Lodgers

Lodgers are good when you are a single parent. They pay the council rates, their rent pays for the gardener and they give the illuson that one will not die alone in the house in the middle of the night. However one must be aware of certain common characteristics belonging to the genus lodger.

Lucinda came to the house one Saturday morning. She wanted the room, the best room that my daugher and and I had painted and scrubbed and polished for the new person. The room had an external door onto the front verandah, and a studio attached with cedar shutters across a garden full of green stripped leaves.

As is usual with lodgers the first thing Lucinda did was to move into this tree top room and hang contents of a hundred grimey garage sales over the windows and shutters. She claimed the space as hers with black fairy wings, paintings of contorted faces and a chinese umbrella under a grimey mosiquito net. She stuffed a stove, a fridge and her double bed into the room with the wooden shutters.The remaining space was taken up by a video screen the sieze of one wall, a shelf of old self help books and a vinnies collection of used clothes.

She did not watch TV or read the papers or take drugs. The only topic of converstion that was possible with Lucinda was Lucinda.

I can see shadows moving in her room, said my daughter, when Lucinda was out; a company of ghosts that lept off the walls out of her black paintings and  old clothes and danced alone in her absence.

 Hauntings are another characteristic of  lodgers .

Lucinda grew up in a tent on the cane fields of North Queensland. Her kids were still young and did not live with her. She had had her tongue, her nipples, her vagina and her clit pierced. I always wondered why she used a roll of toilet paper each day.

Lodger characteristic no 3: The Mother Trip. Lucinda applied this when she got her tongue pierced and had some eye surgery. There was absoutely no one to look after her. She needed dressings four times a day and had to be fed soft foods and comforted hourly. She told me she had cancer and was followed by a stalker who she loved but could not live with because he would not give up other women.

Bullshit I now believe.

A procession of men began to come into the house each night.

 It's ok, I told my friends, to have some male energy around. Some of the men even kissed my cheek as they left. My daughter went to stay with friends in Brisbane.The dogs were not impressed as they felt their status was challenged as the dominant male in the family.

Lucinda went to Melbourne to visit her daughter and a discontented angst crept under the door of her room and got stuck in the hallway, which is, I have noticed, a common place for entities to take up residence. When Lucinda got back she stopped paying rent and told me she was a bankrupt. I got the flu. My daughter went on a drug binge. Lucinda began to move her belongings out of the house. Her stove and carpet went first. Then the photos of her kids.

I asked her if she was leaving.

No, she said, I am just looking after a sick old man in a caravan. I'll be here for months.
When I caught her stuffing her bed into her car I said, you are doing a very good impression of someone in the midst of a flit.
Yeah, she said, I am going. the old man in the van is very ill.

She left me with an enormous electricty bill, a water bill and used the bond as notice.She left the room cacked in her smell and spots all over the walls. When I asked her to clean the room and for a contribution to the electricity she became as violent as her black paintings and treatened to attack me with a mop. She turned into a thin little crim with no interest in any truth but her own.

cannabis and strawberries

Giez has spent the night smoking in the lounge room. The room smells of cannabis and wood smoke. He says he got the habbit from a voyage to Hindu Cush. Yesterday he stayed under the pine trees planting strawberries where the eucalyptus from the valley comes into the yard and colours the air blue. I go with my daughter for a coffee and pastry at the German patrissery. Giez retires to the trampoline under the pines; he says his mother used to make jam from the tips of the silver pine tree,the jam tree.

The last lodger has left in a morass of screaming abuse. She was the perfect picture of a reformed crim who reverts to form when under stress. Admittedly I invited this part of her personality to emerge. We had an interaction fueled by temezepam and strong German coffee; not good. she left owing me the electricity bill and used the bond as rent.

A fat bird has come to eat the strawberries. Revenge is necessary.

dead chooks

I lurk in the house with the doors shut and the curtains drawn. The dog forced a hole in the fence today and disappeared. Silence, strange I thought. the neighbour's yard full of dead chook feathers and guilty dog.

Could have been a sacrifice to investigate the omens .Galba the emperor ignored such an omen before battle when the guts were healthy and the Romans stuck his head on a pole and booted it around Rome.

So I dragged that fat dog back into the house. I hide with the dog from the male part of the couple next door. Men have always been infuriated by my physical vunerability; I can't beat em up. I think this is what it comes down to, the ability to control by physical terror.

Once I was a single mother in the mountains with a baby under 6/12 .There was ice on the fern fronds and high pine trees on the way to the toilet in the night. The man next door disliked where I parked my car. He would come to my house and circle it , beating on the wall, yelling, I know you're in there , come out and move your car.

I used to hide in the bath with my baby.

Now in a similar mood I hide in the house with this chook murdering dog.

The cat was a wittness. told me about it when I went in to extract the dog and the sacrifical victim.

I guess he hated single mothers.

My mother was writing to the government to get them to stop the single parent payment when I was pregnant.

Why not lock the chooks up? A little family of animals and dope plants and two adults. Maybe he won't come in and bash at the front door and demand an equavalent sacrafice for his chook.

I remember another man from another house in the mountans. This man shook his sneakers at me and demanded money for a new pair. Said the dog ate one. How could I say fuck off I haven't got a bean to eat let alone money to spend on your sneakers.

No wonder all the little old ladies in the Tai Chi classe want to learn to beat men up. However I found it rather disquetening to be confronted by a thin old duck wanting to chop me to a state of permanent disability when ever we did partner exercises.

Enough.