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.