Tightening the Belts

As constant readers will recall, my accommodation has always been eclectic at best. For that interminable decade between leaving university and admitting my childhood was over, I lived in a basement apartment in a non-descript Sydney suburb, under a sort of pseudo-Aunt.

When I was kicked out of my own home by an angry ex-girlfriend and her angrier cat, I moved - well, squatted, really - into my parents’ investment apartment in Balmain. There, I had it all: exciting executive sunken lounge, yellow Formica dine-in kitchenette, and a constant stream of visitors who came by to drink my beer and admire the view.

But all good things come to an end, and as related I was booted out of the sweet apartment when my parents literally sold it out from under me. It’s now occupied by a thin retiree with an empty bank account and a desperate look in his eye. Me? I moved into the old magazine offices in Redfern, partly to keep the dream alive but mostly to exterminate the interns.

It remained a Sisyphean task. No sooner had I burned out one alley, than they were popping up in the other. There were just too many nooks and crannies. So I did what any Sydney-sider of indeterminate age and non-specific future direction did: I threw a housewarming.

Too much time had passed since I’d been in the company of my very bestest friends. Everyone came: Vic my crazy ex-third flatmate of course, Cmos the unluckiest man alive (on this occasion his entire lower body was encased in plaster: he rode in on a Segway), Silver my rich-bastard buddy whom no number of insults about his Audi A3 Cabriolet could seem to dislodge, ex-semi-official PlayStation magazine editor Meatloaf, the Guerrilla Gamer of course, and L- who cannot be further identified for legal reasons except to mention he was once the editor of a Nintendo magazine.

We set up the keg, drew a tall glass each, then released the safeties on our shotguns and .303s.

“Tough times ahead,” said the Guerrilla Gamer, leg slung casually over the arm of my battered old recliner, shotty across his lap. “The economic downturn. You know, the crash and all that.”

“Hells yes,” said Vic, sighting down his rifle at a particularly likely-looking sheet of corrugated iron stacked up against the alley wall. “I mean we need to be careful, don’t we? We could lose our jobs!”

There was a pause while everyone tried to remember if Vic even had a job at the moment. There had been the exterminator job, where he was supposed to sterilise the very building in which we now held our housewarming / vigil, but that had ended very badly for the neighbours. The intern problem was spreading.

“There’s one!” screamed Meatloaf. Guns blazed. Pellets and bullets slammed into a section of the alley, obliterating whatever had stuck its unfortunate nose out from behind a pile of old bricks. The smell of cordite hung heavy in the air.

“No wait, it was just a cat,” said Meatloaf, squinting at the soggy mess that remained. “I think.”

We went back to drinking.

“It’s probably important for all of us to make cutbacks,” said Cmos, importantly. “I mean me, for instance, I’m not buying medication anymore. Saving my dad hundreds a month.”

“Yeah,” said Vic, “but isn’t that a false economy? Because of the hospital and ambulance bills.”

Cmos shrugged.

“Oh God I’m so BORED with hearing about ECONOMY,” moaned L-. “Everywhere you turn, even in the pages of your favourite gaming mag, it’s just Wall St this and economy that and downturn the other. I mean who gives a shit?”

“He’s right you know,” said the Guerrilla Gamer, as if he hadn’t been the one to bring it up in the first place. “What do we care anyway? We didn’t have money before and now things are just the same, only more-so.”

“I feel like I should be really worried about credit card debt,” said Vic. “But I’ve never been able to accrue any.”

“Oh really?” said Silver. “Is that because you always pay your card off before the interest-free period expires?”

Vic looked at him with that crazy look he has. In this I had some sympathy for Vic: despite his GUARDS, SEIZE HIM credit rating, card companies kept sending him application forms and he kept filling them out. One day, he fervently believed, he would have a credit card of his very own. Due to an administrative error, probably, like when they give them to pets.

“Anyway,” I said, “I agree with L-. This whole thing is getting really tedious. What is money anyway? Is it food? Is it an awesome car? Is it a beautiful and sensitive lover?”

“No,” said the Guerrilla Gamer, “but you can turn it into all of those things.”

“Fire!” screamed Meatloaf. We blazed away at shadows, at spiderwebs, at sunbeams and dust-motes. As the echoes died away, we fancied we heard chittering, in the walls.

“They’re laughing at us dude,” said Meatloaf darkly. “Laughing at our foolish, mortal lives.” He cocked his .303 again and fired, putting one more defiant bullet into the skirting board. There was a yelp, a great deal of scuttling, and then silence.

“Wait a second,” said Vic, narrowing his eyes. “A crisis out of our control. Blazing away with no strategy or clear objective.” He rounded on me. “Dude,” he said accusingly, “have you got us trapped in another one of your metaphors?”

And that’s when the interns swarmed us. Little bastards got all of our beer, too.