The House at the Edge of the Deep Blue Sea

In the past 30 years, I have lived in 25 different houses, which means I have moved 25 times, 6 times in the last 5 years alone. I am now at the point where I just move in, open a few boxes, take out some underwear, t-shirts, a book and my toothbrush, and leave the rest there ready to be mobilized. I am constantly in mobilization mode, scanning available apartments, which always offer something I don’t currently have, a larger balcony, views of the river. Some people just can’t manage too much freedom and do best when in forced lockdown; I am one of these people, so the lockdown, for me, has been a great time to just sit, stay, don’t move, stay put. One time, I moved into a room in a giant villa, got every thing into its place, put things in cupboards, set things up, slept there one night, looked for another place and then moved out again within a couple of days.

I had moved there to write a book, so I needed somewhere quiet. It quickly became apparent that, right in front of my balcony, using the front gate as the goal area, a late-afternoon soccer game featuring the local kids was to be the daily event. When I spoke to the landlady about my problem, she told me she had already offered them bribe money to play elsewhere – probably not the smartest thing to do – but, like some kind of pestilence, these people are not easy to eradicate. Young Vietnamese boys are not like other boys. In fact, they are not really like any other humans, and when they play soccer, they are like wild ravenous animals, like little typhoons in shorts, like some kind of demons, typhoon demons.

I have lived in all kinds of places and all kinds of neighbourhoods, in 3-bedroom houses, 3-bedroom apartments, two-bedroom, one-bedroom, studios, rooms, some of them new and some old, including a 16^th century apartment in Florence. Many years ago, in another age, before any of this, I lived in a house in countryside Australia, a nothing house in a nothing town, the kind of house where nothing should have happened, and yet, everything did. Sometimes I lived there alone, just me with a great white dog, and sometimes I lived there with others. I remember, for a time, there was a Lithuanian girl living with me. I came home from work one day to find her, in some kind of mad panic, carrying a box out to her car, stopping only momentarily to scream something at me and drop a glass, which smashed on the driveway and was left there as a moving out gift. I can’t remember what she shouted at me, but the gist of it was that, in her opinion, I was some kind of hell dog, an unfeeling, uncaring mess of a man who would never amount to anything and no one would be crazy enough to live with, and just who the hell did I think I was. Because I didn’t really have a reply, and because I agreed with most of what she said, I just stood there watching her, this poor woman, this poor woman who came all the way from Lithuania, for what? For this? To live with some insane Australian man and his great white dog? I felt sorry for her. What was most confusing was that I had no clue of her burgeoning distress, no suspicion of her growing dissatisfaction with her living arrangements. I am not sure if all Lithuanians act like this. She was, and still is, the only Lithuanian I have known, so, in my experience, 100% of Lithuanians act like this. I thought it would be exotic to live with a Lithuanian. I thought she would be into vampires and tell stories of trekking through the Carpathian Mountains at night, but it was nothing and nothing, and then the shouting and the breaking of glass.

After the Lithuanian moved out, a pharmacist moved in, a man about the same age as me, meaning he was early 20s. I had heard rumours that the local pharmacy had medicinal-grade cocaine locked up in the safe, so I planned to befriend him, gain his trust and then go after the coke. He had been living with me only some weeks when I came home from work to find black and yellow police tape strewn across my front door. It was just like in the movies and was the last thing I expected to see when I arrived home. It left me with something of a dilemma: this was my house; where I lived, my abode. Do I go inside, do I break through the police barrier, or, if not, go where? A million questions ran through my mind, not the least of which concerned just what the hell I had done that might have raised the suspicions of the local constabularians. Had they heard about my cocaine plan? Is it illegal to plan a drug heist but not yet carry it out?

I unlocked the door and (sheepishly and with some trepidation) ducked through the yellow and black police tape and went inside to have a look around. I felt the need to sneak around, like there was still someone in the house, but nothing seemed out of place. I was looking for clues. There was a cigarette butt in the ashtray that may or may not have had just a smidgen of lipstick on it and was not the brand I smoked; the plot was definitely thickening. I was about to explore the other rooms when I heard a car pull up outside. It was the police. I went to the door to meet them. There were two of them, a man and a woman. They didn’t seem to mind that I was stepping all over their crime scene, playing detective. The police told me that my housemate, the pharmacist, the one who had the keys to a safe containing grade-A medicinal Columbian party powder, had decided to take himself out of the world of the living. He had killed himself in the bathroom with an overdose of an, as yet, unknown chemical substance (pending toxicology reports).

Amid an afternoon of the unexpected, came more unexpected. The policeman informed me, very matter-of-factly, that there was some cranial fluid still on the bathroom floor and that I should clean it up before I slip on it or something (cranial fluid?). We went to the scene of the crime, the bathroom, and he pointed out the cranial fluid. “There it is,” said the man policeman, “cranial fluid.” I stared down at it. We all did. All three of us momentarily still, all just staring down at this cranial fluid, as though suddenly hypnotized, all lost in our own thoughts, like we were staring into an open fire. I don’t know what they were thinking about. Perhaps they were ruminating on the senseless death of yet another one of our young generation with so much potential. Perhaps they were thinking of what to cook for dinner. For me – admittedly, a small uncaring part of me – I was just hoping he didn’t use the coke to kill himself with. What a waste of some fine Bolivian powder-fluff that would be, I thought.

There is something about certain pairs of words that, in the course of normal life, just don’t generally appear together, and ‘cranial’ and ‘fluid’ are two such examples. The fluid was clear and just looked like some spilled water, not too much, just a little, like a small dog had peed there, perhaps a Chihuahua or one of those small Japanese dogs that people like nowadays. He explained to me that this small amount of clear cranial fluid would have come out of the ears of the deceased (deceased? Was that the word he used?). Up until then, I had been spared a visual dimension to this unexpected news, but now that I had ears and cranial fluid, a clear image began to form in my mind of my recently deceased pharmacist, lying there on the floor, but with these huge ears and with torrents of gushing cranial fluid, like geysers, just pouring out of his head.

As soon as the police left, I immediately went to get a mop and bucket to clean up the fluid. The next thing I did was to bring in the great white dog to check for ghosts. I took her into the bathroom with the idea that if she started barking at the sink or crying at the towel rack, I would move out of the house. The great white dog had a sniff around and then walked back out. All good, I thought. Until later that night.

I should explain something about the street where I live. This house of dead pharmacists and unrealized drug hauls was located two houses from the end of a dead-end street. At the end of the street were some small cliffs and a few metres from the cliffs lay the great Southern ocean, a place of immense wilderness. At night, when the wind was up, I could hear the oceanic surf from my bedroom, which was located at the front of the house. Almost all of the houses in the street were holiday houses and almost never occupied; I could lie down on the road out front, and, for days, no one would even notice. That night, the night following the household death, not a creature stirred, except the incessant ocean and an unavoidable and persistent feeling that the recently departed had not, as yet, departed.

A few weeks went by and my girlfriend came up from the city to stay with me for the weekend and keep me company during these strange times. One night we were taking a shower together. We were both just standing there enjoying the hot water, and suddenly her eyes rolled back in her head and wham, she slid straight down and was lying crumpled in a heap on the floor of the shower. In a state of horror, I looked down at her and my first thought – I am not kidding, I seriously thought this – was that my bathroom was killing people. Given the recent history of events, I had no reason at all to believe that she wasn’t dead (meaning I thought she was dead). My second thought was that no one would believe that it was the bathroom that was killing people, and would start looking for a non-bathroom, more traditional kind of killer, for instance, me. As it turned out, she had just fainted from the hot water and the steam.

I stayed on in that house for three-years, as did the great white dog, for better or worse. Others also came to stay. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn’t, sometimes they smashed things, and sometimes they died, all in this house at the edge of the deep blue sea.