Those were the days part 2

The continuing saga of my life as a twenty-something... (the first part)
My third place was in Lakemba. My boyfriend didn’t come with me, but a friend of his did move in – I was still an apprentice, someone had to help pay the rent. This fellow was of a fairly traditional Greek family and my now ex-boyfriend knew his family well. Shame he didn’t tell me what a pig he was! Do the dishes? Sweep the carpet in his room (didn’t have a vacuum in those days)? Do anything else domestic? Forget it – “women’s work”!! Needless to say, this particular flatmate didn’t last real long. Good thing? I got to know that upstairs neighbours when I went to ask if I could borrow their vacuum to clean out the foot of dust and crap that he’d left behind in his room.

My next flatmate was also a friend of my ex-boyfriend’s, although I knew her as well. She was the sister of my exe’s best mate, who I got on really well with. This mate begged me, (and so did his mother) to let this girl stay with me; someone to look after her… I went looking for some knickers in her room one day, mine seemed to have gone missing and I found a desert-sized spoon in one of her drawers. I should add at this point that this girl was a heroin addict and my proviso on her living with me was that she didn’t use in the flat. I confronted her and she broke down, promised to never do it again etc etc. Anyone who knows an addict (I hadn’t before) will know that such a promise is worthless. At one stage she asked me if her boyfriend could move in and took some efforts to persuade me. I didn’t know him and the flat was small, so I kept saying no. Good thing I did… I got a call from the police one night; her boyfriend was actually her pimp and I was advised to stay away from him. How they knew me, or the fact that this girl was living with me and bringing her boyfriend home for visits I still to this day don’t know. But I not long after asked her to move out. I found out several years later that she died, alone, on her 21st birthday in a flat in Kings Cross from; you guessed it, a heroin overdose. Apparently the stuff she had bought was too pure and the overdosed was accidentally.

My third flatmate in Lakemba, where I lived for all of a year, was someone who would move with me for years to come. The atmosphere in Lakemba in those days was pretty tense; I live 4 apartment blocks down from a public school, which was regularly burnt-out. One of the girls living in the apartments across from our driveway was a teacher there and her stories of being sworn at in Lebanese, and the treatment she received from the Lebanese boys she taught were enough to curl your hair. I used to stack shelves in the supermarket as a 2nd job and walk to the station to go to work, so I was in the main street of Lakemba quite a lot. Not a great place to be if you were blond, young slim and pretty (yes, I was once). I used to cop a lot from the men standing in shop doorways. On one occasion while in the flat I was lying in bed, reading, naked, with my cat, when a hand stuck itself through my venetian blinds (no screens but the windows key-locked open about 3 inches wide) and watched me. I couldn’t reach the light to turn it off without revealing myself, so I threw my book at the blind and yelled and screamed. I was living with the Greek guy at the time and when I later confronted him, he said that he thought I was yelling at the cat……….. So much for having a male on hand for safety!

Another eventful occurrence was when I was living alone in the flat (in-between flatmates) and I’d gotten into bed when the phone rang, it was the friends upstairs who said they’d spotted a guy lurking around my ground-floor flat. Don’t panic and keep talking like you’re still on the phone was their advice to me before they hung up and phoned the police. I hung up and called my mother, all the while talking like I knew nothing. By the time the police got there, they’d gone of course; in fact guys trying to get away from someone or something often jumped the fences between the blocks of flats down that stretch of road. I had a cat, given to me by my boyfriend, for company and during the times I was living alone she’d be my ‘guard dog’. My flat was alongside the driveway and on the other side of that was the neighbouring fence and some shrubbery, then next-door flats. She used to raise her hackles and growl, and I knew that there was someone watching me, so I could lock the door out on to the balcony and pull the blinds. I’m sure that she saved me several times during my yearlong stay in that flat.
part 3