDALOUGH’ on the leadlight window. Home.

From the street looking in, our home was surrounded by two Federation bungalows to our right and two fibro cottages to our left. The first bungalow was Costa’s concrete masterpiece, the second was the commie students’ disasterpiece; disaster not because they had pickets showing ‘Kulaks to the Gulags’ permanently set up in their front lawn, but because unlike the Manor, it did not look kempt enough to squat in.^[10]

The first fibro cottage belonged to an Indigenous family – the Smiths – fond of 48 hour parties, having domestics on the street, and yarning about how the footy was harder in the nineties. The front of their house was a sooty mess after an old family friend gifted them a physical sign of the health of their relationship by sticking a Molotov cocktail in their commodore’s petrol tank. The other fibro cottage had a guy who just sat on his verandah, swore, and chucked durries at anyone passing by.

Our waterfall picked up First, Second and Third Nations’ jetsam on the way to the Cooks: suds from Costa’s Audi, burnt rubber from the Smiths, and ciggies galore from the commies on the way down Petersham road. The pork roll wrappers strewn ubiquitously about would resist the water’s tug until the water got underneath them and they’d rise, go with the flow like unmanned scows, then bump up against the gutter in delicate little dinks-

‘Epa why you skippies have to play bouzouki so loud?’

Costa’s big fat Greek yelling sideswiped the reverie I’d slunk into while watching the waterfall. Costa’s skin looked like it saw sun all day every day because it did, his mouth only the largest of the sun-damaged crypts pockmarking his face.

‘Ah sorry Costa, what did you say?’

‘You play bozouki so loud that my cousin Vasili hear it in Melbourne’

‘Oh the music? Yeah I guess it’s a tad loud, but Miriam’s a gun player, I mean, she’s very good at playing fiddle and she has a gig tomorrow night so she’s practising –

‘Fiddle? You sure not bouzouki?

‘Yeah I’m pretty sure she’s not playing a bazooka’

‘Eh, not bazooka, bouzouki. Maybe bazooka only skippy word to not come from Greek word.’

I had to fight my internal grin from becoming external as Costa inhabited ever further the walking stereotype of a Greek man of his age, from the Windex bottle in his hand to the Adidas slides on his feet. Curious to see how deep the stereotype would go, I let go of my immediate life responsibilities, not least those currently streaming down Petersham Road, to inquire further.

‘Tell me more about skippy and Greek words Costa.’

‘Follow me Brod, I show.’

As he walked me over to the side of his house, he confessed that he’d filled his water bucket from our overflowing generosity to save money, but eventually gave in to habit and used his hose to finish the highlight of his day: the daily wash of his beloved Audi. The other highlight of his day was the daily wash of his bin, which he now wheeled before me like a proud kindie kid about to do show-and-tell and opened the red lid. All I could see was a mound of mouldy spanakopita, though it seemed to be shivering. Costa ushered me to look closer, so I leant in and saw why it was moving. Thousands of maggots were crawling through it.

‘Look, biologia! Bio mean life, and logia mean study!’

I nodded with generous affirmation even though, snooty Arts student that I am, already knew the etymology.

‘Yeah Costa, Miriam our bouzouki player up there actually studies biology at university!’

‘I don’t know why you young skippies go to university to study life. I have life here in bin. Study bin, study life, only difference with uni and bin is bin is free! Haha, but epa look, life not last long in bin.’^[11]

He sprayed the churning maggots with the Windex he’d just cleaned his car with and wiped them out with the same rag he’d just wiped his face with.

‘Don’t believe me about Greek word? He gestured at the Manor – ‘You are church boys no?’ – he then pointed at the church opposite us on the corner of Petersham and Marrickville road.^[12]

‘Greek word for God is theos. Theologia mean study of God. He pointed at the whitewashed walls of his own house. ‘Oikos. Oikologia!’ He tapped his head knowingly and some maggots fell from the rag.

‘The study of houses, Costa?’

‘No! Mean study of where things live. Maggots live in bin, so you can do oikologia and biologia at same time. I think skippy word is economy. No wait that is oikonomia… ecology!’

Hmm. Ecology and economy both come from oikos. I actually learned something from Costa. Droll.

‘Thanks for the lesson Costa, but I should really try to fix this water situation.’

‘Yes. Try fix bouzouki situation too. Is not bad sound, but I don’t want all afternoon.’

I left him and climbed through the iron gate and up towards the front door, my crunching footfalls sending tiny skinks skittering through the cracks in the tiles and into the hedge litter.

Our unintentional open-door policy was in full swing, the door hinge creaking in offbeat synchronisation with the fiddle’s squalls. The openness of the policy was occasionally stress-tested by kindred spirits in guilt-based doorknocking evangelism: chuggers^[13] and the local JWs,^[14] but I actually welcomed the policy in this case as I had forgotten my key and the recently sealed scabs on my legs didn’t wish to tussle with the barbed wire above the sidegate again.

Next to the door was a rotting wooden chair bearing a small blackboard we’d pinched from church reading Baby, it’s cold outinside, a relic from Shane’s Romeo and Juliet wrap party a few months ago. Our front porch was in theory painted red but it was hard to see under the dust, dead roaches and barbecue grease leftover from when we had our front yard Australia Day party earlier in the year.^[15] Cleaner patches were torn asunder by curling ribbons of flaking paint showing the atavistic green underneath. Under Miriam’s balcony was another set of double-doors, these ones bound shut with curtains half-heartedly drawn behind, but there was enough of a gap between the curtains to show the lights were off and the TV was on, which suggested that one of the boys was home. In the corner next to the door were the remains of a teabrief^[16], probably a recent one, as Jack’s beautiful clear teapot didn’t look ringed with mould. The threshold was indistinguishable from inside or out due to the unvaccumed hordes of dead ants, toenails and live ants seething across it.

I stepped inside. The atrium ceiling was cathedral high, but lacking cathedral windows, was catacombs dim, the grey walls broached by a columned arch and a musty chandelier with one globe working out of eight. Never one to shy away from a chance to exhibit the fruits of his fine arts degree, Jack was using the cornices of the entry archway to display a diptych of sorts: a tiny figurine of a jacked Marge Simpson in a bodybuilder’s bikini (with her face burnt off) and an enormous papier mache anime sword that hung suspended from wall to wall. Don’t ask.

On the left wall, a detached door looking for its frame lay girt by shoes opposite the staircase, itself behind our stable of inner-west share-house bikes. Three of these were Jack’s, him being a former BMXer, and another three which did not work and gave tetanus by sight alone. The stairs, clad in drab carpet surrounded moatlike by black floorboards, led up to most of the bedrooms as well as a bathroom and the attic. Dead straight down the corridor was the dining area and to the left was our double-chambered living room, separated by floor-to-ceiling French doors, often closed to give Joe some privacy, because, house gigs notwithstanding, half of the living room was technically his bedroom.

I looked in and recoiled. The living room was dark and smelled of fart. This was probably because of the greenhouse effect enacted by the blanket fort we’d set up for Jack’s birthday but hadn’t taken down yet.^[17] The blanket fort looked like a cross between Genghis Khan’s royal yurt and a shrine dedicated to video games; everything flecked with Cheetohs dust. The OG Star Wars was playing on our properly monolithic TV, our latest item of street bounty that passed the sniff and carry test^[18], and the obvious focal point of the room. Leia was in Luke’s arms and in his ear about the stormtroopers about to burst under the door.

I felt something in my own ear, a light whispering that was tracing the inside of my ear like so many tongues. It got louder and the whispers became words: ‘party’, ‘meeting’ ‘essay’. I realised that the polyglossolalic wet willy I was receiving was from the dreaded three-headed hydra of my responsibilities in what I thought was a descending triage of importance, though a fourth had reared its ugly mug and was now wormtonguing me about fixing the pool situation. Dreadful. I should really get on to all that. But I’m hungry now, so to the fridge I go-

‘Help me Brodie Wann Kenobi, you are my only hope’

I wheeled back round to the living room to seek the source of the noise. I saw some winedown^[19] detritus next to the fireplace and a rapidly spreading pool of red liquid near the Xbox. I vaulted the couch and took in the scene below. Shane was laying spreadeagled like a 3D corpse outline, somehow suspended across the couch and beanbag, his mouth centimetres from the floor and puddle of smoothie spilling out from the fallen glass near his hand. What the heck happened here.

I knelt down and could hear him breathing. Not dead, at least. From the splatter pattern of the smoothie, and how his floppy body straddled the couch and beanbag like King Kong strewn across New York, it looked like his assailant had blindsided him from behind. I sniffed. He smelt vaguely of chlorine and bananas – maybe someone had spiked his drink? Hmmm. I considered the facts, and the culprit became obvious. His whiteknuckle work ethic had done its work on him again. Shane either looked for acting gigs, acted, or grinded in one of a million side hustles to support his acting. When he got home, he was vulnerable to attack. The nap would take him forcefully, in any position, at any time, no matter how loud his alarm would blare next to his ear, no matter if he’d left the toilet door open. Comforted that he wasn’t dead, and that the nap had somehow left him in recovery position, I left Shane with a mental note to clean up the living room when I had a spare moment.

I left the living room and on the way to the fridge I made the mistake of looking into Joe’s room. As was his wont, Joe had decorated the mantelpiece above his dormant fireplace with literally half our crockery. I knew it was half because one time, fed up with having one clean mug between us with which to consume our three meals for the day, Jack and I unclogged the dysfunction of our communal dishwashing cycle by braving Joe’s floordrobe^[20], retrieving his mantelpiece ornaments, and filling an entire dishwasher load with our efforts. I don’t think he even noticed. I added another mental note to the laundry list, and as I felt the hydra wrapping its necks around it, I walked into the dining room.

Everything was amiss, which was normal. I stepped over the cushions on the scorched-earth floor near the dining table and looked out the open bifolds to the courtyard, which somehow eclipsed the dining room floor as an absolute sight.

Our pool runnethed over: it had blown its lid and I was about to blow mine watching it spume water fountainlike over its brim, down the side gate and out into Marrickville. The pool was a rubber blowup thing we’d bought to take the edge off summer’s heat, holding roughly 500 litres, but it seemed to be ejecting about as much every five minutes or so. I just stood there, listening to the water slapping off the brick floor and streaming out with a not-inconsiderable-to-our-water-bill fluency towards the gate. A low flying jumbo jet on that deafening flight path over Sydenham broke the holding pattern of sound that was stupefying me, and, now that I’d come to, promptly marched out the door and turned the hose off at the tap. The pool filter, audibly straining with its workload, was still plugged into the external power socket, so I went over to turn it off… wait, hang on, what are those? Through the Perspex filter lid I could see a red, wriggling thing near the pipes. I flipped the lid and didn’t know what I was looking at. Vermicelli-thin inch-long squiggles floating in a swaying mass, kind of like when you rub your eyes too hard and see space invaders having a rave on your corneas. I lowered my head to take a closer look. One of them moved – no – all of them were moving with the unmistakable undulation of a worm.

Flop me dead. I slammed the lid in disgust and added another mental note to clean the filter. I paused to uncoil the hydra necks from the laundry list and review the new house admin from the last few minutes: clean bins in the front garden (thanks Costa), clean teabrief on the porch (thanks Jack), clean Shane crime scene and winedown detritus (thanks Shane, Jack, Joe, et al.), undecorate Joe’s mantelpiece (thanks Joe), unscorch the dining room floor, write note to local MP apologising for draining the Warragamba in and out of our paddle pool (thanks…, hm, not sure who to blame for that yet).

Stuff that. I’m gonna do my own thing, everyone can deal with their own mess. I’m gonna eat some food, listen to Black Messiah again, then play some Broforce, then…

‘Essay’

‘Meeting’

‘Party’

The hisses of the hydra were untimely and unheimlich. I paused to reconsider the situation. This reconsidering swiftly became painful, because despite my best efforts to avoid it, a cleanup was palpably unavoidable: the house has to be in better shape for the party, because everyone’s coming, and among everyone, She might be there. I sighed. Optimist shoulder angel and pessimist shoulder demon sprung up on the hydra’s haunches to contribute their helpful mood swings to my inner monologue:

‘I suppose there’s nothing like hosting to get your arse into gear for cleanup and teamwork makes the dream work and we’ll get the playlist pumping and the boys’ll be jumping and a tidy house makes for a tidy mind yadda yadda yadda and maybe once we establish the pattern for cleaning this time people will actually bloody hold to it – but they didn’t last time we had a big cleanup and as bloody usual I’m already ahead on the chores roster, wherever the heck that’s gone, and everyone’s schedules always become conveniently filled up when planning for cleaning, but not for partying, and there is no flopping way I’m Ramboing all this mess free-solo, particularly the pool, gee the pool situation is gonna come back to bite us isn’t it – though far out it was pretty good enjoying a stubby and watching the cricket in the pool, wow how right I turned out to be with O’Keefe on the India tour – the man can’t hold his tongue or his liquor but boy can he bowl – gee though are his straight-breaks really better than my leggies? I should ask Pete Lalor next time he’s at Cornersmith^[21] – maybe I still have it in me – just a few good games in a row and I’ll make 1st grade, then a few good games there then I’ll be in the state team, then I’ll make Australia in three games tops, then I’ll be the best since you-know-who, actually nah once I fix my shoulder I’ll be better than Warnie… OW, ow, yowza, my shoulder bursitis flares when I mention his name, curse this, curse this, God why have you led me to this? My dissembling shoulder has connived with the devil to cheat me out of featuring for Australia and left me pursuing what the heck to do with my life, left me pursuing this Arts degree, left me pursuing my housemates to clean up this bastardry, hmm this sucks this sucks this SUCKS! But c’mon mate, calm your farm, you’re just whinging now, you should slow down and remember how to deal with setbacks: either get bitter or get better as Wayne Bennett always said, and getting better means reframing the setback; so how can I ponder this binfire anew? Mercifully the bin is not actually on fire, I suppose communal mess-processing is the best way to counter communal mess-producing, and who knows it could be fun to all work together on something, and I might even find my $10 note I lost the other day! – but nah stuff em actually my essay is due tomorrow so I’d really help future Brod by at least starting on the title page, or even just starting to read the damn book, The Odyssey is meant to be the beginning of western lit or some crap, and everyone else is obviously prioritising their future selves, so may as well join the herd and sheeple with the people – oh crap the house meeting is tonight and whoops, bugger, fart, darn it I just remembered it was me who insisted on it happening tonight so I wouldn’t miss futsal, so it makes sense as a bare minimum I should rock up for the meeting I insisted on, and should probs set aside some time to write a plan for it to best avoid blamethrowers getting whoofed out- ooft, OW that’s a wince and a half, my bloody toe is probs not bloody good enough for futsal anyway, my head, shoulders, knees and toes are genetically so rubbish (thanks mum and dad), I didn’t even need to insist on the time, wait wait wait what’s that – eww is that another worm?’

My shoe was nudging some orange streaks next to the filter. I squatted over it and had a proper look. Yeah nah all good, I think it’s just leftovers from Romeo’s vomit – yeah fermented carrot from chundered yeeros – I thought we’d cleaned that up.

Romeo had vommed in our courtyard because a few months ago Shane had volunteered the Manor to host the wrap party for his amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. Dearest Romeo was hitting sixes with the vodka cruisers, much to Miriam’s delight (she had picked him as her batsman for drunk cricket^[22] in the snake draft), and was therefore sufficiently potvaliant to – no joke – pledge his star-crossed, undying love to the actress who played Juliet. Unfortunately thereafter he pledged half digested yeeros and grog on her lap. Six and out. She then pledged her own love to him as she caressed his head on the courtyard floor, the worms her chamber-maids as they gorged themselves on their nearest morsel: sloppy seconds of yeeros.

Gee a yeeros wouldn’t go astray right now: I’m famished after thinking through all this sharehouse crap. Actually, there may be some leftover moussaka from Joe’s share meal the other night! I should check the fridge.

I went back inside and journeyed back over the cushions to the kitchen, half hidden from the dining room by a recessed wall. The smoking ruin of last night’s charcoal chicken takeaway lay on the stove, twice reheated by our fireblacked pans that left teflon shards in our meals like black dandruff. Curving up and out like bullhorns, the slatribs of the chicken carcass had become makeshift aeries for the dunny budgies^[23] as they took turns feeding on the carrion and grease below. Put the mental list away Brod you’re not touching that.

I checked the fridge. There was bugger-all besides a thin yellow film covering the shelves, geriatric lemon halves and a fetid paste of mashed up veggies stewing in the crisper. The shelves held a bizarre assortment of never-used condiments and never-used film canisters Jack said he would use one day. I tried the freezer. Half the top shelf was stuffed with black bananas, empty packets once filled with frozen peas and a large foil package of indiscernible shape. I reached for it then froze. Maddy, our resident taxidermist, had put it there.^[24] Hmm. Just the other night she had been telling me about the flesh eating roaches she uses to polish skulls. I put my now-horripilated hand down and shut the freezer door.

With growing desperation, I tried the time honoured approach of reopening the fridge door in hope something new would materialise there, but I spotted some garlic sprouting roots that looked like The Thing so shut the door.

With a desperation mature enough to drink and vote I checked the pantry. At eye level were five mismatched bottles of Homebrand-tier cooking oil. On the floor was an open sack of rice riddled with pantry moth larvae and other weevils. The sack itself was surrounded by pantry moth traps that had been overrun, their sticky pads covered with a marmalised smear of victims with the odd cockroach limb or antennae poking out. My shelf was naked bar small mounds of mouse poo and a half-eaten can of tuna I’d forgotten to throw away. There was a smattering of food on the other’s shelves, leaving me with the sharehouse-heightened instinct to ask for forgiveness rather than permission in taking their food, but none of it looked much good besides Joe’s case of Coopers which I was too skint to consider buying off him anyways. I sighed.

Next to the pantry was the microwave which I opened out of procedural thoroughness rather than genuine hope of a meal. The interior decor looked like Cronenberg had filmed a Saw movie in it, but that was mere backdrop to the one small mercy of the afternoon: I found where I had left my tea last night. I tasted some. Mm, cold. I put it back in, turned the microwave on and enjoyed watching the family of Germans^[25] skitter and dance in the neon display as it counted down to zero. It went bing and I retrieved my tea, now smoking.

I took a breath and took the moment to slow down a bit. I suppose I shouldn’t be hasty in giving up on this place. It’s not like we don’t try to war with the mess; we’ve set up a chore roster and set-and-forget defences for air, land and sea, though it must be said that our esprit de corps was always one setback away from simmering thoughts of intentional friendly-fire.

With the world-weariness of a trench commander knowing his side was enduring a long defeat, I indexed the state of our defences. Our land defences in the pantry needed a complete overhaul: the ubiquity of the mouse poo suggested we needed to roll out some heavier artillery, and the aforementioned pantry moths now had free rein to go forth and multiply after breaking through via kamikaze Zerg rush, their comrades bodies neutering the once-lethal stickiness of the traps. The anti-aircraft on the bench was still functional but in need of urgent repairs, as indicated by the brimming cadavers in the vinegar pit and the wilt of the gladwrap covering our old peanut butter jars, leaving the fruit flies a bit of wriggle room in the lip of the trap. Dunny budgies were everywhere, though congregated particularly on the stovetop near the burnt scree surrounding the chicken and on the sponges and food scraps near the sink.

As I was scanning, one of the budgies left its wishbone parapet and performed a dive bomb through one of the holes in the gladwrap ceiling of a newer fruit-fly trap, enlarging it beyond the event horizon required to allow fruit flies in but stop them coming out.

In dismay I checked our navy. The dishwasher was ajar enough for me to see wheat had been stacked with chaff, and the rest of the other half of crockery that wasn’t on Joe’s mantelpiece was on the bench or in the sink. Next to the sink was a sponge oozing black oil and snot-coloured rice, though on closer inspection the snot-coloured rice was actually a farrago of maggots and larvae that, infected with the same deathwish as lemmings, yeeted themselves off the edge of the sink into the murk below.

Everything smelt as it looked, which really put a dampener on me enjoying my tea, so I left the kitchen for the greener pastures of the courtyard. I ignored the leopard slugs the size of sausages leaving criss-crossing starlit snailtrails on the wall and stood next to the pool.

The final skirls of Miriam’s fiddleathon got me nodding and I gulped down my thrice-reheated tea. Another jet flew over, almost knocking the rooster off our weathervane. Once its skyscraping roar had subsided, I heard our back door neighbour hawk a massive golly onto our fence and our indigenous neighbour John call his indigenous half-brother (also named John) a racial slur. Ah, the sounds of Marrickville.

In the hedge I heard a rustle of indeterminate size. Probs too big to be a skink, probs too small to be a cat. Maybe a Kevin?^[26] Drawn by the sound, I walked to the garden bed. A largeish skink jumped out with its svelte mouth wrapped around an earthworm. The worm’s tail overlapped briefly with the skink’s, creating a mutant ouroboros next to the pool filter, corrugated pink melding into cracked-plate grey. Yummo. Hang on, what’s that?

In the garden bed I could see a corner jutting out of the litter like the prow of a sunken oceanliner. It was Tupperware, and it was near the tap, which put it in the Overton window of acceptable intentionality-to-clean from our housemates. In other words, putting Tupperware near the outdoor tap showed enough good intent to suggest it would get cleaned, but not enough for it to actually get cleaned. In other words, this is where Tupperware goes to die.

The jutting prow before me had well and truly died. I put down my mug and pulled it out. It was surprisingly heavy and nearly opaque with black liquid, though the odd bit of technicolor mould occasionally floated by near the container wall. Oh right, this was that cerealbox thing I bought for my oats a while ago; gee I could smash a porridge for lunch right now if I don’t get a yeeros. The black opacity created something of a mirror to check myself out in, something I was more than happy to d- wait WHAT!

I dropped the container and fell backwards. I’d seen a face in the mirror and it was not my own. The face was a skeletal face. A decomposing face. A rat face. I looked at it and it looked at me. I felt another hydra head uncoiling near my ears and looked at my reflection in the dropped container, my shell shocked face overlaid on the rat’s underneath.

Why me.

***

Sneak peek of fascicle 2:

The horror of the afternoon caused my fists and frontal lobe to clench and unclench over and over again like a broken bear trap. My eyes tracked the streams of death-juice flowing into the drain before seeing a new devilry emerge from it: a mist of blue vapour beginning to take the form of a force ghost pointing my way.

’Get up Brodysessus. Get up and restore your honour.’

1. Not a compliment. ↑
2. The Marrickville Manor, aka the epicentre of Christian Bohemia circa 2015-2019, was the home of many arty-farty Christians while they went through uni, including me. This story is set during my second attempt at my Arts degree in 2017. ↑
3. Oldest Marrickville would obviously be the First Nations folk who lived round the Cooks, but here by Old Marrickville I mean those who came before the gentrifiers did and tend to live more on the south of the suburb. In rough order from settlement through the various wars that begat migration, it was Anglo-Celtic working class folk, then the first Greeks to Australia (before even Melbourne), then Portuguese, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese and Lebanese again. New Marrickville are the young trendy gentrifiers who bought up old factories in the industrial district, moved into sugar cube apartments near the trainline and inflated pork roll prices by $5 in 10 years. Our sharehouse was mostly composed of the usual carousel of non-Sydney students moving to the inner west for cheap rent and proximity to the unis. We are the great unwashed. ↑
4. Read this for more on the Cornersmith dandies. ↑
5. Who’d also be out the front all day unless being taken for a walk by an army of volunteers ↑
6. Check em out ↑
7. The Gasoline Pony ↑
8. Though hopefully the southerlies had dropped the smells they picked up at the station ↑
9. Rather like my Bondi experience ↑
10. In ten years, Marrickville had gone from Australia’s heroin capital  to Australia’s craft beer capital. The commies looked ten years behind the times. ↑
11. I know this sounds made up but it is, as I remember it, almost word for word what he actually said ↑
12. The aptly named ‘Marrickville Road Church’. Come check us out on Sundays at 10am. ↑
13. Chugger is a portmanteau of charity and mugger, and describes the sales approach of street promoters often spotted around Central station. Usually they are poor backpackers pressganged into commission based work by some vampiric recruiter who should know better. They are often dreadlocked and hygiene-averse effective altruists. ↑
14. Jehova’s Witnesses ↑
15. In truth, it was a party we threw yearly on Australia day because it was a public holiday, our focus being on playing our own hottest 100 based on our own listening data and voting system. John Smith, our Aboriginal neighbour, was none the wiser and spat on our porch to show us what he thought of it. I’ll never forget what happened next: one of the garden skinks snuck out of the shade and slurped up the golly before the sun did. ↑
16. Manorism #1 – teabrief: a debrief had while consuming tea ↑
17. Another factor would be the overproduction of methane by the room’s most common occupiers: the boys. ↑
18. Manorism #2 – sniff and carry test: test performed to assess whether street bounty should be brought home. The criteria are, firstly, that the item must not cause you to gag when you sniff it, secondly be able to carry your weight, and thirdly be able to carried by hand back home. ↑
19. Manorism #3 – winedown: a wind down had while consuming wine. ↑
20. He was a jazz musician, so it was mostly populated by music charts, instruments, and unwashed laundry ↑
21. Famous cricket journo that frequented Cornersmith seemingly always when we did ↑
22. A party game I won’t fully explain, because we stopped playing it due to its inherent flaw of setting your sporting interest in your batsman getting wasted against the ethical imperative of stopping him getting wasted. I believe Lord Montague (Joe’s batsman) won on the night after Romeo vommed out. ↑
23. Flies ↑
24. By trade she was a dinosaur-puppet-maker, though in her spare time she moonlit as a hawker, insect sketcher and fungi breeder. For comparison, my hobbies at the time were picking my nose and jaywalking. ↑
25. Small European cockroaches named Germans by the pest biz circa whenever Tom and Jerry came out. They prove very hard to stamp out compared to native cockies coz they are smaller and wise enough to get inside appliance and live rent-free next to the comforting warmth of wires. ↑
26. Kevin is what a visitor named the collective consciousness of the rats that lived in and around us. Our policy for pet names was that they could only be given by an outsider, it had to occur organically, and it had to be applied to the whole of a species, not an individual member of a species. There were a few exceptions to this like the foot long stick insect on Costa’s wall I named Scrit after Jack (who’s Manor name was Scrat. More on that next fascicle). ↑