The Love nest crumbles

The Love nest crumbles

Is it any wonder that I can't stand the singer Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell was a 70's icon and has been struggling ever since to retain her fame. I heard all about it on Radio National. Yes, I admired her for she has gone political and I did like her song, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone" but her voice leaves me cold. In fact her voice brings back rather unpleasant memories.

It was in the 70's when my kids were about 5 and 6 that he moved in. I needed boarders for my little blue stone rented cottage. He was recommended by friends and was a musician and an artist. He was very quiet, played his guitar softly and painted in his tiny room. The only thing he played loud was a record player and his favourite was Joni Mitchell. I swear that he played that record every day over and over again until I wanted to scream inside. I thought, what is it about that record and what deep hurt is he hiding?

Scraps of information and gossip filtered down to me through our mutual network of friends. It seems we were all tied by an invisible thread to each other by our similar political, artistic and radical ideas so it seemed natural to try to understand my new house mate's mind set. It turned out that he was still in love with Magda,a charismatic, exquisitely beautiful woman of many talents who could sweep a man off his feet just with a glance from her. Magda's conquests were legendary and her broken hearts were littered from Carlton to North Fitzroy. She even had a passionate affair with my friends son who was 15 at the time. An affair he told me later that was both exciting and educational.

Magda had had a passionate affair with my new boarder and just at the point he was about to swear his undying love for her she grew bored and dropped him. Joni Mitchell, I realized meant heart ache.

Not much romantically was going on in my life and he began to intrigue me and as usual I was still looking for a lover with a sensitive, passionate and artistic outlook. I began to think he was the one. We started sharing joints and meals. He started playing his guitar in the garden we started brushing up against each other when we passed on the stairs and electricity began to spark between us.

Soon we were sharing a bed occasionally. He made it quite clear though that we were a separate entity and not a couple. He was very wary of any one knowing of our relationship. That extended to my kids who he seemed to so assiduously avoid. The man was like an impenetrable piece of ice with no sense of humour. Laughter left the gorgeous little cottage.

No matter how many nights we spent together he would always come home from work and without speaking rush to his room and listen to Joni Mitchell over and over again. Sometimes he would not come out of his room all night or the whole weekend. He and Jone Mitchell.

I was jealous. Jealous of the ghost of a woman who dangled her beauty and charm in my face and some music by a monotonous wining voice of angst and doom.

I don't know how long it was before the penny dropped and I began to see who he really was. Maybe it was when his ex wife died and his son came to live with us. The son was great and a the kids became friends. Real life had come to him to him at last. He had to be a father and responsible. His days of pining were over. He stopped coming to my room and became both angry and sullen. He started going out all the time while his kid stayed with us.

The death knoll was on a Saturday. I was lying on the bed with my kids. We were all reading and drawing. My son unbeknown to me was sharpening a pencil with a stanley knife and cut himself in the eye. Blood flowed from his eye and I knew it was serious. I grabbed my son and rushed to his room and asked him to drive us to the eye hospital. He refused. My son had seriously damaged his eye and consequently his sight.

He and his son moved out not long after that.

The Man Who Liked Cool Mints

It was a hot year but there was still ochre coloured water in the billabong. Lots of homeless men lived in the park and that year they decided to strip off and cool down in the murky water of the billabong. It was an unusual sight to see the heavily tatooed men with brown arms, white legs and torsos yelling in enjoyment and comradeship as they splashed around in the water. He was one of them.

I'd met him walking the dogs in the park which I did night and morning. He lived under some bushes where the blue wrens lived. I used to chat to him every time I saw him. He was presentable enough and he always wore a clean unbuttoned white shirt , black trousers and black shoes. I often wondered how he could keep so clean in that dirty and dusty environment and admired the way that, despite his homelessness he had pride in his appearance. He was slim and quite good looking for a man aged around 45 or so but I guessed straight away that he was a gay man and not threatening in any way.

Our chats were fairly nondescript, the weather, the dogs or how his health was. He stayed there for many months and as I began to wonder why he couldn't find accomodation or work he started to deteriorate in his appearance and agitation.

My friend, who I often walked with, had 2 very naughty dogs who kept running off and eating garbage. She was perpetually calling out to the dogs to come back. One day he jumped out of the bushes and stopped me saying angrily saying. "You know your friend whose always yelling at her dogs she is very bad. I don't like her at all, I feel like hitting the silly bitch when she starts screeching for her dogs."

This was a bit of a worry so I told her not to go near him unless I was there and although I was not the slightest bit scared of him I kept my eye on him. His campsite got untidy. The shrub branches were being torn down, the blue wrens had gone and the place was littered with bottles, cans, food sraps and old bits of clothing. He was obviously losing the plot I thought. Then he disappeared.

A couple of weeks later I saw him near my daughters house. I asked him where he had moved too. He seemed very agitated and said he had a room in hotel and scuttled off looking very sus.

I didn't think of him again till months later when I saw a court notice of a man charged with the murder of his mother and how he had been living at Royal Park until he was arrested.

He apparantly was a compulsive gambler and kept asking his mother for money to feed his habit. She finally refused and he finally finished her off. He said it was an intruder and went to the funeral. When the police started asking questions he disappeared for over 6 months. He was sentenced and jailed.

This wasn't his only murder. He had been jailed before for killing his boyfriend and keeping him at home for quite a while after he was dead, enjoying him with a the aid of cool mints. Before that murder he was suspected of necrophilia by not notifying the authorities of his lover's overdose and subsequent death until weeks after.

In royal park we dog walkers are hounded by dog haters who live in Parkville. The dogs are dangerous, they kill birds, they frighten children and old ladies, they say. The council obey their every whim and concede to their demands and the government follows.

Are the crazy really innocent?

Yesterday I saw John opening up his shop door. On the floor under the door was a crumpled up piece of paper with the words in scrawled hand writing. JOHN CROOK THIEF Exasperated, he picked up the paper and screwed it up and said to me. "There we go again. JOHN the crook and the thief."

I told him that I could guess where that came from and he told me they were put there almost everyday. The one sided vendetta that had started years ago was still going on.

Is she mad ? Is she crazy? She functions o.k. of sorts. She runs a family business still. I haven't seen her sister now for at least two years. How can you disappear into the bowels of a couple of shop fronts and not be seen again? I've asked her about her sister and she says. " What do you want to know for. She's around doing her own thing and I do mine"

Her sister is the soft one with the many gold teeth. She used to serve in the shop a lot but over the years it's been less and less until now she has almost vanished. The crazy one is there with her bumps on her head. The bumps that are sometimes bumps on bumps until they burst. Sometimes she covers them with a greasy hat but most of the time she doesn't. I've offered to take her to a skin specialist. I know a really nice professor who'll take them off and it won't be painful to sleep anymore, I said. She ignored me and changed the subject to her pet hate John.

It was the first time that I felt really sorry for John. It seemed like he had had enough. "When is this going to end ," he said. "Her mother was over 90 when she died and probably I'll have to put up with this until I retire.'' I hadn't realized that she was so relentless and fixated and sneaky. All notes are unsigned. The two families had lived in the same area for decades and there was no ill will between them. It was just this poison that developed in her mind.

The poison and paranoia was not only directed towards him, it was anybody her fancy took.

"See that girl at the window," she'd say pointing to young pretty girl gazing out the window. "She's watching us. She's working out when I go out and in and then she'll sneak in. They always do, those young people climb on the roof and get in through the window and take my clothes. I see them wearing them down the street."

The fancy clothes shop stole her tea towels and sold them, the antique dealer stole her mothers hand made doilies a had them sitting in the front window. She insinuated that my son and son in law, after painting her shop went upstairs and took a $1000 from under the floorboards in the bathroom. The amount they stole went up by the thousands in a couple of conversations. I had possibly stolen the dog's worm tablets that were sitting on her kitchen table. It didn't matter that I had never entered her house. She would just fix her wily old eyes on you and insinuate and watch you squirm.

The smells that came from the back of the house were truly horrendous, the rank and musty smell even permeated the walls and the floor boards. She said she was cooking the dog food. The dogs started from two poodles I believe. They bred and inbred again and again till there was 16. People complained but the dog catchers were too frightened to enter the house.

The dogs lost their hair, stunk and went blind and died one after another until their was 2 left. They used to scratch themselves under the table, rubbing their poor suffering bare skin against the table legs for relief. The blind one ran outside in the street and disappeared. Apparently, I had stolen her dog. She posted up a sign in her window about the stolen dog but it turned up at the dog shelter.

Of course John was to blame for the dog complaints.

Probably the worst thing she did was when John's accountants house was fire bombed by his irate bogan tenants who had been evicted after their marihuana plantation was discovered. An unsigned, hand delivered letter to the accountant said she would like to inform him that John had done it. That's pretty serious but some of her accusations were truly fantastic. She swore to me that she had seen John wearing a very nice black coat in the street and had I seen it? John did wear a nice woolen black coat in Winter. It was, she said her late brother's.

" We kept our dear brothers beautiful coat safely in the wardrobe after he died and then one day I looked and it was gone. Then I saw him in the street with it on. He had climbed out of his window walked along the verandah and then climbed in our window and stolen the coat. He was watching us how else would he know the coat was there."


Was there no end to his crooked ways? It seemed not. She and her sister had seen this with their own eyes. They could see into their kitchen and they were cooking spagetti. "They cook a lot of spagetti that lot'" she said. Then he, John started grating cheese. It was then she noticed it was her cheese grater.

"They had stolen our cheese grater. What an appalling thing to do. They leave me notes all the time too."

Strangely enough she seems not to acknowledge how much mischief she has caused. She said to me once really sweetly. " They just don't try to be nice to me that family. You'd think when the old man died that they would have got me to do the flowers for him. I wouldn't have charged them you know."